Johann gottlieb fichte johanna rahn

With the death of his patron, Fichte was forced to discontinue his studies and seek his livelihood as a private tutor, a profession he quickly came to detest. When the true identity of its author was revealed, Fichte was immediately catapulted from total obscurity to philosophical celebrity.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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. In Fichte spend a semester as a professor at the University of Erlangen, but returned to Berlin in the fall of that year. 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.

Following a lengthy sojourn in Zurich, were he met his future wife, Johanna Rahn, Fichte returned to Leipzig with the intention of pursuing a literary career.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte - Wikipedia

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.

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. 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.

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. Fichte was born May 19, in the village of Rammenau in the Oberlausitz area of Saxony.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

He was the eldest son in a family of poor and pious ribbon weavers. When his projects failed, he was again forced to survive as a tutor. 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.

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. Fichte wants to employ his philosophy to guide the spirit of his age. 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.

It was in this capacity that he began giving lessons on the Kantian philosophy in the summer of Fichte eventually made his way to Königsberg, where he lived for a few months. The first of these was published in with the provocative title Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, who have hitherto Suppressed it. 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.

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. While maintaining his allegiance to the new Critical or Kantian philosophy, Fichte was powerfully impressed by the efforts of K. 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.

As was his custom, he did this first in his private lectures and then in published texts based upon the same. Meanwhile, Fichte was once again employed as a private tutor, this time on an estate near Danzig, where he wrote several, anonymously published political tracts. In 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.

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. 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.

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. His extraordinary intellectual talent soon brought him to the attention of a local baron, who sponsored his education, first in the home of a local pastor, then at the famous Pforta boarding school, and finally at the universities of Jena and Leipzig.

His final years saw no diminishment in the pace either of his public activity or of his philosophical efforts. 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.

Be that as it may, Fichte never stopped trying to refine his philosophical insights and to revise his systematic presentation of the same.

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. Following the completion of these projects, Fichte devoted his time in Zurich to rethinking and revising his own philosophical position.

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. 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.