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WorkJohann Gottlieb Fichte

The Way Towards the Blessed Life

Blessedness, Fichte tells a Berlin audience, is not earned or postponed but found by turning from the many to the One.

by Johann Gottlieb Fichte331 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben
First published
(aged 44)
Original language
German

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Overview

On Sundays at noon from 12 January to the end of March 1806, in the round hall of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave eleven lectures to a general audience on how to live a blessed life. Partway through the series, on 20 March, his appointment to a permanent chair at Erlangen was confirmed, and the printed book was on sale in April. Its claim is that blessedness is not a reward postponed to a life beyond the grave; it lies there only for someone in whom it has already begun here. Only being truly is; everything else exists as its appearance, and a person is miserable to the extent that their love is scattered over the many changing things of the world and blessed to the extent that it rests in the One. Blessedness cannot be won, Fichte says, only uncovered, by throwing off the misery that hides it, and since life itself is love, the life that loves the One is already blessed. He sets out five standpoints from which the world can be seen, rising from mere sensuality through law and morality to religion and knowledge. In the sixth lecture he argues that this teaching is true Christianity as it stands in the Gospel of John, whose opening verses he restates in his own terms. Fichte called these lectures the summit of his popular teaching, and wrote to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in May that here he had stated the results of his system clearly. The title had an awkward neighbour: in Philosophy and Religion (1804) Schelling, Fichte's former ally, had described the whole of ethics as a guide to a blessed life. That same year, 1806, Schelling published a list of alleged parallels implying that Fichte had borrowed from him. Hansjürgen Verweyen, a modern editor of the lectures, warns against reading real dependence into them.

Key concepts

What does Fichte mean by blessedness?

Blessedness (Seligkeit) is the state of a life united with what it loves, when what it loves is the One, the eternal and unchanging. Because life is love, a life that loves rightly is already blessed. It is not a reward after death and cannot be handed over by any outside power or miracle: a person, Fichte says, must take it up with their own hands, here and now.

What is the difference between true life and 'apparent life'?

True life is one with being and loves the One; apparent life is one with mere appearance and tries to love changing things. Since appearance is constant becoming and passing away, a life fastened to it never stays the same for two moments: each moment swallows the last. That is why Fichte calls apparent life a constant dying, while true life is whole in every moment.

What is the difference between being and existence here?

Being (Sein) is God, the one reality, complete in itself and unchanging. Existence (Dasein) is being's appearance outside itself, and Fichte identifies it with consciousness or knowing. Everything we meet, including the many things of the world, belongs to existence, not to being. This distinction is how he reads the Gospel of John: the Word that was with God in the beginning is existence, the appearance of being.

What are the five standpoints?

They are five ways of seeing the one world, each clearer than the last. First, sensuality: only what the senses give is real. Second, legality: the law ordering what exists is the real. Third, higher morality, which creates new good rather than only keeping order. Fourth, religion, which sees all things as God's life. Fifth, science, which understands how the many follows from the One.

Themes of the book

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

Love of the One

Why are so many people unhappy when blessedness is close at hand? Fichte's answer lies in what they love.

Life is love, Fichte tells his Berlin audience, and so life is itself blessedness, when it loves the right thing. True life loves the One, the unchanging and eternal; mere apparent life scatters its love over changing things and becomes a constant dying, each moment devouring the last. Blessedness is not postponed beyond the grave. It lies there only for someone in whom it has begun here, and pain, the felt separation from what one loves, is the sting that drives a person towards union.

  • happiness
  • blessedness
  • love
  • life
  • desire
  • being
  • divine being
  • unity
  • selfhood
  • individuality
  • attention
  • world

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Five Ways of Seeing the World

Do we all live in the same world? Fichte distinguishes five standpoints from which one world can be seen, each higher one clearer than the last.

The lowest standpoint takes as real only what the senses deliver; the second, legality, grants reality only to the law that orders what exists. Third comes a higher morality that creates new good, through which alone, Fichte claims, religion, science and just laws entered the world. Fourth is religion, fifth the one complete science. Climbing requires real thinking rather than mere opinion, since whoever never thinks for themselves remains, all their life, an appendage to other people's understanding.

  • knowledge
  • consciousness
  • reflection
  • epistemology
  • self-consciousness
  • self-knowledge
  • morality
  • freedom
  • metaphysics
  • worldview
  • reason
  • truth
  • education
  • spiritual development

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Reading John's Gospel

Can a philosopher's teaching on being also be the teaching of Christianity? Fichte stakes the claim on a single evangelist.

Fichte accepts John alone among the evangelists as a teacher of true Christianity. Only John, he says, respects reason; the others build on miracles, which prove nothing to us, and give at best a morality. He restates John's opening, 'In the beginning was the Word', in his own terms: in the beginning, and absolutely with Being, was existence. He promises to separate what in John's teaching is true for all time from what was true only for John's standpoint and age.

  • religion
  • christianity
  • god
  • theology

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Within this work

passages held
331
distinct concepts
389
by passages held, corpus-wide
#228

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: “consciousness” and “knowledge”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
consciousnessknowledge6
consciousnessmetaphysics6
happinessreligion6
lovereflection6
happinesslove5
knowledgemetaphysics5
knowledgereligion5
freedomreflection4
freedomreligion4
knowledgereflection4
consciousnessreflection3
freedomhappiness3
lovereligion3
metaphysicsreflection3
consciousnesslove2
freedommetaphysics2
lovemetaphysics2
metaphysicsreligion2
reflectionreligion2
consciousnessfreedom1
consciousnesshappiness1
consciousnessreligion1
freedomknowledge1
freedomlove1
happinessknowledge1
knowledgelove1

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)

    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
  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) you are here 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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