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WorkJohann Gottlieb Fichte

Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre

Printed sheet by sheet for his first students at Jena, the book in which Fichte's I posits itself and its world.

by Johann Gottlieb Fichte429 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre
First published
(aged 32)
Original language
German

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Overview

When Johann Gottlieb Fichte arrived at the University of Jena in May 1794, he came to teach a system he had named only that spring, and he had no textbook for it. So he wrote one as he went, handing his students the printed sheets one at a time, each finished just before the lecture that needed it. The result is the first full statement of the Wissenschaftslehre, his "doctrine of science" or theory of knowledge, and it starts from an act rather than a fact: every act of consciousness rests on an I that makes itself what it is simply by positing itself. Against the I stands a Not-I, the world that resists it, and the book works out how each limits the other, first in knowing and then in striving and acting. Fichte meant to finish what Kant had left open and to answer the sceptics who said Kant's philosophy rested on nothing, and he did it without Kant's unknowable thing-in-itself. Demand was such that he let the sheets be sold as a public book in 1794 and 1795, though its own pages call the presentation highly imperfect and warn that most readers would sooner believe themselves a piece of lava on the moon than an I. Few did understand it, and within two years he was lecturing on an entirely new version. In 1798 the critic Friedrich Schlegel named the Wissenschaftslehre, beside the French Revolution and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, as one of the great tendencies of the age. When the book sold out, Fichte reprinted it unchanged in 1802, explaining that readers were not yet ready for his newer account.

Key concepts

What is a 'deed-act' (Tathandlung)?

A deed-act is an action that produces nothing other than itself, so the doer and the deed are one. Fichte's example is the I: it exists only by positing itself, and in doing so it is at once the one who acts and the product of the act. That is why the book begins with an act rather than a fact, since no fact could be more certain than the act that knows it.

What does Fichte mean by the Not-I?

The Not-I is whatever is opposed to the I: everything that is not the self and can limit it, which in ordinary terms is the world. Fichte does not take it from experience. It is the second step of his argument: to the I, simply, a Not-I is opposed. Since this opposing happens within consciousness, the world is never wholly outside the self that knows it.

How can the I and the Not-I both exist if they cancel each other?

They limit each other in part instead of cancelling each other completely. Fichte's third principle says that within the I a divisible I is opposed to a divisible Not-I: each has a share of reality, and the more one has, the less the other has. This partial, quantity-like limitation is what lets a finite self and a finite world stand side by side.

Why is the book split into a theoretical and a practical part?

Because the I relates to the Not-I in two directions. In the theoretical part the I posits itself as determined by the Not-I, which is the situation of knowing: the world shapes what we perceive. In the practical part the I posits itself as determining the Not-I, which is the situation of acting. Fichte argues the second is the deeper one, since reason could not know if it could not act.

What is 'critical idealism' or 'real-idealism'?

It is Fichte's name for his own position, set midway between a dogmatism that explains the mind from things and an idealism that dissolves things into the mind. The I really is limited by something it did not make, so the world has its own reality. Yet that limit exists only for an I and through its activity, which is why he says it could equally be called real-idealism or ideal-realism.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

An I That Makes Itself

Can anything be certain before we know a single thing about the world? Fichte answers that one thing is: the act by which the I sets itself up as an I.

Every judgement, even 'A is A', presupposes someone who judges, and Fichte follows it back to that someone. The I is not a thing that later becomes aware of itself; it exists only in positing itself, at once the one acting and the product of the action. Such an act cannot be proved, only performed and noticed. Going beyond 'I am', he warns, leads straight to Spinoza's single all-embracing substance, in which no free self survives.

  • self-consciousness
  • activity
  • agency
  • subjectivity
  • self-determination
  • freedom
  • reflection
  • philosophical method

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The I and What Resists It

If the I is everything, how can there be a world that pushes back? Fichte has to find room for limits inside the very activity that sets them.

Fichte opposes a Not-I to the I and must then keep both without letting either cancel the other; his answer is that each limits the other in part. Step by step, every contradiction is resolved by such a division, and imagination does the decisive work, hovering between the finite and the infinite. What sets the process going is only a 'check', a bare resistance with no shape of its own. The theoretical half, he concedes, is Spinoza's system with each person's I as the one substance.

  • negation
  • limitation
  • opposition
  • determination
  • synthesis
  • contradiction
  • imagination
  • causality
  • substance
  • subject-object relation
  • objectivity
  • reality
  • realism
  • judgment
  • intuition
  • idealism

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Striving Without End

What is a self that can never be finished? Fichte's answer makes knowing depend on effort.

Reason, Fichte argues, could not even be theoretical unless it were practical: without a power to act there would be no intelligence at all. The I strives to be infinite and is infinite only in that striving, so it never coincides with what it demands. Where the striving meets resistance it is felt as compulsion, and where it reaches for something it cannot name it is felt as longing. Feeling, he writes, relates to reality but is blind, while intuition sees but is empty.

  • striving
  • drive
  • feeling
  • infinity
  • finitude
  • consciousness

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Within this work

passages held
429
distinct concepts
280
by passages held, corpus-wide
#175

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “idealism” and “self-consciousness”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
idealismself-consciousness33
limitationself-consciousness21
reflectionself-consciousness19
negationself-consciousness18
causalityself-consciousness15
activityself-consciousness14
self-consciousnesssynthesis14
causalityidealism9
negationsynthesis8
activitysynthesis7
idealismsynthesis7
causalitynegation6
limitationreflection6
reflectionsynthesis6
activitylimitation5
causalitysynthesis5
activitycausality4
idealismnegation4
limitationnegation4
idealismlimitation3
activityidealism2
activitynegation2
activityreflection2
causalitylimitation2
causalityreflection2
limitationsynthesis2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1792 Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung)

    The debut, written in weeks in Königsberg to impress Kant: a book on religion that made Fichte famous before he had a system of his own.

     DE
  2. 1794 Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre (Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie – als Einladungsschrift zu seinen Vorlesungen über diese Wissenschaft)

    A manifesto before the system: the short programme Fichte printed to introduce himself to Jena, months before the first sheets of the Foundation reached his students.

     DE
  3. 1794 Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre) you are here DE
  4. 1794 Some Lectures concerning the Scholar's Vocation (Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten)

    Popular ethics for students, given the summer Fichte arrived at Jena in 1794, alongside the far harder Foundation.

     DE
  5. 1795 Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty (Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre)

    A companion rather than a book of its own: the 1795 supplement that carries the Foundation's theoretical half on into sensation, space and time.

     DE
  6. 1797 First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre (Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre)

    Written for beginners: the 1797 journal essay in which Fichte, frustrated with how the Foundation had been read, began explaining his system again from first principles.

     DE
  7. 1799 Streitschriften zur Denk- und Gewissensfreiheit

    Gathered here from two separate publications, of 1793 and 1799, that bracket Fichte's rise to fame and his fall at Jena.

     DE
  8. 1800 The Closed Commercial State (Der geschlossene Handelsstaat)

    A venture into economics, offered as an appendix to his theory of right and published in 1800, the same year as The Vocation of Man.

     DE
  9. 1800 The Vocation of Man (Die Bestimmung des Menschen)

    Written straight after the Atheism Dispute, in his first months in Berlin: the system retold for general readers as a first-person passage from doubt to faith.

     DE
  10. 1806 The Characteristics of the Present Age (Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters)

    One of three popular lecture courses Fichte published in 1806: the philosophy of history that the Addresses to the German Nation would later claim to continue.

     DE
  11. 1806 The Way Towards the Blessed Life (Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben)

    The summit, in Fichte's own estimate, of the popular lectures he gave in Berlin before the war: religion presented as the result of the Wissenschaftslehre, his "doctrine of science", for listeners with no philosophy.

     DE
  12. 1808 Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation)

    His most influential book: public lectures once more, but this time a call to a defeated nation rather than a philosophy of history or a doctrine of religion.

     DE
  13. 1810 Kürzere Darstellungen der Wissenschaftslehre

    A Jena beginning and a Berlin summing-up, published separately and gathered on one page, on either side of the many versions of the system Fichte kept to the lecture room.

     DE
  14. 1845 Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre. Aus dem Jahre 1801 (Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre aus dem Jahre 1801)

    An early Berlin reworking of the system, written in 1801 as Fichte and Schelling were drifting apart, and left among his papers.

     DE
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