Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born on May 19, 1762, near Bischoffswerda in Saxony. He was a prolific writer, but space permits only a few of his works to be mentioned here. His ideas on time resolved largely into his notion of history.

Fichte studied at the prestigious University of Jena and then became a private tutor in Switzerland. Inspired by Kant's critical philosophy, Fichte published Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung {Attempt at a Critique of All Revealed Religion) anonymously in 1792. Kant praised the work and made public that Fichte was its author. This made Fichte a formidable intellectual in the public mind, but the work's critical nature aroused suspicions of atheism. Fichte was greatly gifted in rhetoric, and he gained a wide reading audience in a series of publications. In 1793 he was offered a professorship at Jena at the suggestion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He published a work in the same year designed to sway the German public to support the French Revolution. In the next year, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre {Groundwork for[Page 515]the Entirety of Science) appeared, which contained Fichte's attempt to turn Kantian metaphysics into a science deriving from a single principle. In their most exact form, Fichte's metaphysical ideas on time are found in the Groundwork. There followed Das System der Sittenlehre {Science of Right) in 1798, which showed the public that Fichte's scientific idealism would be a highly ethical, even moralistic and preachy, sort.

When he published ber den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine gttliche Weltregierung (On the Grounds of Our Belief in a Divine World-Order) in 1799, Ficthe ironically came into conflict with the University at Jena over charges of atheism. He had suggested in this work that the divine world-order requires human agency to become actualized. But the orthodox view was, of course, that the Divine Will of God cannot be thwarted by human free will, and the university officials supported orthodoxy. So Fichte moved on to Berlin.

There he published Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Vocation of Man) in 1800. This highly popular work made his obscure scientific system accessible to the general reading public. Though The Vocation of Man was short on detail, the reader could discern the oudines of Fichte's notion of time. Strictly speaking, secular time does not exist, according to Fichte. Time as a metaphysical form and time as all of human history, have an essentially sacred nature. Time, independent of a Divine Will, simply cannot exist, because the internal form of intuition is a tool in the hands of the Creator; further, all historical events are manifestations of his will, for Fichte, but are achievable only if human beings freely choose sacred time. Man's free will creates the Divine world-order, in short, a notion that alarmed some readers. This insistence that all time is sacred sought to rescue history from empirical (English) science and from Spinozism. In this sense, Fichte's notion of history is more akin to Herder and Jacobi than Kant.

Fichte was awarded a professorship at Erlangen in 1805. In a series of lectures, Fichte argued against Schelling, among many others. While at Erlangen he also published Reden an die Deutschen (Addresses to the German Nation, 1800) to rally Germans after their defeat by Napoleon. In 1809 he became a professor at the University of Berlin. Fichte died on January 27, 1814.

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