There is one problem for the ages to solve. Ecclesiastes wrote:“Meaningless! Meaningless! says the teacher. Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
Toil and wisdom he found, were meaningless. The wise may profit from being wise but will die just like the fool.
Already I see a christian smile. He thought of that long ago. The answer to ecclesiastes is that the wise is not equal to the fool in death. Even there, the wise, which will always mean the christian, maintains his power over the unwise after death, retaining his meaning, his value, the value of existence, of being wise.
Fichte asks:“Am I to eat and drink only to get hungry and thirsty and eat and drink again?”
The Good Book says in response that:“A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work.”
Obviously Johann was not satisfied.
As he sees it, he is a “rational being”, therefore he must have come from a rational creator who gave him a rational goal or end. Otherwise existence would be unbearable.“Will it go on forever? Never-- unless the whole of human existence is a purposeless and meaningless game.” (reasoning out of consequences)He becomes an incarnation of Paul.
He bases his project on this:“Reason is not there for the sake of existence, but existence for the sake of reason”.
In this he abandons the nihilism he and Kant saw in Hume, and return their King to the safety of his throne. In grave arrogance he says:“And existence that does not in itself satisfy reason and answer all it’s questions cannot possibly be true existence.”
We will see about that.
Going about the daily bussiness of eating and drinking must have a purpose, a reasonable cause. He imagines that he is compelled to do these because he is obeying a rational imperative set by a Higher Will.“I embrace this world solely in the prupose and under the purpose which my obedience must have.”
He separates man from beast due to the former’s capacity to reason; and yet to eat and drink a beast is in no need of an intellect to dictate to it a purpose for these actions, other than instinct of it’s flesh. Nor do we embrace bread and water for any other cause than hunger and thirst.
Johann does say that:“I am not hungry because there is food avaiable to me, but rather something becomes food for me because I am hungry.” But what is so reasonable about hunger? It takes no deliberation. You are or are not, regardless of the counsel from your mind. Once again, he points towards the starry night, towards this Will–that is what is rational. It is not in the earthquake, or the wind, or in my hunger, but controls all according to It’s reasons.
Fine, fine. Notice that we observe hunger. We can both feel it, so let’s concentrate on that. As I said, hunger is irrational to your reason. Hunger, we agree, causes one to pursue food. In order to eat, we need to hunt, gather, cook etc. In all of these reason has been used. But the cause of all this rational phenomena had no reason we could recognize. How are we to declare our existence as rational? Should we not confess that:“Reason is there for the sake of hunger and hunger is the cause of reason.”?
Of course, how can we know that bread will satisfy us? How do we know what is, or will be, food? We simply obey. We have faith that that bread is food. There is no knowledge of this in an absolute way but it seems quite rational as a guess. Yet we only debate what is or what is not food after we become hungry.
Reason is a mean to serve and satisfy an unreasonable cause in an unreasonable existence that is, I stress, in no need for meaning or reason in-itself. Nature does not wait for reason to establish itself. The Higher Will, if you will, makes hungry all things regardless of their admiration, or intelligence; and obedience is simply an illusion that presupposes a possibility of freedom, of not obeying.
This life cannot be it’s own end:“if this life is not to be wholly in vain and useless in the series of our existence, then it must at least relate to a future life as means to an end.”
This life is to be validated by something outside and later, not now nor here. If not by heaven, which I think he sees as a myth, then by the being most call “God”.
So we return to God–why never gods?
“I am only a link in it’s chain and can judge the whole just as little as a single note of a song can judge the harmony of the whole.” The message of Job, retold by Johann.
Though he may die, he die only to others around him but to himself he does not die. His death is but another birth, eternally so.“All our life is It’s Life…We are eternal because It Is.” But this is not some Heaven:“After having lived through a thousand times a thousand spirits lives I will still comprehend you just as little as I do now in this hut of earth.”
Was Eccl. right all along then? Is there nothing better to do “that to eat and drink”?
He asked the questions, like a Job. He asked for reason and received mysteries instead and he loves It just the same. What matters is that reality has changed and is different to him. He has re-valuated all, and where he was once a slave he is now his own King, and that is what is important. NOt that much was gained beyond this, but he now has become blind to those consequences that tortu#red his heart. The Will that compels him, which he obeys, which lives eternally, is incomprehensible, unreasonable for his reason, thus irrational. And the funny thing is that existence for Fichte, becomes bearable, comprehensible and rational, by the very opposite qualities of it.(That is, he is satisfied in knowing his incapacity to understand why we must eat or drink again and again).
He has, like most, assigned It, (“It”?), “reason”, as a quality, but a reason that is infinity, while ours is finite, and thus beyond human comprehension. He has reasoned well.
The irrational drive in man enslaves man’s reason to agree, in the end, with it. Man reasons a Higher Reason in what before was merely unreasonable. The question has become it’s own answer and man is now satisfied. The vocation of man is just this–the vocation of his reason, his intelligence is to spur man to life, to find food not only to satisfy his hunger but reasons and ideas to bring tranquility and peace of mind.
Here is the goal stated briefly:
“About everything else I remain perfectly calm for I know nothing about everything else. Those events which seem sad to me could, in the plan of the Eternal (and perhaps only in the plans of any eternal-- be it God or ideology) One, be the nearest means to a very good result.”
