Matters of Spirit: J. G. Fichte and the Technological Imagination

3. Spirit and the Technology of the Letter

3 Spirit and the Technology of the Letter Between the Spirit and the Letter Late eighteenth-century German thought revived and transformed the classical debate surrounding mimesis and imitation. It did so primarily through the discourse of Darstellung and Vorstellung. Now Vorstellung designated a representation , a product of the reproductive imagination, that like Nachahmung , was a type of copying or a degraded form of imitation. By contrast, Darstellung, like mimesis, arose as a productive creation, a creation whose liminal nature appeared as a representation that nevertheless disavowed its own representational status in order to present or at least indicate a truth that was somehow beyond it.1 1. This, as we will see, is the intent behind Fichte’s own conception of the transparent I (das durchsichtige Ich) in the last period of the Wissenschaftslehre. Here the finite self is in a state of 52 Matters of Spirit It is not truth in some abstract sense that is at issue. What is at stake in this long-running debate on representation is the very mode by which we apprehend ourselves and our world. After all, the structure of representation describes the very mode of the constitution of consciousness. And representation and consciousness arise out of our unique interaction with and comportment to the world. From these determinate material practices arises a sphere of interaction, a lived world. And it is this activity, the activity of the Fichtean self-active ego, which generates, for consciousness, space and time. Here, Fichte’s descriptive account of the ego in terms of activity reveals an approach that is phenomenological in nature.2 What I mean by this is that Fichte’s ego is not defined as a concept, but rather emerges in its development and activity . In fact, an entire worldview stems from such an understanding. Our own interaction within the social horizon of our world exhibits a founded/founding relation to that world such that our practices both give shape to and in turn are shaped by that world. For instance, although I have been arguing that technology is a product of human literary consciousness, or in short, written language, that product itself, technology, gives structure and shape to consciousness through its technique for the manipulation of time and space. What we need to understand in this chapter then is how our own material practices, techniques, and technologies, which generate space and time, ultimately articulate consciousness, self-consciousness, and representation. The power of space and time in the constitution of consciousness is in large part played out in the discourse of the spirit and the letter. One recalls, as Havelock and Ong argue, that it is the linearity of the typographic text, the letter, which is essential to the development and constitution of the autonomous self-conscious psyche. The technique of the letter establishes a disavowal, and as such stands as a pure medium of the absolute. It is the mode of the coming to appearance of presentation of the absolute. 2. I understand this approach to be phenomenological in the general sense that the ego is not conceived as a substance or concept, but rather is determined descriptively as a ‘‘coming to be’’ in its activity. Here the ego is defined exclusively in terms of activity. Hegel also understands phenomenology in a similar manner. In the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit he describes his methodology of phenomenology as the ‘‘coming to be of science as such.’’ Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 15. Of course, such notions of phenomenology are not divorced from the greater phenomenological movement begun by Husserl in at the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, as I noted, my references to phenomenology in Fichte do not reference phenomenology in this particular sense. I am also not the first to refer to Fichte’s work in phenomenological terms. See, for instance, Janke’s Fichte: Sein und Reflexion. Or for a more recent assessment of the role of phenomenology in Fichte’s methodology, see my article ‘‘Reduction or Revelation? Fichte and the Question of Phenomenology’’ and those of others in the collection Fichte and Phenomenology. The Technology of the Letter 53 temporal iteration, which is the condition of possibility of self-consciousness. Yet if time is a function of the letter, what then of space? The corollary proposition is that spirit is somehow a function of space—but how? Spirit arose in the breath of life...