For financial reasons, Fichte found himself compelled to take a post as a tutor in a family at Zurich where he read Rousseau and Montesquieu and welcomed the news of the French Revolution with its message of liberty. He was introduced to Kantian philosophy in Leipzig, 1790. Fichte had been influenced in his philosophical thinking chiefly by Spinoza, then much read in Germany, until his attention happened to be called to Kant's Critiques by a pupil who desired intruction in them. The student's request for the explanation of the critical philosophy led him to study it for the first time. Fichte became an enthusiastic convert to Kant, and wrote Johanna that he expected to devote many years to the study of this wonderful philosophy which threw light upon all the problems that had been troubling him. And in 1791, on returning from Warsaw, where he had failed to give satisfaction as a tutor, he stopped at Konigsberg to visit Kant, who received the crude and unprepossessing young man rather coldly. Fichte was challenged by this rebuff and resolved to convince Kant of his merits. He stayed on in Konigsberg and in a few weeks wrote a Essay towards a Critique of Revelation along Kantian lines in which he applied the critical philosophy to some religious topics which Kant had not himself treated; the essay developed Kant's justification by faith in the name of practical reason. This treatise pleased Kant, who arranged for its publication. When it was published in 1792, Fichte's name was omitted from the title page by inadvertence, and the book was widely attributed to Kant because of its thought and style. When Kant corrected the mistake while commending the work, Fichte's reputation was assured.
In 1793, Fichte published his Contributions Designed to Correct the Judgment of the Public on the French Revolution. This work won for him the reputation of being a democrat and Jacobin, a politically dangerous figure. In spite of this, the next year (1794) Fichte was called to a professorship at the university of Jena. There, and in the neighboring small city of Weimar, lived many of the greatest scholars and men of letters of the time, including Goethe and Schiller. They welcome Fichte warmly, regarding him as the most brilliant interpreter of the philosophy of Kant. Fichte proceeded in his lectures and publications to interpret Kant very freely, amending the critical philosophy where he thought he could improve it, claiming that he was making a more consistent statement of what Kant really meant. The now aged Kant did not like these emendations very well. But Fichte was a profound thinker and a natural orator, full of youthful vigor and enthusiasm, and the feeling became general that Kant had had his day, and the Fichte was the coming philosopher.
Fichte's chief publication of 1794 was the Basis of the Entire Theory of Science in which in which he presented his idealistic development of the critical philosophy of Kant. His predecessor in the chair of philosophy at Jena, K. L. Reinhold (1758-1823), who had accepted an invitation to Keil, had already demanded that Kantian criticism should be turned into a system, that is to say, that it should be derived systematically from one fundamental principle. And in his theory of science, Fichte undertook to fulfil this task more successfully than Reinhold had done. The theory of science was conceived as exhibiting the sysematic development from one ultimate principle of the fundamental propositions which lie at the basis of and makes possible all particular sciences or ways of knowing. But to exhibit this development is at the same time to portray the development of creative thought. Hence the theory of science is not only epistemology but also metaphysics.
Fichte derived his philosophy from Kant by making practical reason determinative over theoretical reason, a step which Kant himself did not seem to make. Fichte started by arguing for the freedom of the will. For Kant, the primacy of the moral is a matter of postulates; we are to act as if the maxim on which we act were a law of nature; as if our wills were free; as if we were immortal; as if there was a God. In Ficte's thought. the as if disappears. The moral law is is the law of nature; our wills are free; our souls are immortal. God exists as the moral order of the universe. The Kantian postulation has been replaced by Fichtean affirmations. The whole external physical world is the material of duty made manifest to our senses. Fichte argued; if everything happens by causal necessity, then we are not responsible for either good or evil that we do; for the source of our action will be nature, and not ourselves. He argued that causal necessity, which we at first seem to see in nature, exists only in our own thought; therefore we need not to take necessity or nature as seriously as we did initially. Indeed, moral consciousness, telling us that we are free and alone responsible for our actions, is not in the same class as our positing of causality and is given primacy over the nature and causality. Moral ideals are more determinative of our actions than causality.
Fichte called this philosophy that gave the primacy to moral ideals "Idealism" and its opposite "Dogmatism." This philosophy that Fichte called "Dogmatism" implies materialism and determinism, and denies the independent existence of the self (or ego) and the freedom of the will. If the thing, the object, is taken as the fundamental principle of explanation, intelligence will ultimately be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon. But two possibilities are open to us. Actual experience is always the experience of something by an experiencer; consciousness is always consciousness of an object by a subject or, as Fichte sometimes put it, intelligence. But by a process that Fichte called abstraction the philosopher can isolate conceptually the two factors which in actual consciousness are always conjoined. He can thus form the concepts of intelligence-in-itself and thing-in-itself. And two paths lie before him. Either he can try to explain experience as the product of intelligence-in-itself, that is, of creative thought. Or he can try to explain experience as the effect of the thing-in-itself. This second path is that of "dogmatism" and the first is obviously of "idealism."
Fichte is convinced that the superiority of idealism to dogmatism as an explanation of experience becomes evident in the process of working out the two systems. But they have not yet been worked out the two sysems. And in looking for the first principle of philosophy we cannot appeal to the theoretical superiority of a system which has not yet been constructed. What this means is that the philosopher who is maturely conscious of his freedom as revealed in moral experience will be inclined to idealism, while the philosopher who lacks the mature moral consciousness will be inclined to dogmatism. The dogmatist emphasizes the thing, the not-self. But the thinker who has genuine interest in and for the free moral subject will turn for his basic philosophical principle to intelligence, the self or ego, rather than to the not-self.
Fichte's preoccupation with the free and morally active self is clear from the start. Underlying and inspiring his theoretical inquiry into the ground of experience, there is a profound conviction of the primary significance of man's free moral activity. Fichte continues the Kantian insistance on the primacy of the practical reason, the moral will. But he is convinced that to maintain this primacy one has to take the path to pure idealism. For behind Kant's apparent innocent retention the thing-in-itself, Fichte sees the lurking spectre of Spinozism, the exaltation of Nature and the disappearance of freedom. If we are to exorize this spectre, compromise must be rejected.
As a result of certain of his lectures and phamphlets on the freedom of thought and religion, Fichte became the center of a despute known as the Atheismusstreit in which he was accused of atheism. Fichte was enraged at this misinterpretation, and wrote such violent attacks upon his accusers that the grand council of the duchy of Weimar lost its patience and voted a censure in 1799. This led to his dismissal from the university of Jena in 1799. He went to Berlin, where he was welcomed on his arrival by such leaders of the new Romantic movement as the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Schleiermacher. Even though he delivered various series of lectures which attracted considerable attention and added to his reputation, he did not succeed in obtaining a permanent university chair until the new University of Berlin was opened in 1810. Fichte was appointed dean of the philosophical faculty and from 1811 to 1812 he served as rector of the University of Berlin.
During years 1800 to 1810, he lectured at Erlangen, Berlin, and Konigsberg. Most attention at the time was aroused by his Addresses to the German Nation, courageously delivered in the winter of 1807-1808, when Berlin was occupied by French troops. These patriotic addresses helped greatly to revive the national spirit and thus to make possible the popular uprising known as the "War of Liberation," which in 1814 drove the French out of Germany after Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. During the war, Fichte's wife at his behest visited the hospitals and helped to take care of the wounded soldiers. She caught a dangerous fever, typhus, from which she slowly recovered, but Fichte caught it from her and died on January 29th, 1814.
It was also Fichte, not Hegel, who first presented the process of the dialectic as consisting of Thesis, Antitheses, and Synthesis, and so-named the stages. The activity of reason itself requires that posit, counterposit, and synthesis mark its progress. In his Basis of the Entire Theory of Science Fichte approaches the first fundamental propositions of philosophy by reflecting on an indemonstrable logical proposition, the truth of which would be admitted by all. This is the principle of identity, which is stated in the form A is A or A = A. Nothing is said about the content of A; nor is it asserted that A exists. What is asserted is a necessary relation between A and itself. If there is an A, it necessarily self-identical. And this necessary relation between A as subject and A as predicate is referred to by Fichte as X. This judgment is asserted or posited only in and through the I or ego. Thus the existence of the ego is affirmed in its activity of judging, even if no value is assigned to A. "If the proposition A = A is certain, so also must the proposition I am be certain." In affirming the principle of identity the ego affirms or posits itself as self-identical. In the self, therefore, is implied by the category of reality. This argument is regarded as a thesis.
Similarly, what Fichte calls the formal axiom of opposition, Not-A not = A, is used to arrive at the second basic proposition of philosophy. For the positing of Not -A presupposes the positing of A and is thus oppositing to A. And this oppositing takes place only in and through the ego. At the same time the formal axiom of opposition is said to be grounded in the second proposition of philosophy which affirms the ego's oppositing to itself of the non-ego in general. This argument is the negation of the thesis, the antithesis. And implied here is the category of negation.
And further, the logical proposition which Fichte calls the axiom of the ground or sufficient reason, A in part = -A, and conversely, is said to be grounded in the third basic proposition of philosophy, in the sense that the former is derived by abstracting definite content from the latter and substituting variables instead. This the category of limitation, which is the synthesis or union of the two opposing of reality and negation in which each has its place.
Thus the whole is again is within the experience of the one self, which posits (asserts) itself, then posits a non-self or world in opposition to itself, then proceeds to combine the two in a whole in which is limited by the other. The process by which all this is done is one activity; the larger ego, which first posits the lesser ego, next the outer world of the non-ego, and thirdly their union in a whole, is an active agent, a will. "In the beginning was the deed" was a favorite expression of Fichte's; he believed in the primacy of the practical reason.
In brief, Fichte's view is that formal logic is dependent on and derived from the Wissenschaftslehre, that is, the science of science, the knowledge of knowledge, and not in other way around. This view of the relation between formal logic and basic philosophy is indeed somewhat obscured by the fact that Fichte begins by reflecting on the principle of identity.
Schelling gave the name "subjective idealism" to the philosophy of Fichte, since in Fichte's philosophy the world is a posit of the judging subject. This view also could have been called "solipsism." Fichte, who rested idealism on the primacy of moral will, is regarded as the founder of German idealism. Schelling gave his own philosophy the name "objective idealism," for nature, he held, is simply "visible intellegence." Thus the term "idealism" came to be applied to all philosophies that identified reality with idea, reason, or spirit. Idealism had become Ideaism. Taking this designation to apply all philosophies that identify reality with ideas, reason, or spirit. Berkeley would thus be included along with all philosophies beleving in panpsychism.
Schelling's philosophy developed through five stages:
The ambiguities in Schelling's ever-changing philosophy led to his repudiation by Hegel, who had been his disciple and for whom he had secured a position as a colleague at Jena. Hegel stayed on at Jena after Schelling left for the university at Wurzberg in 1803. Hegel appropriated various features in Shelling's view of the Abslute and of its gradual development in nature and history, and worked them over into a more coherent and systematic account which he defended by a better logical method (the dialetic). In the Phenomenology of Mind, which he published in 1807, Hegel exposed the vagaries and inconsistencies in the philosophy of Schelling in a manner logically justified, but discourteous and unkind. It was evident that Hegel was a far more profound and systematic thinker than Schelling. Hegel soon superseded Schelling in influence, and remained the recognized leader of philosophical thought in Germany until Hegel's own death in 1831.
In his final mystical stage, the Absolute becomes "primitive will." God evolves through the persons of the Trinity, adding another instance of triadic development. The source of evil is traced to a desire for existence present in God and all else that antecedes even God, and is a first principle of all existence. Merged indissolubly in God's love, the principle becomes dissociated in men, so that the quality making possible man's freedom and creativity is also the source of his fall and his sin. Schelling affirms finally, a polarity in God, which does not disturb God's essential unity. It involves a merging of absolute and relative, necessary and contingent, eternal and temporal, potential and actual aspects. At this point God, the "Eternal Contrariety," evolves by means of the opposition between the void of nothingness and the plentitude of being, an opposition internalized in the divine nature itself.
Schelling had the satisfaction of being called to Berlin in 1841 to counteract the followers of Hegel, who after the death of Hegel ten years before had fallen out among themselves, and were beginning to be viewed with disfavor. Schelling was unable to regain the position of renown which he had lost thirty years before, and the philosophy of his last period made little impression. Historically, Schelling earlier thought was an essential connecting link between Fichte and Hegel, while some of his evolutionary ideas helped to prepare the way for Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson.
This is the metaphysical veiw that holds that the nature of reality is personal. The founder of this form of idealism is Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910). The distinctive feature of personalism is "the unequivocal insistence upon the attribute of personality in all that is real." Bowne held that God is the supreme Person. He was strong in his oppositon to pantheism, and personalism generally adhered to this opposition. A familiar saying among them is that whereas God is all, yet all is not God. But personalist have had difficulty avoiding it. To the question: where do we find an adequate conception of reality which obviously combines both identity and diversity, permanence and change? Bowne answers that the conception of personality, "self-conscious spirit," only is adequate to interpret being.
"Only personality is able to give concrete meaning to those ontological categories by which we seek to interpret being. Only personality is able to reconcile the Eleatic and Heraclitic philosophies, for only the personality can combine change and identity, or flow and permanence."As a person, each one of us knows himself as one and as enduring, and each person distinguishes himself from changing states and experience as their permanent subject. As persons we are "one and many," "abiding in the midst of change," and we are permanently active. The idea of person or personality, therefore, provides us with the only adequate conception of reality.