Johann Fichte

German idealist philosopher (1762–1814), born in Rammenau, Saxony, into a humble family of weavers who was able to study thanks to the patronage of a local nobleman impressed by his prodigious memory, professor at Jena and, later, the first elected rector of the new University of Berlin, which he himself helped found and design. An enthusiastic disciple of Kant —whom he visited in 1791 and with whom he maintained an ambivalent relationship of deep admiration and growing tension, after Kant publicly distanced himself from Fichte's interpretations— he developed in the Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science), reworked in multiple and divergent versions throughout his life, a radical idealism that aimed to overcome the Kantian dualism between phenomenon and thing-in-itself: for Fichte, all reality —the I and the not-I, the subject and the objective world that opposes and limits it— is deduced from the absolute self-positing activity of the pure Ego, an original and free act of self-consciousness from which everything else derives through a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis that Hegel would later develop with far greater fame and systematicity. He lost his chair at Jena in 1799, formally accused of atheism in the wake of the famous 'atheism controversy' (Atheismusstreit), for having identified God with the living cosmic moral order rather than with a transcendent personal substance, a controversy that left him without work for years. In his Foundations of Natural Right (1796) and Doctrine of Ethics (1798) he also developed his own political and moral philosophy centred on intersubjective recognition as a condition of self-consciousness. During the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia, following the humiliating defeat at Jena, he delivered his famous Addresses to the German Nation (1808), a series of fourteen patriotic lectures in Berlin, delivered under French surveillance, extolling universal national education and the distinctive, original spiritual character of the German people as a path to moral, cultural and political regeneration —texts that would later be claimed, controversially and often in distorted and decontextualised fashion, by nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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