Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814)

Fichte developed Kant’s Critical philosophy into a system of his own, which he named ‘Theory of Science’ or Wissenschaftslehre. Though Fichte continued to revise this system until the end of his life, almost all of his best known and most influential philosophical works were written in first portion of his career, when he was a professor at the University of Jena.

The task of philosophy, as understood by Fichte, is to provide a transcendental explanation of ordinary consciousness and of everyday experience, from the standpoint of which philosophy must therefore abstract. Such an explanation can start either with the concept of free subjectivity (‘the I’) or with that of pure objectivity (the ‘thing in itself’), the former being the principle of idealism and the latter that of what Fichte called ‘dogmatism’ (or transcendental realism). Though neither of these first principles can be theoretically demonstrated, the principle of freedom possesses the advantage of being practically or morally certain. Moreover, according to Fichte, only transcendental idealism, which begins with the principle of subjective freedom and then proceeds to derive objectivity and limitation as conditions for the possibility of any selfhood whatsoever, can actually accomplish the task of philosophy.

One of the distinctive features of Fichte’s Jena system is its thoroughgoing integration of theoretical and practical reason, that is, its demonstration that there can be no (theoretical) cognition without (practical) striving, and vice versa. Another important feature is Fichte’s demonstration of the necessary finitude of all actual selfhood. The ‘absolute I’ with which the system seems to begin turns out to be only a practical ideal of total self-determination, an ideal toward which the finite I continuously strives but can never achieve. Also emphasized in Fichte’s Jena writings is the social or intersubjective character of all selfhood: an I is an I only in relationship to other finite rational subjects. This insight provides the basis for Fichte’s political philosophy or ‘theory of right’, which is one of the more original portions of the overall system of the Wissenschaftslehre, a system that also includes a foundational portion (or ‘first philosophy’), a philosophy of nature, an ethics and a philosophy of religion.

1 Life and works I: Jena

Born in the village of Rammenau in the Oberlausitz area of Saxony, Fichte was the eldest son in a family of poor and pious ribbon weavers. At the age of 9 his extraordinary intellectual talents brought him to the attention of a local baron, who sponsored his education, first at the Pforta school and then at the Universities of Jena and Leipzig. With the death of his patron, Fichte was forced to discontinue his studies and earn his livelihood as a private tutor, a profession the proud young man quickly came to detest.

After several years of such employment, including a long sojourn in Zurich, where he met his future wife, Johanna Rahn, Fichte returned to Leipzig to pursue a literary career. All his projects failed, however, and he was again forced to survive as a tutor. This time he was asked by a university student to give lessons in the Kantian philosophy (see KANT, I.). This encounter with Kant’s writings in the summer of 1790 proved to be decisive, and Fichte became an instant convert to a philosophy he described as having ‘occasioned a revolution in my way of thinking’. Eventually he made his way to Königsberg, where he lived for a few months. After his first disappointing interview with Kant, he resolved to demonstrate his mastery of the new philosophy by writing a treatise on a theme as yet unaddressed by Kant: namely, the question of the compatibility of the former with any concept of divine revelation. In just 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. Suitably impressed, Kant helped to arrange the publication of Fichte’s manuscript, which was published by Kant’s own publisher in 1792 under the title Versuch eine Kritik aller Offenbarung (Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation). For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, the first edition appeared without the author’s name and preface. Not surprisingly, the book was hailed as a product of Kant’s own pen and was widely praised as such. When the true identity of its author was revealed, Fichte was immediately catapulted from total obscurity to philosophical celebrity.

At the time that this stroke of fortune occurred Fichte was again employed as a private tutor, this time in Poland, where he was also working on several political tracts, including the provocatively entitled Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, who have Hitherto Suppressed it (1793). In the summer of 1793, however, he returned to Zurich where he married his fiancée and oversaw the publication of the first two instalments of his spirited Contribution to the Rectification of the Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution (1793 and 1794), a work in which he outlined his own democratic view of legitimate state authority and insisted passionately on the right of revolution. Even though both of these political tracts were published anonymously, Fichte was widely known to be their author and thus acquired an early reputation as a political – as well as a religious and philosophical – radical.

In Zurich, Fichte’s time was increasingly occupied by his efforts to construct for himself a systematic revision of what he still took to be Kant’s Critical philosophy. It was while he was so engaged 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 philosophy and, together with nearby Weimar, as one of the liveliest intellectual centres in the German-speaking world.

Fichte arrived in Jena in May of 1794, and enjoyed tremendous success there for the next six years, during which time he laid the foundations and developed the first systematic articulations of his new system (the Wissenschaftslehre or ‘Theory of Science’). Even as he was engaged in this tremendous theoretical labour, 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 accurately remarked, ‘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’. This passionate striving to address the pressing needs of his own time is plainly evident in the text of the enormously popular public lectures that he began to deliver immediately upon his arrival in Jena and published under the title Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (Some Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation) (1794c).

The first hint of Fichte’s new philosophical project and strategy came in his 1794a review of G.E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus, which was soon followed by a brief but important manifesto for the new system, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre) (1794b). The first full – albeit still provisional – presentation of the first or ‘foundational’ portion of the new system was presented in the so-called private lectures that Fichte delivered during the 1794–5 academic year, lectures he arranged to have printed in fascicles for the convenience of his students, to whom these printed sheets were distributed in instalments over the course of the year. Eventually, these same pages were bound together and offered to the public under the title Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre Wissenschaftslehre (Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre) (Parts I and II, 1794; Part III, 1795), supplemented by the Grunriß des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre in Rüchsicht auf das theoretishce Vermögen (Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty) (1795), though each of these publications still bore on its title page the words ‘a manuscript for the use of his listeners’.

Dissatisfied with many features of this initial presentation and surprised and shocked by the virtually universal misunderstanding of his published Foundations, 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’ (1796–7, 1797–8, 1798–9). Though he intended to revise these lectures for serial publication under the title An Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre in the Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten, of which he himself was by then co-editor, the only portions of this projected New Presentation that ever appeared were the ‘First and Second Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre’ (1797) and Chapter One of the same (1798).

At the same time that Fichte was revising the presentation of the foundational portion of his system he was also elaborating its various subdivisions or branches – first in private lectures and then in published treatises on Foundations of Natural Right Based on the Wissenschaftslehre (1796–7) and Das System der Sittenlehre nach den Principien der Wissenschaftslehre) (System of Ethical Theory Based on the Wissenschaftslehre) (1798a). Fichte’s intention was then to turn to the development of the remaining subdivision of his system and to expound a philosophy of religion ‘in accordance with the principles of the Wissenschaftslehre’, but before he had a chance to do this he published a brief essay Üeber den Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung (On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World) (1798b), in which he attempted to sketch some of his preliminary ideas on this topic. This essay, along with another by K.L. Forberg, that was contained in the same issue of the Philosophisches Journal, provoked an anonymous author to publish a pamphlet charging Fichte with atheism, 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) – quickly assumed a life and even a name of its own: ‘the Atheism Controversy’ or Atheismusstreit. In the end, Fichte badly miscalculated his own position and was finally forced to resign from Jena and flee to Berlin, where he arrived in the summer of 1799 and where the final phase of his career largely unfolded.

2 Life and works II: Berlin

In Berlin, which was not yet home to a university, Fichte supported himself by giving private lectures on his philosophy and by a new flurry of literary production, increasingly aimed at a large, popular audience. The first of these new writings was a brilliant popular presentation of some of the characteristic features and conclusions of Fichte’s system, with a strong emphasis upon the moral and religious character of the same. This work, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Vocation of Man) (1800b), which is perhaps Fichte’s greatest literary achievements, was published in 1800, the same year that he also published a typically bold foray into political economy, The Closed Commercial State, in which he propounds a curious blend of socialist political ideas and protectionist economic principles. Defending his own philosophy against misunderstanding remained a primary concern for Fichte, however, as is attested by the publication in 1801 of the poignantly titled Sonnenklarer Bericht an das größere Publikum über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie. Ein Versuch, die Leser zum verstehen zu zwingen (Sun-Clear Report to the Public at Large on the Actual Character of the latest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand).

At the same time that he was addressing the public, Fichte was deeply engrossed in yet another effort to rethink and to restructure the foundations of his system. Hardly a year went by that he did not produce, either for his own use, or else for use in conjunction with the private lectures he was delivering in Berlin, yet another completely new version of the Wissenschaftslehre, each of which differed more and more dramatically from the familiar published version of 1794–5. (By 1804, for example, most references to ‘the I’ had been replaced with references to ‘the absolute’ and its various ‘appearances’.) Having learned a lesson from the public reception of his 1794–5 presentation, Fichte resolved never to publish any of these new versions of his system (of which more than a dozen survive in manuscript), explaining in an official pro memoria of 3 January 1804 that the author of the Wissenschaftslehre ‘wishes to confine himself to oral communication, so that misunderstanding can thereby be detected and eliminated on the spot’. Consequently, the sole public hint of Fichte’s new understanding of his system was a brief and enigmatic Die Wissenschaftslehre, in ihrem allgemeinen Umrisse dargestellt (General Outline of the Wissenschaftslehre) published in 1810, as well as whatever hints in this direction readers might glean from the popular works published during this period.

In 1805 Fichte spent a semester lecturing at the University of Erlangen, but returned in the autumn to Berlin, where, in 1806, he published in rapid succession three popular and well-received books, all of which were based upon earlier lectures: On the Essence of the Scholar (a reworking of some of the same themes first addressed in the similarly titled lectures of 1794); Der Grundzüge des gegewärtigen Zeitalters (Characteristics of the Present Age) (1806a) (an attempt to show the implications of his ‘system of freedom’ for a speculative philosophy of history); and Guide to the Blessed Life (an eloquent and rather mystical treatise on philosophy and religion). With the entry of the French army into Berlin in 1806, Fichte joined the Prussian government in exile in Königsberg, where he held yet another course of lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre and wrote an important short work on Machiavelli as Author (1807), in which he defends a form of Realpolitik that appears to contrast starkly with the liberalism and political idealism of his earlier writings. Eventually, however, he returned to Berlin, where, under the eyes of the occupying forces, he delivered his celebrated Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) (1808). Though these lectures later obtained a place of dubious honour as founding documents in the history of German nationalism, they are mainly concerned with the issue of national identity – and hence with the question of national education (which is the main topic of the work) – as a means to a larger, cosmopolitan end.

Fichte had always had a lively interest in pedagogical issues and hence took a leading role in planning the new Prussian university to be established in Berlin. Appropriately, when the new university finally opened in 1810, Fichte himself served as the first head of the philosophical faculty as well as the first elected rector of the entire university. His final years saw no diminution 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 Theory of Right’ (1812) and ‘Theory of the State’ (1813)) and ethics (‘System of Ethical Theory’ (1812)). As presaged by the book on Machiavelli, these late forays into the domain of practical philosophy paint a far darker picture of human nature and defend a much more authoritarian view of the state than anything to be found in the earlier, published writings on these subject.

In 1813 Fichte cancelled 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. Through his wife, who was serving as a volunteer nurse in a Berlin military hospital, he contracted an infection of which he died on 29 January 1814.

3 The project of a Wissenschaftslehre

The primary task of Fichte’s system of philosophy 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 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. Hence, in his ‘First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’ (1797), he describes philosophy’s task as that of ‘displaying the foundation of experience’, that is, ‘explaining the basis of the system of representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity’. Fichte owed this conception of the task and strategy of philosophy entirely to his reading of Kant, and no matter how far his own presentation of his system seemed to diverge from ‘the letter’ of Kant’s own presentation, he always maintained that it remained true to ‘the spirit’ of the same – which, for Fichte, lay entirely in its uncompromising insistence upon the practical indubitability of human freedom and its thoroughgoing dedication to the project of giving a transcendental account of ordinary experience that could explain the objectivity and necessity of theoretical reason (cognition) in a manner consistent with the affirmation of human liberty. For this reason Fichte sometimes referred to his own presentation of this same philosophy as ‘the system of human freedom’.

In accordance with this conception of philosophy’s task, Fichte insisted firmly upon the sharp distinction between the ‘standpoint’ of natural consciousness (which it is the task of philosophy to somehow ‘explain’) and that of transcendental reflection (from which alone such a philosophical explanation can be conducted – if at all). Thus there is no possible conflict between transcendental idealism and everyday realism; on the contrary, the whole point of the former is to demonstrate the necessity and unavoidability of the latter.

However ‘Kantian’ in spirit Fichte’s enterprise might have been, he was at the same time all too keenly aware of certain glaring weaknesses and inadequacies in Kant’s own execution of this project. Taking to heart the criticisms of such contemporaries as F. JACOBI, Salomon Maimon and G.E. Schulze, Fichte realized, first, that the doctrine of the thing in itself, understood as an external cause of sensations, was indefensible on Critical grounds, and second, 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 objects, was nevertheless difficult to reconcile with certain other Kantian doctrines regarding the subject’s 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).

Fichte was also persuaded by his reading of the works of K. L. REINHOLD that the systematic unity of the Critical philosophy – specifically, the unity of theoretical and practical reason, of the First and Second Critiques – was insufficiently apparent in Kant’s own presentation of his philosophy. His study of Reinhold also convinced him 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 task, then, was to discover a single, self-evident starting point or first principle from which one could then somehow deduce or ‘derive’ both theoretical and practical philosophy. Not only would such a method guarantee the systematic unity of philosophy itself, but, more importantly, it would also display what Kant hinted at but never demonstrated: namely, 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 that clearly designates 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. It is, however, important to note that Wissenschaftslehre is not the name of any particular Fichtean treatise, but is instead the general name for his entire system or project – a larger system that consists of a number of interrelated parts or systematic subdisciplines and an overarching project that could be expounded in a series of radically different presentations and a bewildering variety of systematic vocabularies. In fact, Fichte spent his entire life demonstrating this last point: that is, expounding and re-expounding what he himself took to be the same philosophy (‘the Wissenschaftslehre’) in a number of radically different forms and guises (The Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre of 1794–5, ‘Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo’, ‘the Wissenschaftslehre of 1801–2’, ‘the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre’, ‘the Wissenschaftslehre of 1805’, and so on) – more than a dozen in all between 1794 and 1814.

4 Idealism versus dogmatism

In order to construct any genuine philosophy of freedom, thought 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 theoretical objections to such claims; on the contrary, it was the very impossibility of any theoretically satisfactory refutation of scepticism concerning the reality of freedom that led Fichte to the recognition of the inescapable ‘primacy of the practical’ with respect to the selection of any philosophical starting point.

In so far as any proposed first principle of philosophy is really 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 argument. Furthermore, Fichte maintained that there are two and only two possible starting points for the philosophical ‘explanation’ of experience sketched above: namely, the concept of pure selfhood (freedom) and that of pure thinghood (necessity) – neither of which can be warranted, qua philosophical starting point, by a direct appeal to experience, and both of which can be arrived at only by a selfconscious act of philosophical abstraction from ordinary experience (within which freedom and necessity, subject and object, are invariably joined).

The two rival philosophical strategies made possible by these opposed starting points are unforgettably limned by Fichte his two 1797 Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, where 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 ‘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 also recognized that the choice between philosophical starting points could not be resolved philosophically, he nevertheless denied that any dogmatic system – any system that started 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 the realm of mental ideas or ‘representations’ (Vorstellungen). Idealism, in contrast, at least when correctly understood as the sort of Critical idealism that recognizes that the intellect itself most operate in accordance with certain necessary laws, could – at least in principle – accomplish the prescribed task and explain our experience of objects (‘representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity’) in terms of the necessary operations of the intellect itself, 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 selfconsciousness is in fact possible. This 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.

Returning to the question of the starting point, however, it still must be granted that the truth of the latter cannot be established by any philosophical means, including its utility as a philosophical first principle. On the contrary, one must be convinced, on wholly extraphilosophical grounds, of the reality of one’s own freedom before one can enter into the chain of deductions and arguments that constitute the system of transcendental idealism. 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’.

In the end, the only reason why transcendental idealists come to a stop with – and thus begins their philosophy with – the proposition ‘the I freely posits itself’ is not because they are unable to entertain theoretical doubts on this point nor because they cannot continue the process of reflective abstraction. Instead, as Fichte explains in his essay On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World, ‘I cannot go beyond this standpoint because I am not permitted to do so’. Of course I could think of myself as determined by things, but still ‘I ought to begin my thinking with the thought of the pure I, and I ought to think of this pure I as acting with absolute spontaneity – not as determined by things, but rather, as determining them’. It is precisely because the categorical imperative is in this way invoked to secure the first principle of his entire system that Fichte can make the rather startling claim that the ‘Wissenschaftslehre is the only kind of philosophical thinking that accords with duty’.

5 Foundations 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 – that is, as positing itself’. To be sure, this starting point is somewhat obscured in the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre by a difficult and somewhat forced attempt 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 1796–9 lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo.)

‘To posit’ (setzen) means simply ‘to be aware of’, ‘to reflect upon’, or ‘to be conscious of’, and thus the principle in question simply states that the essence of selfhood lies in the assertion of ones own self-identity. Such immediate self-identify, however, cannot be understood as a ‘fact’, no matter how privileged, nor as an ‘accident’ of some previously existing substance or being. Instead, it must be understood as an activity, albeit an activity of a most extraordinary, auto-productive type: in Fichte’s own language, it is 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 self-consciousness might also be described as an ‘intellectual intuition’, since it involves the immediate presence of the I to itself, prior to and independently of any sensory content. Understood in this way, this original intellectual intuition is merely the reflectively realized presupposition for the possibility of actual consciousness and does not designate any act or state of actual, empirical consciousness – including the consciousness of the philosopher. Fichte himself, however, confuses matters by sometimes using the term ‘intellectual intuition’ to designate the act of philosophical reflection through which the philosopher arrives at the former concept or, on still other occasions, to indicate 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, it is important to recognize its systematic ambiguity in Fichte’s own writings. Significantly, the term ‘intellectual intuition’ does not even occur in the 1794–5 Foundations.

A fundamental corollary of Fichte’s understanding of selfhood as a kind of act is his denial that the I is originally any sort of ‘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. 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 selfconsciousness.

After establishing the first principle and conceiving the act expressed therein, the philosophical task is then to discover what other acts must 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 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 we are 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 this first act. 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 can actually occur in isolation from all of the others. Thus what transcendental philosophy actually does is to analyse 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 a clear realization on the part of the transcendental philosopher 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 philosophy of the absolute I. Instead, the conclusion of both the Foundations 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.

An 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). Moreover, it cannot even posit for itself its own limitations, in the sense of producing or creating these limits. 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 itself is first posited 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 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, this term signifies 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 in order to explain to itself the latter. Though the Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates that such an Anstoß must occur if selfconsciousness is to be actual, 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. Though transcendental philosophy can explain, for example, why the world has a spatio-temporal character and a causal structure, it can never explain why objects have the particular sensible properties they happen to have. 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.

But 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 imagination, an equally original ‘practical’ power of sheer willing, which, once ‘checked’, is immediately converted into a capacity for endless striving. The Wissenschaftslehre thus also includes a deduction of the categorical imperative and of the practical power of the self. For Fichte, therefore the Kantian principle of ‘the primacy of practical reason’ 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 ‘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 demonstrates from the very start that reason could not be theoretical if it were not also practical – at the same time, to be sure, that it also demonstrates the converse of this proposition, 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 natural 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) or ‘for no reason’ – so must it never identify itself with any determinate or limited state whatsoever. Instead, 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 posited in 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 always striving for a sheer self-determinacy that it never achieves. Between the original abstraction of pure selfhood as pure Tathandlung and the concluding ideal 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 experience.

6 Philosophy of nature and ethics

Having established the foundations of his new system, Fichte then turned to the task of erecting a fully-articulated transcendental system according to a plan that is perhaps most clearly outlined in ‘The Deduction of the Subdivisions of the Wissenschaftslehre’, with which the lectures on ‘Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo’ conclude. At least as conceived during the Jena years, the entire Wissenschaftslehre consists of four parts: (1) first philosophy, which is to say, the ‘foundational’ portion of the system; (2) ‘theoretical philosophy’ or ‘philosophy of nature’, the latter understood in a sense corresponding to Kant’s Metaphysical First Principles of Nature; (3) ‘practical philosophy’ or ethics; and (4) ‘philosophy of the postulates’, which includes the subdisciplines of political philosophy or ‘theory of right’ and philosophy of religion.

The closest Fichte himself ever came to developing a philosophy of nature according to transcendental principles is the compressed account of the same presented in the Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty (1795), in which, however, the domain of specifically ‘theoretical’ philosophy is not rigorously distinguished from the ‘theoretical’ portion of the Foundations, which also includes a discussion of the a priori structure of the objective world. In fact, the kind of theoretical philosophy of nature made possible by the Wissenschaftslehre turns out to be 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.

In contrast to Fichte’s rather cursory treatment of purely theoretical philosophy, ethics or ‘practical philosophy’, which analyses 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 Ethical Theory (1798a) is Fichte’s longest single book. Whereas theoretical philosophy ‘explains how the world is, and the result is the same as pure experience’, practical philosophy ‘explains how the world ought to be constructed by rational beings, and its result is something ideal’. Ethics thus considers the object of consciousness not as something given or even 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. The specific task of Fichte’s ethics is therefore to deduce from the general obligation to determine oneself freely the particular obligations of every finite rational being.

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 characterize 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, first, of the constitutive role of theoretical reason, and secondly, of the sheer ‘giveness’ of the I’s original determinacy (doctrine of the Anstoß).

7 Political philosophy and philosophy of religion

The final portion of the Jena system is devoted to ‘the philosophy of the postulates’, a discipline conceived 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, the moral world is itself considered from the perspective of the natural world (that is, one considers the postulates that theoretical reason addresses to the practical realm) or else, alternatively, the natural world is considered from the perspective of the moral world order (that is, one considers the postulates that practical reason addresses to the realm of theory). The first of these perspectives is that of political philosophy, or what Fichte calls ‘theory of right’ or sometimes the domain of ‘natural right’; the latter is that of the philosophy of religion.

A transcendental theory of right proceeds from the general principle that one must limit one’s own freedom in accordance with an a priori concept of the other free beings with whom one comes into contact, and goes on to consider the precise conditions under which such a postulated society of free and equal individuals is in fact possible. Ultimately, this leads Fichte to the formulation of his own version of the contract theory of political legitimacy.

If one is to posit one’s own freedom, then one must posit the freedom of others and limit one’s own freedom accordingly. It follows that a just political order is a demand of reason itself, since ‘the concept of justice or right is a condition of selfconsciousness’. This passage, from the Foundations of Natural Right, points to what is perhaps the most original feature of Fichte’s political philosophy: its attempt to demonstrate the intrinsically social character of reason itself and thus to deduce the concept of right from the ‘reciprocal concept’ of an individual free being. The strategy of Fichte’s deduction of intersubjectivity is to establish, first, that an I can posit itself only as an individual and, second, that it can posit itself as an individual only insofar as it recognizes other free individuals – a recognition facilitated by the presence, within selfconsciousness itself, of an immediate awareness of oneself as ‘summoned’ by the other to limit oneself freely in recognition of the latter’s freedom. 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.

The theory of natural right developed by Fichte during his Jena period is clearly quite different from the kind of theories that have traditionally gone by this name. The task of Fichte’s theory of right is to consider the specific ways in which the freedom of each individual must be restricted so that several individuals can live together with the maximum amount of mutual freedom. Furthermore, 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. The concept of right 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 must be externally limited if a free society of equals is to be possible.

Unlike Kant, Fichte does not treat political philosophy merely as a subdivision of moral theory, but as an independent philosophical discipline with a topic and laws of its own. Whereas ethics analyses the concept of what is demanded of a freely willing subject, the theory of right describes what such a subject is permitted to do; and 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. If the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole can be described, in Fichte’s words, as a ‘system of freedom’, then the spirit of such a system is perhaps best reflected in the distinctively liberal political philosophy based thereupon.

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.

As it happened, Fichte never had a chance to develop this final subdivision of his Jena system and, somewhat ironically, he was prevented from doing so by a controversy that erupted in the wake of the publication, in 1798, of a tentative foray into this very domain in his essay On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World. In this essay Fichte seems to contend that, so far as philosophy is concerned, the realm of the divine is wholly coextensive with that of the moral law itself and that no further inference to a ‘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 something like a ‘moral world order’. Philosophy of religion would thus include a deduction of the postulate that our moral actions really do make some difference in the world. The argument of the essay On the Basis of Our Belief is, nevertheless, primarily a negative one, designed to deny 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 (1800) and in Part III of The Vocation of Man (1800b), attempted to restate his position in a manner that at least appeared to be more compatible with the claims of theism.