Fichte, Johann Gottlieb

FICHTE, JOHANN GOTTLIEB. - Philosopher, b. May 19, 1762 in Rammenau, a small village in Oberlausitz in Upper Lusatia, d. in Berlin on Jan. 29, 1814. Of precocious intellect, at the age of nine he entered the good graces of Baron Miltitz, who entrusted him to the care of the parish priest Krebel so that he might give him the first elements of learning. In 1774 he was placed in the boarding school at Pforta, where he began to reveal himself also through his sullen and rebellious character, to which there soon was added a spirit of romantic exaltation for the reading, done secretly, of Wieland, Goethe, and Lessing. The loss of his protector set him on the road, so that he was forced to work as a tutor, wandering from one place to another.

In 1780 he attended the University of Jena as a student of theology. In Zurich he met Johanna Rahn, niece of the poet Klopstock, to whom he became engaged in 1790 and whom he married in 1793. That acquaintance was for him the beginning of a new life: for, owing to the difficulties in which he found himself, he had fallen into a state of despair. But that year 1790 is memorable in F.'s life also for another fact: a student asked him to be enrolled in Kant's philosophy. F., who had moved to Leipzig in search of fortune, was at that time dominated by the ideas of Spinoza, and was ignorant of Kant. While to others Kantian thought proved extremely difficult and obscure, he penetrated and conquered it at a stroke, so much so that the following year, having gone to Königsberg, he was able to present to Kant the manuscript of his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung, which pleased the old philosopher so much that he had it published (Königsberg 1792) by his own publisher, so that, since it still did not bear the author's name, the writing was believed to be by Kant himself. The latter thus had to deny the attribution, and declared with flattering words who the true author was. Kant's philosophy of religion, much awaited, had not yet appeared, and F.'s essay seemed to anticipate it. In reality, F., in that writing, limited himself to analyzing critically the idea of supernatural revelation, distinguishing the pure part of that idea, which was, according to him, the reference to the moral law, from the empirical part, due to sensible representations, and therefore the cause of an "illusion" analogous to the metaphysical one of the Kantian transcendental dialectic. Owing to his aforementioned intellectualism (Spinozistic or Leibnizian), F. had previously inclined toward deism. The theological problem, now passed over into a moralistic conception of the Kantian type, remains at the basis of his later speculation as well (with a return, in the end, as will be seen, to Spinozism). It should be added that the social question always exercised an equal attraction upon him, and that he was among the most ardent apologists of the French Revolution, indulging in the Enlightenment dreams of a renewal of society on the basis of liberty and of a radical transformation of political institutions. Hence the propagandistic and pedagogical fervor of F.'s writings, in which one senses the influence, besides that of Rousseau, also of Pestalozzi (who, in turn, felt the influence of F.'s ideas), whose work he had become acquainted with during his stay in Switzerland (but they later came to know each other personally as well).

In 1794, when the chair held at Jena by Reinhold became vacant, F. was invited by the government of Weimar, on Goethe's suggestion, to occupy it. Thus opens the most glorious period of his teaching, in which he sketched his fundamental works: Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Jena-Leipzig 1794) and Einige Vorlesungen über d. Bestimmung d. Gelehrten (ibid., n.d.): works which he then continued for a long time to labor over with various introductions, reworkings and completions, which followed the course of development of his thought. They are to be integrated, for the theoretical part, by the Rezension v. Aenesidemus (Jena 1794), in which he defends Kantian criticism against the accusations of Schulze, who, basing himself on Reinhold's interpretation, charged Kantianism with skepticism; and, for the practical part, by the Grundlage des Naturrechts (Jena and Leipzig 1796) and by the System d. Sittenlehre (ibid. 1798). The clamorous success of his lectures (not without incidents, however, in his relations with a female student) was suddenly interrupted by the famous Atheismusstreit, in 1799, which had great resonance throughout Germany. In substance, F. was accused of atheism, and he defended himself against the accusation by adducing that such was not his intention nor the meaning of his doctrine. He lost his chair, and in his place Schelling was called, formerly his fervent pupil and admirer. "One star sets, another rises," Goethe exclaimed on that occasion.

From Jena F. moved to Berlin, where he found himself in a fully Romantic milieu, close to the two Schlegels, to Schleiermacher, to Tieck (but, again, owing to his egocentric character, personal accord with them was always very difficult: add to this the break and the bitter polemic, at this time, with Schelling). Meanwhile, the Jena incident induced him to rethink his own doctrine: in his lectures Die Bestimmung d. Menschen (Berlin 1800) he broadened his narrowly moralistic view of religion, justifying, in his own way, faith in God from a more universal point of view (analogously to what Kant had done in the Critique of Judgment). Hence, also for the theoretical part, the new version Darstellung d. Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen 1801) and Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben (Berlin 1806). For the political part, he passes from his earlier cosmopolitan humanitarianism to the nationalist position, represented by the writings Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (Tübingen 1800) and by the famous Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin 1808). The System d. Rechtslehre and the Sittenlehre of 1812 mark, likewise, a reworking in this new political and religious direction (to be remembered, also, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, ibid. 1806).

These are years dense with grandiose military events: in 1806 Prussia had placed itself at the head of the league against Napoleon. There followed the German defeats, and the fall of Berlin. F. went wandering, writing and collaborating, as best he could, in the recovery. When in 1810 the University of Berlin was reopened, he was appointed rector (French domination was in place, but, since F. appealed to the spiritual forces of the nation, he did not cast too great a shadow). He remained in office a short time (as usual, he clashed with the students and with his colleagues). With the campaign of 1812 in Russia the Napoleonic eagle began to decline. The insurrection of the nations followed. F., too, put on the military uniform, while still continuing his lectures. The hospitals of Berlin were overflowing with wounded and sick. His wife was at their bedsides as a nurse, and, stricken by a typhus infection, was in danger of her life. One day, returning from his lecture, F. learned that the crisis had been overcome, and in his happiness he embraced the suffering woman effusively. It is believed that in that act he contracted the fatal germ. On Jan. 29 he passed the threshold of death serenely, after having learned, a few minutes earlier, that the Prussian army was advancing victoriously on French soil.

The philosophy of F. marks the starting point of the transformation of Kantianism into absolute idealism: hence its great importance in the history of modern philosophy, which, moreover, had already set out on this path with Descartes (v. DESCARTES). This idealism therefore has, from the very beginning, a strong vein of spiritualism, and is linked, on this side, to a motive that is undoubtedly Christian. What distances it from Christianity is the immanentist tendency, typically asserted with Spinoza. Kantian criticism, on this point, was not without uncertainties: on the one hand, by restricting the activity of the knowing consciousness to the world of phenomena, it left undoubted the existence of the world for itself; on the other, in that vague concept of "noumenon" it did not distinguish clearly enough the idea of the world from that of God, which one then sought to regain on moral ground, where, however, it remained (as had already been declared before), more than a reality, an ideal posited by pure reason. This is, at bottom, the most debated problem in idealism: doctrinal formulas are then added to corroborate the theses of individual philosophers with a rigor of demonstration that is many times only apparent (hence, also, often, the changes in their enunciations, as, for example, in F. and still more in Schelling). Doctrinally F. set himself this program: to give a more organic unity to the Critique of Pure Reason and to its relation with the Critique of Practical Reason. This, at first; then, also with the Critique of Judgment. He therefore moves, faithful to criticism, from empirical consciousness (Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, p. 92 of vol. I of the edition of the Works edited by his son), and asks himself the foundations of its possibility. Here emerges the famous principle of the I (which is the Cartesian cogito assumed in the transcendendentality of the Kantian pure I), which, in its first positing, affirms itself only as I = I: activity of self-consciousness that simply posits and affirms itself (immediate identity of subject and object). First principle, absolute, immanent to empirical consciousness, which, however, is always consciousness of something, of something other than itself, and therefore of a non-I. This non-I opposes the I, and constitutes, thus, the second principle, in which the form (I) is determined by the first (I), but not so the empirical content, although this, as mere negation, must also be put in relation with the act in which the I posits and affirms itself (hence the starting point of the dialectic of opposition, which later unfolded, in more decisive and grandiose forms, in Schelling first, but above all in the Hegelian Logic: the defect of this dialectic lies in its abstractness). But F., still adhering, if not to the spirit, at least to the letter of Kantian criticism, wants to save a certain positivity of the world outside us, given by sensation, and therefore has recourse to an unconscious faculty, to Kant's transcendental imagination, which, by means of the forms and categories of sense and intellect, gives consistency to the world of sensibility, making of it a world of true and proper objects, until, when critical reflection intervenes, it reveals itself for what it really is: that is, a production or creation of the I itself, although still always limited originally by the datum of sensibility which is, in itself, indeductible (hence the clash, the obstacle: the deuteros). On the other hand, the logical deduction of the particular forms, in which that datum is organized to form science (knowledge in general), was elaborated by F. at length, on several occasions, never satisfactorily (because of the initial separation, as already in Kant, of content and form). This is the harshest and darkest part of his doctrine, where it seems that the dogmatic thesis of Berkeley is to be reconciled with the more prudent one of Kantian criticism. In any case, the question remained: why does the I create for itself, passing to the empirical I, this world that opposes it?

Hence the third principle, which seeks to give the key to the mystery and, at the same time, the true meaning of the doctrine in its first formulation: the I is activity, absolute freedom: if an opposition is created in the I, it is only in order to overcome it. Not the knowing I, but the practical I reveals to us the true reason of our existence in the world. Knowing is for acting, and in acting what counts is the effort to realize gradually, in the inexhaustible process of the finite, the infinity of the spirit. Thus, here, the form, unlike Kant's moral law, determines not only the intention, but also the content of the act (v. Grundlage, cit., part 2, and Sittenlehre, ed. cit., vol. IV, p. 66 ff.). There is, in this way, an oscillation between what is commonly defined as "ethical idealism" and a mere "transcendental pragmatism" (of action in general): the I, in fact, which here is God, remains, in this first phase, as a mere ideal, so that the finite, in the process of personalization of the world (from the natural world to the social and historical one) can never arrive at actuating infinity in its action. In the second phase, instead, of his thought, under the impulse of the religious movement led by Schleiermacher (and, in part, also by Jacobi), F. wished to give reality to that ideal, but spermatized in the traditional Being, understood as universal life and activity that goes beyond, therefore, also the world of human morality and of the Kantian cosmic order. Man, now, creates, with faith and with love, the world of religiosity, and, identifying himself with God, finds, in the end, his beatitude in an act that is, at the same time, absolute freedom and absolute consciousness of himself (Annennung zum seligen Leben, ed. cit., vol. V, p. 518). We are, one might say, halfway between the Spinozian amor intellectualis Dei and the Hegelian thought that at the end of the dialectical process arrives at the absolute self-consciousness of itself.

The practical part follows, as has been mentioned, the course of theoretical meditation, and is the one that has made, and still makes, the fascination and popularity of this philosophy, which has undoubtedly the merit of having brought a spiritualistic inspiration into the questions of law, morality, the State and human history. The learned man is not, for F., the merely instructed man, but he who, living more deeply in himself the sense of spiritual value, makes a mission of educating others, his people, his Nation and, through this (famous, the primacy attributed by F., for this task, to the German people), humanity entire.

Armando Carlini