• Philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762
  

Fichte was born in Rammenau, Upper Lusatia. The son of a ribbon weaver, he came of peasant stock which had lived in the region for many generations. The family was noted in the neighborhood for its probity and piety. Christian Fichte, Johann Gottlieb's father, married somewhat above his station. It has been suggested that a certain impatience which Fichte himself displayed throughout his life was an inheritance from his mother.

Young Fichte received the rudiments of his education from his father. He early showed remarkable ability, and it was owing to his reputation among the villagers that he gained the opportunity for a better education than he otherwise would have received. The story runs that 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 into his protection, which meant that he paid his tuition.

Fichte was placed in the family of Pastor Krebel at Niederau near Meissen and there received thorough grounding in the classics. From this time onward, Fichte saw little of his parents. In October 1774, he was attending the celebrated foundation school at Pforta near Naumburg. This school is associated with the names of Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte and Nietzsche. The spirit of the institution was semi - monastic and, while the education given was excellent in its way, it is doubtful whether there was enough social life and contact with the world for a pupil of Fichte's temperament and antecedents. Perhaps his education strengthened a tendency toward introspection and independence, characteristics which appear strongly in his doctrines and writings.

In 1780, he began study at the Jena theology seminary. Fichte seems to have supported himself at this period of bitter poverty and hard struggle. Freiherr von Militz continued to support him, but when he died in 1784, Fichte had to end his studies prematurely, without completing his degree. During the years 1784 to 1788, he supported himself in a precarious way as tutor in various Saxon families. Fichte then worked as a private tutor in Zürich for two years, which was a time of great contentment for him. Here he met Johanna Rahn, and became acquainted with Pestalozzi. In 1790, he became engaged to Johanna Rahn, who happened to be the niece of the famous poet F. G. Klopstock. In 1790 Fichte began to study the works of Kant, but this occurred initially because one of his students wanted to know about them. They had a lasting effect on the trajectory of his life and thought. While he was assimilating the Kantian philosophy and preparing to develop it, fate dealt him a blow: the Rahn family had suffered financial reverses, and his impending marriage had to be postponed.

From Zurich, Fichte returned to Leipzig, and in 1791 obtained a tutorship at Warsaw, in the house of a Polish nobleman. The situation, however, proved disagreeable. He was soon released. He then got a chance to see Kant at Königsberg. After a disappointing interview, he shut himself in his lodgings and threw all his energies into the composition of an essay which would compel Kant's attention and interest. This essay, completed in five weeks, was the Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, 1792). This book that investigates the connections between divine revelation and Kant's critical philosophy. The first edition of the book was published, without Kant or Fichte's knowledge, without Fichte's name and signed preface; it was thus mistakenly thought to be a new work by Kant himself. Everyone, including the first reviews of the book, assumed Kant was the author; when Kant cleared the confusion and openly praised the work and author, Fichte's reputation skyrocketed, as many intellectuals of the day were of the opinion that it was "...the most shocking and astonishing news... [since] nobody but Kant could have written this book. This amazing news of a third sun in the philosophical heavens has set me into such confusion..."

In October 1793, he was married at Zürich, where he remained the rest of the year. Stirred by the events and principles of the French Revolution, he wrote and published anonymously two pamphlets which mark him as a devoted defender of liberty of thought and action and an advocate of political changes. In December of the same year, he received an invitation to fill the position of extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. He accepted and began his lectures in May of the next year. With extraordinary zeal, he expounded his system of “transcendental idealism.” His success was immediate. He seems to have excelled as a lecturer because of the earnestness and force of his personality. These lectures were later published under the title The Vocation of the Scholar. He gave himself up to intense production, and a succession of works soon appeared.

After weathering a couple of academic storms, he was finally dismissed from Jena in 1799 as a result of a charge of atheism. He was accused of atheism in 1798 after publishing his essay “Ueber den Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung” (On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World - Governance), which he had written in response to Friedrich Karl Forberg's essay “Development of the Concept of Religion,” in his Philosophical Journal. For Fichte, God should be conceived primarily in moral terms. To many, such a conception would rob Him of personality, and in vain did Fichte deny the atheistic nature of his doctrine.

Since all the German states except Prussia had joined in the cry against him, he was forced to go to Berlin. Here he associated himself with the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Tieck. In April 1800, through the introduction of Hungarian writer Ignaz Aurelius Fessler, he was initiated into Freemasonry in the Lodge Pythagoras of the Blazing Star where he was elected minor warden. At first Fichte was the warm admirer of Fessler, and was disposed to aid him in his proposed Masonic reform. But later he became Fessler's bitter opponent. Their controversy attracted much attention among Freemasons. In 1805, Fichte was appointed to a professorship in Erlangen. The disaster at Jena in 1806, in which Napoleon completely crushed the Prussian army, drove him to Königsberg for a time, but he returned to Berlin in 1807 and continued his literary activity.

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. He became a professor of the new university at Berlin founded in 1809. By the votes of his colleagues Fichte was unanimously elected its rector in the succeeding year. But, once more, his impetuosity and reforming zeal led to friction, and he resigned in 1812. The campaign against Napoleon began, and the hospitals at Berlin were soon full of patients. Fichte's wife devoted herself to nursing and caught a virulent fever. Just as she was recovering, he himself was stricken down. He died of typhus at the age of 52.

His son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, also made contributions to philosophy.

In mimicking Kant's difficult style, Fichte produced works that were barely intelligible. "He made no hesitation in pluming himself on his great skill in the shadowy and obscure, by often remarking to his pupils, that 'there was only one man in the world who could fully understand his writings; and even he was often at a loss to seize upon his real meaning.' " This remark was often mistakenly attributed to Hegel.

Fichte did not endorse Kant's argument for the existence of noumena, of "things in themselves", the supra - sensible reality beyond the categories of human reason. Fichte saw the rigorous and systematic separation of "things in themselves" (noumena) and things "as they appear to us" (phenomena) as an invitation to skepticism. Rather than invite such skepticism, Fichte made the radical suggestion that we should throw out the notion of a noumenal world and instead accept the fact that consciousness does not have a grounding in a so-called "real world". In fact, Fichte achieved fame for originating the argument that consciousness is not grounded in anything outside of itself. The phenomenal world as such, arises from self - consciousness; the activity of the ego; and moral awareness. His student (and critic), Schopenhauer, wrote:

...Fichte who, because the thing - in - itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without any thing - in - itself. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and through merely our representation, and therefore let the knowing subject be all in all or at any rate produce everything from its own resources. For this purpose, he at once did away with the essential and most meritorious part of the Kantian doctrine, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori and thus that between the phenomenon and the thing - in - itself. For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally without any evidence for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. Moreover, he appealed boldly and openly to intellectual intuition, that is, really to inspiration.

— Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, §13

In his work Foundations of Natural Right (1796), Fichte argued that self - consciousness was a social phenomenon — an important step and perhaps the first clear step taken in this direction by modern philosophy. A necessary condition of every subject's self - awareness, for Fichte, is the existence of other rational subjects. These others call or summon (fordern auf) the subject or self out of its unconsciousness and into an awareness of itself as a free individual.

Fichte's account proceeds from the general principle that the I must set itself up as an individual in order to set itself up at all, and that in order to set itself up as an individual it must recognize itself as it were to a calling or summons (Aufforderung) by other free individual(s) — called, moreover, to limit its own freedom out of respect for the freedom of the other. The same condition applied and applies, of course, to the other(s) in its development. Hence, mutual recognition of rational individuals turns out to be a condition necessary for the individual 'I' in general. This argument for intersubjectivity is central to the conception of selfhood developed in the Doctrine of Science (aka 'Wissenschaftslehre'). In Fichte's view consciousness of the self depends upon resistance or a check by something that is understood as not part of the self yet is not immediately ascribable to a particular sensory perception. In his later lectures (his Nova Methodo), Fichte 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 Anstoss as both a limit upon the absolute freedom of the I and a condition for the positing of the same.

The I ('Das Ich') itself sets this situation up for itself (it posits itself). To 'set' (setzen) does not mean to 'create' the objects of consciousness. The principle in question simply states that the essence of an I lies in the assertion of ones own self - identity, i.e., that consciousness presupposes self - consciousness. Such immediate self - identity, however, cannot be understood as a psychological fact, nor as an act or accident of some previously existing substance or being. It is an action of the I, but one that is identical with the very existence of this same I. 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 I, as a fact and/or act (Tathandlung), a unity that is presupposed by and contained within every fact and every act of empirical consciousness, though it never appears as such therein.

The 'I' must set (setzen) itself in order to be an 'I' at all; but it can set itself only insofar as it sets itself up as limited. Moreover, it cannot even set for itself its own limitations, in the sense of producing or creating these limits. The finite I cannot be the ground of its own passivity. Instead, for Fichte, if the 'I' is to set itself off at all, it must simply discover itself to be limited, a discovery that Fichte characterizes as a repulse or resistance (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 sets it out as a limit. The I does this, according to Fichte's analysis, by setting its own limitation, first, as only a feeling, then as a sensation, then as an intuition of a thing, and finally as a summons of another person. The Anstoss thus provides the essential impetus that first sets in motion the entire complex train of activities that finally result in our conscious experience both of ourselves and others as empirical individuals and of the world around us.

Though Anstoss plays a similar role as the thing in itself does in Kantian philosophy, unlike Kant, Fichte's 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 non-I is set up by the I precisely in order to explain to itself the anstoss, that is, in order to become conscious of anstoss.

Though the Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates that such an Anstoss must occur if self - consciousness is to come about, it 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, and this limitation, for Fichte, equally applies to Kant's transcendental philosophy.

According to Fichte, transcendental philosophy can explain that the world must have space, time, and causality, 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.

Fichte also developed a theory of the state based on the idea of self - sufficiency. In his mind, the state should control international relations, the value of money, and remain an autarky. Because of this necessity to have relations with other rational beings in order to achieve consciousness, Fichte writes that there must be a 'relation of right,' in which there is a mutual recognition of rationality by both parties.

Fichte made important contributions to political nationalism in Germany. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), a series of speeches delivered in Berlin under French occupation, he urged the German peoples to "have character and be German" -- entailed in his idea of Germanness was antisemitism, since he argued that "making Jews free German citizens would hurt the German nation." Fichte answered the call of Freiherr vom Stein, who attempted to develop the patriotism necessary to resist the French specifically among the "educated and cultural elites of the kingdom." Fichte located Germanness in the supposed continuity of the German language, and based it on Tacitus, who had hailed German virtues in Germania and celebrated the heroism of Arminius in his Annales.

In an earlier work from 1793 dealing with the ideals and politics of the French Revolution, Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die Französische Revolution (Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgment concerning the French Revolution), he called Jews a "state within a state" that could "undermine" the German nation. In regard to Jews getting "civil rights," he wrote that this would only be possible if one managed "to cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea."

Historian Robert Nisbet thought him to be "the true author of National Socialism".

Fichte argued that "active citizenship, civic freedom and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands."

Some of Fichte's best known works are from the last decade of his life, where he gave lecture courses in Berlin to the public at large on a wide variety of topics.

These include two works from 1806: The Characteristics of the Present Age, where Fichte outlines his theory of different historical and cultural epochs, and a semi - mystical work: The Way Towards the Blessed Life; or, the Doctrine of Religion, which contains his most extensive thoughts on religion. In 1808 he gave a series of speeches in French occupied Berlin, Addresses to the German Nation.

In 1810, in part because educational themes in Addresses..., although the University itself was designed along lines put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt and in part because of his earlier work at Jena University, Fichte was made the first Chair of Philosophy at the new Berlin University, where he was also made rector.

Fichte also continued to give private and university lectures on further versions of his Wissenschaftslehre. However, apart from a brief work of barely 15 pages from 1810: The Science of Knowledge in its General Outline, Fichte did not publish any of these lecture courses. A small selection was published thirty years after Fichte's death by his son, but the vast majority has only recently been made available in the last decades of the twentieth century, in the Gesamtausgabe. These writings include substantially reworked versions of the Wissenschaftslehre from the years 1810, 1811 and 1813, as well as a Doctrine of Right (1812), a Doctrine of Ethics (1812).

Jewish liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin listed Fichte, along with his fellow German idealist G.W.F. Hegel, French materialist and utilitarian philosophe Claude Adrien Helvétius, Swiss collectivist philosophe Jean - Jacques Rousseau, French utopian socialist Henri de Saint - Simon, and Savoyard conservative Joseph de Maistre as thinkers who constituted the ideological basis for modern authoritarianism, in his book Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty.

The new standard edition of Fichte's works in German, which supersedes all previous editions, is the Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works or Complete Edition, commonly abbreviated as 'GA'), prepared by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften approx. 40 volumes. Edited by Reinhard Lauth, Erich Fuchs, Hans Gliwitzky, Ives Radrizzani, Günter Zöller, et al., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1962 ff..

It is organized into four parts. Part I: Published Works; Part II: Unpublished Writings; Part III: Correspondence; Part IV: Lecture Transcripts.