Recognizing the human
In his Foundations of Natural Right, J.G. Fichte offers the first interpretation of rights as modes of recognition. One possesses a right insofar as one is accorded a certain status – that of an individual – through the manner in which one is treated, acted upon, by others. What makes rights forms of recognition is that one has a certain status and standing in the world, for oneself and for others, only through how some of those others or the collective body representing them act toward you. Rights are not possessed; they are given, bestowed, granted by others – albeit for reasons. The giving, bestowing, granting of a status is how one is recognized. Because rights are items bestowed, then they are only con-cretely had when formalized into laws backed by the coercive powers of a political state. Rights, then, demarcate the series of modes of action and enti-tlement one must possess in order to have a certain status, and being recog-nized as having a certain status, e.g. as a citizen, is how one acquires access to those modes of action and entitlement. Political right is interpreted in this manner by Fichte because he regards being recognized as a free and rational being by others who one in turn recognizes as free and rational beings as a necessary condition for one becoming a self-determining agent in the world.
One achieves the status of being a full-fledged human being only through being recognized, and hence being recognized as a self-conscious agent is at least in part constitutive of what it is to be a self-conscious agent. Rights are recogni-tions because they secure one’s standing as a self-determining subject, where being a self-determining subject is itself a product of being recognized and recognizing in turn. In brief, that is the structure of Fichte’s argument.
What distinguishes Fichte’s theory of right from competing recognitive the-ories is that it aims at an integration of the recognitive and the bodily material.
The opening arguments of Foundations forward two central theses: first, a ‘‘finite rational being cannot ascribe to itself a free efficacy in the sensible world without also ascribing such efficacy to others, and thus without also presupposing the existence of other finite rational beings outside of itself’’ (p. 29)1– think of this as the commencement of Fichte’s transcendental dissolution of the problem of
other minds.2Second is the thesis that a rational being cannot posit itself as an individual – the object of the first thesis – without ascribing to itself a material body, where to so ascribe a body to itself requires simultaneously positing it as
‘‘standing under the influence of a person outside him’’ (p. 58). The first thesis presupposes the second: to posit oneself as one among others presupposes being an embodied being among other embodied beings who can mutually influence one another causally and intentionally. Self-consciousness is thus just as much inter-bodily as intersubjectively constituted. While there are curiosities galore in Fichte’s defense of both theses, because in obvious and, I shall argue, unobvious ways he is seeking to materialize idealism, to provide an account of recognition and rights that fully acknowledges the material conditions of everyday life, his project is worth further detailing. That Fichte, who is often regarded as the arch subjective idealist without concern for the human body, should be forwarding a radically social and material conception of human experience should, at the very least, suggest that our conception of his philosophy wildly betrays its actuality.
After providing a brief discussion of what Fichte intends by providing a transcendental conception of right, I will examine each of his two core theses in turn.
Rights, proto-rights, norms
In a letter to Reinhold in August, 1795, Fichte argues that in order to consider myself a finite a subject, I must not only think of myself as determining a sphere of things regulated by mechanical laws of cause and effect, but must also think of myself ‘‘as determined in a realm of rational beings outside of myself . . . There can be no individual unless there are at least two of them. The conditions which make individuality possible are called ‘rights.’’’3Fichte is here beginning to explore the thought that actual self-consciousness, one’s empirical awareness of oneself as a determining subject, is only possible if one is brought to self-consciousness – one must, in some constitutive sense, be determined by other individuals to become an individual. Persons are made, not born. Fichte calls the act by which I am determined by the other, by which I am called to free-dom by the other, the ‘‘summons.’’ Toward the end ofx3 in which he has been discussing the summons of the other in quite abstract and formal terms, he suddenly baldly states that ‘‘The summons to engage in free self-activity is what we call up-bringing [Erziehung; education]. All individuals must be brought up to be human beings, otherwise they would not be human beings’’ (p. 38).
Hence, what first appears as an abstract empirical condition of individuality is given empirical specificity: the summons, and the connecting of freedom to embodiment are products of childhood development.
How Fichte means to connect his transcendental conception of right with ordinary political rights is deeply problematic.4 However, it is evident that throughout the early paragraphs of Foundations Fichte interprets the necessary conditions for the possibility of self-consciousness as involving some form of
genetic analysis. That the analysis requires a genetic dimension follows from the role of the summons: an individual can ascribe self-consciousness to itself only by having its individuality recognized – summoned – by other beings whom the recognized subject in turn recognizes to be free. Demonstrating the necessary conditions for free agency thus involves demonstrating what condi-tions must be realized for free agency to be actual, that is, what condicondi-tions must come to be in order for free agency to manifest itself. The best evidence for this claim is that the human infant is born pre-maturely and becomes a person.
Fichte assumes that evidence in his analysis (p. 76). We should take Fichte at his word here, interpreting and reconstructing the transcendental portion of his argument as sketching out an ideal process of socialization that is targeted on the child acquiring a minimum conception of individuality, a conception that could be understood as indifferent to the actual ideals and values of different societies while nonetheless being sufficient to underwrite the normative struc-tures necessary to preserve the minimum core of individuality in any con-ceivable society.5Let us call such norms ‘‘proto-rights.’’
Proto-rights are obviously not political rights or explicit moral norms or actual values, although they may overlap with any of these; rather, they are the normative scaffolding that emerges in developmental sequences terminating in individuals capable of acting in the world and interacting with other indivi-duals.6Behind the notion of proto-rights lies the thought that the structures of right through which individuals are recognized as individuals track the func-tional imperatives necessary in order for infants to become individuals. In this respect, one might say that transcendental necessity tracks functional necessity.
But to say that transcendental necessity tracks the functional imperatives of an ideal process of socialization is not to reduce norms to functional demands. On the contrary, and this is patently Fichte’s quasi-naturalist thought, his way of connecting idealism and materialism, norms (actual structures of right, how-ever implicit or explicit) are the way in which functional imperatives become satisfied for free and rational beings whose modes of interaction with the world, with things and other rational beings, are not governed by instinct but by rule-governed, purposive actions. Proto-rights are value-contoured modes of other-regarding attitudes (sufficient for guiding action) and practical norms that condense the series of conditions necessary for becoming a self-moving, inde-pendent being capable of interaction with others and objects in a manner suf-ficient to meet survival imperatives. Proto-rights as the normative grid that must be satisfied by any actual society capable of reproducing itself, that is, capable of reproducing the life of self-determining individuals, can thus be understood as the transcendental outline of the recognitive structures making human life possible. I take it, this is what Fichte intends when he reprises his defense of right thus:
it has been shown that a certain concept [X] . . . is necessary for the rational being as such . . . This X must be operative wherever human
beings live together, and it must be expressed and have some desig-nation in their language. It is operative on its own, without any help from the philosopher, who deduces this X with difficulty (pp. 49–50) As this passage makes evident, Fichte intends transcendental right to be some-thing that is uncovered or discovered as necessarily underlying all actual viable social worlds. Hence, its deduction should demonstrate why proto-rights have the role they do, and not why they ought to be adopted or obeyed or valued.
In claiming that proto-rights are a transcendental grid representing the minimum necessary conditions for individuality empirically and normatively for any possible society, I am simultaneously claiming that Fichte’s actual way of connecting transcendental right and political right is insufficient. His theory of political right would need to become the demonstration that the rights of the liberal state are the fullest expression and the most adequate means ‘‘for the realization and flourishing’’7 of the minimum conception of individuality developed in the transcendental portion of his argument. It is doubtful that his concrete conception of the liberal state can stand up to that claim; but that is an argument for another occasion.
Individuality (I): the socialconstitution of freedom
The object of xx 1–7 of Foundations is the transcendental elaboration of the minimum necessary conditions for individuality – and not moral autonomy or self-realization or self-perfection. Individuality is a more modest concept of the subject compared to these others. Let us, then, genetically examine some of the central steps in the becoming of the individual. In order to be a free and rational being one must be a self-determining being; hence, the self is defined by its activity.
To be an agent is, minimally, to carry out doings in accordance with ideas in mind, imprinting on a world that is independent of one those ideas through intended actions. Agency and world are internally correlative: the infant learns what its powers are as it learns how objects can and cannot be altered.
Fichte contends that coming to awareness of one’s agency through awareness of one’s ability to bring about changes in the external world, while certainly an awareness of individual powers, is not yet awareness of oneself as self-determining.
In the exchange between efficacious willing and object ‘‘the subject’s free activity is posited as constrained’’ (p. 31), i.e. efficacious willing presumes only knowledge of what one is able to do or not able to do. There is nothing in this account of awareness of the self as a powerful agent that might not be ascribed to the learning sequences of higher non-human mammals. Fichte supposes that no elaboration of agency in the sense already established can bootstrap the individual into self-consciousness of its freedom. Self-consciousness cannot be transcendentally deduced or causally produced; it is transferred from one indi-vidual to another. The presumption here is that in order for an indiindi-vidual to be fully aware, it must become an object of its own awareness. To be
self-aware as object requires that an individual first actually be the object of another’s attention. But it must be the object of another’s attention as a self-active subject. That, so to speak, is the puzzle: how can an object of awareness be simultaneously, as object, subject? The scene of this transforming transfer-ence in which the ‘‘thread of self-consciousness’’ is passed from one to another is a ‘‘summons [Aufforderung].’’ Because Fichte intends the summons to displace Kant’s fact of reason, then it must be that through which the neophyte becomes aware of its freedom. And this is just how Fichte conceives the scene of instruction occurring: the beginner experiences a sensation coming from without:
The object is not comprehended, and cannot be other than as a bare summons calling upon the subject to act. Thus as surely as the subject comprehends the object, so too does it possess the concept of its own freedom and self-activity, and indeed as a concept given to it from the outside. It acquires the concept of its own free efficacy, not as some-thing that exists in the present moment . . . but rather as somesome-thing that ought to exist in the future. (p. 32)
Recall that what is here presented as a single episode is in reality a process, the education of a human to its humanity. As an episode, it condenses the complex set of eventualities that the process of socialization involves. In the first instance, the summons is conceived as a ‘‘bare’’ summons; Fichte strips the summons of complexity in order to focus its status as summons, and not con-ceivably a determinate object.8The summons is an act of another. It is an act whose purpose is to elicit an action from the infant. But if the only purpose of the summons was to elicit a response, it would fall short of its task, namely, awakening the child to its own freedom and self-activity. So it is insufficient to say, for example, that mother smiles for the sake of having the infant smile in return since that exchange could be conceived as a movement from stimulus to response; and, in fact, mimetic activity, however truly intersubjective, does begin through automatic reflex actions that, we now think, begin in the first week of life. If actions inviting mimetic response are as ‘‘bare’’ as could be, then in thinking of the summons as bare, Fichte must be attempting to elicit a fea-ture or structural aspect of agent-other interactions rather than a particular type of action. Indeed, as we shall see, Fichte comes to regard ‘‘every human interaction, not only the original one, [as having] the form of a summons, of reciprocal recognitions.’’9To think of the summons as a form belonging to all actual interactions (of a certain type) explains how it could come to displace Kantian morality in installing individuals into a normatively constituted sphere in which their standing as self-determining agents is inscribed.
What is missing from the smile begets smile scenario? The summons, Fichte contends, is essentially something which opens the possibility of refusal, of not acting, of saying ‘‘no,’’ of negation (p. 33). In becoming aware that a summons
may be responded to either by acceding to its requirements or by not acting and so demurring, the agent becomes aware that it is free to respond or not respond. But becoming aware of being free to respond or not respond is the beginning of the awareness that for such types of objects, summons-type objects, there is an indefinite number of different ways of responding, and hence there is no necessary way in which the action or non-action that will come to be must be. Awareness that one can say ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ is the condition for awareness of the openness of the future; and the openness of the future is a condition of one’s awareness that what one is to do, and hence how one is to be in relation to the one who summons, is all undetermined.
In order for an agent to be self-conscious it must find itself as object, but an active object; hence it must find itself determined to self-activity. The external check which determines the subject must nonetheless leave it in full possession of its freedom and elicit that freedom as object of awareness. An agent can be determined to exercise its efficacy only if it finds that efficacy is something it could, possibly, exercise in some future, or not. The summons, then, must open a field, the minimum structure of which is the yes/no choice of to act or not to act. A summons is a purposive action that determines but does not causally compel. Summonses involve the producing of a non-natural sign of some kind (linguistic or non-linguistic), a sign whose fundamental character is that it is intentionally produced in order that another respond intentionally to it, and the one to whom it is addressed respond on the basis of being invited to respond and to do so in a manner that enables the original summoner to understand that the response given is intended as a response to the original summons (pp. 36–37).10 While mother’s smile could be simply the trigger for generating a smile from the infant, in time it will come to be understood as an invitation to smile in return, and the return, be it a smile or (ironic) grimace or stone-faced refusal becomes an element in the bond connecting mother and child. It is because Fichte recognizes the complexity of this exchange that he reframes the scene of instruction into up-bringing, the becoming bound to community through the learning of non-natural modes of interaction.
Proto-rights: a first ppproach
How complex the material conditions are for non-causal modes of mutual influence we shall come to shortly. What is significant here is that Fichte deduces his concept of right directly from the conditions of mutual interaction, which is to say, again, that right is being proposed as the normative lining of that very process, its flip-side, what the sequence is as seen from a normative perspective. In order for mutual interactions to occur, the neophyte must assume that beside objects with causal powers there also exist rational beings, beings who summon it. And hence, for there to be human beings at all, ‘‘there must be more than one’’ (p. 37); all these are direct inferences from the exis-tence of episodes of mutual interaction. In participating in such interactions,