Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born on 19 May in 1762 in Rammenau, Saxony, Germany. The son of a Saxon peasant. The family was noted in the neighborhood for its probity and piety. As a child, he impressed a visiting nobleman, Baron Miltitz, who adopted him.
Fichte's extraordinary intellectual talent soon brought him to the attention of a local baron, who sponsored his education, first in the home of a local pastor, then at the famous Pforta boarding school.
Johann educated at the universities of Jena (1780) and Leipzig (1781-1784), he traveled widely as a tutor during the succeeding ten years.
In 1790 Fichte began an intensive study of the thought of Immanuel Kant, which was to structure the entire course of his philosophic life. Fichte first met Kant in 1791, presenting him with a hurriedly written essay, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung ("Essay Toward a Critique of All Possible Revelation"). The manuscript established Fichte's reputation as a philosopher, and in 1794 he was called to the chair of philosophy at Jena.
Fichte's patron died in 1788, leaving him destitute and jobless, but Fichte was able to obtain a position as a tutor in Zurich. Having unsuccessfully tried to make his mark in the world of letters, he finally succeeded in 1792, when he wrote his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Critique of All Revelation), an application of Kant's ethical principle of duty to religion. Since this work was published anonymously, it was believed to be Kant's; but Kant publicly praised Fichte as the author, earning him the attention of Goethe and the other great minds at the court of Weimar.
In 1794, through the influence of Goethe, Fichte was offered a professorship at Jena, where he proved an impassioned, dynamic teacher. Fichte displayed a strong moral concern for the lives of his students; he criticized the fraternities and gave public lectures on university life, which were published as Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1794; The Vocation of the Scholar). Despite all this extracurricular activity, Fichte developed his basic system, the Wissenschaftslehre, the doctrine of knowledge and metaphysics, in two works, Über de Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre and Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (both 1794). Since he was obsessively concerned with the clarity of his writings, these works were later revised and published in several different versions in his lifetime (the English translation was entitled The Science of Knowledge).
Fichte's metaphysics is called subjective idealism because it bases the reality of the self and the empirical world on the spiritual activity of an infinite ego. His System der Sittenlehre nach den Principien der Wissenschaftslehre (1798; The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge) expresses the necessity of moral striving in the formula, "If I ought I can." ("On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World Order" (1798)).
Later years of professional insecurity did not diminish Fichte's philosophical activity. He produced a popular account of his philosophy in Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800; The Vocation of Man). In Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (1800; The Closed Commercial State) he argued for state socialism, and in Grundzüge der Gegenwärtigun Zeitalters (1806; Characteristics of the Present Age) he presented his philosophy of history. Fichte's metaphysics became more theologically oriented in Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, order Religionslehre (1806; The Way towards the Blessed Life).
But his most memorable accomplishment during the time of the siege of Napoleon was his Reden au die Deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation), given in the winter of 1807 - 1808. These speeches rallied the German people on the cultural and educational "leadership of humanity." In 1810, after teaching two terms at the universities of Erlangen and Königsberg, Fichte was appointed the dean of the philosophy faculty and later rector of the University of Berlin. But Napoleon's siege of Berlin was to cut short his new teaching career. His philosophy was quickly superseded by the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel.
In 1813 Fichte canceled his lectures so that his students could enlist in the "War of Liberation" against Napoleon, of which Fichte himself proved to be an indirect casualty. From his wife, who was serving as a volunteer nurse in a Berlin military hospital, he contracted a fatal infection of which he died on January 29, 1814. Almost to the moment of his death, he continued his lifelong efforts to rethink and to re-examine the basic foundations and systematic implications of his philosophy, as is rather poignantly reflected in the remarkable philosophical "Diary" in which he recorded his thoughts during this final period.
Johann became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Fichte was also the originator of the thesis - antithesis - synthesis, coining the terms "real-idealism" and "ideal-realism" to characterize Wissenschaftslehre (his own version of transcendental idealism), philosophy pragmatic history of the human spirit, the power of productive imagination as an original power of the mind. His famous works - Doctrine of Science (Wissenschaftslehre, 1810 - 1813), The Science of Rights (Das System der Rechtslehre, 1812), and The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge and others.
He posited the spiritual activity of an "infinite ego" as the ground of self and world. He believed that human life must be guided by the practical maxims of philosophy.
(Fichte's System of Ethics, originally published in 1798, ...)
1798(These selections provide a brief but comprehensive introd...)
1800(This is the first translation of Fichte's Addresses to th...)
1800(The book is written by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.)
1796Because of his radical political ideas and his intense moral earnestness, Fichte attracted the hostility of the clergy. The last group charged Fichte with atheism since he had stated that "there can be no doubt that the notion of God as a separate substance is impossible and contradictory." For Fichte, God should be conceived primarily in moral terms: "The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself, God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other" ("On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance"). He refused to compromise with his critics, even publicly attacking their idolatry of a personal God.
Stirred by the events and principles of the French Revolution, he wrote and anonymously published two pamphlets which led to him being seen as a devoted defender of liberty of thought and action and an advocate of political changes.
Johann assimilated three major ideas that became the foundations of his own philosophy: Spinoza's pantheism, Lessing's concept of striving, and Kant's concept of duty.
From the principle of the infinite ego, Fichte deduced the finite ego, or subject, and the non-ego, or object. This split, or "oppositing," between subject and object cannot be overcome through knowledge. Only through moral striving and the creation of a moral order can the self-be reunited with the infinite ego.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte is one of the major figures in German philosophy in the period between Kant and Hegel. Initially considered one of Kant’s most talented followers, Fichte developed his own system of transcendental philosophy, the so-called Wissenschaftslehre. Through technical philosophical works and popular writings, Fichte exercised great influence over his contemporaries, especially during his years at the University of Jena. 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. Today, however, Fichte is more correctly seen as an important philosopher in his own right, as a thinker who carried on the tradition of German idealism in a highly original form.
Quotations:
"Active citizenship, civic freedom, and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands."
"Humanity may endure the loss of everything; all its possessions may be turned away without infringing its true dignity - all but the possibility of improvement."
"What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is."
"Full surely there is a blessedness beyond the grave for those who have already entered on it here, and in no other form than that wherein, they know it here, at any moment."
"A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not."
"By philosophy, the mind of man comes to itself, and from henceforth rests on itself without foreign aid, and is completely master of itself, as the dancer of his feet, or the boxer of his hands."
Johann was a short, strongly built man with sharp, commanding features. His language had a cryptic ring.
Quotes from others about the person
"Fichte who, because the thing-in-itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without any thing-in-itself. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and through merely our representation, and therefore let the knowing subject be all in all or at any rate produce everything from its own resources. For this purpose, he at once did away with the essential and most meritorious part of the Kantian doctrine, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori and thus that between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally without any evidence for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. Moreover, he appealed boldly and openly to intellectual intuition, that is, really to inspiration." - Arthur Schopenhauer.
"Our whole age is imbued with formal striving. This is what led us to disregard congeniality and to emphasize symmetrical beauty, to prefer conventional rather than sincere social relations. It is this whole striving which is denoted by - to use the words of another author - Fichte's and the other philosophers' attempts to construct systems by the sharpness of mind and Robespierre's attempt to do it with the help of the guillotine; it is this which meets us in the flowing butterfly verses of our poets and in Auber's music, and finally, it is this which produces the many revolutions in the political world. I agree perfectly with this whole effort to cling to form, insofar as it continues to be the medium through which we have the idea, but it should not be forgotten that it is the idea which should determine the form, not the form which determines the idea. We should keep in mind that life is not something abstract but something extremely individual. We should not forget that, for example, from a poetic genius' position of immediacy, the form is nothing but the coming into existence of the idea in the world, and that the task of reflection is only to investigate whether or not the idea has gotten the properly corresponding form. The form is not the basis of life, but life is the basis of form. Imagine that a man long infatuated with the Greek mode of life had acquired the means to arrange for a building in the Greek style and a Grecian household establishment - whether or not he would be satisfied would be highly problematical, or would he soon prefer another form simply because he had not sufficiently tested himself and the system in which he lived. But just as a leap backward is wrong (something the age, on the whole, is inclined to acknowledge), so also a leap forward is wrong - both of them because a natural development does not proceed by leaps, and life's earnestness will ironize over every such experiment, even if it succeeds momentarily." - Søren Kierkegaard.
In Zurich, Johann met Johanna Rahn, whom he married in 1794. The couple had a son Immanuel Hermann Fichte.
