I. Reading Fichte OF ALL THE modern philosophers, Fichte is the least appropriate for solitary reading. His texts are, in general, conceived for public exposition. In their majority, they should have been thought and heard in the realm of teaching and academic learning. Therefore, its linguistic and intellectual design are essentially ready for oral communication. The later and additional exposure through the printed publication is extrinsic to it - and this also applies where Fichte himself previewed or proposed their publication. These texts absolutely lack the establishment of fixed terms and theorems. In place of that, Fichte's texts carefully effect an evolved and highly complex movement of thought, by means of which the public should be instructed and motivated for an autonomous intellectual co-realization of such thought. In a deliberate analysis of written culture in the philosophic field, Fichte de- emphasizes the work in favor of the effect, and in place of the progressive development of multiple contents he prioritizes varied repetition of a few subjects and fundamental theses; and this always with new attempts in the direction of a procedure chosen in a premeditated manner, by means of which one should challenge, undo and replace the established modes of thinking. With his typical connection between a thematic focus and volatility, philosophizing for Fichte is less extensive than intensive, less expansive than repetitive, less instructive than insistent. Fichte takes his listeners and his readers seriously, and he takes them to the extremes of superimposition. Thus, despite being developed and designed for public exposition, the Fichtean hermetic texts become comprehensible, typically, after repeated reading. To read Fichte requires the immersion in a pathway of thought that profoundly challenges thought itself, yet with which, justly, one's freedom with respect to external rules is presupposed and deliberately intensified. Fichte counts upon a public that thinks like him, and with readers who reflect. For Fichte, the subject with which he deals is things, although his insistent tone and the energetic sound of his philosophic voice can appear highly subjective. From Fichte's texts--and from his life--one can learn how philosophical investigation should occur in intellectual freedom, that is, with complete deliverance to the search for knowledge and wisdom, without consideration of losses or personal advantages. Therefore, to be fair to the biographical-philosophical character of Fichte's thought, it does not suffice either to take under consideration only some of his works or a good part of them through an artificial separation of everything vital from his thought. Fichte is a philosopher who always and everywhere concerns himself with everything, and his work essentially eliminates selective reception. In the same fashion, the restriction to one or another phase of his thought cannot satisfy the continuous character of the movement of Fichtean thought either. An adequate confrontation with his philosophy should result from a background of familiarity with his complete works and influence, as in a framework of knowledge of his total Oeuvre. The present introduction to the philosophy of Fichte attempts to make available such a preliminary orientation for a proper and deep study of the Fichtean texts. II. Compendium of Life and Work 2.1. Years of apprenticeship and pilgrimage (1774-1794) Fichte's family origin is humble and his philosophic beginnings are rather obscure. Born the 19th of May in 1762 in Rammenau--in Upper Lusatia, an old principality of Saxony--as the first of ten children of a family of laborers, only by luck undergoes the joy of noble incentives and high level training. After decisive years in the state school of Pforta (Schulpforta)--where before Fichte, Klopstock and later Nietzsche would receive their pre-university education with specialization in ancient languages--he enrolls, practically without resources, in the University of Jena in 1780; later, the following year, he transfers to the University of Leipzig, where he studies Protestant theology without obtaining an academic title. In 1788 an occasion arises as a tutor in Zurich, which he prolongs for two years. Returning to Leipzig, a casual encounter with the philosophy of Kant will be the revolutionary intellectual experience of his early years, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1788) opens for him the intelligible world of morally responsible freedom, as opposed to the order of nature. By means of study of the Critique of Pure Reason (first edition in 1781, the second modified edition in 1787) and of the Critique of Judgment (1790), Fichte manages to consolidate the conviction, intellectually based, of the natural determinability of all events by personal certainty, motivated by affect, concerning the freedom of human action. Following Warsaw, where the expectation of employment as a tutor was to be promptly frustrated, Fichte goes in 1791 to Kant in Königsberg. In place of financial support, which Fichte sought from him, Kant facilitates the printing of his first writing, conceived there under pressure, to wit, Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation (1792, an expanded 2d edition in 1793). The writing, that initially appeared anonymously, was woven primarily from a work of Kant's; after clarifying the relation that united them, the writing makes famous, all of a sudden, the until then unknown author and lifts him to the rank of authorized successor to Kant. 2.2. Professor in Jena (1794-1799) After a renewed stay of several months in Zurich, where he marries Klopstock's niece, Johanna Rahn, and where publications are presented regarding his critical position about the character and meaning of the French Revolution and upon the state of post- Kantian philosophy (Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought, anonymous, 1793; Contribution to the Rectification of the Public's Judgment of the French Revolution, anonymous, 1793-1794; Aenesidemus Review, 1794), Fichte receives an offer of a chair in the University of Jena, the principal center for Kantian philosophy, which he incorporates during the semester of summer, 1794, amidst great public expectation. In the framework of his much appreciated and influential academic activity teaching in Jena, there emerge in the four coming years and in rapid succession a coordinated series of publications, in which Fichte proposes the methodological and programmatic grounding, the same being executed in various parts, of his systematic philosophy. Fichte expresses the epistemological pretension of the philosophy, that is, to create the fundamental science or meta-science of all the others, through the neologism, "Doctrine of Science." First Fichte provides a programmatic writing (On the Concept of the Doctrine of Science, 1794), later the first of the numerous presentations of the Doctrine of Science in a strict sense (Fundamentals of the complete Doctrine of Science, 1794-1795) together with a partial complement (Outline of the characteristics of the Doctrine of Science in relation to the theoretic faculty, 1795), followed by the Doctrine of Science applied in its double form as the doctrine of right and the doctrine of the moral (Foundations of Natural Right, 1796-1797; The System of Ethics, 1798). The innovative character of Fichte's philosophy, to which also belongs the academic exposition following his own manuscripts instead of doing so in accord with the existing manuals, meets with an enthusiastic reception. In little time Fichte's reputation exceeds the renown of the aged Kant. With his teaching activity and his publications, Fichte becomes a fundamental figure of German idealism, from which the young Schelling would soon emerge and later too the early Hegel, yet who also will become a reference point for the individual intellectual and poetic efforts of Hölderlin and Hardenberg-Novalis. Finally, Fichte ascends to be a spiritus rector of the Romantic circle in Jena around the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel. 2.3. The so-called dispute concerning atheism (1798-1799) Fichte's years in Jena, however, were also marked by university complaints, cultural wars and scientific polemics. He quarrels with student secret societies, provokes the local ecclesiastical authorities with academic courses that coincide with the Dominican masses, and reacts with vehemence and sarcasm before the collegial critique concerning the evolution of Kantian transcendental philosophy towards a Doctrine of Science. Meanwhile, scandal arrives with the publication of an article by Fichte about religion in a journal, of which Fichte himself was co-editor. In that article Fichte reduces the concept of God to the totality of the universal moral order ("On the basis of our belief in a divine governance of the world" 1798). In the state- political and ecclesiastical scandal that is produced, Fichte provokes his dismissal from the teaching activity through his pronouncements and extreme demands - he reprimands Church atheism and calls for a public redress of the authorities. This leaves him practically like a family head without resources, so that in the coming decade he must find their scarce sustenance through extra-university teaching and literary activities. Fichte seems particularly affected by the fact that the distinguished intellectuals of the age--among them Kant--distance themselves from him and his supposed atheism, as much in private as publicly. On the immediate occasion of the dispute concerning atheism apologetic writings appear (Appeal to the Public 1799; Responsibility for the Accusation of Atheism 1799). In Berlin, where Fichte relocates, he immediately writes his most read text, to wit, a popular presentation of the fundamental positions in the Doctrine of Science, written in a form compatible with the religious opinions of the era (The Vocation of Man 1800). Similarly, from the years in Berlin there emerges as the result of his politico-juridical thought an economic text about the fusion of the riches of the people with the state economy (The Closed Commercial State 1800). A little later there appears a deliberately simplified and modified presentation in didactic form of the fundamental features of the Doctrine of Science ( A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy 1801). 2.4. Docent without an academic job (1799-1809) With the move from the university city in the provincial principality of Thuringia to the capital of the kingdom of Prussia, which even up to 1809 did not have its own university, the academic docent Fichte, who develops his best work in the ambiance of professorial exposition, he is converted into the privatized intellectual occasionally present at cycles of scientific and popular conferences in front of an educated public from the upper classes - from public servants to the clergy and from the educated bourgeoisie to the local nobility. Due to the impression of extensive error in the comprehension of his written philosophy and, in particular, the misunderstood atheism in his theory of religion, Fichte effects two radical changes in his public appearances. In what follows, he desists in a practically absolute manner from the publication of his scientific works in the form of books and, with regard to the oral exposition, he gives a new form every time--or let us say an externally modified form--to the scientific presentation of his philosophy. With that, the middle and late Fichte protects, certainly, the essence of his philosophy against false or abbreviated interpretations, yet he also limits his influence to the relatively small group of his listeners and only reaches more readers with his scant publications presented in popular form. For this reason, in the perception of his contemporaries Fichte becomes scientifically mute after 1800 and continues to be active and present solely in a popular or pseudo-scientific fashion. It is thus that the efforts of Schelling and Hegel to displace Fichte from his leadership within post-Kantian philosophy and present his still influential Doctrine of Science from Jena as a mere historical footnote, objectively surpassed by their original contributions and philosophical developments, became an easy matter. For Fichte's posthumous readers, for whom the editorial efforts of the mid-19th century and of the last 70 years have made accessible the dimensions of his work on the Doctrine of Science that continued over more than two decades, Fichte is seen, on the contrary, as a thinker oriented to the problem of systematic philosophy, who never tires of showing and demonstrating the original as well as the experimental, new foci and intentions, and his central preoccupation with grounding all knowledge - including the knowledge which guides action. After Fichte would expound, already during the second half of his teaching activity in Jena, a completely new presentation of the Doctrine of Science (Doctrine of Science "novo methodo" 1796-1799) of which he himself published only a part (Attempt at a New Presentation of the Doctrine of Science 1797- 1798) yet which is preserved in various Kollegnachschriften. In the 14 years of life that remain to him beginning in 1800 Fichte every year offers a new presentation of the Doctrine of Science, each respectively oriented in a different way. After an interrupted focus in 1800 and a presentation completed during the years 1801 and 1802 there arrives, as the result of intensive preparation, the monumental series of five presentations of the Doctrine of Science from the years 1804 and 1805, among which one highlights particularly the second exposition of 1804 as a speculative apex. Along with the serial work on the Doctrine of Science there appears in Fichte's middle period, 1804-1806, a cycle in various parts of popular lectures about the philosophy of history, of religion and of education, whose parts Fichte publishes by 1806 (Fundamental Characteristics of the Present Age 1804-1805; On the Essence of the Scholar 1805; Instructions for a Blessed Life 1806). In the summer semester of 1805, Fichte briefly teaches for the first time at the University of Erlangen, which in the past had belonged to Prussia. During the summer of 1807 he expounds the Doctrine of Science in the University of Königsberg. When after the catastrophic defeat of Prussia before Napoleon in the battles of Jena and Auerstedt (1806) the French occupation of Berlin arrives, in the winter of 1807- 1808 Fichte offers 14 activist conferences ("Addresses") about the history and the reality of the European peoples and States; this in a continuation derived from his old lectures on the philosophy of history. This consideration of history and actuality causes him to keep in mind the situation of the Germans that hinges between the political impotence of the moment, the traditional and cultural spiritual particularity, and the potential function of leadership in a post-Napoleonic Europe of free nations, as much internally as externally in a political sense (Addresses to the German Nation 1807-1808). 2.5. Professor in Berlin (1809-1814) Physically and intellectually exhausted by his philosophic labor and from publication in previous years, starting in 1809-1810 Fichte finds energy for his philosophical occupation; this time as an academic docent in the new University of Berlin, to which he brings a political writing on university reform in a preparatory state (Deduced Scheme for an Academy to be Established in Berlin 1807; published posthumously in 1817) and where he officiates as its first elected rector, until a dispute concerning a Jewish student, whom Fichte attempts to defend from hostilities on the part of the students and the professors, obliges him to quit. As a professor in Berlin, Fichte integrates the presentation of the Doctrine of Science--still always diversely pursued and constructed--in a preparatory and continued series of lectures, as previously he did in Jena. From this series there exist some drafts--in part fragmentary--from the years 1810, 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814, among which he particularly highlight Instruction for philosophizing (1809), On the Study of Philosophy in General (1812), Introduction to the Doctrine of Science (1813), The Facts of Consciousness (1810-1813), Concerning the Vocation of the Scholar (1811), On the Relation of Logic and Philosophy (1812-1813), System of the Doctrine of Right (1812), and System of Ethical Theory (1812). The traditional image of Fichte's life and work is completed and rounded out with two texts from his last year of life: on one side, a philosophical diary in three parts (Diarium I, Diarium II, Diarium III) which permits a fascinating glance at the experimental work of Fichte's thought and, on the other, his later political and historico-philosophic lectures on the evolution of law and ethics in ancient, modern and contemporary history (Doctrine of the state: the relation of the original State with the kingdom of reason, 1813; published posthumously in 1820). Since his intellectual beginnings in the milieu of the French Revolution, passing to the republican dispute about the German political misery and the universal reign of Napoleon, as well as about the strategic resource of Machiavelli (Machiavelli as Author 1807) in the confrontation with Napoleon, even to philosophical support for wars of liberation--in which he, as their indirect victim, dies infected with the hospital fever in the midst of the uprising against Napoleon-- Fichte's philosophic thought is designed to be effective, especially with an effect of a public and political nature. In accordance with his comprehension of philosophy, strict speculation should not exclude historical action, but instead guide, orient and motivate it. As a philosophical theorist of political praxis, Fichte is the practical politician of philosophical theory - of a praxis that attempts to make thought effective with deliberate consideration of the given historical relations. Despite all doubt that one might have, seen from a distance of two centuries, as much in the determination of the goal as in the selection of the means of Fichtean philosophical praxis and in his practical philosophy--especially there where Fichte conceives freedom unilaterally and too rapidly sacrifices liberality for rationality--the intellectual output of Fichte seduces with its fundamental trait: a philosophically determined and politically oriented thought, which elevates the forecourt as well as the grandstand and knows how to deal with the persistent word and the profound concept. III. Philosophizing for, against and after Kant 3.1. Determination of the limit of pure reason (Immanuel Kant) The lasting imprint of the philosophy of Kant in Fichte's thinking is founded in his novel proof of the fundamental reconciliation between nature and freedom. With the critical project of determining the limit of pure reason, Kant manages to restrict the absolute determinability of the events of nature to a mere sphere of magnitudes and physical relations, as distinct from another, purely intellectual, of desiring and of rationally based acting. With the limitation of reason to its theoretic use (grounded in knowledge) of things sensibly given in space and time there precisely corresponded the widening of reason in its practical use (grounded in action) towards an order of things that is only given through thought. With the critical foundation of theoretical philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had only opened a domain of reason in principle, that would be located outside of nature and its mechanical concatenation of causes, and had expected future utilization of it. With the critical foundation of practical philosophy in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant undertakes the objective determination of that intellectual domain through the rational concept of freedom - on one side, negative freedom with respect to the legitimacy of nature and, on the other, positive freedom as the legitimacy of reason. The proper legitimacy of the rational domain is identified with the ethical normativity of rational willing through the demand for principles universalizable in action. Nevertheless, Kant not only is determinative for Fichte regarding the moral philosophic boundedness of his causal determinism. Kant precedes Fichte in the attempt to place into a complex relationship the spheres, in principle separate, of nature and freedom; a relation that, furthermore, is characterized as much by mutual exclusion as by reciprocal interchange. Contrary to and complementary with the theoretical distinction between thing in itself and phenomenon, and also with respect to the practical amplification of this distinction as a difference between the legitimacy of nature and the legitimacy of human desiring and acting, Kant undertakes the reconciliation of the natural order and the rational order, like that between theoretical reason and practical reason. One of the amplifications of the critical idea of reconciliation is the moral- philosophical connection between the aspiration for happiness and the morality of a state of total realization ("summum bonum"). Such a state can be anticipated with good reasoning, but its realization refers to the human capacity for desiring and acting, the same as that certainty about reality surpasses all human knowledge. The complete final realization of human aspiration, which might be assumed as possible, brings moral philosophical reasoning to the "postulates of pure practical reason." They are not objects of possible knowledge, but instead objects of a belief, as much theoretically permitted and practically required, in the existence of God and in the immortality of the soul. Upon the basis of practical moral reason, that which theoretical reason can think yet not demonstrate is accepted as sufficient for the goals of practical reason - the raising of morality. The second Kantian characterization of the final reconciliation of nature and freedom, which previously were separate, is the consideration in the Critique of Judgment of nature as the arena for the exercise of freedom - a consideration that does not consider nor treat nature as the contrary of freedom, but which leaves visible the utility of the sensibly given for the rationally required. For Kant, the sensory-intellectual unity is aesthetically manifested as the beauty of nature, while teleologically it is presented as the organic life of the phenomenon. Fichte transforms the double Kantian perspective--aesthetic and teleological--of the unity of determinate nature and free spirit in a descent towards his grounding of unity in an integral structure of subjectivity and objectivity--of sensibility and spirituality, of thought and will--that first makes the division possible and at the same time always transcends it. The final Kantian unity is attributed by Fichte to an original unity, that Kant himself perhaps took as existent, yet not demonstrable. 3.2. The opposition between faith and knowledge (Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi) Practically contemporaneous with Kant's critical philosophy there emerges, against the Enlightenment thought of the 18th century and its affirmation of scientific progress, an alternative in the critique of reason with the philosophical interventions of the Romantic writer and economic theorist Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819). In them, reason is not investigated from within and in itself as with Kant and with regard to its possibilities and limits, but instead is critiqued externally and with recourse to external standards and measures, as pre-rational. At the beginning of Jacobi's attacks on reason and science is found the so-called dispute about atheism with Moses Mendelssohn concerning the supposed lack of faith of the recently deceased Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). Jacobi places the well-known confession of Lessing regarding the impersonal concept of God within the tradition of philosophical pantheism as belonging to the systematic context of the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), judged as atheistic and heretical, whom the Jewish community of Amsterdam had excommunicated early. For Jacobi, the negation of a personal God and of the freedom of the human will, executed by Spinoza with a strictly rational argument, demonstrates the atheistic and fatalistic consequences of the Enlightenment confidence in reason and science, to which Jacobi counterpoises, programatically, the culture of sentiment and of faith. As opposed to Kant, who in the Critique of Judgment puts the "sentiment of pleasure and displeasure" under principles, for Jacobi the sentiment is not accessible to rational consideration. Faith as well and, especially, religious faith, that Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason shows to be rationally based, is not amenable to rational ordering. Rather, sentiment and faith indicate, for Jacobi, alternative instances of comprehension of self and the world, by means of which the always limited discernment in scientific consideration of the world can and should be surpassed in a genuine experience of the reality of God and freedom. Despite the continuing link with Enlightenment thought and, especially, with the Kantian critical philosophy, in Fichte can be seen a profound and lasting influence of the affective and dogmatic overcoming of Jacobi's reason and knowledge. From Jacobi derives Fichte's profound mistrust towards mere knowing without the anchor of that dimension of reality that already Jacobi and, in agreement with him, Fichte characterizes as "life." Yet, above all, Fichte takes from Jacobi the affective evidence of freedom in an original sense and the total grounding of knowledge in a pre- and extra-scientific certainty, which is essentially certainty in itself. Beyond his similarity with the critique of reason by Jacobi, Fichte does not share his objective fixation upon a personal concept of God. Here it is not Jacobi, but Spinoza --newly brought onto the philosophical discussion plane by Jacobi--with his identification of God and nature (Deus sive natura) who becomes motivating for Fichte and his contemporaries, above all for Goethe and Schelling. 3.3. Philosophy starting from a single principle (Karl Leonhard Reinhold) Fichte is not the first who in a productive confrontation with criticism aspire to take philosophic development beyond the standard attained by Kant. From his influence and his effect, Fichte's predecessor in the professorship of Philosophy in Jena, Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823) is the most important mediator between Kant and the initial movement of German idealism. Reinhold comes from a Masonic environment of the late Enlightenment in Vienna and arrived in Weimar escaping from his monkish life there; in Weimar he was active with his publications. When during the Eighties decade of the 18th century Kant's Critique of Pure Reason put popular philosophical thought in the German language under unknown intellectual demands and almost insuperable difficulties of comprehension, and it is the Enlightenment popularizer Reinhold who manages to bring to light the strategic meaning and the systematic significance of Kant's innovative theory of the object and of knowledge. With his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, which first appeared in a series of articles and later as a book (1790) Reinhold attempts to bring the critical philosophy back, beneath an ample renunciation of its arcane methodology and doctrine, to the traditional preoccupation of philosophy--the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and the reality of freedom--and highlight especially the theoretical-speculative guarantee of practical-moral freedom as an essential part of critical philosophy. In the second volume of the Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (1792) Reinhold takes Kantian underpinning of moral philosophy as a motive for a widened and deepened presentation of the concepts and the fundamental principles of desiring and of acting. Here of particular importance for post-Kantian development, and especially for Fichte, is the amplification of a theory of action through a theory of the impulses and of freedom, that seeks to integrate the Kantian accord of freedom and morality in a broader conception of the impulsive basis of all action and of the fundamental function of freedom as an indifferent selection capacity. For the subsequent generation, Reinhold takes the decisive step over Kant since 1789 with the systematic project of a philosophy based upon a single principle, that tries to deduce the fundamental structure of the spirit, presented in Kant still separated and of successive form, starting from an original unity. With that, Reinhold places the systematic project of post-Kantian philosophy before a double requirement: on one hand, that of identifying a first absolute principle, which should be in itself evidently true and immediately comprehensible; on the other, that of completely deducing the fundamental form and contents of the spirit in methodically controlled steps starting from that systematic principle and in accordance with a system of principles. 3.4. The skeptical theme of Kantianism (Salomon Maimon and Schulze's Aenesidemus) Together with the Kantian philosophy, its general critique by means of Jacobi and its sympathetic revision by means of Reinhold, there appears a fourth formative factor in the development of scientific philosophizing by Fichte: a skeptical reaction to Kant in the milieu of the Leibnizian and Humean approaches, which Kant had considered superseded. The object of the meta-critique of the critical philosophy is, among the later rationalists as well as among the neo-empiricists, the Kantian use of the thing in itself, which Kant himself presents as unknowable, yet at the same time as indispensable. Jacobi had already formulated the dilemma with respect to the theory of the object and of knowledge in Kant, according to which without the supposition of things in themself, existing in a fashion independent from human forms of knowing (space, time, categories - particularly that of causality) Kant's philosophy does not make sense; yet with the acceptance of the thing in itself he cannot abide with it. According to Jacobi, an extra-subjective material grounding of knowledge is certainly needed. However, this supposition serves to annul the integrity of the Kantian system, and especially the application of the category of causality to the determination of the relation between the thing in itself and the cognizant subject contradicts the restriction, imposed by Kant, of categorical knowledge to objects in space and time. Reverting to the epistemological monism of the Leibnizians, for whom sensory and intellectual knowledge constitutes a gradual distinction within the generic activity of representation, a little later Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) in his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy criticizes the unrecognized assumption of critical philosophy - a work which in detail is definite, but with regard to the general situation is completely diffuse, be it pro or contra Kant, be it in correction or refutation of the Kantian enterprise. The special objective of his sagacious analysis is the division, argued by Kant, between intuition and thought with its consequent systematic problems: on one side, respect for the integration of both capabilities of knowledge, radically separated; on the other side, for the adequate application of the subjective apparatus of knowing to an objective, independent and resistant material. Of importance for Fichte will be the re- signification effected by Maimon of the thing in itself as an unknowable object towards an infinitely distant ideal of complete knowledge. Influenced by ancient skeptical thought (Pyrrhonism) and its continuation in David Hume, the critique of Kantian philosophy by Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761-1833) is directed, in the first place, against Reinhold's elemental philosophy. Aenesidemus-Schulze, as he is also called in accord with the old voice from his anonymous writing (Aenesidemus or, On the Fundamentals of the Elemental Philosophy Offered in Jena by professor Mr. Reinhold) criticizes the elemental philosophy particularly for its dogmatism represented by the introduction of the thing in itself and its subjective contrary, the transcendental subject, whose manifestation cannot be verified with the tools of critical philosophy. From Reinhold's supreme principle (the principle of consciousness) according to which the representation of the subject and object are different wherein the former refers to the latter, Schulze's Aenesidemus criticizes especially the lack of foundation for the fundamental epistemological concepts such as representation, subject and object. With their accurate probe of the weak points, as much methodological as of content, in the Kantian philosophy, Maimon and the Aenesidemus of Schulze call Fichte's attention to the defects detected by them and the pending desiderata for systematic philosophy which return to self-critical reason and begin from a single first originating principle. The system of Fichte thus emerges as a productive reaction to the rationalist-dogmatic and empirico-skeptical challenge to critical philosophy. IV. The System of Freedom 4.1. The discovery of the I In the origin of Fichte's systematic philosophy, as well as in its configuration as a complete philosophical system, a cognitive experience is encountered: the autobiographical realization--suddenly confirmed--that the only primordial and infallible evidence available concerning the process through which the consciousness of oneself occurs in relation with our neighbors - finite rational beings capable of thought and rational action. In this process, that Fichte describes as the object of a primary intuitive experience, the finite rational being grounds her own identity on practical intelligence. The primary self-constitution claimed by Fichte is not a passive event, that appears and whose appearance if found subject in a casual and supplementary mode to self-observation. According to Fichte, one deals more with a product, active and effective, of the self-grounding through the practico- intelligent being herself, in which the latter is attained for the first time for herself - in its own forms of existence as a being who knows of themself and others, and the reason for such knowing as an active being. According to Fichte's later analysis, in the primary conscious self- constitution the certainty of one's own existence and the certainty of the practico- intelligent nature of oneself coincide. According to the Fichtean appreciation of the primary experience of self as a practico-intelligent being, all other certainty --including that most certain within it--is ontologically and epistemologically secondary and with respect to the first certainty of the practical intelligence, refers to the assumption of a primary self-consciousness and is dependent upon it. Thus, all knowing is founded upon the primary knowledge of self, all objective consciousness is the primary consciousness of the self. From the beginning, Fichte named the primary internal instance of all certainty with the nominal personal pronoun of the first person singular "I" and identified the corresponding consciousness with "self-consciousness"; put more exactly, as a non- empirical, pure self-consciousness. In this, he does not make recourse to individual psychic or mental acts, which would be inappropriate for reliably identifying the first evidence and all that is based with and on it. Or better, recurring to terms from the grammar and the phenomenology of inner experience or the experience of self, Fichte notes a basic confusion in the denomination and description underlying the instantiation of all particular and objectively determined consciousness of self, as also of every other consciousness. Even further: according to Fichte, this instance of primary certainty is not given in the form an an external grounding, separated from the finite rational being and independent of her, but instead as an essential part of her being, which belongs profoundly to the finite rational being, but that shares with all its neighbors on a generic and supra-individual basis the I in the form of a Foundational-I. In the discursive presentation of his discovery of the I and in the argumentative exposition of its fundamental meaning for the philosophical comprehension of oneself and of the world, Fichte sought to unite, intrinsically in himself, the identification of the I with the proof of the function of the I regarding the principles qua pure self-consciousness for all conscience. The I-Principle is shown, in this manner, to be the principle of the I, and the ground is presented as the principle in the phenomenon. With this, he arrives at different presentations of the Foundational-I. On one hand, the I figures as the non-objective quasi-object of an immediate comprehension, not conceptually mediated and not given sensorily; better, it is an active comprehension, direct and purely intellectual, for whose denomination Fichte returns to the mode of knowledge, proscribed by Kant, of "intellectual intuition." For Fichte, the I as such is comprehensible first and only through intellectual intuition, at the same time as it is essentially characterized by it - an I that is understood as purely intellectual and is composed as purely intellectual. On the other hand, Fichte characterizes the I-Principle with the technical term "genesis," which is applied by Fichte in analyzing the usual term "fact," in order to show its active, productive character and, especially, the mode of its self-production. So thus, the Yo is somewhat effected and factually existent as an act, and certainly one's own act, an action for oneself that is due in the first place to one's own action. But Fichte is also sure from the start and without exception that the pure self- referentiality of the I that is preserved in oneself cannot be the object of a determinate consciousness. In particular, the pure self-constituting I--put more exactly the I that should be thought of as thus proceeding from a philosophical reconstruction--is not a case of manifest self-consciousness. As a principle, the I underlies all consciousness constituted as a me; it is the unconditioned conditional which does not belong to the conditioned. Only artificial preparation through philosophical reflection can elevate the isolated I as such to consciousness and, beginning there, permit applying the function of the principles of the I in the posited formation of the "I" to the form of a "me," and thus from there to a "personal me," to a "you" and to an "us." 4.2. From the infinite I to the finite one The origin of the individual "i" and of the plural I's starting from a primary, singular and generic I is presented by Fichte in a reconstructive and artificial manner in two complementary configurations: first, in a dialectic oriented to the logical forms of proof and mediation of contradictory relations and, second, in a "pragmatic history of the human spirit," supported by the empirical unfolding of the forms of consciousness. In the first presentation of the Doctrine of Science (1794- 1795)--the only one Fichte will publish--both procedures alternate such that the recourse to the form of consciousness of the fundamental experience of finitude factually concludes the infinite progressive specification of the contradictions in the constitution of the "i." The New presentation of the Doctrine of Science or Doctrine of Science nova methodo (1796-1799), supplied a little later in the form of lectures, renounces the dialectical construction in view of a double historical presentation of the I: the ascent of the individual empirical "i" towards the supra- and inter-individual I-Principle; and the subsequent descent from the Super-I of the principles to the multiple participating I's. Yet this new presentation, whose phenomenology of the practical intelligence anticipates Schelling's "history of self-consciousness" in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), the "science of the experience of consciousness" of Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and even Husserl's "genetic phenomenology" in Ideas I (1912), was not historically influential. More exactly, it is the dialectical presentation of the I that experiences an immediate influence, in which the I is presented in distinct capacities and contexts - as an absolute, empirical, infinite, finite, theoretical, and practical I. In this presentation, furthermore, the I is placed in opposition to its contrary, the "Not-I"; its factual existence is attributed to the I itself such that this latter --as inexplicable as it is unquestionable--is made finite through the admission and initiative proposed for it by its contrary. The interlaced and complex co-existence, opposition and community as much of the infinite, unconditioned and absolute I as of the I with the Not-I, in the object in the early Fichte of an artificially separated and technically re-integrated taxonomy of the fundamental protozoic activities that underly, in a conditional manner, the conscious and self-conscious representation of objects. For the characterization of these protozoic activities, Fichte recurs to a concept deriving from the logic of "to posit" (in Latin, ponere). According to Fichte's conception, through the multiple coordinated positional acts of the I it make disposable or opens, in principle, the conceptual space for the particular consciousness and for self- consciousness. In particular, Fichte distinguishes three principles of positing with their respective specific modes: the unconditioned self-positioning of the absolute I, the unconditioned self-contraposition of the Not-I through the absolute I, and the unconditioned position through the absolute I and Not-I as divisible, through which the absolute, infinite I is distinguished from the "i" and the finite not-I's. The self-dependency of the absolute, primary, pure I, from from contra-position, in view of a finite divisible "i," opposed and limited by the Not-I, is developed by the young Fichte as a dynamic of conflicts in the tension between self-limitation and auto-expansion, both effected by the I. Fichte subordinates the principle of the contraposition between the "i" and the divisible not-I's to the alternative of theoretical or practical configurations in the relation between the I and the Not-I. In the theoretical relationship, which is grounded on the possibility of an objective cognitive relation between oneself and the world, the absolute I pre-conditions the finite divisible "i" as conditioned by the finite divisible not-I. In the relationship thus grounded, the I as the subject of knowledge is oriented in its determinant objective executions towards the object together with its properties. In the practical relationship, which is based on the possibility of an intervening relation of action between oneself and the world, the absolute I instantiates the divisible "i" as a determinant of the not-I. In the relationship grounded upon the latter, the not-I is determined by the I in an active fashion by actions or is modified in its existing determination. Starting from the theoretical principle that has as its object the cognitive determination of the I by the Not-I, in the early Doctrine of Science Fichte localizes the place of origin for the determination of objects, which is gradually re-conducted from apparently external instances or not-"i" to the forms of self- limitation that are found in the I. According to Fichte, it is not originally exterior things, existing in a manner independent of the I, that limit the cognitive I in a determining way and, for that reason, become the object of cognitive determination. Or rather, it is the I itself that originally provides the limitation and conceives it, so to speak, as secondary as if effected by the external objects. Fichte sets the residual form of the external determination as a "top," to which the I is subject and that is an impetus for the first time towards a (counter) position regarding the world of objects, which are equally due at the originating moment to the limitation, as to its objectifying conception by means of the I. The resistance itself is not understood by Fichte in an objective sense, seen as an external impulse, but instead as an experience of the limit of the I, which is held within the confines of its effectiveness in the determinination and for which it objectivizes being limited by something as a being topped by something. To the being-determinate of the I by means of the Not-I at the theoretical level, the young Fichte adds the contrary determination of the Not-I through the I in the practical. From the plane of the principles of "i" acts at the referred position to the plane of the relations between oneself and the world, posited through those acts, with the foregoing meaning the following: upon the basis of knowledge of that which is, one arrives at the realization or effectuation of that which is not, but that can and, furthermore, should be. The rational norm of the universal I is the foundation of duty in the goal of determination and transformation, effectuated by the I, from the Not-I. There where the Not-I exists, the I should be; all the relations of the external determination of the I through the Not-I should be moved into self-determined relations of the I. Basing himself on Kant, the normative status of the pure I is understood by Fichte as an "ideal" that is the object of infinite approximation, without the essentially finite "i" being capable of reaching the final infinite-unconditioned state of pure rationality or the pure I. Thus, the infinite-finite I is characterized by the young Fichte with a lack of existence of the I, which means a continual, and partly successful effort overcoming this lack through its internal demand for an evolutionary self-perfecting. Instead of registering sorrow and reacting with affliction before the fundamental limitation of the I in passive determination, which is justly found also in active self-determination and in one's self-determination of the I, Fichte refers to a balancing factor, according to which only an I, who in her incessant pursuit of infinitude remains with every partial success referred to and dependent on the Not- I, can have that experience of limitation, without which manifest consciousness and self-consciousness--which always is consciousness of the finite-determinate--can take place. Wherever there might no longer be a Not-I, there neither will exist a consciousness of the I. According to Fichte, the absolute I should be represented as a purely self- referential activity, which is everything and for which everything else is nothing. The pure, non-empirical I is seen in the course of constituting the individual "i" as the ground of I-ness, which does not itself present the "i" characteristics--given as consciousness and self-consciousness--of an "i" frequented by it. More exactly: the pure-absolute I is a Proto-I than only can be realized as a factual and finite "i." 4.3. The unity of knowing and willing The transit of the primary, pre-individual I toward the particular "i" is not further treated by Fichte in the first presentation of the Doctrine of Science (1794-1795) --that he himself would publish--but instead in the Doctrine of Science applied to the domains of law and ethics, which Fichte also presents after its academic exposition in the form of a book (Foundations of Natural Right, 1796-1797; System of Ethics, 1798). Methodologically both works fall close to the "new presentation" of the Doctrine of Science, which Fichte had already exhibited three times in Jena (1796-1797, 1797-1798, 1798-1799) yet that--with the exception of the fragmentary publication of its initial parts (Attempt at a new presentation of the Doctrine of Science, (1797-1798)--is only preserved in the notes to the lectures made by the students (Doctrine of Science novo methodo, Halle annotations, Krause annotations). Despite the problematic state of its transmission, the Doctrine of Science novo methodo is worthwhile since its discovery and first publication up to the beginnings of the 20th century as an important source for the early evolution of the Doctrine of Science; also because by its balanced and complete presentation--formal as well as regarding content--for which reason it is appropriate for beginning the study of Fichte's first philosophy. Instead of artificially and abstractly placing the pure I in its double status as principle and goal of the rational life--the I as "intellectual intuition" and the I as "idea"--the New presentation of the Doctrine of Science commences with a "postulate" for the listener and the reader, namely: think about oneself and attend to how it operates. As the result of the thought experiment, obtained respectively for each individual, Fichte claims individually validated, yet universally valid, comprehension, according to which I-ness occurs uniquely in the first place due to (and also consists of) the thinker and the thought coinciding in the I-Thought; and both result like two corresponding faces of a single and sole fact. I-ness (the I) consists essentially in the numerical identity of that that thinks with that which is thought; and, on the contrary, where such an identity exists, there there exists a being of an "i" constitution. The nature of the I as the originating identity of the I-Subject with the I- Object is certainly for Fichte the object of a philosophical reflection, in whose unfolding enter concrete acts of consciousness and self-consciousness. However, the subject-object identity in the primary I is not, according to Fichte, a case of objective consciousness of the I as an object; nor is it the concession that such an identity is a case of reflexive self-consciousness of the I as subject. In other words, the primary consciousness of the I is pre-reflexive and immediate and less a consciousness-of than a diffuse internal-being that traverses all extant conscience and which grants, for the first time, to all particular manifest consciousness--including the particular consciousness of oneself constituted in such and such a way--its fundamental "i" characteristic. In its fundamental working, this is the being principle of all other consciousness, the originating, pre-reflexive consciousness of the I replicating --methodologically like phenomenologically and in a refined fashion--the Kantian conception of "universal self-consciousness" that makes all other consciousness possible. Kant had assigned to pure self-consciousness the first person form of, to think and the function of connecting all the contents of consciousness belong to me. Fichte goes beyond the intellectualist Kantian conception of the consciousness of apperception as a product of thought and its subjection to the links between representations, produced intellectually when he conceives the primary self- consciousness of the I as essentially practical - as referring to an action and grounded in it. For Fichte, the primary practical self-consciousness is, more precisely, consciousness of one's actions and, especially, consciousness of oneself directed towards the action. Otherwise, the primary practical self-consciousness is an individual-homogeneous consciousness, in which the action and consciousness of the action coincide in a single and sole fundamental act. The primary consciousness of oneself is directed to acting-toward-oneself and, in return, the acting-toward- oneself is originally conscious. The self-referential structure of the action of the I, through which the I, so to speak, obtains itself, is identified in the Doctrine of Science novo methodo with the willing that Fichte conceives--based again on Kant--as the primary practical self-correlation of determining-oneself. The primary determination of the will, that comprises the I in the first place, is highlighted--as opposed to the subsequent particular determinations of the will in accordance with such and such a goal or through an already constituted "i"--because the finality and the act of willing coincide, just like the object of willing and willing the object. In the particular case of the original or "pure" willing there exists no finality external to the willing, whose comprehension had been foreseen in it. In such a way that mere willing or pure willing remains with the only object (or better, quasi-object) of its willing without objects and free of finalities is willing itself and as such. Thus, pure willing is less a primary or originating willing than a formal will, or rather the mere form of willing, which in Fichte underlies all willing-something and equally utilizes the form of I-think with respect to all thinking-something in Kant. As a fundamental form of the I, pure willing--and in this it is newly comparable with the Kantian "i-think"--not only is formally self-referential, but also undefined with respect to the content and dependent upon the possible contents of willing, those that provide the "i" form of willing. The I that correlates with pure willing without objects is not, then, a singular "i" with its determinate particularities. Rather, it is a pure, universal I, that can be characterized reverting to Kant--starting from whom Fichte develops his theory of the will--as reason, and more exactly as the rational form of willing. Pure willing signifies for Kant and Fichte willing in conformity with reason and its formal norm of strict generality or universality. Pure willing is thus seen to be willing in accord with the moral law, the practical I as the ethical I and the primary self-consciousness as the moral conscience. 4.4. From the I to the "i," to you and to us Along with the practical amplification of the early theory of the I into a theory of pure volition there appears in the new presentation of the Doctrine of Science the deduction of the individual "i" starting from the pure I and the translation of the I-Principle into plural i's and their relations in various forms of socialization. In a series comprised of argumentative steps, Fichte reconstructs the enabling conditions of consciousness and self-consciousness of finite rational beings. As Fichte believes he can demonstrate, for the realization of individual self- consciousness one requires not only the actual limitation of the originally infinite- indefinite and purely self-referential activity from contrary objects, but also a personal experience of the limit by means of encountering its counterparts. Fichte places at the beginning of human intellectual becoming the original pedagogic event, "interpellation," by means of which a mature human, already intellectually and morally formed, requires of another human being, although not formed like them, to enter in practice into the use of reason. The external motive and internal basis of originally unilateral interpellation is, according to Fichte's schematic narrative, the physiognomic presentation of the (in principle virtual) rational being, whose conformity with the figure of the interpellated being--particularly regarding the expressive capacity of the face--is conceived as our display of rational potential and as a stimulus for its activation. Among the material basics of the interpellation process, Fichte counts our bodily disposition--the actual as well as the potential--of the rational being for mutual understanding through signs and particularly, through spoken language. Also the capacity of the living body for voluntary movement of the extremities is included by Fichte under natural functional conditions for human communication. To Fichte's historico-philosophical conquests belongs the "deduction" of the corporal constitutionality of the I, that by means of its material manifestation passes from the general I to the individual "i" and, with that, is self-individualized. However, for the concrete becoming of the I not only its materiality is necessary, but also its socialization. Only in communicative interchange, freely initiated with its neighbors (intersubjectivity, inter-personality) and oriented towards a genuine community does the finite rational being (common "man") become themself. In the systematic program of Fichtean philosophy, the deduction of the body itself thus coincides with the deduction of the other "i" or the other i's. Interpellation, which is directed at the rational and free being, is based on the part of the interpellating being, now acting freely and rationally, in a cognitive-volitional act. This act associates the knowledge of the other--potentially rational and freely acting--with their relationship in ideal conformity with that idea. Correspondingly, interpellation does not mechanically result from action and repulsion, but instead stimulates the rational use of their liberty by the interpellated other. With a concept drawn from the existing theory of judgment at the time, Fichte characterizes the receipt of practical, effective knowledge of the other "i" as "recognizing" and "recognition." Put more exactly: as her recognition qua (potentially) rational and free being. Originally, the interpellation of the other and her recognition are unilateral and for a single time. Yet, when the interpellation is successful in its initial effect for the emergent rational use of freedom then the interpellated "i" sees in the interpellating "i" a similar rational being, and in their behavior before them also recognizes them as such. The latter results from renunciation of mere mechanical retroactivity, and also by means of the limitation of such forms of interaction which fulfill the liberty and the rationality of the other "i." If the originally interpellated "i" results in behavior, it repetitively replicates the recognition arising in part in him. The same exists for the originally interpellating "i" that, for its part, continues the recognition of the interpellated "i" beyond the original act of interpellation. For Fichte, the continual praxis of treating the other as similar to myself falls under the rational assumption of prudent social behavior. To award permanence and reliability to the cognitive behavior--which is rationally based, but in its apparition and its duration is absolutely contingent--Fichte locates the relationship between free beings beneath the concept of law as a set of conditions under which freedom, in the contractual-social sense, can make itself effective. The goal of the law is to make possible a "community among free beings as such." While Fichte conceives liberty--stated more exactly: the external freedom of an action in the social domain--as the first and only innate human right, and subjects all law to the theme and to the finality of maximum enabling of freedom with the means least interfering with her. The instrument for the installation and the imposition of the law of freedom, of the guarantees subordinate to that (rights) and of the defenses of freedoms (prohibitions) is the State - understood as an institution of law with the authority for coercion in the interest of guaranteeing general liberty. For Fichte, the State is essentially a means; and this in light of a goal that goes beyond the State and also precedes it: original-innate freedom of the rational being endowed with will. The juridical order, ruled and sustained by the state, serves directly as a guarantee of external freedom of action. Juridical peace, ensured by the state, indirectly enables the ethical self-perfecting of the free citizen. For the configuration of the State of law, Fichte reverts to the modern political conception of the social contract. However, Fichte pluralizes the juridical form of the State in a plexus of contracts, by means of which the citizens are constituted, firstly, within the State and equally are made subjects of the State constituted previous to them. Despite every extension of law and of the rights of the widest population, it must also be maintained that Fichte conceives liberty in the social context as personal and bourgeois freedom in the foundation of individual relations, and not as political freedom in self-government or even only co-governing of the community. The juridical socialization of man through the political power of the State in the Foundations of Natural Right is completed in the System of Ethics with the moral conditioning of the person through the ethical community. Also within ethics, according to Fichte, freedom comprises the principle and the aim of action. However, ethical freedom goes beyond the external liberty that allows action in the juridical sphere. While law has as object the restriction of each individual freedom in favor of the liberty of all individuals, ethics has as its aim the transfer of the free individuality toward legal-egalitarian universality. Together with judicial action, diverse yet coherent, there appears unanimous, strictly identical, ethical desire. Whereas in the law everyone can pursue their own whenever it does not impede the action pertaining to others, in ethics everyone should desire and do the same. The identico-universal objective of ethical desire is freedom as such, understood as growing and finally complete independence of rational willing with respect to all nature, whether it be found within the rational being as their sensible nature, or whether it is found outside of him in the form of the natural limiting power of free action and of wishing. Nevertheless, the practical goal of complete liberty and of the absolute exclusion of everything extra-rational or irrational is not, for Fichte, a state that can be reached by particular individuals. Rather, to the extent that absolute freedom deals with the ideal form of an ethical evolution, in which the nature--external as well as internal--of being rational constitutes the unrenounceable foundation for the long-term process of self-ethicalization. Fichte's ethics insists, in particular, upon the natural basis of all rational action in the natural mechanism of motivational "drive," also included in moral action. Certainly, in order to become effective in human action, each drive requires the act of freedom of voluntary acceptance. However, and on the contrary, all voluntary action is also dependent upon a foundation of drives. This foundation allows attaining the exterior execution of what is inwardly desired and freely decided. Regarding ethical action, Fichte locates the necessary motivational basis in the "ethical drive." This drive is composed--with regard to its form--of the "pure drive," directed by itself towards independence and--with regard to its substance-- toward a "natural drive," variable in its content according to the outer or inner circumstances. In the Fichtean ethical perspective, the individualization and particularization of the I in the individual "i", normatively formed through law, is inverted in the de-individualization of the particular "i" in the universal I. In the latter, it does not deal--as in the juridical community of free individuals--with a plural we, but instead with a total-I, with a collective I of the community or Super-I which surpasses all individuality, just as the absolute, pure or pre-individual I underlies all individuality. Thus, the juridical conception of a liberty for individuality is followed by an ethical conception of a freedom of individuality. Also in the later evolution of Fichte's politico-philosophic thought are fused judicial individualism and the political civics of his philosophy of right with the contrary agreement of uniformity and socialism in his ethics. 4.5. The primacy of the practical In addition to grounding law and ethics in systematic connection with his fundamental philosophy (Doctrine of Science) Fichte planned the execution of a philosophy of nature and of religion, which for external reasons remained without realization (such as, for example, the loss of his post as professor in Jena because of the dispute about atheism, and his imparting of private classes for years). The four disciplines (nature, right, ethics, religion) together with their foundational unification in the Doctrine of Science in a strict sense form, in Fichte's systematic architectonic, a quintuplicity of perspectives together with their corresponding objective domains --which go from nature, passing through law, ethics and religion, culminating in the complete perspective of the philosophy. The fivefold schematic division is found also in another application, as well as in the divided and integrated structure of knowledge. Starting from the I one arrives, first, at its double unfolding as a rational theoretico-cognitive being and as practical-volitional together with the constitutive relation of the double I with respect to both spheres of objective knowledge and of desiring founded in action (world of sensory being or phenomena, world of intelligible being or noumena). Finally, both activities of the I are placed into a relationship of interchange with their respective worlds, in which the sensible world provides the intelligible world with the material and the basis, while the intelligible world provides the sensible world form and finality. Fichte himself presented his philosophical system, early and continually regarded by him as "the first system of freedom," and with it he demonstrated the absolutely innovative function of the principles of liberty for the grounding of his philosophy together as well as in each of its parts. Just as the right to external freedom of action underlies the sub-system of rights, so in the case of ethics the sub-system of moral duties is based on the internal freedom of one's ethical intentions. In the systematic foundation of nature freedom displays its importance as the formative principle of the given reality, that is culturally and historically transformed through law and ethics. In the sphere of religion, freedom enters into action as self-liberation of the I towards an ethical attitude, religiously oriented with respect to life. In Fichte's central perspective concerning liberty, which must be presupposed and achieved, he shows apparently independent matter as mere material for the realization of rights and duties, and with it also as a sphere for the confirmation of freedom. The sensory world is understood by Fichte with a double function: as a limit on liberty and as an enabling condition for it. Freedom becomes real in the overcoming of the resistances. As the contrary, the following is also true: objects first appear in the phenomenon as resistances to the "i" activity. The primacy of acting over being, of activity as against objectivity and of desiring over observing is designated by Fichte with a term taken from Kant's moral philosophy of the "primacy of practical reason over the theoretical." However, while in Kant the primacy of practical reason concerns, in its directive function, the connection of the theoretical use of reason (determinants of the object) with practical use (determinants of will), Fichte argues for the practico-radical character of all "i"-rational activity, which he considers completely grounded in action. For Fichte, all reason is originally practical. According to its origin, all thought is an action and all knowledge is oriented toward an object, a desire oriented towards a goal. The eminently practical character of the general system of freedom is also manifested in the origin and the practical objective of Fichte's philosophy. Highly abstract reflection, deliberately carried out by Fichte, upon the conditions and the possibilities of knowledge is not an end in itself, yet instead is functionally integrated into a deliberate process of self-comprehension and self-informing; a process that has freedom as much as an assumption as an aim. Reality, underlying speculation and from his perspective freely chosen and artificially formed is already denominated by Fichte early and later with the term "life," which derives from the philosophic doctrine of F. H. Jacobi. For Fichte, philosophy qua the Doctrine of Science originates in life, in which the Doctrine of Science, as well, should also deliberately reverberate. In general, the relationship between philosophy and life is approached by Fichte marked by the interaction between liberty and facticity. The factually existent ought to transform itself through the activity of freedom towards a rational form, like that free reason ought to confirm and realize itself in the factual. The factual limits to the realization of reason are thematized by Fichte recurring particularly in the duality of "natural" pre-philosophic perspectives on the world. Against reality's natural conviction and primordial freedom there competes in life the opposite natural belief in the primacy of being and in the primary reality of things. The philosophical reflection of the extra- and pre-philosophical alternative between, on one hand, the conviction of the living I and of freedom and, on the other, the natural belief in things appears in the systematic alternative of a philosophy of liberty and a philosophy of things. The idealistic philosophy of freedom knows itself, certainly, in possession of better arguments as against dogmatic realism, which hypothesizes the sensory thing in the metaphysical thing. Despite that, Fichte must concede that the original conviction of the authenticity and the finality of freedom, necessary for idealism, cannot be mediated by a conceptual procedure. Therefore, the decision between idealism and philosophical dogmatism is not a rationally based selection of the better position, but instead a choice based on taste and thus, not free, which is taken respectively depending upon "the person that he is" - born idealist or just a born dogmatic. Also the attempted reverberation of philosophy in general, and of the idealist philosophy of freedom in particular, upon life is not a simple question of applying a rule or a case of the subsumption of the particular in the general. Philosophical thought does not become effective, according to Fichte, through a direct influence on life, but instead mediated through the "mode of thinking" or of the "spirit" that idealist philosophizing of the I brings with it starting from the principle of freedom. Correspondingly with that, Fichte's pedagogical ambition is not directed to the transmission of philosophical contents, but instead the proper development, free and independent, of thinking and of desiring. Yet Fichte also has to concede that in every orientation of speculative philosophy towards life philosophy as such and idealistic speculation one cannot comprehend them in a general manner. To be effective and influential upon life, speculative philosophy needs the wardrobe of images and concepts familiarized by everyday life and traditional thought. As a model example of popular communication of philosophical thought we have the summary presentation of his early philosophy, done as a text of formation and edification, namely, the writing that Fichte published in 1800 under the title The Vocation of Man. The succession of the three brief "books" in this work commences with unreflective confidence in the primary reality of natural things and with the conviction, that accompanies it, of the complete integration of the I--only free in appearance--in the natural order regulated under laws. It then advances to the not less apparent autonomy of the I, which--liberated from all ties and rule--dissolves, so to speak, into nothing. Finally arriving at the claims of the I as a free- autonomous member of a supra-sensible, purely intellectual order, which is configured with religious images and theological concepts. Here the fundamental concept for the Doctrine of Science of will is presented--that is, the set of free, practically effective self-determination--in a supra-individual, popularly visible form, as an "infinite will" and "law of an intelligible world." In order to characterize the internal certainty that supports the I--isolated only in appearance--in community with its neighbors, Fichte recurs in the last part of The Vocation of Man to the concept of faith. Invoking Reinhold, a little previously Jacobi had introduced this concept in a critical way against the construction of the Doctrine of Science upon knowledge without a foundation. By "faith" Fichte designates, in what follows, the certainty--attributed by him a little previously to practical knowledge as it relates to action--concerning the foundation as much of knowledge as of action, in practical self-consciousness and, especially, in the immediate consciousness of practical obligation. Yet as opposed to Jacobi, who precedes knowledge with faith as its unattainable material presupposition, Fichte integrates the latter in the self-foundation of knowledge and conceives it as the practical attitude of undoubted confidence in the reliability of knowledge. Fichte characterizes the existence in community of the I (revealed by faith, yet grounded in knowledge) as the "intelligible world." As a unifying principle of such an intelligible order of co-existing rational beings, Fichte focuses on the law of rational action which places the particular will beneath a universal will. The intelligible kingdom serves for Fichte as the properly real, before which the particular "i" represents the potential plural individuation of the intelligible principle in space and time. For this reason, the rational existence of the I consists essentially in the production--or rather in the reproduction--of the original intelligible unity under the conditions of individuality and limitation. With the recourse to the intelligible world and with the transfer of the I, divided into plural individuals, to the community of Us as "i"-beings Fichte undertakes, as much in the popular writing The Vocation of Man as also in the, for that time new presentation of the Doctrine of Science (Doctrine of Science novo methodo), an important clarification of his idealist model, taking on the contemporary perception of his philosophy as unilaterally subjectivist and deficiently egoistic. But, despite all the re-orientation of his philosophy towards a pre-individual conception of pure spirituality (noumenalism) Fichte maintains the practico-free orientation of his thought. Certainly, the individual "i" is only an instrument and vehicle of generic reason (I-total) and of its own legitimacy, removed from all natural order. Nevertheless, the concrete realization of reason can only result through rational individuals and their respective partial praxis. The intelligible or the noumenal world may finally be the only real one, yet the purely intelligible becomes effective only in the form of the "free" individual "i," who is as much naturally determined as she can and should be rationally self-determined. V. Being, knowledge and the world 5.1. The Doctrine of Science and its later presentations The wide teaching and publication activity that Fichte had during his five years in the position of professor in Jena experiences and abrupt end with the loss of the post as a consequence of the dispute about atheism. After 1799 Fichte's public presence is limited to a complete decade of different lessons that he offers privately in Berlin, other than those in Erlangen in 1805 and Königsberg in 1807. The object of the belated lessons is transcendental philosophy and freedom of a Kantian provenance with his central theme concerning the conditions, the possibilities and the limits of knowledge with respect to its carrier (subject) and its object; philosophy that Fichte continues developing under the title of "Doctrine of Science." Just after his naming to the new University of Berlin (1809) and during his four remaining years of life, Fichte newly develops a wide program of lectures, in which his philosophical system attains detailed presentation. In the center of his later lectures is found the exposition of the Doctrine of Science, which Fichte formulates in a new fashion every time. During the last decade and a half of university and private activity there exist a total of 13 different versions of the Doctrine of Science (1800, 1801-1802, 1804/1, 1804/2, 1804/3, 1805/1, 1805/2, 1807, 1810, 1811, 1812, 1813, 1814). Among them, some are found incomplete, but the majority are finished and constructed in an ample fashion. With the exception of an introductory and synoptic text of 1810 (The Doctrine of Science presented in its general environment) that involves a final lesson on the Doctrine of Science of 1810, Fichte himself does not publish any of his presentations. For this reason, to his contemporaries (successors and rivals), first Schelling and later Hegel, Fichte's continual work on his fundamental philosophy remains simply unknown, as much in regard to its content as to its existence. In the perception of his contemporaries, over two decades Fichte remains essentially in the position of the presentation of the Doctrine of Science of 1794-1795, the first and only one that Fichte himself will publish. Although Fichte's continual work on the Doctrine of Science is not given to a wide public to know, nevertheless, for him the communicative context for the continual re-elaboration of his philosophic thought remains essential. The constant question of the Doctrine of Science, namely to inquire into and establish knowing and willing according to the mode and dimension of its validity, is pursued by Fichte in successive, multiple and varied expositions, which always are co-determined by consideration of the intellectual capacity and the formative philosophical horizon of his listener. However, the philosophical environment, within which Fichte tries to make the presentation of the Doctrine of Science effective, is transformed considerably during the course of two decades of his academic and conference activity. At the start he seeks to establish the Doctrine of Science as the definitive form of the post-Kantian philosophy as against the former and contemporary efforts. This leads, with respect to the content, to placing the focus of attention, on one hand, upon the grounding of knowledge through self-evident "principles" and, on the other, in the program of a gradual deduction of the forms of knowledge, knowledge of the object as of action, starting from the system of principles of knowing. In reaction to the first reception of the Doctrine of Science, marked by misunderstanding and incomprehension, Fichte still develops a "new presentation" in Jena, which instead of starting from the apodictic principles of knowledge does so according to the philosophical demands of considering practical intelligence and observing in them the exact realization of the fundamental thought of one's own I, towards an artificial reconstruction. With the presentations of the Doctrine of Science, given 11 times beginning in the year 1800 in Berlin and once, respectively, in Erlangen and Königsberg, Fichte reacts to the broad changes in the philosophical landscape of the epoch, marked by Jacobi and Schelling's meta-critique and Fichte's critique of the Kantian origins. Fichte's later presentations are guided by the effort to go and meet the critique of the Doctrine of Science with a clarification of its fundamental question, its purpose and its focus. Such a clarification attempts to display the philosophical advantages of that system, as well as to demonstrate the defects, which he diagnoses, in the philosophical outlines of his opponents. It is characteristic of the later presentations of the Doctrine of Science that Fichte does not react even once with a polemical attitude or to refute the critique of Jacobi and Schelling which, according to his analysis, is mistaken. Or rather, Fichte takes seriously, despite all the argumentative discrepancies, the alternative focuses of Jacobi and Schelling as challenges to the Doctrine of Science. And this in order to highlight in an ever more clear manner, as much for himself as for others, his own main question in the productive confrontation with contrary positions. Thus, Fichte deliberately draws inspiration and orientation from Jacobi and Schelling's thought, which he tries to make fruitful for the Doctrine of Science. Fichte's strategy in the later presentations of the Doctrine of Science is not so much to refute the opponent, yet rather instead the procedure of making their understandings his own in the light of his philosophic focus. As a result, this leads to a positive reception of the fundamental concepts of Jacobi and Schelling in the exposition of the Doctrine of Science; in this exposition the thought of others does not appear as a foreign import and external influence, but instead as an appropriate and re- configured part of the Doctrine of Science. Among the fundamental conceptions that Fichte receives from his prominent critics and transforms in accordance with the spirit of the Doctrine of Science, one finds the fundamental life concepts of Jacobi and those of the absolute of Schelling. These concepts are presented by their authors against Fichte as a counterweight to the supposed empty self-referentiality of the philosophy which endows the principle of the I with a dimension independent, anterior and prior to reality. In addition to the concepts of life and the absolute as indices appropriated from a dimension of reality that transcends the I, Fichte adopts the concepts associated with them: on one hand, the concept of faith, which according to Jacobi fundamentally surpasses one's own knowledge of the I in reliability and real content; on the other hand, the concept of the phenomenon, which for Schelling expresses the origin of everything conditioned starting from the unconditioned-absolute. The later Fichte integrates the terminology of life and the absolute in the development of his own philosophical thought in order to show, through the explicit and prominent employment of these borrowed concepts, the inclusion of the dimension of extra-"i" fusion, claimed by Jacobi and Schelling, into the Doctrine of Science. In it, Fichte submits the concepts taken from Jacobi and Schelling to a revision from the perspective of his own critico-idealist principle. In addition to the contemporaries Jacobi and Schelling, among those whom the later Fichte re-interprets from sharp critics to required guarantors claimed by himself, there more and more frequently appear two historico-philosophic figures in the new versions of the Doctrine of Science: Plato and Spinoza. In both cases philosophical positions previously combated by Fichte are integrated, such that he appears as the continuer who perfects the previous intellectual efforts. With recourse to Plato's theory of ideas and to Spinoza's of substance, Fichte attempts, like already before with the critical application of Jacobi's life philosophy and Schelling's of the absolute, to impose this substantial reality in the conception of knowledge in the Doctrine of Science which, according to the then contemporary interpretation, remains trapped like a non-substantial subjectivity. The presence of the thought of Jacobi-Schelling and Plato-Spinoza in the later Fichte has, not a few times led in the reception of Fichte's philosophy to the supposition of a dramatic evolution of the Doctrine of Science beyond the presumptive idealism and the subjectivism of the young Fichte towards some assumed realism and absolutism of the later Fichte. The presumed change or turn in Fichte's thought is typically thought as a return to metaphysical thinking, which should have replaced the previous Kantian orientation with the current meaning of classical metaphysics and its fundamental themes of being in general and the existence of God, of the soul and of the world in particular. However, such revisionist evaluations of Fichte's philosophical development ignore the complex relationship, as much critical as affirmative, of the later Fichte with the cited predecessors and opponents. This relationship does not consist of a total and complete imitation and identification, but instead in a selection deliberately planned and a strategically chosen assumption. For this reason, for the correct comprehension of the later Fichte and especially the Doctrine of Science in its latest presentations, it is unavoidable to consider the metaphysical motifs and the traditional themes--among them above all the references to Plato and Spinoza as well as to Jacobi and Schelling--in their respective functional contexts. One must reject absolutely the idea that Fichte continually draws from the arsenal of other authors for his own philosophical ends and with an interest in illustrating and explaining his own positions. The essential identity of Fichte's principal philosophical question--as opposed to the diachronically different presentations--and the considerable continuity in the succession of the distinct versions of the Doctrine of Science becomes clear when one keeps in mind the breadth of the manuscripts and lecture notes preserved and completely published only recently. In place of a few apotheoses in the results, that in the past often had primacy in the interpretive attempts (preferentially those with respect to the Fundamentals of the complete Doctrine of Science of 1794- 1795 and the second exposition of the Doctrine of Science in 1804), they here make visible the serial character of the intellectual task of Fichte, which consists essentially in always presenting a few fundamental ideas in a new or modified form. The obstinate, repetitive and varied Fichtean philosophical praxis is motivated by his conviction that to wrap a philosophic idea in words selected deliberately is certainly irrevocable, yet also always replaceable and, sooner or later, requiring of substitution. Strictly viewed, no particular presentation of the Doctrine of Science with its respective fixed form can, according to Fichte, do justice to the living, "pneumatic" character of knowledge and especially, philosophical knowledge. Only the deliberately exercised change in the terminology and plasticity avoids the false coupling of the live thought and a dead idea. In this consists the need for varied repetition with a view to the adequate comprehension of the Doctrine of Science by the Fichtean audience and readers. The same necessity applies equally for Fichte with regard to his own self-comprehension of the finality and the content of the Doctrine of Science. With the successive alternative presentations, Fichte writes and creates under the project "Doctrine of Science," a cumulative comprehension of knowledge as such, as much in its condition and structural system as its final function. 5.2. From the absolute I to the Absolute With Schelling there emerges, early and almost contemporary with the first formation of his own doctrine (Doctrine of Science) and of the theory of ethics and of right, a sympathetic critic. Apparently even in the role of talented exegete of the innovative philosophy of Fichte, the young Schelling goes on record against Fichte's systematic preference for critical idealism versus the equal originality of that critique and dogmatism as fundamental philosophical options. "Transcendental" realism, that starts from the theoretical knowability of the "things-in-themselves" and which Fichte --following Kant--excludes as non-critical, returns, in this fashion, as an alternative focus of post-Kantian philosophy. Already early on--namely, in the second half of the decade of the 1790's-- Schelling develops independently of Fichte the program of a realist-dogmatic type of philosophy which puts aside the critical-transcendental world genealogy beginning with the I - and in particular nature beginning with spirit. Thus, the concept of nature contributed by Schelling is radically different from the concept of nature of Kant and of Fichte, for whom nature is, primarily, a product of categorical constitution and of a subjectivist position. Seen from a systematic viewpoint, with his equalization of matter and spirit together with the independence of nature, Schelling adheres to Spinoza's conception of a productive, generative nature (natura naturans). Schelling's next step beyond Fichte, taken in 1801 in the fragmentary Presentation of my system of philosophy, is also inspired by Spinoza. Like Spinoza, who subordinates the attributes of being and of thought in a unique absolute substance (Deus sive natura) as a common ground, Schelling attributes the complementary realities of nature and of spirit to a pre-disjunctive origin that is characterized neither by materiality nor by spirituality, and which Schelling introduces as the completely unconditioned indefinite. In a third step, carried out in 1804--above all in Philosophy and Religion--Schelling replaces his own early exposition of the deployment of the conditioned starting from the unconditioned--a presentation which, furthermore, was already oriented to the logical concept of deduction--by the dramatic idea of the "leap" and of the "fall" into the absolute to which one might succumb in their transit towards the finite-conditioned myriad. Fichte becomes aware of all these evolutions, rapidly puts them to the test and responds to them in detail - first in private notes, also in correspondence with Schelling (interrupted in 1801) and later in the final expositions of the Doctrine of Science. The continual development of Schelling's philosophy beneath the sign of the radical concept of human and divine freedom as a concept of the capacity for choice between good and evil, which he presents in 1809 as the work Philosophical investigations into the essence of human freedom, had not already been considered by Fichte. Fichte emerges from the encounter with Schelling's successive projects concerning the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of the absolute indifferent and the philosophy of the absolute which "succumbs to itself" with growing skepticism; yet also with a selective reception of concepts and Schellingian conceptions for the presentations of the Doctrine of Science. In the year 1800 Fichte is in agreement with Schelling's proposition to "go beyond the I." However, as opposed to Schelling, Fichte does not see in it an enervation of transcendental idealism into one of the two fundamental egalitarian forms of the philosophy. Rather, Fichte claims to have already executed the complement of the philosophy of the I demanded by Schelling, as well as having already launched its subsequent elaboration. In particular, Fichte refers to the transformation of the individual "i" through a generically extended will--that already is found in germ in the Doctrine of Science novo methodo and in its popular version, The Vocation of Man-- as well as the deduction of the plural existence of the I starting with the spatio- temporal individuation of a pre-individual spiritual matter, undifferentiated, yet differentiable. Fichte responds to encountering Schelling's requirement for the transcendence of the ego with reference to the respective philosophical representation of the practical fusion of the particularized individuals into an intellectual community of equals under the conditions of freedom. Especially against the philosophic project of Schelling of a philosophy of nature systematically independent of idealism (transcendental) Fichte alleges that the monistically limited materiality of nature cannot explain the characteristic duplicity of reality, in which what is thought can refer to the quantity and quality of an entity different from itself. Above all, Fichte insists versus Schelling on the presence of thinking in all being, while all being exists only as thought - even as that not expressly thought. For Fichte it is possible to abstract oneself from all, but not from the I itself, which as the subject of the thinking cannot be in any way denied. In the same fashion, Schelling's conception of the undifferentiated absolute, that cannot be included in the domain of thinking nor in that of the reality of being finds criticism and refutation in Fichte. Fichte criticizes the emptiness of Schelling's indifferent absolute, from which nothing can result and that therefore cannot be appropriated as the beginning of some other, not to say of all other things. That Schelling maintains, despite that, the deduction of the finite- conditioned starting from the absolute-unconditioned demonstrates for Fichte the ambiguity of the concept of the absolute in Schelling, which Fichte sees oscillating between infinite self-referentiality and self finitude that does not want to end. In the self-establishment of the absolute as ground and consequence, affirmed by Schelling, Fichte diagnoses the clandestine presence of thinking in that shape of the intellectual form of ground and consequence, while the absolute is grounded in itself and something else is now found by Fichte under a sort of legal thinking that operates against the supposed indifference and undeterminability of the absolute. If the Schellingian absolute is conceived as internally articulated self-referentiality, then the infinite-unconditioned coincides with that absolute which Fichte claims to have already shown long ago in the will through the figure of "pure self- determination." In the background of the critical evaluation of Schelling's new focuses, Fichte takes two properties of the Schellingian theory of the absolute for his own elaboration in the Doctrine of Science. Meanwhile he develops--in a perfected continuation of Schelling's thought--an original conception of unconditionality. This is presented under the rubrics of "being," "absolute being" or "the absolute" as completely indeterminate and indeterminable, as completely supported within itself, closed into itself as if deprived of all comprehension and determination. The absolute thus isolated does not have to include itself in the sphere of the subject (thinking) nor either in that of the object (objective being), but instead can be presumed by both spheres. Fichte attempts to be fair with the radical indeterminability of the absolute, inasmuch as it alienates all formal determination as the content of the concept of the absolute and tries to understand its being--or rather its quasi-being--with the minimal, limiting characterization as pure activity. In fact, with that the absolute--recaptured in the later presentations of the Doctrine of Science derived from Schelling--is equated with the "absolute I" of the early presentations, for the "absolute I" of the early presentations from Jena was not an I in the sense of a being conscious of herself, but instead the element presented separate from unconditionality in the individual "i." Thus, to the elimination of the "i" characteristics of conscience and intentionality of the pure I in the early Fichte corresponds the structural equalization of the absolute in the "absolute I" of the later Fichte. Later, and also in that improving on Schelling, Fichte defines the absolute, that resides internally in oneself, with a second formula of being, which reaches beyond oneself and appears in a singular fashion in the phenomenon. The original form of the absolute-in-the-phenomenon is determined by Fichte in a way that brings to the surface the objective coincidence between the concept of the absolute--introduced by Schelling into post-Kantian philosophy--and the fundamental conception of the Doctrine of Science, as it had been established long before. The unique phenomenon of the absolute is nothing else than knowledge; put more exactly, knowledge as such in its absolute and unconditional validity and certitude, independent of all the contingent conditions of realization in a particular consciousness. With his double thesis, namely that only to the absolute does being properly belong and that outside of the absolute only knowledge exists, the later Fichte moves clearly away from Schelling, who together with knowing always grants value to natural being as a genuine form of manifestation of the absolute. On the contrary, for the early as well as the later Fichte all objective reality is only as knowledge, by knowledge and of knowledge. If one wished to reproduce the conception of reality represented by Fichte by means of a model of ontological layers, whose traditional focus upon fixed forms is barely appropriated by the active character of the Fichtean reality, then they would have to differentiate knowing, as the unique phenomenon of being, from being one with the unique absolute, as well as differentiate it from pretty reality as plural secondary phenomena to the original phenomenon. 5.3. The Absolute and its manifestation With the expression, based in Schelling, of the "phenomenon of the absolute," the later Fichte returns to the Platonic idea, according to which the one, the uniquely real, underlies everything else--which actually is not and therefore is not actual-- as the condition and limit of its diminished reality. Thus, in Fichte's terminology a deficient meaning is joined with an efficient meaning. As a mere phenomenon, the manifestation of the absolute--of knowledge--is not and never will be the absolute itself. Nevertheless, as a phenomenon of the absolute, the phenomenon is also the absolute, if indeed in its phenomenal form. With a different terminology the later Fichte follows Plato's double concept of the phenomenon. The being-outside-itself of the absolute in the phenomenon, in which the absolute appears in the phenomenon and at the same time does not appear, is reproduced preferentially by the later Fichte with the concept of "image." In the concept of image are unified the secondary, deduced and diminished character of the being of mere phenomenon with the intrinsic reference of the image to the actual real, to which--despite all differences--the phenomenon-image belongs. To this one adds a double sense of the image in Fichte, that both before and after separates in the "image" of knowledge the copy of the model, or say the imitation of the ideation. A tight reference to Plato exists, when one thinks of the etymological origin of "idea" (eidos) in the verbal form of "to see." The later Fichte frequently applies the terms "insight" and "seeing" as a metaphorical replacement for the concept of "knowledge." In the later Fichte, the term image encounters another significant dimension through the linguistic origin of "image" in the perfect participle of "imagine." As something formed, the "image" is the product or creation and, especially, result of processes of the formation of knowledge, by means of which objects of all sorts are implemented, inasmuch as they are formations or images. With the productive meaning of "to form" and the underlying reference in it to the productivity of knowledge, the later Fichte pursues his own early distinction in the principle of knowing as active and productive. In the later presentations of the Doctrine of Science the focus on the phenomenon qua image corresponds with the position, pre-eminent in the early presentations, of the "productive imagination," which already in Kant figured as the fundamental capacity for constituting the object. The image as a product of the imagination in its productive function, as much for knowledge of the object as for the objects of knowledge, is not in Kant and Fichte merely imagined, but instead is the formed reality. As alternative terminology Fichte presents the difference between the absolute and the image through the distinction between truth and phenomenon. Correlative with this, in the later presentations he marks the divisions in the Doctrine of Science by means of the titles "doctrine of reason and doctrine of truth" and "doctrine of the phenomenon and doctrine of appearance." The doctrine of truth contains only the minimal awareness in a being of the absolute and of the absoluteness of being, yet for whose articulation and communication the laborious procedure of the elimination of appearance and of error is needed. To the presentation of the original certainty of the absolute being is united the certainty of its manifestation as knowledge, by knowledge and of knowledge. To the doctrine of the phenomenon of the absolute (phenomenology) then belongs the differentiation of knowledge according to the carrier (subject) and the object, just like the typological differentiation of the fundamental forms of subjectivity and objectivity with respect to the diverse specific perspectives regarding nature, law, ethics, religion, and philosophy. In the exposition of the fundamental relation, in which one finds the absolute with respect to the phenomenon-image, the later Fichte reverts to the double figure of manifestation and separation (Diremption). The absolute is realized in the phenomenon, yet also is lost in it. Grounding the contradictory relationship of the absolute with its phenomena is an ambiguity constitutive of the absolute itself, in which Fichte distinguishes an internal form and another external one. In its strict immanence the absolute is closed into itself, completely without references and, therefore, absolutely particularized. Or rather, it should be considered in this manner in philosophical reflection upon the pure concept of the absolute. The being of the immanent absolute is completely indeterminate and properly infinite; for this reason, it is conceived and reproduced by Fichte in a grammatical sense as an infinitive. Yet, additionally, Fichte believes he can set a form of exteriorization upon the absolute, by means of which exteriorization or emanence also corresponds to being, the alternative to interiorization or immanence. Fichte conceives the distinction between the internal and external forms of being of the absolute also as the distinction between mere "being" or "position" or "existence." The duplication of the absolute does not consist in a pure parallelism, but instead in a consecutive relation, through which the absolute, which first was closed and enclosed in itself, subsequently and in addition exteriorizes itself. As Fichte explains, the result of the figures of being of the absolute (immanent being, emanent being) are not subject to an unconditioned legalism, which would limit the absolute in the conditions of its manifestation. Rather, the transit from immanence to emanence or from being to existence occurs in the absolute in a spontaneous manner through a leap. Nevertheless, the hiatus in the relation between the interiority of the absolute and its exterior contributes only to the event of the exteriorization as such. Under the presumption that the absolute should manifest itself, the phenomenon of the absolute--its manifestation as knowledge and, especially, as knowledge of the absolute or "absolute knowledge"--is realized with the necessity of law. With terminology and a form of representation that are supported in the internal relation of freedom of the will with the normativity of an action of human desire, Fichte unites facticity and normativity in the being of the phenomenon of the absolute. For Fichte the following is true: the absolute does not necessarily manifest itself; it can also not do so. But, if it does manifest itself, then it should necessarily do so as knowledge and within its legality. With the theorem of the absolute being and its phenomenon-image the later Fichte endows his critical theory of knowledge with a foundational dimension that should guarantee the absolute nature of the validity of knowledge - certainty and unconditional truths pertaining to knowledge as such. Instead of supporting himself in himself and provoking the suspicion of being in an empty circle, the knowledge is manifested as fundamentally marked by an unconditionality that does not flow from itself. In this manner, the being that appears as independently absolute cannot be an identity which resides and is external to knowledge. Rather, absolute being represents in an artificially isolated fashion that element of unconditionality which attains complete development in knowledge per se and, especially, in the unconditional pretensions of certainty and truth in knowledge. If the absolute, instead of representing an ontologically or even theologically separate magnitude, is encountered as the logical-epistemic moment of unconditioned validity, then there exists a complete functional equivalence between the absolute being of the late presentations of the Doctrine of Science and the absolute "I" of the early presentations. Just as the absolute "I" of the early Fichte does not represent a functional "I" with self-consciousness and freedom of the will, but more like the logical-epistemic structural condition of that consciousness, so likewise the absolute being of the later Fichte is an entity in itself, like the originally represented absoluteness that corresponds ideally with real knowledge. The strategic parallel between the absolute "I" in its relationship to the individual "i" and absolute being in its relation to absolute knowledge even attains in Fichte's self-critique the formerly attempted independence or emerges from the absolute character of the "absolute I" and of "absolute being." In this manner, the early Fichte promptly replaces the originally separate presentation of the "I" that faces itself and everything else in an integral presentation by means of a history of the formation of individual self-consciousness. Equally, the later Fichte does not abandon it in the separate introductions of the absolute or of being, but instead integrates the latter in the display of the structure such that the absolute can fulfill itself first and only in the phenomenon. In the later Fichte, as a consequence of this modified presentation, the "I" as being becomes the "I" as form, as the fundamental form of knowledge. 5.4. From the Doctrine of Science to the Doctrine of Wisdom The integration of the absolute into knowledge is developed by the later Fichte in a double form - as the original identification of the absolute with (absolute) knowledge and as the final direction of knowledge towards the absolute. For the later Fichte, according to its origin, knowledge does not have its unconditional, absolute validity (certainty and truth) in subjective or mental acts of an individual consciousness, nor likewise in objective nature, the material of particular things. Rather, the absolute character of the validity of knowledge--or put more exactly, the validity of genuine, certain and necessarily true understanding, distinct from fallible belief--lacks all ontological and epistemological contingency. Insofar as knowledge as such exists only by means of its origin in the absolute, the absolute comes to realize itself, on the contrary, only in knowledge and, especially, in its absoluteness. Certainly the absolute should be considered as prior to knowledge and as its grounding. However, it is thought itself that constitutes the absolute as the corresponding assumption. In this way, the inter-crossing of the absolute is presented in a double perspective: on one hand, with the absolute a magnitude is introduced into the philosophical foundation of the possibility of knowledge (Doctrine of Science) that surpasses all knowledge by definition, even the meta-knowledge and fundamental knowledge of the Doctrine of Science. On the other hand, the operative act of making the assumption of the absolute is an integral part of knowledge in its complex self-analysis. The contiguity and community of the absolute transcending knowledge and the absolute immanence of knowledge are not treated by the later Fichte as a logical contradiction, but as a productive opposition. It reflects the complex composition of knowledge, whose relation to being is marked as much by difference as by coincidence. The later Fichte justly sees the Doctrine of Science as a pendular movement of philosophic thought, which deliberately and intentionally oscillates between the realist perspective on the absolute as something different and separate from knowledge, and the idealist perspective of the absolute as a necessary-conditioned product of the thought of knowledge's self-constitution. With the oscillation of the philosophical presentation between the realist transcendence of the absolute with respect to knowledge and the idealist immanence of knowledge the later Fichte recaptures previous reflections that seek to connect the idealism of the Doctrine of Science with its realism; this is the double figure of "idealist realism" and "realist idealism." Just as was the case in Fichte at first, in the later Fichte the idealist position has preponderance over the realist. In the view of its author, at no time does the Doctrine of Science become a doctrine of being or mutes critical philosophical transcendence into post-critical metaphysical transcendence. The differentiation of the Doctrine of Science with respect to ancient pre- critical metaphysics is explicitly effected in the later Fichte through a radical critique of the traditional fixation of metaphysics upon the classical themes of being, God, soul, and world. Against the general tendency of metaphysics towards being as such (ontology), Fichte argues that being can manifest phenomenologically only in thought, through thought and for thought. For this reason, the fundamental philosophical discipline is not the theory of being, but instead the doctrine of knowledge. Epistemology appears in the place of ontology. With regard to the ancient metaphysical them of the existence and the essence of God, Fichte criticizes the fundamental presupposition of a God distinct from the world, with properly human characteristics like personality, intelligence and will. Instead of that, the later Fichte defends--in continuity with his early conception of God as the basis of universal moral order--a cosmological conception of God, with the absolute located in the world itself as its living and edifying principle, and he not recognizing "any extra-mundane God" or "any world outside of God." With this, the ancient metaphysical conception of the world as created by God and distinct from him also becomes null. In place of anthropomorphic creationism there appears in the later Fichte the complementary conception of the worldliness of God and the divinity of the world. The identificatory reunion of God and world is illustrated by recourse to the traditional theological conceptions of "revelation" and incarnation. However, Fichte also explains that the phenomenal process of the absolute, as opposed to its theological-religious setting and data, is infinite, does not reach a conclusion and constitutionally comprehends the phenomenon of the absolute as a phenomenon of something that does not manifest, and the revelation of God as the revelation of something not revealed. Finally, Fichte criticizes the traditional metaphysical theory about the soul as the false supposition of an individual existence, purely intellectual and independent. For Fichte, individuality is neither original nor ultimately final. Rather, the individual acknowledges the primary potency of the intellectual in the state of particularization and individuation, to which is united the progressive re- integration of individuality into the totality beneath the rubric of the social norms of law, of ethics and of religion. Also, the characteristic separation in ancient metaphysics of the individualized spirit (soul) from the correlatively individualized matter (body) arouses in Fichte an energetic critique. For the early and later Fichte, matter is the principle of individuation through autonomization. The spiritual is manifested in the phenomenon only in strict correlation with the body itself. And furthermore: spirit and matter, soul and body are considered by Fichte as alternative perspectives, complements in the double constitution of the practico-rational being--"man"--who without the body could not actuate and realize anything, but also would not even be able to think and desire. Despite the rigorous critique of the traditional metaphysics of objective being, of the personality of God, of the creation of the world, and of the separate existence of the soul, the Doctrine of Science does not embark upon a polemic of anti-metaphysical thought, nor does it fall into the simple substitution of being through knowledge. From the start and to the end, the self-critique of knowledge exceeds the reduction to mere nature and causal determination, and tends towards the vindication of radical freedom and the self-validation of the bringer of knowledge and the action based on knowledge. His supra-naturalism brings metaphysical characteristics to the Doctrine of Science, so that the Kantian grounding of nature and natural science together with the grounding of liberty and moral philosophy reclaims the status of a "metaphysics of nature" and a "metaphysics of customs." As predecessors of the philosophy specifically developed by himself Fichte names Plato and Spinoza, as well as the Gospel of John, whose prologue is seen by Fichte as an anticipation of his own considerations regarding knowledge, the world and God. The anti- and supra-naturalist intention and motivation in the later presentations of the Doctrine of Science take the double form of the self-grounding and self-limitation of knowledge. Knowledge is seen, on one hand, as free from the natural determination of psychic and physical factors, which occasionally could determine knowledge at its conception and configuration, yet they cannot constitute it in its essence, that is, in its unconditional character of certainty and truth. On the other hand, the self-sufficient legitimacy of the validity or knowledge becomes limited. Knowledge concerns everything known and knowable. The self-formation of knowledge is seen as a process of formation, that naturally disables pristine access to that which underlies all characterization or formation. In view of the paradoxical situation of everything beings only in and for knowledge, yet knowledge itself not being all, the later Fichte assigns to the Doctrine of Science the ultimate task of surpassing the limits of knowledge with the same means of limited knowledge. To this end, the self-constitution of knowledge should be carried out as much extensively as intensively, in such a way that its essential limits flourish in maximum extension and profundity of knowledge. With the exposition of the limits of knowledge and the united effort for self-surpassing that knowledge, in the later presentations of the Doctrine of Science Fichte does not effect a suspension of knowledge, nor does he seek a replacement through alternative recourses. Rather, one deals here with a perfecting of knowledge - the perfecting and complementing of its capacity up to the extreme form of the self-assignment and self- surpassing of knowing. The figure of the perfection of knowledge is for the later Fichte enlightened knowledge of himself, that understands its conditions, possibilities and limits. Optimized knowledge is knowledge's knowledge-of-itself or knowledge as knowing. Stated in the characteristic terminology of the later presentations of the Doctrine of Science, which conceives knowledge as an image, the following applies: knowledge ought to conceive itself as an image and evaluate itself according to the "being of the image" and the "system of the image." The self-understanding of knowledge thus essentially includes the comprehension that knowledge, in accord with its essence, refers to a not-knowing - or to something which is not known positively, yet can be known within limits. But for the later Fichte the self-knowledge of the understanding as knowledge is not limited to an intellectual comprehension and to a theoretical understanding. To the complete self-understanding of knowledge in its limitations belongs, rather, the effort of knowledge for its self-surpassing and its elevation over something which is fundamentally distinct and separate from knowledge. This self-elevation is articulated in the later presentations of the Doctrine of Science in several ways: as the self-destructive abrogation of knowledge as the transit from the knowing of knowledge towards the not-knowing of faith, as the subtractive apportioning of knowledge, as a transit from knowledge to life, as the depersonalization of thought and of desire, and finally as the progress of science towards knowledge. In the later Fichte, common to the alternative expositions of the self- transcendence of knowledge is the confrontation of knowledge with something different from knowledge itself, yet with which, on one side, is found a relation--whether in fact formal, negative and empty of content--and on the other, towards which it is oriented as part of its complementary manifestation. The subsequent expositions of the self-transcending of knowledge coincide also with the change, which its propagates and portrays, of the activity and the spontaneity of acts of knowledge towards passivity and the receptivity of knowledge that has reached its limits; knowledge that opens towards something completely other and this latter opens itself, for its part, to correct knowledge in the moment of its complementation. In this way, the desired self-abrogation of knowledge should pass from intentional distance, from which thought only represents being, to an internalism in which knowledge participates directly and without distance from being. Faith, which replaces and complements knowledge, should surpass the circularity of knowledge, though certainly supported within itself, yet also simply turns toward itself; a transcendence that is carried out through a voluntary confession of an ultimate reality or lawfulness which is at the basis of knowledge. Finally, knowledge's deliberate reflection on its process of formation should lead to a non-thought of the product of the formation, by which knowledge can arrive per negationem at being. Nevertheless, the distinct procedures of knowledge's self-surpassing remain only partially effective. The absolute does not allow being commanded. Nor can the self- critique of knowledge be directly mediated. Fichte can only argue with examples and didactically present how each item, particularly those for itself, must proceed in order to introduce the necessary transfiguration of knowledge, yet whose occurrence is really upheld by the voluntary disposition. In this fashion, possible information about the "other state" (Robert Musil) remains minimal and negative. The non-thought of the form of knowledge takes place only in thoughts, and the abrogation of knowledge consists more in the recognition of its ultimate nullity than in its sharp abrogation and definitive destruction. Fichte himself mostly approximates the radically modified character of knowledge critically by means of recourse to the concept of life. The early Fichte had opposed life to the concept of knowledge and had presented knowledge precisely as non-life; the later Fichte operates with a wider concept of life, that also comprehends the self-movement of knowledge, characterized by action and, especially, by action- towards-itself (subjectivity-objectivity); in place of the old opposition of life and not-life there appears in the later Fichte the difference between suspended and thus "dead" life, and living, lived life, which is experienced. The difference between substantial life and verbalized life corresponds in the later Fichte to the internal difference in the concept of life between objective, realized knowledge and live, continuous life. With this background, the self- transcendence of knowledge is understood as the realization of knowledge, attained theoretically and practically executed. The self-surpassing of life does not for Fichte consist in the renunciation of knowledge, but instead in the internalization of knowledge that arise from knowledge of being and its object to knowledge of life and of itself. Also however, the process of enlivenment of knowledge, theorized by the later Fichte, should finally go beyond knowledge. Despite this, the finality of vitalized knowledge is not non-knowing and emptiness. Instead of being slight or even nothing, enlightened knowledge regarding itself should be more than knowledge. Knowledge should become especially effective and thereby participate in life not only by copying and reproducing, but by modeling and forming. The influence of knowledge, guided by the understanding, tends especially to the voluntary direction of life, a direction toward comprehension and rational purpose which Fichte places under the title of "wisdom, prudence, reflection"; denominations that are connected with the ancient traditions of cognitive and connative self-domination. The final direction of knowledge towards wisdom signifies for the central enterprise of the Doctrine of Science the demand to develop into a Doctrine of Wisdom. Yet, like already in the case of understanding, including the knowing of knowledge in the Doctrine of Science, knowledge--together with its philosophical presentation as the Doctrine of Wisdom--is not an available object of intellectual information and instruction. For the later Fichte, wisdom represents the ideal of the practical influence of knowledge attained theoretically. Knowledge becomes wisdom in the transit from the understanding to the deed and, especially, in the transit from rationally grounded comprehension to rationally grounded praxis. The elevation, in accordance with a goal, of knowledge towards desire corresponds with the prominent position of the fundamental practical concepts in the final presentation of the Doctrine of Science, which expresses with them a continual return to the distinctions of primary practical reason in the early presentations of the Doctrine of Science. To the practical direction of the Doctrine of Science there corresponds, in the later Fichte, the complementation of the Doctrine of Science in the strict sense through the Doctrine of Science that arrives at its application in life. With this occurs the return of knowledge to life in a double form. Within the Doctrine of Science itself it arrives at the complement of the philosophic system in the doctrine of law and of ethics, that the later Fichte newly expounds in Berlin reverting to the first presentations from Jena (Rechtslehre 1812; Sittenlehre 1812). Outside of the system of the Doctrine of Science, yet based upon it, the later Fichte develops a critical diagnosis of human history in the past and in the present, which he connects with a prognosis for the future of human culture in view of reason and freedom - this expressed in a generally comprehensible form and with the explicit intention of broad influence. VI. The philosophy of the future 6.1. Science and art The eminently practical character of Fichte's philosophy is also manifested in his conception of the social effect of philosophy in general and of the Doctrine of Science in particular. Knowledge, including its scientific basis, should never be an end in itself, but instead serve the orientation and the motivation of the action. Taking the step of thinking does not carry out a mere external application of knowledge to life. Rather, knowledge itself is already conceived in a practical sense. As "practical knowledge," it is based upon an internal, "ideal" activity, and is directed towards an external, "real" activity. Fichte also gives value to the pre-eminence of action and its effect for oneself and for his own academic activity and as a writer. As a university docent and writer, he is interested in communication of his own philosophical thought to a public whom he attempts to stimulate and challenge to think and to act autonomously. The general purpose of influence absolutely determines the respective specific selections of the conceptual and linguistic means for the exposition of his reasoning. The public, deliberately pursued by Fichte, consists, in the first place, of students and persons already formed academically, to whom he directs himself in open and publicly announced, yet privately organized, university expositions. In the same manner, the writings published by Fichte himself are directed to a university or academically formed public - whether as a version printed practically contemporaneously with his university lectures, or as subsequent publications from old conferences. Nevertheless, the Fichtean proposition of exercising influence goes beyond his own audience and his readers. The role and the social function that his audience and his readers possess or will possess in the future should have provided Fichte a wider, indirect influence upon the overall society. Nor is the practical ambition of the knowledge limited to the maximum extent or influence and effect of the knowledge. Even of greater importance than the extent is the manner of realization of the desired effect. Knowledge, which has to be communicated to the society, should not only help in understanding the world, but also serve to change it. The attempted transformation of the world is seen by Fichte, furthermore, as an improvement of it. Viewed strictly, Fichte does not attempt to change the already existent into something better. Rather, the practical direction of knowledge has as a goal the construction of a completely new world, to wit, the construction of a better world. The improvement of the world, guided and introduced through practical knowledge, is situated at two levels of human evolution. On one hand, it deals with a modification and an evolution of the relation of rational finite-sensory beings with respect to external nature, who increasingly through their technical efforts are liberated from their nature and are brought into order by means of the rational formation of the will. Fichte propagates and predicts the progressive transformation of nature into culture and of the naturally given into the humanly made. On the other hand, the improvement of the world, analyzed and demanded by Fichte, contributes to the relation of persons one with another. According to Fichte, in social relations there should appear, instead of the transmitted traditions, marked by ancient privileges and historical traditions, the dominion of rational principles for human co-existence. Fichte professes, especially, the realization of liberty and equality as fundamental forms of community on the global level. The general direction of practical knowledge towards the progressive betterment of the natural and social relations of persons conditions the characteristic focus of Fichte's philosophy on the future. The future, which Fichte adopts as a theme, is not an imminent series of events, whose occurrence could be prepared for or prevented. The future with which Fichte deals is essentially open and must be produced by the people themselves; yet thus is also not essentially given through to a conclusion and is thereby infinite. According to Fichte, knowledge is decisive for the formation of the future, given that it appears as previous knowledge. Being practical, something is not known in knowledge either as existing or as something imminent, but instead as something to be produced. Considered as an image, practical knowledge is not an imitation, but a model. Philosophical futurism differentiates Fichte's conception of history from that of his previous followers and that of his subsequent critics and opponents. As opposed to the Fichtean philosophy of self-formation of the future, the philosophy of Hegel appears as a philosophy of the present, that instead of a preparation for a completely different future serves the affirmative identification with the here and now. On the contrary, the philosophy of Schelling is presented primarily in the melancholic internalization of the former past, which even profoundly affects the present as a foundation (Grund) and abyss (Abgrund). In Fichte, the conception of the open-infinite future that men should form elevates freedom--together with knowledge--to a fundamental factor of history. But historically effective freedom does not mean for Fichte the arbitrary selection of ends and means for human self-realization. Rather, freedom is classified under knowledge, whose understanding sets the goal and shows the necessary means for the realization of the freedom. The specific freedom of practical knowledge consists, in a negative sense, in the freedom of natural determination, while in a positive sense, in the liberty of a rational destiny. To be able to become socially and historically effective, the knowledge of the future needs agents who know how to effectively transmit their rational comprehension, based upon acts, to other persons. Fichte names the immediate destination group of his philosophical conferences and of his writings, thanks to whom knowledge can and should become real, as "wisdom." The concept corresponds to the Latin term, also applied by Fichte, of "eduditus." This does not primarily designate a person formed scholastically (scholasticus) or connoisseur of a science (doctus) but instead to someone who possesses knowledge acquired independently, such that they can transmit it to others and others can apply it. The social concept of wisdom in Fichte is conceived in such a wide manner that it comprehends scholarly and university activity, and the free labor of writing, as well as the politico-juridical practice of administrative and government posts up to the position of constitutional governor. Despite all specific differentiation according to position, task and function, the sages are associated through knowledge that they hold commonly, through society, which should be supra- and inter- generationally active for perfecting and for progress. The formation of history foreseen by Fichte, through the sage, is of a mold as much political as pedagogic. The opposite concept to the sage as subject and agent of human self-perfecting is formed, according to Fichte, by the "people" as the subject of perfecting. However, for Fichte the opposition between the sages and the people is not absolute and insuperable, but rather historically conditioned and limited. Naturally, the theoretical and practical efforts of the sages with regard to formation are aimed so that all persons, independently of their educational level and their social position, can take an active part in the process of human perfecting, of the self and of the world. In order to guarantee an effective transit from knowledge to its realization, Fichte includes in the formation of the sage the development of communicative capacities and technical abilities whether in discourse, writing or action. Fichte sees the sages not only as persons who know, but also as persons who act creatively, flexibly and are formative; put briefly, as "artists" and, especially, as progressive and creative formers of human development. With this, "art" does not have the meaning of an aesthetic ingredient for life as in the established "fine arts"; nor is it a mere useful art according to the model of the manual arts. Rather, the wise art of the savants of art is found in the tradition of the "liberal arts," that in the old university guaranteed the general formation of the students in the fundamental logico-linguistic disciplines (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and in the basic mathematical subjects (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Yet Fichte replaces the fixed canon of the pre-established materials and technical knowledge from the old schools and universities with the focus on philosophy (Doctrine of Science) and practice directed towards the expansion and the application of knowledge in the university of the future, which he envisioned. The fundamental characteristics of his philosophy of knowledge and the art of the sage are developed by Fichte in cycles of university lectures upon the duties of the sage - the Latin title announcing the lectures reads de officiis eruditorum. Fichte offers the lectures on the morality of the sage once in Jena (1794), Erlangen (1806) and Berlin (1812) respectively, the the curricular and conceptual context of the contemporary presentation of the Doctrine of Science. Common to the three cycles is the internal connection between scientific pretension and "moral," ethico-social obligation, by means of which Fichte hopes to instruct and inspire the sages of the future for the scientific-artistic work in the society. The Jena lectures concerning the definition of a sage integrate the presentation of the social obligation of the scientifically formed person in the wider plan of the destiny of humanity in general, that consists in the pursuit and realization of accord within oneself under the guiding idea of pure "i"-being. The particular position of the sage is due to the human destiny of free self-perfecting, for which preparatory education is needed as well as introductory formation by means of a human model, scientifically versed and ethically qualified. Furthermore, the young Fichte places the measures of education and formation under a pedagogic perspective, in which the sage and the people should deliberately direct themselves to one another. In the Erlangen lectures about the essence of the sage he explains the knowledge of the sage through the concept, taken from Plato, of Idea, which Fichte conceives as theologically singular to show the non-empirical origin and the normative pretension of an alternative universal order to construct. With the goal of the progressive realization of the ideal world in the given and real world, Fichte demands from the sage, in addition to understanding of the eternal idea, internal familiarity with the proper time and the free-sovereign disposition of forms of efficient influence upon his contemporaries. In accordance with Fichte's exposition, the divine idea is realized in such a way in the sage that it completely supplants one's personal life to present itself in its place. The lectures in Berlin concerning the definition of the sage apply the term of "regard" for the vision of the theologically identified idea which guides the sages; regard in the ancient sense of "sight." For the fundamental aspect of the sage's wisdom, to know is separate from the everyday and the given, and for its transforming effect in the society Fichte applies the term, Platonically inspired, of "enthusiasm." For the remainder, Fichte subordinates the particular sages to a generic concept of sage that corresponds to the pre-eminence of the human genre in the long-term collective progress against the fragmentary and continually frustrated courses of the particular individuals. The lectures of Erlangen and Berlin on the definition of the sage assign to it the task, now in tangentially theological terms, of the co-creation and the continuous creation of the world. Underlying the elevation of the sage, the artist and creator is the idea that the world, insofar as it is conceived as a divine creation, should not be seen as closed and completed by the divine act of creation. Instead, the manifestation of the divine in the finite is an infinite process, that essentially is established through the cooperation of people and, especially, through their free action. In the pedagogical perspective of the later Fichte, the creation of the world becomes a common question for the human genre, in which the sensory world offers the means for the progressive realization of the intelligible world. To the structural unity of the sensory world and the intelligible world corresponds the social union of the sage and people through the instrument of the "popular doctrine." 6.2. Reason and history The popularization of knowledge and, especially, of philosophical knowledge --propagated and practiced by Fichte--has its focus of attention in the critical confrontation with its own time, that Fichte situates in the double context of its historical origin and its future goals. In the center of the popular Fichtean philosophy is found thought about history, in which the pre-determined succession of times is presented along with the proper autonomous action of persons compatible within themselves and dependent upon each other. For Fichte, the course of history according to a plan is established and is dependent on the cooperation of humans in the formation of their own history. The exact unfolding of the history is not pre- determined, not even its successful culmination - both things are subject to the unpredictability of human liberty and of empirical contingency. It is a form of the passage of history that allows ordering and considering the factual events in a past and present. From a philosophical perspective Fichte believes he can subsume the course of history under a general scheme. The historically effective and ruling powers of the course of history in their mutual relation are for Fichte reason, nature and freedom. Human history in Fichte has its presumptive point of departure in the completely instinctive realization of a rational order among persons. The complete interchange of nature towards liberty in the rational foundation of the human world constitutes the eventual theme of the history of the human genre; an interchange in which the ancient directive role of (rational) instinct is replaced by rational reflection and free decision. In the midst of the legendary ends of human development Fichte localizes his own era, that he sees marked by the complete loss of the previously given order and the temporal absence of the human world's new free order. The schematic course of history proceeds, in this way, from reason without freedom, passing through freedom without reason, until it is reason with freedom. Through the insertion of a respective phase of transition between the end points and the empty middle of history Fichte arrives at a number of five epochs of the world, to which he awards distinct titles, marked theologically: beginning with the "state of innocence of the human genre," descending from there to the "state of growing sin" up to the "state of complete sinfulness" and from here newly ascending from the "state of growing justification" until a "state of complete justification." The conception, centered around reason and liberty, of total historical time and its succession in five epochs is developed by Fichte with pure conceptual means like the philosophical construction of history. The pertinence of one era is not to be determined, according to Fichte, simply in a chronological mode, yet instead is based in the given factual affinity of a culture's representatives and participants with respect to the principle and the constitution of the epoch. Fichte assigns to the third era of human history, which he identifies with the "actual epoch," the enlightenment principle of not recognizing and not giving value to something that cannot be understood with the common means of understanding. The cultural manifestations of the prevailing intellectual principle of actuality are, for Fichte, the reduction of the society to the concrete individual and to her self-interest (individualism), the ontic reduction of reality to the sensorily experimentable (empiricism), the empirical privilege of doubt (skepticism), and the ethico-religious orientation of human ambition toward personal freedom (eudemonism). Fichte criticizes the pseudo-enlightenment equivalence of the real with what is comprehended through mere understanding; and instead of that, defends the contrary thesis, according to which only the real can be properly understood. Nevertheless, Fichte appreciates in the evaluative spirit of the enlightened era and in its construction of a critical public space the historical dissolution of prejudices and superstition by means of the understanding itself; a comprehension that Fichte requires lifting from the naturalist plane of mere understanding to supra-natural summit of reason and freedom. At the center of the Fichtean universal history, based upon actuality and oriented to the future, is found the history of the States. To the thematic focus of philosophic consideration of humanity's history and its progressive evolution corresponds a concept of the State, that subordinates individuals to a superior totality and for the first time grants sense, finality and meaning to their insignificant particular lives . Yet the State, in accord with its ideal concept, is not actually an instrument of repression, but the legal outline within which the individuals can for the first time attain their liberty and self-responsibly direct it towards a rational life. Here Fichte pursues his own early reflections about the instrumentalization of right and the State for the enabling and incentivization of free and rational self-determination. In the Fichtean perspective of the philosophy of the State appears the total historical development of humanity as an evolutionary movement that moves from the despotism of the Near East--marked by arbitrary domination and the impossibility of freedom, whose traces Fichte pursues up to the contemporary Ottoman Empire--and passing through the discovery and the struggle for freedom for many in ancient Greece and Rome, until the idea of a universal equality and liberty and its--up to now limited--realization in Christian Europe - especially in post-reformation Europe. At the center of the juridico-political philosophy of history is found the doubly-phased progress towards the universal dominance of right and of the law, which might be accompanied by an unequal distribution of rights, and later advance towards equality in the sense of equal rights for all. Particularly noteworthy in the Fichtean political history of post-ancient Europe is the guiding idea of an intra-state unity and a supra-state identity of the European medieval and modern States, that Fichte sees durably united through their double origin, namely, in the later consequences of the migration of peoples and in the repercussions of Christianization. Corresponding to this, Fichte also sees, behind all the apparently heterogeneous population of Europe with its differences of language, culture and politics, "a single people." 6.3. Nation and education The political philosophy of universal history, that Fichte will present for the first time in the popular conferences about the Fundamental aspects of the current age in the years 1804-1805, with its historical integration of the existing egoistic-individualist culture in a story of decadence and progress by the human genre discovers its actualized continuation three years later in the Discourse to the German nation, which was presented before a private and educated public. The external motive for the new evaluation of the current actuality is found, on one hand, in the French occupation of Prussia following a disastrous military defeat against Napoleon in 1806 and, on the other, in the compliance of the German States to the French Empire, which transformed them into an agglomeration of protectorate vassal States and occupied States. Instead of attributing, without vacillation, the loss of state autonomy to the military debacle, Fichte pursues the deeper origin of the political catastrophe in a fundamentally moral-spiritual crisis, in which the egotistical orientation of the governors as much as the governed was proven incapable of energetic action for the self-defense and the self-preservation of the community. But in Fichte's opinion, effective self-surpassing of egoism also created the cultural-spiritual space for the deliberate introduction of another complete and fundamentally transformed world. The opportune point of departure for the possible transit toward the next epoch is found, for him, in the part of Europe that has attempted the consequential self-destruction of the era of egoism, that is, the German States. With the concept "German nation" Fichte reverts to the traditional term for the German origin or nationality which served as the specific denomination of the new medieval-modern Roman empire in the succession of the Imperium Romanum (Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation), yet that also showed the country of origin of business- persons or students who lived abroad. In this mode of usage the single German nation is contrasted with the plural (particular) German States, which were only precariously united by the imperial constitution. Furthermore, at the time of the Addresses the "ancient empire" was crumbling into self-dissolution, such that the term "German nation" did not correspond to any actual political entity. When in the Addresses Fichte makes the denomination "German nation" independent, hitherto applied to history in an attributive mode, and into a noun and names it as the recipient of his 14 consecutive discourses, we do not deal with a restorative or reactionary maneuver, with which one attempts to remember or revive a past figure of German history. Rather, the naming by Fichte is an innovative and completely revolutionary process, that also matches the configuration of the object of Fichte's politico-nationalist discourses. With the designation "German nation" Fichte aims neither at the regional citizens of the different political structures upon German soil, nor to the population diversified by dialect and custom in the particular States. Rather, in a creative act of political imagination, Fichte directs his Addresses to a population without its own politico-state or historico- geographical identity. Nor does the denomination "people" do justice to the interlacing, as much imaginative as universal, of Fichte's creative thoughts on history, because "people," seen politically, suggests submission (people-State) whereas the "German nation"--as much expressed as attracted by Fichte--deliberately ignores the opposition between prince and people and, precisely, seeks to overcome it. In its orientation toward a future "republic of the Germans," the Addresses are politically explosive and are affected by the political concept of nation from the French Revolution. Later, the adaptive and manipulated reception of the Addresses in the environment of the First and the Second World War would make Fichte's Addresses an anachronistic document of aggressive German imperialist nationalism. In the usage that Fichte's gives it, the term "nation" itself is not characterized, for example, in an ethnic manner. Certainly the general term denominates in its Latin root (natus) origin or provenance. However, Fichte does not conceive the provenance of the "German nation" as a tribal origin, but instead as belonging and spiritual affinity. Nor does he use the term for an ethnographic distinction of the "German nation" with regard to other nations, but for the geographic differentiation between the populations strictly stemming from Europe. In the Fichtean comprehension of history, the German States--among them Fichte counts the European nations of the north--form together with France and the rest of the Romanic nations a national community, whose sub-nations, culturally and politically differentiated, belong to a single class by reason of their common origin, and in the future should live together instead of only co-existing or indeed living one against the other. Fichte's fixation on a particular nation--his own--is found in the wider context of European thought about history in which nationalization and inter-nationalization should be mutually conditioning and loyalty to one's own country should serve as the specific direction of each nation towards the European and international goal of a community of nations. With the central idea of the Addresses, that is, the international-cosmopolitan intention of the nation, Fichte recurs to his previous reflections on international law and on international pacific order. The intra-European difference, argued by Fichte, between the (at the moment virtual) "German nation" and the other already politically constituted nations--in the first place, France--is neither ethnically nor politically motivated. For Fichte, what is specific about the "German nation" is based, rather, on an historical factum from long before with long-term consequences for the history of Europe - this is, the regionally limited Romanization of the trans-Alpine space and the division, following from it, between the "free" resident population and the Romanically civilized Germanic population. Fichte sees the politico-cultural difference between the Latin-speaking culture of the Romanic peoples and the Germanic languages of the non-Romanic peoples of the north of Europe. The thematic focus on the propagation of Latin is underlain by another philosophic conception of language and of thought, in which language is considered as a means of intellectual communication and, especially, as mediation of spiritual contents. Fichte takes language in its communicative capacity with regard to the spiritual as a disposition for human formation and comprehension. In this, Fichte considers that the formative effect of language upon humans is more meaningful than that formation which men can impress upon it. The subject of language is not, therefore, the person and even less the particular person, but instead her genre in its respective specific manifestation under given historical conditions. Nevertheless, the ancient cleavage in Europe is not exhausted, for Fichte, in the descriptive difference of the arising Romanic peoples, linguistically speaking, and the peoples who remained Germanic. Fichte makes the historical process responsible for the foreign linguistic formation in the specific cultural evolution of the Romanic nations. In place of the former internal affinity between thought and language there appears in the Roman, according to Fichte, the interference of an external linguistic culture distant from the reflection and the linguistically articulated aspirations of its vital basis and subjects it to an alternative language and thought. Yet decisive for the process diagnosed by Fichte of germanico-romanic alienation are not the respective preferences and disadvantage of the linguistic cultures involved, which Fichte regards as genuine, but instead only the process of cultural hybridization per se, in which the entering culture displaces and overlays the former linguistico-cultural character. Nor do the ideas of originality and ascendency which Fichte presents reflect an essentialist or even ethnic conception of the philogenetic linguistic identity. He uses them, rather, as functional expressions for the structural differences between homogeneous and heterogeneous cultural forms. The concept of a people, operative in the European construction of history, indicates in a completely neutral manner a society of persons, understood as interchange and procreation in a corporal and spiritual sense. The functional differentiation beween an originative language, together with the correlative culture, and a foreign language and culture experiences a widening of values when Fichte places the historical difference of the Germanic and Romanic linguistic cultures with his own philosophical distinction between free, living, critico-idealist thought and unfree, dead and dogmatic-realist thought. Due to this, from the originative thought and speech of the non-Romanized European peoples arises their capacity for the true philosophy of liberty; from the alienated spirituality and linguistic character of the Europe's Romanized populations arises their limitation to deficient thought about things. To the false philosphical consciousness of the Roman and the true wisdom of the German there corresponds also, according to Fichte, different political forms of cultural formation. The first of the cultural formations starts from the dominators and thus is effected in an external manner, while the second part of the people and their particular representatives--Fichte refers to Luther--thus should be rooted in the people themselves. In addition to the linguistico-cultural alienation of people with respect to their spiritual roots, the partial Romanization of Europe leads also, according to Fichte, to the political alienation of the peoples with respect to their princes. The significant consequences of the perturbed relations of domination are absolutism in pre-revolutionary France and Caesarism in post-revolutionary Napoleonic France. On the contrary, the non-Romanized peoples of Europe--and especially for the German States--validate a political culture of consensus for Fichte, of freedom from arbitrary domination and from violence, and of agreement between prince and people; a political culture that, however, due to external influences and new developments Fichte views as historically and actually limited and threatened. With the double background of the privileged historical position in the European cultural sphere of the German language and the actual destruction of an autonomous political life in the German States, Fichte sketches a politico-social plan for a "German nation" to be formed for the first time, which should essentially begin from the people and from their representatives instead of from the degraded and ruined dominators. At the center of the Fichtean philosophy of political formation the project for a "national education" is found, by means of which the unity of the "German nation" should be produced, beyond civil limits and the State. As opposed to the early enlightenment proposition of an "education of the people" with its focus on the pedagogically ignored rural population--Fichte refers here particularly to the theoretical and practical work of the Swiss educator Pestalozzi--the educational formation of the German nation should comprehend all the circles of the population. Fichte attempts to abolish the traditional private domestic education of the so-called higher circles and replace it with public education and universal formation. In his theme of the overcoming of prejudices and privileges, and also liberation from ignorance and superstition, Fichte's pedagogical reform is presented as egalitarian and liberal--and thereby as specifically modern. The propagation of education and the transmission of knowledge concerning domination of the body itself, the formation of a responsible will and the formation of the person as a citizen also unite the pedagogy of Fichte with ancient ideas, especially classical-Greek, about the political formation of the citizen through gymnastic and musical education (paideia). Particularly noteworthy are the resonances of public education by means of the educational State (Politeia) outlined by Plato, that is manifested in the uprooting of learning from the familiar circle and the implementation of an educative ethico-political program upon a philosophical base. But as opposed to Plato, whose model of the city-State is constructed at the highest level of supra-historical stability and immobility, Fichte arranges his educational politics for the "German nation" into a wide and open traversal of history, that should approach the still influential past, going beyond the contradictions shared in the present, toward a peacefully united future. The politico-pedagogical formation of the "German nation" is not in the service of a planned conquest nor a deliberate usurpation of Europe, in the style of the regenerator of the revolution and Corsican political arrival Bonaparte, to whom Fichte denies a proper dynastic name (Napoleon). Rather, in Fichte's political vision of history the pacific Europe of the future should emerge from the mutual enrichment among the Romanic civilization, the Germanic culture and the ancient legacy. In a theoretical perspective on the State, Fichte sees the European supra-nation of the future as a federative community of free States instead of a universal imperial monarchy. 6.4. Law and religion In a complement to the schematic sketch of a complete background to history in his Fundamental aspects of the current age and the programmatic project of a common European history in Addresses to the German nation, in the short and unexpected ending of his life Fichte outlines a universal history of freedom. It includes the course of thought and political action since the founding of the States in the early Near East, passing through the political achievements of Greece and Rome, until Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, and Modernity. At the center of the universal history of freedom is found the idea of law, according to which human desire and doing underlie obligatory rules that particularly orient and order the life of the political community. In the "Conferences on varied subject-matter in political philosophy" of Berlin in 1813, that later appeared under the title, The doctrine of the State or, on the relation of the originative State to the kingdom of reason, Fichte pursues the development of the political idea of law since the autocracies of the Near East, passing through the forms of domination by the aristocracy, democracy and the republic in European Antiquity, until the modern monarchies. With that, his politico- philosophic interest has in mind the construction of a legally ruled order, that binds the governors as much as the governed and in this fashion ties them together. The guiding viewpoint of the politico-philosophic telling of history is the formation and development of right as a reliable rule for social action. The historically dimensioned concept of law of Fichte's so-called Science of Rights places the focus of legal regulation not on justification and permission, but instead in obligation and in command. In the later Fichte, right contains as a primary political category legislation for social action and has for a theme to guarantee the legality of such action. The liberation of tutelage does not have priority in Fichte's juridical thought, but instead the legal enabling of social action through its liberation with respect to illegal coercion and arbitrary power. As a successor to Kant, Fichte thinks of freedom as realized and guaranteed primarily through law. Fichte presents the political history of the idea of right as a long-term process of growing comprehension of nature and the function of law, as well as the diffusion, united to the foregoing, of legal relations. The arena of the legal process in the political society is for Fichte the State with its capacity and its authorization for the realization of coercive law. The evolutionary movements of rights as the fundamental form of state order consists in the growing reunion of the idea of right with the idea of equality, which instead of privileges for some few introduces and demands equality before the law first for several, later for many and finally for all. The requirement of juridical equality is seen by Fichte as theoretically understood and practically realized--at least in principle--above all by two successive historical steps. The beginning of juridical progress performs the transit from the realm of violence towards the dominion of law, which Fichte sets in the Greek discovery of the political form of life in the autonomous city-state (Polis). Before the law all members of the political community are equal and are equally subsumed under the obligations and the guarantees of the law. Fichte localizes the criterion for the enjoyment of equality of right in the Greek city-states--as also in the successor Roman Republic--in political status. Equality of right or equality before the law and, thereby, also equality with each other, in accordance with the understandings of Antiquity, forms the complete citizenry of a state structure; all certainly, yet only them. Characteristic in the political comprehension of law and in the juridical comprehension of politics is that Fichte does not fasten political progress of juridical relations on equality of participation in power by the citizens, but instead their equality of participation upon right. Formulated in the ancient terminology of Greek thought on the State, Fichte's attention is not on the government by the people (demokratia) but instead upon equality of the law (isonomia). Therefore, the politico-juridical form of life is not limited to the comparatively liberal and permissive Athens of Pericles, but equally comprehends the rigid and politically rigorous form of its opposite, to wit, Sparta beneath the dominion of law. The second juridical advance identified by Fichte goes from the juridical privilege of the full citizen in classical Antiquity towards equality principally of all the members of a politico-juridical community within Modernity. Fichte sees the beginning of the extension of juridical equality in the intentional change in the subject of law, which advances from the character as citizen toward that of person and from the specifically political rights of the citizen to those that correspond to man-as-such. In place of the maximum extension of juridical equality through the equality before the law of ancient Rome appears--at least in principle--the juridical equality of all in modern Europe. The "legalization" of political relations in the community is caused according to Fichte's comprehension of history by a growing understanding of the meaning and the goals of right and the law, which do not limit or, even, suppress freedom, yet instead are appropriated to guarantee it and make it absolutely possible. Fichte puts the apprenticeship process primarily in the hands of the governors themselves, who with their role like legally empowered executors of coercive law, present themselves at the same time like civil pedagogues, who should foment a culture of accord. For the distant future of the politico-juridical order, Fichte foresees the disappearance of the State as an institution of coercion. In its place at the end of history there should appear respect and the free observance of law. Terminologically, Fichte interprets the difference between the coercive legal order and the free legal order as the difference between "State" (real) and "kingdom" (ideal). He defines the kingdom more precisely as the "kingdom of right" and as the "kingdom of liberty." The kingdom forms the supra- and post-State community of free persons, in agreement in their comprehension as well as in their action; people no longer comprehended as citizens in a State with particular laws, with authorization for coercion, but instead as members of a widely cosmopolitan society of equals that is in the service of the "formation of the free personality, independent of nationality." The dominion without coercion of law and of freedom has in Fichte the character of a juridical community oriented towards the ethical, that replaces external coercion with internal self-obligation. With the predicted dissolution of external state coercion through the internal and spontaneous observance of the law, Fichte recurs to early ideas about the transition of the political community from the juridical realm toward the ethical realm, above all Kant's conception of an "ethical community." Yet as opposed to Kant, who considers the republic of virtue as an ideal- imaginary order contrasted to the State of law, Fichte conceives the integration of the juridical order with ethical conviction in the context of a philosophy of history, which imagines the State as a means to an end; an end that goes beyond the State itself. Similarly the religious conception and Kant's idea of an ethical community encounter their transformed continuity when Fichte equates the realm of right and of liberty with the entrance of the "kingdom of God on Earth" or with the "heavenly kingdom." The difference from Kant, for whom the religious community goes beyond the limits of space and time, is found in the radical conception of a nearer, intra- mundane "kingdom," with which Fichte connects with his early politico-philosophical saying: "to discover heaven already on this Earth." Thus, Fichte's late recourse to religion and theology is politically oriented and juridically motivated. For Fichte, at the start of political history one finds the founding and the foundation of state power through an invocation of a divine order and legislation. The naive confidence is the authenticity and the reliability of the divine laws, that Fichte tries to find equally in priest-governors and believers, allows him to frame political "theocracy" as "blind faith." Instead of unenlightened fideism at the other extreme of history there should appear an understanding and recognition of the rational foundations of right and law, which should lead to a final state of an enlightened and self-liberated humanity. To the historical growth in comprehension of the rational nature of state law corresponds the historically growing understanding of theology and of religion, generally, and of the theological basis of political domination in particular. At the start of politico-religious development Fichte places his anthropomorphic concept of God with the idea of a divinity conceived of as a person with their own will. The goal of politico-religious development is formed, in Fichte, with the rational idea of a universal divine order, that grants the person liberty for thought and their own actions and conceives the concept of God in a non-personal fashion and as the ground for enabling free action. When Fichte characterizes the final historical State of voluntary juridical action as a "theocracy," we do not find there a regress to religious forms of thought over the political. Rather, what is happening is the translation of a traditionally proven concept to its ultimate meaning, stripped of antiquated myths and obsolete images, and shaped by the double requirements of reason and freedom for human thought and action. In the later Fichte "theocracy" has the meaning of domination of reason and legislation of freedom. And this coincides with the later doctrine of right not treating the divine kingdom, imagined and desired by Fichte, as a kingdom of over there, but rather is treated as the real world in space and time, freely and rationally improved through the work of humans. The decisive distance of Fichte with respect to the ancient religious and theological ideas and prejudices is also seen in the explicit critique in his later political philosophy of the central doctrines of the Christian faith. Particularly in the so-called Science of States Fichte denies the conception of sin and expiation--of human culpability and divine redemption--as well as the miraculous activity of the creator of the Christian religion, whose life Fichte comprehends as a moral example, instead of interpreting his demise in a theologico-dogmatic way. In Fichte's polemical expression all who believe in the Christian doctrine are mere "Christians," representatives of a specific dogma. On the contrary, those who should properly be called "Christs" are simply those in whom the meaning of the passing of the creator of the religion orients one's own life by means of his example. That which is preserved from religion in the Fichtean political theology is a specific perspective on the world, in which one's gaze on the existing reality is embellished by the light of the new order, anticipated rationally and freely, in human relations. Nevertheless, the real perfecting of the world is not due to a "religious gaze at ourselves and the world," but to one's historico-social action in accordance with right and the law. Fichte's thought can seem particularly religious only if the world is reduced to nature, the spiritual to the material and the moral to the sensory, as Fichte might have observed of his contemporaries. VII. Fichte yesterday, today and tomorrow The immediate effect of Fichte upon philosophical development is essentially limited to the half decade of his writing and academic activity as a professor in Jena. However, his influence over the course of those few years is wide and deep, and extends from the inspiration of the early works of Schelling and Hegel up to the philosophic impress of the early Romanticism of Jena. The early Fichte has, particularly, an antagonistic effect and provokes enthusiastic approval as well as an original critique. For the 19th century Fichte is a superceded philosophical author, who sowed his own historical magnitude as a popularizer of himself. During the second third of the 19th century Fichte's practical and popular philosophy had repercussions mediated by the protagonists of the progressive Hegelian school (Max Stirner, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx). During the last third of the 19th century an historical interest grew concerning the significance of Fichte as a transitional figure from Kant to Hegel. In the framework of the academic reorientation towards Kant instead of toward Hegel, carried out by neo-Kantianism, at the end of the 19th century a neo-Fichteanism is developed, which in the context of the First World War assumes a populist character. A genuinely philosophical confrontation with the work of Fichte takes place in the first quarter of the 20th century as a consequence of the metaphysically oriented turn of neo-Kantianism (M. Wundt, H. Heimsoeth, M. Heidegger) and in the framework of a complete exposition of German idealism (R. Kroner, Nicolai Hartmann). Works of great importance appear at that time in France (X. Léon, M. Gueroult). After the propagandistic takeover of Fichte by the national-socialist ideology, from which few exceptions exist (W. Weischedel) Fichte is academically rehabilitated in the second half of the 20th century in West Germany by means of phenomenology, transcendental- philosophical and theory of consciousness lectures (W. Janke, R. Lauth, D. Henrich). Research about Fichte in philosophic circles has evolved and specialized over the last decades with particular and general studies - above all in Germany, France, Italy, and North America. At the center of the fresh interest are found, in the front line, Fichte's original contributions on the theory of subjectivity ("i" body) and of sociability (you, ourselves). The most recent investigations into the philosophy of Fichte are dedicated as much to the particular presentations of the Doctrine of Science as also to the Fichtean philosophical grounding of law, politics, morality, pedagogy, art, and religion. Currently a generation of young researchers is active in an international context and in their work connect a profound understanding of the primary texts with current philosphical questions and perspectives, in particular in the realm of the philosophy of spirit and practical philosophy. Corresponding to the wide repercussions of his work, in recent times Fichte has gained significance also in the political sciences, in history and in literature, and has attracted scientific attention. Thanks to the ample and modern translations, Fichte is also present in research and in philosophico-cultural and politico-social debates in China and Japan. With the culmination of the J. G. Fichte Gesamtausgabe by the Academy of Sciences of Bavaria in 2012, Fichte's philosophic work is completely open and available for philosophical investigation. Up to the moment, the post-humous texts --many of them published for the first time or well edited in a trustworthy way for the first time--have been, in general, investigated and interpreted selectively and as separate - among those post-humous texts are found practically all 15 different presentations of the Doctrine of Science. In future research concerning Fichte it will be important to take into account the complete evolution and the maturing of his philosophy and especially the Doctrine of Science, with its serial and varying presentation, and to evaluate it later from the now optimized situation of the texts. Among Fichte's other works with philosophical range and current philosophical significance, which ought to be read as text as well as in context, pertain to the popular conferences corresponding to philosophy of history, of right, of religion, and of politics. Regarding the general evaluation and valuation of Fichte's philosophic potential it will not be unimportant to critically, comparatively and creatively confront Fichte's complete work with the philosophical results of his opponents Schelling and Hegel. Short of a differentiated inventory of the achievements of German idealism, there could not be a linear history of the progress or regress of the thought of Fichte to Hegel, passing through Schelling. Rather, one must try to appreciate Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, starting with Kant, as historically alternate and systematically complementary sides of one philosophical thought. A thought that at a distance of two centuries appears to us extraordinarily near and distant at the same time: near through its critical and self-critical focus on reason and liberty, yet also distant given its hope and its confidence to be able to consider everything in such a way that it becomes and remains a docile object for human co-design.