On January 27, 1814, John Fichte died in Berlin, Germany, and Fichte can be said to have directly studied under Kant, and his summary and extension of Kant's philosophy directly influenced the later Hegel.
There are many great philosophers who were directly related to Kant and Hegel, such as Schelling and Schopenhauer, but only Fichte is called the link between Kant and Hegel's philosophy.
On the special day of the 207th anniversary of Fichte's departure, let's walk into Fichte to see how he relates and influences the two greatest peaks of modern philosophy.
Fichte did not get started in the field of philosophy very early, and in 1781 he entered the theology department of the University of Leipzig at the age of 19 before he began to study philosophy.
At that time, the glory of Renaissance rationalism was still shining in Europe, so Fichte also studied Spinoza's rationalism and had not yet come into contact with Kant.
We know that one of the most important events in the European world at the end of the 18th century was the French Revolution of 1789.
Oil painting of the French Revolution
This revolution was not only the most important figures in the French intellectual circles at that time: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Locke's exploration of the national political system, but also the unified spirit of Kant's reason and experience to the whole of Europe.
Kant's emphasis on "intellectuality as the legislation of nature" emphasizes the importance of reason to know experience, which is based on the awakening of human self-consciousness, and is a subjective reason, rather than the rationality of facing the objective world as recognized by ancient Greece and Spinoza.
It was not until 1790 that the 28-year-old Fichte read Kant for the first time, but it was this time that he was deeply immersed in Kant's philosophical world and was deeply attracted.
Portrait of Kant
After developing a strong interest in Kant's philosophy, Fichte intended to meet Kant, who was already 67 years old in Europe at the time.
One was an obscure student and the other was Kant, who had just published three of the greatest philosophical critiques in the history of philosophy. Fichte naturally made some preparations in order for Kant to see him.
Fichte studied in the field of theology in his early years, and later read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment.
Therefore, he studied and studied based on Kant's three major critical contents, and integrated it into his own theological discussion. Wrote a religious article on the study of the connection between Kant's critical philosophy and theology, which was handed over to Kant.
Churches and religions were already in decline at the time, so with Kant's help, Fichte published the article anonymously as "A Trial of All Apocalypses."
We need to know that in the early days, Kant did scientific research, discovered the theory of celestial motion, and published the nebula hypothesis, so it was highly respected throughout The European cultural community.
After the publication of this article, scholars thought that this was Kant's own criticism of religion, and the article was widely disseminated. Later, Kant himself explained that it was Fichte's work, and highly appreciated it, which directly made Fichte famous in the philosophical world.
Since then, Fichte has truly entered the world of philosophy, and has promoted and extended Kant's philosophical ideas for a long time. Later generations also incorporated Fichte's philosophy into the pre-Kantian school.
Oil painting of the First Franco-Prussian War in 1806
We already know that Fichte entered the University of Leipzig in 1781 to study philosophy, and before that, in 1780 he also entered the University of Jena.
So when he gained status and fame in the field of philosophy, he was invited by the University of Jena in 1793 to become a professor of philosophy, that is, to teach Kant's philosophy.
It was also during this stable decade that he completed two of his most important books: The Foundations of Total Epistemology and The Foundations of Natural Law. In 1806, the First Franco-Prussian War broke out.
Less than a year after the war, Berlin was occupied by Napoleon. Fichte, a German, joined the patriotic movement and published the famous "Speech to the German Nation", in which he expressed in several realistic speeches that he wanted to establish the University of Berlin.
In 1810, the University of Berlin was established and Fichte became the first rector. However, Europe was still shrouded in the shadow of Napoleon's war, and on January 27, 1814, Fichte died of the plague that had lasted from the war.
Fichte is called the link between Kant's philosophy and Hegel's philosophy, and let's look at his most important work, The Foundations of Self-Recognition Jurisprudence, to see why he was so evaluated.
Just as the central word of Kant's philosophy is the thing-self, the central word of Hegel's philosophy is spirit, and the core word of Fichte's philosophy is the absolute self, his theory defines self-consciousness as a natural phenomenon.
Speaking on the broader scope of knowing the world and knowing himself, he first admitted that the existence of an objective physical substance in the outside world is the precondition for all things, and that only under the common influence of all objects can each individual have his own self-consciousness. This directly affected Hegel's objective idealism.
Portrait of Hegel
Fichte's philosophy, having given an objective premise to the absolute self, develops, like Kant, in his own philosophical path all subjectively, and Kant's premise is the self with which we are familiar.
The process of change in self-consciousness is a change that is produced by the difference between the "me" that has become independent and the self I know, and this change has little to do with the objective essence of the beginning. In Fichte's philosophical thought, the new self is defined and produced from the old self, which becomes what we call the absolute self.
Fichte is the most important philosopher caught between Kant and Hegel, and if we want to evaluate Kant in later generations, it must be that all the philosophical systems before Kant flowed to Kant, and then all the philosophical systems flowed out of Kant.
Kant's critical philosophy successfully organizes reason and experience, the thing we mention many times about itself, in other words, the "transcendental" that Kant is also referring to, the meaning that precedes experience.
Although we say that Kant is one of the two greatest peaks in the history of philosophy, it does not mean that Kant's philosophical system is perfect and correct, but Fichte is a strong advocate of Kant's philosophy.
This self, which Kant could not argue for, became the objective substance of the absolute self before Fichte. And these two things, in the later Hegels, are not feasible.
Kant and Fichte found the problems of that rationalist era, the things that really existed in the objective world. Whether it is the experience we remember, or the rationality we need to learn experience, it cannot be philosophically unified with the self.
We can look at spinoza, the most important figure of rationalism, in his description of the self, and we can feel the conflict between this self and objective substance.
Everything, as it is, strives to preserve its existence. If a horse becomes a man, it is like an insect, and it will be completely destroyed. The state of motion of matter, in itself, is its form of existence, but nature makes it difficult to maintain this state, but matter strives to maintain this state, thus showing "inertia", which is the "self" of matter. —— References are from toutiao encyclopedia
This problem is the problem that Hegel strives to solve later, and in hegel's decades-long critique of Kant and Fichte, Hegel's philosophical system of objective idealism tends to be perfected.
Hegel replaced Fichte's absolute self with an absolute spirit, arguing that it is eternal and does not change as a result of the change of the subject, and the method of argument used by Hegel is the dialectic of Marx, the great revolutionary teacher who later influenced us.
We see Fichte acting philosophically and intellectually as a link between the two peaks of Kant and Hegel, but the truth is not only that, history has left more popular stories.
Fichte became the first rector after the establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810 and was also a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, but died of illness in 1814.
University of Berlin (now Humboldt University of Berlin)
Hegel applied for a job at the University of Berlin in 1818, where he succeeded Fichte as professor of philosophy, and in 1829 Hegel became rector of the University of Berlin, dying in 1831.
Fichte's philosophy was strongly attacked by Hegel, but Hegel took over the baton that had opened up a new philosophical path since Kant.
I think this is the charm of philosophy, our thoughts are so antagonistic and conflicting, but our thoughts are equally great and brilliant.
Whatever the impact of Fichte's system of absolute self philosophy on people, on the 207th anniversary of his death, we should be grateful for his contribution to the world.