Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 1762-1814
German philosopher

Born in Rammenau, Saxony, he studied at the University of Jena, made a precarious living for some years as an itinerant tutor in philosophy, in the course of which he met Kant at K�nigsberg and became a devoted disciple. He was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Jena in 1794. His Wissenschaftslehre (1785, 'The Science of Knowledge') modified Kant's doctrine of the 'thing-in-itself' as the absolute reality, substituting the 'Ego', a more subjective reality, affirming itself in the act of consciousness and constructing the external world (the 'non-Ego') as its field of action. Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796, Eng trans The Science of Rights, 1869, 1889) and System der Sittenlehre (1798, Eng trans The Science of Ethics, 1897) elaborate his system of thought. He went on to teach at Berlin (1799), after an accusation of atheism, and became Professor of Philosophy at Erlangen (1805), where he published Grundz�ge des gegenw�rtigen Zeitalters (1806, Eng trans The Characteristics of the Present Age, 1844) and Anweisung zum seligen Leben und Religionslehre (1806, Eng trans The Way Towards the Blessed Life, 1844). He delivered a famous series of patriotic lectures, Reden an die Deutsche Nation (1807-08, 'Addresses to the German Nation'), in which he tried to foster German nationalism in resistance to Napoleon I. In this context Fichte's metaphysical 'Ego' became the German nation, an idea that was later perverted into the Nazi concept of the Herrenvolk. In 1810 he became the first Rector of the new University of Berlin, whose constitution he had drawn up. His son Immanuel Hermann von Fichte (1797-1879) also became a Professor of Philosophy (at Bonn, then T�bingen) and was ennobled in 1867.

Bibliography: Robert Adamson, Fichte (1881)