>>24385226
>Yup re: Descartes and this is one of the many areas where you’ll find Fichte in Aristotle’s camp, unity of subject and object in representations.
I wrote my reply out too hastily, so I forgot to qualify what I meant to say. You seem to have grokked the point anyway, but I think it is worth restating.

So, I was confused by the so-called problem of representationalism, because I thought that it was a vague term and that EVERY account of mind, knowledge, etc., requires a representation. What is a representation? Well, it is a re-presence of a presence. And what is knowledge? Well, when I know something, I am not the thing I know, but there is some fundamental identity or connection there regardless, is there not? It's like how the Scholastics believed that the mind virtually con-forms to the form of the thing known (and yet is still the mind of the person which is separate from the thing). So, every account of knowledge that isn't some cop-out (you're just THERE bro in the WORLD and you SEE things and you KNOW them) seems to require representations (in the broadest sense of the term).

The problem, however, is when we start to divorce representations from the things that they represent. Many critics of modernity (e.g. Deely, Heidegger, etc.) blame late Scholastics and early modern philosophers for thinking about ideas as being too distinct from what they are supposed to represent. Then they make the step that we don't need ideas to point to anything outside at all. And then suddenly we are stuck with solipsism, trapped in our heads with ideas that don't relate to anything. When these critics criticize representationalism, they are not criticizing Aristotle (and not Fichte here I would imagine, from the way you've described him). They are criticizing this solipsistic tendency to ignore representations as a unity.

>I have to go to work but the goal isn’t sheer freedom, Fichte shows how our “drive to independence” (which we are not conscious of in this way and if you had a conscious drive to be absolutely independent you’d be a sociopath) is a drive to become like God a la Theaetetus.
All good stuff. Reminds me of Nietzsche which reminds me of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics.

However, when you get the chance, I'd like to see how you distinguish between sheer freedom and independence (or even absolute independence). For what is freedom but not being dependent on or in relation to anything else that can limit you? And isn't that independence?

(cont.)

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I'm getting filtered by Fichte's views on predestination in the System of Ethics. It seems that the argument goes like this: "The…