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Aug 30, 2001 · Inspired by his reading of Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) developed during the final decade of the eighteenth century a radically revised and rigorously systematic version of transcendental idealism, which he called Wissenschaftslehre (“Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge”).
- Overview
- Early life and career
- Years at the University of Jena.
- Years in Berlin
- Last years
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (born May 19, 1762, Rammenau, Upper Lusatia, Saxony [now in Germany]—died Jan. 27, 1814, Berlin) German philosopher and patriot, one of the great transcendental idealists.
Fichte was the son of a ribbon weaver. Educated at the Pforta school (1774–80) and at the universities of Jena (1780) and of Leipzig (1781–84), he started work as a tutor. In this capacity he went to Zürich in 1788 and to Warsaw in 1791 but left after two weeks’ probation.
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The major influence on his thought at this time was that of Immanuel Kant, whose doctrine of the inherent moral worth of man harmonized with Fichte’s character; and he resolved to devote himself to perfecting a true philosophy, the principles of which should be practical maxims. He went from Warsaw to see Kant himself at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), but this first interview was disappointing. Later, when Fichte submitted his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (“An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation”) to Kant, the latter was favourably impressed by it and helped find a publisher (1792). Fichte’s name and preface were accidentally omitted from the first edition, and the work was ascribed by its earliest readers to Kant himself; when Kant corrected the mistake while commending the essay, Fichte’s reputation was made.
In the Versuch, Fichte sought to explain the conditions under which revealed religion is possible; his exposition turns upon the absolute requirements of the moral law. Religion itself is the belief in this moral law as divine, and such belief is a practical postulate, necessary in order to add force to the law. The revelation of this divine character of morality is possible only to someone in whom the lower impulses have been, or are, successful in overcoming reverence for the law. In such a case it is conceivable that a revelation might be given in order to add strength to the moral law. Religion ultimately then rests upon the practical reason and satisfies the needs of man, insofar as he stands under the moral law. In this conclusion are evident the prominence assigned by Fichte to the practical element and the tendency to make the moral requirements of the ego the ground for all judgment on reality.
In 1793 Fichte married Johanna Maria Rahn, whom he had met during his stay in Zürich. In the same year, he published anonymously two remarkable political works, of which Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (“Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgments Regarding the French Revolution”) was the more important. It was intended to explain the true nature of the French Revolution, to demonstrate how inextricably the right of liberty is interwoven with the very existence of man as an intelligent agent, and to point out the inherent progressiveness of the state and the consequent necessity of reform or amendment. As in the Versuch, the rational nature of man and the conditions necessary for its realization are made the standard for political philosophy.
In 1793 there was a vacant chair of philosophy at the University of Jena, and Fichte was called to fill it. To the ensuing period belongs his most important philosophical work. In this period he published, among other works: Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1794; The Vocation of the Scholar), lectures on the importance of the highest intellectual culture and on the duties that it imposed; several works on the science of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), which were revised and developed continually throughout his life; the practical Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (1796; The Science of Rights); and Das System der Sittenlehre nach den Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (1798; The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge), in which his moral philosophy, grounded in the notion of duty, is most notably expressed.
The system of 1794 was the most original and also the most characteristic work that Fichte produced. It was incited by Kant’s critical philosophy and especially by his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788; Critique of Practical Reason . . .). From the outset it was less critical, precisely because it was more systematic, aiming at a self-sufficient doctrine in which the science of knowledge and ethics were intimately united. Fichte’s ambition was to demonstrate that practical (moral) reason is really (as Kant had only intimated) the root of reason in its entirety, the absolute ground of all knowledge as well as of humanity altogether. To prove this, he started from a supreme principle, the ego, which was supposed to be independent and sovereign, so that all other knowledge was deduced from it. Fichte did not assert that this supreme principle was self-evident but rather that it had to be postulated by pure thought. He followed, thereby, Kant’s doctrine that pure, practical reason postulates the existence of God, but he tried to transform Kant’s rational faith into a speculative knowledge on which he based both his theory of science and his ethics.
Except for the summer of 1805, Fichte resided in Berlin from 1799 to 1806. Among his friends were the leaders of German Romanticism, A.W. and F. Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. His works of this period include Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800; The Vocation of Man), in which he defines God as the infinite moral will of the universe who becom...
The French victories over the Prussians in 1806 drove Fichte from Berlin to Königsberg (where he lectured for a time), then to Copenhagen. He returned to Berlin in August 1807. From this time his published writings were practical in character; not until after the appearance of the Nachgelassene Werke (“Posthumous Works”) and of the Sämmtliche Werke (“Complete Works”) was the shape of his final speculations known. In 1807 he drew up a plan for the proposed new University of Berlin. In 1807–08 he delivered at Berlin his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation), full of practical views on the only true foundation for national recovery and glory. From 1810 to 1812 he was rector of the new University of Berlin. During the great effort of Germany for national independence in 1813, he lectured “Über den Begriff des wahrhaften Krieges” (“On the Idea of a True War”).
At the beginning of 1814, Fichte caught a virulent hospital fever from his wife, who had volunteered for work as a hospital nurse; he died shortly thereafter.
According to Fichte, then, all philosophy and all reality begins with the transcendental ego, the elusive but purely active noumenal self, identifiable only in an indefinitely repeated reflection upon primary experience ("think on one who thinks on one who . . .").
His influence waned towards the end of his life, and Hegel’s subsequent dominance relegated Fichte to the status of a transitional figure whose thought helped to explain the development of German idealism from Kant’s Critical philosophy to Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (/ ˈfɪktə /; [11] German: [ˈjoːhan ˈɡɔtliːp ˈfɪçtə]; [12] 19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814) was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant.
When Reinhold left Jena for a new position in Kiel in 1794, his chair was given to Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who quickly radicalized Kant’s idealism and Reinhold’s attempts to systematize philosophy.
One such successor was the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Taking Kant’s second critique as his starting point, Fichte declared that all being is posited by the ego, which posits itself.
