The Age of Kant and Goethe

This powerful personality, whose gaze was directed entirely inwards, was reluctant to seek the highest that man can achieve, a world view, anywhere other than within himself. "All culture should be the exercise of all forces towards the one purpose of complete freedom, i.e. complete independence from everything that is not ourselves, our pure self (reason, moral law), for only this is ours..." This is Fichte's judgment in the "Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgments on the French Revolution" published in 1793. And the most valuable power in man, the power of cognition, should not be directed towards this one purpose of being completely independent of everything that is not ourselves? Could we ever achieve complete independence if we were dependent on any being in our view of the world? If it were determined by such a being outside us what nature is, what our soul is, what our duties are, and we then obtained knowledge behind from such a ready-made fact? If we are independent, then we must also be independent with regard to the knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has arisen without our intervention, then we are dependent on it. So we cannot receive the highest truth. We must create it; it must arise through us. Fichte can therefore only place at the top of the world view something that first attains its existence through us. When we say of any thing in the external world: it is, we do so because we perceive it. We know that we attribute existence to another being. What this other thing is does not depend on us. We can only recognize its nature if we focus our perceptive faculty on it. We would never know what "red", "warm", "cold" is if we did not know it through perception. We cannot add anything to these qualities of things, we cannot take anything away from them. We say " they are". What they are: that is what they tell us. It is completely different with our own existence. Man does not say to himself: "it is", but: " I am". In doing so, however, he has not only said: that he is, but also: what he is, namely an "I". Only an other being could say of me: "it is". Yes, it would have to say so. For even if this other being had created me, it could not say of my existence: I am. The statement: " I am" loses all meaning if the being that speaks of its existence does not do so itself. There is therefore nothing in the world that can address me as "I" other than myself. This recognition of myself as an "I" must therefore be my very own act. No being other than me can have any influence on it.