"You can't make a program without broken egos."
"You can't make a program without broken egos."
FORTLAGE, KARL (1806-1881), German philosopher, was born at Osnabrück. After teaching in Heidelberg and Berlin, he became professor of philosophy at Jena (1846), a post which he held till his death. Originally a follower of Hegel, he turned to Fichte and Beneke (q.v.), with whose insistence on psychology as the basis of all philosophy he fully agreed. The fundamental idea of his psychology is impulse, which combines representation (which presupposes consciousness) and feeling (i.e. pleasure). Reason is the highest thing in nature, i.e. is divine in its nature, God is the absolute Ego and the empirical egos are his instruments. Entry: FORTLAGE
It is impossible to enter here on the steps by which the theoretical ego is shown to develop into the complete system of cognitive categories, or to trace the deduction of the processes (productive imagination, intuition, sensation, understanding, judgment, reason) by which the quite indefinite non-ego comes to assume the appearance of definite objects in the forms of time and space. All this evolution is the necessary consequence of the determination of the ego by the non-ego. But it is clear that the non-ego cannot really determine the ego. There is no reality beyond the ego itself. The contradiction can only be suppressed if the ego itself opposes to itself the non-ego, places it as an _Anstoss_ or plane on which its own activity breaks and from which it is reflected. Now, this op-positing of the _Anstoss_ is the necessary condition of the practical ego, of the will. If the ego be a striving power, then of necessity a limit must be set by which its striving is manifest. But how can the infinitely active ego posit a limit to its own activity? Here we come to the _crux_ of Fichte's system, which is only partly cleared up in the _Rechtslehre_ and _Sittenlehre_. If the ego be pure activity, free activity, it can only become aware of itself by positing some limit. We cannot possibly have any cognition of how such an act is possible. But as it is a free act, the ego cannot be determined to it by anything beyond itself; it cannot be aware of its own freedom otherwise than as determined by other free egos. Thus in the _Rechtslehre_ and _Sittenlehre_, the multiplicity of egos is deduced, and with this deduction the first form of the _Wissenschaftslehre_ appeared to end. Entry: FICHTE
EGOISM (from Gr. and Lat. _ego_, I, the 1st personal pronoun), a modern philosophical term used generally, in opposition to "Altruism," for any ethical system in which the happiness or the good of the individual is the main criterion of moral action. Another form of the word, "Egotism," is really interchangeable, though in ordinary language it is often used specially (and similarly "egoism," as in George Meredith's _Egoist_) to describe the habit of magnifying one's self and one's achievements, or regarding all things from a selfish point of view. Both these ideas derive from the original meaning of _ego_, myself, as opposed to everything which is outside myself. This antithesis of ego and non-ego, self and not-self, may be understood in several senses according to the connexion in which it is used. Thus the self may be held to include one's family, property, business, and an indefinitely wider range of persons or objects in which the individual's interest is for the moment centred, i.e. everything which I can call "mine." In this, its widest, sense "a man's Self is the sum total of all that he _can_ call his" (Wm. James, _Principles of Psychology_, chap x.). This self may be divided up in many ways according to the various forms in which it may be expressed. Thus James (ibid.) classifies the various "selves" as the material, the spiritual, the social and the "pure." Or again the self may be narrowed down to a man's own person, consisting of an individual mind and body. In the true philosophical sense, however, the conception of the ego is still further narrowed down to the individual consciousness as opposed to all that is outside it, i.e. can be its object. This conception of the self belongs mainly to metaphysics and involves the whole problem of the relation between subject and object, the nature of reality, and the possibility of knowledge of self and of object. The ordinary idea of the self as a physical entity, obviously separate from others, takes no account of the problem as to how and in what sense the individual is conscious of himself; what is the relation between subject and object in the phenomenon of self-consciousness, in which the mind reflects upon itself both past and present? The mind is in this case both subject and object, or, as William James puts it, both "I" and "me." The phenomenon has been described in various ways by different thinkers. Thus Kant distinguished the two selves as rational and empirical, just as he distinguished the two egos as the noumenal or real and the phenomenal from the metaphysical standpoint. A similar distinction is made by Herbart. Others have held that the self has a complex content, the subject self being, as it were, a fuller expression of the object-self (so Bradley); or again the subject self is the active content of the mind, and the object self the passive content which for the moment is exciting the attention. The most satisfactory and also the most general view is that consciousness is complex and unanalysable. Entry: EGOISM
(c) But in fact deeper questions remained. We have spoken of the ego as becoming aware of its own freedom, and have shown how the existence of other egos and of a world in which these egos may act are the necessary conditions of consciousness of freedom. But all this is the work of the ego. All that has been expounded follows if the ego comes to consciousness. We have therefore to consider that the absolute ego, from which spring all the individual egos, is not subject to these conditions, but freely determines itself to them. How is this absolute ego to be conceived? As early as 1797 Fichte had begun to see that the ultimate basis of his system was the absolute ego, in which is no difference of subject and object; in 1800 the _Bestimmung des Menschen_ defined this absolute ego as the infinite moral will of the universe, God, in whom are all the individual egos, from whom they have sprung. It lay in the nature of the thing that more precise utterances should be given on this subject, and these we find in the _Thatsachen des Bewusstseyns_ and in all the later lectures. God in them is the absolute Life, the absolute One, who becomes conscious of himself by self-diremption into the individual egos. The individual ego is only possible as opposed to a non-ego, to a world of the senses; thus God, the infinite will, manifests himself in the individual, and the individual has over against him the non-ego or thing. "The individuals do not make part of the being of the one life, but are a pure form of its absolute freedom." "The individual is not conscious of himself, but the Life is conscious of itself in individual form and as an individual." In order that the Life may act, though it is not necessary that it _should act_, individualization is necessary. "Thus," says Fichte, "we reach a final conclusion. Knowledge is not mere knowledge of itself, but of being, and of the one being that truly is, viz. God.... This one possible object of knowledge is never known in its purity, but ever broken into the various forms of knowledge which are and can be shown to be necessary. The demonstration of the necessity of these forms is philosophy or _Wissenschaftslehre_" (_Thats. des Bewuss. Werke_, ii. 685). This ultimate view is expressed throughout the lectures (in the _Nachgel. Werke_) in uncouth and mystical language. Entry: FICHTE