fichte thesis antithesis

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis

The triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis (German: These, Antithese, Synthese ) is often used to describe the thought of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . Although Hegel never used the terms Johann Fichte used them to describe Hegel's thought.

Quotes [ edit ]

• Johann Fichte , Early Philosophical Writings , p. 63
• The Science of Rights 1796 by, Johann Gottlieb Fichte , 1762-1814; Kroeger, Adolph Ernest, 1837-1882, tr Publication date 1889 P. 147
• Thesis. The freedom of the person, according to the Conception of Rights, is limited only by the possibility that other persons are also to also with him as free persons, and hence as also having rights. Whatsoever does not violate the rights of another, each person has the right to do, and this, indeed, constitutes each person's right. Each one, moreover, has the right to judge for himself what is, and to defend, by his own powers, what he so judges to be, the limit of his free actions.
• Antithesis. According to a correct conclusion drawn from the same Conception of Rights, each person must utterly and unconditionally transfer all his power and judgment to a third party, if a legal relation between free persons is to be possible. By this transfer each person loses altogether the right to judge the limits of his own right and to defend those limits. He makes himself completely dependent upon the knowledge and good- will of the third party, to whom he has made the transfer, and ceases to be a free being.
• The Science of Rights 1796 by, Johann Gottlieb Fichte , 1762-1814; Kroeger, Adolph Ernest, 1837-1882, tr Publication date 1889 P. 149
• Thesis. — The state guarantees to each citizen, who contributes toward the protection of the state and to the support of the poor, the absolute and unlimited property of the remainder of his possession. Each must have the right to waste, destroy, or throw away what belongs to him, provided he thereby inflicts no injury upon other citizens.
• Antithesis. — The state continually takes possession of all the remainder — of the products of the producers, and of the wares and labor of the artist — in order thereby to make possible the necessary exchange, without which each can not be sure that he can sustain himself from the results of his labor.
• The Science of Rights 1796 by, Johann Gottlieb Fichte , 1762-1814; Kroeger, Adolph Ernest, 1837-1882, tr Publication date 1889 P. 317-319
• Thesis. — Whosoever violates the municipal compact in any manner, whether from neglect or intentionally, loses, strictly speaking, all his rights as a citizen and as a man, and becomes an outlaw. ….
• The Science of Rights 1796 by, Johann Gottlieb Fichte , 1762-1814; Kroeger, Adolph Ernest, 1837-1882, tr Publication date 1889 P. 343-344
• Franz Kafka , Parable translated by Hanna Arendt, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1954), p. 7

See also [ edit ]

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

External links [ edit ]

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectic is one of the most influential philosophical theories of the modern era. It has been studied and debated for centuries, and its influence can be seen in many aspects of modern thought. Hegel's dialectic has been used to explain a wide range of topics from politics to art, from science to religion. In this comprehensive overview, we will explore the major tenets of Hegel's dialectic and its implications for our understanding of the world. Hegel's dialectic is based on the premise that all things have an inherent contradiction between their opposites.

It follows that any idea or concept can be understood through a synthesis of the two opposing forces. This synthesis creates a new and higher understanding, which then leads to further progress and development. Hegel's dialectic has been used in many different fields, from philosophy to economics, and it provides an important framework for understanding how our world works. In this article, we will explore the historical origins and development of Hegel's dialectic. We will also examine its application in various fields, from politics to art, from science to religion.

Finally, we will consider the implications of Hegel's dialectic for our understanding of the world today. Hegel's dialectic is a philosophical theory developed by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the early 19th century. It is based on the concept of thesis, antithesis and synthesis , which are steps in the process of progress. The thesis is an idea or statement that is the starting point of an argument. The antithesis is a statement that contradicts or negates the thesis.

The synthesis is a combination of the two opposing ideas, which produces a new idea or statement. This process can be repeated multiple times, leading to an evolution of ideas. Hegel's dialectic has been used in many fields, such as politics and economics . It has been used to explain how ideas progress through debate and discussion.

In politics, it has been used to explain how different points of view can lead to compromise or resolution. In economics, it has been used to explain how different economic theories can lead to new solutions and strategies. Hegel's dialectic can also be applied to everyday life. For example, it can be used to resolve conflicts between people or groups.

Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis

Thesis and antithesis are two conflicting ideas, while synthesis is the result of their interaction. The dialectic process is a way of understanding how the world works, as it helps to explain the constant flux of ideas and events. It also helps to explain how change and progress are possible. Thesis and antithesis can be thought of as two sides of a coin. One side represents an idea or opinion, while the other side represents its opposite.

When the two sides come together, they create a synthesis that incorporates both sides. This synthesis can then be used to create new ideas or opinions. The dialectic process can be applied in various contexts, such as politics and economics. In politics, it can be used to explain how different factions come together to create policies that are beneficial to all parties. In economics, it can be used to explain how supply and demand interact to create a stable market. Hegel's dialectic can also be used in everyday life.

Applications of Hegel's Dialectic

For example, in the political sphere, it can be used to explore how different ideologies can be reconciled or how compromises can be reached. In economics, Hegel's dialectic has been used to explain the process of economic growth and development. It can be seen as a way of understanding how different economic systems interact with each other and how different economic actors are affected by changes in the marketplace. For example, it can help to explain how different economic policies can lead to different outcomes. Hegel's dialectic has also been applied to other social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology. In particular, it has been used to explore how different social systems interact with each other and how different social groups are affected by changes in their environment.

Using Hegel's Dialectic in Everyday Life

This process can be used to explain how various aspects of life, such as career or relationships, evolve over time. Thesis represents an idea or concept, while antithesis represents the opposite of that idea or concept. Synthesis is the resolution between the two opposing forces. This process is repeated until a conclusion is reached.

For example, in a career conflict between two people, one might present an idea while the other presents the opposite idea. Through discussion and negotiation, the two parties can come to a synthesis that meets both their needs. Hegel's dialectic can also be used to resolve conflicts between groups of people. It involves each party presenting their ideas and opinions, then engaging in dialogue to reach a compromise or agreement.

This process can be applied to any area of life, from politics and economics to relationships and personal growth. It helps to create understanding and respect between different perspectives, allowing everyone to come together in a meaningful way. By understanding and applying Hegel's dialectic in everyday life, we can better navigate our relationships and interactions with others. Through dialogue, negotiation, and compromise we can work towards resolutions that benefit all parties involved.

In economics, it has been used to explain how market forces interact with each other and how different economic theories can be used to explain the same phenomenon. The dialectic has also been used in other fields such as philosophy, science, and psychology. In philosophy, it has been used to explain the relationship between theory and practice and how theories evolve over time. In science, it has been used to explain the relationship between empirical evidence and logical reasoning.

This theory can be applied to any area of life, from career to relationships. The core of Hegel's dialectic involves the concept of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which is a way of understanding how ideas evolve over time. In this way, the dialectic helps to identify contradictions in a situation and find a resolution through synthesis. In terms of its application to everyday life, the dialectic can be used to find common ground between two opposing sides. For example, if two people are in disagreement, the dialectic can help them identify the underlying issues and then work to resolve them.

Additionally, it can help individuals and groups identify areas where they have common interests, which can lead to more productive conversations and outcomes. The dialectic is also useful in understanding how different perspectives can lead to different solutions. By recognizing different points of view, individuals and groups can gain insight into why certain solutions may not work for everyone involved. This can help to create a more productive environment for collaboration. Finally, the dialectic can be used as a tool for self-reflection. By understanding how different ideas evolve over time and how different perspectives interact, individuals can gain insight into their own views and values.

For example, it can be used to explain the development of a new policy proposal or a new form of government. In economics, Hegel's dialectic can be used to explain the dynamics of supply and demand, or the emergence of a new economic system. In addition, Hegel's dialectic has been applied in other areas, such as education and religion. In education, this theory can be used to explain the process of learning and understanding new concepts. In religion, it can be used to explain the evolution of religious beliefs and practices over time.

This is followed by a synthesis of the two, which creates a new, higher form of understanding. This new understanding then forms the basis for further analysis, which can lead to further synthesis and resolution. Hegel's dialectic can be applied to any area of life, such as career or relationships. For example, if two people have different approaches to a problem, they can use the dialectic to work together to find a solution that works for both of them.

This could involve identifying their respective points of view and then looking for common ground where they can agree. As the synthesis forms, it can provide a basis for further discussion, which may eventually lead to a resolution. The same process can be used to resolve conflicts between groups, such as political parties or countries. By recognizing each side's point of view and then looking for common ground, it is possible to find ways to bridge the divide between them.

This can help create an atmosphere of mutual understanding and respect, which can lead to constructive dialogue and positive outcomes. Hegel's dialectic is a valuable tool for helping people and groups come to agreement and harmony despite their differences. By recognizing both sides' points of view and then looking for common ground, it is possible to create a synthesis that can provide a basis for further discussion and resolution. Hegel's dialectic is a powerful philosophical tool that helps to explain how ideas evolve over time. Through the concept of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, it provides a framework for understanding how opposing forces interact and ultimately create new ideas and solutions.

This theory has been applied to many areas, such as politics and economics, and can be used in everyday life. The article has provided a comprehensive overview of Hegel's dialectic and its various applications.

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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”). Perhaps the most characteristic, as well as most controversial, feature of the Wissenschaftslehre (at least in its earlier and most influential version) is Fichte’s effort to ground his entire system upon the bare concept of subjectivity, or, as Fichte expressed it, the “pure I.” During his career at the University of Jena (1794–1799) Fichte erected upon this foundation an elaborate transcendental system that embraced the philosophy of science, ethics, philosophy of law or “right.” and philosophy of religion.

1. Life and Work

2. fichte’s philosophical project, 3. the starting point of the jena wissenschaftslehre, 4.1 the “foundation”, 4.2 philosophy of nature, 4.4 philosophy of law ( recht ), 4.5 philosophy of religion, 5. the later wissenschaftslehre and the reception of fichte’s philosophy, individual works and english translations, secondary literature about fichte and the wissenschaftslehre, other internet resources, related entries.

Fichte was born May 19, 1762 in the village of Rammenau in the Oberlausitz area of Saxony. He was the eldest son in a family of poor and pious ribbon weavers. His 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, and finally at the universities of Jena and Leipzig. With the death of his patron, Fichte was forced to discontinue his studies and seek his livelihood as a private tutor, a profession he quickly came to detest.

Following a lengthy sojourn in Zurich, were he met his future wife, Johanna Rahn, Fichte returned to Leipzig with the intention of pursuing a literary career. When his projects failed, he was again forced to survive as a tutor. It was in this capacity that he began giving lessons on the Kantian philosophy in the summer of 1790. This first encounter with Kant’s writings produced what Fichte himself described as a “revolution” in his manner of thinking. Whereas he had formally been torn between, on the one hand, a practical commitment to the moral improvement of humanity and, on the other, a theoretical commitment to “intelligible fatalism,” he found in the Critical philosophy a way of reconciling his “head” and “heart” in a system that could meet the highest intellectual standards without requiring him to sacrifice his belief in human freedom.

Fichte eventually made his way to Königsberg, where he lived for a few months. After a disappointing interview with Kant, he resolved to demonstrate his mastery of the latter’s philosophy by writing a treatise on a theme as yet unaddressed by Kant: namely, the question of the compatibility of the Critical philosophy with any concept of divine revelation. In a few weeks Fichte composed a remarkable manuscript in which he concluded that the only revelation consistent with the Critical philosophy is the moral law itself. Kant was sufficiently impressed by the talent of this unknown and impoverished young man to offer to arrange for the publication of Fichte’s manuscript, which was published by Kant’s own publisher in 1792 under the title Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation . The first edition of this work, however, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, appeared without the author’s name and preface and was quickly and widely hailed as a work by Kant himself. When the true identity of its author was revealed, Fichte was immediately catapulted from total obscurity to philosophical celebrity.

Meanwhile, Fichte was once again employed as a private tutor, this time on an estate near Danzig, where he wrote several, anonymously published political tracts. The first of these was published in 1793 with the provocative title Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, who have hitherto Suppressed it . In the summer of 1793 Fichte returned to Zurich where he married his fiancé and oversaw the publication of the first two installments of his spirited Contribution to the Rectification of the Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution (1793 and 1794). In this work he not only defended the principles (if not all the practices) of the French revolutionaries, but also attempted to outline his own democratic view of legitimate state authority and insisted on the right of revolution. Despite the fact that these political writings were published anonymously, the author’s identity was widely known, and Fichte thereby acquired a reputation, not wholly deserved, as a radical “Jacobin.”

Following the completion of these projects, Fichte devoted his time in Zurich to rethinking and revising his own philosophical position. While maintaining his allegiance to the new Critical or Kantian philosophy, Fichte was powerfully impressed by the efforts of K. L. Reinhold to provide the Critical philosophy with a new, more secure “foundation” and to base the entire system upon a single “first principle.” At the same time, he became acquainted with the works of two authors who were engaged in skeptical attacks upon the philosophies of both Kant and Reinhold: Solomon Maimon and G. E. Schulze (“Aenesidemus”). It was the need to respond to the sharp criticisms of these authors that eventually led Fichte to construct his own, unique version of transcendental idealism, for which, in the spring of 1794, he eventually coined the name Wissenschaftslehre (“Doctrine of Science” or “Theory of Scientific Knowledge”). During the winter of 1793/94 he composed a long manuscript, “Private Mediations on Elementary Philosophy/Pracical Philosophy,” in which worked out some of the fundamental features of his new system. In Feburary and March of 1794 he gave a series of private lectures on his conception of philosophy before a small circle of influential clerics and intellectuals in Zurich.

It was at this moment that he received an invitation to assume the recently vacated chair of Critical Philosophy at the University of Jena, which was rapidly emerging as the capital of the new German philosophy. Fichte arrived in Jena in May of 1794, and enjoyed tremendous popular success there for the next six years, during which time he laid the foundations and developed the first systematic articulations of his new system. Even as he was engaged in this immense theoretical labor, he also tried to address a larger, popular audience and also threw himself into various practical efforts to reform university life. As one bemused colleague observed, “his is a restless spirit; he thirsts for some opportunity to act in the world. Fichte wants to employ his philosophy to guide the spirit of his age.” Indeed, a passionate desire to “have an effect” upon his own age remained a central feature of Fichte’s character, most notably expressed a decade later in his celebrated Addresses to the German Nation , delivered in Berlin in 1806 during the French occupation. In Jena, this same desire is reflected in the enormously popular series of public lectures on “Morality for Scholars,” which he began to deliver immediately upon his arrival in Jena. The first five of these lectures were published in 1794 under the title Some Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation .

Though Fichte has already hinted at his new philosophical position in his 1794 review of G. E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus , the first full-scale public announcement of the same came in a short manifesto that he published as a means of introducing himself to his new students and colleagues at Jena and attracting listeners to his lectures. (As an “extraordinary professor,” Fichte was largely dependent upon fees paid by students attending his “private” lectures.) This manifesto, Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre (1794), articulated some of the basic ideas of the new philosophy, but it mainly focused upon questions of systematic form and the relationship between philosophy and its proper object (the necessary actions of the human mind).

Fichte’s first truly systematic work was his Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (1794/95). As the title implies, this work, which remains to this day Fichte’s best-known philosophical treatise, was not meant to be a presentation of his entire system, but only of the rudiments or first principles of the same. In fact, Fichte had not originally intended to publish this work at all, which was written less than a year after his first tentative efforts to articulate for himself his new conception of transcendental philosophy. The Foundation was originally intended to be distributed, in fascicles, to students attending his private lectures during his first two semesters at Jena, where the printed sheets could be subjected to analysis and questions and supplemented with oral explanations. Because of the great interest in Fichte’s new philosophy, however, he soon authorized a public edition of the same, in two volumes. Parts I and II of the Foundation were published in 1794 and Part II in 1795. In 1795 he also published a substantial supplement to the Foundation , under the title Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty . The title pages of all three of these publications, however, still stipulated that they were intended only as “a manuscript for the use of his listeners.” (When, in 1802, Fichte issued a second, one-volume edition of the Foundation and Outline , in 1801, this subtitle was dropped.)

Dissatisfied with many features of his initial presentation of the “foundational” portion of his system and shocked by the virtually universal misunderstanding of his published Foundation , Fichte immediately set to work on an entirely new exposition of the same, which he repeated three times in his private lectures on “The Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy ( Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo ” (1796/76, 1797/98, 1798/99). Though he intended to revise these lectures for serial publication under the title An Attempt a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre in the Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten , of which he himself was by then co-editor, only the two Introductions to and the first chapter of this “New Presentation” ever appeared (1797/98).

Even as he was thoroughly revising his presentation of the foundational portion of his system, Fichte was simultaneously engaged in elaborating the various subdivisions or systematic branches of the same. As was his custom, he did this first in his private lectures and then in published texts based upon the same. The first such extension was into the realm of philosophy of law and social philosophy, which resulted in the publication Foundations of Natural Right in accordance with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre (published in two volumes in 1796 and 1797). The second extension was into the realm of moral philosophy, which resulted in the publication of the System of Ethics in accordance with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre (1798). Fichte then planned to extend his system into the realm of philosophy of religion. Indeed, he announced lectures on this topic for the Spring Semester of 1799, but before he could commence these lectures, his career at Jena had come to an abrupt and unhappy conclusion in the wake of the so-called “Atheism Controversy” of 1798/99.

In 1798 Fichte published in his Philosophical Journal a brief essay “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World,” in which he attempted to sketch some of his preliminary ideas on the topic indicated in the title and simultaneously to give the first clear public hint of the character of a philosophy of religion “in accordance with the principles of the Wissenschaftslehre .” The occasion for this essay was another essay, published in the same issue of the Philosophical Journal , by K. L. Forberg. As it happened, these two essays provoked an anonymous author to publish a pamphlet charging the authors of both essays with atheism and demanding Fichte’s dismissal from his post at Jena. The matter quickly escalated into a major public controversy which eventually led to the official suppression of the offending issue of the journal and to public threats by various German princes to prevent their students from enrolling at the University of Jena. The crisis produced by these actions and the growing number of publications for and against Fichte—which included an intemperate Appeal to the Public by Fichte himself (1799), as well as a more thoughtful response entitled “From a Private Letter” (1799)—eventually provoked F. H. Jacobi to publish his famous “open letter” to Fichte, in which he equated philosophy in general and Fichte’s transcendental philosophy in particular with “nihilism.” As the public controversy unfolded, Fichte badly miscalculated his own position and was finally forced to resign his position at Jena and to flee to Berlin, where he arrived in the summer of 1799.

At this point, the Prussian capital had no university of its own, and Fichte was forced to support himself by giving private tutorials and lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre and by a new flurry of literary production, increasingly aimed at a large, popular audience. The first of these “popular” writings was a brilliant presentation of some of the characteristic doctrines and conclusions of Fichte’s system, with a strong emphasis upon the moral and religious character of the same. This work, The Vocation of Man (1800), which is perhaps Fichte’s greatest literary achievements, was intended as an indirect response to Jacobi’s public repudiation of the Wissenschaftslehre . That same year also saw the publication of a typically bold foray into political economy, The Closed Commercial State , in which Fichte propounds a curious blend of socialist political ideas and autarkic economic principles. Defending his philosophy against misunderstanding remained, however, Fichte’s chief concern during this period, as is evidenced by the more direct response to Jacobi contained in his poignantly titled Sun-Clear Report to the Public at Large concerning the Actual Character of the latest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand (1801).

At the same time that he was addressing the public in this manner, Fichte was becoming ever more deeply engrossed in efforts to rethink and to rearticulate the very foundations of his system, beginning with his private lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre of 1801/2, and culminating in the three, radically new versions of the same produced during the year 1804. Indeed, he continued to produce new versions of the Wissenschaftslehre right up until his death, delivering new versions of his system in 1805, 1807, 1810, 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 (though the last two versions were cut short, the first by the war with France and the second by Fichte’s death). However, with the single exception of the extraordinarily condensed (and extraordinarily opaque) Presentation of the General Outlines of the Wissenschaftslehre (1810), none of these later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre was published during Fichte’s lifetime. Some of them appeared, in severely edited form, in the collection of Fichte’s Works published by his son several decades following his death, but most of them are only now being published for the first time in the critical edition of Fichte’s writings produced by the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences. It appears that Fichte was so discouraged by the public reception of the first, 1794/95 presentation of the foundation of his system that he concluded that it was prudent to limit future new presentations of the same to the lecture hall and seminar room, where he could elicit reactions and objections from his listeners and respond immediately with the requisite corrections and clarifications. Be that as it may, Fichte never stopped trying to refine his philosophical insights and to revise his systematic presentation of the same. Thus there are more than a dozen different full-scale presentations or versions of the Wissenschaftslehre , most of which were written after his departure from Jena. “The Wissenschaftslehre ” is not the name of a book; it is the name of a system of philosophy , one capable of being expounded in a variety of different ways. Despite the striking differences between the earlier and later versions of his lectures on the foundations of his system, Fichte always insisted that the “spirit” of the same remained unaltered—a claim that continues to be challenged and debated by Fichte scholars.

In 1805 Fichte spend a semester as a professor at the University of Erlangen, but returned to Berlin in the fall of that year. The next year, 1806, he published in rapid succession three popular and well-received books, all of which were based upon earlier series of public lectures that he had delivered in Berlin: On the Essence of the Scholar (a reworking of some of the same themes first addressed in the similarly titled lectures of 1794); The Characteristics of the Present Age (an attempt to show the implications of his “system of freedom” for a speculative philosophy of history); and Guide to the Blessed Life, or the Doctrine of Religion (an eloquent and somewhat mystically tinged treatise on the relationship between transcendental philosophy and genuine religion). Taken together, these three “popular” works are remarkable blends of speculative profundity and rhetorical eloquence.

When the French army of occupation entered Berlin in 1806, Fichte joined the Prussian government in exile in Königsberg, where he delivered yet another course of lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre and wrote an important short book on Machiavelli as Author (1807), which defends a form of Realpolitik that at least appears to contrast quite starkly with the liberalism and political idealism of Fichte’s earlier political writings. Fichte soon returned to occupied Berlin, however, where, in the winter of 1807/8, he delivered his celebrated Addresses to the German Nation (published in 1808). Though these lectures later obtained a place of dubious honor as founding documents in the history of German nationalism, they are mainly concerned with the issue of national identity (and particularly with the relationship between language and nationality) and the question of national education (which is the main topic of the work)—both of which are understood by Fichte as means toward a larger, cosmopolitan end.

Fichte had always had a lively interest in pedagogical issues and assumed a leading role in planning the new Prussian university to be established in Berlin (though his own detailed plans for the same were eventually rejected in favor of those put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt). When the new university finally opened in 1810, Fichte was the first head of the philosophical faculty as well as the first elected rector of the university. His final years saw no diminishment in the pace either of his public activity or of his philosophical efforts. He continued to produce new lectures on the foundations and first principles of his system, as well as new introductory lectures on philosophy in general (“Logic and Philosophy” [1812] and “The Facts of Consciousness” [1813]), political philosophy (“System of the Doctrine of Right” [1812] and “Doctrine of the State” [1813]) and ethics (“System of Ethical Theory” [1812]). As presaged perhaps by his earlier book on Machiavelli, these late forays into the domain of practical philosophy betray a darker view of human nature and defend a more authoritarian view of the state than anything to be found in Fichte’s earlier writings on these subject.

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.

The primary task of Fichte’s system of philosophy (the Wissenschaftslehre ) is to reconcile freedom with necessity, or, more specifically, to explain how freely willing, morally responsible agents can at the same time be considered part of a world of causally conditioned material objects in space and time. Fichte’s strategy for answering this question—at least in his early writings, which are the ones upon which his historical reputation as a philosopher has (at least until recently) been grounded and hence are the ones to be expounded here—was to begin simply with the ungrounded assertion of the subjective spontaneity and freedom (infinity) of the I and then to proceed to a transcendental derivation of objective necessity and limitation (finitude) as a condition necessary for the possibility of the former. This is the meaning of his description, in his “First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre ,” of philosophy’s task as that of “displaying the foundation of experience” or “explaining the basis of the system of representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity.” Fichte derived this conception of the task and strategy of philosophy from his study of Kant, and no matter how far his own system seemed to diverge from “the letter” of the Critical philosophy, Fichte always maintained that it remained true to “the spirit” of the same. Central to this “spirit,” for Fichte, is an uncompromising insistence upon the practical certainty of human freedom and a thoroughgoing commitment to the task of providing a transcendental account of ordinary experience that could explain the objectivity and necessity of theoretical reason (cognition) in a manner consistent with the practical affirmation of human liberty. Though Fichte attributed the discovery of this task to Kant, he believed that it was first accomplished successfully only in the Wissenschaftslehre , which he therefore described as the first “system of human freedom.”

In an effort to clarify the task and method of transcendental philosophy, Fichte insisted upon the sharp distinction between the “standpoint” of natural consciousness (which it is the task of philosophy to “derive,” and hence to “explain”) and that of transcendental reflection, which is the standpoint required of the philosopher. He thus insisted that there is no conflict between transcendental idealism and the commonsense realism of everyday life. On the contrary, the whole point of the former is to demonstrate the necessity and unavailability of the latter.

However “Kantian” in spirit Fichte’s enterprise might have been, he was at the same time all too keenly aware of what he considered to be certain glaring weaknesses and inadequacies in Kant’s own execution of this project. Taking to heart the criticisms of such contemporaries as F. H. Jacobi, Salomon Maimon, and G. E. Schulze, Fichte propounded a radically revised version of the Critical philosophy. First of all, he argued that the very concept of a “thing in itself,” understood as a mind-independent, external “cause” of sensations, is indefensible on Critical grounds. In addition, he maintained that Kant’s denial of the possibility of “intellectual intuition,” though certainly justified as a denial of the possibility of any non-sensory awareness of external objects, is nevertheless difficult to reconcile with certain other Kantian doctrines regarding the I’s immediate presence to itself both as a (theoretically) cognizing subject (the doctrine of the transcendental apperception) and as a (practically) striving moral agent (the doctrine of the categorical imperative).

His study of the writings of K. L. Reinhold convinced Fichte that the systematic unity of the Critical philosophy—specifically, the unity of theoretical and practical reason, of the First and Second Critiques —was insufficiently evident in Kant’s own presentation of his philosophy and that the most promising way to display the unity in question would be to provide both theoretical and practical philosophy with a common foundation. The first task for philosophy, Fichte therefore concluded, is to discover a single, self-evident starting point or first principle from which one could then somehow “derive” both theoretical and practical philosophy, which is to say, our experience of ourselves as finite cognizers and as finite agents. Not only would such a strategy guarantee the systematic unity of philosophy itself, but, more importantly, it would also display what Kant hinted at but never demonstrated: viz., the underlying unity of reason itself.

Since it is a central task of philosophy, so construed, to establish the very possibility of any knowledge or science ( Wissenschaft ) whatsoever, Fichte proposed to replace the disputed term “philosophy” (or “love of wisdom”) with the new term Wissenschaftslehre or ‘Theory of Science’—a name intended to highlight the distinctively “second order” character of philosophical reflection. Though Fichte’s proposal never caught on as a general name for what was once called “philosophy,” it did become the universally acknowledged name for his own distinctive version of transcendental idealism. Here again, it is important to keep in mind that “ Wissenschaftslehre ” is not the name of any particular Fichtean treatise, but is instead the general name for his entire system or project—an allegedly all-encompassing system that consists of a number of interrelated parts or systematic subdisciplines and an overarching project that could and would be expounded in a series of radically different presentations, employing a bewildering variety of systematic vocabularies.

In order to construct any genuine philosophy of freedom, maintained Fichte, the reality of freedom itself must simply be presupposed and thus treated as an incontrovertible “fact of reason” in the Kantian sense. This, of course, is not to deny the possibility of raising skeptical, theoretically grounded objections to such claims; on the contrary, it was the very impossibility of any theoretically satisfactory refutation of skepticism concerning the reality of freedom that led Fichte to affirm the inescapable “primacy of the practical” with respect to the selection of one’s philosophical starting point.

To the extent that any proposed first principle of philosophy is supposed to be the first principle of all knowledge and hence of all argument, it clearly cannot be derived from any higher principle and hence cannot be established by any sort of reasoning. Furthermore, Fichte maintained that there are two and only two possible starting points for the philosophical project of “explaining” experience: namely, the concept of pure selfhood (which Fichte associated with pure freedom) and that of pure thinghood (which Fichte associated with utter necessity)—neither of which can be warranted, qua philosophical starting point, by a direct appeal to experience, and each of which can be arrived at only by a self-conscious act of philosophical abstraction from ordinary experience (within which freedom and necessity, subject and object, are invariably joined as well as distinguished).

The two rival philosophical strategies made possible by these opposed starting points are unforgettably limned by Fichte in his two 1797 “Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre ,” in which he characterizes the sort of philosophy that begins with the pure I as “idealism” and that which begins with the thing in itself as “dogmatism.” Since, according to Fichte’s earlier argument in Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre , a unified system of philosophy can have one and only one first principle, and since there are two and only two possible first principles, then it follows that no “mixed” system of idealism/dogmatism is possible. Moreover, since dogmatism, as understood by Fichte, unavoidably implies a strict form of determinism or “intelligible fatalism,” whereas idealism is, from the start, committed to the reality of human freedom, it is also practically impossible to reach any sort of “compromise” between two such radically opposed systems.

Though Fichte conceded that neither dogmatism nor idealism could directly refute its opposite and thus recognized that the choice between philosophical starting points could never be resolved on purely theoretical grounds, he nevertheless denied that any dogmatic system, that is to say, any system that commences with the concept of sheer objectivity, could ever succeed in accomplishing what was required of all philosophy. Dogmatism, he argued, could never provide a transcendental deduction of ordinary consciousness, for, in order to accomplish this, it would have to make an illicit leap from the realm of “things” to that of mental events or “representations” [ Vorstellungen ]. Idealism, in contrast, at least when correctly understood as the kind of Critical idealism that demonstrates that the intellect itself must operate in accordance with certain necessary laws, can—at least in principle—accomplish the prescribed task of philosophy and explain our experience of objects (“representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity”) in terms of the necessary operations of the intellect itself, and thus without having to make an illicit appeal to things in themselves. To be sure, one cannot decide in advance whether or not any such deduction of experience from the mere concept of free self-consciousness is actually possible. This, Fichte conceded, is something that can be decided only after the construction of the system in question. Until then, it remains a mere hypothesis that the principle of human freedom, for all of its practical certainty, is also the proper starting point for a transcendental account of objective experience.

It must be granted that the truth of the Wissenschaftslehre’s starting point cannot be established by any philosophical means, including its utility as a philosophical first principle. On the contrary—and this is one of Fichte’s most characteristic and controversial claims—one already has to be convinced, on wholly extra-philosophical grounds, of the reality of one’s own freedom before one can enter into the chain of deductions and arguments that constitute the Wissenschaftslehre . This is the meaning of Fichte’s oft-cited assertion that “the kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon the kind of person one is.” The only compelling reason why the transcendental idealist comes to a stop with—and thus begins his system with—the proposition that “the I freely posits itself” is therefore not because he is unable to entertain theoretical doubts on this score nor because he is simply unable to continue the process of reflective abstraction. Instead, he appeals to a principle eloquently expressed by Fichte in his essay “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Moral Governance of the World,” namely: “I cannot go beyond this standpoint because I am not permitted to do so.” It is precisely because the categorical imperative is in this way invoked to secure the first principle of his entire system that Fichte felt entitled to make the rather startling claim that the Wissenschaftslehre is the only system of philosophy that “accords with duty.”

4. Systematic Overview of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre

The published presentation of the first principles of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre commences with the proposition, “the I posits itself”; more specifically, “the I posits itself as an I.” Since this activity of “self-positing” is taken to be the fundamental feature of I-hood in general, the first principle asserts that “the I posits itself as self-positing.” Unfortunately, this starting point is somewhat obscured in Part I of the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre by a difficult and somewhat forced attempt on Fichte’s part to connect this starting point to the logical law of identity, as well as by the introduction of two additional “first principles,” corresponding to the logical laws of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. (Significantly, this distraction is eliminated entirely in the 1796/99 Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo , which begins with the simple “postulate” or “summons” to the reader: “think the I, and observe what is involved in doing this.”)

“To posit” ( setzen ) means simply “to be aware of,” “to reflect upon,” or “to be conscious of”; this term does not imply that the I must simply “create” its objects of consciousness. The principle in question simply states that the essence of I-hood lies in the assertion of ones own self-identity, i.e., that consciousness presupposes self-consciousness (the Kantian “I think,” which must, at least in principle, be able to accompany all our representations). Such immediate self-identify, however, cannot be understood as a psychological “fact,” no matter how privileged, nor as an “action” or “accident” of some previously existing substance or being. To be sure, it is an “action” of the I, but one that is identical with the very existence of the same. In Fichte’s technical terminology, the original unity of self-consciousness is to be understood as both an action and as the product of the same: as a Tathandlung or “fact/act,” a unity that is presupposed by and contained within every fact and every act of empirical consciousness, though it never appears as such therein.

This same “identity in difference” of original self-consciousness might also be described as an “intellectual intuition,” inasmuch as it involves the immediate presence of the I to itself, prior to and independently of any sensory content. To be sure, such an “intellectual intuition” never occurs, as such, within empirical consciousness; instead, it must simply be presupposed (that is, “posited”) in order to explain the possibility of actual consciousness, within which subject and object are always already distinguished. The occurrence of such an original intellectual intuition is itself inferred, not intuited.

Unfortunately, Fichte confuses matters by sometimes using the term “inner” or “intellectual intuition” to designate something else entirely: namely, the act of philosophical reflection or purified self-observation through which the philosopher becomes conscious of the transcendental conditions for the possibility of ordinary experience—among which, of course, is the occurrence of the “original” intellectual intuition as a Tathandlung . On other occasions, he employs the term “intellectual intuition” in yet another sense: namely, to designate our direct, practical awareness within everyday life of our moral obligations (categorical imperative qua “ real intellectual intuition”). Given the subsequent abuse of this term by Schelling and the romantics, as well as the confusion that one sometimes finds among expositors of Fichte on this issue, it is crucial to recognize systematic ambiguity of the term “intellectual intuition” in Fichte’s own writings.

A fundamental corollary of Fichte’s understanding of I-hood ( Ichheit ) as a kind of fact/act is his denial that the I is originally any sort of “thing” or “substance.” Instead, the I is simply what it posits itself to be, and thus its “being” is, so to speak, a consequence of its self-positing, or rather, is co-terminus with the same. The first principle of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre is thus equally “practical” and “theoretical,” insofar as the act described by this principle is a “doing” as well as a “knowing,” a deed as well as a cognition. Thus the problematic unity of theoretical and practical reason is guaranteed from the start, inasmuch as this very unity is a condition for the possibility of self-consciousness.

After establishing the first principle and conceiving the act expressed therein, the philosophical task is then to discover what other acts must necessarily occur as conditions for the possibility of the original, “simply posited,” first act and then to do the same for each of these successively discovered acts (or the theorems in which they are formulated). By continuing in this manner, one will, according to Fichte, finally arrive at a complete deduction of the a priori structure of ordinary experience or, what amount to the same thing, a complete inventory of the “original acts of the mind.” This is precisely the task of the first or “foundational” portion of the Jena system.

Just as we are never directly aware of the original act of self-positing with which the system commences, so are we also unaware—except, of course, from the artificial standpoint of philosophical reflection—of each of these additional “necessary but unconscious” acts that are derived as conditions necessary for the possibility of the originally posited act of self-positing. Furthermore, though we must, due to the discursive character of reflection itself, distinguish each of these acts from the others that it is conditioned by and that are, in turn, conditioned by it, none of these individual acts actually occurs in isolation from all of the others. Transcendental philosophy is thus an effort to analyze what is in fact the single, synthetic act through which the I posits for itself both itself and its world, thereby becoming aware in a single moment of both its freedom and its limitations, its infinity and its finitude. The result of such an analysis is the recognition that, although “the I simply posits itself,” its freedom is never “absolute” or “unlimited”; instead, freedom proves to be conceivable—and hence the I itself proves to be possible—only as limited and finite. Despite widespread misunderstanding of this point, the Wissenschaftslehre is not a theory of the absolute I. Instead, the conclusion of both the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre and of the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo is that the “absolute I” is a mere abstraction and that the only sort of I that can actually exist or act is a finite, empirical, embodied, individual self .

The I must posit itself in order to be an I at all; but it can posit itself only insofar as it posits itself as limited (and hence divided against itself, inasmuch as it also posits itself as unlimited or “absolute”). Moreover, it cannot even posit for itself its own limitations, in the sense of producing or creating these limits. The finite I (the intellect) cannot be the ground of its own passivity. Instead, according to Fichte’s analysis, if the I is to posit itself at all, it must simply discover itself to be limited, a discovery that Fichte characterizes as a ‘check’ or Anstoß to the free, practical activity of the I. Such an original limitation of the I is, however, a limit for the I only insofar as the I posits it as such. I does this, according to Fichte’s analysis, by positing its own limitation, first, as a mere “feeling,” then as a “sensation,” then as an “intuition” of a thing, and finally as a “concept.” The Anstoß thus provides the essential occasion or impetus that first sets in motion the entire complex train of activities that finally result in our conscious experience both of ourselves as empirical individuals and of a world of spatio-temporal material objects.

Though this doctrine of the Anstoß may seem to play a role in Fichte’s philosophy not unlike that which has sometimes been assigned to the thing in itself in the Kantian system, the fundamental difference is this: the Anstoß is not something foreign to the I. Instead, it denotes the I’s original encounter with its own finitude. Rather than claim that the Not-I is the cause or ground of the Anstoß , Fichte argues that the former is posited by the I precisely in order to “explain” to itself the latter, that is, in order to become conscious of the same. Though the Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates that such an Anstoß must occur if self-consciousness is to be actual, transcendental philosophy itself is quite unable to deduce or to explain the actual occurrence of such an Anstoß —except as a condition for the possibility of consciousness. Accordingly, there are strict limits to what can be expected from any a priori deduction of experience. According to Fichte, transcendental philosophy can explain, for example, why the world has a spatio-temporal character and a causal structure, but it can never explain why objects have the particular sensible properties they happen to have or why I am this determinate individual rather than another. This is something that the I simply has to discover at the same time that it discovers its own freedom, and indeed, as a condition for the latter. (It must be admitted, however, that Fichte’s own ambitious descriptions of his project sometimes obscure the essential limits of the same and that he sometimes gives his readers the false impression that the Wissenschaftslehre proposes to provide a complete a priori deduction of all the empirical details of experience. This however is certainly not the case.)

Despite this important stricture on the scope of transcendental philosophy, there remains much that can be demonstrated within the foundational portion of the Wissenschaftslehre . For example, it can be shown that the I could not become conscious of its own limits in the manner required for the possibility of any self-consciousness unless it also possessed an original and spontaneous ability to synthesize the finite and the infinite. In this sense, the Wissenschaftslehre deduces the power of productive imagination as an original power of the mind. Similarly, it can be shown that the I could not be “checked” in the manner required for the possibility of consciousness unless it possessed, in addition to its original “theoretical” power of productive imaginative, an equally original “practical” power of sheer willing, which, once “checked,” is immediately converted into a capacity for endless striving. The foundational portion of the Wissenschaftslehre thus also includes a deduction of the categorical imperative (albeit in a particularly abstract and morally empty form) and of the practical power of the I. For Fichte, therefore, “the primacy of the practical” means not simply that philosophy must recognize a certain autonomous sphere within which practical reason is efficacious and practical considerations are appropriate; instead, it implies something much stronger: namely, the recognition that, as Fichte puts it, “the practical power is the innermost root of the I” and thus that “our freedom itself is a theoretical determining principle of our world.” The Wissenschaftslehre as a whole can therefore be described as a massive effort to demonstrate that reason could not be theoretical if it were not also practical—at the same time, to be sure, that also demonstrates that reason could not be practical if were not also theoretical.

Freedom, according to Fichte’s argument, is possible and actual only within the context of limitation and necessity, and thus it is never “absolute,” but always limited and finite. On the other hand, just as surely as a free subject must posit its freedom “absolutely”—that is to say, ‘purely and simply’ ( schlechthin ) and “for no reason” whatsoever—so must it never identify itself with any determinate or limited state of its own being. On the contrary, a finite free self must constantly strive to transform both the natural and the human worlds in accordance with its own freely-posited goals. The sheer unity of the self, which was posited as the starting point of the Foundations , is thereby transformed into an idea of reason in the Kantian sense: the actual I is always finite and divided against itself, and hence it is always striving for a sheer self-determinacy that it never achieves. Between the original abstraction of pure selfhood as sheer Tathandlung and the concluding (necessary) idea of a self that is only what it determines itself to be, in which “is” and “ought” wholly coincide, lies the entire realm of actual consciousness and real human experience.

Having established the foundation of his new system, Fichte then turned to the task of constructing upon this foundation a fully-articulated transcendental system, the overall structure of which is most clearly outlined in the concluding section of the transcripts of his lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo . According to this plan, which has no analog in Fichte’s later writings, the Entire Wissenschaftslehre is to consisting of four, systematically interrelated parts:: (1) first philosophy, which corresponds to the “foundational” portion of the system, as presented in the Foundation of the entire Wissenschaftslehre and revised in the lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo ; (2) “theoretical philosophy” or “philosophy of nature,” (3) “practical philosophy” or ethics (corresponding to the content of the System of Ethics ); and (4) “philosophy of the postulates,” which includes the subdisciplines of “natural law” or “theory of right” (as expounded in the Foundation of Natural Right ) and philosophy of religion.

By “philosophy of nature,” Fichte seems to have had in mind something similar to Kant’s Metaphysical First Principles of Nature , though Fichte himself devoted very little attention to the execution of such a project. The closest he ever came to developing a philosophy of nature according to transcendental principles is the compressed account of space, time, and matter presented in the Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty and the lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo . In neither of these works, however, does he make any effort to distinguish rigorously between the “theoretical” aspect of the foundational portion of his system and a distinctively “theoretical” subdivision of the same (“philosophy of nature”). In fact, a “philosophy of nature in accordance with the principles of the Wissenschaftslehre ” turns out to me even more modest than Kant’s and more closely resembles what later came to be called the philosophy of (natural) science than it does the speculative Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Hegel. Indeed, disagreement concerning the compatibility of a rigorously transcendental philosophy with a speculative, a priori “philosophy of nature” was the very issue that precipitated the rift between Fichte and his erstwhile disciple, Schelling. The popular picture of Fichte’s attitude toward nature, namely, that he viewed the latter almost entirely from the perspective of human projects, that is, as the necessary realm for moral striving, is therefore very close to the truth.

In contrast to Fichte’s rather cursory treatment of purely theoretical philosophy, ethics or “practical philosophy,” which analyzes the determinate ways in which willing and acting are determinable by principles of pure reason, constitutes a major portion of the Jena system, and the System of Ethics is Fichte’s longest single book. Whereas theoretical philosophy explains how the world necessarily is , practical philosophy explains how the world ought to be, which is to say, how it ought to be altered by rational beings. Ethics thus considers the object of consciousness not as something given or even as something constructed by necessary laws of consciousness, but rather as something to be produced by a freely acting subject, consciously striving to establish and to accomplish its own goals and guided only by its own self-legislated laws. The specific task of Fichte’s ethics is therefore, first of all, to deduce the categorical imperative (in its distinctively moral sense) from the general obligation to determine oneself freely, and, second, to deduce from this the particular obligations that apply to every free and finite rational being.

Like all of Fichte’s systematic treatises of the Jena period, The System of Ethics begins with a detailed analysis of what is involved in the self-positing of the I. In this case, the focus is upon the necessity that the I posit for itself its own activity or “ efficacy ,” and upon a detailed analysis of the conditions for doing this. In this manner Fichte deduces what he calls “the principle of all practical philosophy,” viz., that something objective (a being) follows from something subjective (a concept), and hence that the I must ascribe to itself a power of free purposiveness or causality in the sensible world. The I must posit itself as an embodied will , and only as such does it “discover” itself at all. From this starting point Fichte then proceeds to a deduction of the principle of morality: namely, that I must think of my freedom as standing under a certain necessary law or categorical imperative , which Fichte calls “the law of self-sufficiency” or “autonomy,” and that I ought always to determine my freedom in accordance with this law. This, therefore, is the task of the philosophical science of “ethics,” as understood by Fichte: to provide an a priori deduction of our moral nature in general and of our specific duties as human beings.

Viewed from the perspective of practical philosophy, the world really is nothing more than what Fichte once described as “the material of our duty made sensible,” which is precisely the viewpoint adopted by the morally engaged, practically striving subject. On the other hand, this is not the only way the world can be viewed, and, more specifically, it is not the only way in which it is construed by transcendental philosophy. For this reason it is somewhat misleading to characterized the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole as a system of “ethical idealism.” As noted above, Fichte certainly does succeed in constructing an account of consciousness that fully integrates the imperatives and activities of practical reason into the very structure of the latter, but this integration is always balanced by a recognition of the constitutive role of theoretical reason and of the sheer, contingent “giveness” of the I’s original determinacy (doctrine of the Anstoß ).

The final portion of the Jena system is devoted to “the philosophy of the postulates,” a discipline that Fichte conceived of as occupying the middle ground between purely theoretical and purely practical philosophy. In this portion of the system the world is considered neither as it simply is nor as it simply ought to be; instead, either the practical realm of freedom is viewed from the theoretical perspective of the natural world (in which case one considers the postulates that theoretical reason addresses to practical reason) or else, alternatively, the natural world is viewed from the perspective of practical reason or the moral law (in which case one considers the postulates that practical reason addresses to theoretical reason). The first of these perspectives is that of juridical philosophy or philosophy of law, or what Fichte calls the “doctrine of right” ( Rechtslehre ); the latter is that of the philosophy of religion.

Fichte’s philosophy of right (or of “natural law”), as expounded in his Foundation of Natural Right , is one of the most original and influential portions of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre . Written prior to Kant’s treatment of the same topic (in Part One of the Metaphysics of Morals), Fichte’s philosophy of right is notable, first of all, because of the way in which it distinguishes sharply between the realm of ethics and that of “right” and tries to develop a complete theory of the latter (a “theory of justice”) without appealing to the categorical imperative or the moral law, and secondly, because of the inclusion within this theory of a thoroughly original “deduction” of the social character of human beings.

Fichte’s transcendental account of natural right proceeds from the general principle that the I must posit itself as an individual in order to posit itself at all, and that in order to posit itself as an individual it must recognize itself as “summoned” or “solicited” by another free individual—summoned, that is, to limit its own freedom out of respect for that of the freedom of the other. The same condition applies, of course, to the other; hence, mutual recognition of rational individuals turns out to be condition necessary for the possibility of I-hood in general. This a priori deduction of intersubjectivity is so central to the conception of selfhood developed in the Jena Wissenschaftslehre that Fichte, in his lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo , incorporated it into his revised presentation of the very foundations of his system, where the “summons” takes its place alongside “original feeling” (which takes the place of the earlier “check”) as both a limit upon the absolute freedom of the I and a condition for the positing of the same.

The specific task of Fichte’s theory of right is to consider the specific ways in which the freedom of each individual must be restricted in order that several individuals can live together with the maximum amount of mutual freedom, and it derives its a priori concepts of the laws of social interaction entirely from the sheer concept of an individual I, as conditions for the possibility of the latter. Fichte’s concept of right therefore obtains its binding force not from the ethical law, but rather from the general laws of thinking and from enlightened self-interest, and the force of such considerations is hypothetical rather than categorical. The theory of right examines how the freedom of each individual must be externally limited if a free society of free and equal individuals is to be possible.

Unlike Kant, Fichte does not treat political philosophy merely as a subdivision of moral theory. On the contrary, it is an independent philosophical discipline with a topic and a priori principles of its own. Whereas ethics analyzes the concept of what is demanded of a freely willing subject, the theory of right describes what such a subject is permitted to do (as well as what he can rightfully be coerced to do). Whereas ethics is concerned with the inner world of conscience, the theory of right is concerned only with the external, public realm, though only insofar as the latter can be viewed as an embodiment of freedom.

Having established the general, albeit hypothetical concept of right, Fichte then turns to an investigation of the conditions necessary for the realization or “application” of the same: that is, for the actual coexistence of free individuals, or the existence of a free society. The sum of these “conditions” constitute the sum of our “natural rights” as human beings, rights that can be instantiated and guaranteed only within a deliberately constructed free society. On purely a priori grounds, therefore, Fichte purports to be able to determine the general requirements of such a community and the sole justification for legitimate political coercion and obligation.

The precise relationship of Fichte’s theory of right to the social contract tradition is complex, but the general outline is as follows: Fichte presents an a priori argument for the fundamentally social character of human beings, an argument grounded upon an analysis of the very structure of self-consciousness and the requirements for self-positing. Only after this “deduction” of the concept of right and of the applicability of the same does he explicitly introduce the notion of what he calls the Staatsbürgervertrag or “citizens’ contract,” a notion that he goes on to analyze into a series of distinguishable moments, including the “civil contract” proper (or “property contract”), the “protection contract,” and the “contract of unification,” all of which must be supplemented by the contracts of “subjection” and “expiation.” Fichte thus propounds what one might call a “contract theory of the state,” but not of human community.

As numerous commentators, beginning with Hegel, whose own Philosophy of Right was strongly influenced, both positively and negatively, by Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right , have pointed out, the actual theory of the state that Fichte himself, in Part Two of that work, erected upon what would appear to be a rather “liberal” theoretical foundation contains many elements that are not usually associated with the individualistic, liberal tradition—including a general indifference to questions of constitutional structure, public participation in government, etc., and a strong emphasis upon the “police” functions of the state (functions which, for Fichte, were not limited to concerns of security, but also included those of social welfare). This, however, is not particularly surprising, since the function of the state in Fichte’s system is primarily to employ coercion to guarantee that the parties to the contract will, in fact, do what they have promised to do and to insure that every citizen will have an opportunity to realize his own (limited) freedom. One of the more remarkable features of Fichte’s conception of right is that every citizen is entitled to the full and productive employment of his labor, and hence that the state has a duty to manage the economy accordingly. The truth is that Fichte’s social and political theory is very difficult to fit into the usual categories, but combines certain elements usually associated with liberal individualism with others more commonly associated with communitarian statism.

In addition to the postulates addressed by theoretical to practical reason, there are also those addressed by practical reason to nature itself. The latter is the domain of the transcendental philosophy of religion, which is concerned solely with the question of the extent to which the realm of nature can be said to accommodate itself to the aims of morality. The questions dealt with within such a philosophy of religion are those concerning the nature, limits, and legitimacy of our belief in divine providence. The philosophy of religion, as conceived by Fichte, has nothing to do with the historical claims of revealed religion or with particular religious traditions and practices. Indeed, this is precisely the distinction between philosophy of religion and “theology.”

As noted above, Fichte never had a chance to develop this final subdivision of his Jena system, beyond the tentative foray into this domain represented by his controversial essay “Concerning the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World” and the works he contributed to the ensuing “atheism controversy.” In “Concerning the Basis of our Belief” he certainly seems to contend that, so far as philosophy is concerned, the realm of the divine is that of this world, albeit viewed in terms of the requirements of the moral law, in which case it is transformed from the natural to the “the moral world order,” and that no further inference to a transcendent “moral lawgiver” is theoretically or practically required or warranted. In this same essay Fichte also sought to draw a sharp distinction between religion and philosophy (a distinction parallel to the crucial distinction between the “ordinary” and “transcendental” standpoints) and to defend philosophy’s right to postulate, on purely a priori grounds, something like a “moral world order.” Philosophy of religion thus includes a deduction of the postulate that our moral actions really do make some difference in the world. But this is about as far as it can go.

With respect to the existence of God, the argument of Fichte’s essay is primarily negative, inasmuch as it explicitly denies that any postulate of the existence of a God independent of the moral law is justifiable on philosophical grounds. In the wake of the atheism controversy, Fichte returned to this subject and, in his “From a Private Letter” and in Part Three of The Vocation of Man , attempted to restate his position in a manner that at least appeared to be more compatible with the claims of theism.

For much of the nineteenth century, beginning with Hegel’s self-serving interpretation of the history of modern philosophy, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre was generally assimilated into the larger history of German idealism. Criticized by both Schelling and Hegel as a one-sided, “subjective” idealism and a prime instance of the “philosophy of reflection,” Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre was almost universally treated as a superseded rung on the ladder “from Kant to Hegel” and thus assigned a purely historical significance. Neglected as the Wissenschaftslehre may have been during this period, Fichte was not entirely forgotten, but remained influential as the author of the Addresses to the German Nation and was alternately hailed and vilified as one of the founders of modern pan-German nationalism.

This same situation prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century as well, during which Fichte’s fortune seemed closely tied to that of Germany. Particularly during the long periods preceding, during, and following the two World Wars, Fichte was discussed almost exclusively in the context of German politics and national identity, and his technical philosophy tended to be dismissed as a monstrous or comical speculative aberration of no relevance whatsoever to contemporary philosophy. There were, to be sure, isolated exceptions and authors such as Fritz Medicus, Martial Gueroult, Xavier Léon, and Max Wundt who, during the first half of the twentieth century, took Fichte seriously as a philosopher and made lasting contributions to the study of his thought. But the real boom in Fichte studies has come only in the past six decades, during which the Wissenschaftslehre has once again become the object of intense philosophical scrutiny and lively, world-wide discussion—as is evidenced by the establishment of large and active professional societies devoted to Fichte in Europe, Japan, and North America.

J. H. Stirling once quipped that “Fichte had two philosophical epochs; and if both belong to biography, only one belongs to history,” and until quite recently there was a great deal of truth to this observation. Indeed, even today, Fichte’s technical writings of the post-Jena period remain little-known to the vast majority of philosophers. Admittedly, it is hard to recognize these late texts—which drop the strategy of beginning with an analysis of the self, along with the strong emphasis upon the “primacy of the practical,” and which include unembarrassed references to an apparently transcendent “absolute” (“Being,” “Absolute Being,” “God”)—as the work of the same author who wrote the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre . Though Fichte himself always insisted that his basic philosophy remained the same, no matter how much his presentation thereof may have altered over the years, many sympathetic readers and not a few well-informed scholars have found it impossible to reconcile this claim with what at least appear to be the profound systematic and doctrinal differences between the “early” and “late” Wissenschaftslehre . It is therefore not surprising that the problematic “unity” of Fichte’s thought continues to be vigorously debated by experts in the field.

Whatever one may conclude concerning the relationship between Fichte’s earlier and later writings, it is certainly the case that, with the publication of numerous, faithfully edited “new” manuscripts of later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre , the focus of much of the best contemporary Fichte scholarship has shifted to his later texts, most of which were entirely unknown to earlier generations of readers. Seldom has a new edition of a philosopher’s literary corpus had a greater effect upon the contemporary reputation of the thinker in question or a more stimulating effect upon contemporary scholarship than in the case of the monumental new critical edition of Fichte’s works begun in the early nineteen-sixties under the auspices of the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and the general editorship of Reinhard Lauth and others. Now complete, this edition has contributed directly and enormously to the contemporary revival of interest in Fichte’s philosophy in general, and in the later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre in particular. Much of the best recent work on Fichte, particularly in Germany, Italy, and Japan, has been devoted exclusively to his later thought. Stirling’s observation is thus no longer true, inasmuch as the work of Fichte’s “second epoch” has, however belatedly, now become the object of genuine and lively philosophical discussion and dispute.

In contrast, anglophone Fichte scholarship, which has also experienced quite a renaissance of its own over the past few decades, has remained largely focused upon the “classical” texts of the Jena period. This is no doubt due, in large part at least, to the appearance, during these same decades, of new, reliable translations of almost all of Fichte’s early writings and the lack of translations of his later, unpublished texts. But it is also a reflection of the relatively anemic tradition of Fichte scholarship in England and North America, where even the early Wissenschaftslehre has long been neglected and under-appreciated. Until quite recently, virtually no scholars writing in English were interested in examining the Wissenschaftslehre in its own right, but were mainly concerned to determine Fichte’s position in relationship to Kant’s or Hegel’s. This situation, however, has fundamentally altered, and some of the most insightful and original current work on Fichte is being done in English. The recent publication of an English translation of the Fichte’s second series of lectures on the Wissenschaftslehr from 1804 suggests that anglophone Fichte scholarship is at least ready to begin coming to terms with Fichte’s later philosophy.

Editions of Fichte’s Complete Works in German

• Johann Gottlieb Fichtes nachgelassene Werke , 3 volumes, I. H. Fichte (ed.), Bonn: Adolph-Marcus, 1834-35.
• Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke , 8 volumes, I. H. Fichte (ed.), Berlin: Veit, 1845–46. [Taken together, these 11 volumes, edited by Fichte’s son, constituted the first attempt at a complete edition of his works and are still widely cited and reprinted, most recently by de Gruyter, under the title Fichtes Werke .]
• J. G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , 42 volumes, Erich Fuchs, Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacobs, and Hans Gliwitzky (eds.), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1964-2012. [Organized into four separate series—writings published by Fichte, unpublished writings, correspondence, and student lecture transcripts—this monumental critical edition supersedes all earlier editions.]
• Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation , trans. Garrett Green, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978 .
• Contribution to the Correction of the Public's Judgment on the French Revolution , trans. Jeffrey Church and anna Marisa Schön. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021.
• “Creuzer Review,” trans. Daniel Breazeale, The Philosophical Forum 32 (2001): 289–96.
• “Gebhard Review,” trans. Daniel Breazeale, The Philosophical Forum 32 (2001): 297–310),
• “ Aenesidemus Review.” In Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (= EPW ), trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, 2nd ed., 1993.
• “The Zurich Wissenschaftslehre,” trans. Daniel Breazeale, in Fichte, Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre and Related Writings (1794–95). ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021 (hencefore = FWL)
• Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre , trans. Breazeale, in EPW . Rev. version in
• Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation , trans. Breazeale, in EPW .
• Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre , trans. Breazeale, in FWL.
• Science of Knowledge , trans. Peter Heath. In Fichte: Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) , ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970; 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 (= SK ).
• Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty , trans. Breazeale, in EPW; rev. version in FWL.
• “On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language,” trans. Jerry Surber, in Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy , New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996, pp. 119–45.
• Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo , trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
• “Review of Kant, Perpetual Peace,” trans. Daniel Breazeale, The Philosophical Forum 32 (2001): 311–21.
• Foundations of Natural Right , ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Michael Baur, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre . In Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (1797–1800) [henceforth = IWL ], ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
• “First and Second Introductions to The Science of Knowledge ”, trans. Peter Heath, in SK.
• The System of Ethics in accordance with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre , ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• “On the Basis of our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World,” trans. Breazeale, in IWL .
• J. G. Fichte: Appeal to the Public , trans. Curtis Bowman, in J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800 , ed. Yolanda Estes and Curtis Bowman, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 85–125.
• J. G. Fichte: Juridical Defense , trans. Curtis Bowman, in J. F. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute , pp. 145–204.
• “From a Private Letter,” trans. Breazeale, in IWL .
• The Vocation of Man , trans. Peter Preuss, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
• The Closed Commercial State , trans. Anthony Curtis Adler, Albany, SUNY Press, 2012.
• A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand , trans. John Botterman and William Rash, in Philosophy of German Idealism , ed. Ernst Behler, New York: Continuum, 1987.
• Partial translation by David Wood, in The Philosopical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802) , trans. and ed. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood, Albany, Albany, Suny Press, 2012.
• The Science of Knowing: Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre , trans. Walter E. Wright, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.
• The Characteristics of the Present Age , in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte [henceforth = PWF ], trans. William Smith, ed. and with an introduction by Daniel Breazeale, Bristol, England: Thoemes Press, 1999. [These translations were original published between 1848 and 1889.]
• On The Nature of the Scholar and Its Manifestations , trans. Smith, in PWF .
• The Way Towards the Blessed Life; or, the Doctrine of Religion , trans. Smith, in PWF .
• Addresses to the German Nation , trans. Gregory Moore, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Adresses to the German Nation , trans. Isaac Nakhimovsky, Bela Kapossy, and Keith Tribe, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2013.
• “The Science of Knowledge in its General Outline,” trans. Walter E. Wright, Idealistic Studies , 6 (1976): 106–117.
• Lectures on the Theory of Ethics (1812) , trans. Benjamin D. Crowe, Albany: SUNY Press, 2015,
• Briefwechsel , 1790–1802. See the selections from Fichte’s correspondence from 1792–1799, trans. Breazeale, in EPW and the selections from his 1800–1801 correspondence with Schelling, trans. Wood, in The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling .
• Adamson, Robert, 1881, Fichte , Edinburgh: Blackwood. [Though woefully out of date, this remains the only full-scale treatment of Fichte in English.]
• Bacin, Stefano and Owen Ware (eds.), 2021, Fichte's System of Ethics: A Critical Guide , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Baumanns, Peter, 1974, Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre. Probleme ihres Anfangs , Bonn: Bouvier. [Useful exposition of various ways of interpreting the starting point of the first Wissenschaftslehre .]
• –––, 1990, J. G. Fichte: Kritische Gesammtdarstellung seiner Philosophie , Freiburg: Alber. [A critical overview of Fichte’s philosophical development and analysis of his system, concentrating upon the Jena period.]
• Baumgartner, Michael and Jacobs, Wilhelm G., 1968, J. G. Fichte: Bibliographie , Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. [A complete bibliography. Supplemented by Doyé’s bibliography.]
• Breazeale, Daniel, 2013, Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy , Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom (eds.), 1993, Fichte: Historical Context/Contemporary Controversies , Atlantic Highlands: Humanities. [A collection of essays on various aspects of Fichte’s philosophy. Includes a complete bibliography of works in English by and about Fichte.]
• –––, 1996, New Perspectives on Fichte , Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press. [More essays on various themes from Fichte’s early philosophy.]
• –––, 2001, New Essays on Fichte’s Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge , Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
• –––, 2002, New Essays on Fichte’s Later Jena Wissenschaftslehre , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [A collection of essays on the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo , Foundation of Natural Right , System of Ethics , and Atheism Controversy.]
• –––, 2006, Bodies, Rights, and Recognition: New Essays on Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right , Altdershot: Ashgate.
• –––, 2008, After Jena: New Essays on Fichte’s Later Philosophy , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• –––, 2010, Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism , Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• –––, 2013, Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretative and Critical Essays , Albany, SUNY Press.
• –––, 2016, Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, Reconsidered , Albany, SUNY Press.
• Breazeale, Daniel, Rockmore, Tom, and Waibel, Violetta (eds.), 2010, Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition , Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Bykova, Marina F. (ed.), 2020, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Fichte , London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Class, Wolfgang and Soller, Alois K., 2004, Kommentar zu Fichtes Grundlage der gesamtem Wissenschaftslehre , Amsterdam: Rodopi. [A line-by-line commentary.]
• Doyé, Sabine (ed.), 1993, J. G. Fichte-Bibliographie (1969–1991) , Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi. [An essential supplement to the bibliography by Baumgartner and Jacobs.]
• Gueroult, Martial, 1930, L’evolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte , 2 volumes, Paris: Société de l’édition. [A pioneering developmental study of the Wissenschaftslehre .]
• Everett, Charles Caroll, 1884, Fichte’s Science of Knowledge: A Critical Exposition , Chicago: Griggs.
• “Fichte and Contemporary Philosophy,” special issue of Philosophical Forum , 19 (2–3) (1988).
• Fuchs, Erich (ed.), 1978–1992, J. G. Fichte im Gespräch: Berichte der Zeitgenossen , 6 volumes, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. [An encyclopedic collection of contemporary reports on Fichte and his writings. An invaluable research tool.]
• Gottlieb, Gabriel (ed.), 2016, Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Henrich, Dieter, 1967, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht , Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann; trans. David Lachterman, “Fichte’s Original Insight,” Contemporary German Philosophy , 1 (1982): 15–52. [An influential reading of Fichte’s alleged movement beyond a “reflective theory of consciousness.”]
• Hoeltel, Steven (ed.), 2012, The Palgrave Fichte Handbook , Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019.
• Jacobs, Wilhelm G., 2012, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Eine Biographie , Berlin, Insel.
• James, David, 2010, Fichte’s Social and Political Philosophy: Property and Value , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• James, David and Günter Zöller (eds.), 2016, The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Janke, Wolfgang, 1970, Fichte: Sein und Reflexion—Grundlagen der kritischen Vernunft , Berlin: de Gruyter. [A hermeneutic-Heideggerian reading of Fichte, with an emphasis upon the later writings.]
• Kosch, Michelle, 2018, Fichte's Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kühn, Manfred, 2012, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Ein deutscher Philosoph , Munich, C.H. Beck.
• Lauth, Reinhard, 1987, Hegel vor der Wissenschaftslehre , Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag. [A vigorous and convincing defense of Fichte against Hegel’s criticisms.]
• –––, 1984, Die transzendentale Naturlehre Fichtes nach den Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre , Hamburg: Meiner. [A masterful exposition of Fichte’s transcendental approach to the philosophy of nature.]
• –––, 1989, Transzendentale Entwicklungslinien von Descartes bis zu Marx und Dostojewski , Hamburg: Meiner. [A collection of essays, most of them on Fichte, by the leading Fichte scholar of the age.]
• La Vopa, Anthony J., 2001, Fichte. The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Sophisticated partial biography which tries to connect Fichte’s philosophy to his life.]
• Léon, Xavier, 1922–27, Fichte et son temps , 3 volumes, Paris: Armand Colin.
• Martin, Wayne M., 1997, Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [An bracing, critical interpretation of the project of the early Wissenschaftslehre .]
• Nakhimovsky, Isaac, 2011, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Neuhouser, Frederick, 1990, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [A fine example of a contemporary appropriation of Fichte’s thought and of an analytically sensitive exposition of the same.]
• “New Studies in the Philosophy of Fichte,” special issue of Idealistic Studies , 6 (2) (1979). [A collection of essays on Fichte in English.]
• Oesterreich, Peter L and Helmut Traub, 2006. Der ganze Fichte: Die populäre wissenschaftliche und metaphilosophische Erschließung der Welt , Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
• Pareyson, Luigi, 1976, Fichte. Il sistema della libertà , 2nd edition, Milan: Mursia. [Along with Philonenko’s similarly titled book, Pareyson’s exposition of the early system as a “system of freedom” is one of the most influential works on Fichte of the post-war period.]
• Philonenko, Alexis, 1966, La liberté humaine dans la philosophie de Fichte , Paris: Vrin; 2nd edition, 1980. [A very original and influential study of Fichte’s early philosophy, interpreted as a “philosophy of human finitude.” Essential.]
• Radrizzani, Ives, 1993, Vers la fondation de l’intersubjectivité chez Fichte: des Prinzipes à la Nova Methodo , Paris: Vrin. [Argues for the continuity of Fichte’s development within the Jena period and for the centrality therein of the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo .]
• Renaut, Alain, 1986, Le système du droit: Philosophie et droit dans la pensée de Fichte , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. [A powerful reading of the Foundation of Natural Right , which argues that political philosophy is the keystone of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre .]
• Rockmore, Tom, 1980, Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition , Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. [One of the first successful effort in English to liberate Fichte’s philosophy from the shadow of Hegel.]
• Schäfer, Rainer, 2006, Johann Gottlieb Fichtes “Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre” von 1794 , Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
• Schwabe, Ulrich, 2007, Individuelles und Transindividuelles Ich. Die Selbstindividutation reiner Subjectivität und Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre , Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh.
• Scribner, Scott, 2010, Matters of Spirit: J. G. Fichte and the Technological Imagination , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Seidel, George J., 1993, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre on 1794: A Commentary on Part I , Lafayette: Purdue University Press. [An elementary introduction to the early system. Written with the beginning student in mind.]
• Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle, 2000, Critique de la représentation: Etude sur Fichte , Paris: Vrin.
• Ware, Owen, 2020, Fichte's Moral Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wood, Allen W., 2016, Fichte’s Ethical Thought , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wood, David. W., 2011, “Mathesis of the Mind”: A Study of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry , Amstersdam: Rodopi.
• Wundt, Max, 1929, Fichte-Forschungen , Stuttgart: Frommann. [Another pioneering study of the development of Fichte’s thought, with an emphasis upon the different “spirits” of the various versions of the Wissenschaftslehre .]
• Zöller, Günter, 1998, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [A well-informed and stimulating analysis of several central themes from the early Wissenschaftslehre .]

See also the journal Fichte-Studien , Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1990 ff., which appears roughly once a year and publishes papers, most of them in German, on every aspect of Fichte’s life and thought, as well as the occasional newsletter, “Fichteana,” published by the North American Fichte Society (and available at their website).

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Home Números 15 Reseñas/Recensões The “Double Sense” of Fichte’s Ph...

The “Double Sense” of Fichte’s Philosophical Language. Some Critical Reflections on the Cambridge Companion to Fichte

James, D. & Zöller, G. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 419 pp., ISBN 9780521472265

1. Introduction: Fichtean Spirit and Letter

1 The example is well-known. Monsieur Jourdain – the main character in Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme – has an epiphany: under the tutelage of a master of philosophy he suddenly becomes aware of the nature of his own language:

Monsieur Jourdain : Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j’en susse rien; et je vous suis le plus obligé du monde, de m’avoir appris cela.

1 J.B.P. Molière, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (Paris, 1671), pp. 28-29. Unless otherwise indicated, all (...) (By my faith! I have been speaking prose for forty years without being aware of it at all; I am infinitely obliged to you for having taught me that.) 1

• 2 See J.G. Fichte, Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre ( Gesamtausgabe : GA I/4: 237). English (...)

3 J.G. Fichte, Ueber Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie (GA I/6: 333-361).

• 4 J.G. Fichte, Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache (GA I/3: 97-127). English transla (...)

2 Although presented as comedy, this example nevertheless highlights an important philosophical point: the difference between merely carrying out acts (here speaking words) and having a conscious understanding of their laws and classification. Johann Gottlieb Fichte philosophically refers to the example of Monsieur Jourdain a number of times in his works, including in the Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre . 2 With his writings on the difference between the letter and spirit in philosophy ( Ueber Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie 3 ), and his long and complex early 1795 essay on language: Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache 4 , it would be hard to accuse Fichte of being a philosopher who was unconscious or indifferent to the nature of his own written and spoken language.

• 5 See J.G. Fichte, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre , 2nd edition 1798 (GA I/2: 118, footnote). (...)

6 Cf. J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 252).

3 Indeed, Fichte’s struggle for an appropriate philosophical language is often discussed in his main published writings on the Wissenschaftslehre . In section §1 of Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre Fichte claimed that there was a necessary and universal system of philosophical terminology that must be employed in accordance with transcendental concepts, but that it could only be fully and accurately determined after the system had been completed. 5 While in the Preface to the first and principal presentation of his system – the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre of 1794/95 – Fichte wrote that he had eschewed a fixed or set terminology both in order to stimulate independent cognitive work in his students and to prevent the ossifying of his system. Moreover, he would continue to adhere to this maxim of changing his technical language in all future presentations of his philosophy. 6 As Daniel Breazeale puts it in his article in the Cambridge Companion to Fichte :

7 Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796-99 ( nova methodo )”, in: The Cambridge Companion t (...) “It was, in fact, Fichte’s deliberate and lifelong policy to adopt a new philosophical vocabulary for virtually every new presentation of his system. His stated reason for doing this was, first of all, to avoid giving comfort to those who might have thought that they could ‘master the Wissenschaftslehre ’ merely by memorizing a glossary of technical terms.” 7

• 8 “ Sprache , im weitesten Sinne des Wortes, ist der Ausdruck unserer Gedanken durch willkürliche Zeich (...)

4 For Fichte, active philosophical thought and spirit had priority over the letter and language, with the latter classified as the outer “designation” ( Bezeichnung ) or “expression” ( Ausdruck ) of the inner cognitive activity: “ Language , in the broadest sense of the word, is the expression of our thought by means of arbitrary signs .” 8 This is why when trying to understand the Wissenschaftslehre it is imperative to move beyond the mere letter of the text.

• 9 “ Vorbericht ” (Preface to the second edition) 1801, J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaf (...)
• 10 “ denselben Inhalt in zwei sehr verschiedenen Formen zu finden, und als denselben wieder zu erkennen (...)
• 11 “ Vorrede ” (Preface to the first edition) 1795, J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftsle (...)

5 However, because Fichte wrote numerous (originally unpublished) versions of his system, certain commentators and readers have assumed that the letter was not important to him. On the contrary, it was of the utmost importance, since the chief reasons behind this multiplicity were to attain ever greater clarity of expression and to present one and the same philosophy from fresh standpoints. 9 In this regard, Fichte wrote in the preface to the second edition of the Grundlage that he was thinking of publishing a new written version of the Wissenschaftslehre ; but if this occurred, the reader would not find any radical departure from the earlier text, but merely “the same content in two very different forms and recognise it to be same again.” 10 Nor should one draw the conclusion from the multiple versions of the Wissenschaftslehre that the main published text of the Grundlage itself was not clear, accurate or understandable enough, or even that it was now obsolete. In Fichte’s eyes, the text was still valid and crystal clear: “What has been thought in a perfectly clear manner, is understandable; and I am conscious of having conceived everything in a perfectly clear way.” 11

• 12 J.G. Fichte, Aus einem Privatschreiben (GA I/6: 374). English translation: From a Private Letter , i (...)

6 Finding the best philosophical expressions were therefore paramount to Fichte, because if upon reading his work one already misunderstands the written letter, it will almost be impossible to move onto its inner spirit. In the fascinating but frequently overlooked small published text from 1800, Aus einem Privatschreiben , Fichte elaborated on some of the misunderstandings connected with his choice of philosophical language. He stated that he instinctively chose terms that could convey the living and active intentions of his philosophizing. For example, German words ending with the suffix “- ung ”, such as Ordnung or Wirkung , were never to be understood statically in his writings, but dynamically , because in his mind they always refer to activity – to the act of ordering or to the act of effecting respectively: “I am so wedded to this way of expressing myself that when I begin to philosophize in the manner that is natural to me no other meaning comes into my thoughts at all”. 12

• 13 Concerning the topic of Fichte’s theory of language and philosophical terminology, see, among other (...)

14 See issue 13 (2017): Verano/Verão 2016.

7 What about modern-day readers and scholars of philosophy – to what extent are we similar to Monsieur Jourdain with regard to Fichte’s philosophical language? Or do we now have a better grasp of the flexible and dynamic qualities of his vocabulary, how and why Fichte selected certain terms, not to mention the underlying concepts, ideas and acts that his words are meant to express? In the last twenty years, great strides have been made in the scholarship concerning Fichte’s philosophical terminology and thoughts on language. 13 Although the newly published Cambridge Companion to Fichte , edited by David James and Gunter Zöller, does not have an individual text specifically devoted to Fichte’s conception of language and philosophical terms, it nevertheless contains a number of valuable insights directly related to these issues. Emiliano Acosta recently reviewed the Cambridge Companion to Fichte for the Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte , giving a general overview of it. 14 In the present review-essay I will critically focus on a few specific topics in the volume, particularly the relationship between Fichte’s language, thought, and philosophical method.

2. What is “ Setzen ” (Positing)?

• 15 See Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Position: Anti-Subjectivism, Self-Awareness and Self-Location in the Spa (...)

8 Fichte’s term “ setzen ” (posit) is surely one of the most ubiquitous and cited but least understood notions in the whole of his philosophy. Paul Frank’s article “Fichte’s Position” in the Cambridge Companion to Fichte is such an outstanding contribution to the literature on the topic of positing because it explains Fichte’s nuanced employment of this term as well as making a convincing case that its origins should be sought for in the Kantian and logical philosophical traditions. 15 Before turning to Paul Franks’s interpretation, I will first of all immanently examine Fichte’s understanding of setzen in his writings.

• 16 Cf. “ Wir haben den absolut ersten, schlechthin unbedingten Grundsatz alles menschlichen Wissens auf (...)
• 17 “ Man setzt durch die Behauptung, dass obiger Satz (A ist A) an sich gewiss sey .” Fichte, Grundlage (...)

18 Cf. J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 255).

• 19 “s chreibt man sich das Vermögen zu, etwas schlechthin zu setzen .” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage (GA I/2: 2 (...)
• 20 “ Das absolute Ich des ersten Grundsatzes ist nicht etwas ; (es hat kein Prädikat, und kann keins hab (...)

9 What exactly does setzen mean for Fichte? In §1 of his central text the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre of 1794/95, Fichte sets out the aim of his philosophy: to discover the first principle of all human knowledge, one that does not enter into the empirical determinations of consciousness, yet still lies at the basis of it. 16 His argumentation begins by drawing a direct parallel between the certainty of positing in logical thought and the principle of identity before moving onto an analysis of the nature of the judgments carried out by the I ( Ich ). 17 Here “ setzen ” or positing signifies a particular type of philosophical judging and asserting. More exactly, in the opening sections of the Grundlage it concerns a rather unique act of theoretical reflection ( Reflexion ) and abstraction ( Abstraktion ). For readers are asked to begin with any fact of empirical consciousness, then to reflect on their own inner thought activity, continually stripping away anything empirical, leading them to a more transparent consciousness of the structure of human cognition. 18 Eventually, the reader learns to determine and posit things schlechthin – that is to say, absolutely, or without any further grounds: “one attributes to oneself the capacity to posit something absolutely .” 19 This will include the activity of one’s own I, or an awareness of what Fichte calls “the absolute I”. However, the absolute I is not a thing or object, but pure activity: “The absolute I of the first principle is not something ; (it does not have a predicate, and cannot have any), it is absolutely, what it is, and it cannot be explained any further.” 20 Accordingly, “ setzen ” in the early sections of the Grundlage seems above all to relate to the self-aware, active and absolute form of thinking ( denken ) and knowing carried out by the philosophizing I.

• 21 “Man wird aus dem Zusammenhange erklären, und sich erst eine Übersicht des Ganzen verschaffen müsse (...)
• 22 “Die künftigen Beurtheiler dieser Schrift ersuche ich auf das Ganze einzugehen, und jeden einzelnen (...)

10 However, if we are to take seriously Fichte’s own specific statements on his use of philosophical language, then any particular sentence or proposition of the Wissenschaftslehre can only be fully grasped to the extent that the reader has examined it in its proper context and obtained an understanding of the Wissenschaftslehre as a totality: “One explains by means of the context, and one should first acquire an overview of the whole before trying to rigorously determine an individual sentence.” 21 A hallmark of Fichte’s approach in the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre is that he repeatedly stresses the crucial interdependency between the part and the whole: “I request the future judge of this text to proceed to the whole, and to view every single thought from the vantage point of the whole.” 22

• 23 “ Das Ich setzt sich, als anschauend, heißt zufördest: es setzt in der Anschauung sich als thätig . ” (...)
• 24 “… dass sie das Vermögen der Freiheit der inneren Anschauung voraussetzt .” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage ( (...)
• 25 See J.G. Fichte, “[Ankündigung:] Seit sechs Jahren ”, 1800/1801 (GA I/7: 155-156); English translati (...)

11 In other words, even though Fichte’s use of setzen is especially crucial in Part One of the Grundlage , we should not neglect to examine the other parts of the text to see what else he might have to say about this concept and term. There we see that in Part Two Fichte does not simply consider setzen in connection with thinking and logical deductions, but also directly relates it to anschauen (intuiting). For example: “The I ( Ich ) posits itself as intuiting, signifies to begin with: it posits itself in the intuition as active .” 23 In Fichte’s epistemology the conscious volition activity of the I may be immediately grasped; however, this cannot be done by means of discursive thought or concepts, but it requires the faculty of intuition. In this respect it should not be forgotten that in the preface to the Grundlage Fichte maintains that his entire system of philosophy ultimately rests on a free Tathandlung or act of the I – and this free act must be comprehended by means of the “faculty of inner intuition.” 24 In a later published text Fichte would write that the grounding of his theory of knowledge on the primacy of intuition ( Anschauung ) instead of on concepts is a sign of his attempt to progress beyond Kant’s epistemology. 25

• 26 “ In den beyden so eben aufgestellten Sätzen liegt offenbar ein Doppelsinn in der Bedeutung des Wort (...)
• 27 “ Aber – ein Satz, den wir aus einer Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre als bekannt und erwi (...)

12 Accordingly, I would argue that in the Grundlage the term “ setzen ” is deployed in at least two distinct yet interrelated senses: it essentially signifies both thinking and intuiting . In the first sense it relates to our theoretical activity, in the second to our practical activity. That the term setzen is capable of being deployed in a twofold sense in the Grundlage is specifically highlighted by Fichte himself in the text: “In the two sentences that have just been stated there is obviously a double sense ( Doppelsinn ) in the meaning of the word ‘positing’ ( setzen ).” 26 Here Fichte’s underscoring of the “double sense” of setzen occurs in the context of a discussion about the passive and active nature of the I, about its real and ideal grounds. In essence, for Fichte, one becomes aware of the ideal ground through the activity of thinking, whereas intuiting is required for a consciousness of the real or practical ground. Moreover, the fact that setzen in the Grundlage had been be employed in a twofold sense in terms of thinking and intuiting, including in relation to the object-nature of the empirical I, is confirmed by Fichte in his 1798 System of Ethics . There he writes: “However – a proposition that we can presuppose to be known and proved from a Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre – the I is something only to the extent and degree in which it posits (intuits and thinks) itself as the same, and it is nothing that it does not posit itself to be.” 27

• 28 See Claudio Cesa, “‘… ein Doppelsinn in der Bedeutung des Wortes Setzen ’” in: Der Grundansatz der e (...)
• 29 See Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794-95 (...)

30 Claudio Cesa, “‘… ein Doppelsinn in der Bedeutung des Wortes Setzen ’”, p. 141.

• 31 “ Der Satz: das Ich setzt sich selbst, hat 2 unzertrennliche Bedeutungen, eine ideale und reale, wel (...)

13 The twofold philosophical sense of “positing” in the Grundlage is not unknown in the research. In 1996 Claudio Cesa published a seminal essay precisely on Fichte’s reference to this double meaning of setzen . 28 In his article in the Cambridge Companion to Fichte , Paul Franks does not refer to Cesa’s seminal text, but it is cited by Christian Klotz in another contribution. 29 Cesa also points to a corresponding example of the double function of the activity of positing in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo . 30 There the context is on the synthesis of the real and ideal activity of the I, and how it might be possible to unite them in consciousness in an unconditioned or absolute ( schlechthin ) manner: “The proposition, ‘the I posits itself’, thus has two inseparably linked meanings: an ideal and real meaning, both of which are absolutely united in the I.” 31

• 32 Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Position: Anti-Subjectivism, Self-Awareness and Self-Location in the Space o (...)

14 In his illuminating discussion on setzen or positing in the Cambridge Companion to Fichte , Paul Franks goes greatly beyond much of the earlier research. Although he does not cite Fichte’s later reference in the Grundlage to the word’s “double sense”, he arrives at exactly the same conclusion that it should be understood in this manner. Therefore, I can only agree with him when he puts forward the view that Fichte chose this unusual term positing because he needed a single linguistic formulation for capturing this unified notion of the human being. Franks argues that, philosophically speaking, positing is a term which particularly well expresses the theoretical and practical rational activities of the I itself: Fichte “needs a fundamental notion of rational agency as such. Positing is the notion he employs. […] Furthermore, since Fichte rejects any radical distinction between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning, positing is an activity that is capable of both theoretical and practical inflections.” 32

• 33 “ Der Begriff der Position oder Setzung ist völlig einfach und mit dem von Sein überhaupt einerlei .” (...)
• 34 See Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Position: Anti-Subjectivism, Self-Awareness and Self-Location in the Spa (...)

35 E.g. see J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 263; SW I: 100-101).

• 36 On Spinoza, see I. Kant, Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (...)

15 Paul Franks also rightly points to the logical tradition of ponere in which setzen originally arose, and shows Kant’s recourse to it in his early text of 1763: Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God . There Kant equates positing with being: “The concept of position or positing is perfectly simple: it is identical with the concept of being in general.” 33 Thus, on the topic of philosophical origins too, Paul Franks’s article provides a much more detailed and original treatment of the Kantian heritage of positing in Fichte than all previous commentators, convincingly showing among other things how it relates to Kant’s reflections on the question of existence, position in space, and the issues relating to the ontological proof of God. 34 However, perhaps there are other fundamental Fichtean links to Kant’s text, especially in connection with Fichte’s philosophy of religion. For if Fichte’s concept of setzen or positing is indebted to Kant’s treatment of being and absolute positing in the Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God , as it definitely seems to be, then a possible avenue of future research that could be worth exploring is how far Fichte’s references to absolute positing and the modes of Spinoza’s God in the Grundlage 35 , are also a transformation or extension of Kant’s arguments on absolute positing and Spinoza’s God in that same early 1763 text. 36

3. The Significance of Fichte’s Tathandlung

• 37 Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796-99 ( nova methodo )”, in: The Cambridge Companion t (...)

16 It should be clear that with the example of setzen or ‘positing’, readers of Fichte should bear in mind the possibility that his key philosophical terms might have multiple meanings. And of course, even though the terms change in the different versions of the Wissenschaftslehre , the central underlying ideas and philosophical doctrines do not change, but are carried over into subsequent presentations. This important principle is summarized by Daniel Breazeale in The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , when discussing the Fichtean conception of Anstoß in the early Grundlage and later nova methodo : “A similar point might also be made about the differences in technical terminology found in the two presentations. Thus, for example, though the term Anstoß or ‘check’ does not occur in the second presentation, the doctrine itself is retained, though what was previously referred to as a ‘check’ upon the activity of the I is now called ‘a feeling of the I’s original limitation or determinacy’ […] The same is true for other key terms: the ‘subject/object’ of the second presentation, for example, is simply another name for the ‘f/act’ or Tathandlung of the first presentation.” 37

17 This leads to the question: apart from setzen (positing), what about other key Fichtean terms – do they too have an especially dual meaning or significance? As one can see from Daniel Breazeale’s statement above, the free Tathandlung or act carried out by the transcendental philosopher relates to the I as both a subject and object, or more exactly, as a “subject-object”. Like with setzen , the word Tathandlung also seems to have dual sense, and which is directly evident in the composition of the term itself. It is made up of the two German words Tat (deed) and Handlung (action). In the Wissenschaftslehre , Tathandlung relates to the ability of the I as subject to carry out an action in which it becomes its own cognitive object. Fichte repeatedly juxtaposes this inner act with Tatsachen – the facts or objects of external being. Again, it is not by chance that Fichte intentionally chose the term Tatsache to highlight this juxtaposition, for it is also a composite word formed out of two other words, Tat (deed) and Sachen (things).

• 38 Elizabeth Millán, “Fichte and the Development of Early German Romantic Philosophy” in: The Cambridg (...)
• 39 Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794-95 Wis (...)
• 41 See Paul Franks, “Freedom, Tatsache and Tathandlung in the Development of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaf (...)

18 In the Cambridge Companion to Fichte Elizabeth Millán succinctly observes the willed and performative aspect of this move: Fichte’s philosophy is a “bold shift from a fact ( Tatsache ) of consciousness to an act of performance ( Tathandlung ) of consciousness uncovering a new starting point for all philosophizing.” 38 While in his rich article on “The Dynamic Structure of Consciousness”, Christian Klotz also underscores the dual sense of Tathandlung : “There are two important aspects that Fichte wants to emphasize with this peculiar terminological move. First, the term expresses the difference between the self-constitutive activity of the I and whatever is a fact ( Tatsache ) of consciousness and thus is grounded by the I’s activity. Secondly, the term ‘ Tathandlung ’ also expresses the intrinsic character of this activity: the action in the sense of acting ( Handlung ) immediately brings about its result ( Tat ) …” 39 However, the word Tathandlung is not a neologism created by Fichte, as Christian Klotz mistakenly remarks. 40 That is still a widespread misconception in the research. Paul Franks demonstrated twenty years ago that its origin lies in the two spheres of right and religion. During Fichte’s epoch, the term Tatsache was the one that was actually the new compound neologism. It had been created by Spalding out of Tat and Sache and used by him to translate the English word “matters of fact”. 41

• 42 J. G. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre 1804 (2) (GA II/8: 202). Cf. the English translation: The Science (...)

19 Fully in line with the maxim of repeatedly modifying his terminology, the unique act that Fichte had first called “ Tathandlung ” in 1794, becomes designated in 1804 by the Greek word “Genesis”, since the earlier German word had been more difficult to grasp: “The Wissenschaftslehre is underpinned by and testifies to an Act ( Tathandlung ), which I have named in these lectures using the Greek word Genesis , since the Greek terms are often more easily and correctly understood than the German ones.” 42

4. Antitheses: Other Key Fichtean Terms with a “Double Sense”

• 43 See Jere Paul Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy (Atlantic Highla (...)
• 44 “Intellectual Intuition”, a chapter in: Daniel Breazeale, Thinking through the Wissenschaftslehre: (...)

20 As we have seen, Fichte employs his philosophical language in various ways. Firstly, he continually changes his philosophical terms to stimulate the spirit and avoid his system becoming too static. Inversely, Fichte often uses one and the same philosophical term like setzen that has a number of different but interrelated meanings. A term may even have more than two meanings. For example, in his study of Fichte’s 1795 essay on language Jere Surber shows that willkührlich (arbitrary) is utilised in four distinctly different senses. 43 Likewise for Fichte’s celebrated notion of intellektuelle Anschauung (intellectual intuition). Daniel Breazeale has demonstrated in detail that throughout his writings the single designation ‘intellectual intuition’ may signify for Fichte at least four different things: i. an intellectual consciousness of freedom and the moral law; ii. “pure I-hood” or identically, a Tathandlung ; iii. a freely produced ‘fact of consciousness’; and iv. the method of genetic construction. 44

21 So it is clearly imperative to examine the context in which any technical term appears in Fichte’s writings in order to exactly determine the sense he has given it. Furthermore, a closer analysis of Fichte’s own comments on his method of his philosophical language not only reveals that he selected and employed terms with multiple and interrelated meanings, but that like with setzen , Fichte specifically uses terms that express a “double sense”, in which the two main meanings appear at first sight to be directly opposed or antithetical to each other. Here I will briefly list a number of other Fichtean terms that are employed in this manner and show that this procedure is an intentional and intrinsic aspect of Fichte’s philosophical methodology.

• 45 See Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796-99 ( nova methodo )”, in: The Cambridge Compani (...)
• 46 Daniel Breazeale, Thinking through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy (O (...)

22 A classic example of this apparently antithetical double sense in a word is Fichte’s conception of Anstoß . In his article on the nova methodo in the Cambridge Companion to Fichte , Daniel Breazeale points to the fact that Anstoß for Fichte may signify a “summons”, i.e. an impetus impelling the I to a fresh and new sphere of activity. However, Anstoß is also used by Fichte in virtually the opposite sense, that is to say, as a restriction for the I, blocking or hindering its activity. 45 Elsewhere Breazeale has neatly summarized the almost antithetical “double sense” of Anstoß in Fichte’s Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre . “[This passage in the Grundlage ] encapsulates Fichte’s case for the necessity of such an Anstoß for the very possibility of cognition at the same time that it points to the dual role of the Anstoß as both a limit and a stimulus to the activity of the I.” 46

• 47 See Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794-95 (...)
• 48 Günter Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (...)

23 Or to take another well-known example. – Fichte scholarship has again long noted that Fichte likewise employs “Bestimmung” in two diametrical senses. In the Cambridge Companion to Fichte , Christian Klotz provides an important outline of Fichte’s conception of Wechselbestimmung (mutual determination): “It is through the opposed directions involved in the mutual determinations of the I and not-I in the dynamical sense that Fichte can introduce – albeit in an initial and rudimentary sense – the distinction between the ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ aspects of consciousness.” 47 However, it is worth remarking that this oppositional nature is even present in the single term Bestimmung . On the one hand, Fichte’s concept of a Bestimmung is that of a “determination”, i.e. determining, measuring or defining some kind of object or activity (and here we see further explicit links to setzen and Anstoß ); and on the other hand, it is like a distant ideal, related to one’s human vocation. Günter Zöller perfectly summarizes this duality present in Fichte’s 1800 book Die Bestimmung des Menschen : “The key word of the work’s German title ‘ Bestimmung ’, can mean both ‘determination’, in the sense of an imposed limitation, and ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’, indicating the goal of some pursuit. Fichte’s employment of the term in its finitist-finalist double meaning addresses the tension between what is fixed or given in human existence and what is open and yet to be realized about it.” 48

• 49 See Hansjürgen Verweyen, “Fichte’s Philosophy of Religion” in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , p (...)
• 50 See J. G. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (GA I/10: 141, 148, 208-209) and J.G. Fichte, Vorles (...)

24 A third example is Fichte’s enigmatic use of the old German word “ Gesicht ” in his Berlin period, a term which literally means “face”. In his article “Fichte’s Philosophy of Religion” in the Cambridge Companion to Fichte , Hansjürgen Verweyen explains how Gesicht signifies for Fichte both a philosophical “idea” as well as a “spiritual revelation”. 49 Hence, this too appears to be a striking contradiction. No doubt most other thinkers would thoroughly distinguish between the revelations or visions of a religious mystic and the strictly deducted ideas of a philosopher. Yet in works such as the 1807/08 Reden an die deutsche Nation and the 1811/12 Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten , Fichte apparently sees no contradiction, clearly believing that the two senses of Gesicht may ultimately be reconciled. In these two late Berlin texts he employs one and the same word Gesicht for the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel on the one hand, and for the scientific ideas of the scholar of the Wissenschaftslehre on the other. 50

• 51 See J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre , 1806 (GA I/9: 73, 1 (...)
• 52 Günter Zöller, “Fichte’s Later Presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre ” in: The Cambridge Companion (...)

25 How could these two senses of Gesicht be rationally and epistemologically reconciled? One possible path to examine would be to take Fichte’s conception of Anschauen or intellectual intuiting as a cognitive form of “seeing”, and then relate it back to the original Platonic Greek sense of “idea”, which as we saw is explicitly translated into German by Fichte as Gesicht . In the domain of his philosophy of religion, Fichte designated Plato as one of the philosophical forerunners to the Wissenschaftslehre . 51 Günter Zöller remarks in his article “Fichte’s Later Presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre ” on Fichte’s Bildlehre , or theory of the image, are highly appropriate in this regard: “Fichte’s imagist understanding of knowledge further strengthens the linkage of his thought to Plato, whose key concept of Form (or Idea) is etymologically derived from the Greek word for ‘seeing’. Like Plato, Fichte tends to cast his conception of knowledge in visual terms by assimilating knowledge to seeing and by designating the instantaneous obtaining of knowledge as ‘intuition’ and ‘insight’.” 52

5. Conclusion: Language in the Light of the Synthetic Method

• 53 “ Besonders halte ich für nöthig zu erinnern, dass ich nicht alles sagen, sondern meinem Leser auch (...)

26 In the Preface to the Grundlage Fichte states: “I especially consider it necessary to recall that I will not say everything, but I will also leave some things for my readers to think about.” 53 Looked at in isolation, Fichte’s employment of the above-mentioned main terms of setzen , Tathandlung , Bestimmung , Anstoß and Gesicht may appear unusual, and perhaps not particularly methodical. It is only when we consider them as a totality that a pattern and systematicity starts to arise. Could Fichte have intentionally and systematically used terms with almost antithetical senses – where it is left to the reader to carefully examine the context, and to actively try and overcome their apparent contradictions? It appears so, especially if we view Fichte’s linguistic method as an integral part of his general synthetic method of philosophy, and not divorced from it, as is so often the case.

• 54 See Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794-95 (...)

55 Ibid. pp. 79-81.

• 56 Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796-99 ( nova methodo )”, in: The Cambridge Companion t (...)

27 Fichte’s synthetic method involves the positing of opposed elements and then undertaking a process which involves trying to overcome the antitheses. This process involves the power of the imagination, which in Fichte’s system assists the I in uniting the apparently contradictory elements. Fichte’s philosophical method is often known by the triad of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”, as Christian Klotz explains in his contribution. 54 Klotz is also one of the few contributors in the Cambridge Companion to Fichte to highlight the crucial reconciling function that the power of the imagination plays in the Wissenschaftslehre . 55 Moreover, Daniel Breazeale’s article also provides an overview of Fichte’s various methodical approaches in his Jena period. Breazeale notes how Fichte’s method in the Grundlage specifically relates to what we have said above concerning the activity of setzen and the other key Fichtean notions and terms. It is a procedure of trying to reconcile the conflicts between the real and ideal activities of the I: “The Foundation begins with a posited contradiction between the I and the not-I and then proceeds ‘inward’, as it were, first redefining the conflict between the ‘directions’ of the I’s activities or between the ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ activities of the I, and finally locating it within the necessary internal structure of I-hood itself.” 56

28 At the non-empirical and transcendental standpoint, the task of the philosopher is to unite these opposed elements at a higher level by means of a synthesis . To do this properly, however, the philosopher must not neglect to freely engage their power of imagination. For it is the latter power which allows the philosopher to hover between the two extremes of the finite and the infinite, the ideal and the real, the theoretical and practical, and then to commence the process of overcoming any apparent philosophical contradiction. – And not only that: it is precisely the power of the imagination that furthermore permits the student and reader of Fichte to pass from the fixed outer letter to the dynamic inner philosophical spirit or ideas of his system. As Fichte writes in the Grundlage :

57 “ Die Wissenschaftslehre ist von der Art, dass sie durch den blossen Buchstaben gar nicht, sondern d (...) “The Wissenschaftslehre is of such a kind that it cannot at all be communicated by the mere letter, but solely by the spirit. This is because in anyone who studies it, its foundational ideas have to be generated by the creative power of the imagination itself.” 57

1 J.B.P. Molière, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (Paris, 1671), pp. 28-29. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the present review-essay are my own.

2 See J.G. Fichte, Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre ( Gesamtausgabe : GA I/4: 237). English translation: “Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre ”, in: J.G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings , ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), p. 79.

4 J.G. Fichte, Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache (GA I/3: 97-127). English translation: “On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language”, in: Jere Paul Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1996), pp. 119-144.

5 See J.G. Fichte, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre , 2nd edition 1798 (GA I/2: 118, footnote). English translation: Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre in: J.G. Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings , ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 106.

7 Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796-99 ( nova methodo )”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , p. 123.

8 “ Sprache , im weitesten Sinne des Wortes, ist der Ausdruck unserer Gedanken durch willkürliche Zeichen . ” J.G. Fichte, Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache (GA I/3: 97; SW VIII: 302). English translation: “On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language”, in: Jere Paul Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy , p. 120.

9 “ Vorbericht ” (Preface to the second edition) 1801, J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 461; SW I: 85). (ibid.).

10 “ denselben Inhalt in zwei sehr verschiedenen Formen zu finden, und als denselben wieder zu erkennen ” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage , ibid .

11 “ Vorrede ” (Preface to the first edition) 1795, J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 253; SW I: 88). Concerning the validity of the Grundlage text, see the “ Vorbericht ” (Preface to the second edition) 1801 (GA I/2: 461; SW I: 85).

12 J.G. Fichte, Aus einem Privatschreiben (GA I/6: 374). English translation: From a Private Letter , in: J.G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings , ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), p. 16 (slightly modified).

13 Concerning the topic of Fichte’s theory of language and philosophical terminology, see, among others: Jere Paul Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy (1996); Dominik Schmidig, “Sprachliche Vermittlung philosophischer Einsichten nach Fichtes Frühphilosophie”, Fichte-Studien 10 (1997): 1-15; Thomas Sören Hoffmann, “ Die Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre und das Problem der Sprache bei Fichte”, Fichte-Studien 10 (1997): 17-33; Damir Barbaric, “Fichtes Gedanken vom Wesen der Sprache”, Fichte-Studien 19 (2002): 213-222; and Augustin Dumont: “Qu’est-ce que dire ‘je suis’? Étude sur la question du langage chez Fichte”, Les Études philosophiques 2013 (2): 179-199.

15 See Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Position: Anti-Subjectivism, Self-Awareness and Self-Location in the Space of Reasons” in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , pp. 374-404.

16 Cf. “ Wir haben den absolut ersten, schlechthin unbedingten Grundsatz alles menschlichen Wissens aufzusuchen . ” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 255; SW I: 91).

17 “ Man setzt durch die Behauptung, dass obiger Satz (A ist A) an sich gewiss sey .” Fichte, Grundlage (GA I/2: 256; SW I: 93).

19 “s chreibt man sich das Vermögen zu, etwas schlechthin zu setzen .” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage (GA I/2: 256; SW I: 93).

20 “ Das absolute Ich des ersten Grundsatzes ist nicht etwas ; (es hat kein Prädikat, und kann keins haben), es ist schlechthin, was es ist, und dies lässt sich nicht weiter erklären.” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 271).

21 “Man wird aus dem Zusammenhange erklären, und sich erst eine Übersicht des Ganzen verschaffen müssen, ehe man sich einen einzelnen Satz scharf bestimmt.” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage (GA I/2: 252; SW I: 87).

22 “Die künftigen Beurtheiler dieser Schrift ersuche ich auf das Ganze einzugehen, und jeden einzelnen Gedanken aus dem Gesichtspunkte des Ganzen anzusehen.” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage (GA I/2: 253; SW I: 89).

23 “ Das Ich setzt sich, als anschauend, heißt zufördest: es setzt in der Anschauung sich als thätig . ” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage (GA I/2: 371; SW I: 229).

24 “… dass sie das Vermögen der Freiheit der inneren Anschauung voraussetzt .” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage (GA I/2: 253; SW I: 88).

25 See J.G. Fichte, “[Ankündigung:] Seit sechs Jahren ”, 1800/1801 (GA I/7: 155-156); English translation: “Announcement” in: J.G. Fichte/F.W.J. Schelling, The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling, Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802) , eds. and trans. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood (Albany/N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2012), pp. 87-88.

26 “ In den beyden so eben aufgestellten Sätzen liegt offenbar ein Doppelsinn in der Bedeutung des Worts Setzen . ” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage ( GA I/2: 325; SW I: 173).

27 “ Aber – ein Satz, den wir aus einer Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre als bekannt und erwiesen voraussetzen könnten – das Ich ist etwas nur insofern, inwiefern es sich selbst als dasselbe setzt (anschaut und denkt) und es ist nichts, als was es sich nicht setzt.” J.G. Fichte, Das System der Sittenlehre , 1798 (GA I/5: 46). Cf. the English translation: Fichte, The System of Ethics , eds. and trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 34.

28 See Claudio Cesa, “‘… ein Doppelsinn in der Bedeutung des Wortes Setzen ’” in: Der Grundansatz der ersten Wissenschaftslehre Fichtes . Der Stand der Fichte-Forschung , eds. Erich Fuchs, Ives Radrizzani (Neuried: ars una, 1996), pp. 134-144.

29 See Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794-95 Wissenschaftslehre”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , endnote 7, p. 88.

31 “ Der Satz: das Ich setzt sich selbst, hat 2 unzertrennliche Bedeutungen, eine ideale und reale, welche beide in dem Ich schlechthin vereinigt sind. ” J.G. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo (GA IV 2: 46); English in: J.G. Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1796/99) , ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 145 (translation slightly modified).

32 Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Position: Anti-Subjectivism, Self-Awareness and Self-Location in the Space of Reasons” in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , p. 382.

33 “ Der Begriff der Position oder Setzung ist völlig einfach und mit dem von Sein überhaupt einerlei .” I. Kant, Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (AA 2: 73); English translation: Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God , in: I. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770 , eds. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 119 (translation slightly modified).

34 See Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Position: Anti-Subjectivism, Self-Awareness and Self-Location in the Space of Reasons” in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , especially pp. 378-380.

36 On Spinoza, see I. Kant, Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (AA 2: 74); English translation: Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God , in: I. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770 , p. 119.

37 Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796-99 ( nova methodo )”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , p. 123.

38 Elizabeth Millán, “Fichte and the Development of Early German Romantic Philosophy” in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , p. 308.

39 Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794-95 Wissenschaftslehre ”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , p. 70.

41 See Paul Franks, “Freedom, Tatsache and Tathandlung in the Development of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre ” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 79/3 (1997): 310-323 .

42 J. G. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre 1804 (2) (GA II/8: 202). Cf. the English translation: The Science of Knowing. J.G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre , ed. and trans. Walter E. Wright (Albany/N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 106.

43 See Jere Paul Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1996), pp. 34-44.

44 “Intellectual Intuition”, a chapter in: Daniel Breazeale, Thinking through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 197-229.

45 See Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796-99 ( nova methodo )”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , pp. 120-123.

46 Daniel Breazeale, Thinking through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 162.

47 See Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794-95 Wissenschaftslehre”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , endnote 7, p. 88.

48 Günter Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 1.

49 See Hansjürgen Verweyen, “Fichte’s Philosophy of Religion” in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , p. 297.

50 See J. G. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (GA I/10: 141, 148, 208-209) and J.G. Fichte, Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (GA I/10: 384-399). For a valuable discussion of Fichte’s use of Gesicht , see: Marco Rampazzo Bazzan: “Idee und Gesicht in den Fünf Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1811)”, Fichte-Studien 32 (2009): 25-36.

51 See J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre , 1806 (GA I/9: 73, 110) .

52 Günter Zöller, “Fichte’s Later Presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre ” in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , pp. 150-151.

53 “ Besonders halte ich für nöthig zu erinnern, dass ich nicht alles sagen, sondern meinem Leser auch etwas zum Denken überlassen wollte. ” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 253).

54 See Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794-95 Wissenschaftslehre”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , pp. 72-73.

56 Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796-99 ( nova methodo )”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Fichte , p. 122.

57 “ Die Wissenschaftslehre ist von der Art, dass sie durch den blossen Buchstaben gar nicht, sondern dass sie lediglich durch den Geist sich mitteilen lässt; weil ihre Grundideen in jedem, der sie studirt, durch die schaffende Einbildungskraft selbst hervorgebracht werden müssen; ” J.G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2: 415; SW I: 284).

Electronic reference

David W. Wood , “ The “Double Sense” of Fichte’s Philosophical Language. Some Critical Reflections on the Cambridge Companion to Fichte ” ,  Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte [Online], 15 | 2017, Online since 01 December 2017 , connection on 21 May 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ref/781; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ref.781

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the German Idealism

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)

On May 19 , 1762 ,  German   philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born. Fichte was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism , which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant . Thus, Fichte often is regarded as a bridging figure between Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . Like Descartes and Kant before him, he was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness . Maybe you have never heard of Fichte . It was also only recently that philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness .

“Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.” — Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar (1794)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Way to Kant

Fichte was born on May 17, 1762, in Rammenau, Upper Lusatia as the son of Christian Fichte, a ribbon weaver. The Fichte family was noted in the neighborhood for its probity and piety. There is the story that Fichte owes the chance of a good education his profound memory. One day, the Freiherr von Militz, a country landowner, arrived too late to hear the local pastor preach. He was, however, informed that a lad in the neighborhood would be able to repeat the sermon practically verbatim. As a result the baron took the lad, who was young Fichte, into his protection, which meant that he paid his tuition. After having visited the the celebrated foundation-school at Pforta near Naumburg, where also the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel as well as Friedrich Nietzsch e had spent their school days, Fichte began study at the Jena theology seminary in 1780. Unfortunately, his patron Freiherr von Militz died in 1784 and Fichte had to end his studies prematurely, without completing his degree. For the next years, he worked as a private tutor and in 1790 finally, Fichte began to study the works of Immanuel Kant, but this occurred initially only because one of his students wanted to know about them. However, they had a lasting effect on his life as well as on his thought.

Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation

In 1791, Fichte had the chance to see Kant at Königsberg. But the interview was rather dissapointing. He shut himself in his lodgings and threw all his energies into the composition of an essay to raise Kant’s attention and interest. The Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung ( Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation , 1792) was written in five weeks only. There, Fichte investigated the connections between divine revelation and Kant’s critical philosophy. The first edition of the book was published without Fichte’s name and signed preface. Therefore, it was thus mistakenly credited to be a new work by Kant himself. When Kant cleared the confusion and openly praised the work and author, Fichte’s reputation skyrocketed. Now, the French revolution was creating excitement all over Europe. Inspired by its principles Fichte wrote and published anonymously two pamphlets which led to him being seen as a devoted defender of liberty of thought and action and an advocate of political changes. The same year, he received an invitation to fill the position of extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Jena, which he gladly accepted. With extraordinary zeal, he expounded his system of “transcendental idealism.” His success was immediate.

“Humanity may endure the loss of everything: all its possessions may be torn away without infringing its true dignity; — all but the possibility of improvement.” — Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar” (1794)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Sonnenklarer Bericht an das größere Publikum über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie (1801).

The Absolute I

A central core of Fichte’s philosophy is the concept of the “absolute I”. This absolute I is not to be confused with the individual spirit. Later he used the terms “absolute,””being,” or “God. Spruce begins in its basis of the entire science with a determination of the ego:

“The I sets itself, and it is capable of this mere setting by itself; and vice versa: The I is, and it sets its Seyn, capable of its mere Seyn. It is both the acting, and the product of action; the active, and that which is produced by action; action, and that is one and the same thing; and therefore this is: I am, expression of an action.”“[10]

Practical Implications

Fichte was concerned with the practical implementation of his philosophy, which is why he considered the establishment of a complete philosophical system to be of secondary importance. The comprehensibility of his teaching was in the foreground for him. He represented a positive image of man and assumed that in every man – and not only in the scholar – the foundation of true self-knowledge (and thus also Godknowledge) is laid and the philosopher only has to refer to it.

The Basis of all Science

Since Fichte quickly regarded his Basis of all Science (Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre ) as insufficient and in need of supplementation, at the height of his Jena period he set about a new elaboration of science (under the name of Science Nova Methodo ) and a first elaboration of practical philosophy (in the basis of natural law and morals) at almost the same time. In terms of content, the question has arisen since the foundation of the entire theory of science as to why the absolute self, which is autonomous, reacts to an “impulse”. Fichte makes it clear that the absolute ego is only when it becomes conscious of itself. This can only happen when it is confronted with material to which it has to react. If there were no contact, the ego would be “completely absorbed in its activity”. Fichte employed the triadic idea “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” as a formula for the explanation of change. Fichte was the first to use the trilogy of words together, in his Grundriss des Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre, in Rücksicht auf das theoretische Vermögen (1795, Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty ):

“Die jetzt aufgezeigte Handlung ist thetisch, antithetisch und synthetisch zugleich.” [“The action here described is simultaneously thetic, antithetic, and synthetic.”]

The triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis is often used to describe the thought of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel .[ 8 ] However, Hegel never used the terms himself, as instead his triad was concrete, abstract, absolute.

On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance

After publication of his essay “ Ueber den Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung ” ( On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance ) in 1798, in which he wrote that 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. “, he was finally dismissed from Jena in 1799 as a result of a charge of atheism. Since all the German states except Prussia had joined in the cry against him, he was forced to go to Berlin. In 1805, Fichte was appointed to a professorship in Erlangen. One year later, in 1806, Napoleon, who had brought war all over Europe, completely crushed the Prussian army in the battle of Jena-Auerstadt. The deplorable situation of Germany stirred him to the depths and led him to deliver the famous Addresses to the German Nation (1808) which guided the uprising against Napoleon. In 1810, the new University of Berlin was set up, designed along lines put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt .[ 7 ] Fichte was made its rector and also the first Chair of Philosophy. This was in part because of educational themes in the Addresses, and in part because of his earlier work at Jena University.. When the campaign against Napoleon finally began in 1812, Fichte’s wife devoted herself to nursing, where she caught a virulent fever. Just as she was recovering, Fichte himself was stricken down and died in 1814 at age only 51.

“The Doctrine of Knowledge, apart from all special and definite knowing, proceeds immediately upon Knowledge itself, in the essential unity in which it recognises Knowledge as existing; and it raises this question in the first place — How this Knowledge can come into being, and what it is in its inward and essential Nature?” –Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Outline of the Doctrine of Knowledge (1810)

References and Further Reading:

• [1]  Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• [2]  Works by Johann Gottlieb Fichte , original German texts
• [3]  Internationale Johann Gottlieb Fichte Gesellschaft
• [4]  Johann Gottlieb Fichte at Wikidata
• [5]  Immanuel Kant – Philosopher of the Enlightenment , SciHi Blog
• [6]  Wilhelm von Humboldt and Prussia’s Education System , SciHi Blog
• [7]  Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel and the Secret of his Philosophy , SciHi Blog
• [8]  Cogito Ergo Sum – René Descartes , SciHi Blog
• [9] Timeline for German Idealism , via DBpedia and Wikidata
• [10]  Prof. Fred Amrine –  “Kicking Away the Ladder” ,  Footnotes2Plato  @ youtube
• [11] Karl Ameriks, Dieter Sturma (eds.),   The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy , Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
• [12] Frederick Neuhouser.   Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• [13]  Works by or about Johann Gottlieb Fichte   at   Internet Archive
• [14] Works by or about Johann Gottlieb Fichte at Wikisource

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In philosophy, the triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis (German: These, Antithese, Synthese; originally: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis) is a progression of three ideas or propositions. The first idea, the thesis, is a formal statement illustrating a point; it is followed by the second idea, the antithesis, that contradicts or negates the first; and lastly, the third idea, the synthesis, resolves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis. It is often used to explain the dialectical method of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but Hegel never used the terms himself; instead his triad was concrete, abstract, absolute. The thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad actually originated with Johann Fichte.

1. History of the Idea

Thomas McFarland (2002), in his Prolegomena to Coleridge's Opus Maximum , [ 1 ] identifies Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) as the genesis of the thesis/antithesis dyad. Kant concretises his ideas into:

• Thesis: "The world has a beginning in time, and is limited with regard to space."
• Antithesis: "The world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is infinite, in respect to both time and space."

Inasmuch as conjectures like these can be said to be resolvable, Fichte's Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre ( Foundations of the Science of Knowledge , 1794) resolved Kant's dyad by synthesis, posing the question thus: [ 1 ]

• No synthesis is possible without a preceding antithesis. As little as antithesis without synthesis, or synthesis without antithesis, is possible; just as little possible are both without thesis.

Fichte employed the triadic idea "thesis–antithesis–synthesis" as a formula for the explanation of change. [ 2 ] Fichte was the first to use the trilogy of words together, [ 3 ] in his Grundriss des Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre, in Rücksicht auf das theoretische Vermögen (1795, Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty ): "Die jetzt aufgezeigte Handlung ist thetisch, antithetisch und synthetisch zugleich." ["The action here described is simultaneously thetic, antithetic, and synthetic." [ 4 ] ]

Still according to McFarland, Schelling then, in his Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795), arranged the terms schematically in pyramidal form.

According to Walter Kaufmann (1966), although the triad is often thought to form part of an analysis of historical and philosophical progress called the Hegelian dialectic, the assumption is erroneous: [ 5 ]

Whoever looks for the stereotype of the allegedly Hegelian dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology will not find it. What one does find on looking at the table of contents is a very decided preference for triadic arrangements. ... But these many triads are not presented or deduced by Hegel as so many theses, antitheses, and syntheses. It is not by means of any dialectic of that sort that his thought moves up the ladder to absolute knowledge.

Gustav E. Mueller (1958) concurs that Hegel was not a proponent of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and clarifies what the concept of dialectic might have meant in Hegel's thought. [ 6 ]

"Dialectic" does not for Hegel mean "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." Dialectic means that any "ism" – which has a polar opposite, or is a special viewpoint leaving "the rest" to itself – must be criticized by the logic of philosophical thought, whose problem is reality as such, the "World-itself".

According to Mueller, the attribution of this tripartite dialectic to Hegel is the result of "inept reading" and simplistic translations which do not take into account the genesis of Hegel's terms:

Hegel's greatness is as indisputable as his obscurity. The matter is due to his peculiar terminology and style; they are undoubtedly involved and complicated, and seem excessively abstract. These linguistic troubles, in turn, have given rise to legends which are like perverse and magic spectacles – once you wear them, the text simply vanishes. Theodor Haering's monumental and standard work has for the first time cleared up the linguistic problem. By carefully analyzing every sentence from his early writings, which were published only in this century, he has shown how Hegel's terminology evolved – though it was complete when he began to publish. Hegel's contemporaries were immediately baffled, because what was clear to him was not clear to his readers, who were not initiated into the genesis of his terms. An example of how a legend can grow on inept reading is this: Translate "Begriff" by "concept," "Vernunft" by "reason" and "Wissenschaft" by "science" – and they are all good dictionary translations – and you have transformed the great critic of rationalism and irrationalism into a ridiculous champion of an absurd pan-logistic rationalism and scientism. The most vexing and devastating Hegel legend is that everything is thought in "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." [ 7 ]

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) adopted and extended the triad, especially in Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Here, in Chapter 2, Marx is obsessed by the word "thesis"; [ 8 ] it forms an important part of the basis for the Marxist theory of history. [ 9 ]

2. Writing Pedagogy

In modern times, the dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis has been implemented across the world as a strategy for organizing expositional writing. For example, this technique is taught as a basic organizing principle in French schools: [ 10 ]

The French learn to value and practice eloquence from a young age. Almost from day one, students are taught to produce plans for their compositions, and are graded on them. The structures change with fashions. Youngsters were once taught to express a progression of ideas. Now they follow a dialectic model of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. If you listen carefully to the French arguing about any topic they all follow this model closely: they present an idea, explain possible objections to it, and then sum up their conclusions. ... This analytical mode of reasoning is integrated into the entire school corpus.

Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis has also been used as a basic scheme to organize writing in the English language. For example, the website WikiPreMed.com advocates the use of this scheme in writing timed essays for the MCAT standardized test: [ 11 ]

For the purposes of writing MCAT essays, the dialectic describes the progression of ideas in a critical thought process that is the force driving your argument. A good dialectical progression propels your arguments in a way that is satisfying to the reader. The thesis is an intellectual proposition. The antithesis is a critical perspective on the thesis. The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition.

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Opus Maximum. Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 89.
• Harry Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History. Greenwood Publishing Group (1986), p.114
• Williams, Robert R. (1992). Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other. SUNY Press. p. 46, note 37. 
• Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Breazeale, Daniel (1993). Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings. Cornell University Press. p. 249. 
• Walter Kaufmann (1966). "§ 37". Hegel: A Reinterpretation. Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0-268-01068-3. OCLC 3168016. https://archive.org/details/hegelreinterpret00kauf. 
• Mueller, Gustav (1958). "The Hegel Legend of "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis"". Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (4): 411–414. doi:10.2307/2708045.  https://dx.doi.org/10.2307%2F2708045
• Mueller 1958, p. 411.
• marxists.org: Chapter 2 of "The Poverty of Philosophy", by Karl Marx https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm
• Shrimp, Kaleb (2009). "The Validity of Karl Marx's Theory of Historical Materialism". Major Themes in Economics 11 (1): 35–56. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/mtie/vol11/iss1/5/. Retrieved 13 September 2018. 
• Nadeau, Jean-Benoit; Barlow, Julie (2003). Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France But Not The French. Sourcebooks, Inc.. p. 62. https://archive.org/details/sixtymillionfren00nade_041. 
• "The MCAT writing assignment.". Wisebridge Learning Systems, LLC. http://www.wikipremed.com/mcat_essay.php. Retrieved 1 November 2015. 

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Dialectic Synthesis

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Part of the book series: Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing ((STUDFUZZ,volume 375))

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In [250], Enric Trillas and Garcia-Honrado have presented a discussion of dialectic synthesis that has the potential to be a cornerstone paper for mathematics of uncertainty. In this chapter, we call upon the ideas presented in [250] to first apply them to fuzzy graph theory and then to illegal immigration. We apply our results to modeling loss of life in migrations in the Mediterranean.

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Mordeson, J.N., Mathew, S. (2019). Dialectic Synthesis. In: Advanced Topics in Fuzzy Graph Theory. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, vol 375. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04215-8_6

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Brief Lives

Johann gottlieb fichte (1762-1814), matt qvortrup on the cosmopolitan idealist who became the misunderstood father of german nationalism..

On the 19th of February 1919, The Times carried a report of a speech made the previous day by the German President, Friedrich Ebert. “We shall realise that which Fichte has given to the German nation as its task,” said the Social Democrat: “We want to establish a state of justice and truthfulness founded upon the equality of all humanity.” It is as telling as it is noteworthy that Ebert evoked the name of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) in his address to the Parliament of the newly established Weimar Republic. For Ebert and his contemporaries, Fichte was a cosmopolitan thinker and proponent of social justice and equality.

Fast forward almost a hundred years, and Fichte is regarded as a national chauvinist. In 2012 the German newspaper Die Zeit wrote, “The judgement of history is unequivocal. Fichte had an ominous impact on German history. All extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, he is one of the forefathers of German nationalism, and through this played a role in the rise of National Socialism.”

Was Fichte a prophet of cosmopolitanism or a precursor of ethnic nationalism? In the year of the bicentenary of Fichte’s death – he died in January 1814 of typhus contracted from his wife, who worked in a hospital for soldiers – it is worth reconsidering his thinking. Fichte’s philosophy is increasingly recognised by so-called ‘progressive’ writers (including, for example Slavoj Žižek), and his ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ provides a corrective to the degenerated version of nationalism that some have associated with his name.

Early Life & Active Thinking

In British philosophy textbooks Fichte is mentioned (if at all) as a stepping-stone between Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, and as someone who later in life acted as an apologist for German national pride and petty chauvinism. He was probably the former, but arguably wasn’t the latter. Throughout his career as a public intellectual, Fichte was driven by an often fanatical obsession with equality and liberty. He was a philosopher of action, who famously said, “I do not wish only to think, I wish to act.”

This attitude was partly due to his humble origins. The son of an impoverished weaver from Saxony, Fichte was ‘discovered’ by Baron von Miltitz, and was able to enter Schulpforta, an elite German school later attended by Nietzsche. Fichte went on to study theology at the University of Jena. But fate dealt him a blow when Miltitz died and his widow stopped his financial support. Unable to finish his degree, Fichte had to work as a tutor for rich aristocrats, who often – so he would have us believe – treated him with condescension and contempt.

After a period as an itinerant teacher, Fichte familiarised himself with Kant’s work. In 1791, on one of his many impulses, he travelled to visit Kant himself in Königsberg. He was cordially welcomed by the old philosopher, who seemed to take an instant liking to the young whippersnapper. To make an impression on Kant, Fichte had hastily written a study of religion based on Kant’s philosophy. Kant read the book with enthusiasm and helped secure its publication under the title An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792).

The story of how the volume was published without the name of the author on the cover, how many people thought the essay was Kant’s long-awaited treatise on religion, and how Fichte became famous overnight when he was revealed as the author, has become mythological in the history of philosophy. It is certain that the publication of the book helped Fichte’s career and improved his financial situation. He was able to marry and live a more comfortable life. Three years later, the student who had failed to get his degree at the University of Jena returned there to take up a chair as Professor of Philosophy, in a town the contemporary French lady of letters Madame de Staël called ‘the Athens of Germany’.

While at Jena Fichte wrote his famous Wissenschaftslehre (1796) – often translated as the Theory of Scientific Knowledge – as well as a series of polemical political tracts. But his outspoken views led to accusations of atheism, accusations which subsequently prompted him to resign his chair in a fit of anger. This was typical of Fichte. He was by all accounts a charismatic and a cantankerous soul, and his temper often got the better of him. Aged thirty-seven, his passion, brilliance and charisma had taken to the highest academic peaks, from which he had fallen because of his pride and argumentative nature.

Once again penniless, but now with a wife and a young son to support, Fichte went to Berlin and began to support himself and his family as a freelance writer and lecturer. It was a precarious existence, in what he called an “immense, dusty, tiring city.” But he delivered his lectures on nationalism in the Prussian capital, which in turn led to his appointment as professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin; a position he owed to the liberal educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt – the man who inspired John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty .

Unlike many philosophers, Fichte was a man of action, and someone who almost invariably advocated the most radical practical consequences of the insights he reached. But before his political philosophy crystallised, his thinking had to take a diversion into theoretical philosophy (what we call metaphysics).

As a professor, Fichte was duty-bound to deliver lectures on theoretical philosophy and epistemology. His theoretical philosophy merits an important footnote in the history of philosophy, not only because of his formulation of idealism, but also because it was Fichte who in his Wissenschaftslehre first introduced the triad of ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ more often associated with Hegel. In that book, Fichte sought to find a more solid foundation to knowledge than Kant had provided in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). But the book also became a turning point in his thinking, as it provided a theoretical justification for engaging in practical politics. As he summed it up in the more popular work Bestimmung des Menschen ( The Vocation of Man , 1800), Fichte had reached the conclusion that our vocation “is not merely to know but to act in accordance with [our] knowledge.”

His path to this realisation was convoluted. Unlike Kant, but like Descartes, Fichte took the thinking ‘I’ as his point of departure. In Wissenschaftslehre he contrasted the I or Ich (or the thesis ), with the not-I or Nicht-Ich (or antithesis ). The not-I held the I in check; and this fact not only implied that a not-I existed, but also pointed beyond this opposition. The I/not-I opposition could only be resolved by introducing an I that was capable not just of speculation, but of action: the only way out of pure speculation was by accepting that the I was acting freely in the world. As Fichte pointed out in Die Bestimmung des Menschen , “you do not exist for idle self-observation or to brood over devout sensations. No, you exist for activity.” So the synthesis of the I and not-I was an acting intellect. For philosophical purists, such as Fichte’s later student Arthur Schopenhauer, this deduction of the active intellect was logically and philosophically illegitimate. Fichte was willing to concede this. Indeed, the title of the chapter in Bestimmung des Menschen in which he outlined this argument was ‘Belief’ ( Glaube ).

But reaching the conclusion that the human Ich is fundamentally called to act apparently liberated Fichte. It forced him to pursue his first love, political philosophy. As he wrote in a letter to his friend Karl Reinhold in 1799, once the meaning of theoretical philosophy is grasped, it can be discarded. While not entirely discarding his theoretical thinking, Fichte turned to practical philosophy, and began to write for a broader audience, and so became a public intellectual rather than an ivory-tower theorist (the fact that he was penniless also contributed to this new focus). The young man who had read Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795) with enthusiasm, gradually began to develop his own political thinking.

Political Philosophy

In his earliest writings Fichte had been an outspoken critic of nationalist sentiments. Indeed, after the French conquest of the Rhineland in 1774, he even spoke of himself as “a young man who had abandoned his fatherland and did not feel bound by any state.” His aim then and later was cosmopolitan and utopian. Foreshadowing Marx’s prediction of the ‘withering of the state’, Fichte bluntly stated in Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation (1796) that “the state… aims at its own destruction. It is the purpose of government to make itself superfluous.” He was in no doubt, that, as he put it in his Staatslehre ( Theory of the State ) written a year before his untimely death, “traditional government would wither away” However, “this moment has not yet arrived.” And in any case, he had yet to spell out the process by which the withering of the state would take place.

Kant had argued that trade liberalisation – what he called ‘the spirit of commerce’ (der Handelsgeist) – would slowly but surely lead to a kind of brotherhood of man. Fichte agreed with Kant that the “whole race that inhabits our globe will… become assimilated into a single republic including all peoples” but he did not see free trade, let alone economic liberalism, as the path to perpetual peace. Rather, he feared that the economic competition between states would generate new enmities that would lead to war. Moreover, unlike his former mentor’s espousal of classic economic liberalism, Fichte made a case for economic protectionism and a planned economy in Der geschlossene Handelsstaat ( The Closed Commercial State , 1800). This book’s defence of social justice facilitated by government intervention is but one of the reasons it has been labelled the first systematic case for the welfare state.

The Closed Commercial State was a philosophical Rubicon for Fichte. He maintained that all people eventually would be united into a single “peoples’ republic of culture,” and here he began to consider how this would be achieved, gradually coming to the conclusion that the German people could play a pivotal role in the process of creating a cosmopolitan utopia.

In 1804-1805, Fichte delivered a series of lectures entitled Characteristics of the Present Age ( Grundzüge des Gegenwärtigen Zeitalters ), in which he outlined five stages of human development. Having travelled from the primal state of noble savages in ‘the Age of Innocence’, through dark ages, absolutism, and the ‘State of Progressive Justification’, mankind was now on the threshold of ‘the state of completed justification and sanctification’. Indeed, the ideals of the French Revolution had been characteristic of the State of Progressive Justification, but to reach political nirvana it was not enough to rely on the ideals of the French, which in any case had been undermined by the conquering forces of Napoleon. So in 1807 – the year after Hegel had described seeing ‘the world spirit on horseback’ in the guise of the French emperor, and at a time when the Germans were at a historical nadir and the once all-powerful Prussia was a shadow of its former military self – Fichte proposed that the Germans had to seize the day. In fourteen addresses, delivered as entertainment for bourgeois Berliners on Sunday afternoons in the winter of 1807, Fichte asserted that the Germans had a historical role: namely that of shepherding humanity into the bliss of a cosmopolitan utopia.

To fulfil its potential, to complete its spiritual and political journey, mankind needed Kultur , which Fichte defined as “the exercise of all forces for the purpose of total liberty, of total independence from everything which is not ourselves, which is not our pure ego.” But to be cultured was not a matter of winning on the battlefield: “Victories are won not by the power of a man’s arm, nor by the effectiveness of weapons, but by the strength of mind,” he said in the Eighth Address; and in the strength of mind the Germans were the masters. (Fichte would not have been surprised to learn that Monty Python ’s philosophy football-match featured Germany and Greece, nor that Thomas Mann pondered “if you can be a philosopher without being German?”) So as the inventors of critical philosophy and scientific thinking, the Germans had a unique historical role in spreading this Kultur , by “leading the way and serving as an example for the rest,” or as Fichte put it in his Third Address, critical philosophy had become a “mirror to this nation,” and propagating the ability to think freely had become the “purpose for which [the German nation] is destined.”

This was not, Fichte believed, a mere accident. Unlike most other European nations, the Germans had maintained their language free of Latin influences. This did not mean that the Germans were in any sense better than other Europeans, but because the German language had maintained its purity, German philosophers were able to express thoughts clearly and without mediation. (It is interesting to note that Fichte’s theory of a pure and undiluted language was taken up by the Arab nationalist thinker Zaki al-Arsuzi (1899-1968), the philosophical godfather of Pan-Arabism, and that – notwithstanding certain incriminating anti-Semitic remarks – Fichte inspired the early Zionists to revive the Hebrew language.)

The Germans themselves were not yet ready to take on the burden of educating humanity. True, their language enabled them to utter deep thoughts, and so potentially to spread reason to the rest of mankind. But in order to fulfil their mission, the Germans themselves needed educating. Thus educational reform, not military strength, was Fichte’s key policy proposal. And in his Second Address he went to great lengths to explain how the aim of education was to make active and creative individuals who would “learn with enjoyment and love, purely for the sake of learning itself.” The aim was to facilitate “the capacity to spontaneously construct images that are not at all replicas of reality, but are capable of becoming models for reality.”

Fichte’s political philosophy was not static. As he grew older he adopted less liberal positions. But for all this, he maintained the view that, as he put it in his Staatslehre , one day the “whole human race on earth will be encompassed in a single… state, which according to a common plan will vanquish nature and enter the higher sphere of another life.”

It is undisputed that Fichte’s writings were later abused by the likes of Otto von Bismarck, but reading Fichte himself, it is hard to find much evidence for him as an apologist of Blut und Boden (‘blood and soil’) nationalism. Indeed, it is instructive to note that Fichte wrote dismissively of ‘national hatred’ in The Closed Commercial State , and that in a lecture delivered during his brief tenure as Professor in Erlangen in 1805, he also attacked the patriotism of every other nation as “egoistic, narrow and hostile to the rest of mankind.”

Fichte’s thought was often complex, and he appreciated that not all would comprehend the poetic arguments at the heart of his philosophy. But he expressed confidence that “he who feels it within himself will be convinced.” And to those “puffed-up blowhards, half-educated men who drifted through school,” and who did not understand, he had a simple message; “give up your contempt for deep thought and scholarship, and learn what you do not know.”

© Dr Matt Qvortrup 2014

Matt Qvortrup earned his doctorate at Oxford University and currently teaches at Cranfield University. He is the author of, among other works, The Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Manchester University Press, 2003) and Referendums and Ethnic Conflict (Pennsylvania University Press, 2014).

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What is Hegel's concept of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in simple terms?