Review of Klassische deutsche Philosophie (4): Fichte, Schilling

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)

Part 4 of a review of Wolfgang Förster, Klassische deutsche Philosophie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung [Classical German Philosophy: The Basic Lines of Its Development] (2008)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a follower of Kant's philosophy of transcendental idealism. The publication that made him famous, Versuch eine Kritik aller Offenbarung (1792), was initially published anonymously and was generally thought to have been written by Kant himself. When Fichte was revealed as the author, he became instantly well-known. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) in his Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (1834) makes an entertaining story out of the young Fichte's efforts to pal around with Kant. Successful efforts, as it turned out.

Fichte is most known for his Wissenshaftslehre, or teaching on science, which was the framework for his philosophical theories; he actually advocating using Wissenschafslehre as a replacement for the term "philosophy". His goal was to show within the Kantian system the relationship between transcendental (philosophical) reason and practical reason. He looked for a unifying principle that would connect the two in a more adequate way than he believed Kant himself had achieved. He worked from the premise that the ego itself is the theoretical foundation for philosophy, a situation which he saw as starting from the basis of freedom. Kant's notion of the "thing in itself" meant that humans could never fully perceive the essence of external objects, and Fichte worked within that framework.

This may seem like a distant starting point from which to get a notion of political freedom. And how close Fichte got to that goal is a matter of some dispute. But as I explained in my post Why democracy and Christianity need science 01/05/08, our democratic notions of freedom stem from a scientific understanding of the world, as well as from moral and religious notions of the dignity of the individual person. And such a scientific understanding of the world is what Fichte sought to develop on the basis of Kant's system.

Fichte based his philosophy on the radical-democratic tendencies in the French Revolution.

Fichte argued in matters of religion, the topic of the 1792 work that made him famous, that religious revelation was only valid in the form of Reason. This concept saw God being divinely revealed in the form of reasoning about Him. But rejected the generally accepted Christian idea of revelation as God breaking into the natural world through a special intervention outside the normal laws of nature. He wound up being publicly accused of atheism eventually, which occasioned his leaving the University of Jena to go to Berlin in 1799.

Fichte is considered to have developed the subjective side of Kantian Idealism. Förster writes, “Mit Fichte bildet sich innerhalb der klassische deutschen Philosophie der subjektive Idealismus voll aus.” (“With Fichte, subjective Idealism within classical German philosophy was completely constructed.”) For Fichte and other classical German philosophers, the intense focus on defining the nature of the ego and the exact relations among between perception, the object perceived, and the subject perceiving it, was part psychology, part “hard science”.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling developed the objective side of Kantian Idealism, while Fichte is understood as having developed the subjective side. As noted in the Jacob Bronowski quote in the first post in this series, Schelling’s natural philosophy had a big impact on science and medicine. He gave particular attention to magnetism, electricity and chemical processes. This may have a lot to do with the central role he gave to physical development through contradiction.

An essential element of Schelling’s early natural philosophy was his concept of the identity of Subject and Object. This was a departure from Kant’s understanding of human perception as being reflective of outside objects but constrained from fully comprehending their essence, their “thing in itself”, but the categories inherent in human perception itself. We could think of Schelling’s as a more holistic conception, in which Subject and Object must be understood in the framework of their connection with one another. Lorenz Oken (1779-1851) and Henrik Steffens (1773-1845) would make use of Schelling’s identity concept in his scientific work.

Förster notes that Franz von Baader (1765-1841) played an important role in encouraging Schelling's turn toward an outright reactionary, restaurationist philosophy. He says that it was under the influence of Von Baader's ideas that Schelling wrote Untersuchung Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), which Förster describes as the "philosophische Programmschrift der Restauration" (the philosophical programmatic plan for the restauration).

Tags: fichte, schelling