Fichte, Johann Gottlieb

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814), German philosopher and educator. Fichte was a proponent of an idealist theory of reality and moral action and, along with Friedrich Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, was one of the most important figures in the philosophical movement called German idealism. He was born on May 19, 1762, at Rammenau in Saxony, and educated at Pforta, Jena, and Leipzig. His anonymously published essay Critique of All Revelation (1792; trans. 1978), at first thought to be a work by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, led to his gaining the chair of philosophy at Jena in 1794. In 1799, however, Fichte was charged with espousing atheism and forced to resign. He continued to write and lecture, and in 1805 secured the chair of philosophy at Erlangen. In 1810 he became the first rector of the new University of Berlin. During this period the independence of the German states was imperilled by the ambitions of Napoleon, and Fichte fervently advocated the development of a German national consciousness. He died in Berlin on January 27, 1814.

Fichte’s works include The Science of Knowledge (1794; trans. 1970), The Science of Rights (1796; trans. 1869), The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge (1798; trans. 1907), and Addresses to the German Nation (1808; trans. 1922). His most accessible work, introducing his basic ideas in deliberately plain and simple language, is The Vocation of Man (1800; trans. 1956).

Fichte maintained that philosophy must be a science: it must be developed systematically from a single self-evident proposition, and make clear the ground of all experience. Although on the whole he accepted the critical philosophy of Kant, he took exception to Kant’s theory of the unknowable “thing-in-itself” and to his dichotomy between speculative and practical reason. Fichte held that the ground of all experience is the pure, spontaneous activity of the “I” or ego, which the “I” is itself capable of apprehending. The very fact that the “I” apprehends its own free activity requires it to counterpoise a “not-I”, or non-ego, or otherness, and to see itself in contrast to that otherness. In the dynamic encounter between the “I” and the “not-I”, each is defined and realized by the contrast with the other. Thus, the opposition between the “I” and the “not-I”, the self and the world, is ultimately generated by the “I”’s own activity. Fichte’s ethical idealism, based on the moral will, was derived from this conception.

In his political philosophy, Fichte argued that the self-conscious “I” can only confirm its sense of itself as a free agent insofar as it encounters another such “I”, and insofar as each of them recognizes the other as free. In the first instance, this recognition must take the form of each recognizing the other as free to do as it will with its own private property. He attempted to show that other basic principles of legality could be derived from that of private property.

Fichte’s ideas that activity is the ground of everything, that the subject and object of consciousness are each defined by contrast with the other, and that self-consciousness can only be realized “intersubjectively” within a community of mutually recognizing self-conscious beings were highly influential on subsequent thinkers, especially Hegel. Through Hegel, Fichte’s thought has exerted an influence on philosophers such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and on more recent discussions of the relations between the self and the “other”.