FICHTE, JOHANN GOTTLIEB. – Philosopher, born 19 May 1762 in Rammenau, a small village in Upper Lusatia in Upper Lusatia, died in Berlin on 29 January 1814. Of precocious intellect, at nine years old he came under the patronage of Baron Militz, who entrusted him to the care of the parish priest Krebel to provide him with his first elements of learning. In 1774 he was placed in the Pforta boarding school, where he began to reveal a difficult and rebellious character, soon joined by a spirit of romantic exaltation through clandestine readings of Wieland, Goethe, and Lessing. The loss of his protector left him adrift, forcing him to work as a peripatetic tutor.
In 1780 he attended the University of Jena as a theology student. In Zurich he met Johann Rahn, nephew of the poet Klopstock, with whom he became engaged in 1790 and married in 1793. This acquaintance marked the beginning of a new life for him, for he had fallen into a state of despair due to the difficulties he faced. Yet 1790 was also memorable in Fichte’s life for another reason: a student asked him to be instructed in Kant’s philosophy. Fichte, who had moved to Leipzig in search of fortune, was then dominated by Spinoza’s ideas and was ignorant of Kant. While others found Kantian thought exceedingly obscure and difficult, he grasped and mastered it at once. The following year, having traveled to Königsberg, he presented Kant with the manuscript of his *Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung*, which so pleased the old philosopher that he had it published (Königsberg 1792) by his own publisher. Since the work bore no author’s name, it was mistaken for Kant’s own. Kant was thus compelled to disavow the attribution and publicly praised the true author. The eagerly awaited Kantian philosophy of religion had not yet appeared, and Fichte’s essay seemed to anticipate II. In reality, Fichte in that work limited himself to a critical analysis of the idea of supernatural revelation, distinguishing the pure element of that idea—which, in his view, was the reference to the moral law—from the empirical element, arising from sensible representations and thus the cause of an illusion “analogous to the metaphysical illusion of Kant’s transcendental dialectic.” Given his prior intellectualism (Spinozist or Leibnizian), Fichte had previously inclined toward deism. The theological problem, now reframed in a Kantian moralistic conception, remained at the core of his later speculation as well (with a return, in the end, as we shall see, to Spinozism). It must be added that the social question always exerted an equal attraction on him, and he was among the most ardent apologists of the French Revolution, indulging in Enlightenment dreams of a renewal of society based on freedom and a radical transformation of political institutions. Hence the propagandistic and pedagogical character of Fichte’s writings, which show the influence not only of Rousseau but also of Pestalozzi (who, in turn, was influenced by Fichte’s ideas), whose work he had encountered during his stay in Switzerland (though they later also met in person).
In 1794, when the chair held by Reinhold at Jena fell vacant, Fichte was invited by the Weimar government, on Goethe’s recommendation, to occupy II. Thus began the most glorious period of his teaching, during which he sketched his fundamental works: *Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre* (Jena-Leipzig 1794) and *Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution* (there, s.d.), works he continued to revise and expand in various introductions and completions that followed the development of his thought. These must be supplemented, for the theoretical part, by the *Recension von Aenesidemus* (Jena 1794), in which he defends Kantian criticism from the accusations of Schulze, who, basing himself on Reinhold’s interpretation, traced a skeptical form of skepticism; and, for the practical part, by *Grundlage des Naturrechts* (Jena and Leipzig 1796) and *System der Sittenlehre* (there 1798). The sensational success of his lectures (though not without incidents in his relations with students) was suddenly interrupted by the famous *Atheismusstreit* of 1799, which caused a great stir throughout Germany. Essentially, Fichte was accused of atheism, and he defended himself against the charge by arguing that such was neither his intention nor the meaning of his doctrine. He lost his chair, and Schilling, once his ardent pupil and admirer, was called to replace him. “Where one door closes, another opens,” Goethe remarked on that occasion.
From Jena, Fichte moved to Berlin, where he found himself in the full Romantic milieu, close to the two Schlegels, Schleiermacher, and Tieck (but, again, due to his egocentric character, personal agreement with them was always difficult; indeed, this period saw the rupture and bitter polemic with Schelling). Meanwhile, the Jena incident led him to rethink his own doctrine: in his lectures *Die Bestimmung des Menschen* (Berlin 1800), he broadened his narrowly moralistic view of religion, justifying belief in God in a more universal manner (similarly to what Kant had done in the *Critique of Judgment*). Hence, for the theoretical part, the new *Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre* (Tübingen 1801) and *Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben* (Berlin 1806). Politically, he shifted from his previous cosmopolitan humanitarianism to a nationalist position, represented by *Der geschlossene Handelsstaat* (Tübingen 1800) and the famous *Reden an die deutsche Nation* (Berlin 1808). The *System der Rechtslehre* and *Sittenlehre* of 1812 also mark a reworking in this new political and religious direction (worth noting also is *Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters*, there 1806).
These were years dense with grand historical events: in 1806 Prussia took the lead of the league against Napoleon. The German defeats followed, and the fall of Berlin. Fichte wandered, writing and contributing as he could to the resurgence. When the University of Berlin reopened in 1810, he was appointed rector (under French domination, but since Fichte appealed to the spiritual forces of the nation, he did not cause excessive concern). He remained in office for only a short time (as usual, he clashed with students and colleagues). With the 1812 campaign in Russia, the Napoleonic eagle began to wane. The nations rose in insurrection. Fichte too donned a military uniform, even as he continued his lectures. Berlin’s hospitals overflowed with the wounded and sick. His wife served as a nurse at their bedsides and, contracting typhus, nearly died. One day, returning from a lecture, Fichte learned that the crisis had passed, and in his joy he embraced his suffering wife warmly. It is believed that in that moment he contracted the fatal germ. On 29 January he passed peacefully from this life, having just learned, minutes before, that the Prussian army was advancing victoriously into French territory.
F.’s philosophy marks the initial 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. BORDES, CHARLES). This idealism, therefore, from the outset, has a strong vein of spiritualism, and in this respect it reconnects with an undoubtedly Christian motif. What distances it from Christianity is the immanentist tendency, characteristically affirmed by Spinoza. Kantian criticism, at this point, was not without its uncertainties: on the one hand, by restricting the activity of the knowing consciousness to the world of phenomena, it left the existence of the world in itself beyond doubt; on the other, in that vague concept of the “noumenon,” it did not sufficiently distinguish the idea of the world from that of God, which was then sought in the moral sphere, where, however, it remained (as had already been declared earlier) more an ideal posited by pure reason than a reality.
This is, in essence, 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 often merely apparent (hence, too, the frequent shifts in their formulations, as, for example, in F. himself and even more in Schelling). Doctrinally, F. set himself this program: to give a more organic unity to the *Critique of Pure Reason* and its relationship to the *Critique of Practical Reason*. This, initially; then also with the *Critique of Judgment*. He thus proceeds, faithful to criticism, from empirical consciousness (*Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre*, p. 92 of the 1806 edition, as revised by his son), to inquire into the foundations of its possibility. Here emerges the famous principle of the ego (which is the Cartesian *cogito* assumed within the transcendental ego of Kantian thought), which, in its initial formulation, asserts itself only as the “I”: the activity of self-consciousness that posits and affirms itself simply as itself (the immediate identity of subject and object).
A *first principle*, absolute, prior to empirical consciousness—which, however, is always consciousness of something, of an other than itself, and thus of a non-ego. This non-ego is opposed to the ego and thus constitutes the second principle, in which the form (the ego) is determined by the first (the ego), but not so as to yield empirical content; rather, this content, as mere negation, must also be related to the act in which the ego posits and affirms itself (hence the germ of the dialectic of opposition, later developed in various grander forms by Schelling, first, and above all in Hegel’s *Logic*: the defect of this dialectic lies in its abstractness).
But F., still adhering—if not in spirit, then in letter—to Kantian criticism, seeks to preserve a certain positivity of the world outside us, given by sensation; hence he resorts to an *unconscious* faculty, to Kant’s transcendental imagination, which, through the forms and categories of sense and intellect, gives consistency to the world of sensibility, rendering it a world of proper objects, until, when critical reflection intervenes, it reveals itself for what it truly is: namely, a production or creation of the ego itself, albeit always originally limited by the given of sensibility—which is, in itself, indeducible (hence the shock, the obstacle: *Anstoß*). Instead, the logical deduction of the particular forms in which that given is organized to form science (knowledge in general) was elaborated by F. at length, repeatedly, yet never satisfactorily (owing to the initial separation, as in Kant, of content and form). This is the most arduous and obscure part of his doctrine, where he seems to seek a reconciliation between Berkeley’s dogmatic thesis and Kant’s more cautious criticism.
In any case, the question remained: why does the ego, in passing to empirical ego, create for itself this world that opposes it?
Hence the third principle, which is meant to provide the key to the mystery and, at the same time, the true meaning of the doctrine in its first formulation: the ego is activity, absolute freedom; if an opposition arises within the ego, it is only to be overcome. It is not the knowing ego but the practical ego that reveals to us the true reason for our existence in the world. Knowing is for the sake of acting, and in acting what matters is the effort to realize, step by step, within the inexhaustible process of the finite, the infinity of spirit. Thus, here, form—unlike in Kant’s moral law—determines not only the intention but also the content of the act (v. *Grundlage*, loc. cit., part 2, and *Sittenlehre*, ed. cit., vol. IV, pp. 66ff). In this way, there is a blending of what is commonly defined as “ethical idealism” with a mere “transcendental pragmatism” (of action in general): the ego, which here is God, remains, in this first phase, as a mere ideal, so that the finite, in the process of personalizing the world (from the natural world to the social and historical), can never, in its action, fully realize infinity.
In the second phase of his thought, however, driven by the religious movement led by Schleiermacher (and in part by Jacobi), F. sought to give reality to that ideal, though depersonalizing it into the traditional Being, understood as universal life and activity that transcends even the world of human morality and Kant’s cosmic order. Now, man, through faith and love, creates the world of religiosity, and, in immediate union with God, finds at last his beatitude in an act that is at once absolute freedom and absolute self-awareness (*Anweisung zum seligen Leben*, ed. cit., vol. V, p. 518). We are, so to speak, halfway between Spinoza’s *amor intellectualis Dei* and Hegel’s thought, which, at the end of the dialectical process, arrives at absolute self-consciousness.
The practical part, as has been noted, follows the course of theoretical meditation and is what has made—and continues to make—the popular appeal of this philosophy, which undoubtedly merits credit for having infused a thoroughly spiritual character into questions of law, morality, the state, and human history. For F., the true doctor is not the merely erudite man but one who, by living more deeply within himself the sense of spiritual value, makes it his mission to educate others, his people, his nation—and, through them (famously, the primacy attributed by F. to the German people for this task)—mankind as a whole.