Fragment 216, Word count: 311.

Tags: God, existence, humanity, spirit, transcendence, embodiment, Fichte.

God is a loving human self-portrait, laboriously crafted as an idea, but made so comprehensively superlative, so simplified by being disembodied, so necessarily the best, so elevated beyond comparison, that it stands distant from normal humanity. The idea of God is the idea of spirit, a drama-cloud of consequential caring-power, knowing, supposing, an improvising intentional will-to-act for initially non-actual but specific results. Caring exists in the context of a malleably open future, in that receptivity for creative expression. Spirits matter because they care and have cares and their caring makes things matter. Nothing else does that. Spirit is what human persons feel a need to assert as our mode of existence in the face of an overwhelming appearance of materiality as our primary existence. Gazing outward at objects we notice things with outlines and boundaries, separate and distinct manifest beings, stable and determinate object categories and structures. This overwhelming appearance of materiality, perhaps, dissuades us from embracing spiritual existence as truly and entirely our own, since we also love the pleasures of materiality, and we rarely want to abandon our embodied animal experience. An individual’s sensorium is structured as a personal animal body, experienced as a grounded object among others. As experienced, embodiment is an arrangement within ideality. Structurally stable objective reality is a main organizing principle of spirituality, just as the shaped body is. But that experience is also knowledge, empathy and attachment, sensitivity, felt needs, creative power, fore-planning futurity and a personally chosen particular future, actively reconfigured from moment to moment. There is the will and power to shape the future in specific personally pleasing ways, inseparable from a sense of moral rightness and sometimes aesthetic beauty. In other words, the idea of god is a portrait of the kind of existence lived-in by individual human persons. The indistinguishability of divine and human spirituality is clearly portrayed in Fichte.

Some relevant fragments:

Fragment 91, February 20, 2016, Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God (word count: 3,287)

Fragment 100, December 6, 2016, What’s Spiritual about Thinking? (word count: 1,562)

Fragment 178, June 28, 2021, The Edge of Existence (word count: 1,044)

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.