Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (German Edition)

Moreover, it cannot even posit 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 posit itself off at all, it must simply discover itself to be limited, a discovery that Fichte characterizes as an "impulse," [56] "repulse," [57] or "resistance" [58] Anstoss ; Modern German: Such an original limitation of the I is, however, a limit for the I only insofar as the I posits it out as a limit.

The I does this, according to Fichte's analysis, by positing 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 posits 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 original encounter of the I with its own finitude. Rather than claim that the not-I das Nicht-Ich is the cause or ground of the Anstoss , Fichte argues that not-I is posited 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.

Dieter Henrich proposed that Fichte was able to move beyond a "reflective theory of consciousness". According to Fichte, the self must already have some prior acquaintance with itself, independent of the act of reflection "no object comes to consciousness except under the condition that I am aware of myself, the conscious subject [ jedes Object kommt zum Bewusstseyn lediglich unter der Bedingung, dass ich auch meiner selbst, des bewusstseyenden Subjects mir bewusst sey ]".

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Fichte also developed a theory of the state based on the idea of self-sufficiency. In his mind, the state should control international relations, the value of money, and remain an autarky. Because of this necessity to have relations with other rational beings in order to achieve consciousness, Fichte writes that there must be a 'relation of right', in which there is a mutual recognition of rationality by both parties.

Between December and March , Fichte gave a series of lectures concerning the "German nation" and its culture and language, projecting the kind of national education he hoped would raise it from the humiliation of its defeat at the hands of the French. Consequently, Fichte came to believe Germany would be responsible to carry the virtues of the French Revolution into the future. Furthermore, his nationalism was not aroused by Prussian military defeat and humiliation, for these had not yet occurred, but resulted from devotion to his own humanitarian philosophy. Through disappointment in the French he turned to the German nation as the instrument of fulfilling it.

The Addresses display Fichte's interest during that period in language and culture as vehicles of human spiritual development. Fichte built upon the earlier ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder and attempted to unite them with his more systematic approach. The aim of the German nation, according to Fichte, was to "found an empire of spirit and reason, and to annihilate completely the crude physical force that rules of the world. The nationalism propounded by Fichte in the Addresses would be appealed to over a century later by the Nazi Party in Germany, which sought in Fichte a forerunner to its own nationalist ideology.

Like Nietzsche , the association of Fichte with the Nazi regime came to colour readings of Fichte's German nationalism in the post-war period. Furthermore, the final act of Fichte's academic career was to resign as rector of Humboldt University in protest when his colleagues refused to punish the harassment of Jewish students.

Fichte argued that "active citizenship, civic freedom and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands. Fichte gave a wide range of public and private lectures in Berlin from the last decade of his life. These form some of his best known work, and are the basis of a revived German-speaking scholarly interest in his work. The lectures include two works from In , the new University of Berlin was set up, designed along lines put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt.

Fichte was made its rector and also the first Chair of Philosophy. This was in part because of educational themes in the Addresses , and in part because of his earlier work at Jena University.

Fichte lectured on further versions of his Wissenschaftslehre. Of these, he only published a brief work from , The Science of Knowledge in its General Outline Die Wissenschaftslehre, in ihrem allgemeinen Umrisse dargestellt ; also translated as Outline of the Doctrine of Knowledge. His son published some of these thirty years after his death.

Most only became public in the last decades of the twentieth century, in his collected works. The new standard edition of Fichte's works in German, which supersedes all previous editions, is the Gesamtausgabe "Collected Works" or "Complete Edition", commonly abbreviated as GA , prepared by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences: Fichte's works are quoted and cited from GA , followed by a combination of Roman and Arabic numbers, indicating the series and volume, respectively, and the page number s.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Fichte disambiguation. Immanuel Hermann Fichte his son , G. Hegel , Dieter Henrich , C. This section needs additional citations for verification.

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Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. May Learn how and when to remove this template message. Limnatis, German Idealism and the Problem of Knowledge: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel , Springer, , pp. Beiser , German Idealism. The Struggle Against Subjectivism, Harvard University Press, , p.

This, however, is only part of the story. For the kind of internal agreement just discussed is adequate only to establish what Fichte himself called the "inner truth"—by which he meant the consistency and completeness of a system. But surely a system can be consistent and complete without being true in the sense that Fichte himself considered most important, that is, without possessing any extra-systematic basis in something certain. This kind of truth, which Fichte sometimes referred to as a philosophy's "outer truth," cannot be established simply by insuring the correct Michael Vater and David W.

In Breazeale, Daniel; Fichte, Johann In a similar way, Fichte had derived in his Foundations of the Science of Knowledge publ. See Breazeale , pp. Henrich's article is an analysis of the following three presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre: Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Retrieved 20 October New International Encyclopedia 1st ed.

Kleine Werklehre der Freimaurerei. Das Buch des Lehrlings. In either case, Fichte did not plan it and in fact only heard of the accident much later. Cambridge University Press, Cornell University Press, Princeton University Press, Vol 2, p Fichte as a Freemason: October to September Retrieved 18 January Cambridge University Press, p.

Wood , The Free Development of Each: Nationalism and the Culture Crisis in Prussia: Addresses to the German Nation. The Roots of National Socialism. Archived from the original on Friedrich Nicolai's Life and Strange Opinions. Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource. This page was last edited on 12 December , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Schulpforta University of Jena ; no degree Leipzig University —; no degree. Continental philosophy German idealism Post-Kantian transcendental idealism [1] [2] Empirical realism [1] Foundationalism [3] Coherence theory of truth [4] [5] [6] Jena Romanticism Romantic nationalism [7]. Immanuel Hermann Fichte his son. Self-consciousness and self-awareness , moral philosophy , political philosophy. Influenced Immanuel Hermann Fichte his son , G.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Wikiquote has quotations related to: Wikisource has original works written by or about: In this work he not only defended the principles if not all the practices of the French revolutionaries, but also attempted to outline his own democratic view of legitimate state authority and insisted on the right of revolution. Following the completion of these projects, Fichte devoted his time in Zurich to rethinking and revising his own philosophical position.

While maintaining his allegiance to the new Critical or Kantian philosophy, Fichte was powerfully impressed by the efforts of K. Solomon Maimon and G. In Feburary and March of he gave a series of private lectures on his conception of philosophy before a small circle of influential clerics and intellectuals in Zurich. It was at this moment 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 German philosophy. Fichte arrived in Jena in May of , and enjoyed tremendous popular success there for the next six years, during which time he laid the foundations and developed the first systematic articulations of his new system.

Even as he was engaged in this immense theoretical labor, he also tried to address a larger, popular audience and also threw himself into various practical efforts to reform university life. Fichte wants to employ his philosophy to guide the spirit of his age. Though Fichte has already hinted at his new philosophical position in his review of G. This manifesto, Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre , articulated some of the basic ideas of the new philosophy, but it mainly focused upon questions of systematic form and the relationship between philosophy and its proper object the necessary actions of the human mind.

In fact, Fichte had not originally intended to publish this work at all, which was written less than a year after his first tentative efforts to articulate for himself his new conception of transcendental philosophy. The Foundation was originally intended to be distributed, in fascicles, to students attending his private lectures during his first two semesters at Jena, where the printed sheets could be subjected to analysis and questions and supplemented with oral explanations.

In he also published a substantial supplement to the Foundation , under the title Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty.

Wissenschaftslehre (1805)

Even as he was thoroughly revising his presentation of the foundational portion of his system, Fichte was simultaneously engaged in elaborating the various subdivisions or systematic branches of the same. As was his custom, he did this first in his private lectures and then in published texts based upon the same. The first such extension was into the realm of philosophy of law and social philosophy, which resulted in the publication Foundations of Natural Right in accordance with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre published in two volumes in and The second extension was into the realm of moral philosophy, which resulted in the publication of the System of Ethics in accordance with the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre Fichte then planned to extend his system into the realm of philosophy of religion.

The matter quickly escalated into a major public controversy 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. At this point, the Prussian capital had no university of its own, and Fichte was forced to support himself by giving private tutorials and lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre and by a new flurry of literary production, increasingly aimed at a large, popular audience.

That same year also saw the publication of a typically bold foray into political economy, The Closed Commercial State , in which Fichte propounds a curious blend of socialist political ideas and autarkic economic principles. An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand Be that as it may, Fichte never stopped trying to refine his philosophical insights and to revise his systematic presentation of the same.

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Thus there are more than a dozen different full-scale presentations or versions of the Wissenschaftslehre , most of which were written after his departure from Jena. In Fichte spend a semester as a professor at the University of Erlangen, but returned to Berlin in the fall of that year. The next year, , he published in rapid succession three popular and well-received books, all of which were based upon earlier series of public lectures that he had delivered in Berlin: Though these lectures later obtained a place of dubious honor as founding documents in the history of German nationalism, they are mainly concerned with the issue of national identity and particularly with the relationship between language and nationality and the question of national education which is the main topic of the work —both of which are understood by Fichte as means toward a larger, cosmopolitan end.

Fichte had always had a lively interest in pedagogical issues and assumed a leading role in planning the new Prussian university to be established in Berlin though his own detailed plans for the same were eventually rejected in favor of those put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt. When the new university finally opened in , Fichte was the first head of the philosophical faculty as well as the first elected rector of the university. His final years saw no diminishment in the pace either of his public activity or of his philosophical efforts.

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From his wife, who was serving as a volunteer nurse in a Berlin military hospital, he contracted a fatal infection of which he died on January 29, He thus insisted that there is no conflict between transcendental idealism and the commonsense realism of everyday life. On the contrary, the whole point of the former is to demonstrate the necessity and unavailability of the latter. Taking to heart the criticisms of such contemporaries as F.

Jacobi, Salomon Maimon, and G. Schulze, Fichte propounded a radically revised version of the Critical philosophy. His study of the writings of K.

Not only would such a strategy guarantee the systematic unity of philosophy itself, but, more importantly, it would also display what Kant hinted at but never demonstrated: To the extent that any proposed first principle of philosophy is 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 reasoning. Though Fichte conceded that neither dogmatism nor idealism could directly refute its opposite and thus recognized that the choice between philosophical starting points could never be resolved on purely theoretical grounds, he nevertheless denied that any dogmatic system, that is to say, any system that commences with the concept of sheer objectivity, could ever succeed in accomplishing what was required of all philosophy.

To be sure, one cannot decide in advance whether or not any such deduction of experience from the mere concept of free self-consciousness is actually possible. This, Fichte conceded, 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.

The principle in question simply states that the essence of I-hood lies in the assertion of ones own self-identity, i. The occurrence of such an original intellectual intuition is itself inferred, not intuited. 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 self-consciousness.

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 actually occurs in isolation from all of the others. Transcendental philosophy is thus an effort to analyze 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.

Despite widespread misunderstanding of this point, the Wissenschaftslehre is not a theory of the absolute I. Moreover, it cannot even posit for itself its own limitations, in the sense of producing or creating these limits. The finite I the intellect cannot be the ground of its own passivity. Such an original limitation of the I is, however, a limit for the I only insofar as the I posits it as such.

Accordingly, there are strict limits to what can be expected from any a priori deduction of experience. According to Fichte, transcendental philosophy can explain, for example, why the world has a spatio-temporal character and a causal structure, 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. This however is certainly not the case.

Despite this important stricture on the scope of transcendental philosophy, 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. The foundational portion of the Wissenschaftslehre thus also includes a deduction of the categorical imperative albeit in a particularly abstract and morally empty form and of the practical power of the I. On the contrary, 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, which was posited as the starting point of the Foundations, is thereby transformed into an idea of reason in the Kantian sense: Having established the foundation of his new system, Fichte then turned to the task of constructing upon this foundation a fully-articulated transcendental system, the overall structure of which is most clearly outlined in the concluding section of the transcripts of his lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo. The closest he ever came to developing a philosophy of nature according to transcendental principles is the compressed account of space, time, and matter presented in the Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty and the lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo.

Whereas theoretical philosophy explains how the world necessarily is , practical philosophy explains how the world ought to be, which is to say, how it ought to be altered by rational beings. Ethics thus considers the object of consciousness not as something given or even as something 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 and guided only by its own self-legislated laws.

From this starting point Fichte then proceeds to a deduction of the principle of morality: 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. In this portion of the system the world is considered neither as it simply is nor as it simply ought to be; instead, either the practical realm of freedom is viewed from the theoretical perspective of the natural world in which case one considers the postulates that theoretical reason addresses to practical reason or else, alternatively, the natural world is viewed from the perspective of practical reason or the moral law in which case one considers the postulates that practical reason addresses to theoretical reason.

The same condition applies, of course, to the other; hence, mutual recognition of rational individuals turns out to be condition necessary for the possibility of I-hood in general. The theory of right examines how the freedom of each individual must be externally limited if a free society of free and equal individuals is to be possible. Unlike Kant, Fichte does not treat political philosophy merely as a subdivision of moral theory. On the contrary, it is an independent philosophical discipline with a topic and a priori principles of its own.

Whereas ethics analyzes the concept of what is demanded of a freely willing subject, the theory of right describes what such a subject is permitted to do as well as what he can rightfully be coerced to do. 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.

On purely a priori grounds, therefore, Fichte purports to be able to determine the general requirements of such a community and the sole justification for legitimate political coercion and obligation. Fichte presents an a priori argument for the fundamentally social character of human beings, an argument grounded upon an analysis of the very structure of self-consciousness and the requirements for self-positing. 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.

The philosophy of religion, as conceived by Fichte, has nothing to do with the historical claims of revealed religion or with particular religious traditions and practices. But this is about as far as it can go. Neglected as the Wissenschaftslehre may have been during this period, Fichte was not entirely forgotten, but remained influential as the author of the Addresses to the German Nation and was alternately hailed and vilified as one of the founders of modern pan-German nationalism. Particularly during the long periods preceding, during, and following the two World Wars, Fichte was discussed almost exclusively in the context of German politics and national identity, and his technical philosophy tended to be dismissed as a monstrous or comical speculative aberration of no relevance whatsoever to contemporary philosophy.

But the real boom in Fichte studies has come only in the past four decades, during which the Wissenschaftslehre has once again become the object of intense philosophical scrutiny and lively, world-wide discussion—as is evidenced by the establishment of large and active professional societies devoted to Fichte in Europe, Japan, and North America.

Much of the best recent work on Fichte, particularly in Germany, Italy, and Japan, has been devoted exclusively to his later thought. But it is also a reflection of the relatively anemic tradition of Fichte scholarship in England and North America, where even the early Wissenschaftslehre has long been neglected and under-appreciated. This situation, however, has fundamentally altered, and some of the most insightful and original current work on Fichte is being done in English.

See too the journal Fichte-Studien , Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, ff. Life and Work 2. The Starting Point of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre 4.