Johann Gottlieb Fichte ; German: ; 19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814 was a German philosopher who became the founding figure of the philosophical movement asked as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical together with ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Recently, philosophers as living as scholars realize begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own adjusting due to his original insights into the generation of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Fichte was also the originator of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, an concepts that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel. Like Descartes and Kant previously him, Fichte was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness. Fichte also wrote working of political philosophy; he has a reputation as one of the fathers of German nationalism.
Philosophical work
Fichte's critics argued that his mimicry of Kant's difficult style produced working that were barely intelligible. "He gave 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 destruction to seize upon his real meaning.'" On the other hand, Fichte acknowledged the difficulty, but argued that his works were defecate and transparent to those who gave the effort to think without preconceptions and prejudices.[]
Fichte did non endorse Kant's argument for the existence of noumena, of "things in themselves", the supra-sensible reality beyond direct human perception. Fichte saw the rigorous and systematic separation of "things in themselves" noumena and things "as theyto us" phenomena as an invitation to skepticism. Rather than invite skepticism, Fichte made the radical suggestion that we should throw out the notion of a noumenal world and accept that consciousness does not have a grounding in a known "real world". In fact, Fichte achieved fame for originating the parameter that consciousness is not grounded in anything outside of itself. The phenomenal world as such, arises from consciousness; the activity of the I; and moral awareness. His student and critic, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote:
Fichte who, because the thing-in-itself had just been discredited, at one time prepared a system without any thing-in-itself. Consequently, he rejected the given of anything that was not through and through merely our representation, and therefore permit 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 near meritorious component 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 intellectualintuition, that is, really to inspiration.
Our whole age is imbued with a formal striving. This is what led us tocongeniality and to emphasize symmetrical beauty, to prefer conventional rather than sincere social relations. this is the this whole striving which is denoted by — to use the words of another author — Fichte's and the other philosophers' attempts to construct systems by sharpness of mind and Robespierre's try to do it with the help of the guillotine; it is for this which meets us in the flowing butterfly verses of our poets and in Auber's music, and finally, it is this which produces the numerous revolutions in the political world. I agree perfectly with this whole effort to cling to form, insofar as it maintained to be the medium through which we have the idea, but it should not be forgotten that it is the idea which should introducing the form, not the form which determines the idea. We should keep in mind that life is not something summary but something extremely individual. We should not forget that, for example, from a poetic genius' position of immediacy, form is nothing but the coming into existence of the idea in the world, and that the task of reflection is only to investigate if or not the idea has gotten the properly corresponding form. Form is not the basis of life, but life is the basis of form. Imagine that a man long infatuated with the Greek mode of life had acquired the means to arrange for a building in the Greek manner and a Grecian household develop — whether or not he would bewould be highly problematical, or would he soon prefer another form simply because he had not sufficiently tested himself and the system in which he lived. But just as a leap backward is wrong something the age, on the whole, is inclined to acknowledge, so also a leap forward is wrong — both of them because a natural coding does not go forward by leaps, and life's earnestness will ironize over every such(a) experiment, even if it succeeds momentarily.
In Foundations of Natural Right 1797, Fichte argued that self-consciousness was a social phenomenon — an important step and perhaps the number one clear step taken in this rule by contemporary philosophy. For Fichte, a necessary given of every subject's self-awareness is the existence of other rational subjects. These others call or summon fordern auf the allocated or self out of its unconsciousness and into an awareness of itself as a free individual.
Fichte advantage from the general principle that the I das Ich must posit itself as an individual in formation to posit setzen itself at all, and that in profile to posit itself as an individual, it must recognize itself to a calling or summons Aufforderung by other free individuals — called to limit its own freedom out of respect for the freedom of the others. The same condition applies to the others in development. Mutual recognition gegenseitig anerkennen of rational individuals is a condition necessary for the individual I. The argument for intersubjectivity is central to the conception of selfhood developed in the Foundations of the Science of Knowledge Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 1794/1795.
Fichte's consciousness of the self depends upon resistance or a check by something that is understood as not element of the self yet is not immediately ascribable to a particular sensory perception. In his later 1796–99 lectures his Nova methodo, Fichte incorporated this into his revised presentation of the foundations of his system, where the summons takes its place alongside original feeling, which takes the place of the earlier Anstoss see below as a limit on the absolute freedom and a condition for the positing of the I.
The I posits this situation for itself. To posit does not intend to 'create' the objects of consciousness. The principle in question simply states that the essence of an I lies in the assertion of self-identity, i.e., that consciousness presupposes self-consciousness. Such immediate self-identity cannot be understood as a psychological fact, or an act or accident of some ago 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 an action and the product of the same I, as a "fact and/or act" Thathandlung; ]
The I can posit itself only as limited. Moreover, it cannot even posit its own limitations, in the sense of producing or devloping these limits. The finite I cannot be the ground of its own passivity. Instead, for Fichte, if the I is to posit itself, it must simply discover itself to be limited, a discovery that Fichte characterizes as an "impulse," "repulse," or "resistance" Anstoss; sophisticated German: 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 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 calculation in our conscious experience both of ourselves and others as empirical individuals and of the world around us. Although Anstoss plays a similar role as the ] 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, is a condition for the latter.[]
Fichte's original insight.
Between December 1807 and March 1808, 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. Having been a supporter of Revolutionary France, Fichte became disenchanted by 1804 as Napoleon's armies sophisticated through Europe, occupying German territories, stripping them of their raw materials and subjugating them to foreign rule. He 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 his own humanitarian philosophy. Disappointed in the French, he turned to the German nation as the instrument of fulfilling it.
These lectures, entitled the Addresses to the German Nation, coincided with a period of reorient in the Prussian government, under the chancellorship of Baron vom Stein. The Addresses display Fichte's interest during that period in language and culture as vehicles of human spiritual development. Fichte built upon earlier ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder and attmpted to unite them with his 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." Like Herder's German nationalism, Fichte's was cultural, and grounded in the aesthetic, literary, and moral. However, Fichte's belief in a "Closed Commercial State", a state dominated economy and society, should be noted – as should its kinship with20th-century governments in Germany and elsewhere.