Fichte Sentence Examples

To the former he owes his appreciation of exact investigation and a complete knowledge of the aims of science, to the latter an equal admiration for the great circle of ideas which had been diffused by the teaching of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.

Fichte, was born at Jena on the 18th of July 1797.

Fichte's general views on philosophy seem to have changed considerably as he advanced in years, and his influence has been impaired by certain inconsistencies and an appearance of eclecticism, which is strengthened by his predominantly historical treatment of problems, his desire to include divergent systems within his own, and his conciliatory tone.

Fichte, in short, advocates an ethical theism, and his arguments might easily be turned to account by the apologist of Christianity.

One of the tests by which Fichte discriminates the value of previous systems is the adequateness with which they interpret moral experience.

The idealisms of Fichte and Schelling made contributions to Hegel's thought; Krause and the Roman Catholic Baader represent parallel if minor phases of idealism.

From 1847 onward Ulrici edited, jointly with the younger Fichte, the Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie u.

Feuerbach labours under the same difficulty as Fichte; both thinkers strive in vain to reconcile the religious consciousness with subjectivism.

In later life he was powerfully influenced by Fichte, and subsequently, on grounds of religious feeling, by Jacobi and Bardili.

Fichte a new speculative theism, and became an opponent of Hegel's pantheistic idealism.

He also wrote Fichte's Science of Knowledge (1884); Poetry, Comedy and Duty (1888); Religions before Christianity (1883); Ethics for Young People (1891); The Gospel of Paul (1892).

His writings consisted of short articles, of which many appeared in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th ed.) and in Mind, a volume on Kant and another on Fichte.

With these qualities Fichte himself combined a certain impetuosity and impatience probably derived from his mother, a woman of a somewhat querulous and jealous disposition.

A tutorship at Zurich was, however, obtained in the spring of 1788, and Fichte spent in Switzerland two of the happiest years of his life.

Fichte's Letters of this period attest the influence exercised on him by the study of Kant.

Fichte's circumstances had not improved.

Fichte accepted a post as private tutor in Warsaw, and proceeded on foot to that town.

The situation proved unsuitable; the lady, as Kuno Fischer says, "required greater submission and better French" than Fichte could yield, and after a fortnight's stay Fichte set out for Konigsberg to see Kant.

By an oversight Fichte's name did not appear on the title-page, nor was the preface given, in which the author spoke of himself as a beginner in philosophy.

Fichte's reputation was thus secured at a stroke.

The Critique of Revelation marks the culminating point of Fichte's Kantian period.

In this conclusion we can trace the prominence assigned by Fichte to the practical element, and the tendency to make the requirements of the ego the ground for all judgment on reality.

To direct attention to the true nature of revolution, to demonstrate how inextricably the right of liberty is interwoven with the very existence of man as an intelligent agent, to point out the inherent progressiveness of state arrangements, and the consequent necessity of reform or amendment, such are the main objects of the Beitrage; and although, as is often the case with Fichte, the arguments are too formal and the distinctions too wiredrawn, yet the general idea is nobly conceived and carried out.

Fichte, while accepting the call, desired to spend a year in preparation; but as this was deemed inexpedient he rapidly drew out for his students an introductory outline of his system, and began his lectures in May 1794.

Much of this success was due to Fichte's rare power as a lecturer.

These general addresses, published under the title Bestimmung des Gelehrten (Vocation of the Scholar), were on a subject dear to Fichte's heart, the supreme importance of the highest intellectual culture and the duties incumbent on those who had received it.

The last is probably the most important of all Fichte's works; apart from it, his theoretical philosophy is unintelligible.

During this period Fichte's academic career had been troubled by various storms, the last so violent as to put a close to his professorate at Jena.

The second, arising from Fichte's strong desire to suppress the Landsmannschaften (students' orders), which were productive of much harm, was more serious.

Some misunderstanding caused an outburst of ignorant ill-feeling on the part of the students, who proceeded to such lengths that Fichte was compelled to reside out of Jena.

We may here note the order of these posthumous writings as being of importance for tracing the development of Fichte's thought.

As these consist mainly of notes for lectures, couched in uncouth phraseology, they cannot be held to throw much light on Fichte's views.

During these years, however, Fichte was mainly occupied with public affairs.

Debarred from taking an active part, Fichte made his contribution by way of lectures.

Among the most devoted in her exertions was Fichte's wife, who, in January 1814, was attacked with a virulent hospital fever.

On the day after she was pronounced out of danger Fichte was struck down.

The philosophy of Fichte, worked out in a series of writings, and falling chronologically into two distinct periods, that of Jena and that of Berlin, seemed in the course of its development to undergo a change so fundamental that many critics have sharply separated and opposed to one another an earlier and a later phase.

He certainly retains his former opinion, but mainly on the ground, in itself intelligible and legitimate, that, so far as Fichte's philosophical reputation and influence are concerned, attention may be limited to the earlier doctrines of the Wissenschaftslehre.

This may be so, but it can be admitted neither that Fichte's views underwent radical change, nor that the Wissenschaftslehre was ever regarded as in itself complete, nor that Fichte was unconscious of the apparent difference between his earlier and later utterances.

Fichte's system cannot be compressed with intelligibility.

To the criticisms of the latter, in particular, Fichte owed much, but his own activity went far beyond what they supplied to him.

Even in the practical sphere, however, Fichte found that the contradiction, insoluble to cognition, was not completely suppressed, and he was thus driven to the higher view, which is explicitly stated in the later writings though not, it must be confessed, with the precision and scientific clearness of the Wissenschaftslehre.

To answer this one must bear in mind what Fichte intended by designating all philosophy Wissenschaftslehre, or theory of science.

Not that it is a natural history, or even a phenomenology of consciousness; only in the later writings did Fichte adopt even the genetic method of exposition; it is the complete statement of the pure principles of the understanding in their rational or necessary order.

It is what Fichte called a Deed-act (Thathandlung); we cannot be aware of the process, - the ego is not until it has affirmed itself, - but we are aware of the result, and can see the necessity of the act by which it is brought about.

Here we come to the crux of Fichte's system, which is only partly cleared up in the Rechtslehre and Sittenlehre.

As early as 1797 Fichte had begun to see that the ultimate basis of his system was the absolute ego, in which is no difference of subject and object; in 1800 the Bestimmung des Menschen defined this absolute ego as the infinite moral will of the universe, God, in whom are all the individual egos, from whom they have sprung.

It will escape no one (I) how the idea and method of the Wissenschaftslehre prepare the way for the later Hegelian dialectic, and (2) how completely the whole philosophy of Schopenhauer is contained in the later writings of Fichte.

Fichte and der neuere Socialismus (1900).

Originally a follower of Hegel, he turned to Fichte and Beneke (q.v.), with whose insistence on psychology as the basis of all philosophy he fully agreed.

Meanwhile a much more important influence had begun to operate on him, arising out of his study of Kant and Fichte.

With characteristic zeal and impetuosity Schelling had no sooner grasped the leading ideas of Fichte's amended form of the critical philosophy than he put together his impressions of it in his Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1794).

There was nothing original in the treatment, but it showed such power of appreciating the new ideas of the Fichtean method that it was hailed with cordial recognition by Fichte himself, and gave the author immediately a place in popular estimation as in the foremost rank of existing philosophical writers.

He had already contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Fichte and Niethammer, and had thrown himself with all his native impetuosity into the study of physical and medical science.

He quickly became the acknowledged leader of the Romantic school whose impetuous litterateurs had begun to tire of the cold abstractions of Fichte.

This period was marked by considerable changes in his views and by the final breach on the one hand with Fichte and on the other hand with Hegel.

Thus Fichte, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme and the Mystics, and finally, the great Greek thinkers with their Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commentators, give respectively colouring to particular works.

In his own view the turning points seem to have been - (1) the transition from Fichte's method to the more objective conception of nature - the advance, in other words, to Naturphilosophie; (2) the definite formulation of that which implicitly, as Schelling claims, was involved in the idea of Naturphilosophie, viz.

From Fichte's position Schelling started.

From Fichte he derived the ideal of a completed whole of philosophic conception and also the formal method to which for the most part he continued true.

The value of Beck's exegesis has been to a great extent overlooked owing to the greater attention given to the work of Fichte.

Educated at first at Eisenberg, he proceeded to Jena, where he studied philosophy under Hegel and Fichte and became privatdozent in 1802.

Fichte now set himself in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) to make transcendental idealism into a system of metaphysical idealism without Kant's inconsistencies and relics of realism.

This construction, or self-determination, is what Fichte called positing (setzen).

Further, according to Fichte, on the one hand the Ego posits itself as determined through the non-Ego - no object, no subject; this is the principal fact about theoretical reason; on the other hand, the Ego posits itself as determining the non-Ego - no subject, no object; this is the principal fact about practical reason.

Fichte thus transformed the transcendental idealism of Kant by identifying the thing with the object, and by interpreting noumenon, not in Kant's sense of something which speculative reason conceives and practical reason postulates to exist in accordance with the idea, but in the new meaning of a thought, a product of reason.

Fichte transformed this unity of the conscious self into a unity of all conscious selves, or a common consciousness; and this change enabled him to explain the unity of anything produced by the Ego by contending that it is not the different objects of different thinkers, but the one object of a pure Ego or consciousness common to them all.

According to Kant, the ob j ective is valid for all consciousnesses; according to Fichte it is valid for one consciousness.

The former was the alternative of Berkeley, the latter of Fichte.

Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant's Kritik, is the theor y on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego.

Lastly, Fichte called this system realism, in so far as it posits the thing in itself as another thing; idealism, in so far as it posits it as a noumenon which is a product of its own thinking; and on the whole real idealism or ideal realism.

Fichte completed the process from psychological and epistemological to metaphysical idealism, which it has been necessary to recall from its beginnings in France, England and Germany, in order to understand modern idealism.

But Fichte was the most fertile of all.

Kant and Fichte together became the most potent philosophic influences on European thought in the 19th century, because their emphasis was on man.

Kant half asserted, and Fichte wholly, that Nature is man's own construction.

Their real founder was Fichte, on account of his definite reduction of the noumenal to a mental world.

Of these noumenal idealisms the earliest in time and the nearest to Fichte's philosophy was the panlogism, begun by Schelling (1775-18J4), completed by his disciple Hegel (1770-1831), and then modified by the master himself.

Starting from Fichte's " Wissenschaftslehre," Schelling accepted the whole process of mental construction, and the deduction that noumena are knowable products of universal reason, the Absolute Ego.

But from the first he was bolder than Fichte, and had no doubt that the Absolute is God.

Fichte had attributed to man an intellectual intuition of himself as the Absolute Ego.

By the same dialectic Hegel was able to justify the gradual transformation of transcendental into noumenal idealism by Fichte and Schelling.

This new noumenal idealism began, like the preceding, by combining psycho l0 ical idealism with the transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte.

He got the hint of a noumenal will from Kant; but in regarding the noumenal as knowable, because mental, as well as in the emphasis he laid on the activity of will, he resembled Fichte.

Hence he rejected the infinite intelligence supposed by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel against whom he urged that blind will produces intelligence, and only becomes conscious in us by using intelligence as a means to ends.

Indeed, Fichte had previously characterized the life of the Absolute by reason and will without consciousness; and, before Fichte, Leibnitz had asserted that the elements of Nature are monads with unconscious perception and appetition.

Thus his pantheistic is also a teleological idealism, which in its emphasis on free activity and moral order recalls Leibnitz and Fichte, but in its emphasis on the infinity of God has more affinity to Spinoza, Schelling and Hegel.

The pure idealism of Fichte is at the bottom of it all.

But it follows Fichte in his revolt against the unknown thing in itself.

On the other hand, as the speculative systems of noumenal idealism, starting from Fichte, succeeded one another, like ghosts who " come like shadows, so depart," without producing.

Thus they were thrown back on the limits of human knowledge prescribed by Kant, but purged of the unknown thing in itself by Fichte.

Further, holding that, " like every other perception, the perception of a human body immediately involves the existence of that body," and, like Fichte, believing in a " common consciousness," he concludes that the evidence of sense is verined by " common consciousness " of the external world as objective in the Kantian sense of universally valid.

Schuppe, who, in his Erkenntnistheoretische Logik (1878), and in his shorter Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie and Logik (1894), gives the view a wider scope by the contention that the real world is the common content or object of common consciousness, which, according to him, as according to Fichte, is one and the same in all individual men.

While in this identification he follows Fichte, in other respects he is more like Kant.

He has a special relation to Fichte in developing the Kantian activity of consciousness into will and substituting activity for substantiality as the essence of soul, as well as in breaking down the antithesis between phenomena and things in themselves.

Kant further insisted that this apperception, " I think," is an act of spontaneity, distinct from sense, necessary to regarding all my ideas as mine, and to combining them in a synthetic unity of apperception; which act Fichte afterwards developed into an active construction of all knowledge, requiring will directed to the end of duty.

Wundt, in consequence, thinking with Kant that apperception is a spontaneous activity, and with Fichte that this activity requires will, and indeed that all activity is will, infers that apperception is inner will.

His third position is his actualistic theory of soul, which he shares with Fichte, Hegel, Fechner and Paulsen.

When Fichte had rejected the Kantian Soul in itself and developed the Kantian activity of apperception, he considered that soul consists in constructive activity.

Wundt accepts Fichte's theory of the actuality, and Fechner's synechological view, of the soul.

It is to be monistic ideal realism, like that of Fichte and Hegel; not, however, like theirs idealistic in method, a Phantastisches Begrifsgebaude, but realistic in method, a Wissenschaftliche Philosophie.

Carlyle (1795-1881) laid more emphasis on Fichte.

At the height of his career, when between 1840 and 1850 many of Fichte's works were being translated in the Catholic Series, he called attention to Fichte's later view that all earthly things are but as a vesture or appearance under which the Divine idea of the world is the reality.

But history repeats itself; and these same two interpretations of Kant had already been made in the lifetime of Kant by Fichte, in the two Introductions to the " Wissenschaftslehre," which he published in his Philosophical Journal in 1797.

Fichte's " Wissenschaftslehre," he said, is a completely untenable system, and a metaphysics of fruitless apices, in which he disclaimed any participation; his own Kritik he refused to regard as a propaedeutic to be construed by the Fichtian or any other standpoint, declaring that it is to be understood according to the letter; and he went so far as to assert that his own critical philosophy is so satisfactory to the reason, theoretical and practical, as to be incapable of improvement, and for all future ages indispensable for the highest ends of humanity.

After this letter it cannot be doubted that Kant not only differed wholly from Fichte, both about the synthetic unity of apperception and about the thing in itself, but also is to be construed literally throughout.

What Kant never said and what his whole philosophy prevented his saying, was that a single thing is a single thought of a single consciousness; either of men, as in Fichte's philosophy, or of God and man, as in Hegel's.

Fichte began this by saying that ego is activity, and being is life.

His system has had little influence in Germany; Reinhold (q.v.) alone expounded it against the attacks of Fichte and Schelling.

Among a large section of the community patriotism became for the first time a consuming passion, and it was stimulated by the counsels of several manly teachers, among whom the first place belongs to the philosopher Fichte.

He does not free himself from the current theology either by rational moralizing like Kant, or by bold speculative synthesis like Fichte and Schelling.

Meanwhile, Holderlin in Jena had been following Fichte's career with an enthusiasm with which he infected Hegel.

An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant into the banner of revolutionary ideas.

In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, vacant since the death of Fichte.

On the 14th of November, after one day's illness, he died of cholera and was buried, as he had wished, between Fichte and Solger.

Compared with Fichte and Schelling, Hegel has a sober, hard, realistic character.

But at the same time the philosophers Immanuel Fichte and Friedrich Schelling were creating a wide and deep impression.

An earnest attempt to satisfy this demand was made by Fichte whose single principle was the activity of the pure Ego, while his single method was the assertion of a truth revealed by reflection on the content of conscious experience, the characterization of this as a half truth and the supplementation of it by its other, and finally the harmonization of both.

Fichte cannot be said to have developed a logic, but this rhythm of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, foreshadowed in part for Fichte in Spinoza's formula, " omnis determinatio est negatio," and significantly in Kant's triadic grouping of his categories, gave a cue to the thought of Hegel.

As Fichte's Ego finds that its non-ego springs from and has its home within its very self, so with Hegel thought finds itself in its " other," both subsisting in the Idea which is both and neither.

Erlangen was for many years the residence of the poet Friedrich Ruckert, and of the philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm von Schnelling.

In philosophy he heard Fichte and Schleiermacher.

Between 1811 and 1813 the lectures of Fichte (subsequently published from his notes in his Nachgelassene Werke) dealt with what he called the "facts of consciousness" and the "theory of science," and struggled to present his final conception of philosophy.

The gathered illhumour of many years, aggravated by the confident assurance of the Hegelians, found vent at length in the introduction to his next book, where Hegel's works are described as three-quarters utter absurdity and one-quarter mere paradox - a specimen of the language in which during his subsequent career he used to advert to his three predecessors Fichte, Schelling, but above all Hegel.

But in his successors, from Fichte to Hegel, this axiom of the plain man is set aside as antiquated.

In Fichte himself the source of being is primeval activity, the groundless and incomprehensible deed-action (ThatHandlung) of the absolute ego.

It was most numerously attended about the middle of the 18th century; but the most brilliant professoriate was under the duke Charles Augustus, Goethe's patron (1787-1806), when Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schlegel and Schiller were on its teaching staff.

From Schelling, whom he praised as having developed Kant where Fichte failed to do so, he borrowed much and often, not only in the metaphysical sections of the Biographia but in his aesthetic lectures, and further in the cosmic speculations of the posthumous Theory of Life.

Yet, after all, Fichte's dictum holds good that knowledge as knowledge - i.e.

In 1796 he went to Berlin, where he founded a humanitarian society, and was commissioned by the freemasons of that city to assist Fichte in reforming the statutes and ritual of their lodge.

During the same period the excitement caused by the accusation of atheism brought against Fichte at Jena led to the publication of Jacobi's Letter to Fichte (1799), in which he made more precise the relation of his own philosophic principles to theology.

Before the ethics of Kant had begun to be seriously studied in England, the rapid and remarkable development of metaphysical view and method of which the three chief stages are represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel respectively had already taken place; and the system of the latter was occupying the most prominent position in the philosophical thought of Germany.

In Fichte's system the connexion of ethics and metaphysics is still more intimate; indeed, we may compare it in this respect to Platonism; as Plato blends the most fundamental notions of each of these studies in the one idea of good, so Fichte blends them in the one idea free-will.

Neither Fichte nor Schelling has exercised more than the faintest and most indirect influence on ethical philosophy in England; it therefore seems best to leave the ethical doctrines of each to be explained in connexion with the rest of his system.

Meantime he studied Spinoza and Plato, and was profoundly influenced by both, though he was never a Spinozist; he made Kant more and more his master, though he departed on fundamental points from him, and finally remodelled his philosophy; with some of Jacobi's positions he was in sympathy, and from Fichte and Schelling he accepted ideas, which in their place in his system, however, received another value and import.

This work is a severe criticism of all previous moral systems, especially those of Kant and Fichte, Plato's and Spinoza's finding most favour; its leading principles are that the tests of the soundness of a moral system are the completeness of its view of the laws and ends of human life as a whole and the harmonious arrangement of its subject-matter under one fundamental principle; and, though it is almost exclusively critical and negative, the book announces clearly the division and scope of moral science which Schleiermacher subsequently adopted, attaching prime importance to a "Giiterlehre," or doctrine of the ends to be obtained by moral action.

At the same time he approved himself in the pulpit and elsewhere as a large-hearted and fearless patriot in that time of national calamity and humiliation, acquiring a name and place in his country's annals with Arndt, Fichte, Stein and Scharnhorst.

In his earlier essays he endeavoured to point out the defects of ancient and modern ethical thinkers, particularly of Kant and Fichte, Plato and Spinoza only finding favour in his eyes.

In contrast to Kant and Fichte and modern moral philosophers Schleiermacher reintroduced and assigned pre-eminent importance to the doctrine of the summum bonum, or highest good.

From Leibnitz, Lessing, Fichte, Jacobi and the Romantic school he had imbibed a profound and mystical view of the inner depths of the human personality.

The young Lessing produced his first play in the Leipzig theatre, and the university counts Goethe, Klopstock, Jean Paul Richter, Fichte and Schelling among its alumni.

After studying under Fichte at Jena he gave his first philosophical lectures at Gottingen in 1805, whence he removed in 1809 to occupy the chair formerly held by Kant at Konigsberg.

Carriere identified himself with the school of the younger Fichte as one who held the theistic view of the world which aimed at reconciling the contradictions between deism and pantheism.

The philosophy of Fichte is historically interesting as that in which the deficiencies of Kant's fundamental position were first discerned and the attempt made to remedy them.

To this point also Fichte was the first to call attention.

Fichte (the younger) did not escape this misinterpretation of Lotze's true meaning, though they had his Metaphysik and Logik to refer to, though he promised in his Allgemeine Physiologie (1851) to enter in a subsequent work upon the "bounding province between aesthetics and physiology," and though in his Medizinische Psychologie he had distinctly stated that his position was neither the idealism of Hegel nor the realism of Herbart, nor materialism, but that it was the conviction that the essence of everything is the part it plays in the realization of some idea which is in itself valuable, that the sense of an all-pervading mechanism is to be sought in this that it denotes the ways and means by which the highest idea, which we may call the idea of the good, has voluntarily chosen to realize itself.

In this endeavour he forms with Herbart an opposition to the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which aimed at objective and absolute knowledge, and also to the criticism of Kant, which aimed at determining the validity of all human knowledge.

Weisse; but, whereas Weisse thought that the Hegelian structure was sound in the main, and that its imperfections might be mended, Fichte held it to be incurably defective, and spoke of it as a "masterpiece of erroneous consistency or consistent error."

The grand-duke accepted his threat as a request to resign, passed censure, and extended to him permission to withdraw from his chair at Jena; nor would he alter his decision, even though Fichte himself endeavoured to explain away the unfortunate letter.

The method which Fichte first adopted for stating these axioms is not calculated to throw full light upon them, and tends to exaggerate the apparent airiness and unsubstantiality of his deduction.

But the former device is too obviously a dens ex machina, the purpose of which would be equally well served by supposing with Fichte the individual self to be endowed with the power of subconsciously extraditing a world which returns to it in consciousness under the form of a foreign creation.

With characteristic zeal and impetuosity Schelling had no sooner grasped the leading ideas of Fichte's amended form of the critical philosophy than he put together his impressions of it in his Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1794).

It was almost a natural consequence that Fichte never succeeded in amalgamating with his own system the aesthetic view of nature to which the Kritik of Judgment had pointed as an essential component in any complete philosophy.

He also prepared two theses for his doctorate in philosophy, De primis socialismi germanici lineamentis apud Lutherum, Kant, Fichte et Hegel (1891), and De la realite du monde sensible.

Nature was no longer, as with Fichte, to be a mere spring-board to evoke the latent powers of the spirit.

The great series of German thinkers, Lessing, Herder, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher and their 1 This does not, of course, preclude the possibility of degeneration in particular instances.

These lectures Schopenhauer attended - at first, it is allowed, with interest, but afterwards with a spirit of opposition which is said to have degenerated into contempt, and which in after years never permitted him to refer to Fichte without contumely.

But the universal historian Gervinus, refuting this opinion of the specialist historian, tries to prove that the campaign of 1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons were due to other things beside Alexander's will--such as the activity of Stein, Metternich, Madame de Stael, Talleyrand, Fichte, Chateaubriand, and others.