Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre. Aus dem Jahre 1801

(lit.: Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre from the Year 1801)

The new version of his system Fichte wrote in Berlin in 1801 and kept back; it reached print only in 1845.

by Johann Gottlieb Fichte294 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre aus dem Jahre 1801
First published: 1845(published posthumously)
Original language: German

Overview

In May 1801 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who had worked alongside Fichte for years, used his own Journal for Speculative Physics to launch a Presentation of My System of Philosophy. It offered a philosophy of identity, built on the absolute indifference of subject and object, as an advance on Fichte's philosophy of consciousness. That same year Johann Gottlieb Fichte, now in Berlin and without a university, wrote out a new presentation of his own Wissenschaftslehre, his "doctrine of science" or theory of knowledge — a full one, worked out from the ground up. It no longer starts from the I. It starts from knowing as such, and asks what absolute knowing is and how it stands to the Absolute. Fichte's answer is that even absolute knowing is not the Absolute itself, and the Absolute, he writes, is neither knowing nor being, nor their identity, nor their indifference — the word Schelling had just made the centre of his system. Spinoza gets the same treatment: Fichte grants him an absolute substance like his own and faults him for leaving no room for freedom. Fichte did not publish it. After the reception of the Foundation he had come to keep new versions of the system for the lecture room, where he could answer objections face to face. His son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, printed it in 1845 in the second volume of the collected works, as the presentation "from the year 1801". Whether these Berlin versions say the same thing as the Jena ones, as Fichte always insisted, is still argued among his readers.

Key concepts

What is 'absolute knowing'?

Absolute knowing is knowing taken purely as knowing, before it is knowledge of this or that object. It is the highest point the book reaches, yet Fichte insists it is not the Absolute: the very phrase 'absolute knowing' attaches a second word that limits the first. Even absolute knowing knows being only indirectly, through the forms of its own thinking, never by becoming being itself.

Why does Fichte describe knowing as light or seeing?

Because knowing is not a relation between two separate things, a knower here and a known there joined by a line. It exists for itself, aware of itself in the very act, which Fichte calls a living state of light, an inner seeing. He pictures it as one point that sees through itself. That self-transparency, not any object it happens to hold, is what makes knowing knowing.

What is 'formal freedom' in this book?

Formal freedom is the bare fact that knowing need not have occurred: it is the open possibility of an act either taking place or not, before anything decides it. Fichte locates freedom here, at the root of knowing, not only in choices about what to do. Every fixed result of knowing, he argues, is this open possibility brought to a stop and bound.

What is the world of the senses, on this account?

It is what knowing always finds already laid down before it consciously uses its freedom: the measurable, divisible realm of nature. Fichte stresses that transcendental idealism does not deny that this world is empirically real. It shows that its forms, such as measurable quantity, are forms of knowing, and so it removes only the claim that the world exists as a thing entirely independent of being known.

Themes of the book

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

Knowing and the Absolute

Can knowledge ever reach what lies beyond knowledge? Fichte now starts from knowing itself and finds that even at its highest it stops short.

No longer beginning with the I, Fichte asks what absolute knowing is, and answers at once that it cannot be the Absolute: the word 'knowing' already qualifies it. The Absolute is neither knowing nor being, nor their identity, nor their indifference, the term Schelling had just put at the centre of his system, and Fichte calls such an indifference a unity asserted, never shown. Knowing, at its core, is a seeing that sees through itself, one point rather than two terms joined by a line, and it knows being only indirectly.

absolute knowledge
absolute being
absolute
being
knowledge
epistemology
intellectual intuition
intuition
thought
unity
reflection
idealism
transcendental idealism
self-consciousness
philosophical method
synthesis

Enter a dialogue

Freedom Inside Knowing

Where does the fixed, measurable world come from if knowing is free? Fichte traces nature, and even the single person, back to freedom.

Freedom in this book is first a feature of knowing, not of choosing: knowing could be or not be, and that open possibility is its formal freedom. The world of the senses, measurable and divisible, is what knowing finds already set before any conscious use of freedom, which is why idealism does not deny its reality but only shows the forms of knowing in it. Spinoza, Fichte grants, had an absolute substance as he does, but lacked freedom, and so could not explain how anything finite stands apart from it.

freedom
individuality
nature
perception
time
space
quantity
infinity
matter
feeling
necessity
agency
reason
consciousness

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 294
distinct concepts: 219
by passages held, corpus-wide: #251

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: “freedom” and “knowledge”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 74 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
freedom	knowledge	55
freedom	self-consciousness	26
being	freedom	25
freedom	intuition	24
absolute knowledge	freedom	20
being	knowledge	20
freedom	reflection	16
knowledge	self-consciousness	16
intuition	knowledge	15
epistemology	knowledge	12
absolute knowledge	being	11
intuition	self-consciousness	10
knowledge	reflection	10
absolute knowledge	intuition	9
absolute knowledge	self-consciousness	9
epistemology	freedom	9
epistemology	self-consciousness	9
reflection	self-consciousness	9
being	reflection	8
epistemology	intuition	8
being	self-consciousness	7
absolute knowledge	epistemology	6
absolute knowledge	reflection	6
being	epistemology	5
being	intuition	5
epistemology	reflection	5
absolute knowledge	knowledge	3
intuition	reflection	3

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.

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
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
1794 Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre)
The first full statement of the system and his best-known treatise, begun as lecture handouts in 1794; the 1795 Outline carries its theoretical half further, and the First Introduction of 1797 starts the explanation again.
DE
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
1845 Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre. Aus dem Jahre 1801 (Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre aus dem Jahre 1801) you are here DE

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