The ego then posits itself as real.
What the ego posits is real.
According to him, the Ego posits first itself (thesis); secondly, the non-Ego, the other, opposite to itself (antithesis); and, thirdly, this non-Ego within itself (synthesis), so that all reality is in consciousness.
Hence it is the office of the theory of knowledge to show that the Ego posits the thing per se as only existing for itself, a noumenon in the sense of a product of its own thinking.
Further, according to Fichte, on the one hand the Ego posits itself as determined through the non-Ego - no object, no subject; this is the principal fact about theoretical reason; on the other hand, the Ego posits itself as determining the non-Ego - no subject, no object; this is the principal fact about practical reason.
Hence he united theoretical and practical reason, which Kant had separated, and both with will, which Kant had distinguished; for he held that the Ego, in positing the non-Ego, posits both its own limit and its own means to the end, duty, by its activity of thinking which requires will.
Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant's Kritik, is the theor y on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego.
Lastly, Fichte called this system realism, in so far as it posits the thing in itself as another thing; idealism, in so far as it posits it as a noumenon which is a product of its own thinking; and on the whole real idealism or ideal realism.
God does not seem to find much place in the Wissenschaftslehre, where mankind is the absolute and nature mankind's product, and where God neither could be an absolute Ego which posits objects in the non-Ego to infinity without ever completing the process, nor could be even known to exist apart from the moral order which is man's destination.
The method resembles that of the First Epistle of John, for although the errorists attacked in the latter manifesto are not those of the pastorals, and although the one writer eschews entirely the inner authority of the Spirit which the other posits, the same anti-gnostic emphasis on practical religion and stereotyped doctrine is felt in both.
The ego posits itself, but reflection on the given shows that we must add that it posits also the non-ego.
The answer to this is that in the case of contradictory statements - A and not A - the latter is a mere negation of the former, and posits nothing; and the negation of a notion with positive attributes, as the finite, does not extend beyond abolishing the given attributes as an object of thought.
