Fichte's Nicht-Ich: Understanding the Non-Self through Kant's Infinite Judgment

Seidel is thus fully justified in emphasizing that Fichte’s Nicht-Ich should be read according to what Kant called 'infinite judgment.' Kant introduced the key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment 'the soul is mortal' can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject ('the soul is not mortal'), and when a non-predicate is affirmed ('the soul is non-mortal')—the difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between 'he is not dead' and 'he is undead.' The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction: the 'undead' is neither alive nor dead, but precisely the monstrous 'living dead.' And the same goes for 'inhuman': 'he is not human' is not the same as 'he is inhuman'—'he is not human' means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while 'he is inhuman' means something thoroughly different, namely that he is neither human nor not-human, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although negating what we understand as 'humanity,' is inherent to being human. And, perhaps, one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excess of animal lust and divine madness; only with Kant and German Idealism does the excess to be fought become absolutely immanent, located at the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for that core is the night, the 'night of the world,' in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason dispelling the surrounding darkness). So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, as the animal passions or divine madness take over; with Kant, by contrast, madness signals an explosion of the very core of a human being.

In precisely the same way, the Fichtean non-Self is not a negation of the predicate, but an affirmation of a non-predicate: it is not 'this isn’t a Self,' but 'this is a non-Self,' which is why it should be translated into English more often as 'non-Self' rather than 'not-Self.'50 (More precisely: the moment we arrive at Fichte’s third proposition—the mutual delimitation/determination of Self and non-Self—the non-Self effectively turns into a not-Self, something.) Fichte starts with the thetic judgment: Ich = Ich, pure immanence of Life, pure Becoming, pure self-positing, Tat-Handlung, the full coincidence of posited with positing. I am only through the process of positing myself, and I am nothing but this process—this is intellectual intuition, this mystical flow inaccessible to consciousness: every consciousness needs something opposed to itself. Now—and here is the key—the rise of Non-Ich out of this pure flow is not (yet) delimited from Ich: it is a pure formal conversion, like Hegel’s passage from Being to Nothingness. Both Ich and non-Ich are unlimited, absolute. How, then, do we pass from non-Ich to Object as not-Ich? Through Anstoss, this ex-timate obstacle. Anstoss is neither Nicht-Ich (which comprises me) nor Object (which is externally opposed to me). Anstoss is neither 'absolutely nothing' nor something (a delimited object); it is (to refer to the Lacanian logic of suture, as deployed by Miller in his classical text) nothing counted as something (in the same way as the number one is zero counted as one). The distinction between form and content on which Fichte insists so much is crucial here: as to its content, Anstoss is nothing; as to its form, it is (already) something—it is thus 'nothing in the form of something.' This minimal distinction between form and content is already at work in the passage from the first to the second thesis: A = A is the pure form, the formal gesture of self-identity, the self-identity of a form with itself; non-Self is its symmetrical opposite, a formless content. This minimal re-introduction of externality, of the Other, is the first step towards the establishment of a full externality, of the Not-I, of the Object.