Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762 – 1814

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Beginning from Kant's critical philosophy, he developed the Wissenschaftslehre, an attempted derivation of the structure of experience from the self-positing activity of an absolute I. His Addresses to the German Nation, delivered under French occupation, helped to shape modern German nationalism, while his ethics emphasized vocation, freedom, and the moral mission of the rational will. He was a decisive influence on Schelling, Hegel, and the early Romantics.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in 1762 in Rammenau in Saxony, the son of a poor ribbon-weaver, and was educated through the patronage of a local nobleman. He studied theology and philosophy at Jena and Leipzig, supported himself as a tutor in Switzerland and Saxony, and made his name in 1792 with the anonymously published Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, which the reading public initially attributed to Kant.

On Kant's public correction, Fichte was offered the chair of philosophy at Jena in 1794, where he produced the first version of his Wissenschaftslehre and lectured on the vocation of the scholar. The atheism controversy of 1798-99 cost him his chair, and he moved to Berlin, where he delivered the Vocation of Man (1800), the patriotic Addresses to the German Nation (1808) during the French occupation, and rector's lectures at the new University of Berlin from 1810.

Fichte radicalized Kant's transcendental idealism into a system in which the absolute I posits itself and, through opposition, the not-I, providing the bridge from Kant to Schelling and Hegel. His later thought turned increasingly toward religious and political themes. He died in Berlin in 1814 of typhus, contracted from his wife Johanna while she was nursing wounded soldiers.