Creatures, Technology, and Scientific Psychology
2.2 Action, Embodiment, and the Transcendental PerspectivePerspective
In this respect, Kant follows in the trail of ancient ontology. For Kant, the ens creatum corresponds to that I of pure self-awareness—the spiritual substance—
which underpins every experience and which, as such, is destined to remain unknow- able.6 On the other hand, the interaction with finite (spiritual or corporeal) substances produces certain effects within us. As already noted, this generally corresponds to our way of knowing things. Hence, according to Kant, the being of an entity coin- cides with its being perceived. The “affections” roused within us by our dealings with others and with objects manifest themselves as states of the self to our inner sense—“that is to say, the faculty of making one’s own representations the objects of one’s thought” (Kant 1992, p. 104).
From this view of personality, a positum emerged which was destined to shape psychology for centuries to come: the notion of the states of the I as the objects of inner sense (as opposed to the objects of outer sense).7 Psychology thus became the science of inner experience, ontologically conceived as something measurable and hence open to investigation through the methodology of the natural sciences.8
2.2 Action, Embodiment, and the Transcendental
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pragmatism, James too was to articulate his own view of the self according to these two poles. However, in contrast to the Kantian approach, he did so without making any explicit distinction between psychological and philosophical inquiries in the study of subjectivity (Arciero and Bondolfi 2009; Pihlström 2009).
A new unitary vision of the subject was developed by Fichte, who lent new impe- tus to Kant’s tripartition of the human person into personalitas trascendentalis, psy- chologica, and moralis. Regarding his own position as being not only consistent with Kant’s philosophy but an essential part of it (at any rate in the positivist decade of his career), he brought about that crucial turn which enabled Kant’s view to be assimilated by the natural sciences and hence by psychology. Fichte once again, and in more radical terms, posed the Kantian question “How are knowledge and experi- ence possible?”
The crucial issue for Fichte concerns the search for unity between the subject of cognition and that of action: the search for that I-ness (Ichheit) on which they rest before consciousness separates them into knowing I and acting I. In this respect, Fichte brings the Kantian project to completion. However, his method consists in connecting the knowledge of truth to that of its sources (Hyppolite 1959). Before any distinction between subjective and objective, inner and outer, through a radical process of reduction which sets all forms of awareness aside, Fichte searches for a means to access a territory in which meaning emerges without the need to invoke subjectivity. This is a quest for the original experience. It constitutes the underlying theme of the Introduction to The System of Ethics—an introduction which is actu- ally more of a succinct reformulation of Fichte’s position. In what follows, we will therefore recall its salient points.
The Introduction to The System of Ethics says nothing about ethics or the work it is intended to introduce. Instead, it outlines the basic tenets of Fichte’s theory of subjectivity.9 Fichte sets out by establishing as the starting point of his inquiry the absolute, yet hidden, identity between the I as object and the I as subject. This unity become separation as soon as any real awareness emerges, be it only self-awareness.
The most obvious consequence of this rift is the primacy assigned to the “I think”
over the “I act.” Within the framework of this approach, and in line with the Cartesian tradition, Fichte at the same time addresses the problem of methodology.
While modern thought has largely striven to understand how correspondences may exist between representations and things (mind-to-world direction of fit), it has found it is perfectly natural that acting upon the world may lead to expected results (world-to-mind direction of fit). It is starting from this second point that Fichte’s practical philosophy takes shape, with a much broader approach compared to Kant’s focus on the exclusively moral dimension of action.10
9 Along with the first two books of The System of Ethics and the first book of Foundations of Natural Right, this Introduction contributes to a clearer understanding of Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (1794) and Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1798), which provide an overview of the issues which Fichte investigated in his Jena years.
10 This issue is chiefly explored by Kant in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.
2.2 Action, Embodiment, and the Transcendental Perspective
Constantly engaged in the search for the unity between the subject-I and the object-I prior to the separation of the two through awareness, Fichte is interested in the experience of the I acting within an objective world and in all the conditions of possibility for the experience of effective agency in the world. Thus Section 4 opens by placing the very experience of effective agency at the center of everything: “I find myself to be acting efficaciously in the world of sense”.11 For example, in the case of the transformation of a log into a table, I may assume that the knowledge of the materials, of their properties, and of the processes of transformation which will lead me to craft the artifact are acquired from the outside; yet this assumption is not enough to account for the fact that I am the origin of the transformation of the log into a table.
In other words, discovering oneself as the foundation of the changes which the I can engender in the world is not an act of reflection on sensory information from the world;
rather, it is something which emerges precisely by acting upon the world. Only the subject who acts with a given aim in mind can know the transformation he effects within things in the world, as he stands at its origin: knowing is doing.12 This origin is immediately posited with myself as an active subject. This is the axis of Fichte’s philosophy: the absolute posi- tion of the I as something active. “Ich setze mich als tätig” (“I posit myself as active”):
Fichte repeats this like a mantra at the beginning of three successive paragraphs13! As the foundation of all change, the subject has both knowledge of the world and of itself as a subject capable of acting upon the world. The sense of agency is there- fore inextricably bound to the sense of ownership of one’s own body as a source of changes within the world.14 This awareness is devoid of content—it is nonrepresen- tational: it is simply an activity. The genesis of sense lies in practical action.
On the other hand, the sense of agency acquires its determinations in relation to concrete activity, to the actual performance of certain actions in a world that may prove an obstacle to the accomplishment of our aims. So whereas the I manifests—
and knows—itself through given forms of activity, the world (the non-I) simultane- ously reveals itself as resistance to the accomplishment of one’s aims. “A pure activity—Fichte writes—cannot be intuited as such; it can be intuited only insofar as it encounters some resistance, and then it is called an ‘action’. This is because an action has to be directed at some object, which our language correctly designates
‘what stands in opposition’, for this object is what resists activity” (p. 166 Fichte
11 “Ich finde mich als wirkend in der Sinnenwelt.”
12 “The subject of consciousness and the principle of agency are one” (sec. 4). Herein lies the unity between theoretical and practical knowledge.
13 Emphasizing how this vision of the I tallies with the Kantian perspective of the critique of imme- diacy (according to which no datum is “what” it is for a human knower by virtue of its giveness alone), Michael Baur (2003) writes: “Any suggestion that the self might be more adequately defined by reference to something other than its own activity implicitly involves the problematic claim that there is some datum or content, as merely given, that is necessarily determinative for the self’s activity in knowing” (p. 106).
14 One can hardly overlook the link between current neuroscientific studies on the sense of owner- ship and agency (Gallagher 2000) and the misleading characterization of schizophrenia as a disor- der of ipseity (Nelson et al. 2014).
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and Breazeale 1998). In this respect, for Fichte the self must be understood as the activity of being aware of oneself as radically free, undetermined by any given content, and its nature is to only exist in relation to an “other” (a nonself). The intertwining between the I and the world, the mutual determination between self- knowledge and the encounter with the “other,” emerges from the founding character of practical action.15
To actualize itself, the I selects specific possibilities, starting from what Fichte acknowledges to be a “determinable” horizon with respect to the determination of the I: “The practical activity is not constrained in making its selection, for then it would cease to be freedom; it is constrained in this sense, however: i.e., in that it has to make its selection exclusively from what is determinable” (57–156).16 The possibility of this mutual determination and the related concept of purpose are founded on a sensibility system which represents the unity connecting a multiplicity of sensations which are woven together as the background to a concrete situation.17 “This system will eventu- ally prove to be our body, understood as a system of affectability and spontaneity”
(WNM p. 90). The body is thus understood as a whole that realizes itself through the interconnection of its elements but which in turn makes the existence of its parts pos- sible by organizing them into a totality. In his 1855 lecture on Kant, Helmholtz saluted this view as being “in the most exact agreement with the conclusions which the physi- ology of the senses later drew from the facts of experience.”
After having established the sense of agency as the a priori condition for experi- ence, the Introduction takes its boldest step by introducing the famous notion of deduction of the body. Since it is unthinkable to act upon the material world if not by means of something which is itself matter, when I think of myself as an acting subject, I grasp myself as a material body and hence as a causal force within the world of bodies. “To represent myself as a causal force in that world—Martin (2003) summarizes—is to represent my agency as a part of it; this for Fichte, is the phenomenological structure of our embodiment: the body is the point of subject- object unity in agency” (p. 15).18 Not only that, but the body also becomes the means by which to enter materially in contact with other subjectivities, similar to
15 In order to account for this intertwining, Fichte develops concepts such as those of purpose, embodiment, will, and freedom, which were carried through the nineteenth century into modern cognitive sciences. These concepts inspired contemporary themes such as those of self-reference, self-organization, ownership, agency, etc.
16 What we have here is the concept of task (Zweckbegriff), which was destined to play a crucial role in von Helmholtz’s epistemology.
17 This view has consequences for the concept of perception, which according to Fichte has no direct relation to the object: “I sense only myself and my own state, not the state of the object.” It is this framework of sensations that constitutes the transcendental condition of the determination of “alterability” or “affectability.”
18 Angelica Nuzzo writes: “Fichte’s account of the human body—first Korper and then Leib—is framed by three different but interconnected issues: (a) the issue of the self’s or person’s act of embodiment; (b) the issue of the person’s relation to another individual as a similarly embodied rational being; (c) and the assumption (or the possibility for me of assuming) that the other’s body is the same in kind as my own” (p. 73, 2006).
2.2 Action, Embodiment, and the Transcendental Perspective
one’s own. The encounter with the other’s body (external reality) summons one to act and to engage in a reciprocal action of mutual recognition. In the Introduction, Fichte makes no mention of intersubjectivity or, better, interpersonality, a theme which was to provide inspiration for phenomenology from Husserl to Sartre (Nuzzo 2010; Lopez-Dominguez 2010). However, Fichte’s argument may largely be traced back to sections 5 and 6 of part 1 of the Foundations of Natural Right, written a few years before his System of Ethics. Such, then, is the broad horizon related to Fichte’s Jena years and, more generally, the “positivist” themes in his philosophy, which the Introduction discloses.