 This result, however, is not yet sufficient to give us the first unconditioned and fundamental principle of all knowledge. This is so because we have arrived at the I as the guarantee of the absolute certainty of a proposition only on the basis of an empirical fact, namely the proposition “A is A” which has been presupposed as utterly certain. Fichte now rightly observes that the “I am”, as the condition of the certainty of an empirical fact, itself merely possesses the status of an empirical fact [Tatsache]—if the utterly certain proposition were not given, one would never be able to affirm the utter certainty of the “I am”. Up to this point the “I am” has “only been grounded on a fact, and possesses no other validity than that attaching to a fact” (GA I, 2, 257). But in order to discover the first utterly unconditioned principle of all knowledge, we must establish not only the utter certainty of the law of identity, but also the unconditional certainty of the “I am” in such a way that this certainty does not depend upon the presence of a fact at all. In other words: we must be able to answer the question how the utterly unconditioned certainty of the proposition “I am” is possible. It is Fichte’s reflections on this question which lead to his conception of the I as a deed-act/Act (Tathandlung). He reasons along the following lines: we know from our analysis of the conditions of certainty of the law of identity that the I has the capacity to posit something absolutely in the I. But in order to be able to posit something absolutely in the I, the I itself must be posited. We have also already seen that the absolute positing of the I consists in the activity of positing being. If this is so, and if the “I am” is to depend on nothing else as its condition, we must think of the I as the product of its own positing activity, since it would otherwise be quite impossible to explain its being. Now this, in turn, is supposed to imply that we must think the I as an activity which posits its own existence insofar as it is active: the I 