Peak 228 Neutral Beyond

The following idea actually existed since Rousseau, so Fichte believed that the state should be regarded as an institution that embodies a common will, and therefore the state should be in an appropriate position to judge all citizens and sanction them. In fact, whether it is Rousseau or later German classical philosophers, what they want to emphasize or highlight is the neutrality of the state and the state's superiority over all interest groups.

If we accept the political philosophy of Britain that the state is a machine tool for safeguarding the interests of our people, then the state will definitely become a tool for interest groups.

And the people in power are also very clear, why should I spend billions of dollars to choose for you? There is a reward for being elected, and the country will definitely become an interest group. The difference is that democracy is more important. You have a chance to make a profit, and I also have a chance. As long as I defeat you in the election, it's enough. Soldiers say no, I'm impatient. I staged a coup, and I'll use the barrel of a gun to bring you down. I'll also make a profit.

He saw very clearly that it was not just some philosophers who proposed it. Philosophers saw that after the emergence of modern capitalism and the rapid expansion of the private property system, people would inevitably hope to use the state as a tool to promote and protect their interests.

At that time, either Rousseau or German political philosophers wanted to see if there was another way, that is, the way we Chinese used to talk about. State power is the artifact of the world, and artifacts are not exclusive to a few people. Later, Sun Yat sen said that the country is neutral, he should be above all the people, and he is a real public judge.

What does Fichte say about a country?

Fundamentally, the state should not be a tangible entity, it is an objective viewpoint.

In our daily lives, we often have this issue. Don't argue, let me say a fair sentence. There is a saying that states that the state is an objective viewpoint, which is derived from the subjective viewpoint of mutual recognition among citizens. The basic principle of justice is that no one can be their own judge.

Fichte believed that the fundamental principle of justice should be that no one can be their own judge, so there should be a third kind of impartial supervisory power above the executive and legislative powers.

The person with the highest moral and governance cultivation in a society also plays a supervisory role in the various activities of state institutions and governments, to see if they comply with the basic principles of legal rights and the laws of the country. Some people may say that there is no need for it at all. Nowadays, independent judges of the judiciary, or national judges of the Supreme Court, can play such a role.

No, the Supreme Court judges will only make judgments when someone else accuses them, and they will not actively monitor, such as the Nixon Watergate wiretapping incident. The judge of the Supreme Court of the United States will not say that I have a special case team to investigate your matter, but that someone has reported it to him and he will say that I will come forward to investigate the case.

There is a specialized supervisory power that monitors the various activities of state institutions and governments to see if they respect the basic principles of legal rights and the laws of the country. They are not judges in the usual judicial sense, and they must have absolutely no other interests except to promote our common goal of serving society. Sun Yat sen is a bit interesting. The five power structure has a supervisory court, but as long as you are a political party, this is impossible because the president of the supervisory court is also a political party. How can he supervise with his left hand and his right hand? It's impossible. In modern society, theoretically speaking, he represents the Fichte theory.

Now we understand him in this way, which actually indicates that he sees a blind spot in the current political system. There is no one who truly transcends interests to supervise the operation of the state machinery, which is the biggest problem. However, unlike judges, they cannot impose legal sanctions. They only have the power of supervision and the right to publicly disclose the legal rights they discover to the whole society. However, they cannot make judgments.

Of course, in the most extreme cases, they can help a country with a ban in the last few days, putting an end to the legitimacy of the government's existence. The content of the ban is actually announced, and the current officials have deviated from the true teachings of basic law rights. At that time, the people should gather to discuss issues, and they can choose to ignore their ban. There are also two possibilities when the people come to the assembly. One is that we believe it is because you old men have nothing to do and the ban is not a fact. Now that the country is doing well and everything is normal, of course, there is no problem, and the people have rights. Secondly, or rather, based on such a ban, the government is now in a terrible state and the people can launch an uprising.

Fichte believed that only in this way can the legitimate establishment of the rule of law be ensured in modern countries. Of course, those of us today, who are accustomed to the so-called democratic politics of the British and American styles, think it is nonsense, but in it, many of the problems he sees are still present.

Because I have been paying more attention to issues recently, sometimes I check on websites in the United States. Now it is believed that the political system and democratic system in the United States have fallen seriously ill, and the problem is huge. This viewpoint is not the same, and even people with a very right-wing political stance believe the same. He gave many practical examples of institutional problems, because the longer they operate, the more problems they expose. Now it seems that there are many problems. What should we do next?

I don't know, because it seems like humans can't come up with a better alternative.

Moving on to religion, Fichte's accusations about his identity by others, based on his thoughts during the Jena period, cannot be entirely unfounded. Of course, Fichte did not fight openly. On religious issues, he basically followed Kant's ideas, proving the necessity of religion from the perspective of moral importance, and that without religion, there would be no morality. Religion is the guarantee of moral possibility.

His early work was' Critique of All Apocalypse ', attempting to develop Kant's views in this regard, especially in distinguishing between theology and religion. He believed that moral law requires us to believe that God is not only a force that governs nature, but also a comprehensive service of virtue. Being able to repay good people with good deeds, God is still just, and it is also a complete embodiment of moral ideals. It is a sacred existence and the ultimate good. We still need to have such a thing, we must have such a thing.

Of course, don't misunderstand. Fichte does not mean that the content of moral law is that we should not kill, lie, steal, and so on. His intention is not to say that the content of these moral laws is arbitrarily determined by divine will, just like Christianity says that God gave Moses ten commandments. It does not mean that without the revealed moral will, they cannot be recognized. He also did not propose to use the concept of heteronomy, replacing Kant's concept of practicing rational self-discipline with the concept of authoritative ethics. In order to prove his point, Fichte and Kant should be said to be in line in this regard. To prove his point, he sought to help people with extreme ideas. How can people have extreme evil? He said that it is mainly because we are not entirely rational. We humans have natural impulses and passions, and we often have unclear understanding of moral law because it is deeply rooted.

As moral legislation, the concept of God and the concept of obedience to God's divine will can help us achieve moral laws and provide constraints for religion, laying the foundation. But it is beneficial for us to see God as a moral legislator and subject to God's divine will, even though the content of morality is not predetermined by God. These concepts help us to implement moral laws and impose unique constraints on religion, because religion cannot act recklessly, which is beneficial.

At this point, Fichte saw the irrational power of our human nature, which is the strong intensity of natural impulses and passions. Moreover, in modern times, there have been many Enlightenment thinkers from Hume and his contemporaries who believe that reason is a servant of passion. Hume even said that animals also have reason, and reason is not exclusive to humans. He just wants to elevate passion to the level of human primary ability. I think many people who study Hume have not seen why the theory of human nature says that animals also have rational thinking, not just stating a fact.

In fact, to take care of people from a rational perspective, he wants to overthrow the notion that humans are rational beings that began in Aristotle's time. He believed that the truly stronger driving force for humans is passion, and this was the case until Hegel, who also believed that without passion, no great human endeavor could be accomplished.

Since modern times, we have seen this, of course, from a positive perspective and from a negative perspective. Because we have natural impulses and various passions, we may not be able to restore to the moral law, because the moral law requires a person to be rational. You have many passions and impulses that need to be restrained, and you must unconditionally obey the moral law. To a certain extent, if we cannot do it, he said, you also need to set up a God who is watching from the side. If only the moral law has no effect on you.

In the initial version of epistemology, Fichte's concern for deriving or reconstructing our norms from first principles needs to be explained. The pure self is not an existence behind consciousness, but an activity that lies within consciousness and lays its foundation. It is a rational and intuitive grasp of the self, not the mystical intuition of natural theology, but an intuitive grasp of the principle of the pure self, which reveals itself as an activity.

Fichte's pure self is different from Kant's transcendental self not only in that it is an activity, but also in that the self has a status of existence. Kant's self does not exist, and the status of human beings is just an epistemological concept, while Fichte still has the status of human beings here. His function is not to serve as a logical condition for historical unity. Fichte abolished the concept of the thing in itself relative to experience, and sensory existence is not derived from the thing in itself, but from the ultimate principle of the subject, from the absolute self.

Peak 228 Neutral Beyond

Absolute words must be understood as fundamental things that serve as the basis for our consciousness and actions. We call them absolute, and they cannot be understood in a realist sense as an existence outside of consciousness. Kant said that the prior subjectivity of human beings, or the prior category, is the condition of our knowledge. Beyond our knowledge, there are conditions, and the conditions and things regulated by the conditions are external relationships.

Fichte is the same here. On the one hand, the absolute self is not a subjective consciousness of human beings, but a condition of subjective consciousness. On the other hand, he cannot understand it as something outside of our subjective consciousness, he is his condition. On the contrary, he is subjective consciousness. Many people say, isn't Fichte just a traditional idealist?

No, he became like Kant in action, where these norms come into being, how they work, and are directly generated in judgment, rather than saying that there is a set of things that are used externally as materials. This is a very special phenomenon, a proposition that must be well understood, because if you don't understand it this way, you will say, isn't that subjective idealism.

Isn't consciousness just subjective consciousness? Subjective consciousness is absolute. Isn't that the most typical type of subjective idealist? What's new about it?

no, it isn't. It is both a condition of consciousness, but at the same time, it is also in consciousness. The condition does not separate from the thing being conditioned on. Logically speaking, it should come before him, but it is not externally said to come first, and then I am his condition. It cannot be understood in this way. Water and air are the conditions for our human survival. In an external sense, if we go to a planet without air and water, it is impossible to produce life, which is an external condition.

The conditions mentioned here are internal conditions, and the concept is something that German people can think of. It is very special. We need to understand it well, or you will say that this is the original idealism. He is both inner and transcendent, possessing his absoluteness, a general absoluteness.

Of course, with the theory of absolute self, because of Fichte, he wants to find a basis for all our knowledge and behavior, unlike Kant's first critique where I want to find the basis or conditions of knowledge. He wants to find the normative basis for the conditions of our knowledge.

So, Fichte's theory of self was not initially an epistemological theory, but a metaphysical theory. As the metaphysical meaning of his self developed later on, he became increasingly divine in nature, as he was something that produced a natural limited self in his own world.

The self is the absolute self, it produces both natural and limited. I am the third proposition about me, and what it produces can be separated..

I cannot separate myself, I can separate myself. I have limitations, I am the subject of each of our realities. This is a limited self, and some can even be said to be limited self for humans as a natural fact. However, when Fichte initially developed Kant's system into his transcendental theory and the deduction of experience from a priori self, he hardly described himself as God at the beginning, because the priori self is always related to human consciousness, and such a description is inappropriate.

Because God is not consciousness, in Fichte's terminology, God refers to a personified self-awareness, but the absolute self is not an existence of self-awareness, it is not a being, it is an activity that lays the foundation of consciousness, it strives to make self-awareness move, so it cannot be conscious itself, it is a fundamental and foundational thing.

However, within the fundamental things, there is also a kind of Aristotelian primitive power that can only be known by careful discernment. Secondly, Fichte also believed that we cannot think about the concepts above. Why?

Because our concept of consciousness includes distinguishing between subject and object, self and non self, self-awareness is no longer conditional on the self, it itself contains the distinction between the self as the subject and the life as the object. But the concept of God is an existing concept, in which there is no distinction between subject and object, no distinction between myself as a subject and myself as an object. He is an existence, it does not exist through the world, he is completely self aware, he is completely self aware.

Therefore, we can only talk about him, but not think about him. Like Kant, he also inherited the traditional Christian ideas. God is not an object of thinking, he can be talked about, but we cannot think about him. Why?

Because our thinking ability must be divided, and the concept of God itself implies infinity. When we apply the idea of division to think about God, he is no longer God. This is a shared idea between him and Kant. Fichte first wrote a paper in 1798, "On Our Beliefs as the Basis of God's Rule over the World," which clearly expounded his concept of God.

The concept of daily consciousness, which is to view the world from the perspective of empirical science, he said that there is indeed no evidence of supernatural existence in the world. In layman's terms, no one has ever seen God, and there is no evidence of supernatural existence in the world. "The world exists only because he exists, he is what he is, just because he is what he is.

From a perspective, we start with an absolute existence, which is the world. Two concepts are the same thing, and in the real sense of existence, we do not need God because we cannot find a supernatural God in the empirical sense of the world, and no one has ever seen him.

And we understand the world from the perspective of natural science, and indeed do not need such a God to create the world. The world already exists there and does not need God. Fichte admitted that understanding the world as a divine creation is certainly nonsense from a scientific perspective. However, you need to remember that from a scientific perspective, our approach to problem-solving is not just a viewpoint. Only in our People's Republic of China, at least the official view still holds that humans live in the world and have only one correct viewpoint, which is the perspective of natural science.

Of course, the common people have many viewpoints, and we can also understand them by interacting with various people in society. However, our teachers, our so-called academic community, and our orthodox public opinion community will believe that there is only one viewpoint, which is the viewpoint of science and natural sciences, and everything else is nonsense.

Fichte said, of course, from a scientific perspective, if you say that God created the world, it is nonsense. The world is a self-organizing whole, and it contains all the phenomena that occur based on it.

Of course, from a priori perspective, the world exists only because of consciousness and is purely self established, as Wang Yangming said, 'When I look at flowers, they exist; when I don't, they don't.' It's easy to criticize Wang Yangming, isn't it just empty talk? Does Wang Yangming not understand that truth.

So, when you criticize him, he laughs and feels that there are still such stupid people in the world, but Wang Yangming's disadvantage is that he doesn't know how to distinguish and hasn't developed a set of concepts. I'm talking about the problem in a priori sense. Things can only exist when they are presented to my consciousness, in terms of meaning, and we speak in terms of context.

Wang Yangming is at a disadvantage because he does not have this language, which can easily lead to misunderstandings. Fichte said that if we look at a priori philosophy, it's different. It's not that there's no world without people, but rather that without people, the world wouldn't exist in our consciousness because without people, there's no consciousness. Without consciousness, of course, we can't talk about phenomena that appear in consciousness, which is easy to understand.

The world exists only because of consciousness, set purely by oneself. In this case, we will not have the problem of finding reasons for the world outside of ourselves. The reason is here, because we are now talking about the world presented in our consciousness.

Because in the world outside of our consciousness, we can say there is, but beyond that, we know nothing because we cannot say what does not appear in our consciousness. Materialists will also admit that I have never thought about something, how can I say it, and where is the reason for it? I want to say that the prerequisite for something is that it is thought by me, thought by me, and presented in my thoughts.

Therefore, his reason is with me, not outside. That's not wrong. As for why you said there was no one, what's the reason? What cannot be said is an unsolvable problem.

Therefore, whether from a scientific or a priori perspective, we cannot prove the existence of a transcendent divine communication creator. It is from both a priori philosophy and science that he believes that God, in terms of the meaning of existence, cannot be proven.

He said, but don't forget that there is a third perspective in the world besides innate and natural science perspectives. What is this perspective?

A moral perspective. It is the difference between him and us now. Now Chinese people do not think that morality can be regarded as a top three point of view. Now we people do not say that morality is a superstructure, and he can not form a world view at all. Our current people will see it this way.

Fichte believed that there is a third perspective, which is the moral perspective. From this perspective, the world is a material for fulfilling our further sensory needs, and the self belongs to a super sensory moral order. The society we live in is a normative whole? So, belonging to a moral order is not a problem.

Confucius would laugh at this, and I see it the same way. We are all in the midst of the Five Relationships, otherwise we are not humans but animals. In terms of moral order, we call him God.

Fichte's original words are that the living and effective moral order is itself God, and we do not need any other God. We cannot imagine any other God, even if we need God as the cause of things and the cause of the world, we do not need God who created the world. What we need is God as the natural order, and moral order has absoluteness, even sacredness, for us.