Chapter 12
Fichte's Assertion
That Action Alone Furnishes Us
With Belief In The External World
495. What we have said so far about the nature of the animal offers a solution to the great question posed by idealism. Fichte, persuaded that the subject had no possibility of going outside himself, followed Kant and others in maintaining that theoretical reason offers no way of demonstrating the existence of the external world.
Frightened by this strange conclusion, Fichte (who considered the conclusion as the inevitable result of theoretical knowledge) turned to the practical reason, that is, to the human need to act. He maintained that human beings were made for action, not knowledge, that action should prevail over knowledge, and that action was impossible without prior belief in the external world. This need to believe in the exterior world in order to make possible the action to which human beings are ineluctably called by the intimate voice of conscience, constitutes the practical reason of transcendental philosophy. The practical reason is thus a belief induced in us by our need to act.
496. But what Fichte called the conclusion of theoretical knowledge was only the conclusion of his theoretical knowledge, not of knowledge considered in itself. Offering to replace universal knowledge with one's own knowledge was a very bold move, but German philosophy, with Kant at its head, has never been lacking in boldness.
497. As we said (Teodicea, 146-147), transcendental idealism is guilty of a material error. We have only to consider the phrase exterior world, which this form of idealism uses and interprets rigorously, not metaphorically. Strictly speaking, there is no external world relative to the soul (cf. 491). The relationship between soul and matter cannot be expressed by the words inside and outside, or interior and exterior, but only by words indicating different entities. If we abandon the expression, external world, the arguments of the transcendentalists have no further meaning, and the captivating scene presented by this otherwise eternally memorable philosophy vanishes.
498. There is no doubt that the soul could not act unless there were something different from the soul itself. Space, extension, the continuum, etc., is an absolutely necessary condition for animal activity. But this is neither the first, nor the only argument to reveal a world endowed with breadth, height and depth, to reveal, that is, the existence of matter and bodies. Sensation precedes action, and we have shown that in sensation itself we are given immediately that which is extended, along with body and matter, and all feelable qualities. These things, which are essentially distinct from the feeling principle, are the term of sensation and thus intimately necessary to sensation.
This is sufficient to prove with the utmost clarity that the conclusion of theoretical knowledge coincides fully with what Fichte and others of his school attributed to some mysterious, inexplicable belief. The divorce between knowledge and faith can be upheld no longer; knowledge and faith are forever reconciled.