"We call unconditioned, that which absolutely cannot become a thing or a matter of fact. Hence the first problem of philosophy can also be formulated as that of finding something which absolutely cannot be thought of as a thing. But the only candidate here is the self, and conversely, the self is that which is intrinsically non-objective."

Schelling thinks he is here faithfully conveying Fichte's system, which he will then show to be incomplete on its own, and crudely "smoosh" together which his naturphilosophie. But the 'self' is not unconditioned and Fichte would never say something so foolish. It is conditioned, on the one hand, by nature/limitation (the body, natural desires, the external world); and on the other, as a will, it is conditioned by a moral 'ought', the culmination of which is God. Who would claim that their own empirical sense of selfhood was unconditioned? Schelling is describing not Fichte's first principle (as he thinks) but only one pole of the third. (Again, because of Fichte's assumed stance, limitation by the body/nature is expressed negatively, not because it is negative in fact, but because it is negative within the context of a transcendental deduction).

>>24493656
Fuck you buddy.
>>24493646
I had never read anything by Rand because I always heard she was retarded. That's beyond my wildest imaginings. "A thing is a thing, that means it is what it is, all political ideologies I don't like boil down to denying that things are what they are, only we, the objectivists, know that a thing is what it is. The others, the Bad Ones, deny that A is A - they deny that Man is Man! For if A=A, it follows that man IS something, or else, be it said howsoever, he would not BE a man, and then A!=A" It's like self-parody.

I'm gonna drop some truth bombs on you niggies. Also writing things out/trying to explain them to someone else is one of the best ways to break through an impasse in understanding. What happens when you perceive something? Your real activity, the activity of your will, is limited, and you reflect on this limited state to produce an intuition of, not just one thing, but a manifold in space. This isn't as strange as it sounds - you're always willing. Even if you choose to do nothing at all you're *willing* to do nothing and the not-I is produced by us through the limitation of this willing. Accordingly talking about acting is also talking about knowing/perceiving, since knowing/perceiving is dependent on acting (you reflect on the object rather than your acting, and you can easily reflect on either, as you can see for yourself, as both are part of a manifold to which you have immediate access; and to really explain this I'd have to talk about the understanding and the power of judgment, inner and outer sense, etc.) If the intuition is produced by a limitation of willing, it's preceded in time by the constructing of a concept of a goal, and then acting on this goal. So the entire cycle runs like 1.) Choose a goal from the manifold that's given to me, this is ideal activity. 2.) This selection is sensualized, i.e. it becomes something I do (or refrain from doing) with my body. 3.) This acting is limited in turn. 4.) Reflection on the limitation leads us back to 1 and the cycle continues. But how can there ever be a first moment of consciousness? You can't construct a concept of a goal if you're not already a willing subject. Subjectively, there is no first moment of consciousness, every moment is preceded by another. Consciousness does not arise for you 'ex nihilo', that wouldn't make sense; what is (for an omniscient outside observer) the first moment is for you a moment preceded by an indefinite series. Willing happens outside of time; time is only a form of inner intuition, it arises when we intuit our own will. This must be the case simply because of how the steps I listed above are interconnected - one can't exist without another. Just as cause and effect are simultaneous (sorry Kant) so are ideal (constructing a goal) and real activity not actually separated in themselves. I realize all this sounds fairly schizo, I'm only setting the stage for what I want to talk about; there's ~200 pages of material condensed in this paragraph.

How exactly does the ideal activity become sensualized? Fichte already demonstrated that the articulated body is an intuition of the will, but how do you pass from mere thinking to something that happens in matter? Here he introduces the productive imagination which he calls "the most difficult, though indisputably the most important, portion of the Wissenschaftslehre". I will proceed by copying down what he says and then commenting on it. Maybe reading some 'raw Fichte' will inspire others to study him with me.