Die Bestimmung des Menschen (German Edition)

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Author:Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. It is this whole striving which is denoted by — to use the words of another author — Fichte's and the other philosophers' attempts to construct systems by sharpness of mind and Robespierre's attempt to do it with the help of the guillotine; it is this which meets us in the flowing butterfly verses of our poets and in Auber's music, and finally, it is this which produces the many revolutions in the political world.

I agree perfectly with this whole effort to cling to form, insofar as it continues to be the medium through which we have the idea, but it should not be forgotten that it is the idea which should determine the form, not the form which determines the idea. We should keep in mind that life is not something abstract but something extremely individual. We should not forget that, for example, from a poetic genius' position of immediacy, form is nothing but the coming into existence of the idea in the world, and that the task of reflection is only to investigate whether or not the idea has gotten the properly corresponding form.

Form is not the basis of life, but life is the basis of form. Imagine that a man long infatuated with the Greek mode of life had acquired the means to arrange for a building in the Greek style and a Grecian household establishment — whether or not he would be satisfied would be highly problematical, or would he soon prefer another form simply because he had not sufficiently tested himself and the system in which he lived.

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But just as a leap backward is wrong something the age, on the whole, is inclined to acknowledge , so also a leap forward is wrong — both of them because a natural development does not proceed by leaps, and life's earnestness will ironize over every such experiment, even if it succeeds momentarily. In his work Foundations of Natural Right , Fichte argued that self-consciousness was a social phenomenon — an important step and perhaps the first clear step taken in this direction by modern philosophy. A necessary condition of every subject's self-awareness, for Fichte, is the existence of other rational subjects.

These others call or summon fordern auf the subject or self out of its unconsciousness and into an awareness of itself as a free individual. Fichte's account proceeds from the general principle that the I das Ich must posit itself as an individual in order to posit setzen itself at all, and that in order to posit itself as an individual it must recognize itself as it were to a calling or summons Aufforderung by other free individual s — called, moreover, to limit its own freedom out of respect for the freedom of the other.

The same condition applied and applies, of course, to the other s in its development. Hence, mutual recognition gegenseitig anerkennen of rational individuals turns out to be a condition necessary for the individual I in general. In Fichte's view consciousness of the self depends upon resistance or a check by something that is understood as not part of the self yet is not immediately ascribable to a particular sensory perception.

In his later — lectures his Nova methodo , Fichte incorporated it into his revised presentation of the very foundations of his system, where the summons takes its place alongside original feeling, which takes the place of the earlier Anstoss see below as both a limit upon the absolute freedom of the I and a condition for the positing of the same.

The I itself posits this situation for itself. To posit does not mean to 'create' the objects of consciousness. The principle in question simply states that the essence of an I lies in the assertion of one's own self-identity, i. Such immediate self-identity, however, cannot be understood as a psychological fact, nor as an act or accident of some previously existing substance or being.

It is an action of the I, but one that is identical with the very existence of this same I. Tathandlung , a unity that is presupposed by and contained within every fact and every act of empirical consciousness, although it never appears as such therein. The I must posit itself in order to be an I at all; but it can posit itself only insofar as it posits itself as limited.

Moreover, it cannot even posit for itself its own limitations, in the sense of producing or creating these limits. The finite I cannot be the ground of its own passivity. Instead, for Fichte, if the I is to posit itself off at all, it must simply discover itself to be limited, a discovery that Fichte characterizes as an "impulse," [56] "repulse," [57] or "resistance" [58] Anstoss ; Modern German: Such an original limitation of the I is, however, a limit for the I only insofar as the I posits it out as a limit.

The I does this, according to Fichte's analysis, by positing its own limitation, first, as only a feeling, then as a sensation, then as an intuition of a thing, and finally as a summons of another person.

The Anstoss thus provides the essential impetus that first posits in motion the entire complex train of activities that finally result in our conscious experience both of ourselves and others as empirical individuals and of the world around us. Though Anstoss plays a similar role as the thing in itself does in Kantian philosophy, unlike Kant, Fichte's Anstoss is not something foreign to the I. Instead, it denotes the original encounter of the I with its own finitude. Rather than claim that the not-I das Nicht-Ich is the cause or ground of the Anstoss , Fichte argues that not-I is posited by the I precisely in order to explain to itself the Anstoss , that is, in order to become conscious of Anstoss.

Though the Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates that such an Anstoss must occur if self-consciousness is to come about, it is quite unable to deduce or to explain the actual occurrence of such an Anstoss — except as a condition for the possibility of consciousness.

Accordingly, there are strict limits to what can be expected from any a priori deduction of experience, and this limitation, for Fichte, equally applies to Kant's transcendental philosophy. According to Fichte, transcendental philosophy can explain that the world must have space, time, and causality, but it can never explain why objects have the particular sensible properties they happen to have or why I am this determinate individual rather than another.

This is something that the I simply has to discover at the same time that it discovers its own freedom, and indeed, as a condition for the latter. Dieter Henrich proposed that Fichte was able to move beyond a "reflective theory of consciousness". According to Fichte, the self must already have some prior acquaintance with itself, independent of the act of reflection "no object comes to consciousness except under the condition that I am aware of myself, the conscious subject [ jedes Object kommt zum Bewusstseyn lediglich unter der Bedingung, dass ich auch meiner selbst, des bewusstseyenden Subjects mir bewusst sey ]".

Fichte also developed a theory of the state based on the idea of self-sufficiency. In his mind, the state should control international relations, the value of money, and remain an autarky. Because of this necessity to have relations with other rational beings in order to achieve consciousness, Fichte writes that there must be a 'relation of right', in which there is a mutual recognition of rationality by both parties.

Between December and March , Fichte gave a series of lectures concerning the "German nation" and its culture and language, projecting the kind of national education he hoped would raise it from the humiliation of its defeat at the hands of the French. Consequently, Fichte came to believe Germany would be responsible to carry the virtues of the French Revolution into the future. Furthermore, his nationalism was not aroused by Prussian military defeat and humiliation, for these had not yet occurred, but resulted from devotion to his own humanitarian philosophy. Through disappointment in the French he turned to the German nation as the instrument of fulfilling it.

The Addresses display Fichte's interest during that period in language and culture as vehicles of human spiritual development. Fichte built upon the earlier ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder and attempted to unite them with his more systematic approach. The aim of the German nation, according to Fichte, was to "found an empire of spirit and reason, and to annihilate completely the crude physical force that rules of the world. The nationalism propounded by Fichte in the Addresses would be appealed to over a century later by the Nazi Party in Germany, which sought in Fichte a forerunner to its own nationalist ideology.

Like Nietzsche , the association of Fichte with the Nazi regime came to colour readings of Fichte's German nationalism in the post-war period. Furthermore, the final act of Fichte's academic career was to resign as rector of Humboldt University in protest when his colleagues refused to punish the harassment of Jewish students. Fichte argued that "active citizenship, civic freedom and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands.

Fichte gave a wide range of public and private lectures in Berlin from the last decade of his life.

These form some of his best known work, and are the basis of a revived German-speaking scholarly interest in his work. The lectures include two works from In , the new University of Berlin was set up, designed along lines put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt.

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Fichte was made its rector and also the first Chair of Philosophy. This was in part because of educational themes in the Addresses , and in part because of his earlier work at Jena University. Fichte lectured on further versions of his Wissenschaftslehre. Of these, he only published a brief work from , The Science of Knowledge in its General Outline Die Wissenschaftslehre, in ihrem allgemeinen Umrisse dargestellt ; also translated as Outline of the Doctrine of Knowledge.

His son published some of these thirty years after his death. Most only became public in the last decades of the twentieth century, in his collected works. The new standard edition of Fichte's works in German, which supersedes all previous editions, is the Gesamtausgabe "Collected Works" or "Complete Edition", commonly abbreviated as GA , prepared by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences: Fichte's works are quoted and cited from GA , followed by a combination of Roman and Arabic numbers, indicating the series and volume, respectively, and the page number s. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For other uses, see Fichte disambiguation. Immanuel Hermann Fichte his son , G.

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Hegel , Dieter Henrich , C. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. May Learn how and when to remove this template message. Limnatis, German Idealism and the Problem of Knowledge: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel , Springer, , pp. Beiser , German Idealism. The Struggle Against Subjectivism, Harvard University Press, , p.

This, however, is only part of the story. For the kind of internal agreement just discussed is adequate only to establish what Fichte himself called the "inner truth"—by which he meant the consistency and completeness of a system. But surely a system can be consistent and complete without being true in the sense that Fichte himself considered most important, that is, without possessing any extra-systematic basis in something certain.

This kind of truth, which Fichte sometimes referred to as a philosophy's "outer truth," cannot be established simply by insuring the correct Michael Vater and David W. In Breazeale, Daniel; Fichte, Johann In a similar way, Fichte had derived in his Foundations of the Science of Knowledge publ.

See Breazeale , pp.

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Henrich's article is an analysis of the following three presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre: Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Retrieved 20 October New International Encyclopedia 1st ed. Kleine Werklehre der Freimaurerei. Das Buch des Lehrlings. In either case, Fichte did not plan it and in fact only heard of the accident much later. Cambridge University Press, Cornell University Press, Princeton University Press, Vol 2, p Fichte as a Freemason:

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