On only one point, the position assigned in the Wissenschaftslehre to the absolute ego, is there any obscurity; but the relative passages are far from decisive, and from the early work, Neue Darstellung der Wissenchaftslehre, unquestionably to be ins uded in the Jena period, one can see that from the outset the doctrine of the absolute ego was held in a form differing only in statement from the later theory.
How is this absolute ego to be conceived ?
As early as 1797 Fichte had begun to see that the ultimate basis of his system was the absolute ego, in which is no difference of subject and object; in 1800 the Bestimmung des Menschen defined this absolute ego as the infinite moral will of the universe, God, in whom are all the individual egos, from whom they have sprung.
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.
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.
