Fichte’s absolute self cannot be said to exist in the ordinary sense, for it is
the grounding of existence. Only by rhetoric can it be called a self. It is
discoverable through one’s limitable, empirical self; but it is more like the
Advaita self-luminous consciousness within which everything is manifested.
Nevertheless, Fichte tended increasingly to humanize this self because it coin-
cided with a key human quality: freedom.^35
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their philosophical compatriots were in the
midst of the university revolution, successfully expanding the turf of philoso-
phers’ careers; they were, for the first time in history, intellectuals taking
control of their own base. What they were celebrating above all was their
intellectual freedom. With the characteristic enthusiasm of academics con-
flating their intellectual conquests with the topics that they are studying, they
made this spirit of freedom into the ground for the universe.
Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is one of the most astounding performances in
the world history of philosophy. Neither previous Idealism nor any other
position had attempted to deduce why the world exists. Religious idealists had
vacillated between describing the material world as an illusion (as in Shankara
or Berkeley), thereby making its existence a pseudo-problem, or arbitrarily
positing (in the fashion of Plotinus and Ramanuja) that the Highest emanates
the lower out of its own fullness or play. Nagarjuna’s dialectic had come close
to Fichte in denying any ultimate difference between nirvana and samsara; but
the Buddhists had made no effort to try to derive the world from basic
principles. Fichte’s uniqueness was not to denigrate the natural world but to
build it up from philosophical primaries. Fichte is no anti-scientist; he sounds
like his contemporary Laplace when he argues that since every part of the
universe is bound up with the whole, it should be possible “by means of
thought alone, to discover all possible conditions of the universe, both past
and future” (Fichte, [1800] 1965: 7).
In a more limited sense, Kant had envisioned philosophy as a scientific
discipline, complementing the empirical sciences by deductions from the theo-
retical side. Fichte and his followers sensed a larger vacuum in intellectual
space, which was simultaneously an opening in the organizational space of the
university. Fichte soon became too busy with his proselytizing role, while others
marked out the fields for conquest: for Schelling, Naturphilosophie, aesthetics,
comparative mythology, and religion; for Hegel, history, law, and the social.
Just as Fichte made an explicit tool of Kant’s transcendental methods, Hegel
did the same with the dialectic. Fichte and Schelling had proceeded by dem-
onstrating contradictions within any given determination and within its oppo-
site, then overcoming both by a third determination (Forster, 1993: 159). As
Hegel found his place in the intellectual attention space around 1806, he made
the triadic method central to his own work and laid it out for pedagogic pur-656 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths