Johann Gottlieb Fichte, son of Christian and Johanna Dorothea Schurich Fichte, was born in the small town of Rammenau near Bischofswerda in Saxony on May 19, 1762. He received financial sponsorship to attend the foundation school of Schulpforta, near Naumberg, from 1774 to 1780, where he was deeply influenced by the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Baruch Spinoza. Honoring his mother's desires for him to become a minister, Fichte entered Jena in 1780 to study theology. After a year, he enrolled at Leipzig, where he remained until 1784 when financial difficulties forced him to withdraw. He took work as a family tutor, a job for which he was not particularly well suited due to his volatile and temperamental nature. He tutored first in Zurich and then Warsaw and Danzig. While in Zurich he met Johanna Maria Rahn, whom he married in 1793. They had one son, Immanuel Hermann.
In the late 1780s, Fichte studied extensively the ideas of Immanuel Kant. In a letter written in 1790, he described his joy at discovering Kant's philosophy of transcendental idealism: "I have been living in a new world since reading [Kant's] Critique of Practical Reason. Propositions which I thought could never be overturned have been overturned for me. Things have been proven to me which I thought could never be proven." In 1791 Fichte sent Kant a manuscript in which he employed the Kantian principle of the primacy of practical reason to argue for the place of religious belief in philosophical thought. Because faith exists in the moral law, faith also necessarily exists in God, Fichte asserted, because God is revealed as the embodiment of moral reason. Kant passed the manuscript on to his publishers, and it appeared in 1792 as Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation. Widely read, the book generated considerable public attention and fame for Fichte. In 1793 Fichte was offered a chair at Jena. In his six years there, Fichte produced the basis of his philosophical epistemology, developing his key concepts in Science of Knowledge (1794). He expanded on the implications of his science of knowledge, or Wissenschaftslehre, in Science of Rights (1796-1797) and The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge (1798).
Fichte used Kantian transcendental idealism as the basis on which to formulate his epistemology. Before reading Kant's work, Fichte had struggled to reconcile the concepts of reason and freedom. Deeply influenced by the claims to the sovereignty of reason by philosophers Christian von Wolff and Spinoza, Fichte felt himself trapped into accepting Wolff's determinism or Spinoza's naturalistic pantheism. In either case, human freedom was sacrificed to the domination of reason; humanity's path was ultimately predetermined with no room for free, moral acts. Kant believed that reason, when treated with dogmatic allegiance, became unreasonable. Alternatively, Kant suggested that practical reason was, in fact, self-limiting, thus making room for morality and religion. This understanding gave Fichte the bridge between freedom and reason he had been looking for. In other words, Kant gave him a way both to affirm reason and to attest to humanity's freedom to act morally.
Although a loyal Kantian, Fichte did find room for improvement in his mentor's philosophy. Fichte attempted to develop a systematic presentation of Kant's ideas, supplementing his mentor's thought with that of his own. Essentially, he systematized Kantian phenomenology by linking Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, subjects that Kant always treated separately. The result was Fichte's theory of Wissenschaftslehre, in which he posits that the development of a systematic philosophical treatment of consciousness must necessarily begin from a single, self-evident first principle. Considering two choices, Fichte rejects the materialist's reality of things-in-themselves and claims the freely self-positing "I" as the first principle of his transcendental idealism.
In developing this reflective mode of self-consciousness, Fichte outlined three processes. First, the pure I posits itself: It exists only insofar as it continues the activity of self-positing, which Fichte calls the "thesis." Second, to be aware of itself, the I must necessarily have certain limitations, as Fichte explains, "Consciousness works through reflection, and reflection is only through limitation." Thus the I must posit something other than itself, a non-I. This self-negation is termed the "antithesis." Finally, the thesis (positing) and antithesis (negating) must be reconciled as the "synthesis," in which the I limits the non-I, and the non-I limits the I. This synthesis involves two principles. First, the I posits itself in a reflective activity with the non-I, and second, the I posits the non-I in a reflective activity with the I. The first principle forms the foundation for Fichte's theoretical philosophy, and the second is the basis for his practical philosophy. In this way, Fichte creates an inseparable bond between "knowing" and "willing," or reason and moral action.
Fichte's tenure at Jena ended abruptly in 1799 after he was accused of atheism. When he offered to teach a class on Sundays, an anonymously written pamphlet accusing him of being a heretic and atheist began to circulate. He was a gifted and enthralling teacher but was often abrasive and brash; thus, he did not help his own cause during the ensuing "Atheist Controversy." After an inquiry that Fichte handled poorly, he offered his resignation and in 1799 left Jena for Berlin.
Over the next several years, Fichte lectured and wrote extensively. His publications, primarily drawn from his lectures, included The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), On the Nature of the Scholar, and Its Manifestations (1806), and The Way Towards the Blessed Life; or The Doctrine of Religion, (1806). Fichte received wide fame in 1808 when he published Addresses to the German Nation, a publication based on a popular series of lectures given between December 1808 and March 1809. In the wake of Napoleon's triumph over Prussia in Jena and Auerstadt, Fichte revived German nationalism with a call for the renewal and moral regeneration of the German State. In 1810 Fichte was appointed dean of the Philosophy Department at the newly constituted University of Berlin, the first modern university. The next year he became the school's first rector.
Fichte continued to revise his Wissenschaftslehre throughout his lifetime, evidenced by numerous unpublished revisions discovered after his death. His early work influenced Hegel, who adopted Fichte's methodology of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Achieving fame as a popular lecturer and writer on the matters of political and social importance, his contribution to transcendental idealism earned him a place at the table with the time's most important philosophers. In December 1813, Fichte's wife contracted typhus from wounded soldiers whom she had attended in the hospital. Fichte became infected from his wife and died two months later, on January 29, 1814. He was buried next to Hegel in the cemetery of the Dorotheenkirche.
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