2023-01-16, 03:27 AM
Ontological Self-Grounding and Self-Consciousness: Fichte's Relevance to Leibniz's Question
Peter Sas
Peter Sas
Quote: Why is there something rather than nothing? This question seems impossible to answer, because anything that might explain why there is something will itself also be something and must therefore be explained as well. As Robert Nozick put it: "Any factor introduced to explain why there is something will itself be part of the something to be explained." (Nozick 1981, 115) What this shows, however, is not so much that the question is impossible to answer, but rather that the only possible explanation must involve some kind of circularity. That is to say: whatever explains the existence of everything must explain its own existence as well. It must be ontologically self-grounding or self-causing, i.e. the cause of its own existence. It is not surprising, therefore, that ontological self-grounding and self-causation have become a relatively popular strategies in the burgeoning literature devoted to solving Leibniz's question (for overviews, see Wippel 2011; Holt 2012; Goldschmidt 2013; Leslie and Kuhn 2013).
It is surprising, however, that one important development of the strategy of ontological self-grounding has generally been overlooked in the recent literature. I mean the development this approach received in the absolute idealisms developed by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, where the primordial self-grounding entity – which supports the whole of existence – is identified with self-consciousness. Thus the absolute-idealist answer to Leibniz's question can be summarized as follows:
Everything exists because it is thought and/or experienced by an absolute Self who in turn exists because it thinks/experiences itself. Thus it is the Self's awareness of itself that lifts it – and thereby everything else – into existence.