Debates about the self tend to fall into two opposing camps. Many today argue that the self is an illusion. Conversely, critics of this view argue the self is undeniable, claiming that the self is the one thing that cannot be an illusion. Here, philosopher Gabriel Gottlieb, drawing on the philosophy of Fichte, argues that the self posits itself into existence. In fact, the self is the very act of its own self-creation.  

It has become fashionable to think that, at a fundamental level, there is simply no “self.” The self is merely an illusion of the brain’s activity, the narrative center of gravity, as Daniel Dennett has argued, or, if you are a Humean, a mere bundle of sensations, perceptions, or impressions. There is no substance to the self, and certainly no ghostly immaterial thinking substance, as Descartes would have it. In the words of the contemporary German philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, “we are processes.” According to Metzinger, “there is no metaphysical entity such as the self which could exist independently of the brain.” I think Metzinger is right about a key point.

The “self” is a process, or, as I would rather put it, an activity. This, at least, is how another German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), thinks of the self. Fichte, like both Hume and Metzinger, denies that the self is some kind of metaphysical entity, a substance of some variety. “In order not to suggest the idea of a substratum,” Fichte once wrote, “I do not even want to call the I an acting something.” To be a self is just to do “selfy” things, to engage in selfy activities, if I can put it this way. In contrast to Metzinger’s view that the self is illusory, Fichte held that there is, nevertheless, one essential selfy activity that makes one a self, or “an I,” to use Fichte’s preferred terminology. What is that essential activity? Fichte calls it “self-positing.”  

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was posited by his pious parents, Christian and Maria, in 1762. Born in the small town of Rammenau, Germany, just east of Dresden, he came from humble origins. With the support of a noble patron who recognized his prodigious mind at the young age of nine, Fichte eventually attained an elite education. Like many young educated men at the time, Fichte first served as a tutor to the children of wealthy families. During the summer of 1790, while working as a tutor, he began a systematic reading of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical works. He was particularly moved by Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, a work that outlines the role and limits of our reasoning about morality and freedom. Fichte’s reading of Kant was a transformative experience that led him to reject his previously held dogmatic views about the impossibility of human freedom. Kant, for Fichte, had provided an entirely new way to think about the freedom of the self, both in moral and theoretical terms.

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The principle Fichte arrived at is the principle of the self-positing I: “The I originally posits its own being purely and simply.”

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