Early modern Europe · 1762–1814
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
German idealist who grounded all knowledge in the self’s activity
Kant’s thing in itself must go: philosophy should start from the I that “posits” itself and, in striving, posits a world that resists it. His Addresses to the German Nation (1808) made him a voice of German nationalism.
Life and thought
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the son of a poor ribbon-weaver in Saxony; a local nobleman, impressed by the boy, paid for his schooling. His first book, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), appeared anonymously and was at first taken for Kant’s, which made him famous overnight. He taught at Jena until the “atheism dispute” forced him out in 1799, then moved to Berlin, where he gave his Addresses to the German Nation (1807–08) under French occupation. He died in 1814 of typhus caught from his wife, who had been nursing soldiers.
Fichte thought Kant’s “thing in itself” — an unknowable cause of our sensations — made no sense. Philosophy should begin instead from the activity of the self: the I posits itself, and in order to act it must also posit something that resists it, the not-I. The world exists as the arena of our moral striving; freedom comes first. He rewrote his Science of Knowledge many times. Politically he moved from defending the French Revolution to German nationalism. His self-positing subject opened the way for Schelling and Hegel.