Fichte

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Rammenau, Germany, 1762 – Berlin 1814) took Kant’s anti-metaphysics to an even greater degree. Kant had said that behind our sensations lies a noumenon that produces them. Fichte tells Kant that it is contradictory saying that there is the noumenon and then affirming that nothing can be known of this noumenon. Then it means that the noumenon does not actually exist, it is our invention; what exists is our sensations only. But where do our sensations come from? Fichte says that the “I” produces sensations, they are not objects. Kant had said that we frame known things in our mental categories. Fichte says that we don’t just frame known things, we create them completely. The “I” creates not only our sensations, but also the object that produces them. To realize Fichte’s way of thinking about this, it can be useful to notice that he interprets our relationship with the world in the likeness of a dream. We can therefore translate his three fundamental statements into a comparison with dreaming.
1) Thesis: the “I” posits itself. In other words, at the origin of our interpretation of how things are, there is an activity that we call “I”. It is an activity, not a metaphysical object. We can even translate this in our terms by thinking that at the start point there is someones’ dreaming (this does not prove the existence of this “someone”: we only know that there is this dreaming).
2) Antithesis: the “I” opposes a “non-I” to itself. In our words: somebody who dreams introduces certain contents into the dream; they invents a reality and put it into the dream; they invent a world, an environment, other people and make them exist within a dream. According to Fichte, the “non-I”, that the “I” creates, is created within itself, within the “I”.
3) Synthesis: the “I” opposes to the divisible “I” a divisible “non-I”. In Fichte’s language “divisible” means “limited”; “limited” means that receives resistance. To understand this concept we can consider some objections that can be made to the hypothesis of dreaming.
Sometimes it happens, for example, that I insert my keys in somebody else’s car that is identical to my one; then I realize that it is not my one, so I go back to my car. I was convinced that that one was my car, but reality forced me to admit that it wasn’t true. This shows that reality is not our invention, because it often behaves differently from my expectations. We can answer this way to this objection: even in dreams it happens that we meet realities that oppose our expectations, yet nobody doubts that those realities are an invention of the one who is dreaming. This is the meaning of point 3: the “I” invents a “non-I” able to resist him, to oppose him; but it is anyway an invention of the “I”, as it happens in dreams.
Another possible objection is that of interest. If the “I” invents reality, what interest could the “I” have in inventing a reality that so often causes suffering, illness, difficulty to him? This objection can get this answer: even in dreams it happens that we experience situations of malaise, situations from which we would like to go out, nightmares; what interest could our mind have in inventing a dream that makes us feel bad, a nightmare? Yet it happens.
We can even make a counter-objection: the same way so many people deceive themselves, by believing that in dreams there is an external intervention, for example a dead person who suggests the numbers to bet or predicts the future; the same way we can deceive ourselves by thinking that the reality that we have in front of us is derived from something external, whereas instead, in the likeness of the dead person who gives us the numbers to bet, it is not an external fact, but we are inventing it on our own.
Once we understand this mechanism, we can work out that even the fact that other people’s sensations match ours does not demolish the dream hypothesis. It is possible that we are the ones representing other people having sensations in agreement or in disagreement with us; we can even dream of asking another: “What are you seeing? Do you see what I see?”. Both the other, as well as his answer, can still to be an invention of us who are dreaming: I invent the other and his answers as well.
In short, it is not possible to prove that real life is not a dream. Indeed, for Fichte this is the best, most suitable way to understand it.