Johann Gottlieb Fichte
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| Full name | Johann Gottlieb Fichte |
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| Born | May 19, 1762
Rammenau, Saxony, Holy Roman Empire |
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| Died | January 27, 1814 (aged 51)
Berlin |
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| Era | 18th-century philosophy |
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| Region | Western Philosophy |
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| School | German Idealism, German Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, Post-Kantianism |
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| Main interests | Self-consciousness and Self-awareness, Moral Philosophy,Political Philosophy |
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| Notable ideas | absolute consciousness, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the not-I, striving, mutual recognition |
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Johann Gottlieb Fichte (May 19, 1762 – January 27, 1814) was a
Germanphilosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as
German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of
Immanuel Kant. Fichte is often perceived as a figure whose philosophy forms a bridge between the ideas of Kant and the German Idealist
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Recently, 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. Like
Descartes and
Kantbefore him, he was motivated by the problem of
subjectivity and
consciousness. Fichte also wrote political philosophy and is considered one of the fathers of
German nationalism.
Life and work
Fichte was born in
Rammenau,
Upper Lusatia. In 1780, he began study at the
Jena theology seminary. In 1784, without completing his high school. Moved to Zürich, and 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, which were to have a lasting effect on the trajectory of his life and thought.
Not long after meeting Kant in
Königsberg, Fichte published his first work,
Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation(1792), a book that investigates the connections between divine revelation and Kant's
Critical philosophy. Kant 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..."
[2][edit]Atheism Dispute
In 1798 Johann Gottlieb Fichte was accused of atheism after publishing his essay 'On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance', which he had written in response to Karl Friedrich Forberg's essay 'Development of the Concept of Religion', his Philosophical Journal. The controvery eventually forced the resignation of his chair at Jenna in 1799.
[edit]Fichte's philosophical writings
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.' "
[3] 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 [disambiguation needed].
[edit]Central theory
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 so central to the conception of selfhood developed in the
Jena Doctrine of Science (aka 'Wissenschaftslehre') that Fichte, in his later lectures (his
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 Anstoss (see below) as both a limit upon the absolute freedom of the I and a condition for the positing of the same.
This idea is an elaboration and extension of his central philosophical work, Doctrine of Science (aka 'Wissenschaftslehre'), where he showed that 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.
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.s degree, Fichte ended his studies.
