In the summer of 1790, while living in Leipzig and once again in financial distress, Fichte agreed to tutor a university student in the Kantian philosophy, about which he knew very little at the time. His immersion in Kant's writings, according to his own testimony, revolutionized his thinking and changed his life, turning him away from a deterministic view of the world at odds with human freedom towards the doctrines of the Critical philosophy and its reconciliation of freedom and determinism.

In this fledgling effort Fichte adhered to many of Kant's claims about religion by extending them to concept of revelation. In particular, he took over Kant's idea that all religious belief must ultimately withstand critical scrutiny if it is to make a legitimate claim on us. For Fichte, any alleged revelation of God's activity in the world must pass a moral test: namely, no immoral command or action, i.e., nothing that violates the moral law, can be attributed to Him. Although Fichte himself did not explicitly criticize Christianity by appealing to this test, such a restriction on the content of a possible revelation, if consistently imposed, would overturn most aspects of orthodox Christian belief: including, for example, the doctrine of original sin, which states that everyone is born guilty as a result of Adam and Eve's disobedience in the Garden of Eden. This piece of Christian theology, which is said to be grounded in the revelations contained in the Bible, is hardly compatible with the ordinary view of justice that Kant and Fichte took to be underwritten by the moral law, and that maintains that we are not guilty for crimes or transgressions that we did not commit. Attentive readers should have instantly gleaned Fichte's radical views from the placid Kantian prose.

For reasons that are still mysterious, Fichte's name and preface were omitted from the first edition of An Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation, and thus the book, which displayed an extensive and subtle appreciation of Kant's thought, was taken to be the work of Kant himself. Once it became known that Fichte was the author, he instantly became a philosophical figure of importance; no one whose work had been mistaken for Kant's, however briefly, could be rightfully denied fame and celebrity in the German philosophical world.

Fichte continued working as a tutor while attempting to reformulate his philosophical insights of recent years into his own system. He also anonymously published two political works, "Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, Who Have Oppressed It Until Now" and Contribution to the Rectification of the Public's Judgment of the French Revolution. It became widely known that he was their author; and so from the very beginning of his public career, he was identified with radical causes and views. In October 1793 he married his fiancee, and shortly thereafter unexpectedly received a call from the University of Jena to take over the chair in philosophy that Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1758-1823), a well-known exponent and interpreter of the Kantian philosophy, had recently vacated. Fichte arrived in Jena in May 1794.

Throughout his career Fichte alternated between composing philosophical works for scholars and students of philosophy and popular works for the general public. This desire to communicate to the wider public – to bridge the gap, so to speak, between theory and praxis – inspired his writings from the start. In fact, Fichte's passion for the education of society as a whole should be seen as a necessary consequence of his philosophical system, which continues the Kantian tradition of placing philosophy in the service of enlightenment, the eventual liberation of mankind from its self-imposed immaturity, i.e., its willing refusal to think for itself, and thus its responsibility for failing to act independently of the guidance of external authority.

Reinhold had argued that this first principle was what he called the "principle of consciousness," namely, the proposition that "in consciousness representation is distinguished through the subject from both object and subject and is related to both." From this principle Reinhold attempted to deduce the contents of Kant's Critical philosophy. He claimed that the principle of consciousness was a reflectively known fact of consciousness, and argued that it could lend credence to various Kantian views, including the distinction between the faculties of sensibility and understanding and the existence of things in themselves. Schulze countered along Humean lines by offering skeptical objections against the legitimacy of Kant's (and thus Reinhold's) concept of the thing in itself (construed as the causal origin of our representations) and by arguing that the principle of consciousness was neither a fundamental principle (since it was subject to the laws of logic, in that it had to be free of contradiction) nor one known with apodictic certainty (since it originated in merely empirical reflection on the contents of consciousness, which reflection Schulze, following David Hume, persuasively argued could not yield a principle grounded on indubitable evidence).

Fichte, to his consternation, found himself in agreement with much of Schulze's critique. Although he was still eager to support the Kantian system, Fichte, as a result of reading Schulze, came to the conclusion that the Critical philosophy needed new foundations. Yet the search for new foundations, in Fichte's mind, was never equivalent to a repudiation of the Kantian philosophy: as Fichte would frequently claim, he remained true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Kant's thought. His review of Schulze's Aenesidemus provides one tantalizing hint about how he would subsequently attempt to remain within the spirit of Kant's thought while attempting to reconstruct it from the ground up: philosophy, he says, must begin with a first principle, as Reinhold maintained, but not with one that expresses a mere fact, a Tatsache; instead, it must begin with a fact/act, a Tathandlung, that is not known empirically, but rather with self-evident certainty. The meaning and purpose of this new first principle would not become clear to his readers until the publication of the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre in 1794/5.

In addition to his review of the Schulze book, and still prior to his arrival in Jena, Fichte sketched out the nature and methodology of the Wissenschaftslehre in an essay entitled "Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre," which was intended to prepare his expectant audience for his classes and lectures. Here Fichte sets out his conception of philosophy as the science of science, i.e., as Wissenschaftslehre. The Wissenschaftslehre is devoted to establishing the foundation of individual sciences such as geometry, whose first principle is said to be the task of limiting space in accordance with a rule. Thus the Wissenschaftslehre seeks to justify the cognitive task of the science of geometry, i.e., its systematic efforts at spatial construction in the form of theorems validly deduced from axioms known with self-evident certainty. The Wissenschaftslehre, which itself is a science in need of a first principle, is said to be grounded on the Tathandlung first mentioned in the Aenesidemus review. The precise nature of this fact/act, from which the Wissenschaftslehre is supposed to begin, is much debated, even today. Yet it is the essential core of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre in general, and of the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre from 1794/5 in particular.

Given the difficulty of the notion, unfortunately, Fichte's Tathandlung has perplexed his readers from its first appearance. The principle of the self-positing I was initially interpreted along the lines of Berkeley's idealism, and thus as claiming that the world as a whole was somehow the product of an infinite mind. This interpretation is surely mistaken, even if one can occasionally find passages that seem to support it. More important, though, is the question of the epistemic status of the principle. Is it known with the self-evident certainty that Fichte, following Reinhold, claims must ground any attempt at systematic knowledge? And how does it serve as a basis for deducing the rest of the Wissenschaftslehre?

Fichte's method is usually said to be phenomenological, restricting itself to what we can discover by means of reflection. Yet Fichte does not claim that we simply find the fully formed Tathandlung residing somewhere in our self-consciousness; instead, we construct it in order to explain ourselves to ourselves, to render intelligible to ourselves our normative nature as finite rational agents. Thus the requisite reflection is not empirical but transcendental, i.e., a postulate adopted for philosophical purposes. That is, the principle is presupposed as true in order to account for the conditions for the possibility of our ordinary experience. Such a procedure leaves open the possibility of an alternative account of our experience, which Fichte claims can take only one form. Either, he says, we can begin (as he does) with the I as the ground of all possible experience, or we can begin with the thing in itself outside of our experience. This dilemma, as he puts it, is the choice between idealism and dogmatism. The former is transcendental philosophy; the latter, a naturalistic approach to experience that explains it solely in causal terms. The choice between the two, as Fichte famously said in the first introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre from 1797, depends on the kind of person one is, since they are mutually exclusive yet equally possible approaches.

If such a choice between starting points is possible, however, then the principle of the self-positing I lacks the self-evident certainty that Fichte attributed to it in his earlier essay on the concept of the Wissenschaftslehre. There are, in fact, those who do not find it at all self-evident, namely, the dogmatists. Fichte clearly thinks that they are mistaken in their dogmatism, yet he offers no direct refutation of their position, claiming only that they cannot demonstrate what they hope to demonstrate, namely, that the ground of all experience lies solely in objects existing independently of the I. The dogmatist position, Fichte implies, ignores the normative aspects of our experience, e.g., warranted and unwarranted belief, correct and incorrect action, and thus attempts to account for our experience entirely in terms of our causal interaction with the world around us. Presumably, however, someone who begins with a disavowal of normativity, as the dogmatists do (since that is the kind of person they are), can never be brought to agree with the idealists. There is thus an argumentative impasse between the two camps.

Fichte's remarks about systematic form and certainty in "Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre" give the impression that he intends to demonstrate the entirety of the Wissenschaftslehre from the principle of the self-positing I through a chain of logical inferences that merely set out the implications of the initial principle in such a way that the certainty of the first principle is transferred to the claims inferred from it. (The method of Spinoza's Ethics comes to mind, but this time with only a single premise from which to begin the proofs.) Yet this hardly seems to be Fichte's true method, since he constantly introduces new concepts that cannot be plausibly interpreted as the logical consequences of the previous ones. In other words, the deductions in the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre are more than merely analytical explications of the consequences of the original premise. Instead, they both articulate and refine the initial principle of the self-positing I in accordance with the demands made on the idealist who is attempting to clarify the nature of the self-positing I by means of reflection.

Once Fichte postulates the self-positing I as the explanatory ground of all experience, he begins to complicate the web of concepts required to make sense of this initial postulate, thereby carrying out the aforementioned construction of the self-positing I. The I posits itself insofar as it is aware of itself, not only as an object but also as a subject, and finds itself subject to normative constraints in both the theoretical and practical realms, e.g., that it must be free of contradiction and that there must be adequate reasons for what it believes and does. Furthermore, the I posits itself as free, since these constraints are ones that it imposes on itself. Next, by means of further reflection, the I discovers a difference between "representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity" and "representations accompanied by a feeling a freedom" – that is, a difference between representations of what purports to be an objective world existing apart from our representations of it and representations that are merely the product of our own mental activity. To recognize this distinction in our representations, however, is to posit a distinction between the I and the not-I, i.e., the self and whatever exists independently of it. In other words, the I posits itself as limited by something other than itself, even though it also initially posits itself as free.

The nature of this limitation is made increasingly more complex through further acts of reflection. First, the I posits a check, an Anstoß, on its practical activity, in that it encounters resistance to its will when it acts in the world. This check is then developed into more refined forms of limitation: sensations, intuitions, and concepts, all united in the experience of the things of the natural world, i.e., the spatio-temporal realm ruled by causal laws. Moreover, this world is found to contain other finite rational beings. They too are free yet limited, and the recognition of their freedom places further constraints on our activity. In this way the I posits the moral law and restricts its treatment of others to actions that are consistent with respect for their freedom. Thus, by the end of Fichte's deductions, the I posits itself as free yet limited by natural necessity and the moral law: its freedom becomes an infinite task in which it seeks to make the world around itself entirely compliant with its will, but only by doing so in an appropriately moral fashion that allows other free beings to do the same for themselves.

Besides filling out projected portions of the system, Fichte also began to revise the foundations themselves. Since he considered the mode of presentation of the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre unsatisfactory, he began drawing up a new version in his lectures, which were given three times between 1796 and 1799, but which he never managed to publish during his lifetime. These lectures, which in many respects are superior to the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, were published posthumously and are now known as the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo.

Prior to publishing any systematic presentation of his philosophy of religion, Fichte became embroiled in what is now known as the Atheismusstreit, the atheism controversy. In an essay from 1798 entitled "On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World" Fichte argued that religious belief could be legitimate only insofar as it arose from properly moral considerations – a view clearly indebted to his book on revelation from 1792. Furthermore, he claimed that God has no existence apart from the moral world order. (This second view was also an old one, initially suggested in the Aenesidemus review.) Neither view was orthodox at the time, and so Fichte was accused of atheism and ultimately forced to leave Jena.

Two open letters, both from 1799 and written by philosophers whom Fichte fervently admired, compounded his troubles. First, Kant disavowed the Wissenschaftslehre for mistakenly having tried to infer substantive philosophical knowledge from logic alone. Such an inference, he claimed, was impossible, since logic abstracted from the content of knowledge and thus could not produce a new object of knowledge. Second, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi accused the Wissenschaftslehre of nihilism: that is, of producing reality out of mere mental representations, and thus in effect from nothingness. Whether or not these criticisms were just (and Fichte certainly denied that they were), they further damaged Fichte's philosophical reputation.

Fichte continued to revise the Wissenschaftslehre, yet he published very little from these renewed efforts to perfect his system, primarily for fear of being misunderstood as he had been during the Jena years. His reluctance to publish gave his contemporaries the false impression that Fichte was more or less finished as an original philosopher. Except for a cryptic outline that appeared in 1810, his Berlin lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, of which there are numerous versions, only appeared posthumously. In these manuscripts Fichte typically speaks of the absolute and its appearances, i.e., a philosophically suitable stand-in for a more traditional notion of God and the community of finite rational beings whose existence is grounded in the absolute. As a result, Fichte is sometimes said to have taken a religious turn in the Berlin period.

Another famous series of lectures, Addresses to the German Nation, given in 1808 during the French occupation, was intended as a continuation of The Characteristics of the Present Age, but exclusively for a German audience. Here Fichte envisions a new form of national education that would enable the German nation, not yet in existence, to reach the fifth and final age outlined in the earlier lecture series. Once again, Fichte demonstrated his interest in larger matters, and in a manner perfectly consistent with his earlier insistence from the Jena period that the scholar has a cultural role to play.

Curtis Bowman
Department of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania
Logan Hall 433
Philadelphia, PA 19104
USA