Wood, Allen W - Fichte's Ethical Thought-Oxford University Press (2016)

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Fichte’s Ethical Thought

Fichte’s Ethical
Thought
Allen W. Wood
1
3
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To my students
whom I have taught
and from whom I have learned
at
Cornell University
Yale University
Stanford University
Indiana University
Contents
Preface ix
Sources xv
1. Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 1

§1: Background and Education 1
§2: An Impoverished Upstart Philosopher Makes his Way in a Hostile World 2
§3: Professor in Jena: the Years of Greatness 9
§4: Conflicts 15
§5: The Atheism Controversy 17
§6: Exile in Berlin 22
§7: The Napoleonic War 24
§8: Last Years: Professor at the Humboldt University 27
2. Transcendental Philosophy: The Jena Doctrine of Science 29
§1: Philosophy and Common Sense 30
§2: Rejection of Dogmatism or the “Thing in Itself ” 37
§3: Transcendental Idealism 43
§4: The Epistemology of the Jena Doctrine of Science 45
§5: The First Principle 48
§6: The Summons to Self-Activity 51
§7: Intellectual Intuition 55
§8: Moving Beyond the First Principle 59
§9: The Synthetic Method 61
3. Freedom and Intersubjectivity: The Conditions of Action 65
§1: Absolute Freedom 65
§2: The Conviction that We are Free 71
§3: Freedom as a Presupposition of Theoretical Reason 77
§4: Intersubjectivity as a Transcendental Problem 85
§5: Deduction of the Object of the I’s Present Action 87
§6: Deduction of the Summons 91
§7: The Inference to Other Rational Beings as the Cause of the Summons 93
§8: The Summons as Education or Upbringing 96
§9: The Summons as the Ground of Individuality 99
4. Moral Authority: Deduction of the Principle of Morality 101
§1: The Concept of Moral Authority 102
§2: Questioning Moral Authority 105
§3: Finding Oneself as Will 110
§4: The Pure Being or True Essence of Willing 114
§5: The Drive for Self-Activity for its Own Sake 118
§6: Explication of Fichte’s Deduction 121
viii Contents
§7: Self-Legislation 123

§8: Does Fichte have a Metaethics? 128
5. Conscience: The Applicability of the Principle of Morality 137
§1: Fichte’s Systematic Project: its Aims and Structure 137
§2: A Transcendental Theory of the Human Practical Condition 138
§3: The Natural Drive and the Pure Drive 143
§4: What is Material Freedom? 147
§5: The Ethical Drive 154
§6: Theoretical Judgment and Conscientious Conviction 157
§7: The Certainty of Conscience 161
§8: Self-Deception and Moral Conversion 168
6. The Self-Sufficiency of Reason: The Systematic Doctrine of Duties 173
§1: The Final End of Self-Sufficiency: a Form of Consequentialism? 174
§2: The Final End as a Recursive Projection of our Finite Ends 179
§3: The Antinomy: Self-Sufficiency vs. the Conditions of I-hood 184
§4: The Body: No Enjoyment Only for its Own Sake 186
§5: Fichte’s “Rigorism”: No Indifferent Actions, No Meritorious Actions 188
§6: Kierkegaard’s “Ethical Man” as a Fichtean 192
§7: Cognition: Fichte’s Ethics of Belief 194
§8: Intersubjectivity: the Limits of Individual Self-Sufficiency 200
§9: Moral Truth is Constituted by Universal Rational Agreement 203
7. The Social Unity of Reason: The Human Vocation 211
§1: Ethical Intersubjectivity in Kant and Fichte 212
§2: The Republic of Scholars 215
§3: The Human Social Vocation 219
§4: The Final End of Reason 223
§5: End in Itself or Tool of the Moral Law? 226
§6: My Own Happiness 231
§7: The Taxonomy of Duties 236
§8: Matters of Life and Death 239
§9: Choosing an Estate: the “Afterlife” and God 244
8. Right: Freedom, Property, and the State 251
§1: The State in Fichte’s Later Thought 251
§2: The Separation of Right from Ethics 255
§3: Recognition and the Relation of Right 259
§4: The Normative Concept of Right 263
§5: The Civil–Political Contracts 269
§6: The Form of Government 272
§7: Personal Freedom and Penal Law 275
§8: The “Natural” Estate and the “Second Sex” 278
§9: Property and Economic Justice 280
Postscript 291
References 295
Index 303
Preface
This is the third book I have written about German idealist ethics. The others were
Hegel’s Ethical Thought (1990) and Kant’s Ethical Thought (1999). Fichte’s Ethical
Thought is the last to be completed, and it has taken me longer to write than the other
two combined.
Fichte is a great modern philosopher. He is the most original figure in the develop-
ment of post-Kantian German idealism. In fact, Fichte is the most influential single fig-
ure on the entire tradition of continental European philosophy in the last two centuries.
Despite this, he is not nearly as well known, or as well studied, as Kant or Hegel. There is
less literature, and less good literature, on Fichte than there is on Kant or Hegel, or even
on most of the philosophers influenced by Fichte. In Volume III of Terence Irwin’s mas-
sive, impressive, comprehensive The Development of Ethics (2007–2009), there is a lot
about Kant; there are also discussions of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx,
Nietzsche, and existentialism. But there is nothing at all on Fichte; his name does not
even appear in the index. Until moral philosophers understand Fichte better than we
presently do, we cannot properly understand where we have come from, or, therefore,
properly understand even who we are.
Whenever I have said that Fichte is the most influential figure in the continental
tradition since 1800 (for instance, see Wood 1992 and VKO, pp. xxiv–xxviii), this has
been dismissed as exaggeration. That skepticism is only to be expected. If Fichte were
generally recognized as occupying such a pivotal position, he would obviously be
much more widely studied than he is. I nevertheless persist in the assertion. Here’s my
challenge: You pick any major figure in the continental philosophical tradition, and
I will identify an idea (sometimes several ideas) that you will agree is absolutely central
to that philosopher’s thought—even constituting one of that philosopher’s chief con-
tributions. Then I can show you that the original author of that idea is Fichte. I first
thought of documenting this claim in detail in this Preface, but decided that would
both take too long and be excessively pedantic. However, in this book you will find
along the way some very partial documentation for it regarding a number of thinkers:
Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger,
Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas, Gadamer, and Habermas. I hope my pres-
entation of Fichte in this book will enable readers at least to keep an open mind.
The title of the book is accurate, though only about half the book consists in a sys-
tematic exposition of Fichte’s ethical theory. The rest is needed to provide the necessary
context. Chapter 8 in particular is not about Fichte’s ethics, since for Fichte right is
wholly distinct from ethics. The aim of Chapter 8 is also not to provide a complete
exposition of Fichte’s theory of right, any more than Chapter 2 is intended to p rovide a
full account of Fichte’s Doctrine of Science (Wissenschaftslehre). But both chapters are
x Preface
necessary, because we need to see how Fichte’s ethical theory stands in relation to both
his Doctrine of Science and his theory of right. Also necessary is Chapter 3, which
deals with two doctrines absolutely fundamental to Fichte’s ethics: freedom and inter-
subjectivity. A word must also be said about Chapter 1, since it is not customary to
begin a book of this kind with a biographical chapter. I did not even think of beginning
this way in writing about the ethical thought of Kant or Hegel.
Fichte wrote:
The kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is. For a philosophical
system is not a lifeless household item one can put aside or pick up as one wishes; it is animated
by the very soul of the person who adopts it. (EE 1:434).
Fichte’s assertion might imply that in order to benefit from the study of anyone’s phi-
losophy you would need intimate acquaintance with the person or at least knowledge
of their biography. Is this true in general? I think not. We don’t know much about what
sort of person Aristotle was, but don’t feel much deprived by that ignorance. Some
philosophers—such as Hegel—have even insisted that it is part of the job of philoso-
phy to keep the philosopher’s personality out of it, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless,
Fichte spawned a philosophical tradition that encourages the idea that a philosopher’s
personality needs to be part of the subject matter of philosophy. It includes German
Romanticism, and such later philosophers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Sartre, Beauvoir, and Arendt. We do care about the lives and personalities of these phi-
losophers, even when we do not like what we find when we investigate them. Fichte’s
statement might at least imply that this also holds of him.
Other reasons for beginning with Fichte’s life emerge in Chapter 1 itself. Fichte was
an interesting person; his life is inspiring but also tragic. He was born into extreme
poverty, but was forcibly torn from his birth family at age eight, compelled to live
among the privileged classes and address his thoughts to them. Other improbable
events placed him in a position of fame and greatness, but also led to turmoil and his
eventual downfall. Kant too experienced upward social mobility, but in his case the
process was slower, and Kant adjusted to it gracefully. Fichte most definitely did not.
He was thin-skinned, abrasive, and self-righteous. Fichte was convinced that human-
ity’s only hope was that the wealthy and powerful should use their privileges to make
the world a better place and live up to the dignity of their humanity—of all humanity.
But he saw all too plainly, as we still see today, that most of those with wealth and
power are of just the opposite disposition. He could not trust most of the people
around him—those very people on whom his hopes for the moral progress of human-
ity of necessity had to rest.
Fichte had a powerful and original mind. I think his doctrines, his philosophical
method, and his arguments are as much worth studying as those of any other great
modern philosopher. I hope the critical exposition of them offered in this book will
make that evident. Fichte was also a systematic philosopher, and one who laid special
emphasis on the rigor of his philosophical deductions. But he never truly completed
Preface xi
his system, and his attempts at detailed and rigorous argument, whether or not we
ultimately think they succeed, are often frustratingly obscure.
Nietzsche said: “The will to system is a lack of integrity” (Kaufmann, ed., 1954,
p. 442). Like many of the famous sayings frequently quoted by Nietzsche’s admirers
(often in a tone of fatuous self-confidence) this one is obviously false, bordering on
self-contradictory. In philosophy the aspiration to a rigorous system is the only pos-
sible form that intellectual integrity could ever take. There is no such thing as the
“integrity” of a detached fragment, however inspired, apart from a systematic con-
text into which it might be integrated. But like many of Nietzsche’s bold paradoxes,
this one nevertheless makes a valid point: Integrity always requires us to be prepared
to acknowledge the inevitable failure of our systematic aspirations, which all too few
systematic p hilosophers seem willing to do. Fichte did have the integrity to admit
that he never finished his system, but he kept on trying. The tension of insightful
inspiration, aspiration to rigor and system, willingness to admit failure: that unsta-
ble combination is what great philosophy is all about. Fichte illustrates that as well as
any great philosopher.
Fichte was always seen, and always saw himself, as a follower of Kant. He also
emphasized the practical side of philosophy (right, ethics, and religion). In fact, how-
ever, Fichte produced his first important treatise on all these topics independently of
Kant. This is not an interpretive remark, but simply a fact of chronology. On religion,
right, and ethics, Fichte published his main work shortly before Kant published each of
his corresponding works on the same subject. Fichte’s first published work, Attempt at
a Critique of All Revelation (1792), preceded Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason (1793–1794); Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (1796–1797) preceded
Kant’s Doctrine of Right (1797); Fichte’s System of Ethics was published the same year
as Kant’s complete Metaphysics of Morals, which included the Doctrine of Virtue
(1798). Owing to these purely chronological facts, Fichte’s philosophy, while having a
Kantian point of departure, always extends Kant’s ideas in new directions. This also
means that Fichte’s ethical thought should be accessible to anyone conversant with
Kant’s ethical thought.
Today Kant’s ethical writings are widely studied; Fichte’s still are not. But it was not
always so. Michelle Kosch has convincingly documented the surprising fact that for
much of the nineteenth century, the text from which most moral philosophers got
their account of Kantian ethics was Fichte’s System of Ethics (Kosch 2015). People who
have studied Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit can see clearly that it was plainly true of
him. In this there was a serious distortion in the reception of Kant, but unless students
of Kantian ethics also study Fichte, they will inevitably be blind to certain ways in
which their own understanding of the history of ethics—of Kantian ethics in particu-
lar—has been distorted. My own work on Kant’s ethics has been devoted to showing
how much of what now passes for “Kant’s ethics” involves a serious misunderstanding
of Kant. Some of the common misinterpretations reflect the role of Fichte in the past
reception of Kantian ethics, even when people are entirely oblivious to it. For example,
xii Preface
the variations on Kantian themes developed by Rawls and his followers seldom show
any awareness at all of Fichte, but (at least in my opinion) they often end up sounding
like Fichteans without realizing it. Kantian ethics would be greatly enriched if Kantians
looked more closely at Fichte.
Much the same is true of Fichte’s relation to Hegel. Many of the most famous ideas
associated with Hegel’s name were founded quite directly on Fichtean models, though
Hegel seldom directly admits it. This includes even Hegel’s dialectical method itself, as
well as his theories of recognition and right, and his conviction that philosophical eth-
ics must include a conception of the rational society. Hegel’s ethical thought is at many
points in critical dialogue with Fichte’s. The influence of Fichte on Hegel was often
negative: Hegel accepted Fichte’s formulation of certain issues but took a contrasting
position on them. For all these reasons, Hegel’s ethical thought cannot be properly
understood without some knowledge of Fichte.
Fichte is an important philosopher for our own time, especially in morality and pol-
itics. The rising generation knows that there is a great deal that is wrong with the world.
As any decent person would think about it, the course of history has not gone well for
our species in the twentieth century. To thinking people, the old ways, the old answers,
the old traditions, are as hollow as they are hallowed. But we no longer have any clear
conception of what earlier philosophers, including Fichte, might have called humani-
ty’s historic mission. It has become fashionable to doubt or deny that it even has one. If
it does, we are short on faith and hope when it comes to fulfilling it. When we let our-
selves entertain such thoughts, we are always in danger of becoming both desperate
and cynical. Fichte speaks to just such a situation. He was a philosopher whose time
was out of joint. He saw himself condemned, against overwhelming odds (“O curséd
spite”), to undertake the task of trying to set things right.
Nothing is more central to Fichte’s thought than the conception of a human vocation
(Bestimmung). An important part of Fichte’s moral philosophy is his thesis that our
moral vocation is bound up with our positive contribution to the future of humanity—
to what Samuel Scheffler (2013) has very appropriately called “the afterlife.” This is
especially appropriate in relation to Fichte, because Fichte sees the “afterlife” in just
this sense as the only true immortality that our human condition affords us, and the
sole source of any meaning that our individual lives can ever have.
Fichte especially concentrates on the specific vocation of scholars, intellectuals, phi-
losophers, whose task it is to help define the human vocation. In Fichte’s philosophy, the
best and most radical social and political ideals of the modern world achieve a particu-
larly pure, sharp, and vibrant articulation that still has the power to inspire. Fichte’s
obsessive emotions on this topic, which are always close to the surface, also waver pas-
sionately at the cusp where faith and hope are in danger of falling into confusion and
despair. He addresses this personal scholarly vocation, just as he did his audience, with
an existential passion that shines through even his most abstract philosophical argu-
ments and constructions.
Preface xiii
My own first interest in philosophy—when I was still in my teens—began with the

existentialists: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir—a bit later, Heidegger. But
neither I nor my professors at Reed College and Yale University who taught me about
existentialism had any knowledge of Fichte. The writings of the existentialists have a
vividness and popularity lacking in Fichte’s writings—or at least in his more rigorous
and systematic writings, such as those expounded in this book. I now see Fichte as
offering existentialist philosophers, as he offered the Romantics in his own time, a
philosophical theory that served as the background for their less philosophically disci-
plined intellectual adventures. For many of the existentialists themselves, this function
was fulfilled more directly by the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. As I have learned
from my Stanford colleague Dagfinn Føllesdal, Husserl’s philosophy after 1917 was
directly influenced by his study of Fichte. I now see Fichte’s philosophy as providing a
more rigorous and systematic foundation for the view of things championed by those
very philosophers who long ago got me interested in philosophy in the first place.
My first real acquaintance with Fichte’s philosophy had to wait until in the mid-
1980s. In the early 1960s, I read Roderick Chisholm’s translation of the Vocation of
Man (BM), but neither understood it nor took to it. In the 1970s, I tried reading the
Peter Heath-John Lachs translation of the Science of Knowledge (GWL) but it made no
sense to me. A lot of it still doesn’t. In Chapter 1 §3, when we look at the conditions of
its composition, we will see why it doesn’t. It is part of Fichte’s tragedy that people still
regard this text as his most important work, and imagine that they have to master it
before they move on to anything else. It is hardly surprising that your writings remain
largely unread if your reputedly “most important work”—the supposed gateway to
your philosophy—is virtually unintelligible.
Then one day in the mid-1980s I was asked by Cornell University Press to read the
manuscript of Daniel Breazeale’s translations of Fichte: The Early Writings (1988).
I knew next to nothing about Fichte, but at the time I was the only philosopher around
Cornell with an interest in German idealism or the continental tradition. Reluctantly,
therefore, I agreed. It was a life-changing decision. I was seized with an immediate
enthusiasm, especially for Fichte’s 1794 Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation. My interest
was further excited when I read some of Fichte’s other writings in German—the ones
on which this book is focused. I even tried teaching Fichte’s writings on right and eth-
ics to a few bewildered Cornell graduate students, using photocopies of nineteenth-
century translations. That attempt was not repeated.
At the time I was working on Hegel’s Ethical Thought (1990) and also editing
H.B. Nisbet’s new translation of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991). It
was sometime around 1990 that I formed the intention to write the present book. It has
taken a quarter-century to fulfill the intention. In the meantime, new translations of
both Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (2000) and System of Ethics (2006) have
appeared. I myself edited the reissue of Garrett Green’s translation of Attempt at a
Critique of All Revelation (2010). Other good English translations of works of Fichte
xivâ•… Preface
have also appeared in recent years. I hope their availability will make more accessible
both Fichte’s philosophy itself and a book like the present one.
Although the study, thinking, teaching, and writing that have led to this book have
occupied me for a long time, the final push toward its completion began shortly after
the bicentenary of Fichte’s death: the first half of 2014. This book was completed during
the following year.
In the long time I have been working on this book, occasional exchanges with
Breazeale, and attention to his writings, especially the collection of his papers pub-
lished in 2013, have helped me understand Fichte better. He knows more about Fichte
than anyone else I’ve ever met. He gave me a detailed set of comments on a draft of this
book, which saved me from a number of errors. I fear he may not think it saved me
from all the errors he tried to correct, since we do not agree on all aspects of Fichte
interpretation. I still think of Breazeale as the one person to whom I most owe my
interest in Fichte.
I have also especially benefited from personal exchanges with two other Fichte
scholars: Frederick Neuhouser, with whom I taught a mini-course on Fichte at
Stanford in spring 2014, and Michelle Kosch, with whom I have had frequent
exchanges about Fichte’s ethics, especially on the issues where our interpretations disa-
gree. Those two, more than any others, illustrate the fact that Fichte is beginning to
attract the attention of some of the best scholarly and philosophical minds. Other ris-
ing scholars include Owen Ware, from whom I have had helpful comments on parts of
this book, and David James. There is no better measure of a philosopher’s greatness
than the fact that the best minds are attracted to the philosopher’s writings.
I am especially grateful to two of my students for helpful comments on many details
in the manuscript. Tobey Scharding’s comments displayed an affection for Fichte’s phi-
losophy that is like my own. I hope the changes made in response to her questions have
helped to make Fichte’s thought more accessible. Alyssa Bernstein sent me helpful and
detailed comments on every chapter, and even on one preliminary draft that fortu-
nately didn’t make it into the final version. She is not an aggressive person—she’s as
sensitive and gentle as she is intelligent—but she told me bluntly when I was wrong and
challenged me to think about Fichte’s concept of God, the ethics of care, and several
other things which led to significant changes throughout the book.
I am also grateful to all those other students at Stanford University and Indiana
University, who—in ever increasing numbers, I am happy to say—have been willing to
sign up for courses on a difficult and too often marginalized German idealist philoso-
pher, when I have had the time and temerity to offer them. That explains why the dedi-
cation of this book reads as it does.
This book also goes to press less than a month after my wife Rega and I celebrated
our fiftieth wedding anniversary.
Palo Alto, California, July 14, 2015 (Bastille Day) Allen W. Wood
Sources
Works by Fichte, Hegel, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Engels are referenced using the
abbreviations listed below. Where an item also appears in the author’s collected works,
the number of the volume in which it appears is given. Unless otherwise stated, any
English translation appearing in the text is the author’s own, though standard English
translations are used where possible for the reader’s convenience.
Fichte
GA (1962–) J.G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Reinhard Lauth
and Hans Gliwitzky. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich
Frommann. Cited by part/volume:page number or in the case
of letters in III, by letter number.
SW (1970) Fichtes Sammtliche Werke, edited by I.H. Fichte. Berlin:
W. deGruyter. Cited by volume: page number.
EW Daniel Breazeale (ed.) Fichte: Early Writings. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1988. Cited by page number.
IW Daniel Breazeale (ed. and tr.) Introductions to the
Wissenschaftslehre and other writings. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1994.
ARD Aphorisms on Religion and Deism (1790), SW 5, tr.
R.W. Stine, in Stine (ed.) The Doctrine of God in the Philosophy
of Fichte. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.
ASL The Way Toward the Blessed Life, or: The Doctrine of Religion
(1806), SW 5, tr. William Smith. London: John Chapman,
1849.
BHW On Stimulating and Increasing the Pure Interest in Truth
(1795), SW 8, EW
BM The Vocation of Man (1800), SW 2, tr. Roderick Chisholm.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958
EE Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1797),
Erste Einleitung, SW 1, IW, also GWL
ZE Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1797),
Zweite Einleitung, SW 1, IW, also GWL
K1 Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1797),
Kapitel 1, SW 1
Chapter One, IW
xvi Sources
GEW Outline of the distinctive character of the Wissenschaftslehre

(1795), SW 1, EW
GGW On the basis of our belief in a divine governance of the world
(1798), SW 8, IW
GGZ The Characteristics of the Present Age (1805), SW 7, tr.
William Smith. London: Chapman, 1848.
GH The Closed Commercial State (1800), SW 3, tr. Anthony Curtis
Adler. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012.
GWL The Science of Knowledge (1794), SW 1, tr. Peter Heath and
John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
NR Foundations of Natural Right (1796), SW 3, tr. Michael Baur,
ed. F. Neuhouser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.
RDN Addresses to the German Nation (1808), SW 7, tr. Gregory
Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
SB Sun-Clear Report (1801), SW 2, tr. Ernst Behler, The
Philosophy of German Idealism. London: Bloomsbury-
Continuum, 1987.
SL System of Ethics (1798), SW 4, tr. D. Breazeale and G. Zöller.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
UGB On the Distinction between Letter and Spirit in Philosophy
(1795), GA II/3, EW
VBG Some lectures concerning the scholar’s vocation (1794), SW 6,
EW
VKO Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792, 1793), SW 5,
translated by Garrett Green, edited by Allen Wood.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
WL1804 The Science of Knowing (1804), SW 10, tr. Walter Wright.
Albany: SUNY Press, 2005
WLnm Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, GA IV/2, ed. and transl.
Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992
ZE Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre
(1797), Zweite Einleitung, SW 1, IW, GWL
Hegel
Werke Hegel Werke: Theoriewerkausgabe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970.
Cited by volume:page number.
EL Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften: Logik,
Werke 8. Cited by paragraph (§) number.
Sources xvii
PhG Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke 3. Cited by paragraph (¶)

number in the A.V. Miller translation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977.
NP Nürnberger Propädeutik, Werke 4.
PR Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke 7. Cited by
paragraph (§) number; ‘R’ means “Remark”; ‘A’ means “Addition.”
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, tr.
H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
TJ Theologische Jugendschriften (1793–1800), Werke 1. Cited by
page number. Early Theological Writings, tr. T.M. Knox.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971.
WNR Über die wissenschaftliche Behandlungsarten der Naturrecht,
Werke 2, Natural Law, tr. T.M. Knox. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Cited by German volume:page/
English page.
Kant
Ak Immanuel Kants Schriften. Ausgabe der königlich preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1902-.
Unless otherwise footnoted, writings of Immanuel Kant will
be cited by volume:page number in this edition.
Ca Cambridge Edition of the Writings of Immanuel Kant. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2016. This edition
provides marginal Ak volume:page citations. Specific works
will be cited using the following system of abbreviations
(works not abbreviated below will be cited simply as Ak
volume:page).
Anth Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), Ak 7
Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, Ca
Anthropology, History and Education
EF Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf (1795), Ak 8
Toward perpetual peace: A philosophical project, Ca Practical
Philosophy
G Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), Ak 4
Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, Ca Practical
Philosophy
I Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher
Absicht (1784), Ak 8
Idea toward a universal history with a cosmopolitan aim, Ca
Anthropology History and Education
xviii Sources
KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787). Cited by A/B

pagination.
Critique of pure reason, Ca Critique of Pure Reason
KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), Ak 5
Critique of practical reason, Ca Practical Philosophy
KU Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Ak 5
Critique of the power of judgment, Ca Critique of the Power of
Judgment
MA Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (1786), Ak 8
Conjectural beginning of human history, Ca Anthropology
History and Education
MS Metaphysik der Sitten (1797–1798), Ak 6
Metaphysics of morals, Ca Practical Philosophy
NRF Naturrecht Feyerabend (1784), Ak 27
Kant’s Natural Right Gottfried Feyerabend, Ca Lectures and
Drafts on Political Philosophy
O Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientieren? (1786), Ak 8
What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking? Ca Religion
and Rational Theology
P Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (1783), Ak 4
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Ca Theoretical
Philosophy after 1781
R Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft
(1793–1794), Ak 6
Religion within the boundaries of mere reason, Ca Religion and
Rational Theology
Refl Reflexionen, Ak 14–23
Ca Notes and Fragments
RH Recension von Gottlieb Hufeland, Versuch über den Grundsatz
des Naturrechts (1786), Ak 8
Review of Gottlieb Hufeland, Essay on the Principle of Natural
Right, Ca Practical Philosophy
SF Streit der Fakultäten (1798), Ak 7
Conflict of the faculties, Ca Religion and Rational Theology
TP Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein,
taugt aber nicht für die Praxis (1793), Ak 8
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of no use in practice, Ca Practical philosophy
VA Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, VA 25
Lectures on Anthropology, Ca Lectures on Anthropology
VE Vorlesungen über Ethik, Ak 27, 29
Lectures on Ethics, Ca Lectures on Ethics
VL Vorlesungen überLogik, Ak 9, 24
Lectures on Logic, Ca Lectures on Logic
VP [Vorlesungen über] Pädagogik, Ak 9
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VRL Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen, Ak 8
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WA Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (1784), Ak 8
An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? Ca
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Kierkegaard
SV Kierkegaard, Søren (1901–1906). Søren Kierkegaards Samlede
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Marx and Engels

Marx (1981) Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 3 (1895), transl. David Fernbach.
London: Penguin; cited by volume: page.
MECW Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich (1975–2004). Collected
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page.
Spinoza
Spinoza Spinoza, Opera. edited by Carl Gebhardt. Heidelberg: C. Winter,
1925.
Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and
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Proposition (P), Corollary (C), Scholium (S); Epistles cited
by number.
1
Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte?
Fichte insisted that one’s philosophy depends on the kind of person one is (EE 1:434).
But that is not the only reason, or even the best reason, to begin a book on Fichte’s eth-
ics with a biographical chapter.1 Fichte was a complicated and fascinating person. His
life was eventful and interesting. Its early stages make for a gratifying narrative, even an
inspiring one, as we trace the career of a man of lowly background who rises through a
series of improbable events to a position of fame and greatness. Then, however, the
story takes a darker turn. Fichte could even be called an Aristotelian tragic hero: he
was a great man, of lofty and noble accomplishments, brought low through a cruel
fate acting on a decisive flaw in his own character. His tragic fate may be considered
to include the undeserved neglect from which his thought still suffers, and even the
world’s failure to take the path his thought marked out. His tragedy may be the tragedy
of us all.
§1: Background and Education

The story properly begins on one Sunday morning early in the year 1771, in the
bedroom of the Baron Ernst Haubold von Miltitz, a well-to-do nobleman who lived
on his country estate in Saxony, not far from the city of Meissen. The Baron was accus-
tomed to getting into his carriage and travelling on Sundays to hear the sermons of
Pastor Nestler in the village of Rammenau. But on this particular Sunday, the Baron
was ill in bed, which greatly vexed him because he was especially looking forward to
Nestler’s sermon that week. When he mentioned his displeasure to a servant, the
Baron was told of a little uneducated eight-year-old boy who lived in the village,
herded geese to help support his poor family, and attended the Pastor’s sermons
regularly. This boy had shown the astonishing ability to repeat a sermon virtually ver-
batim, and with comprehension, shortly after he had heard it. That child was brought
before Baron Miltitz by his local pastor Dinndorf, and to his pleasure and amazement,
the youngster was able to do what the servant had promised. The Baron was so
1
For those interested in more, there is an excellent recent book-length biography of Fichte in German:
Kühn (2012). There is also a fine biographical sketch in English by Bykova (2014).
2 Fichte’s Ethical Thought
impressed that he undertook to see that the little lad should get an education that
would prepare him for the clergy, so that he might learn to preach sermons of his
own when he grew up.2
That remarkable little boy was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He was born on May 19,
1762, near Rammenau. His father was a poor ribbon-weaver, an emancipated serf.
Baron Miltitz took Fichte away from his family and placed him under the care of Pastor
Krebel in Niederau, about 30 km west of Rammenau. He was then sent to school at
Meissen, and three years later at the Baron’s expense to the famous Internat (or board-
ing school) at Pforta, near Naumburg. This is the same school where, some thirty years
earlier, the poet Friedrich Gottlob Klopstock (1724–1803)—the brother of Fichte’s
future mother-in-law—had been a pupil. It is also where, some seventy years later, the
young Friedrich Nietzsche was to receive his schooling.
The Baron died in 1774, but included provisions in his will for Fichte’s university
education. These studies began in 1780, first at Jena, then Wittenberg, and finally
Leipzig, where he stayed longer than the Baron’s heirs had intended his education to
last. They generously continued supporting him for some time even after it was clear
that he had no intention of becoming a minister of the Gospel, but aspired instead to
an academic career in philosophy.
§2: An Impoverished Upstart Philosopher Makes his

Way in a Hostile World
Fichte later wrote: “Our philosophy becomes the history of our own heart and life;
and according to how we find ourselves do we think about the human being in
general and his vocation” (BM 2:293). We will see that Fichte holds that in acting
freely, the human self must tear itself away from what it is. This I—the pure rational
principle present in every human being—is fundamentally in conflict with the
not-I—the world outside the I, which the I experiences as resisting its striving.
Fichte’s highly abstract, philosophical conception of human action was meant to
apply universally; at the same time, these propositions might serve as metaphors
for the bizarre series of events through which Fichte himself rose to intellectual
prominence. From childhood onward, he tore himself away from the life that a
cruel social order had chosen for him as the illiterate son of a destitute weaver. His
improbable rise in the world, occasioned equally by his extraordinary ability, his
tireless effort, and a series of fortunate occurrences, was at the same time a constant
struggle against the same social order that would have condemned him to a life of
poverty and obscurity.
2
Kühn (2012), p. 45, casts doubt on this story, suggesting that it may be only a Fichte family legend. It
seems impossible to verify at this point precisely how it came about that Baron Miltitz and his family came
to provide for Fichte’s education. But this account, involving Fichte’s verbatim recitation of a sermon, is the
only one we have.
Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 3
Private tutor. By 1784, the patience of the Baron’s heirs had been exhausted. They
were no longer willing to support his education. Fichte had to leave the university—
without a degree. Financial necessity required him to begin making a living, which he
did as a teacher of children in wealthy households near Leipzig and Dresden. Such was
the usual life-path at that time and place for someone of modest means who had aca-
demic ambitions: It was the same path Kant had taken forty years earlier, and that
Hegel would take ten years later.
Fichte seldom stayed long in any one position. He apparently did not feel much grat-
itude for the advantages he had received through the Baron Miltitz’s beneficence. Most
household tutors were treated like family servants. Fichte was haughty and ambitious,
jealous of the dignity and authority to which he thought his intelligence and education
entitled him. He resented having to work for the aristocrats or wealthy bourgeois
whose elevated station in life he regarded as the undeserved privileges of an unjust
social order. If not dismissed for insubordination, Fichte resigned a teaching post as
soon as he had saved enough money to live without it—only to be compelled all too
soon by need to seek similar employment once again.
Zürich. In 1788 Fichte managed to better his position by leaving Saxony for a
household in Zürich, Switzerland. This move was the second major turning point in
Fichte’s life, changing it almost as much as his boyhood encounter with the Baron. In
Zürich he made the acquaintance of Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), a religious
thinker who had connections to some of the most influential intellectuals of the
day. Through Lavater, Fichte was also introduced to the social circle of the famous
poet Klopstock. This is how he met Klopstock’s brother-in-law Hartmann Rahn
(1719–1795), a well-to-do customs official, with whom he began a close friendship.
Like Fichte, Rahn was an ardent supporter of the ideals of the revolution then taking
place in France.
Fichte also met Rahn’s daughter Johanna Marie (1755–1819), and they fell in love.
As Fichte says in a letter to her: “At first sight, at our first conversation, my entire heart
was open for you” (GA III, no. 21). Johanna was intelligent, of strong character, and
very much in love with Fichte. She was a woman whose social station was far above
Fichte’s—someone whom nobody of Fichte’s lowly background could ever expect to
marry. She was, however, already past the age of thirty-five, seven years older than
Fichte, and never a beauty. At the time she met Fichte, she must have long since
despaired of ever having the opportunity to marry. They made for an improbable pair;
the very awkwardness of their romance is touching. Their eventual marriage was by all
accounts a successful and happy one.
They could not marry immediately: Fichte’s social inferiority was probably the chief
obstacle. It could be overcome only with time, as Fichte made new social contacts, in
Zürich and beyond. To this end, Lavater and Rahn soon used their influence to get
Fichte a still better tutoring position in Leipzig, nearer his birthplace. On the way to
Leipzig, he stopped in Weimar, where—with letters of introduction from Lavater—he
made the acquaintance of both Herder and Goethe, contacts that were later to benefit
him greatly. Fichte’s wedding was further postponed when a commercial disaster in
1791 deprived Rahn of a good part of his fortune. Consequently, for the next couple of
years Fichte was to be on his own financially.
Early Spinozism. We do not know much about Fichte’s philosophical views up to this
time. He had been educated in the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy, and during his
school days, he had read with enthusiasm the Anti-Goeze and other theological writ-
ings of G.E. Lessing (1729–1781). These writings must have contributed to an increas-
ingly critical attitude toward traditional Christianity. This seems to be what led Fichte
away from a clerical vocation. The famous “pantheism controversy” between Jacobi
and Mendelssohn in the middle of the 1780s had just focused attention on Lessing’s
Spinozism. Spinozism would have put Fichte in intellectual harmony with a fashion-
able group of German intellectuals who were emboldened to declare themselves as
Spinozists following this renowned controversy. This is what Herder had just done,
for instance, in his dialogues, God: Some Conversations (1787). Goethe too soon
became an avowed Spinozist.
In 1790, Fichte composed a set of Aphorisms on Religion and Deism (ARD 5:1–8).
These were first published only in the mid-nineteenth century, in his son’s first edition
of his works. In the Aphorisms, Fichte embraced a species of “deism” characterized by
the adoption of a Spinozistic monism about God and also a strict determinism regard-
ing human characters and actions:
There is an eternal being whose existence, and whose way of existing, is necessary . . . Every
alteration in this world is determined necessarily, just as it is, through a sufficient cause.—The
first cause of every alteration is the original thought of divinity.
(ARD 5:6)
The Aphorisms seem centrally concerned with the religious problem of sin and
salvation.
What common human sentiment calls sin arises out of the necessary—greater or lesser—limitation
of finite beings. It has its necessary consequences for the state of this being, which is just as
necessary as the existence of divinity, and these are therefore ineradicable.
(ARD 5:7)
The Christian religion, Fichte holds, is merely a subjective expression of human feel-
ing, which has a generally useful influence on morality (again, a Spinozistic position
on the role of religion in human life). Christianity teaches the same reconciliation with
God that comes from the acceptance of necessity, although it presents this reconcilia-
tion not in the form of philosophical “speculation” but instead anthropomorphically,
as God’s forgiveness of sins. Fichte ends the Aphorisms with a set of questions about
“certain moments in which the heart avenges itself on speculation,” leading to a “feel-
ing of God’s displeasure” and an “urgent longing for reconciliation” which may remain
unfulfilled and therefore a source of human misery (ARD 5:7). True salvation for a
person in this condition would be to believe in the necessity of the divine order; but
although this might be proven to him on the intellectual level, it is questionable
whether belief in it will be subjectively possible for a person whose feelings are so
determined (ARD 5:7–8).
In the Aphorisms, Fichte’s conception of God is that of a metaphysical infinite that
transcends all finite categories, in particular that of personality. The influence of
Spinozism seems to have persisted even after Fichte’s conversion to Kantianism in
1790. For Fichte, the I or active person is necessarily finite and materially embodied.
No such a thing as an “infinite person” is even conceivable. In later writings, such as
The Vocation of Man (1800), God is represented not as one person among others but
as the common spiritual life through which human spirits live, the spiritual medium
in which they form a community, even the never realizable ideal spiritual unity toward
which they strive. It was Fichte’s conception of God as nothing beyond the “living and
effective moral order” of the world that brought on the tragic crisis in his academic
career (GGW 5:186).
This is not a book about Fichte’s conception of God, but we will see that these differ-
ent characterizations of the divine play a role in his ethics, especially after 1800. We
will try to make consistent sense of them in Chapter 7 §9. Although God cannot be a
person, Fichte thinks human beings necessarily represent God as personal. Fichte
understands any talk about God not in a literal, supernatural sense, but rather as a
symbolic, aesthetically charged religious expression of truths about human life that
also have a purely secular expression. In the Aphorisms, this includes the truth that
human beings are morally flawed because the perfection of every human being is lim-
ited. Fichte is drawn to traditional religious expressions of these truths because he
thinks the version favored by dogmatic materialists denies human freedom and
deprives human existence of its significance. Religious symbolism is the way to pre-
serve our humanity against the shallowness and depravity of an utterly spiritless world
outlook.
The Aphorisms are also continuous with Fichte’s later philosophy in the way they
concern themselves with the intimate relationship between a philosophical outlook
and the individual personality of the one whose outlook it is. Fichte worries about the
impossibility of persuading a person of philosophical truth through reason, however
evident the arguments for it may be, when it is contrary to the person’s life-orientation,
self-feeling, and hardened individual identity.
Return to Leipzig; conversion to Kantianism. Soon after his arrival back in Leipzig,
Fichte was approached by a university student who wanted to be tutored in the latest
fashionable philosophy—that of Immanuel Kant, with which Fichte up to that point
had been entirely unacquainted. He agreed, and began reading Kant, starting with the
most recent book, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, but soon proceeding to the
Critique of Practical Reason.
Fichte became an immediate and ardent convert to Kant’s critical philosophy.

Decisive was the critical philosophy’s strong commitment to freedom of the will. From
this point onward, Fichte regarded a practical commitment to freedom as foundational
to his entire outlook, not only as grounding any possible theoretical system, but also as
basic to the practical moral and political commitments that animated Fichte’s entire
philosophy. Fichte associated necessitarianism not only with materialism, and hence
with moral laxity and unbelief, but also with social and political complacency. Those
who deny freedom of the will are the kind of people who stand in the way of the moral
progress and enlightenment of humanity because they benefit from social injustice.
This stark opposition must remind us of Friedrich Engels’ later contrast between “ide-
alism” and “materialism” (MECW 26:357–65)—though with an ironic total reversal in
the political and historical implications attaching respectively to the two opposed
world outlooks.
The Spinozistic beginning of Fichte’s philosophy still shows itself in Fichte’s later
writings in many different ways. Fichte adopts many concepts directly from Spinoza,
such as that of the imagination (as a wavering between opposites) or freedom (as the
conscious absence of any determining cause). Thus even when Fichte’s position on an
issue is diametrically opposed to Spinoza’s, he often poses the issue in Spinoza’s terms.
Fichte’s conceptions of sense perception and the mind–body relation are strikingly
original due largely to the way he incorporates much that is distinctive about Spinoza’s
views on these matters into a theory of selfhood and free action that is about as far from
Spinoza’s as could be imagined. In Fichte’s thought, moreover, Spinoza’s philosophy is
always treated with respect, even when (or perhaps precisely because) it represents to
Fichte the most consistent and fully developed expression of the view of life that he
sees as directly opposed to his own. We will also see that on many points of direct rele-
vance to ethics, Spinoza’s philosophy is not at all opposed to Fichte’s. He always
remained at least as much a Spinozist as he ever became a Kantian.
Königsberg. Fichte’s new tutoring post in Leipzig did not work out as planned due to
a quarrel between Fichte and his employer early in their association, which resulted in
Fichte’s angry resignation. He soon accepted another post in Warsaw, to which he trav-
eled (mostly on foot) in spring 1791. This position too came to nothing after another
quarrel between Fichte and his prospective employer upon their very first meeting.
But Warsaw was not far from East Prussia, so Fichte decided to travel on to Königsberg
with the aim of meeting the great Kant.
The first encounter between the two men, on July 4, 1791, apparently left Kant
unimpressed. Fichte remained in Königsberg for several more weeks, however, during
which he wrote a little book, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation; he presented it to
Kant in mid-August. By this time Fichte was in such desperate financial straits that he
also asked Kant for a loan of sufficient funds to enable him to travel back to Saxony.
Kant’s counter-proposal was that Fichte should instead obtain the money he needed by
selling his manuscript, with Kant’s recommendation, to Kant’s publisher, Hartung.
Krakow. With the aid of his colleague, the court chaplain J.F. Schultz, Kant also
obtained a tutoring position for Fichte in Krakow, near Danzig. Unlike the last two, this
position worked out tolerably well, and Fichte remained there about a year. During this
time he composed a radical political tract with the provocative title Reclamation of the
Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, Who have Suppressed It (SW 6:1–35).
Fichte also began work on a long and impassioned reply to an influential conservative
critique of the French Revolution authored by a fellow Kantian, August Wilhelm
Rehberg (SW 6:37–288).
In the meantime, the publication of Fichte’s book on revelation had hit a roadblock.
After the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, his successor Friedrich Wilhelm II had
instituted a censorship of all religious publications with the aim of beating back the
dangerous tendencies of free thought and religious heterodoxy that had blossomed
during Frederick’s reign, which now presented themselves unashamed in many reli-
gious books as well as from university lecterns and church pulpits. (Kant himself was
soon to come into conflict with this censorship when he published Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason.) Fichte was required to submit his manuscript to the theo-
logical faculty at Halle for approval. In January 1792, the dean of the faculty declined
to accept it unless Fichte affirmed that revelation could be accepted on the basis of
miracles. Of course such a change would have totally contradicted Fichte’s critical ration-
alist position; he absolutely refused to make it. Although a new dean soon reversed the
censorship ruling, paving the way for a smoother publication process, Hartung had
already made plans to publish Fichte’s book anonymously and without Fichte’s Preface,
which explained the circumstances of the book’s composition. Thus in the spring of
1792, Fichte’s first publication, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, finally appeared
in this mysterious and provocative form.
In this first book, Fichte holds, along with Kant, that the sole function of religion is
moral, and he thinks the closest we can come to establishing the genuineness of a
particular putative divine revelation (in a holy scripture, for instance) is to determine
that as regards its moral content, it might be consistent with what a good God would
reveal to us. Fichte makes divine revelation a more essential part of the moral life than
Kant ever would—insisting that the moral law given by our own will attains to objec-
tivity only when we regard it as having been addressed to us by a being outside us
(VKO §3, 5:49–58, §7, 5:79–84). As in the early Aphorisms, Fichte thinks God is
beyond finite categories such as personality (VKO 5:42–3), but human beings cannot
think of commands of reason except in the form of commands issued by a divine
person (VKO 5:55).
Fichte’s first publication thus already makes the “second-person standpoint” essen-
tial to morality. It offers transcendental derivations of moral self-respect, of God as
guarantor of the harmony of virtue and happiness, of God as moral lawgiver, of reli-
gion, and of the need for revelation. In these arguments Fichte already makes use
of what he was later to call the “synthetic method”—which also served Hegel as the
prototype for the dialectic employed throughout his speculative system. Fichte’s
development of the concept of volition in the second edition (1793) also anticipates
much of the account he was to use later in his System of Ethics (1798). Although
Fichte’s critique of revelation is recognizably Kantian in inspiration, it is by no means
a mere obsequious imitation of Kant. Nor can it be dismissed as mere juvenilia: at its
publication, Fichte was already within a month of his thirtieth birthday.3
The reception of Fichte’s first book by its earliest readers was the third decisive and
improbable turning point in Fichte’s life. Education at the hands of Baron Miltitz
had wrenched Fichte from his lowly station in life; acquaintance with Lavater and
Rahn had connected him to the learned world; the surprising reception of his book on
revelation would suddenly turn him into an important philosopher, even a kind of
intellectual celebrity.
Many readers of Fichte’s anonymously published book on religion knew already that
Kant himself was planning a work on that subject, and Kant was known to be having
problems with the Prussian censorship that might well have resulted in the anonymous
publication of such a work. The contents of Fichte’s book, especially in this first edition,
and without the changes Fichte made in 1793 for the second edition, easily led many of
Kant’s followers—including Karl Leonhard Reinhold, then Kant’s leading exponent, and
the novelist Jean Paul (Jean Paul Richter)—to suspect that the author was Kant himself.
A lengthy and favorable review in the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung in Jena claimed that
Kant was obviously its author. In the next month’s issue of the same journal, Kant pub-
lished a letter graciously identifying Fichte as the author of the book on revelation and
declaring that the honor of having written it belonged entirely to him. This suddenly
made the hitherto unknown Fichte into a significant figure in the philosophical world.
Return to Zürich. By 1793, Hartmann Rahn’s finances had recovered somewhat from
the setback two years earlier. In the spring, Fichte resigned his tutoring post and
returned to Zürich for his wedding, taking up residence with the Rahn family. Legal
complications further delayed the wedding until the autumn. Fichte used the time to
complete his reply to Rehberg, which he entitled Contribution to the Correction of the
Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution (1793). In this book he attacked the heredi-
tary privileges of the nobility, endorsed a contractualist defense of popular sovereignty,
and defended the right of revolution.
At the same time, Fichte was working on a reply to an important book on theoretical
philosophy that had just appeared anonymously: Aenesidemus, or Concerning the
Foundations of the Elementary Philosophy Propounded in Jena by Professor Reinhold
(1792). This was a critique of Kantian philosophy from a self-described Humean or
skeptical standpoint. Its direct target was the so-called Elementarphilosophie put for-
ward by Reinhold, then professor at Jena. The author of Aenesidemus, whose identity
was known to many of its readers, was Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833), Professor at
Helmstedt, later at Göttingen (one of his later students there was Arthur Schopenhauer).
3
There is a good discussion of the first edition version of Fichte’s Attempt in Breazeale (2013), pp. 1–22.
See also my Introduction to VKO.
Fichte knew Schulze well—they had been students together both at Pforta and at
Wittenberg. In composing his reply to Schulze, and then in working out his own
system of transcendental philosophy, Fichte was also much influenced by the writings
of Salomon Maimon, a largely self-educated rabbi from Lithuania, whom Kant had
described as the critic of his system who had best understood it.
Fichte labored long and hard on his reply to Aenesidemus, finding in Schulze’s skep-
tical critique a fundamental challenge to Kantianism and especially to Reinhold’s
project of grounding Kantian philosophy ultimately on a single first principle that
was proof against any and every skeptical objection. Fichte worked on the review for
nearly the whole of 1793, convincing himself in the process that the critical philosophy
needed a new foundation, different both from Kant’s own and from the one Reinhold
had offered for it.4
§3: Professor in Jena: the Years of Greatness

In the fall of 1793, Fichte was suddenly offered an appointment to Reinhold’s own chair
in philosophy at Jena, which was vacated when Reinhold accepted a more lucrative
professorship from the northern German university of Kiel. This surprising offer to a
young man with no academic degree and no experience whatever in university teach-
ing was obviously inspired by Fichte’s new-found fame as author of the Attempt at a
Critique of All Revelation. But the hand of Goethe—privy counselor at the ducal court
of Weimar with special influence over educational matters—is recognizable as well.
The choice had evidently been made to teach the new Kantian philosophy, and if Kant’s
best-known exponent was leaving Jena for Kiel, he was to be replaced by the latest
Kantian star to appear on the horizon.
Fichte’s appointment was to begin in the spring of 1794, but he was reluctant to
accept it as soon as that, and pled that he needed more time to “complete his philo-
sophical system.” Fichte was already busy on a programmatic essay, Concerning the
Concept of a Doctrine of Science, which he had delivered to the printer by the time he
moved to Jena in May 1794. His evident hope was that he could be given some time
(at least a year) to execute the project described in it before having to take up his
professorial duties. The university refused to permit any delay, however, and this is
probably just as well: in the next twenty years Fichte repeatedly revisited the founda-
tions of the philosophical system he called the Wissenschaftslehre (“Doctrine of
Science”), but without ever coming anywhere close to completing it, or even giving it a
definitive grounding. Fichte therefore assumed the new post at Jena in the late spring
of 1794. This began an all-too-brief five-year period which was fateful not only for his
4
The importance of this review is stressed by Breazeale (2013), pp. 23–41. The role of Fichte’s reception
of Maimon is presented on pp. 42–69. For a good overview of the reception of Kant at this time, see Piché
(1995).
own philosophical development but also (it is no exaggeration to say) for the entire
history of modern philosophy as well.
Lectures. Before leaving Zürich, Fichte was asked by Lavater to give some lectures
developing his new system of philosophy. This he apparently did in April 1794. We
have Lavater’s transcription of the first five lectures on the Doctrine of Science given in
Zürich (GA, IV/3: 1–47). They apparently concluded with a short inspirational speech
later published under the title “On Human Dignity” (SW 1:412–16), which anticipates
some of the ideas Fichte was to present only a short time later in his first series of popu-
lar lectures in Jena, during the summer term of 1794.
Beginning in May 1794, Fichte gave two series of lectures. One was a series of “pri-
vate” lectures for a small audience of tuition-paying philosophy students. In it he
attempted to work out the foundations of his system following the program he had
outlined in Concerning the Concept of a Doctrine of Science. For this Fichte produced,
week by week, a series of difficult exploratory texts which he had copied out for his
students and which he used as the basis of his lectures. These weekly fragments were
later assembled into a book, Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science, published in
the fall of 1794. This text has often been regarded as the unavoidable gateway to Fichte’s
philosophical system; its extreme obscurity has accordingly often constituted an insu-
perable obstacle to the study of Fichte’s thought. When the circumstances of its com-
position are taken into account, however, we should appreciate how far this text is from
being anything that a reader new to Fichte ought to think he or she must master before
going on to other writings. Fichte himself insisted that it could not be understood
without the lectures that accompanied it, and he later even regretted permitting its
publication.5
On Friday evenings in the spring and summer of 1794, Fichte gave another set of
lectures, open without cost to the general public, whose topic he described informally
as “morality for scholars.” These were given in an imposingly large lecture hall—which,
however, was often filled to capacity or even beyond. Fichte’s training as a preacher, as
well as his native talents as a public speaker, made him an inspiring lecturer. He
immediately became the most popular professor at the University. His reputation as a
radical and a Jacobin also preceded him: rumor had it that Fichte taught that “in ten or
twenty years there will be no more kings or princes.”6 Such stories excited not only the
interest of those sympathetic to his message but also the suspicions of those hostile to
it, as well as the curiosity of the crowd that is always drawn by any public spectacle.
Fichte’s passionate commitment to progressive Enlightenment ideals challenged his
audience; it won him many adherents and made him many enemies. These lectures of
1794 were wildly popular. They were in some ways the high point of Fichte’s career,
even of his entire life. More than any other single event, they helped to turn Jena in
5
For good recent expositions of the Foundation of 1794, see Neuhouser (1990), pp. 1–66, Zöller (1996),
pp. 1–43, Förster (2012), pp. 179–204, and Breazeale (2013), pp. 96–123.
6
Voigt to Goethe, June 15, 1794. Tümmler (ed.) (1949), pp. 138–9.
the mid- to late 1790s into the center of philosophical and cultural developments in
Germany. The published version of these lectures still has the power to inspire us today,
for in them Fichte’s basic motives and message come through more directly than any-
where else. For someone with little or no acquaintance with Fichte’s philosophy, Some
Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation is the right place to start.
Fichte’s joy at the enthusiastic reception of his lectures was conveyed in a letter to his
wife and father-in-law (who did not join him in Jena for several months): “Last Friday
I delivered my first public lecture. The largest auditorium in Jena was too small. The
entire entrance hall and courtyard were filled; people were standing on tables, benches,
and each other’s heads.”7 We have several other accounts of the striking impression—by
no means uniformly favorable—that Fichte made on his audience. The most memora-
ble may be that of his student Johann Georg Rist:
Fichte really was an impressive person. Jokingly, I often called him “the Bonaparte of philoso-
phy,” and there are many similarities between the two. This small, broad-shouldered man did
not stand calmly at his lectern like a secular sage, but stood angrily and combatively. His
unkempt brown hair really stood out around the furrowed face, which resembled both the face
of an old woman and that of an eagle. Whether standing or striding about upon his sturdy legs,
he was always planted firmly in the earth upon which he stood, secure and immovable in the
sense of his own strength. No gentle word passed his lips, nor did any laughter. He seemed to
have declared war upon the world which stood over against his I.8
(Rist 1880, 1:70; EW, pp. 19–20)
Fichte was aware how far the opportunity for a decent education had brought him. He
was determined to use that education to make the world a better place. He saw the sons
of the privileged who sat listening to his lectures as spoiled and selfish, taking for
granted their own opportunity for an education, which they were probably destined to
waste in luxury and dissipation. He was determined to change their view of the world,
to make them aware of the heavy duties their privileged existence imposed on them.
His third lecture on the scholar’s vocation contains the following pointed declaration:
Everyone is bound to apply his education for the benefit of society. No one has the right to work
merely for his own private enjoyment, to shut himself off from his fellow human beings and to
make his education useless to them; for it is precisely the labor of society which has put him in
a position to acquire this education for himself. In a certain sense education is itself the product
and the property of society, and thus the man who does not want to use it to benefit society robs
it of its property.
(VBG 6:314–15, 320–21)
Fichte’s popular lectures on “Morality for Scholars” continued throughout the summer.
The five lectures on the scholar’s vocation were followed by another series Concerning
7
Letter of May 26, 1794. EW, p. 19.
8
Several other accounts of Fichte at this time are quoted by Breazeale in the course of his extremely
informative introduction (EW, pp. 20–22).
the Difference between the Letter and the Spirit in Philosophy.9 The conclusion to one
lecture displays their radical tone and also the astonishing claims Fichte made for his
philosophy:
With the discovery of this philosophy an entirely new epoch in the history of the human species
has begun—or, if one prefers, an entirely new and different human species has arisen, one for
which all previous forms of human nature and activity on earth are no more than preparatory, if
they retain any value at all. This is the philosophy to which our age summons us all and which
we can all take a hand in developing just as soon as we have a desire to do so.
(GA II/3:335, EW, p. 208)
These inspiring—yet also combative—popular lectures, as well as the more specialized

ones that led to the Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science, marked the beginning
of the most productive period in Fichte’s life. The writings Fichte produced during his
Jena period were fateful in their influence on all philosophy in the European continen-
tal tradition ever since.
Wissenschaftslehre. Fichte’s Doctrine of Science, though its project was never com-
pleted (and in some ways perhaps precisely due to that fact), served as the prototype
for the systematic philosophical projects carried out during the next twenty years,
most famously by Schelling and Hegel. Soon after producing the first foundations of
his system, the Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science, in 1794, he sketched the
theoretical part of the system in Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Doctrine of
Science With Respect to the Theoretical Faculty (1795; SW 1:331–411). Within a couple
of years, however, Fichte himself had begun to work out a new approach to the foun-
dations of his Wissenschaftslehre, which he presented in lectures customarily called
“Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo” between 1796 and 1799. A published version of
the new approach was suggested (but never fully worked out) in the two Introductions
to the Doctrine of Science published by Fichte in 1797. These were to be followed by a
new systematic exposition of the Doctrine of Science from its foundations onward, of
which, however, Fichte never produced anything but a few—though very interesting
and suggestive—introductory pages (we will be discussing them in Chapter 2 §§5–7).
Apparently Fichte intended at this point to complete his philosophical system not
only with a new presentation of its foundations, but also with two other systematic
works that would complement the systems of natural right and ethics: a philosophy of
religion and a philosophy of nature.10 The only parts of Fichte’s system that he ever really
completed were the “practical”—moral and political—parts: Foundations of Natural
Right (1796–1797) and System of Ethics (1798). These texts, especially the latter, will be
the focus of this book. But Fichte’s plan for a system was to be suddenly interrupted,
never to be resumed, by the turmoil that ended his promising career at Jena.
9
GA II/3:315–42, cf. EW, pp. 185–215.
10
An account of this intended system is presented by Lauth (1994), pp. 57–120. See also Zöller (1997),
pp. 56–9.
Before the end of 1794, Fichte’s wife and father-in-law joined him in Jena. From all
accounts we have, Fichte must have been a difficult person to live with, but his mar-
riage to Johanna seems to have been a happy one. On July 18, 1796, their only child,
Immanuel Hermann, was born. According to a 1796 letter from Fichte to his friend
Berger (GA III, No. 346), the child’s middle name was not supposed to be Hermann
but Hartmann, after his maternal grandfather. The parents later changed the name to
“Hermann” because they thought it sounded better.
One might expect that, given the familial mores of the time, Johanna Fichte would
have gotten along with her husband largely by deferring to him. But reports have it
that she insisted, successfully, on bearing chief responsibility for the upbringing and
education of their son. Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796–1879) was to go on to have a
distinguished career in philosophy in his own right, holding professorships at Bonn
and Tübingen and producing a large output of philosophical writings, including a three-
volume system of philosophy (1833–1846), a three-volume work on ethics (1850–1853),
and a two-volume treatise on psychology (1864–1873). His career was not an easy one,
however, because he too came into conflict with the authorities over his radical political
views. In academic politics, he was controversial due to his opposition to the dominant
Hegelian school of philosophy. Immanuel Hermann wrote a biography of his father,
accompanying an edition of his correspondence, published in 1830–1831; he also
served as editor of the first comprehensive edition of his father’s philosophical writings,
published in 1845–1846 (designated in my list of sources as “SW”).
Fichte’s brief years in Jena were fateful for the history of modern philosophy and
even of modern culture—far more so than is now commonly appreciated.11 This was
due not only to Fichte’s own accomplishments, but also because of the other impor-
tant figures in German philosophy and intellectual life who were attracted to Jena
in the 1790s and came under Fichte’s direct influence. Among them was Johann
Friedrich Herbart (1774–1881), who became the founder of the nineteenth-century
discipline of empirical psychology. Herbart eventually broke with the approach of
Fichte’s Doctrine of Science, but for him it set self-consciousness as the basic problem
of psychology. It was from Fichte that Herbart got the basic critique of traditional
faculty psychology and his view that mental life was fundamentally active. Throughout
the nineteenth century, Fichte was widely recognized as one of the founders of
modern psychology.
Romanticism. Fichte’s influence on the arts and literature was even more direct and
profound than his influence on scientific psychology. The poet Friedrich Hölderlin
(1770–1843) produced early philosophical writings that are clearly Fichtean in their
point of departure. Hölderlin’s school-friend from Tübingen, Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), came to Jena at Goethe’s invitation as “Professor
extraordinarius” in 1798. From 1795 onward, before he was even twenty years old,
11
For good discussions of this influence, however, see Richards (2002), Chapter 2 and Beiser (2014),
Chapter 2.
Schelling began writing philosophical treatises developing ideas drawn from Fichte’s
philosophy. They were so close to Fichte’s position, in fact, that in polemics Fichte
often treated criticisms of Schelling’s treatises as criticisms of himself. It was only
gradually that Schelling broke with Fichte philosophically, championing what
Schelling called a “speculative” approach in contrast to what he saw as Fichte’s
“philosophy of reflection.”12
Another school-friend of Hölderlin and Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (1770–1831), did not come to Jena until after Fichte’s departure. His philoso-
phy after 1800, however, grew out of his encounter with Fichte and Schelling. Hegel’s
first published work was on the Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of
Philosophy (1801). Schelling remained in Jena only until 1803, when his scandalous
affair with Caroline Schlegel forced him to depart for Würzburg. Fichte’s philosophy
in the Jena period not only founded the German idealist philosophical movement
but was also the philosophical inspiration for the intellectual (literary, political,
religious) movement known as “early Romanticism.” Fichte’s dwelling in Jena, at
Unterm Markt 12a, has now been turned into a museum called “das Romantikerhaus.”
It was the site of decisive events in modern philosophy, psychology, theology, and
literature.
Early Romanticism was an intellectual circle centered on the family of August Wilhelm
Schlegel (1767–1845) and his younger brother Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), together
with their wives, Caroline (1763–1809) and Dorothea (1764–1839), who resided in
Jena in the 1790s. The Schlegel brothers founded the influential journal Athenaeum in
1798. Their circle included Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) and his sister Sophie (1775–1833),
Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768–1834), and Georg Philipp Friedrich
Freiherr von Hardenberg, known as Novalis (1772–1801). Novalis’s noble family line
included not only the later Prussian prime minister Karl August von Hardenberg
(1750–1822) but also the family of Baron von Miltitz, so he was connected to Fichte’s
life from that direction as well.13
The early Romantics accepted much of Fichte’s moral and political idealism, but
they were by no means direct followers. They often took Fichte’s emphasis on
human community in an anti-Enlightenment or even anti-modernist direction.
Above all, they rejected Fichte’s conviction that philosophy must be rational and
systematic. But rejections of philosophical systems are always parasitic on some
specific systematic project; they can never survive without it. In the case of the early
Romantics, it was Fichte’s (never completed) system that served as this necessary
background. The Romantic categories of “feeling” and “imagination” were taken
over mainly from Fichte; so was the Romantic conception of the divine as an inde-
terminate transcendence to which we relate through action and aesthetic feeling
For the texts documenting this break, see Vater and Wood (2012).
12
For an influential recent account of the early Romantic movement, and its connection to Fichte, see
13
Frank (2003), especially Lecture 1.

(which is probably best known through Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion of

1798). The early Romantics also often took Fichte’s emphasis on the self-positing
of the I in a radically individualistic direction, giving rise to the variant of Kantian
autonomy which holds not that the rational will legislates universally but rather that
the individual will legislates only to itself. This is also exemplified in Schleiermacher’s
Monologues (1800).
§4: Conflicts
The “cult of reason.” Fichte’s few years at Jena may have been the high point of his
career and also one of the high points of modern philosophy. But for him it was also a
time of constant struggle, grief, and turmoil. Fichte was viewed with deep suspicion
from the start on account of his reputation as a political Jacobin, based on his 1793
essay defending the French Revolution. For a time, following the sensational success
of his lectures on the scholar’s vocation, Fichte held his public lectures on Sundays
immediately following worship services, which struck many as arrogant and even
impious—especially in a professor whose views were already suspected of dangerous
radicalism, both politically and religiously. It marked Fichte, in the eyes of many, as
“an enemy of throne and altar.” It was charged in pamphlets circulated around Jena
that Fichte intended to abolish the Christian religion and replace it with a blasphe-
mous “cult of reason.”14 When it was demanded that he change the scheduling of his
lectures from the Christian Sabbath to a weekday, Fichte was at first indignant and
attempted to enlist Goethe’s support for his position, but eventually he was forced to
back down.
Fraternities. Fichte also made enemies because of his denunciations of the student
fraternities (Landsmannschften or Burschenschaften). These student organizations
seemed to him only to provide an opportunity for lazy and dissolute students to waste
their youthful years in idleness and dissipation, enjoying the luxuries afforded by their
privileged position instead of rigorously preparing themselves, as they ought, for a life
dedicated to the service of society and humanity.
The German Burschenschaften were like a cross between the student fraternities of
the USA and street gangs—whose members, however, were not poor or underprivi-
leged but sons of the highborn, wealthy, and well-connected. The fraternities did not
simply ignore—much less submissively accept—Fichte’s passionate and reckless
denunciations of their frivolity and depravity. During the summer of 1795, Fichte’s
house was vandalized. His aged and ailing father-in-law, who died later that year, was
injured by rocks thrown through his bedroom window. To avoid these attacks, Fichte
was eventually compelled to move his residence to Osmannstädt, some distance from
Jena, and to suspend his teaching at the university. Eventually, the students’ disorderly
14
See EW, p. 24.
behavior forced the military occupation of Jena to quiet the situation, and Fichte
returned to Jena only after he was assured of his family’s safety. Rist’s contemporary
account tells it this way:
In recent years Fichte had been more ardently admired and more violently persecuted than any
other public teacher. All the best minds were his followers. A chaotic world seemed to be trying
to take on a new shape in the confident earnestness of his assertions, in the lofty goals of his
research, and in the consistent rigor of his demonstrations. There was universal jubilation
when we learned that he was returning to Jena from Osmannstädt and would be offering
courses in the winter semester.15
Schiller. Yet another conflict into which Fichte was drawn was more personal and
involved no violence, but it may have played an even greater role in ultimately deciding
his fate at the University of Jena. In 1795, Friedrich Schiller, Goethe’s close friend and
professor of history at Jena, founded a new literary journal Die Horen (named after the
Greek goddesses of the seasons), enlisting the recently arrived professor Fichte as
co-editor. Fichte proposed to submit to the journal three texts: Concerning the
Difference Between the Spirit and the Letter within Philosophy: A Series of Letters (SW
8:270–300). Schiller, however, refused to permit their publication, apparently seeing
them as in conflict with his own Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity (1794).
Fichte’s letters did contain a fairly direct criticism of Schiller:
The ages and the lands of servitude are also those of tastelessness; and if it is not advisable,
on the one side to liberate people before their aesthetic sense has been developed, so it is
impossible, on the other side, to develop it before they are free; and the idea of elevating
humanity to the dignity of freedom through an aesthetic education, and thereby to freedom
itself, leads us around in a circle as long as we have not already found a means of awakening
among individuals in the great mass the courage to be the lord of no one and the servant
of no one.
(SW 8:286–7)
The conflict between Schiller and Fichte also had a distinctively political aspect.
Schiller’s aesthetic letters expressed his growing disillusionment with the French
Revolution, which Fichte continued to support. Fichte, who was always supremely
confident of the justice of his demands, called upon Goethe to settle the dispute in his
favor, but Schiller prevented this as well. In this conflict we see a growing rift between
Fichte and his politically more powerful—and politically much less radical—sponsors
in Weimar.
What fueled all these conflicts was Fichte’s own character and temperament: doctrinaire,
uncompromising, pompously moralistic. Supremely confident in the righteousness of
his cause, he was quick to take offense at any appearance of a slight or criticism. His
opponents were always necessarily in the wrong, not only intellectually but also mor-
ally. Every disagreement was part of the larger battle between the high-minded lovers
15
Rist (1880), 1:61–2. EW, p. 28.
of truth and the corrupt disseminators of falsehood. We get a vivid portrait from
Fichte’s follower Rudolf Steiner:
There was something violent about Fichte’s manner of behavior. Again and again a peculiar
pathos of ideas—which accompanied his scientific ideas just as much as his political ones—led
him to seek the straightest and shortest route to his goals. And when anything stood in his way,
then his inflexibility turned into rudeness, and his energy into recklessness. He was never able
to understand that old habits are stronger than new ideas; thus he was continually coming into
conflict with the persons with whom he had to deal. The reason for most of these conflicts was
that Fichte alienated people through his personality before he could make his ideas accessible
to them. Fichte lacked the ability to put up with everyday life.16
(Steiner 1894, p. 49; quoted in EW, p. 22)
We can see these same attitudes for ourselves in one of Fichte’s letters to Reinhold:
You say that my tone offends and wounds persons whom it does not concern. I sincerely regret
this; nevertheless, it does concern them to the extent that they do not wish to let someone tell
them honestly what terrible errors they usually embrace, and to the extent that they do not
want to accept a bit of shame as the price for some very important instruction. Certainly the
Wissenschaftslehre can have nothing to do with anyone who does not value truth above
everything else—including his petty individual self. The internal reason for assuming the tone
in question is this: whenever I have to witness the prevailing loss of any sense of truth and
the current deep obscurantism and wrongheadedness, I am filled with a contempt I cannot
describe. The external reason for my tone is the way these people have treated me and continue
to treat me. There is nothing I desired less than to engage in polemics.
(GA III, No. 354)
§5: The Atheism Controversy

The article in Philosophical Journal. Things came to a head over a short piece Fichte
wrote for the Philosophical Journal, which he co-edited with his friend Friedrich Philipp
Immanuel Niethammer (1766–1848).17 In 1798, Fichte’s colleague Friedrich Karl
Forberg (1770–1848) submitted an essay in the Journal entitled “Development of the
Idea of Religion,” which was to appear in the fall issue. Though Fichte and Forberg were
in basic agreement on the point that later became the target of attacks, they were not
particularly close. Forberg’s “Letters on the Most Recent Philosophy” (namely, Fichte’s
Doctrine of Science) was even the target of some of Fichte’s replies to critics in the
Second Introduction of 1797. As editor of the journal, Fichte decided to write a short
introduction to Forberg’s paper, “On the Grounds of Our Belief in a Divine
16
This last sentence proves to me that Fichte was a true philosopher—or at any rate to me a kindred
spirit. My wife can confirm this, if any confirmation is needed.
17
Philosophisches Journal 8, pp. 1–20; SW 5:177–89. Niethammer had been a student of Reinhold at
Jena, but also a fellow-student and friend of Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel and the Tübingen seminary;
he was an important figure in setting educational policy in nineteenth-century Germany, especially in
Franconia and Bavaria.
Government of the Universe,” explaining some points both of agreement and disa-
greement with Forberg (GGW 6:177–89).
Fichte’s concept of God. Fichte was a man of profound religious conviction, whose
moral commitments were always seen by him as bound up with the membership of
human beings in a spiritual or divine order. To anyone who appreciates this fact, call-
ing Fichte an “atheist” will seem an absurdity, a claim almost unimaginably far from
the truth. But as we explore Fichte’s views further, we see that the target of the fear and
anger expressed by Fichte’s enemies was something very real and immediately threat-
ening to them. Fichte’s conception of God was never orthodox. In his Foundation of the
Entire Doctrine of Science Fichte had already taken the position that any active I must
be finite and embodied—thus ruling out the possibility that God could simply be a
person such as you or I only infinite and purely spiritual. A deity who would be “a con-
sciousness in which everything would be posited by the mere fact of the I having been
posited”, or an unlimited I, “an I to which nothing would be opposed,” is “unthinkable”
(GWL 1: 253–5). For Fichte, God is a mystical or symbolic way of thinking about the
community of rational beings in history, and their striving for greater unity and per-
fection. God is “the unity of pure spirit,” which is identified with the active community
of rational beings, or even with the never-to-be-attained ideal of its striving. As Fichte
puts it in his 1794 lecture On Human Dignity: “All individuals are included in the one
great unity of pure spirit . . . The unity of pure spirit is for me an unreachable ideal, an
ultimate end, which, however, will never be actual” (SW 1:416,n).
The review of Aenesidemus had concluded with a defense of Kantian moral faith
against Schulze’s charge that it was no different from the cosmological argument for
God that Kant had rejected. Like Kant, Fichte distinguishes the practical grounds
of moral faith from any speculative, theoretical, or metaphysical argument. In this
connection, he claims that the final goal of the I’s striving can be represented by “the
intelligent I as lying beyond itself,” and then the striving is called “faith (faith in God)”
(SW 1:23). For Fichte, God is sometimes an ideal object of human striving, sometimes
the moral world order—an order we humans must create—that grounds our faith in
this striving. We will see in Chapter 7 that God is even identified with the ideal unity of
the human race—past, present, and future in a common action with common aims.
Fichte sometimes also allows (as he did in his Spinozistic Aphorisms of 1790) that
human beings may represent this unity, which is in itself impersonal, in personal terms.
In the Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, Fichte anticipates the later formulation
by Ludwig Feuerbach, saying that we arrive at the idea of God through “an alienation
(Entäusserung) of what is ours, translating something subjective into a being outside
us; and this alienation is the principle of religion” (VKO 5:55).
For the purposes of his short prefatory essay to Forberg’s article, Fichte subscribed,
as did Forberg, to the Kantian idea that we postulate the existence of God in order to
guarantee a moral order to the world in which we act. Like Spinoza, Fichte did not
believe in a “personal God.” God is the infinite spiritual life and ideal striving that
anifests itself through the strivings of the entire community of human beings. Hence
m
it was natural for Fichte to express the thought behind Kantian moral faith in these
words: “The living and effective moral order is itself God; we need no other God and
can grasp no other” (GGW 5:186).
To Fichte’s enemies, this sentence was taken to be an impudent declaration that
there is no God at all. There is no deity, only a “moral order.” Further, given Fichte’s
notoriously Jacobin moral and political convictions, his enemies were certain that this
was bound to be an order quite hostile to that sanctioned by traditional religion and
the secular powers that be. In place of God, Fichte would have us worship only the
dangerous principles liberté, égalité, fraternité. Fichte’s philosophy, whether in print
or in his popular lectures, was a blatant expression of the blasphemy of rationalist phi-
losophers who erected guillotines in France and threaten the good order of society
everywhere. In other forms, the very same cultural battle-lines still exist, especially in
the United States.
Fichte was among the earliest of what we would now call “modernist” theologians.
Such believers enrage the orthodox and fundamentalist with their flagrant apostasy,
but often also bewilder and infuriate the secular-minded with their obscurity and
evasiveness. The “atheism controversy” (Atheismusstreit) should be viewed as one of
the early skirmishes in a conflict between “modernist” theologians and their theologi-
cally conservative, traditionalist, or “fundamentalist” critics. Religious traditions can
provide a vocabulary—aesthetic, emotional, social, conceptual, of rituals and practices
as well as words—in terms of which people can lead richer lives with greater insight
into the human condition. But they also involve traditional authority, barbaric moral-
ity, illusion, dishonesty, and superstition. Fichte was struggling to articulate a concep-
tion of the divine that could reconcile the symbolism of traditional, popular religion
with an enlightened morality and with modern science and reason. It is far from clear
that he succeeded, but his attempt was met with clearly unjust repression by people
who did not care about that. The drama has since been played out over the theology of
Schleiermacher, Rosenzweig, and Tillich.18 As in Fichte’s case, the modernist side often
combines adventurous theology with moral and political views that are progressive or
even radical, while on the conservative side, the fear of atheism is often bound up with
fear of both social change and the Satanism of Enlightenment modernity. Fichte’s
thought puts religion on the side of reason and the cause of freedom, equality, and
community. It seeks to unite progressive social and political radicalism with the sym-
bols and emotions of traditional religion. This is a path that has been largely rejected,
and rejected equally by traditional religion and by most secular movements for radical
social change.
18
On a more popular level, it has shown itself in the debates over Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson’s
Honest to God (1963), Thomas Altizer’s “death of God” theology of the 1960s and 1970s, and on many other
occasions as well, down to the present day.
The attacks begin. There soon appeared in Jena an anonymous pamphlet: “A Father’s
Letter to his Son, Studying at the University, Concerning the Atheism of Fichte and
Forberg.”19 The pamphlet denounced both philosophers as enemies of religion, soul-
less rationalists hell-bent on filling the minds of innocent young university students
with the deadly poisons of libertinism, sedition, and unbelief. Fichte’s enemies had
finally found an issue on which the dangerous radical could be exposed for the male-
factor he was.
The administrative court of Charles Augustus, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar (in
whose domain Jena was located), declared both Fichte’s and Forberg’s essays “atheistic”
and confiscated copies of the issue of Philosophical Journal in which they appeared. The
officials of neighboring Saxony threatened to prohibit their subjects from studying at
the University of Jena unless the Duke took steps to reprimand and punish the authors
and to prevent them from teaching “atheism” to impressionable university students.
Fichte was arraigned at the Duke’s behest by the theologian Franz Volkmar Reinhard
(1753–1812). Reinhard was a man Fichte had until then regarded as his friend and ally:
he had even dedicated the second edition of Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation to
Reinhard.20 Reinhard’s acceptance of this commission, however, was an indication that
he, along with the powers that be, had decided that some concessions to the conserva-
tives would have to be made. The literary attacks on Fichte that began in 1798 soon
became a sensation, spreading far beyond the University of Jena and even beyond the
neighboring states. On one level, the controversy lined up freedom of religious thought
against traditionalists and also defenders of academic freedom against authoritarians.
But on another level, it also provided an opportunity for more general philosophical
attacks on Fichte’s system. Thus it also occasioned Jacobi’s famous “Open Letter to
Fichte” (1799); it even included Kant’s well-known open letter of 1800 (perhaps
ghost-written by Schultz), which denounced Fichte as a false friend to the critical phi-
losophy.21 Fichte was, in effect, abandoned by an entire cluster of important men—
Reinhard, Goethe, Jacobi, Kant, Lavater—on whose support he should have expected to
rely under such circumstances, based not merely on personal ties but even more on the
unquestionably righteous cause of religious and academic freedom. To any enlightened
mind, Fichte was clearly in the right. All those who betrayed him were in the wrong.
No compromise. Fichte’s reaction to the conflict was predictably intransigent,
self-righteous—and utterly self-destructive. He wrote two lengthy defenses of his posi-
tion in 1799 (SW 6:191–238, 239–332). He also wrote an uncompromising letter to the
Duke, declaring his complete innocence of all the accusations that had been brought
against him. He was no atheist, but only a witness to the truth—a truth his accusers
themselves must learn to accept, however much it might unsettle their beliefs, values,
19
See the documents provided in Estes (2010).
20
“Fichte was arraigned as an atheist by the theologian Reinhard, acting in behalf of the court of
Saxony,” Steffens (1863); on Fichte’s relationship with Reinhard, see EW, pp. 362–4.
21
See Jacobi (1994), pp. 497–536; Kant, Ak 12:370–1.
or corrupt ways of life. Fichte threatened to resign his professorship if any action, even
the mildest reproof or reprimand, were taken against him. This ultimatum appeared to
the Duke to exclude any politically workable compromise. Fichte’s arrogant, princi-
pled stubbornness angered even his own supporters within the administrative council
(such as Goethe). Feeling that Fichte had left him no choice, the Duke was quick to
take Fichte’s haughty threat to resign as itself a letter of resignation: a resignation he
hastened to accept. Realizing too late his rash misstep, Fichte tried to explain his true
intent and to mollify his critics. But it was too late. Also unavailing were student peti-
tions circulated on Fichte’s behalf 22 and the support of some colleagues, such as the
theologian Heinrich Paulus (1761–1851).
Fichte was dismissed from his professorship, and he left Jena for Berlin in 1799.
Fichte’s replacement at Jena was Schelling, who was also a post-Kantian philoso-
pher; Fichte even thought of him as a follower. Ironically (but this illustrates how
things work in any world ruled by the maneuverings of political power), Schelling’s
theological views at the time were if anything less orthodox—closer to “atheism”—
than Fichte’s. But Schelling’s interest in the philosophy of nature, his growing sym-
pathy with Spinozism in both metaphysics and natural science, and perhaps most
importantly of all his relative lack of interest in radical politics made him a much
more attractive choice from Goethe’s point of view. Soon Schelling would be joined
at Jena by his friend Hegel and by Hegel’s enemy Jacob Friedrich Fries (1775–1843).
Jena thus began a second brief era of greatness, inherited from the Fichte era,
which would last until the Napoleonic defeat of Prussia in the famous battle of Jena
in 1806.23
As it turned out, Fichte’s greatest years as a philosopher were now behind him. He
never completed his system (though he drafted numerous versions of it, nearly all
unpublished until long after his death). Fichte now dispersed his efforts among several
different projects and at times seems preoccupied with the religious aspect of his
thought, as if obsessed with disproving the charges that ended his academic career at
Jena. Goethe’s wistful remarks were prophetic:
I will always be sorry that we had to lose Fichte and that his foolish presumption expelled him
from a life which (as extravagant as this hyperbole may sound) he will never find again any-
where on this entire planet. The older one becomes, the more highly one values natural talent,
for it cannot be acquired. Fichte certainly has a most outstanding mind, but I fear that it is now
lost, both to him and the world. His present circumstances can only add more bitterness to his
distorted features.
(EW, p. 45)
22
For a first-hand account of the circulation of these student petitions, their failure to have any effect,
and one student’s feelings about the whole affair, see Steffens (1863), pp. 59–67.
23
A powerful recent study of the entire era, which includes a detailed account of Fichte’s 1794 system,
can be found in Förster (2012).
Fichte’s two ethical works of the Jena period, however, came to be accepted for most of
the nineteenth century as definitive statements of Kantian ethics—more so even than
Kant’s own writings—though this has now long since ceased to be so, and even the
historical fact of it has been almost universally forgotten (see Kosch 2015). Fichte’s
most original ideas were picked up by others. They became so much a part of the intel-
lectual environment of the nineteenth century that it is now impossible to say how far
Fichte has ever been recognized as their author.
§6: Exile in Berlin

There was no professorship waiting for Fichte in Berlin. He struggled to make a living
from republication of his works, private teaching, and lectures given in his home for
which he charged a fee. But there were his Romantic friends, such as Schleiermacher
and Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel. There was also some political support from Karl
von Struensee and other reformers within the Prussian political establishment. Many
among the Berlin intelligentsia were sympathetic with his plight, outraged at his treat-
ment by the authorities in Saxe-Weimar, and eager to welcome Fichte as a cause célèbre, a
great philosopher and forward thinker who had become a victim of religious intoler-
ance and a martyr to the cause of academic freedom. He was received at the fashionable
Berlin intellectual salons such as that of Henriette Herz (1764–1847), wife of Kant’s
student Markus Herz (1747–1803).
Publications. Fichte published a work defending his Doctrine of Science against
attacks from various quarters, perhaps most prominently the critique of his system
presented in Jacobi’s Open Letter of 1799, under the remarkable title A Sun-Clear
Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An
Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand (1801; SW 2:323–419). In it Fichte strives
mightily (one might even say desperately) to convince Jacobi, and any who might have
been persuaded by him, that the Fichtean systematic rational reconstruction of every-
day experience from a transcendental standpoint does not alienate us from our lived
agency or threaten us with what Jacobi called “nihilism.” Instead, Fichte claims it only
confirms the everyday world and helps us to understand it better. There was also an
embittered series of letters between Fichte and his erstwhile follower and Jena succes-
sor, Schelling, whose philosophical path had now diverged from Fichte’s.
Fichte’s dismissal from his professorship at Jena in fact changed the entire charac-
ter of his work. Fichte feared further controversy. He thought that much of what he
had published had been misunderstood—even maliciously so. He preferred not to
commit the foundations of his philosophy to writing but instead to rely on the spoken
word. Although he continued to work on the foundations of his Doctrine of Science,
he did not publish any further versions of it during his lifetime—nor did he publish
the later versions of his philosophy of ethics, right, and the state. Instead, he presented
his systematic philosophy mainly in the form of lectures, many of them given at his
home in Berlin. Nearly all of Fichte’s later published writings were popular rather
than systematic.
Fichte’s initial publications after arriving in Berlin were varied, some of them sig-
nificant. The most immediate were two: The Vocation of Man (1800; SW 2:165–322)
and The Closed Commercial State (1800; SW 3:387–513). The Vocation of Man is a
highly engaging work, somewhat reminiscent, in style and aim, of Descartes’
Meditations. It traces the intellectual and spiritual path of an imagined meditator
from skepticism and moral desperation through a transcendental idealist argument
about the dependence of the external world on thought, to a Fichtean moral faith in
God, freedom, and a moral world. Direction to the Blessed Life, or the Doctrine of
Religion (1806; SW 5:397–574) is also religious work, presenting the knowledge of
God as the final goal of all human endeavors. It is difficult to resist the impression that
it and the Vocation of Man were attempts (as enthusiastic and excessive as they were
superfluous) to rebut the charge of atheism that had led to his dismissal at Jena. But
the mystical religiosity of Fichte’s later works represents nothing new, only a more
emphatic development of tendencies in his earlier thought, to which we will continu-
ally return, especially at the end of Chapter 7.
The Closed Commercial State develops the economic doctrines present in Fichte’s
chief ethical works, especially Foundations of Natural Right (1796). Fichte’s conclu-
sions are socially and politically radical. We will look at them further in Chapter 8 §9.
In the next few years Fichte developed parts of his philosophy in two other works. He
treated the philosophy of history in Fundamental Characteristics of the Present Age (1804;
SW 7:1–255). This is a speculative presentation of a characteristically Enlightenment
view of human progress, viewing the present age as a deeply problematic stage in the
development of our species toward higher forms of society. It is problematic because
we have succeeded in throwing off the irrational yoke of tradition and authority but
have not yet learned how to give order to human life through the powers of reason and
free communication. Fichte argues that the only cure for the ills created by freedom
and reason is more freedom and reason, and he looks forward to a time when human
affairs will be determined not by arbitrariness and power but by which way has the
strongest reasons on its side.
Fichte dedicated The Closed Commercial State to Karl August von Struensee (1735–1804).
From 1791 until his death, Struensee was the Prussian minister in charge of finance,
trade, and economic affairs under Friedrich Wilhelm III. Struensee was a theoretician
of state economy as well as a practical politician; he sought many significant reforms
in Prussia which, however, occurred only under his successor Karl Freiherr vom
und zum Stein (1757–1831), chancellor from 1807 to 1810.24 Fichte’s dedication to
Struensee (GH 3:389–94) includes reflections on the relation of the role of the phi-
losopher to the role of a practical politician. Stein’s staunch resistance to French rule
24
For a good, though not recent, historical study of Stein’s life and career, translated from the French,
see Grunewald (1936).
over Prussia required his own exile from Prussia after 1808. His idealistic lack of
compromise—which achieved some reforms but got in the way of others—might be
seen as corresponding politically to Fichte’s intellectual stance. The reform era of
Stein also provides the proper context for considering the German cultural national-
ism of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation.
§7: The Napoleonic War

The late Doctrine of Science. In his later years, Fichte did continue to think about
issues of ethics and political philosophy, presenting lectures on ethics, right, and the
state in 1812–1813 (SW 10: 493–652, SW 11:1–117, SW 4:367–599). But Fichte’s later
thoughts on ethics and right, like his later Doctrine of Science, remained unpublished
until the first comprehensive edition of his writings edited by his son in the 1840s
(though the 1813 Doctrine of the State was published earlier, in 1820).
Fichte wrote whole or partial drafts of his Doctrine of Science (differing significantly
from one another) in 1801 (SW 2:1–164), 1812 (SW 10:312–491), and 1813 (SW 10:1–85),
and lecture series in 1804 (SW 10:87–312), 1812 (SW 9:103–399), and 1813 (SW 9:1–101).
Fichte’s other writings in pursuit of his Doctrine of Science, also unpublished until
his son’s edition of his writings, were Report on the Concept of the Doctrine of Science
and its Fate Up to Now (1806) and Doctrine of Science in its General Outline (1810;
SW 2:695–709), together with a related treatise The Facts of Consciousness (1810;
SW 2:539–689). The Report was mainly a reply to critics, especially to Schelling. The
brief Outline is the last work published in his lifetime, except for two official addresses
given after his appointment at the University of Berlin. It begins with the assertion
that the origin of everything, including knowledge, must be in God, who is pure life
(SW 2:696). In the later versions of the Doctrine of Science, the focus on free subjectiv-
ity and intersubjectivity characteristic of the Jena period works seems to give way to a
theocentric presentation of his philosophy. It is difficult to avoid the impression that
Fichte could never let go of the hopeless task of rebutting the charge of atheism that had
ended his career in Jena.25
Travels. With only two brief interruptions, Fichte was to spend the whole of the rest of
his life in Berlin. The first was a visiting professorship at Erlangen in 1805, during
which he gave a series of ten lectures On the Essence of the Scholar, and its Appearances
in the Realm of Freedom (published 1806). They exhibit Fichte’s continuing concern
with the role of academics and intellectuals in public life and human history, but they
also give evidence of Fichte’s continuing defensiveness about charges of atheism and
his unjust treatment at Jena: the second lecture is devoted to the concept of God and
the sixth to academic freedom.
25
For an exposition of Fichte’s later Doctrine of Science, see Schulte (1971).
Fichte’s second departure from Berlin was a forced exile in 1806, during the French
occupation after Prussia’s disastrous defeat. He went first to Stargard in Poland; then
to Königsberg, where he accepted a professorship and lectured for a time; and finally
to Copenhagen, before returning to Berlin, under still dangerous circumstances, in
August 1807.
Addresses to the German Nation. Between December 1807 and March 1808, 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 and enable it to fulfill its historical destiny. These
lectures coincide with a period of reform in the Prussian government, under the chan-
cellorship of Stein. The government, both central and local, was reformed, the military
reorganized, and serfdom abolished. It was a time of dismal military defeat but also of
hopefulness for those with progressive political views.
Of course at this time there was no “German nation” at all—only a collection of
independent states whose inhabitants spoke a common German language, or rather a
hodgepodge of German dialects. The Addresses display Fichte’s growing interest in
language and culture as vehicles of human spiritual development. Fichte is here
developing ideas found in J.G. Herder and attempting to unite them with his own more
systematic approach. Fichte asserts, for example, the superiority of the German over
the French language, claiming that German represents something living and vital
while French represents something old and decadent (RDN 7:311–27). His evidence
for this—for instance, his etymologies of certain words—is often without foundation
and even downright silly.
The very non-existence of any German nation, however, seems to have been what
inspired Fichte, since it provided him the opportunity to project wholly anew a
national culture still being formed rather than having to work with an already existing
nation, people, or state. The Addresses exhort a recently defeated people to adopt the
same lofty morality and universal human values that Fichte always tried to project on
the world. “It falls to Germans first and foremost to inaugurate the new age, as pioneers
and exemplars for the rest of humanity” (RDN 7:306). The aim of the German nation,
he says, should be “to found an empire of spirit and reason, and to annihilate com-
pletely the crude physical force that rules the world” (RDN 7:496). Like Herder’s
German nationalism, Fichte’s was wholly cultural—aesthetic, literary, and moral. It
was not political; least of all—even in a period of armed conflict—was it military.
Over a century later, and under very different circumstances, the German nation-
alism of the Addresses was notoriously appealed to by the Nazis. It is reported, for
instance, that Leni Riefenstahl chose the works of Fichte to give her beloved Führer as
a birthday present. Such ugly associations still haunt Fichte’s legacy. Given the mon-
strous role played by German nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, it
is difficult for us to think back to a time when German national pride could have
taken more innocent forms. To me it seems absurd to describe Fichte—or anyone
living in a world that was still over a hundred years removed from twentieth-century
horrors—as a Nazi, or even a “proto-Nazi.” But this has been one quite common emo-
tional reaction to Fichte’s Addresses. This reaction appeals to those looking for an easy
way of attesting their own purity of mind by distancing themselves from anything
that could conceivably bear the taint of Nazism—especially to those who have barely
heard of Fichte and know little else about him. But Hitler’s association of Fichte with
German nationalism in its Nazi form was simply a case of a thoroughly loathsome
political movement—a party that represented everything backward and pernicious
in its national culture—seeking bogus respectability by soiling the honorable name of
an admirable figure drawn from its own heritage in the distant past.26 The chief moral
to be drawn, I believe, is that people’s achievements are sometimes grotesquely and
unjustly distorted in historical memory. A second moral is that whatever your cause,
using nationalism or ethnic pride as its vehicle inevitably entangles you in extreme
moral hazard.
Fichte’s chief substantive topic in the Addresses is public education. His radical pro-
posal is that each German state should, each with its own creative experiments and
variations, establish a system of universal free public education. Fichte advocates class-
rooms open equally and in common to boys and to girls, based on the principle that
every child should be inspired with free activity of the mind and the love of learning for
its own sake (RDN 7:280–95, 428–43). Fichte’s thoughts on education were influenced
by the writings of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827). They in turn influenced
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s education theory, and Fichte was associated with Humboldt
in the founding of the University of Berlin. Humboldt is now credited with establish-
ing the system of higher education that made Germany the intellectual leader for most
of the nineteenth century and served as the model for the American university
throughout the twentieth century. Fichte’s Addresses were part of that movement. They
were also expressive of the most hopeful period of the Prussian reform movement
under Stein. That, and not horrific events that transpired twelve decades later, is the
proper context in which to consider them.
The enhancement of Fichte studies through the comprehensive Bavarian Academy
edition of Fichte’s works, edited by Reinhard Lauth, Hans Gliwitzky, and Erich Fuchs
(1964–2012), has excited new interest in the later works of Fichte. But it remains the
case that Fichte’s historical influence was exercised almost exclusively by writings pro-
duced during (or only shortly after) his Jena period, and English-speaking Fichte
scholarship continues to be focused principally on them. This book will refer to some
of his later lectures, especially on history and on religion, but only when I think they
shed light on the works of the Jena period.
26
A present-day parallel would be a political party, regionally dominant in the states of the former
slave-holding Confederacy and with a political base consisting largely of white bigots, that calls itself “the
party of Lincoln.”
§8: Last Years: Professor at the Humboldt University

While in Berlin, Fichte continued to lecture on philosophy, usually in his own home.
With the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810 by Wilhelm von Humboldt
(1767–1835), Fichte finally regained academic prominence. The following year he was
appointed rector and holder of its first chair in philosophy. His functioning in both
posts was hampered by ill health. As rector he was little more than a figurehead; his
political ineffectiveness was again evident in the failure of his attempts to regulate stu-
dent life and impose stiffer academic requirements. Fichte’s last official act as rector of
the Humboldt University was to resign in protest over his colleagues’ reluctance to
punish the harassment of a Jewish student.27 After Fichte resigned in 1812, the chair of
philosophy at the Humboldt University remained unoccupied until it was finally
offered to Hegel in 1818.
Last illness and death. Even before he gave his Addresses to the German Nation,
Fichte’s health had begun to decline. Soon thereafter, he suffered a serious illness from
which he never fully recovered. In 1813, after Napoleon’s notoriously disastrous
Russian campaign, the Prussians revolted against the French occupation. Fichte
favored the revolt, but ill health prevented him from taking any active part. The Berlin
hospitals soon filled with wounded Prussian soldiers, and the crowded and chaotic
conditions were favorable to the spread of infectious diseases. Johanna Fichte worked
tirelessly as a nurse under dangerous conditions. She was stricken with typhoid fever
in January 1814. She survived, but the day after she was pronounced out of danger her
husband, whose health had been frail for the last five years or so, came down with the
illness. He lingered for some days, mostly in a state of unconsciousness, but died on 27
January 1814.
Fichte’s widow lived five years longer, until 24 January 1819. Their graves are next to
each other, adjacent to the graves of Hegel and his wife, in the Dorotheenstädtischer
Friedhof in Friedrichstadt, Berlin. This cemetery, appropriately enough, is also the
resting place of a number of later German leftists, including Bertolt Brecht, Helene
Weigel, Henrich Mann, Arnold Zweig, Hanns Eisler, and Herbert Marcuse.
Fichte’s acknowledgment as a modern prophet of freedom was attested by the biblical
words that were placed on his tombstone:
27
This is worth noting, because a significant amount of attention has been given to an unpublished letter
of 1793 expressing anti-Semitic sentiments with Fichte’s characteristic verbal brutality; this letter is some-
times linked (with pointed reference to events that transpired in Germany some dozen decades after
Fichte’s death) to his German nationalism fifteen years later in the Addresses. See, for example, La Vopa
(2001). There is also in Fichte’s 1793 treatise on the French Revolution a passage in which he expresses
approval for the then prevailing denial of equal civil and political rights to Jews. Attached to it, however,
is a footnote containing an impassioned plea for tolerance: for permitting Jews—along with the adherents
of all other faiths—to practice their religion without hindrance. The note also contains the interesting
suggestion that Jews might best find protection from persecution if their “promised land” were reconquered
and they settled there (SW 6:150–1n).
They that are wise shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to
righteousness shine as the stars forever and ever.
(Daniel 12:3)
But if you visit Fichte’s grave today, the replacement obelisk that bears his name and
image no longer displays the biblical inscription paying tribute to the splendor and
everlastingness of his philosophy. In this way, his tomb bears silent and ironic witness
to Fichte’s restless struggle and tragedy—perhaps also the transitoriness and ultimate
tragedy of our entire human condition—with which, as I hope to argue in this book,
Fichte was engaged perhaps more intimately than was any other modern philosopher.
2
Transcendental Philosophy
The Jena Doctrine of Science
The fundamental motivation of Fichte’s entire philosophy is moral and political. But he
proposed to erect an entire system of philosophy on a fundamental Doctrine of Science
(Wissenschaftslehre). The subtitles of Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (1796) and
his System of Ethics (1798) both read: “according to the principles of the Doctrine of
Science.” These two (“practical”) parts of Fichte’s system, however, are the only parts of
it he ever truly completed. The fundamental Doctrine of Science was never finished.
Fichte was still in the course of revisiting its foundation in the years 1796–1798, and he
rethought it again, even more fundamentally, several times after 1801. Fichte’s most
influential writings are those of the 1790s, and to many who have appropriated them,
including myself, these later developments do not seem like a fulfillment of the earlier
promise.
It might therefore seem to make sense to consider Fichte’s Jena-period works on
right and ethics simply on their own. Fichte himself even avowed in 1800 that it was in
them that the foundations of his system had been most successfully presented
(GA I/7:153). But these works employ the philosophical method at which Fichte had
already arrived in his Doctrine of Science. So it is not only useful but even necessary to
say something about the foundations Fichte was presupposing in his works on right
and ethics. It is no exaggeration, however, to say that even the most basic issues of
interpretation of Fichte’s systematic philosophy are subject to scholarly dispute.1 In
this chapter I will try to make it clear on what understanding of Fichte’s system I am
going to proceed.
Many of the early readers of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason took his project (in the
Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic) to include a response to radi-
cal skepticism.2 Early critics, such as G.E. Schulze, F.H. Jacobi, and Salomon Maimon,
1
An older but still useful presentation of these issues is to be found in Gueroult (1930). Important work
was also done by Philonenko (1966, 1984) and Janke (1970, 1993). More recent treatments of high quality
in English can be found in the following books: Neuhouser (1990), Martin (1997), Zöller (1997), Franks
(2005), and Breazeale (2013). See also Wood (1992).
2
For a thoughtful defense of Kant against the claim that he needed to make such pretensions, see
Ameriks (2000). For a wide-ranging discussion of the post-Kantian anti-skeptical systematic project,
including Fichte’s version of it, see Franks (2005).
found the critical philosophy wanting in these respects. An early defender of it, Karl
Leonhard Reinhold, responded with an “elementary philosophy” that was supposed to
place the critical standpoint beyond the reach of any possible skeptical objection.
Fichte took Reinhold’s project seriously. It was the critique of Reinhold presented in
Schulze’s Aenesidemus that led him to construct his own system, the Doctrine of
Science. Fichte began this in the 1792 review of Aenesidemus and then continued it in
Concept of a Doctrine of Science (1793) and Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science
(1794).3 Fichte continued to work on the project of a Doctrine of Science all the way to
the end of his life.
During the Jena period itself Fichte abandoned (or at least revised) his first system-
atic project in favor of a second one. It is found in the two Introductions and the
(unfinished) Chapter 1 of Attempt at a New Presentation of the Doctrine of Science
(1797–1798). This corresponds to the contents of his lectures during this period, which
have been given the name “Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo.”4 That second version of
the Jena Doctrine of Science apparently does not aspire to being a philosophical sys-
tem that is proof against radical skepticism. Fichte now admits that the first principle
of his system—that of freedom or the self-positing I—does not have the status of a
self-evident first principle (like the Cartesian cogito). Instead, it is more like a necessary
assumption, or an unavoidable presupposition—of free agency, rational inquiry, even of
consciousness. Fichte even describes it as a “faith”—though a faith accepted on rational
grounds, to which there is no coherent alternative. It is this version of the Doctrine of
Science that roughly corresponds to Fichte’s major works of practical philosophy. It is
this second version of Fichte’s system (together with the earlier Jena writings, where
these seem pertinent) that we will treat here as the philosophical background of
Fichte’s ethical thought.
§1: Philosophy and Common Sense

In many standard histories of philosophy, Fichte is pigeonholed as a “subjective ideal-
ist.” This is a philosopher who teaches that all reality exists only for an I or “in the
mind.” This was the reaction that led to F.H. Jacobi’s famous Open Letter of 1800 attack-
ing Fichte as an exponent of “subjective idealism” and even of “nihilism.” It was the
same “subjective idealist” reading of Fichte that served both Schelling and Hegel as a
foil against which they could contrast their own (“objective idealist”) systems. When
Fichte is fitted into a standard narrative of the history of modern philosophy in this
way, he is quickly placed to one side and the narrative comfortably moves on without
him. The distortion involved in this is abysmal in proportions.
3
There are now a number of good discussions of the course of post-Kantian philosophy surrounding
these skeptical criticisms and the response to them. The works cited in the previous note are among them.
See also Breazeale (1982), Beiser (1987), especially Chapter 8, Pippin (2012), and Horstmann (2012).
4
For accounts of this transition, see Radrizanni (1994), Breazeale (2013), pp. 96–124, and Breazeale’s
introduction to WLnm.
transcendental philosophy 31
Mind-independent reality. Fichte sees himself as a transcendental philosopher. A

note from 1794–1795 equates Wissenschaftslehre with “transcendental philosophy”
(GA II/4:53). For Fichte, transcendental philosophy means first and foremost a certain
conception of the relation of the standpoint of properly philosophical science to the
standpoint of everyday life, ordinary consciousness, or common sense, which for
Fichte is also the standpoint of the special empirical sciences.
Fichte often emphasizes that it is not the purpose of philosophy to undermine or
discredit the standpoint of common sense—especially its realist commitment to the
existence of a sensible world of material objects existing independently of our con-
sciousness of them. On the contrary, it is one important aim of philosophy to vindicate
this standpoint, to justify it philosophically, and also to explain it transcendentally, by
deriving the conceptions it uses and the positions it takes from a fundamental first
principle in accordance with a rational method. Fichte explains his position early in
the Foundations of Natural Right:
The transcendental philosopher must assume that everything that exists exists only for an I,
and that what is supposed to exist for an I, can exist only through the I. By contrast, common
sense accords an independent existence to both and claims that the world would always exist,
even if the understanding did not. Common sense need not take account of the philosopher’s
claim, and it cannot do so, since it occupies a lower standpoint; but the philosopher certainly
must pay attention to common sense. His claim is indeterminate and therefore partly incorrect
as long as he has not shown how precisely common sense follows necessarily only from his claim
and can be explained only if one presupposes that claim. Philosophy must deduce our belief in
the existence of an external world.
(NR 3:24)
Although the standpoint of common sense is said to be a “lower” one than that of tran-
scendental philosophy, the standpoint of philosophy is also said to be inferior to that of
common sense, because the philosophical standpoint is always “indeterminate and
therefore partly incorrect” until the entire project of transcendental philosophy has
been completed. In Fichte’s works, it always has this inferior status, because his system
was never completed.
Fichte does not offer transcendental philosophy as a speculative or metaphysical
theory that gets at the real truth of things, exposing the beliefs of common sense as
errors or illusions. There are few claims that Fichte asserts more often or more emphat-
ically than that one. Fichte even compares his philosophical constructions to a “skele-
ton,” whose aim is not to replace the living body—which is ordinary experience—but
only to justify it and enable us to understand it. Anticipating a thought later made
famous by Wittgenstein, Fichte asserts that “our philosophical thinking is no more
than the instrument we use to assemble our work. Once the work is finished, then the
instrument can be discarded as of no further use” (GA III/No. 440).
To many, however, the starting point of Fichte’s transcendental philosophy has
always seemed incompatible with common sense. Fichte proposes to begin solely with
the philosophical “I” and its act of “self-positing,” and to treat everything real lying
outside the I as grounded in its being posited by the I, or even as real only to the extent
that it is so posited. To many readers, that seems straightforwardly inconsistent with
common sense and could not possibly be a vindication of it. If it is an “explanation”
of common sense, then it looks like only what philosophers now call an “error theory”:
that is, a theory that explains how and why everyday beliefs and ways of talking are
systematically mistaken. This is the standard “subjective idealist” reading of Fichte.
It was Jacobi’s “subjective idealist” interpretation that provoked Fichte’s desperate
response in the Sun-Clear Report (1801) (SB). This was Fichte’s panicky “attempt to
force the reader to understand.” Fichte’s attitude seems to verge on paranoia. He claims
that his philosophy has been willfully misunderstood by people who had a personal ani-
mus against him. We have seen in the last chapter how this reflects the self-destructive
side of Fichte’s personality. But when someone’s thought has in fact been so systemati-
cally misunderstood for over two hundred years, his seeming paranoia cannot be
dismissed as mere delusion.
The aims of philosophy. Fichte attributes these misinterpretations to a fundamental
misunderstanding not only of his writings, but even of the proper aims of philosophy
itself.5 The error begins with a misconstrual even of what philosophical questions are.
This happens when we take for granted the common representationalist picture involv-
ing an opposition between our thoughts or ideas and a real world they are supposed to
be about.6 Philosophy is then charged with the (metaphysical) task of saying first what
this reality in itself is like, and then afterwards explaining (perhaps causally) how our
representations of it come about. Fichte consciously breaks with that tradition. He
rejects the representationalist picture as “dogmatic”—in a sense we will presently try to
explain. In this he was anticipated (in different ways) by both Kant and Thomas Reid.
But if we read Fichte while taking for granted the assumptions of this tradition, we will
not understand the questions Fichte is asking and we will understand his answers to
transcendental questions as a bizarre metaphysical theory, fundamentally at odds with
common sense, about the “real” nature of the world our thoughts represent. This would
be a “subjective idealist” theory, something like Berkeley’s idealism, which declares the
material world of common sense an illusion, nothing more than a collection of subjec-
tive ideas in our minds.
Fichte’s transcendental inquiry, however, does not ask directly about reality in itself
at all. It takes for granted what common sense realism holds about the objects of our
representations, and never tries to get beyond or beneath it. Fichte’s transcendental
philosophy addresses an entirely different set of questions. It asks how representations
5
A thoughtful and well-documented discussion of Fichte’s conception of the relation between
the standpoints of common sense and of philosophy is presented in Chapter 13 of Breazeale (2013),
pp. 360–403. An extensive defense of Fichte against the charge of “subjectivism” is found in Beiser (2002),
II, Chapters 1–8.
6
This aim of Fichte’s project, both in his review of Aenesidemus and in the 1794 Doctrine of Science, is
emphasized by Wilson (2011).
are possible at all, and what is presupposed, as a condition of their very possibility,
about the relation of representations to the reality they represent. About the repre-
sented reality, it explicates only what we must presuppose about it in order to make
possible our cognitive and active life in relation to it. In all this there is obviously an
anticipation of Edmund Husserl and the phenomenological tradition. The relation
of the Doctrine of Science to the everyday standpoint in Fichte is, I think, the clear
ancestor of the relation in Husserl between the phenomenological standpoint and the
everyday standpoint or (in the later Husserl) the “life-world.” For Fichte as well as
Husserl, the aim of philosophy is to help us understand the life-world and our own
relation to it. Husserl, however, has sometimes been misunderstood in just the same
way as Fichte, and consequently also dismissed as a metaphysical idealist.7
Fichte may thus be seen as rejecting the entire project of metaphysics, if that term
refers to a theory about reality as it exists “in itself ” in abstraction from our living
interaction with it. In this Fichte saw himself as allied with Jacobi, not opposed to him.
Both attempt to preserve a healthy relation to the life-world of ordinary experience, in
opposition to a metaphysics that would undermine it. Jacobi rejects Fichte’s philoso-
phy because he sees an irreconcilable opposition between life and philosophical rea-
son. For Jacobi, the rationally examined life could not be worth living because it could
not be lived at all. Any rational, systematic philosophical procedure would only alien-
ate us from the life-world. This rejection of rationalism is an extreme position, with
which Fichte does not agree. Fichte’s rejection of metaphysics in favor of transcenden-
tal philosophy does, however, anticipate much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century critique of metaphysics. It agrees not only with Jacobi but also with Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Heidegger and the existentialist tradition, and even Wittgenstein and
Vienna Circle positivism. If we view Fichte’s systematic philosophy as the sort of thing
all these later philosophers were rejecting, then (along with Jacobi) we thereby pro-
foundly misunderstand him.
The crucial question for transcendental philosophy is this: How do we combine
what we think about the world with what we must think about our own activity in
knowing and acting on it, in order to make our conception of the world coherent with
our conception of our own activity? Some of Fichte’s statements of this project are
easily misunderstood: “From the transcendental standpoint [says Fichte] there is no
world that subsists on its own. Wherever we look, we see nothing but the reflection of
our inner activity” (GGW 8:180).
This is not the “subjective idealist” metaphysical claim that the so-called “material”
world is metaphysically dependent on consciousness and therefore “unreal.” Instead, it
is only a description of the way the real, material world is viewed transcendentally,
7
See Føllesdal (1998). Husserl, according to Føllesdal, is known to have made an intensive study of
Fichte’s works around 1917, leading him to embrace a concept of transcendental idealism that was intended
to be entirely compatible with realism on ontological or metaphysical questions. Husserl seems therefore
to have understood Fichte correctly, and his later philosophy should be seen as Fichtean in the most proper
sense.
solely for the purposes of philosophical inquiry. Or consider this statement by a noted
Fichte scholar: “Indeed, the world can be nothing other than something known, some-
thing thought, something represented: the world as object of cognition and the world
as sphere of acting.”8 This quotation accurately paraphrases Fichte in many places, and
is correct if it is understood as an account of how things are presented from the tran-
scendental standpoint. But it is highly misleading if that gloss is omitted. For then it
suggests that Fichte’s transcendental philosophy is a metaphysical theory meant to
discredit the everyday realism of the ordinary standpoint.
Transcendental idealism, according to Fichte, endorses “the assumption that objects
exist outside and quite independently of us” (ZE 1:455n). Fichte’s position about the
material world has nothing in common with those empiricist views that want to iden-
tify external objects with (or reduce them to) “sense-data” or “permanent possibilities
of sensation.” Its aim is to show that the mind-independence of the world is a transcen-
dentally necessary condition for consciousness itself. As we will see in Chapter 4,
Fichte even extends this mind-independent objectivity to the reality of the moral law,
“something objective . . . and entirely independent of the act of thinking” (SL 4:22).
Thus Fichte is a common sense realist even about moral truth. In moral philosophy
and metaethics, it is a common move (a common error) to identify our valuation of
objects with the valuation of our conscious states in being aware of them. The objective
achievements of a good life are reduced to our pleasure in being conscious of them; the
objective value of things is identified with our mental states of valuing them. Fichte’s
transcendental idealism in ethics involves no view of that kind, but insists on its
rejection.
According to Fichte, when common sense speaks of real things existing “externally,”
it means things existing “outside my body,” or at most “external to my acting.”
Transcendental philosophy does not take issue with these claims. It accepts them, and
even vindicates them through “deductions” (roughly, transcendental arguments—
though we will have to see in due course what such a term might mean in Fichte’s phi-
losophy). When, for the purposes of these arguments, transcendental idealism claims
that nothing exists except insofar as it is “posited in the I,” it means something quite
different from what common sense might mean by such statements. From its stand-
point, these statements represent “subjective idealism” as a metaphysical theory—in
other words, they are dogmatic nonsense. Fichte endorses that judgment of them.
When Fichte claims that an object of intuition—for example, an object seen by
us—“comes to be only through the intuiting itself ” he is taking the transcendental
8
Baumanns (1990), p. 129. The misleading impression is reinforced when Baumanns cites Schelling’s
account, which claims that Fichte’s “explanation of experience” appeals to an “absolute I”—a metaphysical
absolute lying outside experience (Baumanns 1990, p. 111). Fichte does say that philosophy should begin
with an absolute I, which is methodologically outside experience; but this “absolute I” is not an entity “in
itself ” that grounds the reality of the world metaphysically, but rather a methodological abstraction
adopted as part of Fichte’s transcendental procedure. To reify the absolute I would turn Fichte’s philosophy,
in his own terms, into a form of dogmatism.
point of view, which he explicitly contrasts with “the way common sense tends to con-
ceive bodily vision” (NR 3:57–8).
The idealist observes how there must come to be things for the individual. Thus the situation is
different for the individual from what it is for the philosopher. The individual is confronted
with things, human beings, etc. that are independent of him. But the idealist says, “There are
no things outside me and independently of me.” Though the two say opposite things, they do
not contradict each other. For the idealist, from his own viewpoint, displays the necessity of the
individual’s view. When the idealist says “outside of me” he means “outside of reason”: when the
individual says the same thing, he means “outside of my person.”
(WLnm GA IV/1: 25)
To understand what Fichte means here by “reason,” we need to explore the options
open to philosophy, as Fichte understands them. Experience, according to Fichte,
involves both subjectivity (the conscious representation of a world to an I) and objectiv-
ity (the world thus represented) (EE 1:425). Sometimes Fichte draws a distinction
between two species of representations: those of which we are conscious that they
depend on us, and are therefore “accompanied by a feeling of freedom,” and those we
are conscious of coming from outside us, “accompanied by a feeling of necessity”
(EE 1:422–3, NR 3:2–7). He associates the latter with objectivity and the former with
subjectivity. What is objective is experienced as independent of us and as constraining
us; what is subjective is open to our free influence. Transcendental philosophy tries to
understand the necessary conditions of our experience of objectivity; it does not seek
to reduce objectivity to those conditions or to identify it metaphysically with them. It
leaves objective reality itself just where common sense always took it to be.
Transcendental necessity. Another common misunderstanding of transcendental
philosophy needs attention as well. The necessity involved in Fichtean deductions is
not merely psychological. When transcendental philosophy speaks of “necessary con-
ditions” of experience, its claim is not merely that, in our pitiful human weakness, we
“can’t help” thinking of our representations as referring to a world outside us. The fact
that we are psychologically “unable” to believe some proposition is no argument for or
against it. Fichte agrees with that assessment. As we will see in Chapter 3, Fichte’s
defense of freedom is not based on the supposed fact that we can’t bring ourselves to
believe otherwise. That would leave entirely open the question whether it is true that
we are free. The necessity in all these cases is rather conceptual, theoretical: that is, it is
normative. It is driven by the requirement that our conception of ourselves and our
activity must be a systematic conception, self-consistent, not self-undermining, and
capable of being presented in a coherent transcendental system. Such an incoherence
is not merely something we (psychologically) can’t believe; it is something we (norma-
tively) must not believe.
The requirement of systematic coherence here involves more than avoiding
self-contradiction or denying analytic truths. It requires also a systematic explana-
tion—which, for example, avoids vicious circularity or a vicious regress—for the
resuppositions that are held to be necessary for the possibility of consciousness. These
p
conditions are to be understood by way of the specific arguments given by transcen-
dental philosophy. They stand or fall with the soundness of those arguments. These
normative requirements claim a methodological priority over any empirical argu-
ments that might result from whatever facts are presented to our consciousness.
Again, this is likely to be misunderstood. From the transcendental standpoint, there
is no room for the speculation that although we cannot coherently think otherwise than
that there is an external world, and we must think of this world using such-and-such
concepts, the true metaphysical reality “in itself ” might be quite different from this, or
might not exist at all. Transcendental philosophy rejects all speculations of that form as
metaphysical, that is, dogmatic. They are rejected because they could never be justified.
But transcendental philosophy does not declare such speculations false, since that too
would be dogmatism. Rather, it declares the questions raised by these speculations to be
in principle unanswerable. This is why Fichte so often declares his dogmatic opponents
not to be asserting falsehoods but rather to be failing to understand him, and also, with-
out realizing it, to be talking incoherently or nonsensically, expressing “no philosophy
at all” (EE 1:434, 438, 439; ZE 1:505, 508–11). Transcendental philosophy offers us an
account of the necessary conditions for posing the questions we can answer, and also for
combining our answers with our questioning in such a way that the answers cohere
with, and do not undermine, the conditions of their own possibility.
Jena and later. After his dismissal from his professorship on grounds of “atheism” and
his move to Berlin, the foundations of Fichte’s philosophy underwent important
changes (see Baumanns, 1990, pp. 175–442). It became more religious in orienta-
tion—I think precisely in response to the charge of atheism. The world, according to
the later Fichte, is the image (Bild) of God (SW 11:117). It is not the I which has the
concept, Fichte says, but the “concept” (sometimes identified with the mind of God)
which “has” the I. In God, the concept becomes “a seeing, a seeing of seeing, a self-seeing”
and becomes “the absolute eye, the faculty of seeing, understanding” (SW 11:64–5).
The “concept” in our minds is also God’s image, not in the sense of a copy or imitation,
but in the sense of a necessary manifestation. This “concept” is the ground of the world,
or of being (SW 10:5), but that is because it is also the ground of all those images,
which, like the practical concepts of things in Fichte’s earlier philosophy, provide
ethical theory with its ends and principles.
It is beyond the scope of this book to decide how far these changes involve Fichte in
a philosophy incompatible with the transcendental idealism of his Jena period.9 It is
9
The changes in Fichte’s Doctrine of Science after 1800 (whatever they amount to) make it all the more
remarkable that in his final system-cycle, Fichte’s 1812 lectures on right and morality involve relatively little
modification in the substantive ethical and political views present in Fichte’s treatises of the Jena period.
Just as the I as practical activity was opposed to objectivity and made its foundation, so now the concept,
which takes the I as its conscious form, is likewise contrasted with being or the existing world and regarded
as its foundation. In practical philosophy, this is once again taken to mean that the real is grounded on a
spiritual activity which proposes ideals and demands according to which it is to be transformed. Much of
easy to think that insofar as Fichte’s later Doctrine of Science grounds philosophy on
“the concept” (or God) rather than on “the I,” it must have been transformed into a
speculative metaphysical system rather than remaining a transcendental investigation
that brings us back to common sense or the ordinary standpoint. This last thought,
however, is highly questionable. In Fichte’s day, belief in God was itself taken to be part
of common sense or the ordinary standpoint. This was especially insisted on by Jacobi
and others who took Fichte to be abandoning common sense. The fact that Fichte’s later
Doctrine of Science is more explicitly theistic is not good evidence that it departs from
common sense, or that it tries to tell us about ultimate metaphysical reality as it is “in
itself.” We will see that Fichte’s theism is not “supernaturalist,” in the usual understand-
ing of that term, but rather a form of rationalist humanism, which accepts traditional
religious claims on a “spiritual”—that is, a symbolic or aesthetic—interpretation.
I suggest that Fichte continues to employ traditional theological concepts and words
connoting metaphysical transcendence as a way of expressing truths not about a meta-
physical “beyond” but instead about our human world—just as in his early Aphorisms
he understood traditional Christian doctrines of sin and redemption to be ways of
thinking about our finitude and imperfection. In §3 of this chapter I will propose such
a reading of Fichte’s references to the “intelligible world”; in Chapter 7 §§4 and 9, I will
suggest that in both the Jena and the later Fichte, the life of God and human immortal-
ity can also be reinterpreted as references to the life of humanity on earth, its collective
strivings, and the ideals associated with them. Fichte’s enemies in Jena were not
mistaken when they saw in his religious views something they could only consider
“atheistic” or a “cult of reason”—something many now would condemn as “rationalist
humanism” or even “secular humanism.” Fichte was, in effect, rejecting traditional
religious superstition in favor of a more rational world view. It was to this deeply unset-
tling symbolic or aesthetic reinterpretation of religious transcendence that they were
reacting. Their treatment of Fichte was unjust, but they did not misunderstand the
mortal threat to traditional religion represented by his philosophy. They were right to
be scared. Even today views like Fichte’s pose a challenge to the way that traditional
religion is usually appropriated, and also to the way it is commonly rejected. They chal-
lenge philosophical “naturalists” as much as religious “fundamentalists.”
§2: Rejection of Dogmatism or the “Thing in Itself”

Any system of philosophy, Fichte argues, must begin with an act of abstraction, either
from subjectivity or objectivity. The philosopher can choose to base a system either
the Ethics of 1812 focuses on the subjective side of the ethical disposition, which rests on the principles of
“selflessness” (SW 11:86), “universal philanthropy” (SW 11:92), “truthfulness and openness” (SW 11:96),
and “simplicity” (SW 11:99). It would be a mistake to think that Fichte’s ethical theory has lost its earlier
social orientation (see Verweyen 1975, pp. 259–60). Although his language now has religious overtones,
Fichte continues to hold that ethics requires us to represent all rational beings as a community, or as he now
puts it, a “communion” or “congregation of I’s” (Gemeinde von Ichen) (SW 11:65).
on the abstraction of the free subject, the I or “intelligence in itself,” or else on the
necessitated object or “thing in itself ” (EE 1:425–6). Thus he claims there are two (and
only two) possible philosophical systems: (1) the critical or idealist system, based solely
on taking the free, self-positing I as the starting point, and (2) the dogmatist, realist, or
materialist system, based on taking the thing in itself as the starting point (EE 1:427–9).
The notion of the “thing in itself,” when it occurs in Fichte, is often taken to be the same
as that notion in Kant. However, the meaning of this notion in Kant is itself notoriously
controversial, and reading Fichte in this way leads only to confusion and misunder-
standing. It will be better to develop this notion as Fichte does, and leave it to Kant
scholars to decide how far it has the same meaning in Kant.10
Idealism accepts the realism of common sense, a world of things existing inde-
pendently of our empirical encounter with them. But it approaches this world from the
standpoint of “reason,” by a philosophical method we will be exploring later in this
chapter. The real, for transcendental idealism, is that whose mind-independent reality
is capable of being established by this transcendental method. The “thing in itself,” by
contrast, is some supposed reality that lies outside “reason,” a reality that cannot be
transcendentally vindicated, but is instead presupposed and theorized about by meta-
physicians who have never taken the transcendental standpoint, never asked how cog-
nition of these things is possible. This sense of “dogmatism,” though perhaps different
from Kant’s, is nevertheless recognizable from Kant’s use of the word. Dogmatic phi-
losophy, as Fichte means it, is one which makes claims that cannot be justified tran-
scendentally—some of which, therefore, are nonsensical, others self-undermining.
Dogmatism is opposed to idealism in the sense that it intends to develop a meta-
physics that tries to explain—in effect, to explain away—our consciousness, our cogni-
tion, our action as the causal results of the interaction of things in themselves. Fichte’s
critique of dogmatism is motivated in part by the way such philosophies represent our
free action, our cognition, even our consciousness, in a way that he argues is self-
undermining, requiring us to dismiss our cognitive and active relations to the world as
involving a kind of pervasive illusion. As some recent “naturalistic” approaches to phi-
losophy illustrate, even today Fichte’s target is by no means a straw man.
Fichte argues that the dogmatist’s “thing in itself ” and the idealist’s “intellect” or “I in
itself ” are equally far from common sense.11 Common sense does not reflect on the
10
Anyone interested in my opinion on this, qua Kant scholar, may consult Wood (2005), pp. 63–76. It
should come as no surprise that I favor an interpretation of Kant of which I take Fichte to be one of the
earliest representatives. It is an interpretation at some distance from interpretations that place Kant in the
context of a pre-critical metaphysics of physical influence between substances. But I concede that Kant
himself is always torn between pre-critical German metaphysics and a transcendental philosophy closer to
Fichte. Henry Allison may be attempting to read Kant in a Fichtean way when he describes transcendental
idealism as a “metaphilosophical” position; Allison (2004), p. 35.
11
Breazeale (2013), p. 366, presents Fichte in 1794–1795 as holding that common sense accepts the
existence-in-itself of external objects, and thus sides with dogmatism—which Fichte describes as a “decep-
tion” (UGB GA II/3, 331). But in the passage Breazeale cites, this deception is presented not as the unre-
flective position of common sense, but rather as the result of “stopping at the lowest level of reflection.”
I take this to be not the common sense view but that of a (dogmatic) philosophy that has begun to reflect
transcendental conditions for becoming conscious of the world, so it is not concerned

with developing those conditions. The dogmatist can try to give an account of con-
sciousness—for example, empirical “naturalistic” theories about its origin in the body
or the brain, as an effect of the causal interaction of things. These theories, Fichte
claims, cannot coherently account for our agency as subjects, the active side of our
contribution to experience. They always take for granted the possibility of our aware-
ness of what they report, attempting causal explanations of it which, Fichte argues, are
committed to explaining away crucial parts of it as illusory. They may give an impres-
sive empirical account of how the real world works, but they always come to grief if
they must account for their own possibility as human knowledge, and for the free
action needed to acquire such knowledge.
Fichte distinguishes the transcendental activity of “speculation” from what he calls
the “way of thinking” (Denkungsart) that belongs to that experience as well as the
empirical science that is grounded on it. Speculation, whether critical or dogmatic,
proceeds by means of voluntary abstraction and transcendental construction. Neither
criticism nor dogmatism directly takes the standpoint or “way of thinking” that
belongs to common sense. Both attempt to explain what is given, each from its own
philosophical standpoint.
The philosopher occupies the standpoint of pure speculation, whereas the I itself occupies the
standpoint of life and science (“science,” that is, in the sense in which science itself is to be
contrasted with the “Doctrine of Science”). The standpoint of life is comprehensible only from
the standpoint of speculation . . . The standpoint of speculation exists only in order to make the
standpoint of life and science comprehensible. Idealism can never be a way of thinking; instead,
it is nothing more than speculation.
(ZE 1:455n)
The first important conclusion drawn by Fichte early on in his attempts at a system of
critical idealism is that the I is limited, its activity meets with a “check” (Anstoss), and
thus it stands in necessary relation to a real world or not-I.12 Another important con-
clusion, which we will also examine in Chapter 3, is that the I necessarily stands in a
relation to other I’s. For Fichte, the I is always situated in a material world. It has (or is)
a material body, and stands in communicative relations with other I’s.
Fichte’s philosophy has therefore been accurately characterized as “a philosophy of
finite freedom,” and best seen as the founder of the existentialist tradition, leading to
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre.13 This is important to emphasize, because those
but has not done so deeply or thoroughly. Fichte regularly presents dogmatism as the result of a deficient
form of reflection, involving culpable and self-inflicted moral delusion and incapacity. Breazeale himself
recognizes (p. 366, n.14) that the later Jena Doctrine of Science attributes the dogmatist deception not to
common sense but to inadequate reflection (cf. ZE 1:514). I think careful attention to UGB shows that this
was always his position, even as early as 1794.
12
One interesting discussion of the relation of realism and idealism in Fichte is Schüssler (1972).
13
Probably the most prominent exponent of Fichte who brought the finite subjectivity of Fichte’s I into
discussion is Philonenko (1966). This point about Fichte is also emphasized repeatedly and its different
who compare Fichte’s system with the “absolute idealisms” of Schelling and Hegel
often do represent the “absolute I” as a “one-sidedly subjective” metaphysical absolute,
frequently contrasted with the “one-sidedly objective” absolute found in Spinoza.
I hope the error in that picture has now become evident.
The place of empirical science. Empirical science, as Fichte understands it, views the
world from the ordinary or natural standpoint.14 Its results, to the extent that they can
be established by experience and presented in a coherent theory, are not contradicted
by transcendental philosophy. Transcendental philosophy does, however, place cer-
tain constraints on what the theories of natural science can justifiably say about reality,
on the ground that these theories must always remain consistent with the conditions of
their own possibility. The natural science based on common sense always passes over
into indefensible dogmatism when it offers theories that undermine the conditions of
possible experience and action through which we humans relate to the world. In
Chapters 3 and 4, we will see that Fichte takes the absolute freedom of the I and the
objective reality of the moral law to be among these conditions.
Fichte argues that the two types of realism, common sense realism and dogmatic
realism, are quite distinct—in the end, even mutually incompatible. The metaphysical
commitments of dogmatism are incompatible with the presupposed agency of the
dogmatic philosophers themselves, insofar as they undertake to investigate the real
world by freely acting in it. Dogmatism must deny freedom, and therefore represent
our ordinary experience of action and consciousness as involving unavoidable, sys-
tematic error and self-deception (EE 1:430). Dogmatism is therefore a form of faith. It
requires a blind belief in a world of “things in themselves” through which it offers a
philosophical account of the world of ordinary experience (EE 1:433, SL 4:26). But just
as it cannot account for itself, it also cannot admit that it has this blind faith as its pre-
supposition. It simply takes the “thing in itself ” for granted, perhaps as a presupposi-
tion or even a result of “science.” It dismisses every transcendental challenge to it as an
absurd “subjective idealist” metaphysical theory.
The moral vices of dogmatism. In Fichte’s view, the philosophical defects in dogma-
tism are fundamentally moral defects. Fichte, like Spinoza, sees the life of the free and
rational human being as led in a different way, on a different plane, from the life of
those who are slaves to their passions. Like Kierkegaard, he thinks there are different
“stages” of human existence, whose assumptions are incommensurable, so that com-
munication between those occupying them is necessarily difficult. Fichte depicts
aspects brought out by Breazeale (2013). Philonenko was anticipated in this by Weischedel (1973, origi-
nally published in 1939).
14
Part of Fichte’s projected Jena system, but one he never developed, was a “philosophy of nature.”
Fichte never endorsed a speculative doctrine of nature of the kind offered by Schelling or Hegel; in fact, this
is one of the chief grounds of his break with Schelling. On this point, see Breazeale (2013), pp. 104–5. For
a highly speculative attempt to project a Fichtean philosophy of nature (one I would not endorse), see
Lauth (1984).
dogmatism as a closed circle of illusion and self-deception which people inflict on

themselves because they remain at a lower, less reflective stage of the moral life than
the stage reached by critical idealists. Dogmatism is a philosophy that rationalizes the
life-attitude of passivity and self-indulgence, the unreflective giving-in to one’s empir-
ical desires and passions. Dogmatists think of themselves as manipulated by objects,
and therefore subject to unavoidable illusions. Denying their radical freedom, they
lack a conception of themselves that enables them consistently to affirm their human
dignity.
Because they cannot affirm their self-worth through free action, dogmatists depend
on things for their sense of self (EE 1: 433). Dogmatists are therefore prone to social-
political-economic conservativism, since the relation of privileged classes to things—
their ownership and power over things—is where they acquire their self-esteem.
Unable to ascribe to themselves the human dignity that belongs equally to all rational
beings, dogmatists therefore adopt an attitude of vanity and arrogance, grounded on
their possessive relation to things, their social privileges, their ability to subordinate
and manipulate other people in the very same way they take themselves to be pushed
around and manipulated by objects.
Dogmatists live in a world of things. They think of all things as objects to be con-
trolled and manipulated. Their relation to everything and everyone tends to be that
of objectification (see Beauvoir 2010 [1949], Part One, and Haslanger 2012,
Chapter 1). For them, people or rational beings, even they themselves, are only so
many further items in this world of things subject to causal necessity. As knowers of
this world, dogmatists adopt what Haslanger calls the attitude of “assumed objectiv-
ity.” The only relations between things are causal relations. Things are the way they
are because this is the way they are caused to be. The way they are caused to be is the
way they have to be. There is no point in resisting the way things are, or in trying to
change them. If I am on top in the social system, then my power over others is neces-
sary. It is an unalterable fact, like the freezing point of water, the specific gravity of a
metal, the motions of the heavens. If in this causal order I have power over others,
then I myself am necessary.15 To question the way things are is to show only that you
do not understand the world objectively. The dogmatist becomes master over the
objective world first by controlling it, and then by understanding this control as an
unquestionable, objective necessity.
Since they look at the world as a network of causal relations, dogmatists view them-
selves as part of it. Practically as well as theoretically, they objectify other things,
including other people. Others are objects of their own causal control. Their only con-
ception of practical reason is instrumentalist. Reason is and ought to be only a slave of
the passions—in the first instance, of their own passions. In Fichte’s view, however,
15
“Those who hide from total freedom . . . who try to show that their existence is necessary . . . —these
I shall call salauds” (Sartre 1956b, p. 308). In the Mairet translation, salauds is rendered as “scum”; it has
also been translated as “swine,” “shits,” or “bastards”; the latter is Lloyd Alexander’s term for it in his trans-
lation of Nausea (Sartre 1964, pp. 82–94).
because they reject radical freedom of the will, the causal mastery over the world of
things to which dogmatists aspire is, spiritually regarded, a condition of servitude
(EE 1:434). The denial of freedom deprives dogmatists of any ground to assert their
own human dignity. Thus if the way things are that gives you mastery over others is
causally necessary, then it follows that if matters were different, it would be equally
pointless for you to resist. “Anyone who considers himself the master of others is him-
self a slave. If such a person is not a slave in fact, it is still certain that he has a slavish
soul and that he will grovel on his knees before the first strong man who subjugates
him” (VBG 6:309).
To many philosophers today who might see themselves in Fichte’s theoretical por-
trayal of dogmatism, this moral diagnosis may seem arbitrary, even absurd. Most “nat-
uralist” philosophers today are not socially or politically conservative. Many of them
would agree with Fichte that the social world ought to be changed; many think it can be
changed. As we saw in Chapter 1, Friedrich Engels later directly reversed the social and
political associations of idealism and materialism. Many materialist philosophers
today would agree.
Such associations, however, in either direction, where they exist at all, probably
depend on incompatible conceptions of “idealism” and “materialism.” Even the char-
acterizations of the opposed positions are likely to talk past each other. They surely
apply only contingently, to certain individuals or at least certain limited intellectual
and social environments. Perhaps for us the associations are arbitrary or even wrong,
but they may have been accurate for Fichte’s time and place.
The issues involved are contentious, the subject of ongoing, deep disagreements that
are perhaps harder to define than they are to settle. Both in Fichte’s time and in ours,
the positions he considered “dogmatist” would be associated with materialism in met-
aphysics, empiricism in epistemology, and the prestige of modern natural science. The
relation of these, especially the last, to morality and politics has never been simple. We
know that natural science and its respect for empirical evidence have often been
rejected by those who are backward socially and politically. Galileo was persecuted by
the Church, religious fundamentalists reject evolution by natural selection, political
conservatives with vested economic interests reject the scientific consensus on the
environment and climate disruption.
Science, however, is a human institution. It is usually a creature of the existing social
power structure, and though its findings may oppose the powers that be, science has
no base of power radically independent of them. It has not always been on the “right”
side in political struggles, or even the side of the evidence. Racism was at one time
good science (see Gould 1981). Ever since the treatise On Voluntary Servitude, written
by Montaigne’s best friend, Étienne de la Boétie (1942 [1548]), we have known that the
oppressed tend to take over the world-view of their oppressors, and oppressors have
tended to control the results of science. Deference to scientific expertise has played an
important part in the justification of oppression (Manfred Stanley 1978). Fichte views
transcendental idealism as a way of justifying the legitimate claims of common sense
and science, while at the same time preserving the presupposition of human freedom
necessary for both knowledge and morality.
Fichte’s association of dogmatism with moral and political conservatism may also
be in part autobiographical. “One becomes an idealist,” he says, “only by passing
through a disposition to dogmatism—if not by passing through dogmatism itself ”
(EE 1:434). Fichte’s temptation to dogmatism, and then its vehement rejection, may
represent his uncomfortable relation to the social world into which his life history had
thrust him, and his violent rejection of the world-view he found among many privi-
leged intellectuals in his day.
§3: Transcendental Idealism

Fichte emphatically denies that either he or Kant is seeking a transcendent metaphys-
ics of things in themselves (EE 1:440–9, ZE 1:480–491). He accuses critics who take
him to be passing beyond the “necessary thinking” to “being” of misunderstanding
him—even deliberately and maliciously (SL 4:16–18). He thinks the same to be true of
Kant as well. It was typical of those who read Kant as accepting an affection of the self
by a transcendent “thing in itself ” to accuse him of self-contradiction. (The group of
those who did this included J.S. Beck, Jacobi, Schelling, and Hegel.) Fichte proposes to
avoid the contradiction by accepting affection by the not-I from a transcendental
standpoint, but rejecting affection by a transcendent thing in itself (ZE 1:482–91; cf.
GA I/4:433–4). Fichte even accounts, though only from a transcendental standpoint,
for our thought of the object that affects us as existing “in itself ” (BWL 1:29n, GWL 1:
157, 174–5, 194–5, 239–41, GEW 1:343, 361). In this way, Fichte accepts the finitude of
human cognition, while rejecting (not as non-existent, but as unknowable and there-
fore not a possible object for philosophy) any metaphysical concept of a “thing in itself ”
that cannot be transcendentally deduced. This is his proposal for the way a Kantian can
avoid the alleged contradiction.
Philosophical abstraction. The starting point for philosophy, as Fichte presents it, is
an act of abstraction (EE 1: 426, ZE 1:501–2, NR 3:1, SL 4:78). As we have seen, philos-
ophy for Fichte always begins with (or in) common life; it has no starting point that is
radically independent of that. One description Fichte gives of his philosophical proce-
dure is that it follows the necessary series of mental acts through which the I makes
experience possible: “What emerges in the I’s necessary acting . . . itself appears as nec-
essary, i.e. the I feels constrained in its presentation of what emerges. Then one says
that the object has reality” (NR 3:3).
The type of realism that presses itself upon all of us—including the most resolute idealist—when
it comes to acting, i.e. the assumption that objects exist outside us and quite independently of us,
is contained within idealism itself and is explained and derived within idealism. Indeed, it is the
sole aim of all philosophy to provide this derivation of objective truth.
(ZE 1:455n)
Fichte realizes that the realism of common sense may be what misleads some dogma-
tist philosophers into accepting dogmatism, since its “thing in itself ” is also “real” by
contrast to the way transcendental philosophy approaches what is given to us in expe-
rience. But if Fichte’s transcendental approach offers no “naturalistic” or “materialist”
account of freedom or of moral obligation, does it therefore offer a “supernaturalist”
(or metaphysically “idealist”) one? I think not. That too would be an account of the
world as it is “in itself ”—hence transcendent and unknowable, as transcendental phi-
losophy sees it. Fichte’s vindication of common sense was, as we have already seen,
supposed to be a vindication of some kind of theism. But in Fichte’s day, that would
have been seen by most as nothing but a vindication of common sense, not a defense of
any transcendent metaphysics.
The intelligible world. Fichte does sometimes contrast the sensible or phenomenal
with the intelligible or the noumenal, and claims that transcendental philosophy ena-
bles us to understand ourselves as members of the intelligible world (SL 4:91, 133,
259–60). But this may easily mislead us. Kant’s readers often take the terms “noume-
non” and “intelligible world” to refer to a supernatural realm, made into the object of a
kind of faith or belief, but of which we can have no cognition.16 However matters may
stand with Kant, I think Günter Zöller is correct when he says that Fichte’s conception of
the noumenal or intelligible is not supernaturalist. See Zöller (1997), pp. 111–16. I
interpret Fichte’s conception of the intelligible or noumenal in the same (“modernist” or
“secular humanist”) way I have already proposed to interpret the religious views for
which Fichte was branded an “atheist.” For Fichte, the noumenal or intelligible is always
part of the way we must think of ourselves from a transcendental perspective in order to
form a coherent conception of our action and the world in which we act (ZE 1:482–3,
WLnm, pp. 243, 260–1, 281, 330, 402). For transcendental philosophy, “reality” in gen-
eral is proven only by its necessity for consciousness. “What is intelligible,” Fichte says,
“originates and enters consciousness only by means of transcendental philosophy
itself ” (WLnm, p. 334). Or, as Zöller puts it, “the intelligible or noumenal is a necessary
product of thinking and its laws. It is part of the coming about of experience and a
reflection of human finitude rather than its transcendence” (Zöller 1997, p. 113). For
instance, Fichte often uses the concept of the intelligible or noumenal world to refer to
the community of rational beings insofar as they are in communication with one
another according to norms of reason (SL 4:259–60, WLnm pp. 303–5, 454).
I suggest that for Fichte the intelligible world could not be a realm of “things in
themselves,” since that would turn all talk of it into only a supernaturalist version of
dogmatism. For transcendental philosophy, the noumenal or intelligible world can
refer only to a way of thinking about ourselves as finite and natural beings that is
16
I think common understandings of Kant exaggerate the extent to which he accepts this picture, and
especially the extent to which Kant’s philosophy is committed to it. In fact, a commitment to faith in super-
naturalist theories, for example about the freedom of rational beings, seems to me inconsistent with the
critical philosophy. See Wood (2008), Chapter 7.
ecessary from a transcendental standpoint. Again, Fichte’s religious opponents in

n
Jena, though profoundly unjust to him, were not wrong in being terrified by the world-
view his philosophy represents. Fichte was, as they claimed, an “enemy of throne and
altar.” His is a philosophy that respects human autonomy in contrast to authority. It
accepts religious ideas, but only symbolically or aesthetically, as a vocabulary of
thought and feeling, richer than any provided by dogmatic materialism, through
which human beings may freely live and act.
§4: The Epistemology of the Jena Doctrine of Science

The task of philosophy, as Fichte understands it, is to recreate artificially (like a “skele-
ton”) the objects of common life and science, based on a voluntary abstraction from
the ordinary standpoint. The final criterion of its success is that it does not deny the
ordinary standpoint but succeeds in explaining and vindicating it. In this way, every
attempt at philosophy is really an “experiment,” or the manufacture of an artificial
product, which Fichte calls the “appearance” of ordinary life and science. The philoso-
pher’s task is to report the results of the experiment.
The action of the philosopher who manufactures an artificial product is, to be sure, identical
with the appearance itself, since the object he is constructing does not act on its own. But what
is reported by the philosopher who has conducted an experiment is not identical with the
appearance he is investigating, but is merely the concept of the latter.
(ZE 1:455)
The outcome of the experiment is measured internally by the cogency of the thoughts
and arguments contained within it; externally it is measured by its capacity to explain
and harmonize with its starting point in ordinary life. The internal criterion involves
both the rigor with which each new thought is derived, and also the systematic har-
mony or agreement among the derived thoughts.
Fichte claims there are two decisive advantages the critical or idealist system has
over the dogmatic or realist system. First, in relation to the external criterion, idealism
begins with our immediate experience of consciousness and the awareness of freedom
that goes with exercising our agency, and accepts these experiences as true, whereas
dogmatism must declare them to be illusions and must attempt to explain them away
as the result of the causality of things (EE 1:428–9). Second, in relation to the internal
criterion, idealism can successfully explain our experience, whereas dogmatism
(Fichte alleges) can never successfully complete the philosophical task (EE 1:435–6).
This last advantage, however, is one Fichte cannot be said to be in a position to claim in
its full form. Against dogmatism, he can claim it to be self-undermining in certain
ways, as we will see in Chapters 3 and 4. But Fichte never completed the Doctrine of
Science. So as regards the positive claim for his transcendental idealist system, he can
make the claim only provisionally, hoping eventually to redeem it when his Doctrine
of Science is complete.
Fichte first outlined the ambitious program of the Wissenschaftslehre in his early
essay Concerning the Concept of a Doctrine of Science (1793) (BWL, which here I will
call the Concept). The (partial) execution corresponds most closely to the Foundation
of the Entire Doctrine of Science (1794) (GWL). It sets forth an epistemology that is to
govern the construction of a philosophical system and that may be regarded as his
standards for meeting the internal criterion, the inner cogency of the thoughts on
which the philosophical experiment is based. This program is apparently what Fichte
was trying to execute in his notoriously obscure Foundation (1794) and related texts,
such as the Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Doctrine of Science (1795). Very
soon, however, Fichte began to reconceive the method of a Doctrine of Science, in
ways that show themselves in the lecture transcriptions of 1796–1799 that commonly
go by the name “Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo.” It is this new conception that also
governs the two Introductions and the fragmentary first chapter of Attempt at a New
Presentation of the Doctrine of Science (1797–1798) (K1) which represent his last
attempt at a presentation of his system during the Jena period. This new conception is
operative in his two works of practical philosophy. Even the “new method,” however,
seems to retain many of the philosophical theses and aims of the 1793 essay, which
therefore still provides a necessary guide to understanding what Fichte is about, at
least during his Jena period.
The first principle as foundation. Perhaps the most striking feature of Fichte’s

Doctrine of Science is his insistence that any systematic philosophy must always rest
on a single first principle. Fichte provides remarkably little argument for this claim,
insisting first that it is “generally admitted” (BWL 1:38). But he later adds the argument
that “a science can have no more than one first principle, for if it had more than one, it
would be several sciences rather than one” (BWL 1:42). The idea that a philosophical
system has only a single first principle seems to have been taken over by Fichte from
Reinhold’s so-called “elementary philosophy.” Reinhold proposed to give the Kantian
or critical philosophy a firm basis by resting it on a single self-evident first principle.
He called this the “principle of consciousness”: “In consciousness the subject distin-
guishes the representation from both the subject and the object and relates it to them
both” (Reinhold 2011 [1790], 1:267.) Fichte came to be convinced, by the critique of
Reinhold presented by G.E. Schulze in Aenesidemus, that this was not a satisfactory
first principle (SW 1:5). But he remained convinced, at least for a time, that a philosophy
can have a “systematic form” only by being based on a single first principle (BWL 1:38).
Fichte’s first principle, whose meaning we will examine in §5 of this chapter, is: “The
I posits itself absolutely” (BWL 1:71, cf. GWL 1:96).
The Concept argues that any science consists of a first principle, which is both known
and certain, and then a series of propositions that are based on it by being shown to be
“equivalent” to it, so that it communicates its certainty from each proposition to the
next. The “content” of any science, Fichte says, is determined by the “inner content of
its first principle”; but the “form of the science” consists in a determinate kind of
inference, grounded on a determinate “warrant” through which the first principle

communicates its certainty to the propositions resting on it (BWL 1:43). These claims
are supposed to be true not only of a philosophical system, but of anything that is enti-
tled to the name of a science. For Fichte, however, the project of philosophy is to ground
all sciences on a single fundamental one, to which he gives the name “Doctrine of
Science” (Wissenschaftslehre). “The I posits itself absolutely” is apparently the first
principle of this fundamental science.
Fichte’s talk about grounding all subsequent propositions on a first principle might
easily be understood as a commitment to foundationalism, as that term is understood
in recent analytical epistemology. Foundationalism is the doctrine that all knowledge
is to be divided into two types: (1) foundational knowledge, that is fundamental,
either grounded on itself, or at least known without any ground beyond itself, and
(2) non-foundational knowledge, which must be grounded solely on foundational
knowledge. Fichte’s statements early in the Concept may give the impression that the
first principle of the Doctrine of Science, and it alone, constitutes foundational
knowledge; everything except this first principle is non-foundational knowledge,
since it is based solely on the first principle.
A foundationalist interpretation of Fichte’s epistemology, in this sense, is, however,
impossible to sustain in the face of many of his most crucial claims. To begin with,
Fichte thinks that all sciences other than the Doctrine of Science derive their first prin-
ciples from the Doctrine of Science; it is only the first principle of this science that is
not proven through anything else (BWL 1:47). On the foundationalist interpretation,
we would have to suppose that all human knowledge is based solely on the first princi-
ple of the Doctrine of Science—the I’s self-positing; no other source of knowledge
could be permitted at all: no empirical contents, no self-evident a priori truths. Fichte
surely accepted no such absurd proposition.
Fichte also soon makes further claims that rule out foundationalism. “The Doctrine
of Science,” he says, “has absolute totality. Within it, each thing leads to everything and
everything leads to each thing” (BWL 1:59n). Coherence for Fichte is not merely an
added sine qua non condition of self-consistency, as it might still be in a foundational-
ist theory. Instead, at every stage, the thoughts that have been derived must constitute a
coherent system in a stronger sense than mere self-consistency. This is why Fichte can
derive new concepts using not only threatened contradictions, but also vicious circu-
larities or the inability satisfactorily to explain something.
Further “coherentist” claims are forthcoming in Fichte’s account of what a science
has to be. Fichte insists that a first principle has been “exhausted” only when “a com-
plete system has been erected upon it, that is, when the principle in question necessar-
ily leads to all the propositions which are asserted and when all these propositions lead
back to the first principle” (BWL 1:58). It is a “negative proof ” of a system, he says,
when it is shown that “no proposition occurs [in it] which could be true if the first
principle were false—or could be false if the first principle were true” (BWL 1:58–9).
“We infer the correctness of the system from the agreement between what we
resupposed and what we discovered. But this is only a negative proof, which estab-
p
lishes mere probability” (BWL 1:75). A “positive proof ” of the system consists in “com-
pleting the circuit” by showing that the first principle “governs human knowledge
completely.” From this need for a “positive proof ” Fichte infers that “there is thus a cir-
cle here from which the human mind can never escape” (BWL 1:61). Even if we estab-
lish “systematic unity” through the negative proof, “something more is still required.
This ‘something more’ is something that can never be strictly demonstrated, namely
that this unity itself is not something which has been accidentally produced by an
incorrect deduction” (BWL 1:75). Also: “A system can actually be on the whole correct,
even though its individual parts lack self-evidence” (BWL 1:77–8).
From this it is clear that we can make no sense of Fichte’s epistemology within a
framework countenancing only the standard alternatives: “foundationalism”/“coher-
entism.” For Fichte, transcendental philosophy begins with a first principle that is cer-
tain not because it bears some mark of self-evidence, but because it can be shown that
it would be self-undermining not to assent to it. Fichte establishes further claims based
on the first principle not by deriving them from it deductively, but by establishing them
as necessary for the coherent exposition of the possibility of cognition or action, start-
ing with the first principle.
The Doctrine of Science and the particular sciences. It is also important to look at
the relation of the Doctrine of Science to the other sciences falling under it—including
the sciences of natural right and ethics. “The Doctrine of Science includes all of those
specific actions which the human mind is necessarily forced to perform,” and “in the
first principle of any particular science an action which has been permitted to remain
free in the Doctrine of Science becomes determined . . . As soon as an action which is in
itself free has been given a specific direction, we have moved from the domain of the
general Doctrine of Science into that of some particular science” (BWL 1:63–4). In
other words, Fichte takes the “self-positing” act of the I to be an act admitting of a
variety of different forms or, as he also puts it, different directions. Once such a “direc-
tion” of self-positing is given, Fichte thinks certain conclusions follow necessarily from
it. The task of any particular science is to begin with the free choice of a determined
direction of the I’s self-positing, and then derive the series of necessary conclusions
that follow.
§5: The First Principle

The first principle of the Doctrine of Science is: “The I posits itself absolutely.” In the
first Jena system of 1793–1794, it is presented as a principle Fichte thinks will be
assented to spontaneously by all who achieve a certain kind of self-knowledge in the
right way: that is, all those who form a concept of the I, along with the acts of abstrac-
tion necessary to grasp the concept Fichte is trying to elicit. Fichte’s clearest account of
this process in the late Jena period occurs in the (uncompleted) Chapter 1 of a new
presentation of the Doctrine of Science for which the two Introductions of 1797 were
to prepare the reader. By then, however, he had changed his mind about the status of
the first principle. It was no longer taken to be self-evident to all, but only to those who
are committed to affirming their own freedom. This commitment is not arbitrary,
however, and Fichte thinks there is in the end no rational alternative to it. We will
postpone until Chapter 3 our discussion of the issues surrounding freedom as they
appear in the later Jena system.
The cogito. Fichte’s first principle, consisting in an act of self-awareness, is bound to
remind us of Descartes’ cogito. Descartes takes the cogito to be the presentation to our-
selves of our own existence through a mode of access to this existence (namely, think-
ing) that makes it self-evident and undeniable. Descartes anticipates Fichte’s principle
when he treats the sum as an awareness I actively produce through the act which is the
cogito. There is also something “transcendental” about Descartes’ argument, since to
refuse to affirm that you are thinking would be self-undermining—it would deny a
necessary condition of the possibility of that very act of consciousness itself. Fichte
agrees that Descartes “put forward a similar proposition” (GWL 1:100). But the better
we come to understand Fichte’s conception of the I, the more we will come to appreci-
ate that it is Fichte, of all modern philosophers, who first offered a conception of the
mind or subject that is decisively different from Descartes. Fichte was the first to
understand the subject as necessarily embodied and also necessarily intersubjective—
standing in an interdependent communicative relation to other subjects. Fichte’s con-
ception of subjectivity is, in these ways, fundamentally anti-Cartesian, anti-Lockean,
even anti-Humean.17
Fichte would not permit the inference from cogito to sum res cogitans, and even
denies the latter proposition in the sense Descartes meant it. The Fichtean I is not
a thing at all, it is only an act—the act, Fichte thinks, which lies at the ground of all
consciousness whatever, and necessarily precedes any “giving” of ideas, perceptions,
representations, things, or objects, or any facts about these, however immediate and
self-evident they are supposed to be (ZE 1: 457–63). As we have seen, for Fichte phi-
losophy must begin not with what is real (the thing “in itself ”), but instead with the
conditions of the possibility of our knowing what is real. Our own act of self-positing,
as the condition of all consciousness, is the first of these conditions. That is the sense
in which Fichte says that “with its first proposition, the Doctrine of Science succeeds
17
I have tried to bring out this point in Wood (2014a), pp. 194–9. Perhaps the most striking thing about
Fichte’s first principle is that it is not supposed to be a “fact” of any kind. The I is not any object or thing that
is theoretically “given” to us. Who I am is who I make myself to be, even who I ought to make myself to be.
Even personal identity is normative rather than descriptive: see Chapter 6 §2. Fichte’s approach is anti-
Humean, if that means it rejects the view of personal identity that Hume adopts at the end of Book I of the
Treatise (Hume 1958, pp. 186–95). But that approach famously comes to grief and ends in deep and diso-
rienting skepticism. Early in Book II of the Treatise, Hume suggests that my real concept of myself is really
the object of practical attitudes: pride and shame (Hume 1958, p. 204). I think in this way Hume began a
way of thinking about personal identity that leads directly to Fichte.
in establishing not just philosophy in its entirety, but also the conditions for all
philosophizing.” The first principle is not anything given to me (however undeniably or
self-evidently). It is “a truth that cannot be provided from without and which one has
to produce within oneself.” Nothing and no one else can perform the act of self-positing
for me, or provide me with the unique transcendental awareness it affords: “This is
something not even God himself can do” (SW 2:443).
Pure apperception. Perhaps this is true of the Cartesian cogito as well, in the context
of the project presented in the Meditations. For there the reader is invited to share in
the meditator’s act of producing self-awareness. As Fichte would be the first to insist,
however, a better comparison than Descartes would be Kant. The title of Fichte’s unfin-
ished Chapter 1 is: “All consciousness is conditioned by our immediate consciousness
of ourselves.” This title inevitably suggests that Fichte’s first principle is closely related
to the principle used by Kant in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories: that
of pure or original apperception. Fichte explicitly confirms this (GWL 1:99, ZE 1:472–
8). For both philosophers, the argument is that the possibility of all conscious experi-
ence is conditioned by a certain kind of self-awareness that guarantees a unity both to
the subject of experience and to its contents and objects. Apperception is “pure” in the
sense that it consists solely in the active exercise of the understanding, and not at all in
the receptivity of the senses. Kant distinguishes “empirical apperception”—the associ-
ation of representations according to contingent, empirical laws (such as Hume’s laws
of association)—from pure apperception, which is the work of the understanding
alone, and involves synthesis that is a priori and necessary for the possibility of experi-
ence (KrV A107, B132, B140).
In one meaning, “pure apperception” refers for Kant to the consciousness of one’s
own activity that accompanies the deliberate formation and application of concepts. In
this sense, apperception is “the vehicle of all concepts” (KrV A341/B399). “The numer-
ical unity of this apperception therefore grounds all concepts a priori ” (KrV A107).
“For only because I ascribe all perceptions to one consciousness (of original appercep-
tion) can I say of all perceptions that I am conscious of them” (KrV A122). In another
closely related meaning, “apperception” refers to an act of self-awareness whose object
is the thinking self itself, when the thinking self is regarded as nothing but the sponta-
neity of the understanding that unifies all representations into one consciousness. The
self to which apperception ascribes its perceptions and of which apperception in this
sense is conscious is the ultimate ground of all unity in experience. Thus Kant explains
“original apperception” as “that self-consciousness which, because it produces the
representation ‘I think,’ which must be able to accompany all others and which in all
consciousness is one and the same, cannot be accompanied by any further representa-
tion” (KrV B 132). Fichte quotes this last statement from Kant at ZE 1:476.
The Kantian idea of apperception is that every consciousness involves a kind of
active self-awareness which is the ground of the subject’s application of concepts to
the contents of its experience. It guarantees simultaneously that they belong to the
experience of one self-identical subject and that they constitute one single coherent
experienced world. Conscious representations always represent things to some sub-
ject, and to numerically the same subject; what they represent is represented to this
subject in the form of a unified system of representations whose connections the sub-
ject can bring under concepts; these two features of conscious experience account for
the unity of both the representer and of what is represented. The active subject’s
self-awareness is always in a sense present to it: if I am consciously engaged in thinking
about something, I do not need any additional input to make me aware either that this
is my experience and my conscious activity, or that it belongs to the same system of
experience, the same world, as other things of which I am consciously aware, either
through actively thinking about them, or in other ways, such as by sensing or remem-
bering or imagining them. At the same time, the specific direction of attention to the
subject, and the explicit ascription of items of experience to this subject, this I (in
the form of an “I think”), is not always present; but its possibility, and its availability to the
subject, are permanent and necessary features of all conscious experience.18
First, there is the active self-awareness involved in any experience, and especially in
the application of concepts to what we experience, guaranteeing the unity of both the
subject of that experience and the organized whole of what it experiences. Second,
there is the permanent availability, made possible by this first self-awareness, of the
subject’s turning its attention to itself, making itself the object of its own conscious-
ness, and thereby appending an explicit “I think” to whatever else it may be thinking or
experiencing at the moment. Both involve self-awareness as the ultimate ground of
unity: the unity of the experiencing subject itself and the unity of the conceptualizable
system of what the subject experiences. This is what Kant means when he says that “the
representation ‘I think,’ which must be able to accompany all others, and which in all
consciousness is one and the same, cannot be accompanied by any further representa-
tion” (KrV B132). It is also what Fichte means in his principle: “the I posits itself abso-
lutely,” and in regarding this as the first principle.
§6: The Summons to Self-Activity

The fragmentary Chapter 1 of the Doctrine of Science Fichte projected in 1797 is
divided into three sections. Section I attempts to prepare the reader to move from ordi-
nary self-consciousness to the philosophical, transcendental, or “higher speculative”
standpoint, from which the first principle can be grasped. Sections II and III of the
chapter attempt to present the conception of the I as it is grasped when we form a
18
Some natural languages (Vietnamese is sometimes cited) have no personal pronoun “I.” Such lan-
guages constitute no counterexample to the claims of Cartesian, Kantian, or Fichtean philosophy. The
speakers of such languages have ways of referring to things and persons other than themselves and of
ascribing thoughts and actions to themselves. Even Descartes’ Latin word cogito—paradigmatic for the
philosophical thoughts of I (ego, Ich)—contains no explicit first person pronoun.
c onception of the active self with clear consciousness of how this is done. The chapter
apparently breaks off before this process is completed, but taken together with what
Fichte tells us in other texts, I think it brings us close enough to the first principle of his
Jena system to be able to identify that principle.
In Section I, Fichte begins by addressing himself to the reader in the second person,
and “summoning” (auffordern) the reader to have certain thoughts. In Chapter 3, we
will see that the concept of a “summons” (Aufforderung) will play a key role in Fichte’s
development of his system, especially in the systems of right and ethics. It also indi-
cates that in the second phase of his Jena period, Fichte has integrated an intersubjec-
tive or “dialogical” approach into his philosophical method, anticipating similar
approaches in twentieth-century continental philosophy. See Theunissen (1984),
Habermas (1984), Lévinas (1987), Gadamer (1989).
Postulates. Fichte’s system is grounded on what he calls “postulates.” Fichte under-
stands this term in the original sense used in Euclid, where the Greek word for “postu-
late” (αὶτὴμα) means “something requested or asked for.” More specifically, a Euclidean
postulate involves two related summonses (or requests): first, a request to perform a
certain action (for instance, in the case of Euclid’s First Postulate: given any two points,
draw a straight line between them) and second, a request to concede some proposition
based on that action (here, the proposition that between any two points a straight line
may be drawn). This understanding of “postulate” captures three basic Fichtean theses:
first, theoretical assent is interconnected with practical activity; second, within this
interdependency the practical has priority; and third, philosophy, like self-conscious-
ness itself, fundamentally involves a dialogical summoning and responding.19
The concept of the I. In the Second Introduction, for instance, Fichte describes the
task of forming the concept of the I in precisely these terms: “Thus our first question
would be: What is the I for itself? And our first postulate would be the following: Think
of yourself, construct the concept of yourself and take note of how you do this” (ZE
1:458). In Chapter 1, Section I, however, Fichte is making a request (or summons) that
is even preliminary to this, with the aim of preparing the reader to move from the
standpoint of everyday common sense to the philosophical standpoint from which
the first principle may be grasped. He proceeds in four stages:
(1) Fichte summons the reader to form the concept “I,” as the subject of any other
thought that the reader might be thinking. Fichte notes that this concept, as it is
drawn from ordinary consciousness, may initially include a great deal from which
Fichte will ask us to abstract in order to reach the I as the first principle (K1 1:521).
(2) As the first step toward this abstraction, Fichte summons the reader to think
of a particular thing and apply an appropriate concept to it: the table, the wall,
19
For a detailed examination of Fichte’s philosophy of geometry, see David Wood (2012). The discus-
sion of postulates is mainly in Chapters 3 and 4. This study, however, deals mainly with Fichte’s Erlanger
Logik (1805), which dates from later than the works with which the present book is concerned.
the window. To the reader who freely chooses to do this, Fichte then issues a
second summons: to notice that this consciousness consists in a free activity:
“You take note of the activity and freedom that is involved therein. Your think-
ing is for you an acting” (K1 1:521). Fichte realizes that not all readers will do
as he has requested: some will refuse. He does not expect to be able to prove
his Doctrine of Science to those readers.20
(3) Next, Fichte summons those readers who are still with him to note that part
of their active thinking which is specifically directed to the I itself, rather than
the table, the wall, etc. (to that which is distinguished from the I). He asks them
to discover that the object of the acting to which they are now attending is the
same as the subject of that acting, so that the actions in question are “self-re-
verting” or “go back into yourself, the thinker” (auf dich selbst, das Denkende,
zurückgehen) (K1 1:522). Fichte now expects the reader to be able to under-
stand, and also to concede, the content of the claim he regards as his first
principle: “The concept of a self-reverting act of thinking and the concept of
the I thus have exactly the same content: the I is what posits itself ” (K1 1:523).
He warns the reader, however, that this content is now the result of an act of
abstraction. He calls attention to two ways in which this is so, one obvious, the
second less so. First, every act of consciousness has an object distinct from it
(the table, the wall, etc.) and the self-positing I is the act involved in being
conscious of this object, yet for philosophical reasons, it is considered in
abstraction from that object. Second, this act has also involved abstraction
from the individuality of the I (from what makes the I of one reader distinct
from that of some other, from your I, my I, or Fichte’s I). The concept of the I as
self-reverting and self-positing is not the concept of a particular person. In the
Second Introduction, Fichte insists that this feature of the I as first principle
must belong also to Kant’s apperception:
Nor can Kant understand by this pure apperception the consciousness of our individ-
uality, or confuse the one with the other; for the consciousness of individuality is nec-
essarily accompanied by another consciousness, that of a thou [du], and is possible only
on this condition.21
(ZE 1:476)
20
Fichte acknowledges that dogmatists will not concede what he is asking at this point, because they are
unable (that is, stubbornly unwilling) to concede the consciousness of their own activity. They are hard-
ened in the delusion that their self-consciousness is a mere appearance or illusion, produced by the causal
interaction of the things in themselves, in which they believe while refusing ever to ask how awareness of
them is possible. To them he says: “Let us part from each other in peace at this point, for you will be unable
to understand anything I say from now on. I am addressing myself now to those of you who understand
what I am saying concerning this point” (K1 1:522). As we will see in Chapter 5 §8, however, Fichte thinks
their incapacity is self-inflicted, and thus still capable of correction. He must hope they will undergo a
moral conversion, making the idealist system accessible to them.
21
Of course this act of abstraction is not the same as a denial that any given I is an individual, or the
claim that it could exist without the opposition of a not-I, or a real world distinct from it. The mistake of
thinking that Fichte denies this is part of what leads people to think that Fichte’s philosophy involves the
(4) In the final step of this transition from the everyday to the philosophical
standpoint, Fichte calls attention to the way in which the act he has summoned
involves abstraction in what may seem like an even more radical and paradox-
ical way: The self-positing I is only an act; in its concept is included no being or
thing as the agent of this act: “Here I am not yet the least concerned with any
‘being’ the I may have apart from this concept” (K1 1:524).
Fichte is aware that the reader may now think he has been asked to make one conces-
sion too many. “I am supposed to think, but before I can think I have to exist” or else
I am supposed to think of myself, to direct my thinking back upon myself, but whatever I am
supposed to think or turn my attention back upon must first exist before it can be thought or
become the object of an act of self-reverting.
(K1 1:524)
Fichte’s reply appeals to the most basic or essential feature of the I (or of Kantian apper-
ception), namely, that it is the ultimate and fundamental ground of consciousness: the
representation “I think,” which must be able to accompany every other representation,
“cannot be accompanied by any further representation” (KrV B132).
Who is it [Fichte asks] that claims you must have existed prior to your act of thinking? It
is undoubtedly you yourself who make this claim, and when you make such a claim you
are undoubtedly engaging in an act of thinking . . . It follows that this existence of the I is
also nothing more than the posited being of yourself, that is, a being you yourself have
posited.
(1K 1:524–5)
The claim is not that you could not exist independently of your self-awareness. Fichte is
not arguing, in the manner of Berkeley, that the tree in your yard, or the books in your
closet, could not exist without someone’s perceiving them. (Berkeley of course calls
upon God to guarantee their reality when no one else is available.) We are not con-
cerned with the metaphysical question of what exists in itself, but rather with the tran-
scendental conditions of the possibility of our being conscious of the mind-independent
reality that exists outside our bodies and that resists our actions. Where this is the
nature of our inquiry, it is legitimate to insist that you cannot become aware of yourself
as thinking without actively positing yourself and being aware of the act of self-positing.
The I that posits any being you might call “yourself ” has been identified as nothing but
the act of self-positing itself. The point is this: there is as yet nothing contained in the
concept of the self-positing I except the concept of an act—there is no concept of an
acting being or thing transcendentally prior to this act.
We should not forget that we are talking about the result of a deliberate act of
abstraction. We are constructing a “skeleton.” So of course the concept of the self-positing
insane metaphysical notion that only “the absolute I” is real, and all else is merely an illusion or a figment
of the I.
I is necessarily a concept of something radically incomplete. It is quite in order to point

out that the concept of the I as self-positing is not fully coherent if the act which is the I
is represented as capable of existing all by itself without a subject of this act. This fea-
ture of the I, in fact, is precisely what Fichte thinks will enable the self-positing I to
serve as the principle of a system of philosophy. This system is supposed to consist of
the necessary progression of thoughts that are successively needed to restore coher-
ence to the first principle if we use it to represent something concrete and complete in
itself. At times (such as at the beginning of the Foundations of Natural Right), Fichte
represents his procedure as following the succession of thoughts through which the
mind proceeds, by necessity, in forming the concept of the I, thereby completing the
necessary conditions of experience (NR 3:1–7).
Here Fichte’s method should remind us less of Kant’s and more of Hegel’s—for
which it obviously provided the model. Fichte will proceed by generating a whole
series of problems or (apparent) contradictions. “All contradictions are reconciled by
more accurate determinations of the propositions at variance” (GWL 1:255). More
specifically, they are resolved through the introduction of a new concept that permits
this more accurate determination. In this way, “philosophy” is supposed to consist in
the “complete deduction of all experience from the possibility of self-consciousness”
(ZE 1:462). In §§8 and 9 of this chapter we will explore the method through which
Fichte introduces these new concepts.
Fichte observes that when I make the claim that I must already exist in order to per-
form the act of self-positing, this existence too can refer in the first instance only to
another self-positing act, which I think of as prior to the act I am now performing,
presupposed by it but without consciousness of that act. This is one direction in which
the abstractness or incompleteness of the thought of the self-positing I might reach out
for completion:
In addition to the act of self-positing which you have at present raised to clear consciousness,
you must also think of this act as preceded by another act of self-positing, one that is not
accompanied by any clear consciousness, but to which the former act refers and by means of
which it is conditioned.
(K1 1:525)
§7: Intellectual Intuition

In Section II of the new presentation of the Doctrine of Science, Fichte proposes to
“shift to a higher speculative standpoint” (K1 1:525). This step consists in a philosophi-
cal reflection on the nature of the knowledge of the I that is present in the principle that
the I posits itself absolutely. Fichte takes this principle to be a cognition (Erkenntnis) in
the Kantian sense. Every cognition requires both an intuition and a concept.
Fichte appears to break with Kant at this point in one respect, however, claiming that
the self-positing of the I is an intellectual intuition. It is significant that Fichte employs
this term only when moving to the “higher speculative standpoint.” This is the stand-
point from which the transcendental philosopher not only abstracts the I’s self-positing
activity from its experiential context, but also reflects on this abstracted activity:
Now, however, I say to you: pay attention to your own act of attending to our act of self-
positing . . . What constituted the subjective element in the previous inquiry must be made into
the object of the new inquiry we are now beginning.
(K1 1:525)
The paradox of self-consciousness. Fichte now develops a paradox: if I make my

thinking, the active I, into an object of reflection, I
obtain a new subject, one that is conscious of what was previously the being of self-consciousness.
I now repeat this same argument over and over again, as before, and once we have embarked
upon such a series of inferences, you will never be able to point to a place where we should stop.
(1K 1:526)
Self-reflection, in other words, assumes a previous acquaintance with the act which has
become its object, but reflection cannot account for this acquaintance, simply because
the subject of reflection is distinct from the object it must claim to know.22
In this way, we will never arrive at a point where we will be able to assume the existence of any
actual consciousness.—You are conscious of yourself as the conscious subject; but then this
conscious subject becomes, in turn, an object of consciousness . . . —and so on ad infinitum . . . In
short, consciousness simply cannot be accounted for in this way.
(1K 1:526)
Fichte then argues that if self-consciousness is to be possible, “there is a type of con-

sciousness in which what is subjective and what is objective cannot be separated from
each other at all, but are absolutely one and the same” (K1 1:527).
This immediate consciousness is the intuition of the I just described. The I necessarily posits
itself within this intuition and is thus at once what is subjective and what is objective . . . I am
this intuition and nothing more whatsoever, and this intuition itself is I.
(1K 1:529)
Fichte vs. Kant. This is what Fichte means by “intellectual intuition” (K1 1:530). Kant
denies that we have any intellectual intuition—of the self or of anything else. He also
abstains from the claim that pure apperception is a cognition of the self, on the ground
that all our intuition is sensible, and apperception is pure thinking, which to be sure
must be applied to sensibility to make experience possible, but apperception itself
involves no intuition (KrV B157–9). How far Fichte’s position really is from Kant’s
depends on our understanding of that to which the term “intellectual intuition” may
22
This paradox is obviously closely related to the one famously explored by Dieter Henrich (1966). As
I understand Fichte, however, he thinks this paradox has a solution, which is to be found in intellectual
intuition.
refer.23 “Intuition” is that cognition which involves a direct or immediate cognitive

relation to an individual object (KrV A19/B33). Kant maintains that all human intui-
tion occurs when objects affect us through the senses (KrV A19/B33). Intellectual
intuition would have to be an immediate cognitive relation that relates actively to the
object known, as in traditional rational theology, where God’s knowledge creates the
objects it knows (KrV A256/B311–12, B308). Kant therefore holds that pure appercep-
tion gives us awareness of our intellectual activity, but no cognition of the thing or
object—“the I or he or it (the thing)” that performs this activity; this is why it is not to
be considered an intellectual intuition of the self (KrV B157–9, A341–8/B399–406,
B406–13). Fichte, however, expands the meaning of “intellectual intuition” (and per-
haps also of “cognition”) to include the purely intellectual consciousness of activity:
“The philosopher,” he says, “is able to engage in abstraction. That is to say, by means of
a free act of thinking, he is able to separate things that are connected with each other
within experience” (EE 1:425). The idealist philosopher abstracts the act of the intel-
lect from all things, whether the object of the intellect or the agent of its activity,
employing this transcendentally in accounting for the objective world. The dogmatist
philosopher, by contrast, abstracts the thing from its representation in experience, and
tries to use it to explain consciousness and activity. Fichte’s claim is that, when under-
stood in these terms, a coherent idealist system is possible, while a coherent dogmatist
system is not. We can understand the world in which we live (know and act) transcen-
dentally through our active consciousness, but we cannot understand our life, our
active consciousness, metaphysically and causally through experience of, or theories
about, this world.
As the starting point of idealism, the I or the intellect “has no real being, no subsist-
ence or continuing existence . . . Idealism considers the intellect to be a kind of doing and
absolutely nothing more. One should not even call it an active subject, for such an
appellation suggests the presence of something that continues to exist and in which
activity inheres” (EE 1:440). Fichte does not affirm the same intellectual intuition that
Kant denies, but instead only expands the reference of the term “intuition,” applying it
to the same active awareness of thinking to which Kant declines to apply it on the
ground that it involves no cognition of the object which thinks.
In the Second Introduction of 1797, Fichte replies to J.F. Schultz, who objected to his
use of the term “intellectual intuition.” He tells Schultz that his use of “intellectual intu-
ition” refers to nothing but what Kant meant by “pure apperception” and is therefore
not at variance with Kantian doctrines, properly understood.24 Intellectual intuition is
23
There is much controversy about the history of the term “intellectual intuition” in Fichte’s philoso-
phy—for example, whether the concept is even present in the GWL of 1794. For an account of this dispute,
see Breazeale (2013), Chapter 8, pp. 197–229. As Breazeale points out, the term is used increasingly in the
later Jena period, after 1796 (p. 200). My exposition here, since it aims primarily at helping us understand
Fichte’s System of Ethics (1798), is focused on the later Jena presentation, in which the term “intellectual
intuition” is indisputably present.
24
Schultz, a close associate of Kant in the late 1790s and one of Fichte’s earlier benefactors, is often
thought to have urged, or even perhaps ghost-written, the famous Open Letter denouncing Fichte which
the immediate awareness of activity that is inseparable from all consciousness, and
which unifies consciousness into experience of a world.
The term “intellectual intuition” has several closely related meanings for Fichte.25
Intellectual intuition is our awareness of acting, when we act. It is also our awareness of
that which makes possible the unity of experience. For this reason, it also refers to
the starting point of the fundamental philosophical science, the Wissenschaftslehre
(ZE 1:471). The method of the Doctrine of Science is that of developing out of the
intellectual intuition of our own activity the series of necessary thoughts that make
experience possible. Fichte thus extends the meaning of the term “intellectual intui-
tion” to include our awareness of these necessary thoughts, and also our self-observation
of the “how” through which experience is constituted (WLnm p. 121, cf. GA IV/2: 33).
Our awareness of activity, however, is not to be understood merely as a passive or
empirical awareness of something occurring now. It is an awareness of acting from the
standpoint of the agent engaged in it. Thus intellectual intuition includes also an
awareness of how we can and should act—in other words, something normative.
Ultimately, it is awareness of the fundamental norm that makes consciousness possi-
ble: the categorical imperative.
The intellectual intuition of which the Doctrine of Science speaks is not directed toward any
sort of being whatsoever; instead, it is directed at an acting—and this is something Kant does
not even mention (except perhaps, under the name “pure apperception”). Nevertheless, it is
still possible to indicate the exact place within Kant’s system where he should have discussed
this. For Kant would certainly maintain that we are conscious of the categorical imperative,
would he not? What sort of consciousness is this? Kant neglected to pose this question to him-
self, for nowhere did he discuss the foundation of all philosophy.
(ZE 1:472)
In the System of Ethics, Fichte does hold that our awareness of the principle of morality
is, according to its form, an intellectual intuition (SL 4:45–7). When we say the I is
active (self-reverting, self-positing), and that it is aware of itself as active, we cannot
mean only that the I is some object or thing that has some property which it observes
itself to have. We must mean that the I is aware of a free decision which it is to make,
and of a norm or reason that applies to this decision. The I’s awareness of its acting, in
other words, is not theoretical knowledge. It is more fundamentally an awareness of
something to be done, of something I ought to do. This might also explain why Fichte
considers this awareness of the I’s activity to be possible in abstraction from any aware-
ness of the being or agent that acts. For if it is awareness not of how the I is acting, but of
how I ought to act, then there need be no awareness myself as the subject of a prior (or
occurrent) action: the self or agent of what is to be done will, so to speak, come into
Kant—whose intellectual powers were by that time very much in decline—published in the Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung in August 1799.
25
That Fichte uses the term “intellectual intuition” in more than one sense is noted by Breazeale (2013),
p. 221, Tilliette (1995), pp. 51–2, and Baumanns (1972), p. 73.
being only after I have responded to the ought, either by conforming to it or refusing to
conform. The subject of a norm, imperative, or reason for acting is a being that can
have no existence and no determinate properties, because it will come to be only after
my absolute freedom responds to the norm or reasons in some way that is still open to
me to determine. The “self-reverting” act of the I, or its “self-positing,” that is, must be
understood most fundamentally as an act still to be performed, whose task is to bring
the I into being. If that is correct, then this ought, or ought-for-a-reason, constitutes the
self-intuition of the I that acts, or posits itself absolutely. This will be key to the argu-
ments we will examine in Chapter 4.
Further, Fichte is identifying this norm-laden awareness of freedom with that very
self-consciousness (Kantian “pure apperception”) which is the ultimate and funda-
mental condition of the possibility of all consciousness and all experience. Fichte is
arguing for the fundamental identity of three philosophical problems that still plague
us because they prove resistant to every attempt to “naturalize” them. These are the
problems of consciousness, of normativity, and of freedom. As we will see in Chapter 3,
of these freedom is for Fichte the most fundamental.
§8: Moving Beyond the First Principle

Conceptualizing the intellectual intuition. Kant insists that cognition requires
both intuition and concepts: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions with-
out concepts are blind” (KrV A51/B75). In his response to Schultz, Fichte quotes
these remarks and presses them emphatically (ZE 1:473–5). The I’s intellectual intui-
tion of itself as self-positing must therefore be brought under concepts in order to
result in a cognition of the I. This step is what Fichte undertakes in Section III of
Chapter 1, though the chapter breaks off before he has gotten very far into it. In this
section, Fichte argues that in contrast to the intellectual intuition of the I, which is an
“agility” (Agilität), a concept is a state of repose from which we wrench ourselves into
activity (K1 1:531–3).
“Agility” is a term Fichte uses for activity in the sense we have just been understand-
ing it—that is, for acting in the sense of being about to act, or facing a choice that is
subject to a norm or imperative which provides a reason for choosing, but leaves the I
free to act in conformity or not. “Agility consists in a movement of transition from
determinability to determinacy” (WLnm, GA IV/2: 183). A concept, by contrast, is
something stable, either a way the world is (providing a fixed point in relation to which
the I is to act) or else a norm (imperative or end) that fixes the manner the I ought to
act, or a result of acting—what is posited in contrast to the act of positing (GWL 1:234,
NR 3:77, SL 4:2, 66, 71, 220, WLnm GA IV, 2: 32–3). Philosophy (or “the higher specu-
lative standpoint”) must first discover the I’s self-positing as an intellectual intuition,
and then grasp it in a concept: “Like sensory intuition, which never occurs by itself or
constitutes a complete state of consciousness, this intellectual intuition never occurs
alone, however, as a complete act of consciousness. Both must be brought under con-
cepts or comprehended [begriffen]” (ZE 1:463).26
The “not-I.” To conceptualize an intuition, as we have seen, is to determine it, which
means to contrast it with something else that falls outside the sphere of the concept
that is being applied to it. “No matter what is being determined, all determination
occurs by way of opposition” (K1 1:532; cf. GWL 1:131). This is apparently the mean-
ing given by Fichte to the principle attributed to Spinoza: omnis determinatio est nega-
tio.27 Fichte infers from this that in order for the I to grasp its intellectual intuition in a
concept, it must perform a second act of positing: it must posit a not-I opposed to its
own activity (GWL 1:106–7, ZE 1:459). Sometimes Fichte describes the formation of
the concept of an I, and the positing of the not-I that is required for it, as the act of
“reflection” (BWL 1: 67, GWL 1:91–2, 107, EWL 1: 359, ZE 1:489).
Fichte is emphatic that for philosophy, the not-I comes about through an act of posit-
ing by the I: “All that is not-I is only for the I” (RA 1:20). From the act of self-positing,
he says, “we may proceed to infer the occurrence of another act, by means of which a
not-I comes into being for us” (ZE 1:459). “I posit myself as something limited . . . since
it conditions my own positing of myself ” (ZE 1:489). Fichte rejects, both as a philo-
sophical error and as a misinterpretation of Kant, the notion that the I is to be limited
through something’s being given to the I “from outside” (ZE 1:486–9). “From the tran-
scendental standpoint it appears utterly absurd to assume a not-I as a thing in itself in
abstraction from reason” (SL 4:100). The essence of the critical standpoint, the “revolu-
tion” accomplished by it, he declares, is that “the object will be posited and determined
by our power of cognition, and not vice-versa” (EE 1:421).
The not-I is not a mere subjective representation of some sort—an “idea” (in the
Cartesian, Lockean, or Berkeleyan sense) or a Humean “perception of the mind.” Fichte
intends the I’s necessary act of positing the not-I to constitute the equivalent to Kant’s
Refutation of Idealism in the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: a proof that there
exists a real world distinct from our representations or mental acts: “This proof clearly
shows, against [Descartes’ “problematic idealism”], that the consciousness of the think-
ing I, as understood by Descartes himself, is possible only under the condition that there
be a not-I which is to be thought” (RA 1:21). Like Kant, Fichte rejects the view that we
must infer a world of external material things from our inner representations, as their
“causes.” He takes it to be a condition of the free efficacy of the I that there is an external,
sensible world of material things on which the I is to act, and that this world must be
given in time as already existing prior to the free action of the I (NR 3:23–9; SL 4:23–4).
Fichte accepts that there is in our experience “a double series, of being and seeing, of
the real and ideal” (EE 1:436, cf. ZE 1:494). But he thinks that the ideal series, in this
26
This also implies that for Fichte, as for Kant, there can in fact be no intuiting apart from thinking. That
point has been argued by Breazeale (2013), pp. 222–9.
27
Determinatio negatio est was stated by Spinoza in Epistle 50 to his friend Jarigh Jelles dated June 2,
1674. But cf. Ethics IP8s1. For a discussion of this principle in Spinoza and two other German idealist
philosophers, see Melamed (2012).
sense, is derivative from the real—that the category “representation” (Vorstellung) is to

be given a transcendental deduction based on the “check” (Anstoss) of the activity
of the I by the not-I (GWL 1:227–8). We do not get at the material world through
our ideas or representations—by the causality of material things on us or through our
inferences from our ideas or representations to material things; on the contrary, we
can get at our ideas or representations only as an abstraction from our living relation to
the material world. This illustrates Fichte’s view that idealism as a philosophical or
“speculative” standpoint is not only compatible with common sense realism, but even
provides a philosophical vindication of it.
§9: The Synthetic Method

The positing of the not-I, as a necessary condition of the I’s own self-positing, provides
Fichte with the first and most basic opportunity to apply what he calls the “synthetic
method” in transcendental philosophy. This is the procedure by which philosophy
moves from its initial abstraction back toward the concrete starting point, by generat-
ing a series of (apparent) contradictions, each of which is successively resolved through
the introduction of a new concept.
Conceptual impoverishment. Apparent contradictions easily arise if we are working
with too few concepts. That forces us to choose between false alternatives, and we seem
to have no way out of contradictions. Adding more concepts to our repertoire enables
us to make subtler distinctions and avoid contradictions. This simple point is the basis
of Fichte’s synthetic method.
We have already seen the synthetic method in operation in §6. Self-consciousness
was displayed as incapable of explanation until we introduced the concept of an imme-
diate, active awareness that the I has of itself in its act of self-positing. We can also see
the synthetic method being used in the first move Fichte typically makes after asserting
the first principle—the I’s activity—and then the second, the existence of a not-I
against which it acts. The I and the not-I are each required for the other, but they are
opposites. If we have only the conception of negating activity, then the activity of each
seems to contradict the existence of the other, but since each is the condition of the
other, each seems to negate its own possibility, making the I itself impossible.
Antinomies and their resolution. In the Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science,
Fichte presents the self-positing of the I and the positing of the not-I presupposed by it
as threatening us with an antinomy:
1. Insofar as the not-I is posited, the I is not posited; for the not-I completely nul-
lifies the I. . . . Thus the I is not posited in the I insofar as the not-I is posited in it.
2. But the not-I can be posited only insofar as an I is posited in the I (in one iden-
tical consciousness) to which the not-I can be opposed . . . Thus insofar as the
not-I is to be posited in this consciousness, the I must also be posited in it.
3. The two conclusions are opposed to each other . . . Hence [our] principle is

opposed to itself and nullifies itself.
(GWL 1:106)
The contradiction can be avoided, however, if we introduce a new concept—that of
limited, partial, or divisible activity or negation (GWL 1:105–10). The I and the not-I
limit each other by partially negating each other, abolishing each other’s activity only
in part. This compatibility offers us a common ground for their synthesis or reciprocal
dependency. The new concept thus generated is therefore the concept of ground
(GWL 1:110–22).
All our conclusions have been derived from the principles already set forth . . . so they must be
correct . . . And thereby our task is now determined. For we have to discover an X by means of
which all these conclusions can be granted as correct, without doing away with the identity of
consciousness.
(GWL 1: 107)
In the present case, Fichte identifies the X in question with the concept of limitation:
the I and the not-I must be seen as acting on and limiting each other (GWL 1: 108), or
(as this concept is further specified) they are related by reciprocal determination
(Wechselbestimmung) (GWL 1:131). The I and the not-I must both be seen as “divisi-
ble” (GWL 1:108–9). They are each in part different from each other, and yet in part also
the same as or equal to (gleich) each other.
This divisibility leads, according to Fichte’s argument, to a third principle in addi-
tion to those of identity and difference: the principle of ground. When two things are
the same or alike (gleich), there must be some mark or characteristic (Merkmal) in
which they differ. Otherwise there could be no meaningful assertion of their sameness.
Hesperus, for example, must appear in the evening and Phosphorus in the morning;
even in the identity statement “A = A,” the first token of A must appear to the left of the
identity sign and the second to the right, and the first “A” must somehow refer to A in a
way that is distinct from the way the second “A” refers to it; otherwise no meaningful
assertion of identity has been made; likewise, when two things are different or opposed
there must be some mark in which they are alike (gleich) or there could no relation
between them, not even one of opposition. A plant and an animal are both living things
(GWL 1:116). In both cases, the respect in which they agree is called a ground: in the
former case, it is the ground of a distinction (within what is selfsame); in the latter case,
of a relation (between two items that are opposed) (GWL 1:110–13).28
Fichte’s synthetic method consists in generating a series of (apparent) contradic-
tions, each of which is avoided or resolved by the introduction of a new concept.
28
Fichte’s actual use of the synthetic method predates its formulation as a method (or in the jargon of
“thesis–antithesis–synthesis”). It is to be found already in Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, where it
is used to resolve threatened conflicts, for example between moral vs. non-moral volition, impulse vs. the
moral law, the law as objective vs. legislated by our own will, and moral vs. sensuous incentives in divine
revelation (VKO 5:33, 35–6, 36–8, 40–2, 52–6, 79–80).
Sometimes Fichte presents the apparent contradiction as an antinomy, “thesis vs. antithe-
sis,” and considers the new concept required to avoid the antinomy as the “synthesis” of
the two opposites (RA 1:7, GWL 1:114–15, GEW 1: 337, NR 3:101–2, SL 4:102–5). It
was Fichte, therefore, who invented the jargon: “thesis–antithesis–synthesis.”29 In fact,
as we shall see, the incoherence often does not take the form of a contradiction, but
rather that of a circular explanation, a vicious infinite regress, a dilemma (a forced
choice between two equally unacceptable options). It is always some kind of unsolved
problem, aporia, or paradox that demands a resolution. What threatens us with a con-
tradiction is sometimes the initial (abstract) statement of the new concept needed to
avoid the problem or escape the aporia. The resolution then takes the form of an expla-
nation that removes from it the appearance of contradiction through the use of the
new concept, and makes the situation at last intelligible.30
The “synthetic method,” according to Fichte, involves the discovery of “a new syn-
thetic concept” (GWL 1:141) in which opposites are united or reconciled (GWL 1:114,
123, NR 3:99, SL 4:104). In Part Two of the Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science
(GWL), Fichte uses the “synthetic method” to provide similar deductions of other
theoretical categories: causal efficacy (GWL 1:136), substance/accident (GWL 1:142),
quantity and quantum (GWL 1: 139), qualitative reality (GWL 1:142); then imagina-
tion (GWL 1:215–19), representation (Vorstellung) which had been the first principle
of Reinhold’s “elementary philosophy” (GWL 1:227–9), followed by understanding
(GWL 1:233), the modal categories of necessity and possibility (GWL 1:238–41), and
judgment (GWL 1:242). In the subsequent essay Outline of the Distinctive Character of
the Doctrine of Science (1795), he derives the subjective conditions for theoretical cog-
nition (sensation, intuition in space and time) (EWL 1:331–471).31 Fichte tells us in the
Foundation that the synthetic method is appropriate only for theoretical philosophy
and an opposed or “analytical” procedure is required for the practical part of the
Doctrine of Science (GWL 1:114–15). We will see in Chapters 4 through 7 that Fichte
29
Fichte’s synthetic method was clearly the original model for Hegel’s dialectic, but Hegel deliberately
avoids using the same triadic terminology. Hegel means to avoid having his dialectic associated with
Fichte’s method, and with Fichtean transcendental philosophy, which he does not accept in an unmodified
form. Marx’s only use of this jargon is in The Poverty of Philosophy, where he uses it to ridicule Pierre
Proudhon’s poor understanding of German philosophy. When expositors of Hegel or of Marx use this
jargon to present their “dialectic,” they are forcing on these philosophers a mode of expression they con-
spicuously did not accept. These expositors are also telling you—without intending to—something else
even more important: that they do not know what they are talking about.
30
For example: Fichte argues that the I must act negatively on the not-I but can never abolish it. This
activity, he argues, must therefore be conceived as “a causality that is not a causality”; Fichte explains the
meaning of this concept by saying that it refers to a striving (RA 1:23–4, BWL, FGA I, 1:151–2, GWL 1:261,
SL 4:34, 73, 121). In this way, Fichte appropriates Spinoza’s conception of conatus (striving or endeavor;
Spinoza, Ethics IIIP6).
31
A good recent exposition of this development in GWL is presented by Förster (2012), Chapter 8,
pp. 179–204. He then expounds the even more tentative and undeveloped practical part of GWL in
Chapter 9, pp. 205–20. But Förster neglects the later development of Fichte’s practical philosophy found
in the Foundations of Natural Right (1796) and System of Ethics (1798) (GWL 1:114–15).
uses the synthetic method explicitly throughout the System of Ethics (SL 4:104); it is
also used in the Foundations of Natural Right (NR 3:99).
Metaphysical deduction, transcendental deduction, schematism. Any new con-
cept that is introduced in this way, and shown to be necessary to avoid a contradiction,
is thereby given (in Kantian terminology) a metaphysical deduction. That is, its origin is
seen to be transcendental rather than empirical, since the concept is needed if the pos-
sibility of experience, grounded on the self-positing I, is to be coherently conceived at
all. At the same time, it is provided also with a transcendental deduction. That is, its
objective instantiation in experience is shown to be necessary as a requirement for
coherently conceiving the conditions under which the I can be, and be aware of itself
as, active. The concept is also provided with what we might call a “determination”—a
specification of its transcendental content, which is that of being precisely that concept
that avoids the threatened contradiction. The series of such concepts, and their deduc-
tions through the synthetic method, is supposed to constitute the Doctrine of Science,
and also constitutes the other sciences (such as that of right and ethics) that are
grounded on the Doctrine of Science.
The principal concept that will receive this treatment in Fichte’s System of Ethics is
that of the principle of morality or the categorical imperative—the concept which, in
Chapter 4, we will call that of moral authority. It receives a metaphysical deduction—a
demonstration of its a priori transcendental grounding—in Part One of the System of
Ethics, then its applicability (in Kantian terms, its transcendental deduction) is supplied
in Part Two (which we will discuss in Chapter 5), and its actual application (Kantian
schematism) is presented in Part Three (discussed in Chapters 6 and 7 of this book). In
the course of these arguments, other concepts—such as those of drive, the system of
necessary drives of the I, and conscience—will be similarly developed. Most important
will be the drive to absolute independence or self-sufficiency, expressive of the I’s free-
dom, and the summons, by which the I’s relation to others is cognized. The foundation
for these two concepts will be the topic of Chapter 3.
The process of deriving new concepts through the synthetic method can also lead to
their radical reinterpretation, and also the reinterpretation of the familiar concepts of
common sense they aim to justify. What might look like an individualistic ethics, or a
teleological ethics, might turn out to be nothing of the kind, but even its virtual oppo-
site. These transformations are also a fertile ground for exegetical disputes about the
meaning of some of Fichte’s fundamental doctrines. We will see in Chapters 5 and 6
that in Fichte’s System of Ethics, the fundamental drive for self-sufficiency, which might
look like the basis for a calculative-consequentialist ethics, cannot coherently be repre-
sented that way, because self-sufficiency cannot be coherently represented as any
determinate end that could be achieved, or even maximized. The determination of
ethical duty will be seen at one stage (in Chapter 5) as an issue for individual conscien-
tious conviction, but later (in Chapters 6 and 7) as something to be determined
through social communication.
3
Freedom and Intersubjectivity
The Conditions of Action
There are two topics we must take up before we can deal directly with the foundations
of Fichte’s system of ethics. The first is seen by Fichte himself as absolutely foundational
to his system: this is his conception of the freedom of the will. The second is the inter-
subjectivity of self-consciousness. The two topics are interrelated, for Fichte holds that
our commitment to freedom is grounded on our attribution to ourselves of rational
capacities, theoretical as well as practical, and that our possession of these capacities
depends transcendentally on our interaction with others, and on our attribution of
absolute freedom to them as well. Our commitment to freedom is the commitment not
to objectify ourselves, or to let ourselves be objectified by others. The intersubjectivity
of freedom means that we may also not objectify others. We must treat other rational
beings always as partners in, never merely objects of, our rational deliberations.
§1: Absolute Freedom

Fichte’s conversion to Kant’s philosophy in the summer of 1790 was a decisive turning
point in his historical development. We know little about what Fichte thought prior to
this, and he had as yet published nothing. But he was already 28 years old, and in many
ways a fully formed philosopher, who even thought of himself as having a “system.”
Based on a brief text, Aphorisms on Religion and Deism (ARD), first published by
Fichte’s son in the mid-nineteenth century, the evidence is that this system was very
close to that of Spinoza. It involved both necessitarianism about the will and a conse-
quent skepticism about morality—specifically, the concept of duty. These were the
points on which his Kantian conversion turned. As he reported in a letter of August
1790 to F.A. Weisshuhn, who had been his close friend since they were students
together at Schulpforta:
I have been living in a new world ever since reading the Critique of Practical Reason. Propositions
which I thought could never be overturned have been overturned for me. Things have been
proven to me which I thought never could be proven—for example, the concept of absolute
freedom, the concept of duty, etc. . . . Thus I was deceived by the apparent consistency of my
previous system, and thus are thousands of persons perhaps still deceived.
(GA III/2, No. 63, EW pp. 357–8)
A letter in November of the same year to H.N. Achelis likewise describes the “revolution
that has occurred in my way of thinking”:
I now believe wholeheartedly in human freedom and realize full well that duty, virtue, and
morality are all possible only if freedom is presupposed. I realized this truth very well
before—perhaps I said as much to you—but I felt that the entire sequence of my inferences
forced me to reject morality. It has, in addition, become quite obvious to me that very harm-
ful consequences follow from the assumption that all human actions occur necessarily, and
just as obvious that this is largely the source of the tremendous ethical corruption of the
so-called “better classes.”
(GA III/2, no. 70a, EW pp. 360–1)
As we see from this last remark, Fichte identifies his commitment to “absolute free-
dom” not only with the idea that duty, virtue, and morality are not illusions, but also
with a social cause: human equality—the rights of the majority of society, protest
against the unjust privileges of the “so-called ‘better classes.’” In spring 1795, Fichte
declares to Jens Baggesen: “My system is the first system of freedom” (GA III/3, no.
282a, EW p. 385). Fichte saw his commitment to “absolute freedom” as a version of
Kantianism; at the same time, he saw his own system as the first “system of freedom.”
We should therefore try to understand his conception of “absolute freedom” both in its
continuity with Kant’s and also in distinction from it.
Kant and Fichte on freedom. For Kant, transcendental freedom is a certain kind of
causal power, namely the power of beginning a state or an occurrence (or a whole
series of states and occurrences) spontaneously or “from itself ” (von selbst) (KrV
A533/B561). Kant does not think we can know whether the human will is such a tran-
scendentally free cause, but if it is, then it is a finite substance (corporeal or incorpo-
real—this is also unknowable), whose existence is causally dependent on other things.
Substances in the natural world possess causal powers to begin a state or occurrence,
but this power is itself the effect of other substances acting on it with similar causal
powers; these powers are themselves the effects of other substantial causes, and so on
indefinitely. The Third Antinomy of pure reason concerns the idea (the concept of rea-
son whose object is not capable of exhibition in experience) of a causal power that is
not dependent in this way on other such powers. This is what Kant means by a tran-
scendentally free cause.
Kant distinguishes transcendental freedom from practical freedom, the capacity to
act without the action being causally necessitated by a natural impulse. He holds that
practical freedom requires transcendental freedom, since any cause whose causal
power results from the causal power of causes external to it (such as a natural impulse)
would have its action thus necessitated (KrV A 534/B562, G 4:446, KpV 5:33). Since
practical freedom is a kind of causality, and causality acts according to laws, there
must also be a law for a free cause. This is the moral law or law of autonomy (G 4:446–7,
KpV 5:29, 33). In the Groundwork, Kant argues that since the moral law is the law of
a free will, a perfectly free being would necessarily act according to the law. We are
Freedom and Intersubjectivity 67
imperfectly free beings, however, for whom the law is a constraint, one that we do not
necessarily obey (G 4:454–5).
Fichte accepts Kant’s conception of freedom as the power to begin a state spontane-
ously—or, as he prefers to put it, “absolutely.” He regards the I as free in this sense
(SL 4:37). But Fichte does not identify the I with a substance possessing this power.
Instead, as we have seen, Fichte conceives the I originally only as an acting. The I is an
act that is absolutely free in the sense that it is self-posited (GWL 1:96–7, ZE 1: 462–3,
NR 3:1–2, n, SL 4:3–4). It is not caused by any thing, not even by a “self ”-thing. As a
transcendental condition of the I, however, its action must be directed to an external
object (a not-I or corporeal world). Its effect on that world is a causality, the causality of
one material thing on another. Therefore, the I’s free act must also be ascribed to a cor-
poreal substance—the I’s material body (ZE 1:495, NR 3:56–62, SL 4:12, 110–12, 129–30).
A disembodied or immaterial I would be transcendentally inconceivable. “Apart from
this connection with a body [the I] would not be a person at all, but would be some-
thing quite inconceivable (if one can refer to a thing that is not even conceivable as
‘something’)” (VBG 6:295, cf. NR 3:59).
Fichte thinks of the free will as a power of our body to act causally on the external
world. Yet because freedom is located in an act, not in a thing or substance, Fichte does
not understand the moral law as the law of free causality, nor does he think that a will
could be free while also acting necessarily. Fichte’s basic conception of freedom is that
of willing (Wollen), which is “an absolutely free transition from indeterminacy to
determinacy, accompanied by a consciousness of this transition” (SL 4:157). Absolute
freedom is described as “independence” or “self-sufficiency” (SL 4: 32, 38, 142). Its acts
can depend on nothing but themselves. But we will see that Fichte also ascribes to
the I a “tendency” to “self-sufficiency” (SL 4:60), or even a drive to self-sufficiency
(SL 4:184–5). “Self-sufficiency” is therefore also the end (even the final end) of the free
will—though it is an end we can never reach, but only approximate (SL 4:149, 153,
210–12, 229–30). In later chapters we will consider repeatedly the relation between
these two kinds (or two senses) of “self-sufficiency.”
For Kant, the free will is a substance, having causal powers like other substances;
according to the mechanism of nature, the causal powers of substances must be
grounded in other, prior causal powers, which necessitate its causal action. The animal
power of choice (tierische Willkür, arbitrium brutum) is a will of this kind. Free will
(arbitrium liberum) must be a substance which acts “from itself,” and is an exception to
the natural mechanism. Fichte, by contrast, holds that the will or willing I is only an
acting. Acts of will are by their concept free; they are not part of the causal mechanism
of nature at all, though motions of the human body, which are the objective side of
these acts, do cause certain effects in the material world. For Fichte, it is a conceptual
truth that all willing is free: “an unfree will is an absurdity” (SL 4:159). Fichte also dif-
fers from Kant in that he does not regard the state that is begun absolutely as begun
solely “from itself ” in the sense that it is unconnected with something prior to it. For
Fichte, to think of the I’s free act as “connected to nothing at all” would be to identify
freedom with mere contingency in the sense of “blind chance,” and the indeterminacy
of freedom with mere “not-determinacy = 0” (SL 4:33–4, 137). Fichte denies that free-
dom could be anything of that sort.
The dilemma of determinism. One familiar determinist argument says that if actions
are not causally necessitated, then they must be merely chance or random events. That
would make them not only bizarre exceptions to the laws of nature but also unintelligi-
ble even as human acts.1 The Fichtean reply is that this must be a false dilemma if we are
even to entertain the concept of an action. Action occurs only if the transition from
indeterminacy to determinacy is effected not by a necessitating cause but by an act of
self-determination which is governed (as Fichte puts it) by “concepts” (or norms).
Acting, grounded on a normative concept, is incompatible with something’s happen-
ing “indeterministically,” if that means it occurs merely at random or from “blind
chance.” A normative concept, however, can be neither an external cause nor a necessi-
tating cause: it has to be a ground of self-determination; it must leave the agent with
alternative possibilities: acting either in accordance with a normative concept or con-
trary to it.
Fichte even allows that agents can, through a failure to reflect, make it necessary that
they act as they do. In this way he provides for the kind of predictability and explicabil-
ity of actions that determinists want to insist on. But he does this without denying
agents the freedom to raise themselves to a higher stage of reflection, and also holding
them responsible—at least to themselves—for failing to do so. (On this point, see
Goh 2012 and Chapter 5 §§2 and 8 in this volume.)
Being before you are. Fichte is not a proponent of the view now commonly called
“agent causation,” if that means treating the agent as a substance or thing of any sort. It
could not be an immaterial thing, because, as we have seen, Fichte denies that there
could ever be any such entity. The I, or will, is a self-determining act. As free, it cannot
have a nature. If the will had a nature, then other things would act upon that nature,
necessitating its acts. To treat a rational being as having a nature is to objectify him or
her (see Beauvoir 2010 [1949], pp. 21, 47, 80–5; Haslanger 2012, pp. 64–7). Dogmatism,
as we have seen, objectifies everything and everyone, turning them into things to be
pushed around and manipulated. So for the dogmatist, it is axiomatic that everything
must have a nature, which explains what it is and how it behaves. For the dogmatist, the
notion of free will as self-making is necessarily nonsensical or impossible. Kadri
Vihvelin, in the course of her recent defense of the compatibility of free will with deter-
minism, characterizes the notion of free will as self-making as “impossibilism,” since
she takes it to be committed to the idea that free will is impossible. She also uses the
term to imply that such a person is beyond any possibility of rational persuasion
1
This is the meaning of the title of William James’s essay, “The Dilemma of Determinism” (James 1968,
pp. 587–610).
(Vihvelin 2013, pp. 35–51). (There seems to be here a mirror-image of Fichte’s concep-

tion of the dogmatist.)
Fichtean transcendental idealists, however, do embrace the idea of freedom as self-
making because, as a matter of moral conviction, they refuse to objectify themselves
or others, or to let rational beings be objectified. They hold that to be free is precisely
not to be an object pushed around by causal forces, but rather an embodied agent—a
participant, along with others, in free, rational agency. The situation of the I, including
its body, is not self-made but belongs to the material world the I inhabits. But the I itself
as act is self-made. It exists before it is anything determinate, and is determinate only as
what it makes itself to be.
Fichte therefore infers that the I as will, in order to be free, must be something that
“has to exist in advance of its nature,” or to “be before it is determined” (SL 4:35–6).
Fichte is not asserting the contradiction that in time the I exists before it exists, but he is
asserting that the I’s existence is transcendentally prior to its being what it is. Fichte
never uses the famous Sartrean formula: Existence precedes essence, but he is obviously
the original author of the idea it expresses.2 The I (as a free act) must exist prior to any-
thing determinate being true of it. Fichte departs from Sartre, however, in thinking
that willing is also essentially subject to a law. Fichte would not say, as Sartre does:
“There is consciousness of a law, but no law of consciousness.”3 But the law in question
is essentially a normative law, which a free will is always free to obey or disobey. Clearly
the will, as Fichte conceives it, does not fit into any of the metaphysical categories phi-
losophers now commonly use. He would declare all such metaphysics to be one form
or another of dogmatism.
Fichte also says that the I is free at all only if, and to the extent that, it makes itself free,
by actually determining itself in accordance with the norm that constitutes its self-
hood. The I “cannot ascribe to itself a power of freedom without finding in itself an
actual exercise of this power, that is, an actual act of free willing” (SL 4:83). I can choose
to remain passive to my feelings. Then I fail to determine myself freely. I (freely) choose
to remain unfree. To those who have made the choice to be unfree, their own freedom
cannot be proven, simply because they are not free.
I am what I am because this is what I willed to be. I could have let the wheels of necessity carry
me away. I could have let my convictions be determined by the impressions received from
nature, or by the tendency of my passions and inclinations, or by the opinions my contempo-
raries wanted to impart to me. But this is not what I willed. I have torn myself free.
(BHW 8:348; cf. SL 4:32–3)
2
This formula is best known from its repetition several times within a few pages early in Sartre’s popular
essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” (Sartre 1956b, 289–91); but in Being and Nothingness, Sartre declares:
“Consciousness is a being whose existence posits its essence.” Sartre (1956a), p. lxii, cf. p. 438, and Heidegger
(1953), p. 42.
3
Sartre (1956a), p. lv.
Formal and material freedom. Clearly in some of the above claims, the term “free” is
being used in two distinct senses. Fichte calls our attention to this (SL 4: 153). If
I choose to remain passive to my desires, this choice requires a kind of freedom. But
I am not fully free except by making myself free. Fichte draws a distinction between
formal freedom and material freedom (SL 4:135–9). Formal freedom is the power or
faculty of the I to determine itself in a variety of different ways (SL 4:50–2).4 Material
freedom is the act of conforming to the norm or law of freedom. Formal freedom is a
capacity—the capacity for material freedom. Thus Fichte speaks of having “freedom
for the sake of freedom”: one acts with formal freedom for the sake of material freedom
(SL 4:153). Those who act with formal freedom but not with material freedom are
(freely) failing to exercise the very capacity in which their formal freedom itself
consists.
The two senses of “freedom” are related as the two senses of “self-sufficiency.” Without
an act of self-determination, there is properly speaking no person, no I at all. Awareness
of the I is awareness of a free action; but an act requires subjection to a norm, though not
necessarily conformity to it. Such an act presupposes both a norm of material freedom
and the power of acting according to this norm. That power is formal freedom. A free
will must be formally free in order to be self-positing—that is, a conscious transition
from indeterminacy to determinacy. Material freedom is the actual determination of
oneself in conformity to the norm of self-sufficiency. Only a materially free action is
absolutely free, but formal freedom is a necessary condition for materially free action.
Originally, that is, apart from its own contribution [Zutun], it is absolutely nothing. It must
make itself into what it is supposed to become through its own doing [Tun]. This proposition
is not proven, nor can it be proven. It is purely and simply up to each rational being to find
himself in this manner and grant the same.
(SL 4:50)
This explains why Fichte thinks dogmatist philosophers, existing in their state of
moral slackness or depravity, cannot be convinced that they are free. Fichte says he
cannot convince someone of their own freedom unless the person chooses to act freely
(EE 1:429–35, ZE 1: 508–15, SL 4:25–6). It would be pointless to try to convince some-
one they have some property when they don’t in fact have it. It would be pointless to try
to convince a sitting Socrates that he is standing. This is still pointless even if Socrates
could stand if he chose to stand, and even if he rationalized to himself his refusal to
make this choice by self-deceptively denying that such a choice is possible for him,
4
The terms “formal freedom” and “material freedom” have a quite different meaning in the context of
right, where formal freedom refers to the capacities that make one a person, a subject of original rights,
and “material freedom” refers to the magnitude of the external sphere of their formally free activity (NR
3:93–4). The two uses of “formal freedom” may be coextensive, even if there are human beings who are
(through immaturity or incapacitation) persons with rights who (temporarily) lack formal freedom in the
moral sense. For they may be considered persons only on account of those moral capacities that they tem-
porarily or contingently lack. But “material freedom” both means and refers to entirely different things in
right and in ethics. See Chapter 5 §4.
remaining caught in the circle of illusion by which he denies his capacity to stand. For
Fichte, the dogmatist’s denial of human freedom is like that. If you are a dogmatist,
there is no point in arguing with you. But you can always undergo moral conversion
and at last make a materially free choice. Then we can point out to you what is presup-
posed by what you just did, and at last prove to you that you are free because now at last
you are free.
§2: The Conviction that We are Free

“Faith” in freedom. In his second Jena system, to which the systems of practical phi-
losophy belong, Fichte admits—or rather, he proclaims—that the I’s free self-positing,
on which his idealist or critical system rests, is grounded on a “faith”—not on
any theoretical insight, but a practical interest. I will to be self-sufficient, and therefore take
myself to be so. Such an assent, however, is faith. Our philosophy therefore begins with a faith,
and knows that it does so. Dogmatism too . . . starts with faith (in the thing in itself), but it usu-
ally does not know this.
(SL 4:26)
Here we must revisit the opposition between criticism and dogmatism discussed in
Chapter 2. For in Fichte’s view, the issue of freedom truly is the decisive point on which
the two world-views part ways.
A certain kind of popular religious apologetics goes more or less as follows:
Both religious belief and unbelief ultimately rest on faith: the believer accepts the Word of God,
unquestioningly by a miraculous leap of faith, while the unbeliever, equally blindly and irra-
tionally, accepts the authority of reason and science. Hence the unbelieving rationalist is just as
guilty as the religious person of making an irrational leap of faith. Belief and unbelief are thus
on a par: the only difference is that the believer is honest enough to admit the irrationality of
his faith, whereas unbelievers try to pretend their faith is something it is not.
How often have we heard this apologetic ploy from some preacher or other? It’s
disgusting.
Fichte was trained for the Lutheran ministry, and at times he appears to present his
defense of absolute freedom as if it were a version of this dismal apologetic: it appears
to us, he says, that we are free. But dogmatists, who think everything can be explained
in terms of natural causality, try to explain away this appearance as an illusion. They
don’t admit that their position is based on faith. The idealist who accepts the appear-
ance that we are free does admit this, and is therefore more honest.
If one nevertheless decides not to explain this appearance any further and decides to consider
it absolutely inexplicable, i.e. to be the truth . . . and our entire philosophy is based on precisely
this decision—then this is not because of any theoretical insight but because of a practical
interest. I will to be self-sufficient, and therefore take myself to be so. Such an assent, however,
is faith. Our philosophy therefore begins with an item of faith, and knows that it does so.
Dogmatism too, which, if it is consistent makes the claim stated above, starts with faith (in the
thing in itself); but it usually does not know this.
(SL 4:25–6, cf. EE 1:429–35)
A closer look reveals that, despite appearances, and to our relief, Fichte is not arguing
in the manner of popular religious apologetics. Nor does he do this in other matters of
“faith.” In the course of avowing his faith in the divine government of the world, for
instance, Fichte declares that faith “should not be represented as an arbitrary assump-
tion one may adopt or not as one pleases, as a free decision to consider true whatever
the heart wishes and to do so because this is what it wishes” (GGW 8: 179, IW p. 144).
Neither is the choice between idealism and dogmatism seen by Fichte as arbitrary, or a
“leap of faith” ungoverned by reasons. It is highly misleading—charitable not to ideal-
ism, but to dogmatism—when Fichte gives the impression that the relation between
idealism and dogmatism is something like an intellectual standoff, where “faith” must
resolve a question that cannot be decided by reason.5 In fact the question is decided by
reason, but a dogmatist cannot be convinced by reason because the dogmatist is
trapped in a web of dishonesty and deception, refusing to listen to reason. The kind of
reason that supports idealism, however, as we will see presently, is one that supports
faith rather than knowledge. The dogmatist, however, claims dogmatically to know
that freedom is impossible. Here too, as we will see, the idealist is both honest and
rational, while the dogmatist is neither.
The starting point of idealism is the self-positing act of self-consciousness. In every
consciousness there is some awareness of this act—both that it is self-positing and that
it could be otherwise than it is—and that awareness constitutes the “appearance of free-
dom.” The appearance can either be accepted as the truth, or else declared an illusion, a
product of the causal action of things.6 Any such dogmatic explanation also makes it
impossible to provide an adequate account of the difference between things and our
representation of them in consciousness, since this difference itself is grounded in the
free act of self-positing (EE 1:435–8). The dogmatist must deny this act, and therefore
cannot consistently accept the distinction between things and our representation
of them, even though it is on this alone that our possibility of knowing things at all
necessarily depends (EE 1:438–9).
5
I conjecture that Fichte displays this charitable attitude toward the dogmatist because he thinks dog-
matists are the victims of a self-inflicted moral incapacity. Although they are to blame for it, no one may be
in a position to blame them for it. They are to be pitied. Therefore, Fichte treats them as charitably as he can.
See Chapter 5 §8.
6
Spinoza too insists that there is in every human being an “innate” belief in their freedom of the
will (Ep. 58, Spinoza, 1992, 250). Spinoza explains this belief as a result of people’s ignorance of
the external causes of their actions, combined with the error of mistaking the partial cause, the part
of which they are conscious, for the entire cause (Spinoza, 1992, IIP40S2a, cf. Ep. 58). Fichte thinks of
Spinoza as the most consistent possible dogmatist (GWL 1:120). He never represents Spinoza, how-
ever, as an example of moral slackness, corruption, or self-deception, but always speaks of him with
utmost respect. I think this means that Fichte does not view the moral failings he associates with
dogmatism as inevitable, but only as tendencies common among dogmatists, to which they may all too
easily succumb.
Dogmatists thus deprive themselves of any immediate trust in the truth of their own
convictions, and at the same time of any confidence in the true ground of their
own worth as human beings. They cannot unite their world-view with their own self-
consciousness. They have to see themselves as the constant victim of self-deceptive
illusions—which in fact they are, but not in the way they think they are, so even their
denial of their own human dignity is dishonest. As we saw in Chapter 2, Fichte thinks
dogmatists are the sort of people who are at home in a social system of unjust privi-
leges, justifying their privileges as “necessary”—if not absolutely, then at least to the
existing world: the world as they are persuaded it must be. “Someone whose charac-
ter is morally slack or who has been enervated and twisted by spiritual servitude,
scholarly self-indulgence and vanity, will never be able to raise himself to the level
of idealism” (EE 1:434). The appearances that speak in favor of idealism, and the
self-undermining character of any attempt to treat them as illusions, provide a
rational ground for the idealist’s decision to treat the appearance of freedom as the
truth. But it is only by actually making this decision, subjecting ourselves to a norm
of self-sufficiency, that we truly give ourselves reason to be convinced of our freedom.
That is a moral decision.
It’s not about shaming, blaming, or punishing. For Fichte, this commitment to
morality is not about freedom as a supposed condition for moral responsibility or
accountability. This point is important to emphasize, because opponents of free will
typically depict its defenders as preoccupied with this issue. They are portrayed as
seeking to rationalize the “reactive attitudes” of blame and indignation, in order to
justify a punitive attitude toward others. In fact, however, it is usually just the other way
round. It is compatibilist determinists who are morbidly obsessed with the issue of
responsibility and blame. They even think they have solved the “free will problem” if
they can give some plausible compatibilist account of “our” (wretched) practices of
holding others responsible, blaming and punishing them, and so forth. That’s the only
problem that concerns them. They are blind to the problems of action and agency that
are the real ones.
Fichte claims that absolute freedom is necessary for “duty, virtue and morality,” but
he never claims that it is required for moral responsibility. Fichte’s accounts of blame
and punishment, which occur only in the context of right, are wholly anti-retributivist.
They are oriented to the coercive prevention of acts that violate right and interfere with
the external freedom of others (GNR 3:260–85). They involve no appeal to freedom of
the will, and could be offered just as well by any compatibilist, or even by a hard deter-
minist who views practices of blame and punishment solely as causal mechanisms for
securing external compliance with legal requirements.
Fichte and Spinoza. In fact, Fichte retained—not totally, but still to a surprising
extent—the Spinozist aversion to all negative “reactive attitudes” even after his conver-
sion to Kantianism. Of course Fichte’s position on free will is diametrically opposed to
the Spinozist position he apparently held prior to his “conversion” to Kant’s philosophy
in 1790. He thinks that a Spinozist must deny both morality and right, properly under-
stood. But his attitude toward the differing stances on freedom of the will, and his per-
ception of the relationship between opposing positions on it, remains strikingly
similar to the attitudes and perceptions found in Spinoza (see especially Ethics, 1992,
V P41S, P42S). Spinoza and Fichte agree in seeing humanity as divided into two con-
trasting groups: a small group of those who truly act, and are free, and a much larger
group who are passive, victims of their own erroneous view of the world and a conse-
quent slavishness of mind. Both philosophers offer the latter group a path to freedom,
but neither thinks very many will take it. For both, those self-condemned to slavery are
difficult to reach because their condition of servitude itself holds them captive in a cir-
cle of illusion, cutting them off from the truth.
For Fichte, liberation requires a radical free choice, accomplishing an inner moral
revolution; for Spinoza, it requires a perfection of the intellect that is as difficult and
rare as it is excellent. If we want an accurate characterization of Fichte’s attitude toward
those who reject absolute freedom, and the morality that goes with it, I think we should
sooner describe it as “contempt” or “condescension” than as “blame” or “indignation.”
It has much in common with Spinoza’s disdainful attitude toward those who are under
various illusions about themselves and others, and who consequently do foolish and
harmful things because they lack adequate ideas and are in bondage to irrational emo-
tions. Although Fichte thinks they are to blame for their moral incapacity, he hesitates
to blame them, or to encourage us to do so. In many ways, Fichte always remained a
Spinozist even about freedom.7
On one occasion, Fichte does argue that the fact that we hold people accountable for
an action shows we think they could have done otherwise, and therefore exhibits our
commitment to regarding them as free. But this argument is ad hominem; it is
addressed solely to those who might claim they have no awareness in themselves of the
moral law whose content Fichte claims to be identical with material freedom. Fichte
admits that some such people might be right, if they have not made themselves subject
to the law through freely positing themselves as self-sufficient. But he appeals even in
their case to judgments he imagines them making about others:
[When], for example, he does not become indignant toward and infuriated with the fire that
engulfs his house, but is indignant and infuriated with the person who set that fire or who was
careless. Would he not be a fool to be infuriated with this person if he did not suppose that he
could also have acted otherwise and that he ought to have acted otherwise?
(SL 4:62)
Fichte’s claim here is only that indignation toward a person presupposes that we think
the person could have, and ought to have, acted otherwise. Since the argument is ad
7
This is Fichte’s official position about the right attitude toward those at a lower level of moral reflection.
We will see in Chapter 5 §8 that he seems not always to have lived up to it in his own life. Even Spinoza
himself violated his own principles against indignation and anger after the murder of his friends, the
DeWitt brothers.
hominem, Fichte could concede that it cannot convince anyone of absolute freedom if
(like Spinoza) the person thinks that since people cannot act otherwise than they do,
fury and indignation toward them makes no more sense than fury and indignation
toward lifeless objects. It is not clear that Fichte himself would blame a person who is a
victim of self-inflicted moral incapacity (see Chapter 5 §8). This is not a general argu-
ment that we must presuppose absolute freedom in order to hold others responsible, or
direct blame at them. Fichte never offers any argument of that form.
The free choice to be free. We can begin to see why Fichte regards idealism as based
on “faith” when we fully appreciate why he thinks morally motivated arguments for
freedom can be offered only to those who have already chosen to act on principles of
moral self-sufficiency. As we have seen, if some people choose not to care about moral-
ity—that is, about material freedom—then as far as Fichte is concerned, those people
are not in fact free, so it would be pointless to try to demonstrate to them that they are.
There may be a kind of responsibility or accountability involved in the choice to be
materially free. But this is a responsibility or accountability only to oneself—the choice
to be free is a choice to hold oneself morally accountable. Fichte regards us as responsi-
ble in one sense whenever we are formally free, that is, whenever we are conscious,
from the everyday standpoint, of not being causally necessitated by a natural drive or
desire. But Fichte does not think this awareness can convince those who rationalize
their refusal to care about morality by declaring the consciousness of formal freedom
to be an illusion. He regards them as “being able to raise themselves to a higher level,”
and thus as being to blame for the self-inflicted incapacity that makes them materially
unfree (SL 4:181). But as we will see later (Chapter 5 §8), Fichte is not concerned to
justify us in directing blame at them. The attitude he most often exhibits toward them
is a kind of sad condescension, along with a resolve to behave toward them in a way
that might lead to their moral conversion.
Fichte summons his readers to think freely, to perform the act of self-positing of
which absolute freedom consists, and then follow the path of idealism that rests upon it
(EE 1:445, ZE 1:461–2). He “challenges [them to] exhibit the ethical law within [them-
selves]” (ZE 1:466). Only those who freely respond to the summons can be convinced.
A single breath from a free human being is enough to blow their system away. But we cannot
refute it for them. We do not write, speak or teach for them, for there is simply no way we could
accommodate them. If we nevertheless continue to talk about them, we do this, not for their
sake, but for others, in order to warn them against the errors of the former and to divert them
from such hollow and meaningless babble. Our opponents should not feel themselves demeaned
by this declaration. If they do feel themselves somehow belittled by our comments, they merely
reveal their own bad conscience and place themselves publicly beneath us.
(ZE 1:510)
Fichte argues that once I choose to be committed to morality, then I am justified in the
morally based conviction that I am free. This justification is twofold. First, this convic-
tion harmonizes with the unavoidable appearance that I am free. Second, once I have
made the free choice to acknowledge the moral norm of self-sufficiency, I can be made
to see that my conviction that I have made this choice cannot be made to cohere with
the dogma that the appearance of freedom is an illusion. Once you have made the
choice to be materially free, the only way to think coherently about yourself is to accept
the unavoidable appearance of freedom. The idealists’ conviction that they are free
always remains a “faith” in the sense that there is nothing in the grounds for this
conviction that dogmatists would have to acknowledge as providing them with a
convincing reply to the thought that the appearance of freedom is only an illusion
(SL 4:25). From the dogmatists’ standpoint, idealists merely choose to act in accord-
ance with an appearance that cannot be demonstrated not to be illusory. Dogmatists
have learned to live complacently with the thought that their consciousness of freedom
is a mere appearance; they objectify themselves along with others, and have become
comfortable with the thought that they are not honest with themselves and are victims
of self-imposed illusions. Thus the incoherence of the dogmatist’s position, though
clear enough to the idealist, cannot be presented to dogmatists as a reason for changing
their minds. Fichte thinks it cannot be otherwise:
Any communication of conviction by means of proof presupposes that both parties agree upon
at least something. How then could the Wissenschaftslehre communicate itself to a dogmatist,
since it simply does not agree with him upon a single point concerning the material of cognition,
and thus there exists no common ground from which they could jointly proceed?
(ZE 1:509)
The appearance of freedom in ordinary consciousness is one advantage that idealism

has over dogmatism. The second advantage Fichte claims that idealism has over dog-
matism is that dogmatism “is quite unable to explain what it is supposed to explain,
and this demonstrates its inadequacy” (EE 1:435). What dogmatism needs to explain is
consciousness itself, the possibility of our representation of the objects dogmatism
considers to be real. Freedom, however, is a transcendental condition for the possibil-
ity of experiencing the very things the dogmatist takes to be real.8 Implicitly, of course,
Fichte is also claiming that idealism, by contrast, can explain what it is supposed to
8
[The dogmatist] has always sought refuge in an appeal to some sort of original being, even if this
was nothing but a crude and formless matter. But idealism does away with this completely and
leaves the dogmatist standing there naked and alone. To defend himself against such an attack,
the dogmatist possesses no weapons beyond the attestation of his sincere displeasure, coupled
with his assurance that he simply does not understand what he is expected to do and that he
neither wishes nor is able to think of what is requested. We are quite happy to believe him when
he assures us of this, and in turn we simply ask that he should also believe us when we insist that
we, for our part, are quite able to think of our own system. If the dogmatist finds this to be too
difficult as well, then we can refrain from making even this demand and can let him think
whatever he pleases about this matter, for we have solemnly confessed on many occasions that
we cannot force anyone to accept our system, since the acceptance of this system is something
that depends upon freedom. —As I have said, the sole recourse left to the dogmatist is simply to
assure us of his own sheer incapacity, which is a purely subjective matter
(ZE 1:499)
Fichte thinks, however, that this incapacity is self-inflicted and always correctible through moral conversion.
See Chapter 5 §8.
explain: namely, how the same world of things is grounded in our experience of
them—that is, how the objective world is made possible through the absolute self-
positing of the I. Since Fichte never completed his idealist system, the full advantage
idealism is supposed to have over dogmatism would seem to be deferred until some-
one is able to complete it. Consequently Fichte tends to see the conviction of freedom
as something not to be demonstrated to those who don’t believe in it, but rather as the
object of a free, rational faith based on a choice that most dogmatists, on account of
their moral defects of character, will never be able to make.
§3: Freedom as a Presupposition of Theoretical Reason

Despite the apparently unbridgeable gulf between the opposed “faiths” of idealism and
dogmatism, there is in Fichte one major line of argument that might be seen as having
some traction with the dogmatist, if only the dogmatists could be honest enough with
themselves to consider it. The Foundation of 1794 begins with a transcendental account
of theoretical reason, and concludes “that reason cannot even be theoretical if it is not
practical” (GWL 1:264). In developing this strategy, Fichte may be seen as following up
a hint given by Kant in the Third Section of the Groundwork, when he attempts to
argue that freedom must be ascribed to every rational being as a condition of its mak-
ing theoretical judgments (G 4:448).9 Another remnant of this strategy is Fichte’s claim
that only the idealist is capable of being convinced (überzeugt) of his philosophy, while
the dogmatist can never be: “Spinoza could not have been convinced of his own philos-
ophy. He could only have thought of it; he could not have believed it” (ZE 1:513).
Coming to be convinced. Conviction (Überzeugung) always arises out of a condition
of doubt, a condition of worry or concern (Besorglichkeit) in which “the imagination
continues to waver between opposites,” and ends with a “feeling of harmony” or “satis-
faction,” through which this wavering ceases, and “the power of the imagination is
now bound or compelled, as it is in the case of everything real” (SL 4:167). This “waver-
ing of the imagination,” according to Fichte, requires (at least formal) freedom, just as
much as willing does (GWL 1:238–9; EE 1:423, SL 4:67–8, 136). In this respect, the
acquisition of “conviction” has freedom as its precondition in the same way as the
acquisition of “understanding” (Verstehen) or “comprehension” (Begreifen):
First of all—what does it mean to understand or comprehend? It means to posit as fixed, to
determine, to delimit. I have comprehended an appearance if, through it, I have attained a com-
plete cognitive whole that, with respect to all its parts, is grounded in itself; i.e. if each part is
grounded or explained through all the others, and vice versa. Only in this way is it completed
or delimited.—I have not comprehended something if I am still in the midst of explaining it, if
my interpretation of it is still in a state of wavering [Schweben] and therefore not yet fixed;
9
Neuhouser (1990), pp. 41–65, has described in some detail the working out of this strategy in the
Wissenschaftslehre of 1794, and also explained how in the revised Wissenschaftslehre of 1797–1799, it
gave way to the more direct appeal to the practical that we have just been examining.
i.e. if I am still being led from one part of my cognition to the others. (I have not yet comprehended
some contingent A, if I have not thought of a cause for A, and this means—since a particular
kind of contingency must belong to A—if I have not thought of a particular cause for it).
(NR 3:77)
Here Fichte contrasts the state of having understood or having comprehended with
a temporally preceding state, in which one was still coming to understand or coming to
comprehend. This preceding state is a Schweben—a hovering over or wavering between
alternative possible judgments about what causes the object still to be comprehended,
or (more generally) about how a cognitive whole relates to its constituent parts. Fichte
seems to assume that for any fact to be theoretically understood or comprehended,
there is a determinate cause, or grounding relation, which, when comprehended, will
remove our sense of contingency from the object. For instance, first I have the thought:
“It is possible that A is caused by X, but also possible that it is caused by Y.” But then I
come to think: “No: I see now that X could not have caused it, so it must have been
caused by Y.” This thought results in my comprehension of A as caused by Y. Here the
modalities regarding the object over which I hover, or between which I waver, are only
epistemic: For all I know, A could have been caused by X or by Y. But once I compre-
hend A, it becomes certain what caused it, and so I can no longer judge otherwise than
that Y caused it. My judgment then becomes epistemically necessary, even if the fact
about what caused A is only a contingent fact.
Dogmatism can perfectly well account for the fact that prior to arriving at under-
standing, comprehension, or conviction, the mind “wavers” between these epistemic
possibilities, regarding them as epistemically contingent. For the dogmatist, it can be
causally necessitated that a given person remains confused or ignorant, hence in a state
of epistemic contingency (or uncertainty) about many things.10 However, there
remains one crucial aspect of the wavering of imagination that cannot be accounted
for in the same way: namely, the wavering of my mind itself between the two alternative
epistemic possibilities prior to the act of comprehension. In order to come to compre-
hension, I must entertain the two epistemic possibilities as possibilities—for me, now,
of some future fixing, determining or delimiting judgment. At the present moment,
they must still be contingent in the sense that I must regard them as open to me to judge
one way or the other. These possibilities I cannot regard as merely epistemic, as due
only to my ignorance. That is, I cannot regard my considering it contingent which of
them I will judge—possibly this or possibly that—as a matter of my now being ignorant
of what my eventual judgment was already determined to be. The temporal process of
coming to comprehend is possible only through a wavering at time t1 between alterna-
tive possible judgments and then my coming to fix or settle on one of them at a later
time t2. If I am to regard the process as a genuine case of my coming to comprehend,
I must hold that both must have been really possible for me, really open to me to judge
at t1, in order that I alone should have been the one who settled the matter by achieving
10
This is precisely the account Spinoza gives of this phenomenon in Ethics (1992, IP33S1 and IIP44CS).
comprehension at t2. If instead I regard the matter as having already been settled or
necessitated beforehand (unbeknownst to me) at t1, then that already amounts to a
denial that my judgment at t2 came about precisely through the process of my (first)
wavering between opposed epistemic possibilities and (then) settling, fixing, deter-
mining, or delimiting the matter to one of them.
Even where the possibilities are merely epistemic with reference to the object (for
instance, the possible causes of A), the possibilities of judging or fixing that are open to
me at t1 must be more than epistemic. They must be real contingencies, capable of
being settled by me, one way or the other. This settling, as we shall see in Chapter 5, is
for Fichte a practical matter. The freedom to judge, fix, comprehend, or be convinced,
moreover, must be absolute in Fichte’s sense: I must exist (be indeterminately as ques-
tioner) before I am later (self-) determined as subject of my comprehension or convic-
tion. In Sartrean terms: in order to decide my conviction at a time I must put myself
“outside of being”: my existence as questioner must precede my essence as subject of my
own conviction.11
Fichte thinks the process of transforming the wavering of imagination into the fixity
of understanding is essential at every moment of time to our coming to the justified
conviction of the reality of the material world around us. “Intuition,” he says, is “fixed
or stabilized by reason,” so that an object can be considered one and the same in differ-
ent determinations of it. Imagination then “wavers between conflicting directions,”
and then through understanding “the transiency [of this wavering of imagination] is
arrested, settled, as it were, or brought to a stand, and is rightly called understanding”
(SW 1:232–3).
The transcendental limits of illusion. Fichte cites certain philosophers (Salomon
Maimon would seem to be among them) who have come to realize that ordinary
understanding is a result of the exercise of imagination, and then have been tempted
to consider the entire process of comprehending or understanding as a deception
(SW 1:227, 234). Fichte insists that they must be mistaken, for that which I must
represent as necessary for successfully coming to understand cannot be represented
as deception. That would make (successful) understanding itself a case of deception.
But it would be self-undermining to claim that you could come to understand that all
coming to understanding is necessarily a deception.
It is always possible, of course, that any particular judgment (about the cause of A,
or about the reality and the determinations of some object before me) was indeed
pre-determined beforehand, by a process I did not understand or comprehend, so that
it did not after all come about by means of the wavering of my imagination and its
11
Sartre in fact closely follows Fichte in arguing that the question itself is the proof of freedom: “The
questioner, by the very fact that he is questioning, posits himself as in a state of indetermination; does not
know whether the reply will be affirmative or negative” (Sartre 1956a, p. 5). “It is essential that the ques-
tioner have the permanent possibility of dissociating himself from the causal series which constitutes
being and which can produce only being . . . He must be able to put himself outside of being” (Sartre 1956a,
pp. 23–4).
fixation by understanding. But this is to exhibit that particular act of coming to under-
stand as a deception, and not genuine understanding at all. We are all victims of this
kind of deception now and then, and even fairly often.
If we ask: How often are our mental lives characterized by such deceptions? the hon-
est answer probably is: More often than we would like to admit. However, there is a
limit in principle to how far we can coherently regard ourselves as the victims or play-
things of such deceptions. If I represent my judgment as pre-determined, then I can-
not, on pain of incoherence, also represent it as a genuine case of understanding or
comprehension. For it is a conceptual point about comprehension that the process of
coming to comprehend must be essentially self-transparent. If it came about in such a
way that the subject is essentially deceived about how it came about, then understand-
ing or comprehension could not have come about at all. A subject need not, of course,
be conscious of every aspect of the process—for instance, of all the neuron-firings
that went into it. But the subject could not be essentially self-opaque, deceived, or in
error about the normative-epistemic essentials of the process—about the grounds or
reasons for what is comprehended, and about the fact that the state of conviction or
comprehension came about for these reasons. The process has to include the real (not
merely epistemic) contingency of the possibilities of judging that are open to me at t1.
If I were mistaken in believing at t1 that my judging was genuinely contingent, depend-
ent on the course of my thinking—if it were not truly open to me at t1 to make any of
several really possible judgments about the cause of A—then the judgment I do even-
tually make at t2 about this cause could not possibly be a genuine case of my coming
to understand or comprehend A. It could at best be some sort of reliably determined
illusion that I understand.
Judging for reasons. Another way to think of it is this: to come to understand or com-
prehend is to come to judge and be convinced of something for a good reason, and also
to have one’s judgment determined by that reason. Any reason, however, as a matter of
conceptual necessity, has the peculiar property that although it may explain why I come
to judge or be convinced as I do, it cannot do this by preventing me from judging other-
wise, or taking away from me the genuine possibility of being otherwise persuaded.
Reasons, in other words, even the best reasons, always leave us free to act against them.
(Reasons, as Leibniz said, “incline without necessitating.”) This is a conceptual truth
about acting for a reason. A judgment or conviction based on reasons is always contin-
gent. Moreover, this contingency cannot be merely epistemic. I must have the absolute
or unconditional ability to judge or be convinced otherwise than I in fact am. In other
words, conviction and understanding both presuppose absolute freedom.
This is not a case where something might appear to me to be one way while I know it
is really another—as when the sun appears to move across the sky, but I know that what
I am seeing is really the earth turning on its axis, or when the Müller-Lyer lines appear
unequal but I know they are really equal. If it is to be true that I judge for such-and-such
reasons, it can’t be the case that it appears to me that I judge freely for these reasons,
while in reality my judgment is determined in entirely another way. If I were to sup-

pose that my acts of judging, understanding, comprehending, coming to be convinced
for reasons, were all pre-determined beforehand, contrary to my consciousness that
they are really contingent and open to my free determination, then that would neces-
sarily be to suppose that all such acts are illusory and self-deceptive. Once again,
deceptions of this form do often occur, but if they always occurred, then there could be
no genuine judgment for reasons at all. Such an account of our cognitive processes
would be self-undermining. It would undermine reason in general, as well as our
dignity as rational beings.
Spinoza both anticipates and avoids this incoherence, though we will see that he
faces a different kind of problem. Spinoza holds, namely, regarding certain privileged
epistemic states which he calls “reason” and “intuition,” that they involve comprehen-
sion of their own necessity (Spinoza 1992, IIP40S, PP41–4). He therefore dismisses as
illusory all states involving “imagination,” which (here he agrees with Fichte) necessar-
ily wavers between alternatives, representing its objects as contingent (Spinoza 1992,
IIP44CS). Spinoza might be correct in cases of understanding where the matter has
been settled in the past. Once I have seen clearly and distinctly that 2 + 3 = 5, then as
long as I retain the results of this insight as part of my beliefs, it will no longer be possi-
ble for me to believe that 2 + 3 could equal any number other than 5. Here I understand
not only that, and why, 2 + 3 = 5, but also that, and why, I can no longer judge other-
wise. It is also true of many of our beliefs that they were not arrived at directly by such a
process, but were acquired along with an entire web of beliefs which was arrived at
through temporal processes yet without each of them being acquired separately by
such a process. Spinoza’s position, therefore, might be coherent if reason and intuition
are considered atemporally. For then they might be necessitated in the same way as our
standing conviction that 2 + 3 = 5. Spinoza also holds that time itself is a product of
imagination (1992, IIP44CS). Perhaps this implies that the temporal process of com-
ing to understand presupposes the erroneous affirmation of real contingency, which is
seen through once the object has been fixed through comprehension. If time—as
past–now–future—is as unreal as contingency, then Spinoza’s position is still defensi-
ble, but only because human understanding (including whatever way Spinoza thinks
the system of the Ethics could be humanly understood) would be impossible. Perhaps a
timeless God could read Spinoza’s Ethics with comprehension; you, I, and Spinoza
could not. But for Fichte, God in this sense is an impossibility. The only beings who
could ever think or comprehend anything are finite and in time.
Fichte’s argument thus proceeds from the premise that the location of our under-
standing in time as past–now–future is a transcendentally necessary condition of all
experience. Nothing has ever been understood except through a temporal process of
coming to understand; the freedom that this presupposes is what Spinozist necessitari-
anism cannot account for: “All our consciousness commences with indeterminacy, for
it commences with the power of the imagination, which is a hovering [schwebendes]
power wavering [schwankendes] between opposites” (SL 4:194). Thus instead of saying
that Spinoza could never be convinced of his philosophy, Fichte might better have said
that Spinoza could never have come to be convinced of it—adding, however, that for a
human subject, coming to be convinced is the only possible way of ever getting into the
state of being convinced. And this truth is transcendentally necessary.
The denial of freedom is self-undermining. Take the issue of free will itself: suppose
I am trying to decide what position is correct on this issue—Fichtean libertarianism,
or some necessitarian position, whether Spinozist or soft-determinist. No matter how
good the arguments on the necessitarian side may be, they always arrive too late. They
also undermine themselves. For in order even to entertain them I must already repre-
sent myself as free—as having a variety of possible judgments open to me, in order to
be capable of deciding the question at a time and according to reasons. I can’t suppose
that these arguments have already necessitated me to draw a certain conclusion
(behind my back, so to speak), because they present themselves to me as arguments I
am still free to reject. Even to consider the possibility that I might become convinced
that necessitarianism is true, I must presuppose that necessitarianism is false.
Necessitarianism cannot be coherently combined with the thought that I have come to
be convinced of it for good reasons.
This is not a question of something “subjective,” valid only from the “first person
standpoint.” Exactly the same would go for my attempt to represent you as having
adopted necessitarianism about yourself for good reasons, or for our attempt to repre-
sent some third person as having done so. No being that can judge or act for reasons
could be coherently represented as merely a causally necessitated mechanism. Fichte
sees this clearly:
The relationship between free beings is one of free interaction; it is by no means a relationship of
mere causality operating through mechanical forces . . . [In seeking to convince others] we begin
with freedom, . . . and assume that they are free as well. To be sure, in presupposing the thorough-
going validity of the mechanism of cause and effect, [the dogmatists] contradict themselves.
What they say stands in contradiction to what they do; for to the extent that they presuppose
mechanism, they at the same time elevate themselves above it. Their own act of thinking of this
relationship is an act that lies outside the realm of mechanical determinism. Mechanism cannot
grasp itself, precisely because it is mechanism. Only a free consciousness is able to grasp itself.
(ZE 1:509–10)
The insolubility of the problem of freedom. It is important to see that the above
arguments leave it still possible, if we consider the matter from a dogmatist standpoint,
abstractly or “in itself,” that we never really come understand or to judge for reasons at
all: that all our supposed comprehension or understanding is always illusory. These
arguments show only that it belongs to the concept of coming to understand that we
must be free, hence that we can never coherently represent ourselves, to ourselves or
to others, or represent others to ourselves, as coming to understand that we are not
free—or, indeed, represent anyone at all as coming to understand anything whatever,
unless we presuppose that we are all free.
This is the ultimate reason why Fichte holds that we can never finally prove that we
are free, or that idealism can ultimately refute dogmatism, so that the idealist posi-
tion must be described as based on faith. This way of putting it, however, may also be
misleading. The “faith” in question is not the least bit arbitrary, irrational, voluntary,
or even avoidable as long as we are thinking coherently about the world along with our
own thoughts concerning it. There is no self-consistent alternative to the conviction
that we are free as long as we represent ourselves as understanding or comprehend-
ing anything, or having come to be convinced of anything at all through reasons.
This is, once again, not a case of psychological necessity, something we “can’t help
thinking is so,” a weakness from which some less frail or defective mind might be
exempt. It is a normative necessity, arising as soon as I try coherently to combine my
claim that I have come to understand with any representation of the process through
which I have come to understand. Freedom is not demonstrated, but it is presupposed
by all doubting, questioning, and coming to be convinced, as a necessary condition
of their occurrence.12
The traditional problem of free will, whatever position one may take on it, is the
problem of reconciling human agency with our metaphysical (Fichte would say “dog-
matic”) conception of the world and how things work in it. Epicurus, who made the
startling discovery of this problem around the beginning of the third century bc, also
put forward an argument rather like the one we have just been examining. He tried to
solve the problem metaphysically by the desperate act of postulating a “swerve” to the
motion of the atoms that would allow for contingency, rationality, and accountability,
and rescue us from the threat of fatalistic necessity. The reconciliation of freedom with
our view of the objective world is equally the problem for naturalistic incompatibilists,
such as Epicurus himself, and for naturalistic compatibilists, who try to conceive of
freedom in such a way that it can be fit more easily into the causal order of nature. It
is even very much the same problem for those incompatibilists who want to locate
freedom among the faculties of Cartesian immaterial thinking substances or supernat-
ural noumenal selves, as long as these are understood in traditional metaphysical
terms. That anti-naturalist picture is equally an attempt to make freedom compatible
with our view of the world of things in themselves.
Fichte cannot be seen as one of those who seeks such a supernaturalist solution.
He does occasionally assert that the failure of dogmatism and its “materialistic” con-
ception of the world justifies us in claiming that as free agents we belong to an intelli-
gible world (SL 4:91, GGW 8: 181). But as I tried to explain in Chapter 2 §2, we totally
misunderstand such remarks if we take them to refer to an attempt to explain freedom
in terms of a theoretical metaphysics of supernatural “things in themselves.” For
Fichte, the intelligible world refers to the community of free I’s in reciprocal communi-
cation, or the way we are to think of the world insofar as our free acting is manifest
12
“Anguish has not appeared to us as a proof of human freedom; the latter was given to us as the neces-
sary condition for the question” (Sartre 1956a, p. 33).
in it (ZE 1:455n, 467; SL 4:91). This is “supernaturalist” if that means it is a way of
thinking about our lived world in a human way, a transcendentally coherent way,
rather than a “naturalist” way, if that means a self-undermining dogmatist way. But it is
not an alternative dogmatic supernaturalist metaphysics.
When Fichte claims that dogmatism is incapable of explaining the I in terms
of “things,” he means to rule out explanations in terms of spiritual or supersensible
“things” as well as sensible “things.” Do not forget that Fichte declares Berkeley’s
system is dogmatic rather than critical or idealistic in Fichte’s sense of the term,
precisely because it involves a transcendent metaphysics of spiritual things or sub-
stances (EE 1:438). Fichte’s transcendental philosophy is supposed to vindicate the
realism—accepting as true the appearance of freedom—that belongs to ordinary con-
sciousness. But it is not supposed to go beyond that. It cannot answer the traditional
problem of free will, naturalistically or even supernaturalistically, because that problem
is the dogmatist’s problem of explaining how freedom fits into a metaphysical theory of
things in themselves.
Another possible stance on the traditional problem of free will—or on any philo-
sophical problem—is not to solve it but to declare it insoluble. We could do this by
claiming (on some pretext or other) to “dissolve” the problem; or we could say that,
although real, the problem is one we lack the cognitive capacities to solve. This seems
to be Kant’s final word on the problems he explored in the “Transcendental Dialectic”
(KrV A vii–viii, A293–8/B349–55, A338–40/B396–8). When Fichte rejects dogmatism
as a system of philosophy, he is in effect taking this Kantian position on the traditional
problem of free will.
Freedom is the root of both consciousness and normativity. All three relate to the
empirical world not only as real components of it but even more fundamentally as
realities presupposed by any possible access we may have to the world as knowers or
agents. Philosophical naturalism, since it is a form of what Fichte calls “dogmatism,”
must deal with these conditions by objectifying them, admitting them only insofar as
they figure in the causal relations in a presupposed realm of “things in themselves.”
In this objectified form, they can have no reality in their distinctive role of offering
us cognitive or agential access to the world. Naturalism can therefore render them
“compatible” with the empirical world only in ways that involve a denial of their reality.
That denial is necessarily self-undermining philosophically, because it cannot be
coherently combined with what would be necessary for us to come to know or act on
the world.
This kind of “compatibilism through elimination” occurs equally in “compatibilist”
views about freedom, in anti-realist views in metaethics, and in physicalist or func-
tionalist theories of consciousness. Fichte thinks that the only way we can fit freedom
into our theoretical worldview is to regard it as a transcendental condition for the
possibility of cognition. “Our world would be originally determined through freedom
as a theoretical principle” (SL 4:74). For this reason, Fichte dismisses in principle any
possible naturalistic solution to the “problem of freedom”: “Freedom is our vehicle for
cognizing objects, but the cognition of objects is not, in turn, the vehicle for cognizing
our freedom” (SL 4:79). There may yet be devised successful naturalistic theories
integrating freedom, consciousness, and normativity into nature. But the prevalence
among naturalists of self-undermining “compatibilist-eliminativist” theories of free-
dom, consciousness, and normatvity tends to confirm Fichte’s view that there are
not. If Fichte is right, then the world in which all human agents (including natural
scientists) already live is a world from which any naturalistic account of freedom
would have to exclude these same agents, not only as free agents in that world but
even as possible knowers of it.
§4: Intersubjectivity as a Transcendental Problem

Kant’s inconsistency. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attempts to provide a tran-
scendental grounding for a number of different claims he regards as essential to the
cognition of empirical common sense and natural science: for example, the existence
of empirical objects that are material substances, whose states are related by necessary
connections of cause and effect, and whose existence is distinct from that of our sub-
jective representations through which they are cognized (KrV A176–218/B218–65,
B274–9, cf. B xxxix–xli n). More specifically, Kant provides a complex argument in
several stages regarding the concepts involved in such objects. First, he provides a met-
aphysical deduction of these concepts, showing their source: their a priori origin in the
judging activity of our understanding (KrV A66–83/B91–116). Next he provides a
transcendental deduction of these concepts, answering the quaestio quid iuris about
them by showing that we have the right to apply them to empirical objects: that they
necessarily apply to any objects that come before our senses (KrV A92–130/B124–
69). Third, he offers a schematism of them, indicating how their instances may be
recognized in experience (KrV A137–47/B176–87). And finally, he shows how these
concepts apply to empirical objects, offering proofs of the principles already cited
above, grounded on the necessity of time-determination (of there being an objective
fact of the matter about the duration, succession, and simultaneity of events occur-
ring in time).
However, Kant never offers any transcendental argument concerning the existence
of other rational beings or the cognizability of their mental states. It is not that the
existence of a plurality of rational beings, or the possibility of their mutual commu-
nicative interaction, is not important to the critical philosophy. On the contrary, Kant
frequently stresses the importance of the free, rational communication of a learned
public as the condition for the very existence of reason itself (KrV A xi n, A738/B766,
WA 8:33–42, O 8:143–6, SF 7:27–9); the concept of a community of rational beings, a
“realm of ends,” is fundamental to his moral philosophy (G 4:433–5), as well as to his
conception of reflective judgment and aesthetic experience (KU 5:291–303). Kant
appears to regard the necessity of rational communication as a merely empirical
condition, just as our cognition of others is grounded merely on experience and lacks
any transcendental necessity. Whether this is self-consistent, however, is precisely
what Fichte means to call into question.
“The most striking demonstration of the incompleteness of Kant’s critical philoso-
phy is that Kant never provided an explanation of how I come to assume that there are
rational beings outside of me” (WLnm p. 303). Kant holds that
objective validity and necessary universal validity (for everyone) are therefore interchangea-
ble concepts; and although we do not know the object in itself, nonetheless, if we regard a
judgment as universally valid and hence necessary, objective validity is understood to be
included.
(P §19, 4:298)
It might seem, then, that a transcendental proof of the objective validity of the con-
cepts of empirical object, substance, and cause should also require a transcendental
proof of the intersubjective validity of these concepts, just as the a priori validity of
morality and aesthetic judgment would seem to make the same demand. Fichte also
argues that Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, which appears to be a tran-
scendental condition both for the possibility of experience and for the thought of an
individual I, must rest on a confusion if so understood:
Nor can Kant understand by pure apperception the consciousness of our individuality, or con-
fuse the one with the other; for the consciousness of individuality is necessarily accompanied
by another consciousness, that of a Thou, and is possible only on this condition.
(ZE 1:476)
The quaestio quid iuris. In the Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science of 1794,
Fichte declares: “No Thou, no I; no I, no Thou” (GWL 1:189).13 It is clear from early on
that Fichte intends his Doctrine of Science (Wissenschaftslehre) to include a demon-
stration of the existence of other I’s as a transcendental condition for the self-positing
of the I. In the popular lectures Fichte gave at the same time, it is even clearer that
Fichte intends to give a transcendental (not merely an empirical) justification for the
existence of other I’s—to answer to the quaestio quid iuris:
The most experience can teach is that there are effects, which resemble the effects of rational
causes. It cannot, however, teach us that the causes in question actually exist as rational beings
in themselves. For a being in itself is no object of experience.
13
Whether this means what it says is questioned by Breazeale (2013, p. 174, n.58), who thinks it
means only that an I implies some kind of not-I. Even before the Jena period, however, in Fichte’s very
first published work, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), it is evident that he understands the
authority of the moral law to be connected with the idea of another person who addresses us with a
moral command that we must respect. In that work, of course, the other who must be presupposed to
address us is God. The issue here is subtle. Fichte does not think such a personal God is actually even
conceivable; but he thinks we must represent God to ourselves in this way, as an alienation (Entäusserung)
of our humanity (VKO 5:55). As I have already suggested, for Fichte, religious ideas are a symbolic or
human way of relating to our existential condition of finite freedom.
We ourselves first introduce such beings into experience. It is we who explain certain expe-
riences by appealing to the existence of rational beings outside ourselves. But with what right
do we offer this explanation? The justification needs to be better demonstrated before we can
use this explanation.
(VBG 6:303)
§5: Deduction of the Object of the I’s Present Action

Fichte’s first, most elaborate, and best-known deduction of other rational beings in any
of his published writings is in §3 of the Foundations of Natural Right (NR 3:30–40). It
occurs as part of the deduction of the concept of right, and its starting point is that the
original I of self-consciousness is the practical I, or the I as will (NR 3:20). Fichte here
follows the “synthetic method” which we described in Chapter 2 §8. He attempts, in
Kantian terms, to provide both a metaphysical and a transcendental deduction of the
conditions necessary for the I to posit itself. Fichte’s First Theorem (§1) is: “A finite
rational being cannot posit itself without ascribing a free efficacy to itself” (NR 3:17). The
I is a free, self-positing act, not a thing or substance of any sort. This act, of course, does
require a natural agent—the human body. Fichte regards a disembodied I (a Cartesian
res cogitans) as incoherent, and the I’s embodiment as knowable a priori.14 “Apart from
connection with a body, [the rational being or I] would not be a person at all, but would
be something quite inconceivable” (VBG 6:295.)15
The I’s relation to the material world is that of reciprocal interaction: it is simultane-
ously an acting and a being acted upon (NR 3:23). Every act of the I thus relates it to an
object that is external to it and constrains it. This is also simultaneously a practical
relation and a theoretical relation (NR 3:26–8). Willing and representing thus stand in
constant, necessary reciprocal interaction (NR 3:21–2). The I’s cognition of the world
is a cognition of something objective that constrains or binds it; the I’s opposed activity
is intuited as free, as the capacity to act in a variety of ways within these objective con-
straints of the material world (NR 3:18–19).
So let us ask: What is the object to which the I essentially relates in its present action?
It might seem that the answer is obvious: it is whatever material thing or complex of
things one is proposing to alter by the action. Fichte’s first task is to reject this answer,
as based on a confusion, and to show that it would lead to a vicious circularity or
regress. For the object just referred to is something that already exists and that stands
Experience could never teach us that we have a body. That we have a body and that it is ours
14
is something we have to know in advance, as a condition for the possibility of experience

and of all acquisition of knowledge.
(WLnm, p. 340; cf. ZE 1:495; SL 4:215–16)
15
The deduction of the concept of the body, however, actually occurs later (NR §5, 3:56–61). It fol-
lows from the fact that the activity of the I must be directed against a natural or material world, which
must be posited along with the I (NR §2, 3:23–4), and therefore must have a natural or material vehicle
of its activity.
fixed and opposed to one’s act, rather than being posited along with the free act “in the
same undivided synthesis”: “[The rational being] cannot ascribe an efficacy to itself
without having posited an object upon which such efficacy is supposed to be exer-
cised” (NR 3:30).
The vicious circle. The fixed and existent material object on which we exercise efficacy
has always arisen in a temporally prior act of consciousness, not in an act which is pres-
ent and now to be done. The kind of object we are looking for must have been present
then too, of course, but at an earlier moment, not at the present one. The question we are
asking about the I’s present action could be raised about this earlier moment too, and by
referring to the already existent material object we are simply presupposing that that
question has a satisfactory answer. But our problem is precisely to know what that
answer must have been. If we think of the object of our action in that previous moment
as an existent material object, we again make reference to yet another preceding
moment, in which consciousness of action is presupposed, but still not yet explained.
The activity of consciousness at the present moment, from this point of view, is
only possible under the condition of [yet another] preceding moment, and so on ad infinitum. We
have not found any possible moment in which we might attach the thread of self-consciousness
(through which alone all consciousness is possible), and thus our task is not solved.
(NR 3:31)
It is important to realize that the I’s consciousness of its activity is not merely con-
sciousness of acts that have occurred or are presently occurring—as though these acts
took place somewhere outside the I, and it is merely observing them taking place. On
the contrary, they are acts of the I itself, whether it is immediately conscious of them,
or they must be inferred as necessary for those acts of which the I is aware in perform-
ing them. The I must think of itself as presently performing its acts, not merely observing
them. We would do better to think of the I’s present action not as something that has
been done or is being done, but rather as something that is to be done. This is the
meaning of Fichte’s important claim that the I’s activity is “the act of forming the con-
cept of an intended efficacy outside us, or the concept of an end [Zweck]. At the same
time, its activity is to be related to—i.e. posited as identical to—the intuiting [of its own
activity]” (NR 3:19–20). As a result, the I’s activity contrasts with the objective exist-
ence of the world by perpetually changing, while the world, in contrast to its activity, is
fixed and unchanging: “The I is what it is in acting, the object in being. The I exists in a
state of endless becoming, there is nothing permanent in it at all; the object is as it
is forever: it is what it was and what it will be” (NR 3:28).
It would be a mistake to take the claim here as meaning that the world is unchanging
(or more unchanging than the human self). That need not be true. The idea is rather
that from the human perspective, the world on which we act simply has been, is, and
will be whatever it is, while by contrast the human agent must at every moment make
(or re-make) itself into what it is through its free action. The not-I, whether undergo-
ing change or not, is permanent in the sense that it is inactive; but the I is always active,
and therefore, even when it chooses to remain in its current state, it is always in transi-
tion—always in opposition to what it is or has been, simply because, even in choosing
to remain where it was, it is in a state of endless becoming, because it must at each
moment make that choice anew.16
The freedom of the I thus also constitutes its temporality. In the present moment,
the material world resists the I’s activity, and yet the I’s effective agency exists along
with this and involves a consciousness of different possibilities regarding what is to
be done.
Since the object is posited as nullifying the I’s efficacy, yet the efficacy is supposed to persist
along with the object, there is a conflict here that can be mediated only through a wavering of
the imagination between both these moments, a wavering through which time comes to be.
(NR 3:28–9)
The past is fixed, but the future is always something that could be either this or
that, depending on the choice of the I and on the way the world reacts to that choice.
Imagination, for Fichte, is the faculty that represents a wavering between, or hovering
over, alternative possibilities. Imagination is the faculty through which we experience
the passing of time, the difference between the fixed past, the present of what we are
freely and contingently doing, and the future, which is always open to multiple alterna-
tive possibilities.
Fichte regards every consciousness as having both a subjective and an objective
pole. Every act of the I is a relation to an object and at the same time involves
cognition of the object, and vice versa: every cognition of an object involves some
efficacious action. This is the starting point of Fichte’s deduction: “The rational being
cannot posit (perceive and comprehend) an object without simultaneously—in
the same undivided synthesis—ascribing efficacy to itself ” (NR §3, 3:30). The
objectivity and temporality of consciousness, together with the present moment as
that in which our free agency consists in the awareness of an action as to be done,
turn out to be the crucial premises in Fichte’s deduction of the existence of other
rational beings.
So the possibility of consciousness, in relation to the I’s present, efficacious action,
depends on answering this question: What is the object of the present act—the act to be
done—the consciousness of which takes the form of forming the concept of an end?
But it might seem that there is no external object needed here at all. For our concept
of an end has a direction of fit that measures objects by whether they fit the concept of
the end. So what could be meant by an object that is essentially involved in forming
such a concept?
16
Compare the famous assertion of this same point by the most Fichtean of all later philosophers:
“[The In-itself] is what it is . . . Human reality [is] a being which is what it is not and is not what it is”
(Sartre 1956a, pp. xlv, 59); or Kierkegaard’s ethical man, who says that the aesthetic is that by which one
is immediately what he is, while the ethical is that by which one becomes what he becomes (Either/Or
II, SV 2:226).
A new kind of object. In rejecting the proposal that the object of the I’s present action
is the material object on which it acts, Fichte ended by saying: “We have not found any
possible moment in which we might attach the thread of self-consciousness (through
which alone all consciousness is possible), and thus our problem is not solved”
(NR 3:31). Fichte seems to be using a metaphor drawn from sewing with a needle
and thread: if we do not put a knot in the thread, it pulls through the fabric and no
attachment occurs by means of it. Analogously, if we don’t introduce the concept of a
new kind of object, an object synthetically combined with our act to be done in the
same moment, then we presuppose what we are trying to explain. We must defer our
explanation to a previous moment, and thus go in a vicious circle (or vicious regress),
like a needle and thread that pass through the cloth over and over again without attach-
ing. No satisfactory account of our present consciousness is possible. Unless we offer a
new and different concept, “consciousness can be explained only circularly; thus it
cannot be explained at all, and so it appears to be impossible” (NR 3:30).
This is precisely the sort of aporia or “contradiction” that drives Fichte’s synthetic
method. So Fichte now introduces the abstract formula for what is needed to resolve
the problem:
The reason for the impossibility of explaining self-consciousness must be canceled. But it
can be canceled only if it is assumed that the subject’s efficacy is synthetically unified with
the object in one and the same moment, that the subject’s efficacy is itself the object that is
perceived and comprehended, and that the object is nothing other than the subject’s efficacy
(and thus that the two are the same). Only with such a synthesis can we avoid being driven
to a preceding one; this synthesis alone contains within itself everything that conditions
self-consciousness and provides a point at which the thread of self-consciousness can be
attached.
(NR 3:32)
We might also put it this way: the concept of an object that we need is not the external
or material object on which action takes place, but is instead merely the objective side
of the subject’s free act itself. Only this new kind of object could provide the “knot”
enabling self-consciousness to be explained satisfactorily, attaching the thread of
self-consciousness to the present moment, without the explanation being deferred to
an earlier moment, leading to a vicious regress.
The need to establish a correspondence between subject and object in this way is a
fundamental principle of Fichte’s method. It goes with Fichte’s transcendental idealism
that objects of consciousness must be viewed as necessitated by the subjective condi-
tions of the I’s action on and cognition of them: in other words, we must gain insight
into the subjective aspect of the object, rather than thinking of it as a “thing in itself ”
(after the manner of dogmatism), something about which we can theorize and obtain
cognition without considering the transcendental conditions of this cognition. But it
is equally true for transcendental idealism that every subjective act must also have
an objective side or aspect.
Transcendental idealism seeks to grasp the subjective conditions of objectivity and

also the objective conditions of subjectivity:
The I is by no means a subject; instead, it is a subject–object. If it were a mere subject, then

consciousness would be incomprehensible. If it were a mere object, then we would be driven to
seek a subject outside it—which one will never find.
(WLnm p. 114)
What is needed to resolve the present problem is the concept of the objective side of the
I’s free action. But objectivity consists in being external to the subject and constraining
the subject. To be free, on its objective side, is always to be limited. “There can be no
expression of freedom without some expression of limitation” (WLnm, p. 287).
§6: Deduction of the Summons

What we are looking for, then, is the concept of an object that has these features:
(1) externality and constraint—limiting the subject, while at the same time (2) being
united directly with the subject’s free exercise of efficacy.
The concept so far deduced might indeed seem self-contradictory, as Fichte observes
(NR 3:32). For it demands the synthetic unity (in a sense, the identity) of the free effi-
cacy of the rational being with an object of that efficacy. For the I itself, as self-positing,
is identical to its own act—it is that in which subject and object must be grasped as
identical. But the very concept of an object is the concept of something that is both
external to the subject and also constrains it. How can this object be external to the
subject’s own efficacy while being synthetically united with it—in effect, identical with
it? And how can it leave the subject free if it constrains the subject?
Fichte’s answer to these questions is to explain what the deduced concept “means,
what is to be understood by it” (NR 3:32). This is the stage of Fichte’s synthetic method
at which his task is to determine precisely the concept whose necessity has been
demonstrated, and which therefore has been given, to put it in Kantian terms, both a
metaphysical and a transcendental deduction. Fichte’s device for doing this is usually
to introduce a new term, a word perhaps with a common sense meaning, which we
can recognize as answering to the new (and perhaps thus far only paradoxically char-
acterized) concept. We are supposed to recognize the concept just deduced as the true
signification of this term, and also to see that when we understand the concept by
means of this term, the apparent contradiction disappears. The term introduced
by Fichte to do this for the concept of the object of the I’s present efficacy is the term
“summons” (Aufforderung):
The subject’s free activity is posited as constrained. But this object is supposed to be the sub-
ject’s free efficacy . . . Both are completely unified if we think of the subject’s being-determined
as its being-determined to be self-determining, i.e. as a summons [Aufforderung] to the subject,
calling upon it to resolve to exercise its efficacy.
(NR 3:32–3)
The meaning of Aufforderung. The German word Aufforderung has a very broad
meaning, ranging from bitten (to request or beg) all the way to verlangen (to demand
or require). Somewhere in the middle is its meaning in the title of Carl Maria von
Weber’s Aufforderung zum Tanz, op. 46 (best known in its orchestration by Hector
Berlioz), which is usually translated as “Invitation to the Dance.” An Aufforderung is
any representation of a free action, addressed to one who might choose to perform it,
that in some way suggests the possible performance of this action, yet without necessi-
tating it, since that would contradict the concept of free action. This occurs equally
when we ask that something be done, invite its being done, and demand or require that
it be done (so long as our demand does not carry with it a coercive-causal force that
excludes the possibility of its not being done).17 What is crucial to the concept of a
summons is that it constrains action, yet only in such a way that the being to which it is
addressed may still nevertheless choose either to act according to it or not act accord-
ing to it. “Either I act in accordance with the summons or I do not act in accordance
with it. If I have understood this summons, I can, of course, still decide not to act [as
the summons represents]” (GA 4/2:179; cf. WLnm p. 355, NR 3:34).
The summons, simply as the concept of an object, in some way constrains the free
action. What is the nature of a constraint on action that still leaves the agent free either
to do or not do as it is constrained? I suggest that a summons, in the precise sense in
which this concept answers to the needs of Fichte’s synthetic method at this point,
is the concept of a ground or reason for doing something (for doing what we are sum-
moned—asked, invited, required—to do). We speak of “compelling reasons,” but this
is hyperbole, and a misleading one at that, at least in the present context. We may rep-
resent strong enough reasons for doing something as if they put the doing of it beyond
any possibility of our not doing it. But it would not be a doing at all if this were literally
true. Again, Leibniz was right: reasons always incline without necessitating. Being
asked or invited to do something gives us something like a reason to do it; if we are
required to do something for a reason the element of constraint is still stronger. But we
are always free to do it or not to do it. It constrains in a way that leaves us free—“by
determining us to be self-determining.”
The summons as the condition of possibility for a reason. The summons, under-
stood as a reason or ground for an action, is united with the action that is done for it as
a reason: the reason becomes a component of the action itself. Yet it is also objective in
the sense of being external to the action, standing over it as that which summons it.
Something seen as a genuine and good reason is always experienced as outside (and in
17
At the beginning of the Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte is using the term “summons”
(Aufforderung) to introduce the concept of a specific demand (Anforderung) that each self makes on
every other with which it interacts; the demand to limit one’s own freedom in such a way as to respect
the external sphere of freedom of another. The mutual making, and recognizing, of this demand of
rational beings on one another will be the concept of the “relation of right” (NR 3:34, 41–7). In Chapter 8
§§3–4, we will look more closely at this specific summons and at the relation between rational beings
that it establishes.
some manner authoritative over) the act with which it is also united as the reason for
that act. This is also the way it constrains: a reason gives us a ground for a free action,
but never prevents us from doing otherwise. It constrains by summoning us to deter-
mine ourselves to do the action. Fichte does not often explicitly describe the summons
as a reason or a ground, but sometimes he does: “The summons would thus contain
within itself the real ground of a free decision; i.e. it would be the determining agency
that intervenes between what is determinable and what is determinate” (WLnm p. 356,
cf. GA 4/2:179). Will, according to Fichte, is the conscious transition from indetermi-
nacy to determinacy—from what I could do, but need not do, to what I choose to do.18
The summons, regarded as a ground or reason for action, is the kind of constraint that
can effect this transition.
According to Fichte, every free action involves the designing or projection (entwer-
fen) of a concept which serves the action as an end (Zweck) (NR 3:20, SL 4:9–10, 67, 71).
In this way, we can also see that the summons serves as the ground of an end: “How is
the concept of an end possible?” (WLnm p. 346, cf. GA 4/2:173). “The end is given to us
along with the summons” (GA 4/2:177). Forming the concept of an end (forming an
intention) is fundamental to “finding oneself,” being conscious of oneself as a free
agent (which is Fichte’s starting point in both the Foundations of Natural Right and the
System of Ethics). In this way, the summons is a necessary condition for the self-
consciousness of the I: “I never find myself except insofar as I find myself summoned to
act freely” (GA 4/2:184). Therefore, “consciousness begins with consciousness of
a summons” (WLnm p. 370, cf. GA 4/2:189).
§7: The Inference to Other Rational Beings as the Cause

of the Summons
Fichte explicitly distinguishes three stages of the deduction at NR §3. The first two
are expository and the third inferential: (1) the deduction of the concept of an object
synthetically united with the rational being’s free agency, the abstract concept needed
to provide the objective side of free activity; (2) the determination of the meaning of
this concept, as the summons; and (3) the inference to the cause of the object whose
concept has been deduced, as well as to other consequences concerning this cause
(NR 3:35). It is in this third stage of the argument that Fichte proposes to establish
that a rational being must employ the concept of other rational beings, and discover
such beings in its experience as one of the transcendental conditions of the possibility
of its own self-consciousness.
18
This is one way Fichte makes the point that willing involves restricting oneself to something determi-
nate; efficacious acting on the world is that willing (Wollen) differs from deliberating (Deliberieren). “In
deliberating, our striving is dispersed . . . It is only when this dispersed striving is constrained on a single
point that it is called “willing’” (WLnm p. 259). See Zöller (1996), p. 10.
Reason as intersubjective. Before entering explicitly into this third stage, however,
Fichte has also taken several steps in its direction which are indispensable to his argu-
ment. First, he has argued that the object in question must be “given in sensation, and
in outer sensation, for all inner sensation arises only through the reproduction of outer
sensation”—and in any case, if one were to presuppose it in inner sensation, this would
again presuppose self-consciousness as actual, which would take us in the same circle
from which we have just escaped (NR 3: 33).
Second, Fichte insists that the objectivity of what has been deduced must have in
common with all objectivity that it constitutes an external check (Anstoß) on the sub-
ject’s activity (NR 3:33; cf. GWL 1:218, 228–31; GEW 1:331). Fichte even thinks that
once we recognize the summons as a condition of self-consciousness, we must regard
the object it represents as fundamental even to our experience of other objects: “The
thread of consciousness can be attached only to something like this, and then this
thread might well extend without difficulty to other objects as well” (NR 3:35).
We might want to pause over these points. For if the summons is supposed to give us
something like the concept of a reason or ground for doing something, we need to face
the fact that some standard (empiricist) theories of practical reason trace all such rea-
sons back to merely subjective or internal states of the agent—its desires, preferences,
or feelings of pleasure and displeasure. Fichte’s argument clearly intends to challenge
these theories. Reasons must come to us from outside, even from outside our bodies;
and they must not be mere urges welling up from our body’s vitality, or conscious
expressions of these in feelings. On the contrary, they must be experienced as a check
or constraint on these.
A view of reasons as external to us in this way is, however, quite defensible. For no
desire or feeling, simply as such, constitutes a reason for doing anything: it does not
even possess the form of a reason. Some desires (which some philosophers call “moti-
vated desires”) are themselves expressions of reasons, or responses to them; in such
cases, it is these reasons, and not the desire, that is more properly the reason for acting.
Unmotivated desires, on the other hand, naturally raise the question whether we ought
to satisfy them—whether their objects are good or bad, whether the resources availa-
ble for their satisfaction ought to be employed in that way—in short, whether the
actions we might take to satisfy them are actions we have reason to do. Fichte shares
with some currently defended theories of practical reason the idea that all reasons for
action are properly regarded as objective facts: all genuine reasons are “object-given.”
In representing such reasons in the form of a summons, however, Fichte is representing
them as more than merely external facts. The summons is constituted by a representa-
tion of a way the subject may (or may not) act. It is this that constitutes the basis for
further inferences about the external source of the summons.19
19
In regarding reasons as object-given I am thinking of theories such as those of Joseph Raz and Derek
Parfit. See, for example, Raz (1999) and Parfit (2011), especially Volume 2. I don’t mean to say that these
theories agree in all respects with Fichte (far from it), but only that they too represent a rejection of the
view that reasons are always constituted fundamentally by subjective facts such as desires or preferences.
The summons is a purposive action by another agent: it aims at summoning a

rational being to act freely in the manner represented by the summons. Only a being
with an understanding, itself capable of free activity, is capable of such purposive
activity.
The purposiveness of the summons is conditional on the understanding and freedom of the
being to whom it is addressed. Therefore, the cause of the summons must necessarily possess
the concept of reason and freedom . . . it must be a free and thus a rational being, and must be
posited as such.
(NR 3:36)
The summons requires a concept of the way I am summoned to act, and also a concept
of my awareness of this, or as Fichte puts it later in the System of Ethics, “the concept of
a concept”: “I cannot comprehend the summons to self-activity without ascribing it to
an actual being outside myself, a being that willed to communicate to me a concept:
namely, the concept of the action that is demanded (gefordert), and hence a being capa-
ble of the concept of a concept” (SL 4:220–1). The deduction of the summons, there-
fore, is at the same time both a metaphysical deduction and a transcendental deduction
of the concept of another rational being: it shows where this concept has its transcen-
dental origin—namely, in the synthesis required to solve the problem of the objective
side of a free action; and it also shows that this concept must be applied to empirical
objects—namely, in order to attach the thread of self-consciousness to the object that
makes possible the formation of the concept of an end, a present intention of an action
as something to be done for a reason.
Schematizing the summons. The remaining task is that of providing something like
a Kantian schematism of this concept: that is, a way of applying the concept empirically.
The task of determining which effects can be explained only by a rational cause is seen
by Fichte as an instance of what Kant (in the third Critique) calls “reflective judgment”
(NR 3:37). Determining judgment for Kant applies a given concept to its instances;
reflective judgment proceeds from experiential data to form a concept that is suited to
express the systematicity found in them (KU 5:179). It is the activity of reflective judg-
ment that leads us to form the concept of a plant or animal organism, and the inner
purposiveness it exhibits (KU 5:377–83). Analogously, we apply the concept of an
embodied being whose behavior can best be comprehended by positing in it rational
representations, such as the representation of a manner of acting, and that of the pur-
posive intention of summoning another to act in that manner (NR 3:38–9).20
We might think that the use of language, or at least communication, would play a
role here, and it apparently does, when Fichte distinguishes the different ways that per-
sons can influence one another. Here he employs Spinoza’s distinction between harder
and softer or coarser and subtler matter to draw the distinction between coercing
someone and communicating with them (NR §6, 3:62–72; cf. Spinoza, 1992, II P13,
For a book-length account of Fichte’s WLnm emphasizing intersubjectivity, see Radrizanni (1993).
20
Post. 2, Post. 5, P39S2). A bit later in the Foundations of Natural Right, however, Fichte
provides a more detailed schematism of the concept of a rational being by describing a
variety of characteristics which lead us to judge that something is a rational being:
(a) action not governed solely by instinct, (b) the use of clothing, (c) upright gait,
acquired skills using the hand with an opposed thumb, and (d) an expressive face,
especially of the eye that looks back actively rather than merely passively receiving its
world (NR 3:81–5). This list of items may at first seem whimsical, but on reflection
I think we can recognize in them some deep insights. These items plainly display the
influence of Kant’s anthropology and Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of History of
Humanity; they also anticipate the insights of later philosophers in the continental tra-
dition, notably of Emmanuel Lévinas.
§8: The Summons as Education or Upbringing

Fichte’s deduction might seem to have proven far too much. It might seem to have the
consequence that it is impossible for a rational being to act at all except in the pres-
ence of another rational being who summons it so to act. But this reaction displays a
misunderstanding of the role that a transcendental condition plays in explaining how
consciousness is possible. It confuses what Kant would call the quaestio quid iuris—
our right to employ certain concepts—with the quaestio quid facti—how empirically
we come to acquire them and be acquainted with the objects to which they apply. The
summons offers us the condition for being conscious of the objective side of a free
action as something we are about to perform; the claim that the summons is what
makes this possible is not the claim that empirically every free action must be accom-
panied by a summons.
Moreover, Fichte draws further inferences about the cause of the summons that are
intended to correct this misunderstanding, and also to determine the way in which the
summons, as a condition of free efficacy and self-consciousness, makes possible the
experience of the I. The summons, as it issues from other rational beings, is not neces-
sarily some particular act that must accompany each free action of a given rational
being. To say that the summons must have its source in another rational being is not to
say how it does so, and it leaves open the possibility that I can be summoned by others
in different ways. In the Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte is going to argue that each
rational being, simply by recognizing every other as itself a rational agent, summons
every other to restrict its free activity in such a way as to leave the one who summons
an external sphere in which to exercise its freedom (NR 3: 41–7). This mutual recogni-
tion and summoning constitutes the relation of right (Rechtsverhältnis) (NR 3: 41)
which is the starting point for Fichte’s philosophy of right, including his accounts of
property, law, punishment, and the political order. But Fichte argues that the more
pervasive form taken by the summons is that influence of other rational beings by
which each rational being becomes a rational being in the first place. “The summons to
engage in free self-activity is what we call upbringing [Erziehung]” (NR 3:39).
I become a rational being—actually, not merely potentially—only by being made into one; if the
other rational being’s action did not occur, I would never have become rational. Thus my
rationality depends on the free choice, on the good will, of another; it depends on chance, as
does all rationality.21
(NR 3:74)
It can thus be proven strictly a priori that a rational being does not become rational in an iso-
lated state . . . My I-hood, along with my self-sufficiency in general, is conditioned by the free-
dom of the other.
(SL 4:221)
Between rational beings who have been brought up or educated to be rational, the
summons can then show itself on particular occasions, in the form of free, rational
communication.
Only free, reciprocal interaction by means of concepts and in accordance with concepts, only
the giving and receiving of knowledge, is the distinctive character of humanity, by virtue of
which alone each person undeniably conforms himself as a human being.
(NR 3:40; cf. VBG 6:308–11, SL 4:230–3)
There can then also be reasoning to oneself, but only on the basis of capacities developed
through the rational influence of others. Giving oneself a reason for acting is therefore
derivative, transcendentally, from being given a reason by others and from giving oth-
ers a reason. Giving others a reason is a response to being given a reason by another,
and giving oneself a reason is only an internalization, or application to oneself, of giv-
ing others a reason.
Transcendental conditions for the acquisition of rational capacity. Fichte is argu-
ing that it is an a priori necessary condition of our self-conscious exercise of free
efficacy that our actual capacity for this should have been acquired in a certain way,
namely through being summoned to free activity by others. This is a thesis worth
taking seriously. In general, the concept of education, and of acquiring certain capac-
ities (intellectual and moral) by being educated, might be held to be a necessary pro-
cess of this sort. It may seem logically possible—in the thoughts of philosophers who
like science fiction—that someone might acquire the capacity to speak French, or do
mathematics or historiography, or to acquire the character of a wise and benevolent
person, not by being taught these things through a process of communicative inter-
action with other human beings (through speech or writing), but rather only by tak-
ing a pill, being injected with a serum, or having one’s brain stimulated in certain
ways by electrodes. But the coherence of such fancies is deeply questionable. Is it
only an empirical truth about available causal mechanisms that makes the learning of
21
Philonenko (1984, p. 46) has stressed that Fichte’s position is not that one is a human being only
among others, but that one becomes a human being only among others. Wildt (1982) has suggested that
Fichte’s theory of intersubjectivity anticipates the insight of developmental psychologists that people
acquire the capacity to subject their conduct to norms only by internalizing the demands that others (such
as their parents) have made on them.
intellectual skills, or the acquisition of character traits, a matter of social practices of

teaching, learning, and upbringing? The very concept of the capacities and traits we are
talking about would seem to involve testing and feedback—seeing how other French
speakers react to your speeches, how your calculations and proofs, your attempts at
historical narrative, or your moral conduct, are received and reacted to by others.
This may be a controversial claim, but it is not an obviously mistaken one.
In fact, in Foundations of Natural Right Fichte presents an elaborate argument
(which I will not try to summarize here) that there must be two distinct ways one
rational being can influence another, and that influence through communication is
fundamentally different from any influence that is merely causal (NR 3:61–73). A spe-
cial, though fundamental, case of this is education or upbringing. Fichte’s position is
that this must occur through human communicative interaction, which cannot be
understood in merely causal terms: which is not merely a technical causal requisite for
rational agency, but a transcendentally necessary condition of it.
Fichte’s view is that the summons is the basis for free interaction (communica-
tion) between rational beings in which their highest aim is simultaneously their own
education and the education of one another. The influence rational beings have on
one another through rational communication is free, not coercive. The relation of
the I to the material not-I (the physical world) is one in which we aim at subordina-
tion of material things to rational human ends. Material things limit our freedom,
and we seek to overcome the limitation. Our relation to other rational beings is one
that does not merely limit but also liberates us. It aims at co-ordination, not
subordination.
The social drive aims at interaction, reciprocal influence, mutual give and take, mutual passivity
and activity. It does not aim at mere causality, at the sort of mere activity to which the other
person would have to be related merely passively. It strives to discover free, rational beings
outside ourselves and to enter into community with them. It does not strive for subordination
characteristic of the physical world, but rather for coordination.
(VBG 6:308)
Implicit in Fichte’s view here is that the transcendental conditions for our access to
the world are social conditions. In that sense, the world in which we live is for Fichte
“socially constructed” in the sense explored recently by Haslanger (2011), espe-
cially Chapters 3, 4, and 6. Haslanger rejects an “idealist” interpretation of social
constructivism. So does Fichte, if his idealism is understood in the way I have been
recommending—as transcendental, not metaphysical. Fichte is usually concerned
with the ideal conditions of social construction, whereas Haslanger focuses on crit-
icizing the ways in which patriarchy and racism falsely construct the world. But
Fichte too thinks people remain at a lower moral level because of the social struc-
ture: “If society were better, we would be better as well” (SL 4:184). All evil is based
on self-deception—self-deception as grounded in our historical situation, espe-
cially on relations of servitude and acquiescence in them (SL 4:201–5). The will to
dominate is also what leads to “the subjugation of bodies and the conscience of
nations, the wars of conquest and religious wars, and all the other misdeeds through
which humanity has been dishonored from time immemorial” (SL 4:190). This is
why from the beginning he linked his philosophy of freedom to resistance against
the dominance and depravity of the “so-called better classes” (GA III/2, no. 70a,
EW p. 361).
§9: The Summons as the Ground of Individuality

“A human being,” Fichte argues, “becomes a human being only among human
beings . . . so that it follows that if there are to be human beings at all, there must be
more than one . . . Thus the concept of a human being is not the concept of an individ-
ual, but rather the concept of a species” (NR 3:39). The summons is equally the founda-
tion of human individuality. As we saw in Chapter 2, the self-positing I, considered in
abstraction from its intersubjectivity or its relation to a “thou,” is not yet the concept of
an individual (ZE 1:476).
In the context of the Foundations of Natural Right, human individuality is seen as
constituted through the reciprocal summons that constitutes the relation of right.
Each rational being “distinguishes itself, through opposition” from the other (NR 3:41).
“The concept of individuality is a reciprocal concept [Wechselbegriff] . . . Thus this con-
cept is never mine; rather it is . . . mine and his, his and mine; it is a shared concept
within which two consciousnesses are unified into one” (NR 3:47–8). To think of one-
self as an individual is therefore to think of oneself as sharing a common concept with
at least one other individual, and being subject to a “law” also shared in common.22
“There must be a law common to us both, and commonly recognized as necessary”
(NR 3:48). In Chapter 4, we will see that free volition, as self-determined, is always
subject to a normative law. In Chapter 7, we will see how this law must always be
regarded as intersubjective, as grounded on presupposed agreement among all rational
beings. In Chapter 8, we will see how the common law applying to individuality also
grounds the concept of right.
22
In Fichte’s lectures of 1798–1799, the “circle” in the explanation of the consciousness of real efficacy
leads, by way of the synthetic method, to the deduction of pure volition (a categorical imperative), experi-
enced as “the feeling of ought”; this in turn leads to the deduction of a “realm of rational beings” to which
the imperative of the pure will is directed, and then, as “another side” of this realm, to a summons to free
activity through another rational being outside us (WLnm, pp. 72–4, 292–9). It is in response to the pure
will that “I, as a willing subject, become an individual”—namely, one member of the realm of rational
beings (WLnm, p. 73, cf. pp. 302–7). “I cannot find myself apart from similar beings outside me, for I am
an individual” (WLnm, p. 304). This seems to be the account Fichte would give of the deduction merely
from the standpoint of the possibility of consciousness, not from the standpoint of grounding either right
or ethics. Proceeding further in this direction after his Jena period, Fichte developed the concept of the
realm of rational beings as an “intelligible world” united in God (BM 2: 299–304) and theorized according
to the “fivefold synthesis” (WLnm, p. 446), which is eventually developed into a matrix of reason’s self-
making (WL1804 10:308–14). These later developments fall outside the scope of this book.
Individuality depends on free self-making through specific free choices. But these
depend on my having been summoned (brought up) to be rational, and therefore on
my interaction with others.
Properly speaking, who am I? I.e., what kind of individual am I? . . . I am what I freely make
myself to be, and this is who I am because this is what I make of myself.— . . . Under the present
presupposition, however, . . . the root of my individuality is not determined through my freedom
but through my connection with another rational being.
(SL 4:222–3)
Individuality is social. We become individuals by being related in determinate ways

to other individuals, and this is because our relation to other rational beings is funda-
mental to the free activity through which we make ourselves into the individuals that
we are. We come to know which individual we are by having our individuality reflected
back from others, and we confirm our sense of our own individuality by having it con-
firmed by others.
The human Bestimmung—in the sense Fichte uses this word, which encompasses
human nature, and also the human vocation—is also social:
One of the human being’s fundamental drives is to be permitted to assume that rational beings
like himself exist outside him. He can assume this only on the condition that he enter into
society with these beings . . . in the sense of an interaction governed by concepts, a purposeful
community. It is man’s vocation [Bestimmung] to live in society . . . Free interaction is its own
end . . . Society is its own end.
(VBG 6:306–7)
The vocation of our individuality is society, which is its own end. Thus, as we will
see in Chapter 7, our vocation is to be—to make ourselves into—tools (Werkzeuge) of
collective reason or the moral law. In the same chapter, we will try to understand why
Fichte thinks this doctrine does not contradict the Kantian doctrine that every indi-
vidual is an end in itself. On the contrary, Fichte thinks the two doctrines come to the
same thing.
4
Moral Authority
Deduction of the Principle of Morality
Fichte’s System of Ethics is a bold philosophical project that expresses the moral convictions
that arose out of his life-experience. It addresses his intended audience in a way that is
supposed to challenge them to live their lives differently. Fichte offers them a new con-
ception of themselves and a new conception of the kind of society they ought to strive
to create. The self-conception is one based on the I’s absolute freedom. The new society
is one that emphasizes both freedom and human interdependency, and the common
commitment of all to building a better world.
The basis of Fichte’s ethics is found in the working out of the two themes of Chapter 3:
the I’s absolute freedom and the necessary intersubjectivity of the I. Fichte’s ethics is
both radically individualist and radically collectivist. It is at its most radical in insisting
that individualism and collectivism must not be separated from one another or seen as
rival values. Fichte was never one for trade-offs or compromises. Here that means that
the two values can be properly understood and successfully pursued only in the form
of their necessary unity. In the System of Ethics, Fichte’s aim is to liberate us as individ-
uals by inspiring us to devote our lives to the good of others and to the future of the
whole community of rational beings.
The path to this radical result will occupy the next four chapters of this book. It is
a difficult path, because it is also an attempt to ground Fichte’s ethical vision in a rigor-
ous transcendental system, using the philosophical method we attempted to expound
in Chapter 2. Fichte begins with the freedom of the I, and works his way toward an
account of our moral vocation and a vision of a rational society in which everyone is
free and reaches self-fulfillment. Our moral vocation connects us intimately to human-
ity in the broadest possible sense: the meaning of our lives is their contribution to the
life of generations yet unborn. The path is also indirect; following it will require our
patience. The first stage of the process will be a transcendental deduction of the moral
principle from the absolute freedom of the I. We will see how the everyday individual
agent applies the principle through conscientious conviction, and Fichte will provide
a transcendental grounding for this too. Only then will he turn to a “scientific” or phil-
osophical account of the content of the moral law, involving a vision of the rational
society toward which it is our duty to strive, and revealing that the meaning of our lives
consists in what we do for future generations.
§1: The Concept of Moral Authority

The title of Part One of Fichte’s System of Ethics is “Deduction of the Principle of
Morality.” From this we might have anticipated a deduction of a specific principle, from
which, along with non-moral facts, we might hope to determine what we morally
ought to do. Kant’s Groundwork, which proposes to find and establish the supreme
principle of morality, offers us a system of three (or five) formulas of the moral law. He
regards this principle as the ground of specific duties, capable of being illustrated in
that work with four (famous) examples. It is controversial what Kant means us to do
with these formulas. Some think the first formula provides a general test of permissi-
bility for maxims, or even a so-called “CI-procedure” for constructing the content of
all morality. I think those interpretations are wrong, but clearly Kant does think that
his three formulas taken together provide some substantive moral guidance and
ground the system of ethical duties he presents in the Metaphysics of Morals. If we
expect Fichte to offer us anything like this, we will be disappointed. The moral princi-
ple he proposes to deduce in Part One is purely formal—nothing can be inferred from
it alone about what we ought to do (NR 3:10, SL 4: 69). The deduction even leaves it an
open question whether the principle is applicable—that is, whether among our possi-
ble actions there are any at all that conform to it. The applicability of the principle has to
be deduced separately, in Part Two of the system. The application itself—the identifica-
tion of the kinds of actions it requires (as far as philosophy can tell us this)—occupies
Part Three.
It would be a serious error to think that nothing of importance is being accom-
plished in Part One. Fichte begins the System of Ethics with a bold assertion:
It is claimed that the human mind finds itself absolutely compelled to do certain things entirely
apart from any extrinsic ends, but purely and simply for the sake of doing them, and to refrain
from doing other things, equally independently of any extrinsic ends, purely and simply for the
sake of leaving them undone.
(SL 4:13)
Fichte calls this “compulsion” (Zunötigung) of the mind “the moral or ethical
nature of human beings as such” (SL 4:13). This claim belongs to “ordinary cog
nition” and “ordinary consciousness” (SL 4:14). Transcendental philosophy is
charged with explaining and justifying it. That’s the task of Part One of the System
of Ethics.
Perhaps the significance of Fichte’s deduction can best be appreciated if we see that it
aims at the philosophical vindication of moral common sense on a crucial point that
has often been philosophically contested. It is controversial right down to the present
day. For what Fichte means to justify is the thought that the claims of morality have a
rational authority that is independent of our wishes, sentiments, empirical desires,
discretionary ends, or contingent motivations. I will use the term “moral authority” to
refer to this thought. It has several aspects.
Moral Authority 103
Categorical obligation. The most basic idea is that there is an independent rational
ground, belonging to the principle of morality itself, not to any ends or interests apart
from it, for doing certain things and leaving others undone. This is what Kant meant
when he claimed that moral duties are categorical imperatives. The actions and omissions
commanded by the principle, and the ends it commands us to set, should happen for
their own sake, not for the sake of any end or motive extrinsic to the moral principle itself.
This is not the claim, as it is sometimes described (perhaps to make the whole idea
look absurd), that such actions and omissions have no end at all, and no reason for
doing them. Every action, according to Fichte, involves the designing or projecting
(entwerfen) of an end (Zweck), that is, an object or state of affairs in the world which the
action aims to bring about. Even required omissions have such an end, at least in the
form of the omission of the wrong action. The “absolute compulsion of the human
mind” (as Fichte puts it) to do or omit these actions for their own sake is itself a ground
or reason (SL 4:13). But perhaps the common caricature is an expression of perplexity
about what such a ground could be.
The task of Part One of the System of Ethics is to understand philosophically what
this ground or reason consists in. Of course there may also be extrinsic ends and
motives—not contained in the principle—for doing the same actions. But Fichte’s
claim is that the ends projected by certain acts and omissions that are performed under
moral authority belong to those acts and omissions themselves. The ends do not
precede it as grounds for choosing that action. The actions are done for their own sake.
A principle with this kind of rational grounding, when presented to a will that is
rationally constrained by it, is a categorical imperative.
Ubiquity and overridingness. There are two further features belonging to the notion
of moral authority that are worth spelling out. First, moral authority is ubiquitous, or
everywhere applicable. There are no choices regarding which we would be rationally
entitled to ignore moral considerations or exempt ourselves from having to take
morality into account. Second, in case of conflicts between moral reasons and other
reasons, moral authority is decisive, or overriding. There are no conflicting reasons that
rationally deserve to prevail over moral reasons.
Fichte’s conception of moral authority involves this ubiquity in an especially strong
form. It is plausible to hold, as Kant does, that there are actions that morality permits but
does not require. Kant holds that there are moral adiaphora (actions that are morally
indifferent), and also that there are duties that are wide rather than strict, that is, merito-
rious without being required. Fichte’s version of the ubiquity of moral authority is
stronger than Kant’s: he denies that there are any indifferent actions, or any actions that
are meritorious without being morally required. In each situation, moreover, Fichte
argues that conscience tells us which action is required by moral authority. This is why
there are also no merely permissible actions, or what Kant calls “wide duties”—actions
that morality does not demand but also does not forbid—and no actions that morality
regards as meritorious without being required (NR 3:13, SL 4:156).
Fichte’s own assertion of this extreme position is emphatic. Even in his own view, it
is apparently to be seen as extreme and uncompromising:
It is absolutely contrary to the moral way of thinking to [pursue any end or take any enjoyment]
for any reason other than for the sake of conscience and with the latter in mind. Eat and drink
to honor God [1 Corinthians 10:31]. A person to whom such an ethics appears austere and
painful is beyond help, for there is no other.
(SL 4:216)
We will further explore this doctrine in later chapters, especially Chapter 6 §§5–6.
“Side constraints” vs. “categorical desires.” There is yet another feature of the notion
of moral authority that does not belong to it in all its incarnations; it is quite alien to
Fichte but is often associated with it in the minds of philosophers, and also raises an
issue that is important for the idea of moral authority even as it appears in Fichte.
Moral authority is often thought to belong chiefly, or even only, to what philosophers
call “side constraints.” The actions that morality requires of us are viewed as what we
must do first, so to speak, so that we may then permissibly, and with a good moral con-
science, go about our other business in life—satisfying our non-moral desires, pursu-
ing our non-moral projects. This other business is supposed to be what we really care
about. Bernard Williams, for instance, famously argued that what gives our lives their
meaning are “categorical desires”—for example, our love for certain individuals or
commitment to certain projects. A similar thought seems to be present in Harry
Frankfurt’s conception of “the importance of what we care about” (Frankfurt 1998).
The very next thought, especially associated with Williams, is that if we let the
side-constraints imposed by impartial morality take over too much of our life, it
threatens our integrity as rational selves (Williams 1981, especially Chapters 1–3 and
10; for a strong statement of this same view, see Wolf (2003)).
Fichte opposes this entire way of thinking. He holds that every one of our actions
must be done in response to principles commanding with moral authority. For Fichte,
after moral authority has had its say, there are no morally permissible desires, aims, or
projects left over. If we look at Fichte’s theory in terms of the picture just described,
then Fichte’s extreme moral rigorism will alarm and repel us. It will seem that for Fichte
there must be nothing to our lives except side-constraints; morality must exercise a
totalitarian control, forbidding us to care about anything else and stifling us under a set
of alien and tyrannical demands.
In order to get beyond that mistaken reaction, we must begin by appreciating
the way it misses something important about morality. First of all, morality does not
consist only of demands made on us by others. It is also deeply connected with our
self-respect, with precisely that integrity Williams wants to marshal in defending us
against morality’s excessive demands. Fichte’s moral philosophy is grounded wholly
on the connection between morality and selfhood. It derives moral authority itself
from the freedom of the I. Even our rational response to the moral demands others
make on us is grounded on the demands we make on ourselves solely in the interest of
Moral Authority 105
our own freedom. The only thing truly categorical is not any desire, but rather the
moral demand. For Fichte, as we will see in later chapters, this does not exclude love for
particular people, because love may be united with what morality demands of us. Thus
what Williams might call our categorical desires may belong to morality’s categorical
requirements. For Fichte, the error consists in separating them.
In order to understand Fichte’s position, we need to keep two things in mind. First,
ethical duties for Fichte are not, even in principle, externally enforceable. Only right
makes claims with which others can compel us to comply. As we will see in later chap-
ters, except when it comes to conduct that violates the rights of others, Fichte places
extreme limits on law and the state. Moral authority is entirely self-imposed; it is never
an alien authority forcing itself on us.
Second, and even more importantly, for Fichte the notion that morality issues only
side-constraints on our authentic projects gets everything exactly backwards. Moral
authority is precisely the authority of our own reason, our own authentic selfhood. Its
basis is our own drive for freedom—absolute independence or self-sufficiency. Every
one of our authentic life-projects falls under it. No project, end, or enjoyment that falls
outside it is morally permissible, precisely because what falls outside morality would
be alien and opposed to ourselves, our very freedom. Morality could not possibly
encroach on those carings, ends, and projects that give meaning to our lives. For they
are precisely what morality consists in. Only those desires, aims, or impulses that fall
outside the moral law could threaten our freedom, integrity, or selfhood. It is moral
authority alone that offers them protection. We will come back to this in Chapter 6 §6.
Regarding the satisfaction of our natural drives and personal ends, we will see later
that the role of morality is not to deny them but rather to harmonize them both with
our own freedom and the freedom of others. Fichte’s ethics is not based on the subjec-
tion of our natural desires to a rational command coming from outside them. It is
based entirely on a “drive for the entire I” (SL 4:44). Morality represents the harmony
of our entire nature. The goal of reason is never the suppression of our nature or any
part of it but is always the unity of the self (VBG 6:299). Moral reasons override other
drives or ends only when these have become detached from our striving for freedom
and therefore threaten our unified selfhood. This theme will be with us throughout our
entire examination of Fichte’s ethical theory. We will be returning to it at many points,
both later in this chapter and then especially in Chapter 5 §5 and Chapter 6 §5.
§2: Questioning Moral Authority

Fichte asserts that everyday morality accepts moral authority. This is something widely
acknowledged but nevertheless the subject of ongoing controversy. Many philosophers,
especially in the empiricist tradition, from the eighteenth century down to the present,
have found the entire idea of moral authority both dubious and perplexing. The rejec-
tion, either total or partial, of the idea of moral authority, or its reduction or deflation,
has taken a variety of forms. Since the nineteenth century, it has come to belong to our
popular culture as well as to moral philosophy. The most common target of these reac-
tions is Kant’s conception of the categorical imperative. A thorough discussion of these
issues is well beyond the scope of this book, but I hope we will be able to see that Fichte’s
version of Kantianism has something distinctive to say to this controversy.
Sentiment or reason? Some philosophers find it difficult to accommodate moral
authority into their theory of human psychology. Or they find it impossible to accom-
modate it into their naturalistic metaphysics insofar as it seems to commit us, in meta-
ethics, to some kind of moral realism. One strategy has been to substitute for the idea
of moral authority either a natural sentiment or else a cultural construct that is sup-
posed to do the same job but without the offense to empiricist moral psychology or a
naturalistic metaphysics.
One downside to this project is that it may have to claim, implausibly, that certain
feelings are universal and belong to human nature as such. This is the position of
Hutcheson and Hume, for instance. (Because of the role played in it by idealized inter-
subjective attitudes, Adam Smith’s moral sense theory seems to me better able to
accommodate the appeal to reason along with sentiment.) In contrast to appeals to
natural sentiment, defenders of moral authority need say only that rational human
beings have good reasons to desire or feel certain things (whether they do or not). There
also need be no specific connection between universally shared sentiments and spe-
cific moral values or convictions. Morality comes from reason, not natural sentiment,
and in rational beings, feelings align themselves with morality because feelings are
responsive to reasons.
This rationalist position does not reject the role of feeling or sentiment in the moral
life. Kant is grossly caricatured when he is seen as doing this. Fichte repeatedly empha-
sizes the role of moral sentiments: his moral psychology is based on drives, including
the ethical drive, and feeling is the awareness of a drive (SL 4:143–6). Feeling plays a
vital role in Fichte’s theory of conscience, which we will examine in Chapter 5
(SL 4:156–73). No human being, Fichte declares, could be entirely lacking in moral
feeling (SL 4:139). But human beings may not desire or feel what they have reason to
feel because, in a state of denial, they refuse or reject such feelings. They may even be
socialized in this refusal of their moral nature. In fact, Fichte thinks this socialization is
extremely common, but moral denial is none the less voluntary for that.
Deflation. Some admit in effect that we cannot do without the idea of moral author-
ity, but nevertheless attempt to explain it away. Skilled philosophers demonstrate their
creative analytical ingenuity by justifying on non-moral grounds our need to think as
if there were such a thing as moral authority, citing the evolutionary advantage of our
thinking that way. Moral authority, according to them, has no literal truth, but we have
attitudes or sentiments that can express themselves propositionally in claims that
appear to embrace the idea of moral authority. “Quasi-realism” can mimic the talk of
moral common sense, they argue, while avoiding the false (or anti-naturalistic) metae-
thics of rationalist philosophers who take literally the claims of moral common sense.
Moral Authority 107
If we combine such accounts with a deflationary conception of truth, then these inven-
tive theories permit us to agree (if only verbally) with common sense.1 Like Berkeley,
we must learn to think with the learned while speaking with the vulgar.
Antimoralism. There is also a tradition, dating mainly from the nineteenth century
and still very much with us today, that represents the absolute claim of morality as a
kind of metaphysical delusion, often associated, or compared, with religious beliefs,
that we would be better off without.2 This tradition takes both more moderate and
more radical forms. It acquires support from the fact, with which we are all too famil-
iar, that moral authority is used to impose alien and unenlightened values on people, in
the name of either God or reason. These anti-moralist critics of moral authority often
make it easier for themselves by considering moral common sense as a single, mono-
lithic psychological-social unit. They portray it as structured by abstract concepts such
as that of moral authority, but also as embodying all the errors, delusions, vices, and
systematic social wrongs that belong to our deeply imperfect human societies and our
backward cultural traditions. According to these critics, moral authority is merely the
mouthpiece for a coercive or manipulative social order, and the neurotic expression of
all the psychic factors (“the father,” “the superego”) subversive of an individual’s free
and rational self-government.
This crude empirical methodology systematically blinds some of these critics not
only to the fact that many of the very things they want to condemn would be condemned
by a correct morality, but also to the fact that condemning them in just that way is what
they would need to do in order to articulate their own objections to a backward or sick
social order. Freud, for example, identifies the Kantian categorical imperative with the
“superego” arising from the Oedipus complex.3 This could be seen, and is sometimes
seen, as supporting the claim that the very idea of moral authority is something
1
The term “quasi-realism” is most closely associated with Simon Blackburn. See Blackburn (1993).
A sustained attack on positions of this kind is found in Parfit (2011), Volume 2. Philippa Foot (1972) puts
it in straightforwardly Kantian terms: morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives, not categorical
imperatives. This position still has great appeal among those who think of themselves as Humeans,
empiricists, and naturalists. See Ruse (1986), Alexander (1987). Attempts to mimic everyday moral talk,
or offer a mere replica of moral authority, but without the moral realist baggage it carries with it, are found
in Gibbard (1990, 2003) and Blackburn (1993, 1998). Views according to which our ordinary ways of
thinking and talking are necessarily self-deceptive bear a striking resemblance to the self-dishonesty
of dogmatism as Fichte describes it. Philosophical theories holding that reasons are always desire-based
may seem obvious and comport with what people call “naturalism,” but they may not be compatible with
quite compelling claims about the sorts of reasons we in fact have. One good recent discussion of these
issues from a broadly Kantian perspective is Markovits (2014).
2
I have explored this nineteenth-century tradition (Wood 2002, Chapter 7). Its most radical repre-
sentative was Max Stirner. Among those who question the unconditional authority of morality in the
course of arguing that morality itself may not be such a good idea are Joyce (2001), Hinckfuss (1987),
Garner (1994), and Campbell (2014). There is clearly a version of this idea also at work in Bernard
Williams’ polemics against “the system morality,” and the ways he argues that moral thinking undermines
individual integrity.
3
See Freud (1953–74, 19:28–35). Freud’s account locates the emotional force of the categorical imperative
not in reason but in unconscious processes—indeed, in deeply irrational ones.
profoundly irrational, which we would be well to do without. That is clearly not the
position of Freud himself. He thinks the superego or “ego ideal” is a necessary part of
the healthy ego, which it is the aim of psychoanalysis to support. Freud’s position even
has a lot in common with the moral philosophy of Kant, who (anticipating Freud)
thinks that the historical-psychological source of morality and the feeling of respect
are to be found in imaginatively transformed human sexuality. Freud’s account does
not preclude the attempt of human beings to apply the emotional force of morality to
rational principles. The psychic origins of these emotions for Freud are profoundly
irrational, and Freud clearly sees this as a danger to psychic health. But it does not fol-
low that all incarnations of the superego are irrational. In fact, Freud is trying to
account psychologically for precisely the categorical nature of moral demands. Freud
clearly agrees with Kant and Fichte against those who would treat moral demands as
a system of hypothetical imperatives, or who would exclude the concept of moral
authority from psychic health.4
The Kantian and Fichtean Enlightenment ideal of thinking for oneself requires that
we question all claims to authority, and comply with them only if our own reason sup-
ports them.5 A Kantian or Fichtean can (and should) agree wholeheartedly with many
immoralist critics of moral common sense that the idea of moral authority is often
used to support demands that are excessive, backward, pernicious, and irrational. If
some of Kant’s or Fichte’s own moral views seem to us backward and excessively harsh,
those issues can be (and should be) litigated independently of controversies about the
concept of moral authority.
Can we do without it? Those who realize this and also criticize many of the backward,
unenlightened, and pathological aspects of traditional common sense morality are often
willing to concede that moral authority might not be so bad if combined with the “right”
moral beliefs and attitudes. Some of them nevertheless, inconsistently, fall back on the
kinds of philosophical theories mentioned above, which deflate the claims of moral
authority or substitute sentiments for demands of reason. Some who view the idea of
moral authority itself as having been discredited by familiar metaethical arguments also
see its widespread acceptance as something that is not only not bad on the whole, but
4
See Kant, MA 8: 112–13, and the discussion of this text in Wood (2008), pp. 230–9. For an argument
that takes Freud in this same Kantian direction, see Longuenesse (2017), Chapter 8. One recent treatment
of post-colonial theory that understands Fanon’s Freudian theories as essentially Kantian in motivation is
Bird-Pollan (2015), pp. 14–59. Fichte’s transcendental account of the ground of moral authority is of course
an entirely different account from Freud’s. As we will see in Chapter 5, however, Fichte’s account too
grounds the ethical drive in an original drive (Urtrieb) whose source is within our physical body. Like
Freud, Fichte separates moral authority from the content to which it is applied, and permits it—Fichte
would even say, directs it—to be applied to rational objects. A Freudian account does not discredit the
claim that the principles associated with moral authority are a priori, since a principle is a priori if it derives
from our faculties rather than from the empirical data to which they are applied. Fichte modifies the con-
cept of a priority by treating our faculties as socially and historically developed through an empirical pro-
cess. (In this he was followed by Hegel and others.)
5
Nothing better expresses the spirit of Enlightenment, as Kant and Fichte understand it, than the
bumper sticker which reads: “QUESTION AUTHORITY.”
Moral Authority 109
perhaps even indispensable, either for an ordered society or for a prudent way of life.
Only moral demands of this unconditional form, they argue, can sustain our practical
commitments in the face of various distractions to which our human imperfections
make us liable. These theorists are caught in a rather embarrassing position. They are
attempting to defend a non-instrumental practical ground solely on account of its instru-
mental value. Their theories might offer a plausible social or psychological explanation
(for example, an evolutionary one) for the acceptance of the idea of moral authority by
others. But that would have to be an explanation that reveals moral authority to be a
useful or adaptive illusion—an error that proves advantageous to those caught in it. Their
arguments would be straightforwardly self-undermining, however, if offered to oneself.
You could accept them for your own life only through some kind of self-deception, which
you might regard, from a benevolent (and paternalistic) third-person perspective, as
beneficial to you. But that would be no defense against the argument’s straightfor-
wardly self-undermining character.6 These critics of moral authority must endorse
self-regarding attitudes that are incompatible with personal integrity and self-respect,
and even incompatible with the self-consistent practice of the kind of instrumental
rationality on which their own arguments would have to depend for their effectiveness.
In this it is not difficult to recognize precisely the kind of self-undermining philosophy
and systematic self-deception to which Fichte thinks dogmatists are characteristically
vulnerable.
A transcendentally necessary concept. Fichte argues that the question of moral
authority itself is distinct from all questions about the content of morality. His deduc-
tion of the principle of morality also challenges directly, on transcendental grounds,
the empiricist or naturalist rejection of moral authority. As we have seen in Chapters 2
and 3, this is not a form of metaphysical supernaturalism but an entirely different kind
of rejection of philosophical naturalism. Anticipating the objection that he would
ground moral authority in a supernaturalist metaphysics, Fichte considers the claim
that his deduction “seeks to go beyond the region of thinking into the entirely different
region of actual being.” He replies:
This is not at all what we are doing; we remain within the region of thinking. Indeed, this is what
constitutes that misunderstanding of transcendental philosophy which continues to persist
everywhere: still to consider such a transition to be possible, still to demand such a transition
6
A particularly open and blatant form of this pretense is advocated by Joyce (2001). It is rightly criti-
cized by Eric Campbell (2014), pp. 468–76. Campbell’s own position on the issue, however, seems unclear,
perhaps equally incoherent. At times Campbell seems to accept moral authority for its instrumental value,
while at other times he says he wants to replace moral discourse as a whole with a discourse “in terms of
what we care about and value” (p. 480). The former attitude puts him right in the same camp as Joyce, and
makes him subject to his own criticisms. The latter invites the question: But what if moral authority itself
is something we “care about and value,” because we find ourselves to have good reasons to care about and
value it? All this is obscured by Campbell through his caricatured description of moral authority as an
authority that is “end- or motivation-independent” (p. 449)—as if by definition morality itself could have
no ends or motives of its own, as if we have no reasons for valuing or caring about moral authority for its
own sake, as common sense says we do.
and still to find it plausible to think of a being in itself. That compulsion within us, what else is
this but a kind of thinking that forces itself upon us, a necessary consciousness? . . . Precisely
this is the intention of all philosophy: to uncover that within the operation of reason which
remains unknown to us from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness. Here there is no talk
whatsoever of any being, as being in itself . . . ; for reason cannot get outside itself.
(SL 4:17)
The necessary thinking to which Fichte refers here is not a fiction or pretense that
we find useful, or which we “can’t help” embracing—perhaps because some empirical
theory finds a deterministic explanation of it in our brains or our genes. The thinking
Fichte means would be necessary because the only alternative to it would be incoher-
ence: a theory that is self-undermining because it could not be combined with the
thoughts about ourselves that we would need to have in order to consider ourselves as
accepting it for good reasons.
§3: Finding Oneself as Will

The beginning of Fichte’s deduction (§1) is intended to connect it to the foundation
of the Doctrine of Science (SL 4:15). It proceeds according to the first principle of the
later Jena Doctrine of Science, as we presented it in Chapter 2 §§5–7. Begin with
the thought of an object (the wall in front of you, for instance). Then turn your atten-
tion to that which thinks the wall (the I)—first to the intuition, then to the concept
of this I (SL §1, 4:18). The variation on this process—the direction given to the first
principle of the Doctrine of Science, which indicates the starting point of the science
of ethics—consists in the consciousness of oneself that Fichte describes as “finding
oneself.” The self that is found is the I, that in which object and subject, that which is
found and that which does the finding, are thought as identical (SL 4:18–19). The
finding is a passive apprehending of what belongs only to the I which is found in this
way (SL 4: 19). What is found in this way will turn out to be, first, a certain kind of
activity, and then second, the “essence” or “pure being” of this activity. Fichte’s first
claim is that the activity is willing.
Fichte realizes that his argument at this point requires another premise: namely
that in following this procedure I do in fact find myself (SL 4:23). He attaches this as a
corollary to the argument he is about to give, pointing out that this is what attaches
the present proof to the Doctrine of Science as a whole. The claim that I find myself
is in effect the claim that I can, and at times necessarily do, become reflectively
aware of myself. This, according to the first principle of the Doctrine of Science,
involves the proposition that self-consciousness is the ground of all consciousness.
Or, as he summarizes the argument by way of anticipation in his Introduction:
“Without consciousness of my own efficacy, there is no self-consciousness; without
self-consciousness, there is no consciousness of something else that is not supposed
to be I myself ” (SL 4:3).
Moral Authority 111
Fichte’s procedure may seem like a mere descriptive phenomenology—an account

of how things merely seem to us. But his aim is not merely descriptive: it is not meant as
an account of how we do in fact think, or of the “facts of consciousness” merely as they
present themselves. It is rather a transcendental argument revealing how we must
think if our thought is to avoid unintelligibility or incoherence. Fichte’s claim that we
find ourselves as willing is thus supported by a discursive argument, which we will
consider presently. There is a good reason why Fichtean transcendental philosophy
must involve this combination of phenomenology and discursive argument, for its aim
is to discover the conditions of the possibility of experience. For this we need some
account of the experience whose possibility we are investigating, and for this we need a
phenomenology of the experience. But we also need a discursive proof of the claim
that this experience is possible only under the conditions specified. The same combi-
nation is involved in the Fichtean notion of a “postulate” (in a parallel with Euclid),
which we explored in Chapter 2 §6: We are requested to perform a certain action (here,
to find our self), and then to concede a certain proposition based on this action, where
the concession, where necessary, can be backed by argument. Fichte describes
“self-finding as willing” as an Aufgabe—a task or problem, but the term could also be
translated as “postulate,” understood in this sense.
As Fichte observes, the proposition “I find myself as willing” is the starting point for
both the Foundations of Natural Right and the System of Ethics (SL 4:21). But different
parts of philosophy for Fichte, as we saw in Chapter 2 §4, depend on the direction taken
by the first principle and this direction is somewhat different in the two works. Natural
right is concerned with willing as efficacious acting on the external world. The proof
there begins with the I’s reflection on itself and asks what it is that is being reflected on
(NR 3:17). The argument follows the strategy of the 1794 Doctrine of Science by posit-
ing the finitude of the I and its relation to a world that limits it, and which it intuits and
cognizes theoretically. Then the argument is that the I’s activity, that which is reflected
on when the I reflects on itself, must be distinguished from this intuition of a world and
must instead be an activity of nullifying the world’s limitation on it (NR 3:18–19). In
the theoretical representation of the world, the subjective concept is supposed to cor-
respond to the way the world is: its standard is the world. In this contrasting kind of
act, however—the act reflected on when the I reflects only on itself—the representa-
tion is that of an end (Zweck) and the world is measured by its correspondence to this
representation (NR 3: 19–20; cf. SL 4:2). Moreover, since in the theoretical representa-
tion of the world, the world can be only one way and is this way independently of any
contribution from us, the I’s activity reflected on, which determines the world, must be
free both in the sense that its ground lies entirely within itself and in the sense that it
can determine the world in a variety of ways (NR 3:18–19). This activity which is the
object of reflection, Fichte claims, is the fundamental condition of all self-consciousness,
and therefore of all consciousness as well (NR 3:20). This activity, a self-determined
activity, that can act in a variety of ways, and be efficacious in the world according to the
concept of an end, is then identified as will:
The practical I is the I of original self-consciousness; a rational being perceives itself immedi-
ately only in willing. . . . Willing is the genuine and essential character of reason . . . The practical
faculty is the innermost root of the I; everything else is placed upon and attached to this
faculty.
(NR 3:20–1)
The proof that I find myself as willing. Now let us look at the discursive proof men-
tioned earlier. In the System of Ethics, Fichte is interested not in the external efficacy of
the will, but more narrowly in the I’s relation to itself in its very act of self-determina-
tion. He identifies three grounds on which his argument will be based: (1) the concept
of the I, as that act in which the subject of the act and the object are one and the same;
(2) the principle that in every act of thinking there is posited something thought that is
not the act itself, but counts as an object of that act; and (3) the “original character of
objectivity,” namely that what is objective exists independently of what is subjective,
something real (Reelles) that limits the subjective act in some way (SL 4:21–2). The
proof may be summarized as follows:
[i] The I is such that what acts and what is acted on are one and the same (1).
[ii] Yet what is acted on is independent of the act of thinking (2).
[iii] What is acted on in a self-determining act has the character of something real
or objective (3).
[iv] Therefore, the I is a real acting on itself, a real determining of itself through
itself.
[v] The real determining of oneself through oneself is what we mean by willing
(SL 4:22).
This proof is presented by Fichte in extremely abstract terms, and requires explication
if we are to see its point. It would be a mistake to think that in [ii] (or in (2)), Fichte
is merely repeating the point he made in the Foundations of Natural Right: that the
I must act efficaciously on an independent objective world external to it. For here
he is investigating only the I’s original acting as it relates only to itself, in its original, self-
determining act. His point is rather that even here there must be a kind of subject–object
relation. As he told us right at the outset: “The entire mechanism of consciousness rests
on the various aspects of the separation of what is subjective from what is objective,
and in turn, on the unification of the two” (SL 4:1). There must be an aspect of the I’s
original act on itself that has the character of objectivity, of something real that counts
as existing really and independently of that act.
Self-determination. What we mean by willing is just this real self-determination.
Consequently, to show that the I finds itself as having this structure, positing itself
along with positing something real or objective according to which it is determined,
is to show that the I finds itself as willing. The direction of fit involved in free willing is
therefore a mind-fits-reality direction of fit. Willing is not cognition of something
external, but it has this much in common with that.
Moral Authority 113
There is something about this conclusion that is bound to strike us as paradoxical: if

the act in question is one in which the I relates only to itself, is entirely self-determining
and wholly self-identical, how can there be any aspect of this act that counts as real or
objective, existing independently of the act and limiting it? I suggest that what Fichte is
claiming is that it belongs to the subject–object structure of the I’s self-consciousness
itself, and especially to the concept of self-determination, that the I should relate to
something real that counts as limiting or determining it. This cannot be an external,
material object, since we are considering here only the I’s active relation to itself. It
must therefore be an object of a wholly different kind.
One way to approach the concept of such an object is to see how self-determination
might differ from being determined from outside, by something that is not oneself,
and also from non-determination. To determine oneself is different from having one’s
acts caused or limited by something external, such as a material object or state of the
world. These objects would limit one’s options, but they could not determine what one’s
choices are within those options. That is why the real or objective side of the I’s origi-
nal act cannot consist in anything that belongs to the objective material world.
Determining oneself also requires that there be something in oneself that determines
(that is, specifies, limits) what one is, rather than leaving this undetermined, or making
what one chooses a matter of mere contingency: chance, accident, or arbitrariness.
There must, then, be two aspects to the act of self-determination: first, the subjective
act of determining oneself, and second, something objective or real posited in and by
the act that makes it a determination of the will—in contrast to non-determination: an
act that determines nothing specific at all, or else leaves to accident or contingency
what is willed. Fichte’s claim is that this latter concept—non-determination, or merely
contingent determination—is self-nullifying. It is not the concept of an act of free will.
It may help if we again think of the act of self-positing not only as something we
might observe happening (as occurs when the I “finds itself ”), but also as something in
which the I is engaged: it is not merely something being done, but something to be done.
Fichte’s claim, then, would be that this act must posit some real or objective ground
according to which the act is to be done. This is required if the act is to be one of self-
determination, rather than external determination or non-determination. Willing,
then, as the “real determining of oneself by oneself ” (SL 4:22), must involve a real or
objective ground for what one does.
We could also put it by saying that willing is essentially normative. Any act of will,
along with positing what it wills, also posits a ground, reason, or norm—having the
character of something real or objective—according to which that act is to be done. It is
essential that this real or objective ground of action must both be posited by the I itself,
in its own self-determining act, and yet that it also be something objective, real and
independent of the act which posits it.
In other words, the notion of a self-determining volitional act that has no ground,
is done for no reason, or recognizes no objective norm is an incoherent notion.
Equally incoherent is the notion that a ground or standard posited by the will might be
something merely subjective, contingent, or at our arbitrary discretion. That would be

no ground at all. An act of willing requires positing a standard that has reality—objec-
tive authority over the volitional act. This objective standard is what Fichte now pro-
ceeds to call the will’s “pure being” or “true essence.”
§4: The Pure Being or True Essence of Willing

Thus far, Fichte says, he has been considering only willing in general or self-determination,
not any specific acts of will. In order to do the latter, we must introduce a relation to an
external object, and thus take ourselves to the starting point of the parallel argument
in Foundations of Natural Right. Any specific act of will involves the postulate of a
world outside us, the theoretical representation of this world, and some modification
of that external world (SL 4:23–4). In every determinate case of willing, the will is
reacting to a specific external situation. The grounds that determine it involve some
relation to the objects around it, and to the I itself insofar as it has been influenced by
these objects. Yet the act of will is supposed to be something purely self-determining.
To express our awareness of it as purely self-determining, Fichte coins the term “agil-
ity” (Agilität)—“something that cannot be demonstrated to anyone who does not find
it in the intuition of himself ” (SL 4:8, cf. 4:36). “Agility” appears to refer to the unavoid-
able appearance of freedom, where the appearance is accepted as true and not an
illusion, and also to the absolutely free act of which it is then taken to be the appear-
ance. Because Fichte thinks we are capable of such an awareness, he thinks we are
capable of abstracting from the influences to which the free I is subject in every con-
crete situation. This enables Fichte to ask a new question about the will: what is its
“true essence” or “pure being”? What is will when we abstract from everything foreign
to the willing itself? (SL 4:24).
“Being” for Fichte refers to objectivity; Fichte reminds us, after he has identified
the “pure being” of the will, that “the I is being considered here only as an object, and
not as an I as such” (SL 4:29). So what we are looking for is exclusively the objective
aspect of the self-positing act of the willing I. Fichte reminds us at this point that as
transcendental philosophers, we are proceeding from the principle that the I is
absolutely free. The search for the pure being or essence of the will therefore begins
from the assumption that willing is absolutely free. Whenever it acts, however, the will
is always situated: it is limited by its external situation and influenced by its relation
to the world of material objects. Our task at this point is to abstract entirely from this
situatedness in order to think only of the pure being of the will. “At the level of abstrac-
tion that it must receive here, this concept may well be the most difficult concept in all
of philosophy” (SL 4:26).
The steel spring. To help us find the concept we are looking for, Fichte proposes to use
an example, whose application, however, will be seen in due course to be strictly lim-
ited. He asks us to imagine a compressed steel spring, which strives from within to
Moral Authority 115
push back against the force that compresses it. The point he wants to make is that the
spring, like the will, is influenced by an external force (the external situation of its will-
ing), but its pushing back comes entirely from within itself and not from what exerts
pressure on it. If the steel spring could be conscious or intuit its pushing back, it would
will to push back (SL 4:26).7 “This self-determination would be that which, in a rational
being, is the sheer act of willing” (SL 4:27).
Fichte then proceeds to characterize this inner force through which the will acts. He
calls it: “the absolute tendency [Tendenz] toward the absolute,” “absolute indetermina-
bility through anything outside itself,” or “the tendency to determine itself absolutely,
without any external impetus” (SL 4:28). Such expressions are more likely to perplex
than to inform. I think Fichte is aware of this, and his procedure in §2 of his deduction
of the moral principle is to clarify them. One point, however, he wants to clarify right
away: Fichte refuses to call this tendency a “drive,” since a drive “operates necessarily in
a materially determined manner, so long as the conditions of its efficacy are present,”
whereas the tendency we are talking about must belong to an act that is entirely free,
self-determined, and capable of acting in any of a variety of different ways (SL 4:29). The
result at which we arrive, therefore, is that “the essential character of the I . . . consists in
a tendency to self-activity for self-activity’s sake” (SL 4:29).8
This tendency is the pure being or essence of the I when it is considered from the
speculative standpoint, as an object of transcendental philosophy. But the I is also
essentially conscious of itself, and so it must become conscious of this tendency from
the standpoint of ordinary experience (SL 4:29–30). So in §2, Fichte proposes that our
next task or problem (Aufgabe), therefore, is “to become conscious in a determinate
manner of the consciousness of one’s original being” (SL 4:30). In other words, we as
transcendental philosophers must become conscious of the way that an I becomes
conscious of its essence or pure being from the ordinary standpoint. Fichte character-
izes this consciousness in the following terms: “the I tears itself away—from itself [reiβt
sich von sich selbst los]—and puts itself forward as something self-sufficient [selbstän-
dig]” (SL 4:32). “Whatever the I is or has been, it experiences itself as becoming, tearing
itself away from the I as a given absolute” (SL 4:33).
Existing in advance of your nature. To understand this characterization requires us
to explore the limitations of the analogy Fichte has drawn between the will and the
compressed steel spring. The spring’s tendency to push back follows a causal necessity
and lawfulness determined by the nature of the metal of which the spring is composed.
7
This concept of striving is evidently borrowed from Spinoza; it is equivalent to the conatus that is the
essence of each particular thing (Ethics IIIP7). Fichte’s remark that if the spring were to become conscious
of its striving to resist the pressure, then it would will to strive, must remind us of Spinoza’s remark that if
a stone flying through the air became conscious, it would think it was moving by free will (Ep. 58). In
contrast to Spinoza, Fichte thinks, as Schopenhauer did after him, that it would be right (Schopenhauer 1958,
1: 126). Of course Fichte also denies that the stone or the steel spring ever could become conscious; he does
not accept Schopenhauer’s panpsychism.
8
Fichte’s important concept of a “drive” will be explored further in §5 of this chapter, and again in
Chapter 5.
We think of the spring’s act of pushing back as determined by its nature. Precisely for
this reason it is not an act that is self-determined, or free.9 Yet if we merely think away
the causal determination, we are also left with an act that is not free or self-determined,
but instead with something quite different—“blind chance” (SL 4:34). As we saw in
Chapter 3, it is typical of dogmatism to pose James’s “dilemma of determinism”: either
an action must be causally necessitated or it must occur by blind chance. Fichte’s argu-
ment, once again, is that we must reject this as a false dilemma, since it precludes the
possibility of free action. He therefore infers, as we saw in Chapter 3, that the I or the
will must be something that “exists in advance of its nature” or that “would have to be
before it is” (SL 4:35–6).
These formulations are deliberately paradoxical, but the paradox can be dissipated
in light of the results Fichte has already established in §1 of his deduction. The sense in
which the I or the will exists in advance of its nature is that it must exist as an object for
itself, and yet have no nature that already determines it, since it is to be self-determin-
ing. Therefore, it must first be this undetermined kind of object in order subsequently
to be something determinate through being this object. The object in question is what
Fichte means by the I’s “pure being” or “essential character.”
This puts us in a position to see how Fichte disagrees with the Sartrean formula
“existence precedes essence,” if it is taken literally. For if the I is to be self-determining,
it is precisely the “essence” or “essential character” of the I that must precede, and
thereby determine, its own nature, or what it is. The “preceding” here, however, must
not be thought of in a literal, temporal sense. There may be no time at which the free
I exists without being self-determined. Also, an I may be formally free without being
materially free. It is then in one sense self-determined and in another sense not. It stands
under a self-given objective standard but does not freely determine itself by that stand-
ard. It is fully free or self-determining only when its act is determined by the objective
standard. In either case, its act of self-determination must still be regarded as prior to
the result of this act. When the I is fully or materially free, the act must be an expression
of the “pure being” or “essential character” of the I’s freedom.
Freedom as a faculty (Vermögen). Fichte has described this essential character using
perplexingly abstract phrases such as “a tendency to self-activity for self-activity’s
sake.” He has done nothing to clarify what sort of thing that tendency is. He begins to
do so when he describes the tendency as a “concept”: “As an intellect with a concept of
its own real being, what is free precedes its real being . . . The concept of a certain being
precedes this being, and the latter depends upon the former” (SL 4:36). This places
absolute self-determination within the framework of practical reason, since practical
reason involves a direction of fit in which what is should conform to its (normative)
9
Here Fichte is rejecting Spinoza’s conception of freedom as determination by one’s own nature rather
than by external causes (Ethics ID7, cf. Ep. 58). Even one’s own nature would for Fichte count as something
external to the volitional act, and therefore render impossible a truly self-determining act of will. To act
freely, our act must be free from our own nature as well as the natures of things outside us.
Moral Authority 117
concept (the concept of an end), whereas in theoretical reason the concept must fit
what is (SL 4:2). When we are considering self-determination in this completely
abstract form, the way this works is not quite the same as when practical reason is
concretely situated. In a concrete situation, the concept is some determinate one, to
which the I (or the world) is to be brought into correspondence.
Every particular situated action is guided by some concept or other of an end to be
achieved. But here we are thinking of the I as will in its own self-determination, that
through which it produces a concept to which the world should then be brought into
correspondence. In this self-determining act, it is now the I which is first the concept of
what it is to be and then, insofar as the self-determination has been successful, it
becomes what corresponds to that concept. That is, it becomes a volition according to
this concept, and then its volition produces a further concept to which the world must
correspond. When we are considering the tendency that constitutes the being or essence
of the I considered solely for itself, the concept in question to which its volition must
correspond is also completely abstract—it is still the concept only of “self-sufficiency”
or “self-activity for self-activity’s sake.” From this Fichte infers that when its free activ-
ity is considered simply for itself, in abstraction from a given situation, the I posits
itself only as a power or faculty (Vermögen):
i.e. only a concept of the sort to which some actuality can be connected by means of thinking—in
the sense that the actuality in question is thought of as having its ground in this power—without
containing within itself any information whatsoever concerning what kind of actuality this
might be.
(SL 4:38)
It should not astonish or confuse us, then, that Fichte has described the tendency
which is the essence or pure being of the I in such wholly abstract terms. For there is, at
the most abstract level, nothing definite that could constitute the essence of the I. If our
action is absolutely free, there is no determinate “nature” limiting what our acts can or
should make of themselves. The essence or pure being of the will can consist only in the
power or faculty to determine itself through concepts, but there is no definite concept
to which its self-determination is bound or limited. This is why the essence or pure
being of the I cannot be identified originally with any determinate end, and why it
must consist only in the power or capacity to be self-active or self-sufficient for its
own sake.
Nevertheless, this essence or pure being is the objective ground of willing as real
self-determination. In §3 of the deduction, where Fichte investigates the way we become
conscious of the tendency to self-sufficiency in ordinary consciousness, we will see
how this grounds what we have above called the idea of moral authority or the princi-
ple of morality. Our first task, in §5 below, will be to explain in Fichte’s own terms the
result of his deduction. Some of this may be hard going. It already is, in some of what
I have been expounding above. But I hope it will put us in a position to offer a clearer
account in the following §6.
§5: The Drive for Self-Activity for its Own Sake

The concept of a drive is an important one for Fichte’s theory of practical reason.
Fichte’s introduction of the concept of a drive also appears to be the origin of the
concept which, no doubt in modified forms, has also played an important part in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology, including the theories of William
James, Sigmund Freud, and Clark Hull. For Fichte, a drive is a subjective source of our
activity, but it is one which results from the fact that this activity is a response to some-
thing already given, and therefore it involves an activity that presupposes a passive
relation to something objective. A drive is “a real, inner explanatory ground of an
actual self-activity” (SL 4:40), but one that becomes conscious or a cognition (SL 4:106).
A drive is a kind of tendency, but as we have seen, not all tendencies are drives. The
tendency to self-activity for its own sake is not itself a drive, because it arises from
the I’s consciousness of its pure being, which is merely the objective side of the I’s free-
dom. In contrast to this, a drive operates necessarily and in a determinate manner (SL
4:29).10 At the same time, a drive is always an activity, and cannot be explained by or
reduced to causal necessities (SL 4: 111).
Most drives discussed by Fichte arise from the I’s embodiment and relate to the
body’s organic functioning. In his deduction of the applicability of the moral princi-
ple (SL §8), Fichte attempts to deduce the transcendental necessity of these natural
or organic drives (SL 4: 101–12). Natural drives, as regards their occurrence, are not
subject to our freedom, but because a drive belongs to a free or rational being, a drive
never necessitates any action—rational beings always remain free either to act on
their drives or to resist them (SL 4:107–8). In distinguishing the essence or pure
being of the I from a drive, we have reached the point in Fichte’s deduction where we
have to consider how the tendency to self-activity for self-activity’s sake—the objec-
tive side of free activity, considered solely for itself and not in relation to external
objects—becomes conscious. When an objective ground of activity manifests itself
consciously, it does so in the form of a drive. Therefore, although the tendency we
have been examining is not itself a drive, when it becomes conscious it manifests itself
as a drive (SL 4:40).
Natural drives seek to unify the I with something external to it, by bringing external
objects into harmony with our natural strivings. The immediate consciousness of a
natural drive is feeling (Gefühl); prior to the drive’s becoming focused on a determinate
object, it is called longing (Sehnen) (SL 4:41; cf. 4:106). When a drive is directed to a
determinate object, it becomes a desire (Begehren) (SL 4:126–7).
The drive for the whole I. These last propositions apply to all natural drives, and to
ethical drives as well, once the principle of morality is being applied in any specific sit-
uation of a rational being. Here, however, we are considering the striving of the I for
10
Fichte means by this that the action of a drive on us is of a necessary kind, even when we resist it (as
Fichte thinks we are always free to do). See Street (2016).
Moral Authority 119
self-sufficiency or self-activity for its own sake entirely for itself, and not in its relation
to any external object or situation. So the unity sought by this drive can be nothing
other than a unity of the two sides of the I itself—the objective and the subjective.
Consequently, Fichte calls this drive the “drive for the whole I” (SL 4: 41–4). Thus far,
our concept of “wholeness” involves only these two necessary aspects of conscious-
ness—subjectivity and objectivity. But it is an important Fichtean doctrine that the I
strives for unity, harmony, or identity of all kinds. Just as Kantian apperception is that
which unifies our consciousness, so the Fichtean I strives for practical unity—of our
volitions under a common principle, of the unification of our drives with one another,
and the unification of our ends with those of other rational beings (cf. VBG 6:296–8,
304). All this belongs to the application of the moral principle, which will be explored
in Chapters 5 through 7. These further kinds of unity or harmony are, I think, already
implicit here in the drive “for the whole I.”
Because this drive for the whole I does not result from the I’s passive relation to an
external object, no feeling results from it, as usually happens with drives (SL 4:43–4).
Instead, the only result of the drive is a “determination of the intellect” or a thought
(SL 4:45). But what thought? Fichte finds this question hard to answer, no doubt
because the thought that results from this drive is just as abstract and indeterminate
as “self-sufficiency” or “self-activity for self-activity’s sake.” The thought is: “the
whole I,” meaning the unity of the subjective and objective aspects of the I. But,
Fichte declares, this is “an unthinkable unity” because any consciousness must
involve a distinction and a relation between subject and object, whereas the drive
now being investigated strives for a unity of the two beyond this distinction. Fichte
therefore designates it as “ = X,” and says it “can be described only as a problem or
task for thinking, but never can be thought” (SL 4:43). Perhaps Fichte does a better
job of explaining what he means a bit later, when he says: “The thought in question is
not really a particular thought, but only the necessary manner of thinking our free-
dom” (SL 4:49).
The antinomy and its resolution. Fichte further deepens the perplexity, however, by
introducing a threatened antinomy regarding the thought (the drive for the whole I)
that has been deduced. As we have seen, this is a regular part of his procedure—his
“synthetic method.” The abstractions from which the synthetic method proceeds are
made more concrete and determinate by drawing out the potential contradictions in
them, and then introducing the concepts needed to avoid these contradictions. The
drive manifests itself as a thought (4:45–59). But a thought is a determination of the
intellect—of subjectivity only, free and active. The antinomy, then, is this:
Thesis: We have deduced: the drive produces a thought in the intellect.
Antithesis: But since the intellect is agility only, no thoughts can be produced in it.
Fichte’s resolution of the antinomy is:
Synthesis: The thought must have a form and a content consistent with agility.
In regard to its form, Fichte says, this thought is therefore an “intellectual intuition.”
Intuition is an immediate consciousness; it is intellectual when it alone produces its
object. The form of such a thought is consistent with agility (unconstrained free activ-
ity). The object in question here, however, is not a thing but only an act—the act of
self-determining—and the intuition is the same as the object intuited (SL 4:45–7).
As regards its content, Fichte says, the thought is only the thought of freedom, or
rather the manner in which the I thinks its own freedom, so again, the thought is con-
sistent with agility.
The content of the thought we have derived can therefore be briefly described as follows: we are
required to think that we are supposed to determine ourselves consciously, purely and simply
through concepts, indeed, in accordance with the concept of absolute self-activity; and this act
of thinking is precisely that consciousness of our original tendency to absolute activity that we
have been seeking. Strictly speaking, our deduction is now concluded.
(SL 4:49)
The result of this deduction, however, may still leave us perplexed. The argument has
been very abstract, and the formulation just quoted seems equally so. We are at that
point in the Fichtean procedure where Fichte can be expected to introduce a term—
either from everyday thought or from philosophy—which is supposed to fit the (often
opaque or paradoxical) concept that has been deduced and at the same time illuminate
it by determining what it means.
Fichte does this by describing the deduced concept using several terms drawn both
from philosophy and from everyday life which he thinks make it recognizable. These
include:
[a] A categorical imperative (SL 4:50): the thought of a rationally binding command
that does not presuppose a pre-given end as the condition of its bindingness or,
in response to such a command, the thought of an action that must be done
merely for its own sake, and not for the sake of any end except those that might
be contained in or posited by the action itself.
[b] The thought of a norm or law (SL 4:51–3). A norm or law carries with it a
kind of necessity, since it represents something that we must do. But Fichte
distinguishes this normative necessity from causal necessity, which prevents us
from doing the opposite or makes anything else impossible. With normative
necessity we remain free to act against the norm or law. Here “necessity”
means: “the intellect charges itself to determine itself freely” (SL 4:52). This
necessity excludes other options as objects of rational choice. Normative neces-
sity therefore includes the overridingness that belongs to moral authority.
[c] An action that ought to be done, or is considered “fitting” (gehöre) or “appro-
priate” (gebühre), whose opposite is inappropriate and ought not to be done
(SL 4:54–6). (If Fichte had been writing in the Anglophone tradition, I think
he would have spoken here of an action that is “right” or “right in itself ” and
Moral Authority 121
whose opposite is “wrong” or “wrong in itself.”) In each situation of choice,

Fichte thinks, we ought to choose one thing over another, as the fitting, appro-
priate, or right thing to do. This captures the strong concept of the ubiquity of
moral authority.
As if to emphasize the affinity of his deduction with Kantian moral philosophy, Fichte
also describes the deduced thought as that of autonomy or self-legislation. And he
understands this term in three related senses (relating to one another as form, content,
and their synthesis):
1. Form of the law: The law becomes a law only when the subject reflects on it and
subjects itself to it. The subject does this when it consistently and coherently
thinks its own freedom.
2. Content of the law: The law requires only self-sufficiency. It has no determinate
content of its own until its application can be deduced, and this must be done
separately and subsequently to the deduction of the law itself.
3. Synthesis: The will’s subjection to the law—its being obligated by it—arises only
from reflection on the I’s own freedom and its true essence or self-sufficiency.
This makes the law it obeys its own law (SL 4:56–7).
In relation to Kant, Fichte also makes one other arresting claim that may seem at first
extravagant. Kant represented freedom of the will and the law’s bindingness on us as
distinct claims, reciprocally implying each other (KpV 5:30). But Fichte argues that they
are not two thoughts related to each other by reciprocal implication, but instead
they are identical—they are the very same thought (SL 4:53–4). The thoughts: categori-
cal imperative, law, ought, normative necessity are the very same as the thought of
freedom, because these are merely the way our freedom itself is thought.
§6: Explication of Fichte’s Deduction

Thus far, I have tried to present Fichte’s deduction in his own terms. The result so far,
I think, has inevitably been only a very limited degree of clarification. In this section,
I will attempt to explain more clearly what I think is going on. I hope to make both
Fichte’s deduction and its conclusion less perplexing, and also to bring out their
philosophical interest. I begin with the last claim: that the moral law and freedom are
not two different (though reciprocally implying) thoughts, but are instead the very
same thought.
I think we can understand this if we recall the concept of freedom with which Fichte
is operating. We may tend to think of an action as free merely on account of its being
unhindered or unconstrained. We think it is free in some respect or other if it is lacking
in any constraint or hindrance in that respect. “Free,” then, would seem to mean the same
as without hindrance or constraint. “Free” would be the same as, or at least consistent
with, “undetermined.” This is also the way philosophers tend to think of incompatibilist
views of freedom such as Fichte’s. Incompatibilists are supposed to think of freedom as

the absence of any form of determination—because it is assumed that determination
must be causal determination. Compatibilists, by contrast, tend to think that free
action should be understood as unhindered or unconstrained only in certain relevant
respects—by external obstacles, threats, and so on. This absence may be compatible
with the action’s being (causally) determined in other respects, such as by the agent’s
desires and beliefs. And that is enough to make us free, or at least (as some of them
admit) free enough—namely, free enough to be blamed, put in jail, and so on (which is
all they think about).
As Fichte sees things, this compatibilism leaves us only with a sham freedom. It leaves
us externally determined and unable to make any genuine choices. We are mere pup-
pets dancing on the strings pulled by whatever forces causally necessitate our desires
and beliefs. Such thoughts as these lead inevitably to James’s famous dilemma. Action
must either be causally determined and so unfree, or else it must be undetermined,
occurring merely by chance, at random, therefore humanly meaningless, hence also
not free action.
Fichte rejects both horns of the dilemma. He thinks that freedom must be under-
stood not as the absence of constraint or determination, but instead as self-constraint,
or even absolute (independent, self-sufficient) self-determination. So as we saw earlier,
self-determination is not only consistent with constraint or determination, but abso-
lutely requires determination or constraint, but of a special kind. This is why freedom
requires actions subject to moral authority, and also why moral authority for Fichte is
not only categorical but overriding and even ubiquitous in the strong sense. Every
truly free action (every materially free action) is one that I must choose solely because
the moral law requires it. This kind of constraint or determination, however, could not
make the action unavoidable or causally necessary. I can always fail (or refuse) to do what
I (morally or rationally) must do—when the “must” expresses normative necessity. The
free action must also be produced solely by the self-determining act itself, and cannot
come from outside it. Here the necessity is conceptual.11 Normative necessity repre-
sents only the objective or self-constraining aspect of the act itself. What determines
the free act is a certain objective rational norm which is at the same time a self-generated
reason or self-legislated law belonging to that very action. In other words, the concept
of a truly free act is nothing but the concept of an act that is normatively or rationally
self-constrained or self-determined.
Freedom and the moral law are the same thought. Every truly free act is both a
response to the moral principle and also self-determining. This is the best way to make
sense of Fichte’s claim that freedom and the moral law are not two distinct co-implying
11
In a sense, then, Fichte does after all accept Spinoza’s conception of freedom as being internally
self-determined (Ethics ID7, Ep. 58); he rejects only Spinoza’s idea that this consists in causal determination
by one’s nature as a thing, insisting, by contrast, that it must be the determination of an action by its own
self-sufficient agility.
Moral Authority 123
concepts, but one and the same concept. To act freely, in the full or unqualified sense, is
simply to act as the moral law requires. To act otherwise is to act unfreely—to be for-
mally free but not materially free.
We might see Kant as already agreeing with Fichte about the identity of freedom and
the moral law. For Kant says that awareness of the law is a Faktum der Vernunft—a deed
of reason, in other words, a free act (KpV 5: 31–2). If the law itself is identified with
awareness of its obligatory force, and both are identified with a rational act or deed,
then Kant and Fichte are not far apart. But an important difference is this: Kant thinks
freedom and the law are distinct (but co-implying) thoughts because he is referring to
a specific law, with a specific content: it involves his formulas of universal law, law of
nature, humanity as end in itself, and autonomy or the realm of ends. Though the fact
(or deed) of reason is the self-effected thought that we are obligated by the moral law,
none of these formulas is the same thought as the thought of freedom. The formula
of autonomy co-implies freedom, at least freedom in the positive sense of the term
(G 4:446–7, KpV 5:28–31), but it is not the same thought as freedom. Fichte’s principle
of morality, however, has no specific content. It really is the same as Kant’s “fact [or
deed] of reason.” The moral principle says only that wherever moral authority applies
to an act, that act must be done; thus every choice is subject to a categorical imperative
that is ubiquitous and overriding.
As we have already observed, for a free act to stand under a norm is also for the
agent to be able to violate the norm; this too is part of the meaning of normative
necessity. Formal freedom is the capacity of an act to be other than what it is. Every
act, properly speaking, is therefore formally free, whether or not it follows the moral
law. To say that the action is normatively necessary is to say that the agent has a deci-
sive and overriding reason to perform it. We free but imperfect human agents are not
always in fact motivated to act on the best reasons we have, including those reasons
that are overriding and even rationally decisive. Our response to reasons, our motiva-
tion in relation to the reasons we have, as well as which reasons we let ourselves be
aware of as reasons, is always up to us. So it belongs to our formal freedom that what-
ever we in fact do, and whatever reasons we might have for doing something, we can
always act otherwise.
§7: Self-Legislation
The paradox of self-legislation. There is a familiar objection to notions such as
self-legislation or a self-given norm. If a law or norm is self-given, then it seems that it
cannot bind, as a law or norm (by its very concept) is supposed to do. For (we may
think) a law is made by a power superior to the person subject to the law. If it were
made by the very person subject to it, then whatever is legislated can then be repealed,
and what is legislated one way could be, or could just as well have been, legislated
another way. So any laws legislated by the very person subject to them would be both
arbitrary and non-binding. Hence such laws could not, properly speaking, be laws at
all.12 Self-legislation makes no sense.
Actually, neither of the claims about legislation used in this argument is true. First,
it is not superior power but legislative authority that makes some entity a legislator.
Brigands and barbarians may command and coerce, but if they lack legitimate author-
ity, they cannot legislate. What a legislator may legislate, therefore, depends not on the
superiority of the legislator’s power, but rather the scope of its legislative authority.13
Not every legislator can make any laws it chooses. The constitution grounding the
authority of a legislature might provide that the legislature could make certain kinds of
laws—for example, laws protecting constitutionally guaranteed rights—but not other
kinds—laws abrogating or abolishing those same rights. Second, and for the same rea-
son, it is not true that every legislator can unmake at will whatever laws it makes.
A constitution might provide that when the legislature makes certain laws, it then lacks
the power to repeal them by the same process through which they were made. The
legislator might be stuck with them, or it might need a distinct procedure to repeal
them. All this depends, again, on the scope of its legislative authority.
In relation to Fichte’s deduction of the law, however, there is a still deeper difficulty
with this objection. The objection relates to the content of laws that are said to be
self-legislated. It claims that the notion of self-legislation is problematic because of
alleged variations in this content. Laws with a certain content could be made at one
time, then repealed, or else the laws could have had a different content. But Fichte’s
notion of self-legislation has a quite different focus: it leaves the content of our
self-legislation entirely open.
The sole content of the law is the I’s “self-sufficiency.” This is merely a placeholder
for a problem or task (an “= X”) whose meaning is still to be determined by later
deductions: first a deduction of the applicability of the law, and then a deduction of its
application. In short, Fichte’s deduction concerns only the form of legislation, namely
that it is categorical, overriding, and ubiquitous. The deduction shows only that if and
when it applies, the concept of moral authority must necessarily apply to any and all the
acts of a rational being. It does not tell us what acts, policies, or laws fall under that
concept, but it does provide that if and when the concept of moral authority applies, it
does so objectively and independently of any act of will. A fortiori, it leaves the rational
being’s will without the power to alter or revoke any particular content. Self-legislation
does not mean that we choose the content of the law. That content is real and objective
for us. We will see in Chapter 5 that for ordinary consciousness, the objective content
of the moral law is an issue for theoretical inquiry, to be settled for practice by
12
This is the force of the objection against self-legislation offered by Elizabeth Anscombe: “Kant offers
the concept of ‘legislating to oneself,’ which is . . . absurd . . . The concept of legislation requires superior
power in the legislator.” Anscombe (1958), p. 2.
13
Kant in fact denies that the moral law is made by any “superior power.” He holds that we can regard
ourselves as legislators of the moral law only by showing respect for the law’s rational authority, which is
independent of our will, or even of God’s will (G 4:439). See Wood (2008), Chapter 6, and note 20 in
this chapter.
Moral Authority 125
c onscientious conviction. In Chapters 6 and 7, we will explore Fichte’s “scientific” or phil-

osophical account of the law’s objective content.
What is “moral” about moral authority? This reply, however, might only shift the
focus of the objection. For if what is self-legislated has no determinate content, how can
we be sure that the thought of moral authority applies to our actions at all? Even if it is
applied, Fichte’s deduction of the moral law imposes no limits on the kinds of rules or
policies that might obtain moral authority through self-legislation. In that case, why
even call it moral authority? Perhaps the actions to which it applies will turn out to be
self-interested actions, or actions we would normally consider morally vicious.
These questions are very much in order. But it is not the task of Fichte’s deduction
of the moral law to answer them. They are not fundamental objections to Fichte’s pro-
gram. In fact, they are questions internal to that program, to be answered by it in due
course. As we have seen, Fichte admits, or rather he proclaims repeatedly, that the
principle he has deduced is purely formal, that both the applicability in general and
the specific application of the principle of morality have to be separately deduced (SL
4: 51, 131, 138, 147, 163). Once we have deduced the application of the principle,
Fichte thinks it will be evident that its content is recognizable as something like what
common sense would call “morality.” It will, for example, prohibit selfishness and
ground many claims that others have on us. But it will not include what unenlight-
ened traditions consider to be “morality” and will even include much that condemns
these traditions. (Fichte was, as we have seen, a social and political radical.)
There is, I think, a legitimate objection to be raised against Fichte’s view that our
authentic selfhood is exhausted by “morality” either in the usual sense of the term or in
Fichte’s sense, which is connected to the concept of duty and conscience. The claims of
our freedom on us overflow “morality” or “duty,” at least in the usual sense of those
terms. The value of my life, as well as my responsibility for living well and giving my
life meaning and value, exceed “duty” or “morality” in the usual sense of those words.
Some philosophers use the term “ethics” to refer to this broader value, and limit
“morality” to the demands others may make on us (for instance, Dworkin 2011,
pp. 13–14). On the other hand, in the Fichtean tradition, there is also a tendency to
expand the scope of moral concepts such as duty and conscience so that they can
encompass the broader meaning of authentic selfhood and the value of your life.
Fichte’s Romantic friends Schlegel and Schleiermacher turned morality into a personal
code, valid only for one’s individuality. Kierkegaard’s ethical man (see Chapter 6 §6)
might also be seen as exemplifying this. So might the Heideggerian concept of “authen-
ticity” (Heidegger 1953, especially §§54–60). Even Nietzsche countenances morality
when it is understood in this expanded way: the sovereign individual, he says, proud in
“the privilege of responsibility,” will become aware of the dominant instinct that gives
him this power over his fate. “What will he call it, this dominant instinct, assuming he
gives it a name? Undoubtedly he will call it his conscience” (Nietzsche 1999, pp. 41–2).
In this tradition, it is Fichte who initiates this expansion of the moral. It may be this
hubristic expansion that incited some later thinkers—Max Stirner, Karl Marx, and
Nietzsche himself—to the wholesale rejection of the moral.
The foundation of practical concepts. What matters for the present is that the con-
cept of moral authority is grounded transcendentally in the I’s own essential volition.
This does indeed go deeper than anything we might call “morality” in the everyday
sense. For it adds rational normative power to the moral law. The objective value Fichte
associates with the moral law may also be seen as something we care about for reasons
that may look to us neither “moral” nor self-interested. Objective value is what we have
objective reasons to care about for its own sake. Fichte tends to associate such values
with the claims of moral duty, but there is no reason why they could not be the claims
on us of whatever gives meaning or value to our lives and actions. That might ground
our moral duties, rather than being identical with them or grounded on them. This is a
direction in which some later existentialists take thoughts like Fichte’s. For more on
this, see Chapter 7 §4.
The real thrust of Fichte’s deduction is that something like the concept of moral
authority is a transcendental condition of the possibility of free or rational action.
Every action involves a concept, namely the concept of an end, to which something in
the real world is to be brought into conformity. But, Fichte argues, in order for a free
act to bring about such a change in the world, it must first freely act on itself. A free act
must be self-determining, and this self-determination is an act directed by a free
act solely at itself. This is the meaning of the striving Fichte identified as the pure being
or essence of the I (the will, the rational being). If, however, we try to describe this
free action’s acting on itself in the same terms in which we think of a situated action on
the world, we find a crucial difference: what plays the role here of the concept to which the
world is to correspond is now itself only an act of the I, and moreover, one that is
supposed to be free or self-determining. In this sense, it produces the concept—the
standard to which the act is to conform. But this concept is the concept of nothing but
its own act in producing it, so this is no determinate concept of how specifically to act;
it is only the concept acting this way for its own sake. There is no determinate concept that
anything is supposed to fit in the way that the world is supposed to fit the concept of an
end in a situated action.
Let us consider the situation in relation to the direction of fit characteristic of practi-
cal as distinct from theoretical reason. In the situated action, the will produces the
concept of an end to which the world should correspond. Call this the “first practical
concept.” The volition that produces that concept must also correspond to a concept,
derived from its situation, which it gives to itself as the norm for its volition. Call this
the “second practical concept.” For example, in a morally motivated act of beneficence,
the first practical concept would be that of the welfare of the person you benefit, and the
second practical concept would be that of your act, aiming at benefiting the person.
But if we are considering the free act in abstraction from any concrete situation, there
is a third practical concept we need to invoke, whose object is only the objective side
Moral Authority 127
of the pure I (what has been called its “essence” or “pure being”), that which does the
determining in an act of self-determination. This is the standard or measure of the I’s
own acting, while at the same time being the product of the same free acting.
To act solely for the sake of freedom, then, requires you to produce a practical concept
that is not a first practical concept—of the way the world should be in order to fit that
concept—nor even a second practical concept—of the particular volition that gener-
ates the first concept. Instead, it requires you also to produce the abstract concept to
which any action should correspond in order to be a truly (materially) free action—to
be something that I, simply as a rational being, ought to do. Precisely this manner of
acting on oneself, responding to this third and most basic practical concept, is what it
means to be self-determining: both in producing the specific concept of one’s own voli-
tion and the concept generated by that volition to which the world should correspond.
A self-determining act, therefore, is one that supplies the objective measure or stand-
ard to which its own action is supposed to conform. This standard is objective and
independent of the specific acts that are to conform to it, but the standard is not any-
thing outside the I’s own action. It consists merely in the concept of an action which is
objectively required and to be done solely for its own sake.
This deduction, therefore, is also Fichte’s answer to a problem he raised at the outset
of the Introduction to the System of Ethics. This is a problem he thinks philosophy has
long neglected. Philosophers have long worried about how cognition is possible—how
it is possible for something subjective, our concept of the way the world is, to conform
to the world, to something objective. But they have not asked the corresponding ques-
tion about action or practical reason: How is it possible for something objective (a state
of affairs in the world) to follow from something subjective, so that a being results from
my concept (SL 4:1–2)? The answer Fichte has now given is this: in order to act freely in
the world, the I must produce both a first and a second practical concept, and in order
to do the latter freely, it must first determine itself. In this way, it generates a third and
most basic practical concept to which its own volition in general must correspond, and
only then can it produce, in any given situation, either the second or the first practical
concept. Prior to both is a free action on itself—an action which is done for its own
sake, whose measure is nothing but its own self-created standard which it must fit. This
is the condition of the possibility of all free actions.
Another way to express the same idea might be this: every free action has an end—a
state of the external world that it aims to produce. But in order for there to be an end,
it must be created—as Fichte says, “projected” (entworfen)—by a free volitional act of
the I. This act cannot be done for the sake of any end of the same kind, since this act is
presupposed by the setting of all such ends. It must be a free act done solely for its own
sake, solely for the sake of its own freedom. As a free action, it stands under an objec-
tive norm, but this norm cannot be given by any end to be produced by the action. The
only norm through which it could determine itself is a categorical imperative, a norm
unconditioned by any projected end or any situation. Since it is the norm for every free
action whatever, it must also be ubiquitous, even strongly ubiquitous (in the sense
earlier described). And it must be overriding, since it is the norm for, the norm prior to,
any act that might create any end that could conceivably override it.
Those who challenge the intelligibility of the notion of moral authority generally
take for granted the rational intelligibility of purposive action directed at the world
(the first practical concept). Usually they think only of the practical direction of fit that
relates volition to the world. They may even get as far as thinking of the second practi-
cal concept—the concept of the volition that relates to our setting the end to which the
world corresponds. But they do not consider what is required for either of these acts to
be free or wholly self-determining. Fichte’s argument purports to show that if this is
supposed to be free action on the world, then its intelligibility presupposes the ration-
ality of action, a rationality grounded on moral authority.
§8: Does Fichte have a Metaethics?

Fichte’s principle of morality is purely formal. He admits, or even emphatically proclaims,
that it tells us nothing concretely about what we ought to do or must not do. Even its
applicability, as well as its application, either by everyday consciousness or by moral
theorizing, must be deduced separately and independently from the deduction of the
principle itself. In effect, Fichte’s deduction, if successful, justifies only the indispensa-
bility of the concepts of categorical imperative, ought, lawfulness, or what I have called
the idea of moral authority. It tells us nothing directly about what we ought to do. That,
as we have seen, has to be transcendentally deduced separately.
Twentieth-century metaethics. We might therefore be tempted to say that Fichte’s
principle of morality is not so much an ethical principle as a metaethical one. For it
seems to operate at a level more abstract than that of normative ethics, as usually
understood. The philosophical field of metaethics, however—which was a twentieth-
century philosophical invention—has usually been understood in quite a different
way. It is the study of the semantic, epistemic, or metaphysical status of moral concepts,
moral norms, and moral judgments. Semantically, the question is whether moral judg-
ments are to be understood as assertions or something else (e.g. exclamations or
imperatives); epistemically, it is whether they are items of knowledge, or instead some-
thing non-cognitive, such as attitudes, feelings, or emotions. The real issues, however,
are metaphysical: What are value-properties, such as good, bad, right, wrong? What are
value-entities, such as oughts, values, and reasons? Do these things exist at all? And if
they do, are they natural, supernatural, or non-natural entities? Where do they fit into
our conception of the world? It is our stance on the metaphysical questions that usually
determines our stance on the epistemological and semantic ones. If good and bad,
right and wrong, are real properties of actions or states of affairs, then predications of
them surely state facts, and these facts might be known like other facts. The real ques-
tion is always the metaphysical status of these facts—especially the question: Do they
exist at all?
Moral Authority 129
Why, then, have philosophers tended to speak of “metaethics” rather than “the
metaphysics of value”? I suspect it is because in the twentieth century one major posi-
tion on the metaphysical issues, perhaps even the dominant position, has always been
that there are no value properties or realities at all, no objects for assertions to be about,
no truths to be known. To admit that the issue is about the metaphysical status of these
realities or truths would call embarrassing attention to the stark, shocking nihilism
of this dominant view. So we have been taught to use “metaethics” as a becoming
euphemism.
One variant of the dominant view is that ordinary value talk means what it says,
but we need to offer an “error theory” of its assertions.14 To others, however, this open
nihilism seems too embarrassingly candid. They escape from the embarrassment (as
well as the candor) by offering morality a semantic rescue: value judgments are not
really judgments about value at all. The appearance of nihilism is a philosopher’s mis-
understanding, based on a semantic misinterpretation of the surface appearance of
moral language.15
The deepest objection to realism. Some cleave stubbornly to the obvious, to moral
common sense taken straight up. They can understand the claim there are no moral
truths or properties (no rightness or wrongness) only as itself a moral position: a
nihilistic one. They won’t buy quasi-realist imitations or deceptive talk that mimics the
language of morality without accepting its literal truth. If your naturalist metaphysics
has no place for moral properties, then you must either renounce morality in practice,
or find a richer naturalist metaphysics, or open yourself up to a non-naturalist meta-
physics that will countenance moral properties and truths. This is the only possible
honest reaction to most forms of metaethical anti-realism when they are motivated
merely by naturalist metaphysics or empiricist epistemology. It should force us to
choose between ethics—any ethics whatever, any life involving choices, reasons, or
values of any kind—and such inadequate and impoverished metaphysics and
epistemology.
There is one prominent argument against metaethical realism, however, that comes
not from metaphysics or epistemology but from practical considerations themselves.
It rests on the compelling idea that no mere thing or fact “out there” could, all by itself,
14
That is, a theory according to which the assertions are false, made in error, together with a theory
about why this error so commonly occurs. The best known defense of this position regarding moral judg-
ments is Mackie (1977). But it is also an important element in some challenges to moral authority we
examined earlier, such as that of Joyce (2001).
15
For some, even the fact that nothing matters no longer matters. See the title of Street (forthcoming).
In Street’s words: “We should fear the view that nothing matters not as a philosophical position that might,
to our dismay, turn out to be correct, independently of what we think or hope—but rather as a state of
mind we might fall into.” Her position, to provide my own (no doubt invidious) characterization of it, is
that it is quite all right that nothing matters as long as we remain in denial about it. Nihilism is true, but all
we need to fear is that we might start acting as if we believed this truth. (This ostrich-like stance is a lot like
the US Republican party’s position on global climate disruption.) Fichte would surely consider it a case of
self-undermining dogmatism, complacent in its self-admitted self-deception.
give us a reason to do anything. But this is apparently just what properties like good,
bad, right, wrong, and value are supposed to do. A reason, so the argument goes, has
to be something that has its hooks in us. It has to be capable of motivating us. Nothing
can do this, however, unless it is something that comes from our side—a desire we
have, a sentiment we feel, an attitude we take, a decision or plan we make, a command
we issue to ourselves. There must be some conation of ours that latches on to the
world and makes any fact (call it what you will) something we can care about. It is this
conative latching—whether passively felt or actively created—and not anything that
could be out in the world itself that must constitute reasons, values, good, bad, right,
and wrong.
Another way to put the same point is this: the realist must say that we have reasons
solely because we are capable of the cognitive act of recognizing and responding to cer-
tain kinds of facts. But the realist seems not to have any further account of the origins
of the conative act that is supposed to result from this cognition. If we are capable of
responding to reasons, caring about them, and acting on them, then it would seem that
the crucial part of the explanation must depend not on our cognition of some fact, but
rather on something about us as practical—caring or desiring—beings. This explanation
is possible only if values somehow enter the world at least partly through our volitions
or carings rather than through our cognitions alone.
A position sometimes called “internalism” about reasons claims that this motiva-
tional capacity must consist in a desire—if not directly the desire to do something,
then the desire for something such that sound practical reasoning would show us we
are committed to do it in order to satisfy this desire. But objective facts about what is
valuable could never encompass such desires. On the contrary: desires are subjective
facts about us, not objective facts about oughtness, rightness, or goodness. Internalism
seems to preclude metaethical realism. There is a dilemma lurking here, even a Fichte-
style antinomy:
Thesis: Morality and practical reason must be based on something objective, “out
there.” If they were not grounded on something real, then reasons would be reduced
to our feelings, desires, or choices; they would lack the authority either to endorse or
to override them. In that case, there could ultimately be no reasons at all.
Antithesis: No fact “out there” is capable of constituting a reason. All reasons must
be capable of motivating us, and thus originate on our side as conative beings.
Objective facts by themselves could never constitute reasons. So again, if practical
reason were based only on objective facts, there could be no reasons at all.
If the Thesis holds, then we could never have a reason for doing anything, because
there would be nothing that had the authority to ground or to override our feelings,
desires, or choices. (Nothing could matter.) But if the Antithesis holds, then reason
would have been sold into slavery, reduced to doing menial service for the passions.
And no passion could ever constitute a reason for doing anything. (Again, nothing
could matter.) Either way, it seems, nihilism wins.
Moral Authority 131
Fichte’s rejection of metaethics. Fichte’s philosophy predates the discovery of

“metaethics” and the problems it poses. But I think his transcendental approach to the
deduction of the moral principle might be seen as a distinctive contribution to these
issues. The crucial point is that both sides of the antinomy begin from a common
assumption. They think morality and action (values, reasons) are to be understood by
reference to things-in-themselves, or facts-in-themselves. The realists want to locate
reasons among those facts, as truths about a set of objective entities or properties hav-
ing rational authority; the anti-realists want to explain reasons and rational authority
(or explain them away) by reference to subjective, psychological facts about our feel-
ings, decisions, or actions. Both want a theory that can be grounded somehow on
facts about “things-in-themselves”—whether the facts, or the things, are natural or
non-natural. Fichte rejects both these alternatives.16
In recent years, Kant has been interpreted by some as a metaethical anti-realist, for
whom the moral law is not based on an objective “order of values” that is “out there,”
but instead legislated to ourselves by our own practical reason.17 This can’t be right as
an interpretation of Kant.18 But for Fichte, as we have seen, there appears to be a sense
in which we, as rational beings, do literally legislate the moral law. For this reason,
it has sometimes occurred to me that Fichte might have been the first “Kantian con-
structivist.” Further reflection, however, has convinced me that Fichte’s position on
metaethical questions is neither realist nor anti-realist. Instead, Fichte’s view is that all
sides of metaethical disputes are proceeding from the common error of dogmatism.
Metaethical theories proceed by explaining the truth (or the falsity) of ordinary moral
consciousness based on claims about reality-in-itself—whether this reality is psy-
chological or non-psychological, and natural or non-natural, without deducing the
concepts of such a reality from the possibility of our consciousness of it—in this case,
our practical consciousness.
Fichte’s transcendental approach considers practical concepts and norms strictly as
we must think of them when we will and act. Specifically, Fichte’s deduction of the
principle of morality, which we have examined in this chapter, attempts to provide
both a Kantian metaphysical and a Kantian transcendental deduction for the concept
we have called “moral authority.” It has also determined this concept; that is, it has
16
Possibly a recent view something like Fichte’s is found in Dworkin (2011), pp. 23–98. Dworkin argues
for the “independence” of ethics from anything found in other departments of philosophy—epistemology,
philosophy of language, or in short, anything that could be called “metaethics.” But Fichte does not regard
ethics as independent of transcendental philosophy or the Doctrine of Science. He grounds what Dworkin
would call the independence of ethics on the I’s “finding of itself,” on its self-positing: ultimately, on the
possibility of consciousness.
17
The fullest articulation of this position is probably Korsgaard (1996).
18
Again, see Wood (2008), Chapter 6. Kant himself was explicitly and emphatically a realist about the
objective worth of humanity as end in itself and the authority of the moral law. For Kant, our self-legislation
is a way we consider or regard the moral law, but the law itself is not legislated by anyone (not by God, not
by us either). For Kant, what has worth has it independently of the way any being (even the highest being)
regards it (G 4:439). The moral law is no more created by God’s will, or our will, than the truths of mathe-
matics (VE 27:282–3). Moral laws “lie in the nature of things . . . the essence of things” (VE 29:633–4).
shown how we must necessarily think of it if moral authority is to play its role as a con-
dition of practical self-consciousness. The result has been this: one way we must think
of it is as something objective or real, the objective side of volition, the real aspect of
self-determination. Another way we must think of it is as something self-legislated by
us. Both are equally necessary to our consciousness of the moral law, and also equally
necessary to the principle of self-consciousness from which transcendental philoso-
phy begins. If metaethics views the two as incompatible, that is a sign that its dogmatic
starting point was erroneous. The metaphysical questions it takes to be primary are
instead to be rejected, to be left unanswered, at least on the dogmatist assumptions that
motivated the questions.
The principle of morality as it has been deduced is real and objective. It grounds the
“real self-determination” in which willing consists. It is objective, in that it is grounded
on the objective side of the volitional act, namely the side to be thought of as independ-
ent of that act and as (normatively) limiting it. This alone is what makes the principle of
morality a law, carrying with it a normative necessity that normatively limits the voli-
tional acts which are by their pure being or true essence subject to it. On the other hand,
this law is derived solely from volition considered independently of everything outside
it. So the law must at the same time be thought of as self-legislated or autonomous.19
Fichte’s argument is, in effect, that the law can be thought of as objective only if it is at
the same time thought of as our own self-legislated law. In other words, both the realist
or “objectivist” and the anti-realist or “subjectivist” have to be equally right or equally
wrong. Transcendentally considered, neither position could be defensible without the
other. Transcendentally, the two sides are compatible because the objectivity of the
moral law is, for practical consciousness, only the objective side of the volition that leg-
islates the law—a volition that makes it a legislation rather than a mere arbitrary maxim
(or subjective principle) precisely because it is grounded on what is objective in the will.
This conclusion does not come from a consideration of how the law must relate to a
“reality in itself ” (whether normative or factual). The conclusion follows merely from
the way we must think of free action if willing, or self-consciousness, or even con-
sciousness are to be possible at all.
Some might be tempted to interpret Fichte’s transcendental idealism as committed
to a metaethics that is anti-realist or quasi-realist. In Chapter 2, I have rejected such an
interpretation of transcendental idealism as regards the reality of the material world,
pointing out that Fichte strenuously protested against it, and explaining why he did.
Fichte did not directly confront metaethical questions as we understand them, but
I think an anti-realist or quasi-realist interpretation of Fichte on issues of metaethics
would be likewise mistaken for the same reasons.
19
The self which is normative for me is an “I,” that is, an activity of freedom; the ideal with which I ought
to harmonize must be my own free creation. See Neuhouser (1990), Chapter 4, and Tugendhat (1986),
pp. 132–43.
Moral Authority 133
The “anti-realist” or “subjectivist” side of Fichte’s deduction is not really subjectivist

or “internalist.” Instead it is rationalist—practically rationalist. It is not that we happen,
empirically, to desire what has objective value. It is rather that reason itself, which
Fichte identifies with I-hood, is constituted essentially by a certain volition, namely the
volition to act according to a real or objective ground—the very ground that makes this
volition free; that is, self-determining or self-sufficient. The doctrines which might
lead us to interpret Fichte as an anti-realist are therefore the very same doctrines that
might lead us to interpret him as a realist. I conclude that we should interpret him as
neither—at least in the way traditional metaethics understands it.20
The principle of morality, as Fichte deduces it, is merely formal; it encompasses only
the concept of moral authority. It addresses not the what of what we ought to do, but
only the why. By separating the question of the rational or motivational ground of
morality from its content, Fichte severs the connection between motivation and sub-
stantive moral truth relied on by the anti-realist argument considered above.21 Fichte’s
position, in other words, is that both sides of the metaethical antinomy stated above
must be equally right, because both are also equally wrong. On dogmatist assump-
tions, there is no way that such concepts as good, bad, right, wrong, ought, reasons, or
moral authority could both exist objectively (“in themselves,” “out there”) and also be
self-legislated by us.
From the transcendental point of view, the moral principle, as universally and cate-
gorically binding on all of us, everywhere applicable, and overriding, can exist “out
there” in the sense that it must be thought of as valid for us independently of any act of
thinking or willing that is normatively subject to it. This is precisely the same kind of
objectivity or “out-thereness” that applies to the material world, whose reality and
independence transcendental philosophy also deduces as a condition of the possibility
20
We will see later that Fichte holds that a free or self-determining I (a rational being) has certain drives,
and that one of these is the drive to form for ourselves in every situation a categorical imperative to do what
we morally ought to do (SL 4:155). This might look like a form of internalism, in the sense defined above:
that is, the view that we have a reason to do something only when, and only because, we have certain
desires. There are two reasons to doubt that Fichte is an internalist in this sense. First, it is not the drive to
form the categorical imperative that constitutes our reason for doing as we ought; it is the imperative itself.
And second, as we will see later, a drive is not the same thing as a desire. We may have a drive to do some-
thing we have no desire to do. Fichte is not an internalist in the sense that might motivate metaethical
anti-realism or quasi-realism.
21
Kantian constructivists, in contrast, usually think that we must be seen as legislating the content of
the moral law as well (which usually takes the form of one or more of the Kantian formulas). This leaves
them, as it seems to me, in an untenable position. They must say either that the content of morality is up to
our volition, or that what we legislate is not up to us at all, but determined independently of us. Neither
alternative is acceptable. According to the former, I could change the moral law at will; the latter would
leave us, as self-legislators more or less in the position of Queen Elizabeth II, who must sign all and only
the laws Parliament puts before her, and therefore is a figurehead rather than a true legislator. Fichte’s posi-
tion, by contrast, is that as the pure I, and an autonomous rational being, I am necessarily motivated to
perform whatever actions I ought to do, as determined by my understanding on objective grounds. Unlike
Kantian constructivism, it separates the motivating aspect of the law, which comes from us, from the objec-
tive aspect, which is to be determined by theoretical inquiry. It thus preserves the genuine reality and
objectivity of the content of the law, which remains independent of my will.
of consciousness—and, because practical reason is the root of all reason, of practical

consciousness even more fundamentally than theoretical consciousness. There is in
Fichte’s system a transcendental deduction of the same kind for both the material
world and for the moral law. There is no room in Fichte’s transcendental philosophy for
saying, as metaethical anti-realists want to do, that material nature, and truths about it,
are real or objective but that truths about reasons, values, or oughts are not real or
objective. The two kinds of objectivity, considered transcendentally, are equivalent.
Moral reality is just as real as physical reality. Both realisms belong to ordinary practical
consciousness. Both are empirically real precisely because they are transcendentally—
not metaphysically—ideal.
The transcendental structure of moral truths. The moral principle tells us what we
ought to do. There must be an objective fact about what we ought to do, and this requires
a “mind fits object” direction of fit, and also a reality (the objective truth “out there”) that
we ought to do it. But that fact must also give us a reason to do it, and in this there is a
“world fits mind” direction of fit. The moral law does not make our decisions for us, but
in a given situation it provides us with a reason for making them one way rather than
another, and this reason must be exactly the same as the objective truth that we ought to
do this rather than that. Neither the mind-fits-object truth nor the world-fits-mind rea-
son can come first and neither can come second. Precisely the same “mind-fits-object”
fact must be identical to the “world-fits-mind” reason for doing something.
Is it possible for any fact about the natural world, or about what exists “in itself,” to
have this structure? Many philosophers have thought not. They have thought that
moral realism, in committing us to “essentially prescriptive properties,” commits us to
a set of weird realities our concept of nature cannot accommodate, and to a set of sup-
posed facts the knowledge of which could in any case never explain how we could have
reasons for action. Their usual conclusion from these arguments is to reject metaethi-
cal realism. Fichte may be seen as agreeing with these philosophers, but drawing a
radically different conclusion. He argues that whether or not truths with this structure
fit into our conception of “reality in itself,” they are indispensable for both knowledge
and action in the life-world we inhabit. So we must accept them on transcendental
grounds, which are prior to any justified thoughts we might have about “reality in
itself.” Notice what this implies about Fichte’s response to metaethical anti-realists who
say there can be no moral reality because knowledge of mind-independent reality
arises from its causally acting upon us, and there is no way any “moral reality” could
causally act upon us. Fichte denies the implicit premise that we know the existence
of external physical reality in this way. As a transcendental idealist, he holds that we
know the external world exists because its existence is a transcendental condition of
the possibility of consciousness.
Fichte accepts that further empirical knowledge of the material world depends on
its causal action on us, whose transcendental necessity Fichte’s philosophy tries to
deduce. We know moral reality exists in exactly the same way, because it is a condition
Moral Authority 135
for the possibility of practical consciousness. More specific moral knowledge is not
acquired through the causal action of material reality on us. Instead, it is to be tran-
scendentally deduced, as we have seen regarding the moral law in this chapter. The
obvious difference is that ethics depends solely on our activity as free beings. Only
someone who exists at the lowest stage of moral development—the stage Fichte thinks
is usually occupied by dogmatists—could hold the contemptible opinion that ethical
knowledge arises from our causal passivity to nature.
Fichte would reject twentieth-century metaethics—not only its answers, but even
its questions—because all the options, realist or anti-realist, presuppose dogmatism.
It might be thought that Fichte’s position comes closest, among recent views in metae-
thics, to what Hussain and Shah (2006, p. 268), have called “quietism”: that there is “no
way of getting outside normative thought to explain it,” thus no way of answering
metaethical questions. If we stipulate that metaethical questions are necessarily asked
from a dogmatist standpoint, then Fichte would agree, since he holds that there is no
possibility of answering any philosophical questions posed from a dogmatist standpoint.
But if metaethical questions are interpreted simply as questions about the foundation
and justifiability of such concepts as that of moral authority—later, we will see also
about other moral concepts, such as conscientious conviction, duty, and even ethical
truth—then Fichte certainly does hold that such questions can be answered: from a
transcendental standpoint. In fact, the Fichtean arguments we have tried to understand
in this chapter, and the ones we will be exploring in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, are precisely
attempts to offer not dogmatist but transcendental idealist answers to those questions.
But such questions do not belong to any “meta-discipline.” They belong to ethics itself.
This is parallel to Fichte’s rejection of the traditional problem of free will. We
must presuppose freedom because, both as agents and knowers, not to do so is self-
undermining for us. We must likewise presuppose a moral law that is both real or
objective and also self-legislated by our volitions, because this conjunction is the
only way free agents can coherently think about themselves and their actions. If
the conjunction makes for an impossible (dogmatist) metaphysics, then so much
the worse for such a metaphysics.
5
Conscience
The Applicability of the Principle of Morality
Fichte’s deduction of the moral law is really the deduction only of a certain concept—that
of a categorical imperative or moral authority. The deduced law supplies a categorical
obligation, and thus also a pure rational motivation, for the actions to which it applies.
But it does not tell us which actions are categorically required, or even guarantee that
there are such actions. As Fichte tells us, the deduction itself does not show that the
deduced concept of moral authority can be applied to determinate actions (SL 4:63–4).
The applicability of the law is the object of a separate deduction, which takes place in
Part Two of the System of Ethics. Then the actual application of the law is the subject
of Part Three.
§1: Fichte’s Systematic Project: its Aims and Structure

Fichte thinks there are no merely permissible or meritorious actions. In any given situ-
ation, there is for you one course of action which the categorical imperative requires;
all others are forbidden. Given such a view, many moral philosophers today would
think it urgent for him to provide some discursive criterion of right action. But this
task, as it is often understood, is not on his agenda at all. We will see why it is not if we
understand Fichte’s theory of conscience and conscientious conviction. This theory
will be the main focus of this chapter, but we will not get to it right away.
Fichte’s method involves the interplay between an ordinary, everyday, or common
sense standpoint and a transcendental, philosophical, or scientific standpoint; the latter
is supposed to explain and justify what is known from the former. The ordinary moral
agent, according to Fichte, applies the principle of morality through conscientious
convictions about what to do (SL 4:155–6). Therefore, Fichte proposes to show the
applicability of the principle of morality by offering a transcendental justification of
the experience of moral conscience, as it is found in the life of the ordinary agent.
Fichte’s investigation into conscience involves two phases. In Part Two of the System
of Ethics (§§4–13), Fichte will claim to have shown that the moral law’s applicability,
from the ordinary standpoint, takes the form of the conviction that something is our
duty, in other words, the form of our conscience. Yet at the point where this is estab-
lished, Fichte later says, “we were quite unable to see how we could determine a priori
what our duty is; we possessed no criterion at all for determining this, beyond the
approval and disapproval of our conscience following the deed” (SL 4:209) (emphasis
added). There must therefore be a second phase in the discussion of conscience, at
the beginning of Part Three, where Fichte completes his treatment of conscience by
showing how it can operate prior to action.
According to Fichte, the deduction of the concept of conscience (and the feelings
associated with it) provides a transcendental deduction of the applicability of the moral
law (the concept of moral authority). This does not yet provide the moral law’s applica-
tion, or offer a theoretical account of those actions to which the moral law applies. As
Fichte describes the situation: “With this we guaranteed the applicability of the moral
law. This is sufficient for the purposes of acting in the course of life, but not for the
purposes of science” (SL 4:209). Therefore, a further inquiry is needed to establish
what we can know about our duties from a transcendental or scientific standpoint.
Conscience plays a role in determining, from the ordinary standpoint, which actions
are right and which wrong. But it does not play this role in Fichte’s “scientific” account
of the content of our duties, which will be the topic of our Chapters 6 and 7.
§2: A Transcendental Theory of the Human

Practical Condition
Fichte’s theory of conscience is based on the transcendental conditions for human
action. The first four sections of Part Two (§§4–7) provide a transcendental account of
the relation between our action on the world and our cognition of the world. Parts
of this transcendental theory are presented in greater detail in other works, such as
the Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science (1794) and Fichte’s lectures on the
“Wisseschaftslehre nova methodo” (1796–1799). In Chapter 3 we have already dealt
with two basic conditions of action for Fichte: freedom and intersubjectivity. The pres-
ent section of this chapter will be devoted to summarizing the results Fichte claims to
reach in §§4–8 of the System of Ethics.
Fichte is struck by the fact that skeptical doubt, and the response to it, has been
directed to our capacity to represent the world, but no one has devoted comparable
attention to how it is possible for us to form the concepts of ends and then realize them
in the world (SL 4:2). Peter Baumanns is correct in saying that “by posing this question,
Fichte became the founder of the systematic transcendental philosophy of action”
(Baumanns 1990, p. 136). Fichte begins his task by illustrating the reality and applicabil-
ity of the concept of morality through a comparison with the reality and applicability of
two other concepts—those of causality in the empirical world, as the way we must think
of the connection of occurrences, and of right, as the way we must think of other rational
beings and the mutual relatedness of our external freedom to theirs (SL 4: 64).
Here again Fichte is concerned with “direction of fit.” In the case of the concept of
moral authority, he points out that it is unlike the concept of causality, which has an
Conscience 139
object in the form of something actual in the world to which the concept is supposed to
fit or correspond in order that the concept should be correct. Instead, moral authority
is like the concept of right: it takes the form of an idea (Idee) in us, or a task for thinking,
which the world and our actions ought to fit or to which they must correspond
(SL 4:64–6). The primary reason for Fichte’s preoccupation with these differences
in direction of fit is that our practical situation involves the mutual dependency of
theoretical cognition and practical striving. In cognition, the concept is supposed to
correspond to reality, or to be a copy (Nachbild) of it; for practice, the concept is a
model (Vorbild) to which reality is to be made to correspond. A concept regarded in
the latter way is the concept of an end (Zweck) (SL 4:71).
Freedom, temporality, and worldhood. This necessary reciprocity of theory and
practice makes our freedom itself into a theoretical principle, into a condition of the
possibility of cognition (SL 4:75–6). From a transcendental standpoint, the subject’s
freedom to act—to inquire, to experience, to draw conclusions—grounds transcen-
dentally the constitution of the empirical world which is the object of cognition. As we
saw in Chapter 3, freedom relates to cognition of the objective world not as an object
(as something known or theoretically comprehended), but only as a transcendental
condition for theoretical inquiry. This is why the traditional (dogmatic, metaphysical)
problem of free will is forever insoluble.
Consciousness is possible only in time, and only for an imagination that hovers
(schwebt) between alternative real possibilities, open to the I’s own choice (SL 4:97,
GWL 1:216–17, SL 4:136–7). This is the meaning of time’s “arrow.” The past is a fixed,
unchangeable condition of action, while the future is open to modification by our free
choices (SL 4:78–9). This is why each present moment is conditioned by a past moment,
and is in turn the condition of, but not conditioned by, the following moment.
Time is a determinate series of successive moments, in which each single moment is conditioned
by another, one that is not, in turn, conditioned by the moment it conditions, and conditions
another moment, which does not, in turn, condition it.
(SL 4:97)
Thus it is through the will and only through it that the future is grasped within the present
moment; it is through the will that the concept of the future in general becomes possible.
(NR 3:117–18)
For us there must necessarily be a past. For only if there is a past can there be a present, and
only if there is a present is consciousness possible . . . Consciousness is possible only if the I
posits a not-I in opposition to itself. Understandably, this is possible only if the I directs its ideal
activity at the not-I. This is an activity of the I and not of the not-I only insofar as it is free
activity, that is, only insofar as it could be directed at any other object instead of this one.
(GEW 1:409–10)
The I is not a substance or a thing, but only an act. Because it is not a thing, it has no
“nature” through which it might be acted upon and its states causally necessitated by
other things. But the I is necessarily finite and situated; it is limited, resisted, and
challenged by a world. The I is passive to that world, whose causality on it sets a boundary
or limit to its efficacy (SL 4:97–8): “The determination to act presupposes stasis . . . [The I]
must already have been provided with its object, and must have received it passively.
Hence self-determination to act necessarily presupposes a passive state” (GEW 1:372–3).
The object is some thing or state of affairs that provides action with its situation
(Lage). The awareness of passivity to this object is “feeling,” which is fundamental to all
consciousness (GWL 1:289–322, GEW 1:365–72, SL 4:105–6). The situation offers
different possibilities among which the free will must choose.
The situation of the I is its world. The practical situation of any freely acting subject is
what provides it with the conditions of action. These conditions are its life-world, its
own world. “My world . . . is determined through its opposition or contrast with me:
that is, the world as I originally find it, the world that is supposed to exist without any
assistance from me, is determined by its opposition to me, through its contrast with
me as I necessarily find myself to be, not as I perhaps ought to make myself freely”
(SL 4:72–3). This is the source of later existentialist ideas of “worldhood.”1
Powers, actions, and the lived body. Fichte argues that our practical powers can be
self-ascribed only through their actual exercise: “A rational being is equally unable to
ascribe to itself a power of freedom without finding in itself an actual exercise of this
power, that is, an actual act of free willing” (SL 4:83). Fichte’s argument is derived from
the contrast between willing and cognition. Volition and cognition, once again, are
distinct and opposed, but reciprocally dependent. In order to cognize, I must will, and
vice versa. Fichte insists that I cannot feel my willing (SL 4:86)—that is, I can have no
merely subjective awareness of it. “A rational being cannot find in itself any application
of its freedom or its willing without at the same time ascribing an actual causality out-
side itself ” (SL 4:89). My volition itself can therefore be cognized only through its
objective efficacy. This follows from the rejection of Cartesian substance dualism. The
concept of a disembodied free agent or rational being is incoherent, since embodiment
is a transcendental condition for the I’s active relation to the not-I.2 Since the only
1
Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world,” Befindlichkeit, and “facticity” are also to be understood as the tran-
scendental conditions of all more abstract conceptions that people may form of an “objective” world (for
example, the world human beings cognize through natural science) (Heidegger 1953, pp. 52–62, 130–40).
Fichte is also the author of the Heideggerian conception of spatiality as distance or “de-severance” (Ent-
fernung) (Heidegger 1953, pp. 101–11). Spatiality, transcendentally considered, is first and foremost that
which separates us from, or alternatively connects us to, the changes in our world that we can bring about
through our free agency. “Object X lies at such and such a distance from me in space means that in travers-
ing the space from me to the object I must first apprehend and posit such and such other objects in order
to be able to posit the object in question” (SL 4:99). It is sometimes also observed that Fichte invented the
existentialist term “facticity.” This is true, but its invention came in 1804 and he did not use it in the same
sense the existentialists later did (WL1804, GA II/8,182; cf. GA II/8:77, 299).
2
The precursor of Fichte’s view here is Spinoza’s thesis that the mind and body are the same thing (res),
conceived under different attributes, so that every action of the mind—conscious or unconscious—is
also a change in the body, causing further changes in the external corporeal world (Spinoza, Ethics II
P 13–14, P21S).
Conscience 141
existing subject of our free actions is our body, every volition on our part is identical to
some bodily change, effecting a change in other bodies within our world.
One corollary is that (as we may put it) there are no purely immanent actions.3 There
are no volitions that merely bring about external changes indirectly, or that might pos-
sibly bring them about, but also might not. There is nothing like Kant’s good (or bad)
will, which might exist, and be morally evaluated (“shine like a jewel”) purely for
itself, entirely apart from its “external” effects (G 4:394). For Fichte, willing is always
manifested in the body, and always externally directed. The concept of an end is our
representation of an action that prefigures and grounds the action; but I do not first
(at one moment) form the concept of an end, and then (at a later moment) perform the
action. On the contrary: “The act of projecting the concept does not precede the act
[of volition] in time” (SL 4:88). Rather, to project (entwerfen) the end is already
to act (SL 4:85–6). The existentialists later express this Fichtean idea: Freedom itself
is a project. Every action, properly speaking, is constituted by the projection of an
end. The value of freedom is not separable from the value of the specific and situated
projects—perhaps a whole series of such projects—in which it is embodied.
A second corollary: “Properly speaking, therefore, if we are at all able to will some-
thing, then we are also able to do it” (SL 4:94).4 We may wish for something beyond our
power, but cannot will it. Apparent counterexamples to this claim, Fichte says, always
involve a series of volitions (and actions) through which an ultimate end is to be
brought about indirectly through a series of intermediate ends and actions (SL 4:94).
When we think we are able to will something but not able to do it, this is merely a case
of willing, and therefore also being able to do, a certain part of this series. To act is to
make a change in my body, which at the same time effects a change in the world.
If, therefore, I were able to change something in myself by means of my will, then my world
would be changed as well, and by displaying the possibility of the former, that of the latter would
be explained as well. “My world is changed” means “I am changed.”
(SL 4:72)
All volition is directed both to the I itself and to its world.
3
In the Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte seems at pains to contradict this, claiming (for instance)
that forming the concept of an end involves no bodily or external action (NR 3: 55, 113). Strictly speaking,
this contradicts even some claims he makes within that work (NR 3:59). But his intent seems to be to dis-
tinguish a class of volitions that cannot be publicly observed or known, and therefore cannot be subject to
coercive legislation. There might be a class of volitions of which this is true, even if it is true that every
volition does result in some consequences for our body and its relation to external things. There might be
no way of determining publicly, for example, that I have set one end rather than another, and this should
exempt such actions from coercive regulation.
4
This formulation is bound to remind us of Schopenhauer’s repeated claim in the essay on the freedom of the
will: “I can do what I will” (Schopenhauer 2005, pp. 6, 16, 19 et passim). I take this to be no accident. Although
he has no kind words for Fichte, Schopenhauer frequently offers him the sincerest form of flattery one
philosopher possibly can bestow on another: he regularly borrows his doctrines (without acknowledgment).
Schopenhauer’s famous doctrine that the I knows itself immediately as will is obviously another such case.
Organism and articulation. A further corollary of the proposition that every voli-
tion is also an efficacious action is that my experience of my body is essentially differ-
ent from my experience of other objects in the world. My body is never merely an
external or remote means of my free action. From the transcendental point of view, as a
free agent “I am my body” (SL 4:127). Every action of my body involves my freedom.
My body is never merely an object of theoretical cognition. It is always at the same time
an expression of my volition and free agency. This is not a merely “subjective” experi-
ence of my body, to be contrasted with the “objective” study of my body as one object
among others in the material world. For it is only through this experience of my body
that I am able to acquire cognition about anything at all. The lived body is a transcen-
dentally necessary condition of all cognition, by being the condition of the free action
on which all cognition depends.
The system of representations constituting the starting point for my causal efficacy
in the world must therefore be distinct from any system of representations constituting
the external objects on which I act (SL 4:98–9). This is a transcendentally necessary
truth. Studying my body as a mere object is therefore essentially different from experi-
encing it through my own agency and the drives that affect that agency. Fichte infers
that there are necessarily two different concepts of the way the human body is arranged
and operates.5 The self-positing and active I must be situated not only in a material
body, but also in a living body. The natural or unconscious disposition of the parts or
organs of this body falls under the concept of an organism. This, in Kantian terms, is an
application of the concept of reflective judgment expressing inner or natural purpo-
siveness, as presented in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (NR 3:77–8; cf.
SL 4:134).6 That would be what makes the human body the body of a living thing—an
animal of a certain species. In contrast, however, the body can also be viewed as the
system of starting points for conscious free action. Then its arrangement falls not
under the concept “organization” but under a quite distinct concept of “articulation”
(Artikulation) (NR 3:59–61; SL 4:98).7
5
It is beyond the scope of this book to explore the consequences of this proposition for perceptual and
cognitive psychology. But two important later developments of Fichte’s basic position are found in Merleau-
Ponty (1958) and Gibson (1986). For a critical survey of more recent theories of this kind, see Shapiro
(2011). A recent helpful discussion of Fichte on this topic is Goh (2015).
6
The unity of the natural or unconscious aspect of the human being (the human body) with its free and
consciously self-positing aspect is an important theme in Fichte’s philosophy—sometimes a paradoxical
one. It is involved, for example, in his curious thesis that while the I is nothing unless it is self-conscious,
the original Act (Tathandlung) of the I—through which it posits itself along with the not-I (the natural
world on which it acts and which it cognizes)—is necessarily unconscious, and can be established only
philosophically, through inferences from the self-positing of the I to its transcendental conditions
(GWL 1:91, 265–6, NR 3:2–3; SL 4: 1).
7
The articulation of a living body appears to presuppose free agency. In a brief discussion of the nature
of non-human animals, apparently written shortly after the System of Ethics, Fichte claims that the body of
an animal is distinguished from that of a plant by the fact that it involves articulation (SW 11:366). He
admits that articulation in human beings presupposes free will, but claims that in the case of other animals,
there can be articulation that operates with necessity (SW 11:367). He does not resolve the apparent
Conscience 143
Deduction of the concept of a drive. The mutual dependency of cognition and activ-
ity, showing itself in these two aspects of the human body as both organized and articu-
lated, creates an antinomy, whose resolution occupies §8 of the System of Ethics.
Thesis: A rational being has no cognition except as the result of the limitation of its activity.
Antithesis: But self-activity does not pertain to a rational being as such except in consequence
of a cognition, at the very least in consequence of a cognition of something in the rational being
itself.
(SL 4:102)
The aporia identified here, at least in its most immediate form, is not the threat of a
contradiction, but instead (as Fichte himself presently tells us, SL 4:103), the threat of
a vicious circularity. The practical conditions and the theoretical conditions of free
action seem to depend on each other in a way that threatens to make both unexplaina-
ble, hence transcendentally impossible. This is what threatens us with a contradiction:
what has already been shown to be transcendentally necessary appears also to be tran-
scendentally impossible.
Fichte’s resolution of the antinomy is hinted at in the final phrase of the antithesis:
“at the very least in consequence of a cognition of something in the rational being
itself.” What we appear to need here is the cognition of something in the rational
being itself that is at one and the same time both a cognition of nature within it—of its
organism or its unconscious aspect—and also a free activity of the rational being. As
with most other such Fichtean antinomies (and their resolution through the synthetic
method) the concept transcendentally deduced by means of the antinomy may itself at
first seem paradoxical or even self-contradictory. In this case, it seems impossible for
the object of a theoretical cognition to be identical with a free activity. Yet as we saw in
Chapter 3, regarding the concept of the summons, the task of resolving the antinomy is
that of presenting this paradoxical concept to us in such a way that it is not only seen to
be possible and intelligible but also to be inevitable, a condition of the very possibility
of experience. In this case, the experience to be accounted for is that of being a rational
agent embodied in a natural organic body that is at the same time capable of free artic-
ulation by this same agent. Fichte’s name for the deduced concept is drive (Trieb).
§3: The Natural Drive and the Pure Drive

In Chapter 4 we were introduced to the concept of a drive, as part of Fichte’s account of
our consciousness of the I’s true essence or original being. A drive is a tendency that
“operates necessarily in a materially determined manner, so long as the conditions of
its efficacy are present” (SL 4:29); yet it is also “a real, inner explanatory ground of
c ontradiction in this statement. Fichte’s ethical writings say virtually nothing about our moral obligations
regarding non-human animals.
an actual self-activity” (SL 4:40) that becomes conscious, or a cognition (SL 4:106).
“Activity, taken objectively, is drive” (SL 4:105).
Drives and consciousness. Transcendental idealism explains the possibility of expe-
rience by deriving it, through a series of steps, from the possibility of self-conscious-
ness. The fundamental condition of self-consciousness, as Fichte argues, is freedom.
Philosophy begins by abstracting from everyday experience, and proceeds stepwise by
deriving the conditions of experience from the possibility of freedom. The concept of a
drive thus arises as the way nature in us is experienced as our own free activity. Since it
is an expression of freedom, a drive cannot be comprehended causally or mechanisti-
cally (SL 4:111). Under the appropriate conditions, I am necessarily subject to the
drive, but when I act according to the drive it is not the drive that acts but I who act
with formal freedom according to the drive. To respond to a drive, however, is not to
act with material freedom. This makes the natural drive the boundary between neces-
sity and freedom, between passivity and activity.
The drive and the feeling of the drive are supposed to exercise no causality upon freedom. The
drive notwithstanding, I am able to determine myself in a manner contrary to the drive, just as
I can determine myself in a manner that conforms to the drive; but it is always I myself which
determines me, and in no way am I determined by the drive.
(SL 4:108)
The drive does not act efficaciously within consciousness, but it is I who act efficaciously or do
not act efficaciously, in accordance with this drive. Here lies the point of transition of the
rational being to self-sufficiency; here lies the determinate, sharp boundary between necessity
and freedom.
(SL 4:125)
The natural drive is nature within the I itself—within its free activity. Our limitedness
as natural beings manifests itself in the natural systems that we are as purposive
organisms. My nature consists, therefore, in being “an original, determinate system of
drives and feelings,” which, although a manifestation of my activity, are “fixed and
determined independently of freedom,” and therefore called nature. “I am myself, in a
certain respect, nature, notwithstanding the absolute character of reason and freedom,
and this nature of mine is a drive” (SL 4:109).
A drive is not cognized in me but rather felt; feeling is not an objective cognition,
but entirely subjective (SL 4:106–7). The characteristic feeling that belongs to a drive as
such is a longing (Sehnen), which Fichte describes as “an indeterminate sensation
of need, not determined through the concept of an object” (SL 4:106). We feel longing
when we are driven but do not know what we desire. Because I am a living organism
whose internally purposive system is a plurality, different drives can also be present
in me, each with the concept of its determinate object, and in that way the system of
natural drives constitutes a system of determinate drives, corresponding to my organic
nature (SL 4:109, 114–15). When a drive is determined by an object, it ceases to be
longing and becomes desire: “A longing determined through its object . . . is called a
Conscience 145
desiring” (SL 4:126). The satisfaction of a given desire is always a determinate way in
which some thing external to the body is brought into harmony with its natural drives.
A natural drive, simply as such, aims at such a satisfaction simply for its own sake, which
Fichte calls “enjoyment” (Genuß) (SL 4:128).
Stages of moral consciousness. As we saw in Chapter 4, there is in the rational being
also a drive that does not comes from nature, or from the I’s dependency on (passivity
to) external objects, but is a pure manifestation of freedom, the “drive toward the
entire I” (SL 4:44). In Part One of the System of Ethics, Fichte was interested in this
drive only insofar as it manifested the “pure being” or “true essence” of the I, and
grounded the principle of morality. In Part Two, he relates this drive to our natural
drive, as part of his strategy for showing that this principle can be applied to our
actions. Fichte’s transcendental account attempts to derive this application by way of a
series of steps. Each of them is an abstraction from the conditions of action, but taken
together they proceed toward the concrete, and they ground a transcendental account
of moral agency and motivation in a specific situation.
The acts of the I that lead from the natural drive to the pure drive are acts of reflec-
tion. We can, of course, reflect on any of our mental states. We can be aware of feeling a
pleasure or a pain, or of passively perceiving something in our environment. We can
then further reflect on the fact that we are in these states. But every state of the free
agent for Fichte involves our agency—if only through the original self-consciousness
(apperception, self-positing) that makes all consciousness possible. And Fichte is here
interested in reflection specifically on the volitional agency involved in the states on
which we reflect. These states then are determined as drives.
A drive may be experienced by us as if it were something to which we are merely
passive. Moral vice and bad character take that form—the form of formal freedom
without material freedom.8 We remain passive to our drives and (with formal free-
dom) let ourselves be determined by them. The absence of reflection on drives involved
in this passive attitude is not, however, an absence of agency. It is merely a deficient way
of exercising free agency—namely, that of failing to exercise it actively, or with material
freedom. The first step toward the active exercise of freedom consists in reflecting
8
For a good discussion of this feature of Fichte’s theory of freedom, see Goh (2012). Michelle Kosch
recognizes the degrees of agency involved in this doctrine. She interprets degrees of agency as corre-
sponding to degrees of moral responsibility, and thus concludes that Fichte tells “two inconsistent stories”
about formal freedom, one story in relation to right and another story in relation to ethics (Kosch 2011,
pp. 162–4). There is something correct in this, for a lesser degree of agency might mean a lesser degree
of responsibility in the view of others—e.g. a lesser degree of legal responsibility in cases of wrongful or
criminal behavior. (Fichte does not seem to me clear on whether this would be so: he says too little about
the psychological side of criminal responsibility.) But there seems to me no inconsistency. Kosch thinks
it calls into question Fichte’s entire discussion of evil (SL §16). She even describes “evil” in his account as
a “mischaracterization.” Kosch apparently thinks the lower degree of agency exempts the agent from
moral evil (p. 167). But this is clearly not Fichte’s position. Formal freedom always involves an awareness
that our drives are non-determining: we are always aware of being free to resist them, and thereby
advance to a higher level of reflection. We are to blame for not doing so (SL 4:174). In fact, this is the
most basic kind of moral evil for Fichte. For further discussion of this point, see §8 of this chapter.
on our drives. This process of reflection makes possible actions that were impossible at
a lower stage of reflection, and thus it permits Fichte to explain actions at the lower
level, and even to claim that, relative to a given stage of reflection, no other action was
possible for the agent.
At this point Fichte anticipates Kierkegaard’s idea of “stages of existence.” For
Fichte, as for Kierkegaard, most people exist on the lowest stage: what Kierkegaard
calls the “aesthetic.” They identify passively with their states rather than with their
freedom; they are passive to their desires. Kierkegaard’s young melancholy “aesthetic
man” (or “A”) is unusual only because he is aesthetic, yet reflective; he is on the
brink of transcending this stage. When Fichte discusses the “ordinary standpoint”
in relation to morality, he is referring to the consciousness of those who have begun
to reflect, who are in some way open to what he calls their “moral nature.” This is
potentially the stage of any of us, because we are all constantly aware of our freedom.
We remain passive to our desires, failing to reflect, only by refusing to reflect. This
refusal is a continual self-deceptive flight from our reason and our humanity. It is, at
least at the present stage of humanity’s development, the condition of most of us most
of the time.
Fichte derives our present moral condition from our place in history. For reasons
we will begin to understand only in Chapter 6 §9, Fichte holds that human history
must be comprehended as a single whole or system of action, involving both past
and future generations. In his lectures The Fundamental Characteristics of the Present
Age (1805), Fichte says that humanity emerged from an epoch of innocence, where
people were subject only to non-rational instincts, into a condition where it was
under the non-rational authority of power and tradition. Fichte’s theological name
for this stage is the epoch of incipient sin. In the modern world, we have in turn
emerged from this into a third stage: an age of liberation. We are free from both
instinct and authority, but also from law in general: this is the epoch of completed
sinfulness. We stand on the brink of a fourth stage, in which the authority of reason
and science will take the place of power in human affairs: the epoch of incipient justi-
fication; eventually, Fichte thinks, if humanity pursues its vocation, then truth will
triumph in a fifth epoch of completed justification and sanctification (GGZ 7:11–12).
It is the perilous third stage of human history that determines our present precarious
moral condition.
Reflection on natural drives. Reflection on our drives makes accessible to us the pure
drive, which aims at freedom for its own sake. The I arrives at its pure drive through an
ordered pair of two acts of reflection. First, it reflects on its natural drive, perhaps in the
form of a determinate desire (SL 4:127); it thereby posits itself as free in relation to that
desire. Through this first act of reflection, the I raises itself above its natural drive, and
sees natural drives as constituting its “lower power of desire” (SL 4:127).
The reflecting subject stands higher than what it reflects upon; it rises above and includes the
latter within itself. For this reason, the drive of the reflecting subject, the subject of consciousness,
Conscience 147
is rightly called the higher drive, and a power of desire determined through this drive is called
the higher power of desire.
(SL 4:131)
The I is then capable of a second act of reflection: it reflects on the fact that, through
the first act, it has constituted itself as this higher power. This “contains nothing but the
pure absolute activity that occurred in the first act of reflection; and this pure activity
alone is the proper and true I” (SL 4:140). But it brings to light, from a transcendental
standpoint, a new and higher drive, “a drive for freedom simply for freedom’s sake”
(SL 4:139). This drive, and its object, do not enter ordinary consciousness; they must
be inferred by transcendental philosophy as necessary for these acts of reflection. “The
pure drive is something that lies outside all consciousness; it is nothing but the tran-
scendental explanatory ground of something in consciousness” (SL 4:152). The pure
drive, however, can also be understood as the transcendental ground of certain feelings
recognizable in ordinary consciousness. The first of these feelings is that of the supreme
worth or dignity of our humanity (SL 4:142). Others will be taken up below, in §5 of
this chapter.
§4: What is Material Freedom?

Transcendental consideration of the two acts of reflection brings to light another
aspect of the distinction between formal and material freedom. We are formally free
when we reflect on a natural drive and become aware of it as non-determining
(SL 4:135). The first act of reflection on a drive makes us aware of our formal freedom,
the indeterminacy of our will. The second makes us aware of a possibility of acting
independently of our natural drives.
Indeterminacy is impossible if the I obeys only its natural drive. There would therefore have to
be a drive to determine oneself without reference to the natural drive and contrary to it, a drive
to derive the material of one’s action not from the natural drive but from oneself.
(SL 4:139)
This is what Fichte calls “the pure drive”; its object has to be freedom simply for freedom’s
sake. By acting on this drive, we achieve material freedom.
[Formal freedom] consists merely in the fact that a new formal principle comes on the scene,
without making the slightest change in the series of effects. In this case, it is no longer nature
that acts, but a free being, even though the latter brings about exactly the same thing that
nature would have brought about if it had continued to act. [By contrast,] freedom in the
second sense consists in this: not only does a new force come upon the scene, but there is a
completely new series of actions, with respect to the content of the same. Not only does the
intellect engage from now on in efficacious action, but it also accomplishes something different
from what nature would ever have accomplished.
(SL 4:139)
What actions belong to this “new series,” and how are they to be identified? What
Fichte tells us immediately about this is intended to follow directly from his transcen-
dental argument, but it may perplex us more than it satisfies us. Materially free
actions, he says, respond to the “pure drive,” the drive for freedom simply for freedom’s
sake. “The pure drive aims at absolute independence, i.e. it lies in a series through the
continuation of which the I would have to become independent” (SL 4:149). How can an
action be part of a series whose continuation would lead to “absolute independence?”
What series is this? And how are we to recognize actions that belong to it?
A calculative-consequentialist interpretation? If we could formulate a conception
of “absolute independence or self-sufficiency” as an end that might be achieved, or at
least maximized, then we could calculate which actions best serve as means to its max-
imization. Those would be the materially free actions. This is the interpretation pro-
posed by Kosch:
For Kant, the fundamental principle of morality requires that we choose only in such a way
that the maxim of choice can at the same time be willed as a universal law by and for a realm
of rational agents. Kant emphasizes that this principle is “formal”; a material principle, by
contrast, would prescribe the production of an end and judge the goodness of acts, rules, or
policies on the basis of their tendency to produce or further that end. Fichte’s moral principle,
by contrast [with Kant’s], is material in just this sense . . . His moral principle requires . . . that
we pursue the substantive end of rational agency’s perfection and material independence
from external limitations of all kinds.
(Kosch 2014, pp. 2–3)
The first major obstacle to understanding Fichte in this way is the abstractness,
or even the virtual unintelligibility, of the end of “absolute independence or self-
sufficiency.” “Most of the descriptions of material independence in the System of
Ethics,” Kosch observes, “are unhelpfully abstract” and some of them even “sound
absurd.” (In Chapter 6 §1, we will see that these are in fact understatements.) However,
Kosch claims to have found in more popular works, such as The Vocation of Man, what
Fichte really means by “absolute self-sufficiency.” There, she says, “progress toward
material independence or self-sufficiency is depicted (in part) as progress away from a
situation in which the species must struggle for survival ‘against recalcitrant nature’ ”
(Kosch 2014, p. 7).
I find puzzling Kosch’s curious qualification “in part.” She does not explain what else
she thinks absolute self-sufficiency would involve. Until we have a complete account of
self-sufficiency, we could surely be in no position to calculate which actions would
maximize achievement of the end. But in her further interpretation of Fichte’s ethics,
Kosch seems to treat maximal control over nature as simply identical with the end of
absolute self-sufficiency. Significantly, she adds that “the end of material independence
must involve the right ordering of people’s relations to one another as well as the right
ordering of their relations to non-human nature” (Kosch 2014, p. 8). But the thrust of
Fichte’s theory, according to Kosch, is a “non-welfarist consequentialist ethical theory”;
Conscience 149
it is “antithetical to the deontological commitments that draw many to Kant” (Kosch
2014, p. 2; Kosch 2011, p. 151). Practical reasoning consists wholly in the sort of rea-
soning Kant calls “technical-practical”; it is entirely “calculative reasoning” (Kosch
2011, pp. 158, 160). “For Fichte, moral reasoning consists of the same maximizing
calculative reasoning that, for Kant, characterizes the prudential case only” (Kosch
2011, pp. 157–8).9
Why this can’t be right. The suggestion that Fichte is a consequentialist, an enemy of
“deontological commitments”—that he proposes a “material moral principle” (in
Kant’s sense of that term)—all this seems to me to stand in clear contradiction to both
the letter and the spirit of Fichte’s ethics. In fact, I doubt that there is any figure in the
entire history of ethics who is more radically committed to deontology than Fichte, or
more relentlessly hostile to consequentialist reasoning in ethics. The main ground for
Kosch’s interpretation, it seems to me, is that it would do what many moral philoso-
phers might expect of Fichte, but also what I have said is not on his agenda at all. It
would, namely, provide us with a discursive criterion of right action. If we reject
Kosch’s interpretation, our alternative must explain why we ought not to be attracted
by the prospect of such a determinate moral criterion. It will take some discussion,
both in this chapter and in the next, to develop what I regard as the correct alternative.
Here is a beginning. In the Vocation of Man Fichte asserts the following:
There is something which I am called upon to do, simply in order that it may be done . . . I must
not have an end assigned to me and then inquire how I must act in order to attain this end;
my action must not be dependent on the end: I must act in a certain manner simply because
I ought so to act . . . I will that something shall come to pass, because I must act so that it may
come to pass . . . I act as I do not because a certain end is to be attained, but the end becomes an
end to me because I am bound to act in the manner by which it may be attained . . . The end
does not determine the commandment; on the contrary, the immediately given purport of the
commandment determines the end.
(BM 2:264–5)
It is clear from this passage that we are to understand the end of absolute self-sufficiency
in such a way that its pursuit consists in the series of actions that we have already and
independently identified as materially free. As Fichte emphasizes: the end does not
determine the commandment, but the commandment determines the end. I think
this means both the immediate end of each materially free action, and the final end
of self-sufficiency.
Fichte repeatedly declares the end of independence or self-sufficiency to be “infinitely
distant” and impossible of attainment (SL 4:149–50, 211). These statements should not
9
This gets Kant wrong as well as Fichte. For Kant, prudence is not a matter of “maximizing desire-
satisfaction,” but rather of creating the concept of a distinct end (happiness), which combines inclinations
into a whole attainable by us. This is not a merely maximizing process; prudence is also not only a matter
of choosing means to happiness; it is mainly a matter of giving happiness priority over other empirical
ends. See Wood (2014a), Chapter 2, pp. 52–60.
be understood (in the way Kosch apparently understands them) as saying only that it
is the kind of maximum which (like the maximal or perfect general happiness for a
utilitarian), though it can never be reached perfectly or completely under actual condi-
tions, can nevertheless be approximated or maximized. The limitation of the I by the
not-I is a transcendental condition of the possibility of the I itself. We cannot maximize
an end whose achievement would abolish the very conditions of our striving in general.10
In Chapter 6 §§1–2, we will argue for this claim in greater detail.
Fichte does, however, regard it as urgent to answer the question: “How can one draw
nearer to an infinite end?” He does not answer this question by offering a “more help-
ful” and less “absurd” characterization of the final end. He says instead only that I “draw
nearer to it for myself ” by always “having before my eyes some determinate goal,” and
I grasp my relation to the infinite pursuit of my final end always only within a “deter-
minate range” (SL 4:150). The series of actions projecting these determinate ends
constitutes my ethical vocation. “At each moment there is something suitable for my
ethical vocation” (SL 4:151). In other words: In my present situation, I render myself
more free (hence, in that sense, “closer” to absolute self-sufficiency) only by perform-
ing that action which is categorically required of me—that is, the action required by
deontological considerations, independent of any assumed end. Again, this point will
be discussed further in Chapter 6 §§1–2.
When it comes to material or teleological theories of ethics, Fichte wholly agrees
with Kant in rejecting all such theories. He rejects any ethics grounded on an end which
would serve to recommend actions only technically-practically, by determining
which actions are to be taken as means to it. Both Kant and Fichte hold that, on the
contrary, we identify the ends of action by first identifying the principles we should
follow and the actions we should perform or omit. These actions and omissions, cate-
gorically commanded, are what then enable us to determine the end of the specific
action required of us. For Kant, the ends we should pursue include the “duties of
virtue”—one’s own perfection and the happiness of others—and ultimately the summum
bonum or highest good for the world. These ends are not determined calculatively-
consequentialistically, as maximizing independently given ends. For Fichte, absolute
self-sufficiency is merely the way we conceptualize in general terms the striving directed
solely at freedom for its own sake. Fichte could hardly be clearer or more emphatic
about this:
In a certain sense it has always been conceded to reason that it is practical—in the sense that it
must find the means for some end given to it from outside itself, e.g. through our natural needs
10
Hegel sees this and takes it to display a Verstellung, a dishonest “shiftiness” in Fichte’s position (PhG
¶¶ 616–30). If Kosch’s interpretation were correct, I think Fichte would be vulnerable to Hegel’s charge. In
Chapter 6 §§3–9, I will present an account of the way Fichte synthesizes the striving for absolute independ-
ence with the conditions of I-hood. The resulting set of negative, positive, and limitative duties are all
deontically conceived. They involve no “shift” or inconsistency whereby our concept of we ought to do
appears inconsistent with the achievement of our end in doing it. Unlike Kosch’s interpretation, that pro-
vides Fichte with a cogent reply to Hegel’s criticism.
Conscience 151
or our free choice. Reason in this sense is called technically practical. We, however, maintain
that reason sets itself an end purely and simply through itself, and to this extent it is absolutely
practical. The practical dignity of reason lies in its very absoluteness.
(SL 4:57)
Situation ethics. We have already seen that the concept of the free agent’s situation
(Lage) is crucial to Fichte’s theory of free action. I suggest that Fichte is an early propo-
nent of what has since come to be called “situation ethics.” As it has been used since,
the term “situation ethics” sometimes implies that actions are not to be subject to any
principle at all, or (in theological uses) that they are subject only to Christian agape
(see Fletcher 1997). Fichte would clearly reject situation ethics so understoood. But
the term is applicable if “situation ethics” means that, for the ordinary agent, what the
agent ought to do is determined by reflective consideration (Besonnenheit) of the
“determinate state of limitation in which every individual finds himself,” in other
words, of the particular facts of the agent’s situation (Lage) (SL 4:154, 166). In decid-
ing what we ought to do, we must “renounce pure philosophy and permit ourselves to
appeal to facts” (SL 4:225). “Everyone ought to do and everyone simply must do what-
ever his situation, his heart and his insight order him to do” (SL 4:270). The facts that
provide us with moral reasons always remain heterogeneous and unsystematic—too
varied in nature to admit of reduction to any deliberative procedure. There is no dis-
cursive criterion of right action. Fichte explicitly accepts the Kantian universalizability
principle, but only if understood merely heuristically (SL 4:234); he never endorses,
but roundly rejects, any technical-practical consequentialist procedure for deciding
what is morally right (SL 4:57).
Most situations consist largely of our relationships to particular other people, or
our responsibility to projects or commitments we have undertaken. Fichte’s view, as
I understand it, allows for considerable variation and flexibility in the cultural context
of a given person’s situation. Different cultures have very different styles of thinking
about what to do, but Fichte’s account applies wherever it can be said that someone
decides what to do by deciding what they should do based on grounds or reasons of
some kind. It is hard to imagine a culture where that would not hold.
For Fichte, as we will see in Chapter 7, in a rational society an important part of my
situation would be my estate (Stand), and an important part of it is also my contribu-
tion to the entire human future. As we will see in Chapter 7, according to Fichte this is
what constitutes the true meaning of my life, and the only immortality of which human
beings are capable. The facts which give us reasons to do something in our situation
often resist formulation in any terms that could be reduced to a consequentialist
calculus. This is partly because the true moral significance of our lives is located at
least as much in our pasts as in our futures. We have made promises and commitments;
others have done things for us. These past facts help to constitute our situation, from
which our future possibilities unfold. Sometimes it is crucial to what we ought to
do that there is some moral rule that must not be violated, but that usually only
constrains how we act in light of the other facts that more properly constitute our
situation. The question always is: What is the right course of action for me here and
now (SL 4:166–8)?
Another way to make the same point is to stress the way Fichte anticipates an existen-
tialist ethics of authenticity—or situated freedom. Existentialist authenticity, as Marjorie
Grene long ago pointed out, is really a combination of several traditional virtues, chiefly
of three: honesty, courage, and active commitment (Grene 1952, p. 267). It is no accident
that for Fichte, the principal vices that constitute evil are the diametric opposites of these
virtues—to list them chiastically: inertia, cowardice, falsity (SL 4:198–205).
Equally essential to existentialist authenticity is the claim that freedom is the funda-
mental positive value. This is not freedom in the abstract: it is not the absence of obsta-
cles, the presence of opportunities, or freedom as it might be used according to some
formal rule or decision procedure. It is always freedom embodied in a concrete project.
Fichte’s material freedom, I suggest, is therefore an anticipation of existentialist
authenticity. Beauvoir made especially clearly and forcefully the point that valuing
freedom is valuing the concrete projects in which it is expressed (Beauvoir 1948,
pp. 25–30; cf. Anderson 2015, pp. 816–18). Morality for Fichte is impartial (SL 4:281–
2), but it is not detached, like the demands of impartial act-consequentialist ethics,
because it is also situated. The kinds of “partiality” that belong to my situation are
always expressions of my freedom. Thus what authenticity or material freedom
requires can follow no algorithm or calculus. These offer models of rational choice
which are as utterly alien to Fichte as to his heirs: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre,
Beauvoir.
Humanity’s relation to nature. Kosch is not mistaken in holding that Fichte values
the subjection of nature to human ends. This is an important theme in Fichte’s account
of the role of science in society as it affects social organization. But the focus is not
really on the relation of humanity to nature but instead on the social relations between
people.
The greater portion of human beings are in their lives still bowed under hard labor, in order to
procure nourishment for themselves and for the smaller portion that thinks for them . . . The
dominion of humanity over nature shall be gradually extended until . . . labor ceases to be a
burden; for a rational being’s vocation is not to be a bearer of burdens.
(BM 2:266, 268)
Fichte advocates the human conquest of nature only to the extent needed to liberate
the mass of humanity from the degrading labor that is currently needed to provide the
basic necessities of life (VBG 5:314–22, GH 3:422–3, GGZ 7:163–7). Thus he antici-
pates Marx’s famous distinction between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of
freedom” that both hope lies somewhere in the human future (Marx 1981, 3:959).
It is also misleading to portray Fichte as an advocate of human beings taking a
controlling attitude toward nature. As we will presently see, Fichte’s conception of the
ethical drive is one which urges us to harmonize or unite our natural drives with the
Conscience 153
pure drive for freedom. The same seems to be true of the relation between our human
ends and those ends found already in nature. Peter Rohs gets this right:
For Fichte, the mediation of freedom of nature through the concept of ends obtains, as regards
content, a very concrete sense . . . : Ethical action is connected to pre-given natural ends, which
are a function of ethics . . . This doubtless offers us an advantageous point of departure, above all
in view of the present-day discussions of ecological ethics.
(Rohs 1990, pp. 103–4)
Fichte’s view is that each individual natural thing has its “final end,” in accordance with
which we should use it. This end is not arbitrary, or such that its attainment could be
maximized by maximizing human control over nature in general. It is the “ends of
reason” which play the fundamental role in determining the final end for each object.11
Fichte does infer, from the fact that our ethical vocation has absolute self-sufficiency as
its final end, that the final end of each thing in the sensible world is to serve the ends of
reason (SL 4:170–2, 210–11, 229). These inferences make sense: when things are
shaped so as to serve our ends, they no longer constrain these ends. Moreover, when
things serve our ends, we are freer than before in the sense that these things no longer
present obstacles to our actions in pursuit of our ends. These valid inferences, however,
give us no reason whatever to identify human control over nature with the final end of
absolute self-sufficiency. By gaining technological control over natural things we do not
cease to be dependent on these things; we merely become more reliably dependent on
them in pursuing our limited ends. Such an identification would be an error on Fichte’s
part, of which there is no sign that he is guilty.
Kosch seems to be aware of this, but says: “It seems to me no crime against language to
call the social and technological progress depicted in the Vocation a progress toward the
increased ‘independence’ or ‘self-sufficiency’ of rational agency with respect to
everything outside itself ” (Kosch 2014, p. 8). This is not a matter of correct linguistic
usage; however we choose to use words, it is simply false that increased technological
control over nature makes us more independent of nature. In any case, control over
nature is not even a candidate for our final end. Such control is never valued rationally for
its own sake, but only for the sake of other ends that are served by controlling certain parts
of nature. For Fichte, chief among these other ends is that of releasing the laboring classes
from menial drudgery, and their consequent subjection to the privileged classes. Besides,
to value control over nature for its own sake would amount to the supremely evil maxim
of “seeking unrestricted and lawless dominion over everything outside us” (SL 4:186).
We will have to return to these issues later. In Part Two of the System of Ethics,
Fichte is viewing things from the ordinary standpoint. In Part Three, he will attempt
to give a “scientific” account of our duties. Kosch’s interpretation might be under-
stood as applying not to the ordinary standpoint but only to this “scientific” phase.
Fichte’s “scientific” account will indeed be seen to involve a kind of means–ends
11
We will say more about how Fichte conceives the “ends of reason” in Chapter 6 §9 and especially
Chapter 7.
reasoning. But it will be not about actions as means to our final end of self-sufficiency,
but rather about things as means to our ends (SL 4:171–2), and about every rational
being as an “active principle, not a mere thing, that is a tool of the moral law” (SL
4:270). It must be shown that this involves neither commitment to a strategy of instru-
mental reasoning concerning the choice of actions nor the identification of absolute
independence with maximal human control over nature. Explaining why it does not
is one task of Chapters 6 and 7.
§5: The Ethical Drive

We have seen that our nature provides us with a system of drives arising from our
organic life. A twofold reflection on these drives makes us aware of our superiority to
them as free beings. We are superior to them, first, on account of our formal freedom,
which applies to all natural drives, and then, second, on account of our consciousness
(in some form yet to be determined) of a higher drive for material freedom, whose final
end is absolute self-sufficiency, independence, or freedom for freedom’s sake. But how
are these two drives related to each other?
Are my drive as a natural being and my tendency as pure spirit different drives? No. From
the transcendental point of view the two are one and the same original drive [Urtrieb], which
constitutes my being viewed from two different sides.
(SL 4:130)
Here it is important once again to appreciate the distinction between the ordinary
and the transcendental standpoints. Since from the transcendental standpoint the I, as
the single ground of all consciousness, is only unitary, the pure drive and the natural
drive must be simply two manifestations of the same original drive (Urtrieb) or funda-
mental drive (Grundtrieb) (SL 4:143). But the two drives—the pure drive and the natu-
ral drive—do appear differently from the ordinary standpoint: “The two are in fact
one, but I-hood in its entirety rests on the fact that they appear to be different. The
boundary separating them is reflection” (SL 4:131).
Conscience and past actions. The two drives are fundamentally the same, but in
ordinary consciousness they are differently experienced. The natural drive is experi-
enced as longing, which aims at satisfaction—even at satisfaction solely for its own
sake, or enjoyment. By contrast, the pure drive is experienced as an absolute demand-
ing (Fordern) (SL 4:145). It appears not as a feeling but as a thought—the thought of a
categorical imperative commanding us to an action or omission purely for its own
sake. Since the I is formally free, when it acts it determines itself independently of both
the longing of the natural drive and the demanding of the pure drive. Either it will act
in conformity to the demand made by the pure drive, or else it will act contrary to it. In
the latter case, the contrary action will be moved by some determinate natural drive or
desire, aiming only at the enjoyment afforded by its satisfaction.
Conscience 155
In the first case, the subject of the drive and the one who acts will be in harmony, and then there
will arise a feeling of approval—things are right, and what happened was what was supposed
to happen. In the second case, what will arise is a feeling of disapproval connected with
contempt.
(SL 4:145)
These feelings of approval and disapproval are the way ordinary consciousness experi-
ences the pure drive in relation to our own actions after they have occurred.
Fichte compares the felt harmony here with the “cold cognitive judgment” in
which we experience the agreement of a cognitive concept with its external object.
He compares it also with the harmony between intuition and concept experienced
in aesthetic pleasure (on the Kantian account of it). But there is also an essential
contrast with both these cases. Neither the cognitive nor the aesthetic judgments are,
simply as such, connected directly with any practical interest. Feelings of approval
and disapproval, however, do involve an interest—a pleasure in what is approved,
displeasure in what is disapproved, a ground for doing the former and avoiding the
latter (SL 4:146).
The pleasure and displeasure here are to be contrasted with the pleasure involved
in “enjoyment”—the satisfaction of natural drives. Since I am active in relation to
approval and disapproval, but passive in relation to enjoyment, there is self-harmony
in the pleasures associated with the pure drive, but self-alienation involved in pleas-
ures arising from satisfaction of the natural drive. “Enjoyment tears me away from
myself, alienates me from myself . . . It is an involuntary pleasure . . . The same is the case
with its opposite: sensible displeasure or pain.” With the pure drive it is just the oppo-
site: “The pleasure and the ground of this displeasure are nothing foreign but depend
upon my freedom; . . . [it] does not lead me outside myself but rather back into myself ”
(SL 4:146). The feeling of approval of my action is contentment, and its opposite is
annoyance, connected with self-contempt.
The proper name, Fichte says, for the power of feeling connected with the pure drive
is conscience. The feeling of approval is a kind of pleasure in relation to the action. In
relation to oneself, it is only a “peace,” “repose,” or contentment: in that sense, “there is
no such thing as a pleasure of conscience.” The capacity for these feelings, he argues,
has thus been derived from our self-consciousness as the awareness of our freedom.
“The name conscience [Gewissen] is well-chosen, for conscience is, as it were, the
immediate consciousness [Bewußtsein] of that without which there is no consciousness
whatever” (SL 4:147).
The pure drive. So far, however, Fichte has given us an account of conscience only
insofar as—through feelings grounded in the pure drive for self-activity—it responds to
actions that have already taken place. These feelings do involve an application of the
moral principle to actions, and in that sense they already demonstrate, in a limited way,
the applicability of that principle. They constitute, in Kantian terms, a limited transcen-
dental deduction of the moral principle—they demonstrate that it has instances in our
experience. But we still have not seen how the moral principle could motivate actions.
We have derived the concept of materially free action, and displayed its transcendental
origin. But we have not yet shown that, or understood how, materially free actions them-
selves are possible. To put it in Kantian terminology, we have provided a metaphysical
deduction of material freedom, but not yet a complete transcendental deduction. To
complete the transcendental deduction, what we need is a demonstration that we can be
motivated by the pure drive to perform materially free actions.
If we think of Fichte as a follower of Kant, we are likely to suppose at this point that
we know what is coming. We are apt to think: actions that issue from the pure drive are
going to be right and good, while actions that issue from the natural drive are evil, or at
any rate lacking in moral value. We will think this way if we interpret Fichte’s distinc-
tion between the pure and the natural drives as equivalent to Kant’s distinction between
“pure reason, which is practical of itself,” and “empirically conditioned reason,” which
acts according to material principles (KpV 5: 21–8). But if this is what we think, then
we are in for a big surprise.
In relation to actions that have already been performed, the pure drive is experi-
enced only as a negation of the natural drive. We approve of actions in harmony with
the pure drive, and disapprove of every satisfaction of the natural drive that conflicts
with those actions. “Nothing could ensue from the pure drive but some absten-
tion . . . the pure drive [is] a drive directed toward a mere negation” (SL 4:147, 152). In
order to be positively motivated to perform an action, therefore, we must somehow
engage our natural drives. “Every possible concept of an end is directed toward the
satisfaction of a natural drive. (All actual willing is empirical.)” (SL 4:148). No materi-
ally free action could be motivated by the pure drive alone.
Yet things get even worse. Later, in his discussion of evil, Fichte does suggest a way in
which the pure drive, the drive toward absolute self-sufficiency, might on its own lead
to action. But this would be to evil action, not good action. For then the pure drive
might appear as “a blind drive,” not one governed by law, but only by “the maxim of
unrestricted and lawless dominion over everything outside us” (SL 4:185, 186). The
pure drive then appears as a kind of boundless self-conceit, regarding every moral
self-sacrifice as an injustice to me and every moral deed of mine as supererogation:
“No matter how we act, we can never be wrong” (SL 4:189). This is the drive that leads,
according to Fichte, to wars of conquest and religious wars, to evil actions that can
never be accounted for by the passive giving in to our natural drives and desires. It is
less common than the form of evil that gives in to natural drives, but it may be even
more reprehensible and harder to correct. As Fichte puts it, in terms drawn from
Christian scripture: “The publican and sinner may indeed have no greater value than
the Pharisee who believes himself to be just . . . but the former are easier to improve
than the latter” (SL 4:191).
The ethical as drive for wholeness. The ethical drive must, then, be a third drive,
synthesizing the pure and the natural drives, the two sides of our freedom.
Conscience 157
The ethical drive is a mixed drive. It obtains its material, toward which it is directed, from the
natural drive . . . The natural drive that is synthetically united and fused with the ethical drive
aims at the same action at which the ethical drive aims, at least in part. All that the ethical
drive obtains from the pure drive is its form.
(SL 4:152)
The way moral conviction works, then, is this. It selects part of the natural drive which
unites with the pure drive; in this way, “I act freely in order to become free” (SL 4:153).
That is, I act with formal freedom in order to choose the materially free action made
available to me by my situation. I do this when I “act with consciousness of my absolute
self-determination, with thoughtful self-awareness [Besonnenheit] and reflection”
(SL 4:154). To do this is to grasp a particular action as a duty. The ethical drive drives
me to form a categorical imperative (SL 4:155), and then my conscience takes the form
of a conviction that it applies to this action, which is my duty. The “principle of an
applicable ethics” is therefore: “Always act in accordance with your best conviction con-
cerning your duty, or Act according to your conscience” (SL 4:156).
We fundamentally misunderstand Fichte’s ethics if we take it to be about the superi-
ority or dominance of the rational over the natural, or the pure over the empirical. No;
it is fundamentally about harmony, unity, or wholeness. The essence of the I, its striving
for freedom for the sake of freedom, is a tendency to the whole I (SL 4:44). The pure
and the empirical drives are originally one original or proto-drive (Urtrieb). Reflection
separates pure from empirical drives. Our human vocation is, through reason, to reu-
nite them.
The characteristic feature of the [not-I] is multiplicity, and the characteristic feature of [the I]
is complete and absolute unity. The pure I is always one and the same and is never anything
different . . . The ultimate characteristic feature of all rational beings is, accordingly, absolute
unity, constant identity, complete agreement with oneself . . . All of the human being’s powers
in themselves constitute one power; [they] should coincide in complete identity and should
harmonize with one another.
(VBG 6:296–7)
§6: Theoretical Judgment and Conscientious

Conviction
Fichte’s discussion of conscience in §15 of the System of Ethics is difficult to interpret,
and very easy to misunderstand. I believe that I myself misunderstood it for a long
time and have come to understand it correctly only within the last year or so.12
Fichte begins with the injunction:
12
For an account reflecting my earlier (mistaken) interpretation, see Wood (1990), pp. 176–8.
In every case seek to ascertain what is your duty. What is contained in the latter is the following:
Do what you can now regard with conviction as a duty, and do it solely because you have
convinced yourself that it is a duty.
Now Fichte imagines someone asking: “But what if my conviction is mistaken? In this
case, then what I have done is not my duty but what goes against my duty. How can I be
satisfied with this?” (SL 4:163). Fichte’s first response is to say that I must compare my
present conviction with “the concept of my possible conviction as a whole,” with
“the entire system of my convictions,” and in this way correct my conviction. “Such a
comparison and examination is a duty.” But, the objection continues, what if my entire
system of convictions is in error? “What if I also err in my judgment concerning my
overall judgment?” Whether our theoretical judgment gets it right, Fichte declares, has
to be regarded as a matter of chance or good luck.
The antinomy of conscientious action. This leads to a dilemma, or a characteristic
Fichtean antinomy: Either (thesis) I take a chance and act, or else (antithesis) I am not
permitted to act at all, but must “spend my entire life in a state of indecision, constantly
swaying back and forth between pro and con” (SL 4:164). Neither option is acceptable.
Inaction (indecision, moral paralysis) is forbidden by the moral law. But leaving the
rightness of my action to mere chance is morally frivolous and equally unacceptable.
To avoid this antinomy, Fichte now draws a radical conclusion. At first glance—or in
my case, even for many years—his conclusion may seem even more indefensible than
the antitheses it is meant to avoid. He infers that
in order for dutiful conduct to be possible at all there must be an absolute criterion for the
correctness of our conviction concerning duty. A certain conviction must therefore be abso-
lutely correct, and for duty’s sake we have to stick with this conviction.
(SL 4:165)
This criterion, he goes on to argue, is experienced as a feeling, “a feeling of truth and

certainty” which is also a feeling of “immediate harmony of our consciousness with
our original I . . . This feeling never deceives us” (SL 4:169). This feeling is conscience. It
alone makes possible the motivation of ethical actions. Fichte therefore argues that we
have “absolutely a duty to acquire such consciousness” (SL 4:173). If we act without it,
we are acting against this duty, and so wrongly. “If one acts without being certain of the
pronouncement of one’s conscience, then one acts unconscionably [gewissenlos]; one’s
guilt is clear” (SL 4:174).
We have seen that Fichte’s resolution of antinomies in furtherance of the synthetic
method often leads into paradoxes. His formulation of the solution to an antinomy
often seems at first sight to be nonsensical or even contradictory. The right under-
standing of what has been derived then consists in coming to understand the paradox
and seeing that what might have looked false or contradictory is actually acceptable
and even transcendentally necessary. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the
next stage of the argument looks paradoxical. Instead of hastily rejecting it, we should
Conscience 159
try to understand it better, and then we will come to see that it is less paradoxical than it
seems. If we forget this, we may think that Fichte has simply argued himself into an
absurd, even a morally repugnant, position. Fichte’s argument appears to be that since
we cannot tolerate moral uncertainty—the possibility that we might be wrong in our
judgment about what to do—there must therefore be an infallible criterion of moral
truth, and this criterion can consist solely in the subjective feeling that we are right. He
even claims that we have an absolute duty to acquire this feeling and this conviction,
and make ourselves certain that we are right. When Fichte’s position is understood in
this way, it seems that he thinks we have not reflected sufficiently on a moral decision
until we have converted ourselves into inflexible fanatics about it, based solely on our
subjective feeling that we are infallibly right. Such a position seems absurd, unreasona-
ble, even odious.
This may be an easy way to read Fichte’s claims about conscience, but I am now
convinced that it is a wrong way. We begin to find the path to the conclusion Fichte
really means to draw if we realize that the unflattering picture just offered directly con-
flicts with several things Fichte prominently emphasizes in this same section. He
denies, for example, that there can ever be a “material duty of belief ” (SL 4:165)—that
is, any determinate proposition that one must believe and is forbidden to question. If
conscientious conviction is identified simply with a determinate theoretical conclu-
sion that must be treated as infallible (based on a feeling of certainty), then the moral
requirement to hold that conviction would amount to a material duty of belief. Fichte
also says:
Thinking should rigorously pursue its own course, independently of conscience . . . No mere
fanatical enthusiast would ever dare act upon his feeling if this meant being stuck with this
same conviction for all eternity, with no possibility of ever altering his conviction.
(SL 4:175)
This declaration would be a direct condemnation of Fichte’s own theory, if his theory is
the one we just took it to be. If, following Fichte (at SL 4:166), we let “X” stand for the
determinate action or abstention from acting required of us, then “the practical power
is unable to provide us with this X; instead, it is to be sought by the power of judgment,
which is here reflecting freely” (SL 4:166). This would directly contradict the thought
that conscience, with its feeling of certainty, provides an infallible guide to which
action is right.
Judgment/conviction. The key to understanding Fichte’s position, I believe, is to rec-
ognize that he is drawing a distinction between moral judgment and conviction (or
certainty).13 Moral judgment is the outcome of a theoretical inquiry in which we ask
what we ought to do and reach some answer. It provides us with “the material” of duty.
Conscientious conviction or certainty is different from that. Certainty is something
13
For a different approach to defending Fichte, see Breazeale (2012).
Fichte holds that no theoretical inquiry can ever give us on any topic outside mathe-
matics and transcendental philosophy. We cannot have it, as ordinary moral agents,
concerning what we ought to do. Conscience, then, does not tell us what to do: that we
learn from theoretical inquiry. But this inquiry must be free and ongoing, always ques-
tioning, and is never final. Its results are at every point always tentative and to some
degree always uncertain. The function of conscience is to add to this theoretical judg-
ment something practical, namely the immediate feeling of certainty that, here and now,
we ought to do it.
Fichte introduces us to this crucial distinction when he says:
Conscience is the immediate consciousness of our determinate duty. [But] consciousness of
something determinate is, as such, never immediate, but is found through an act of thinking.
(With respect to its content, the consciousness of our duty is not immediate.)
(SL 4:173)
Or again:
Conscience is the power of feeling . . . [It] does not provide this material, which is provided by
the power of judgment; conscience does, however, provide the evidential certainty [Evidenz],
and this kind of evidential certainty occurs solely in the consciousness of duty.
(SL 4:173)
The theoretical issue concerning the content of duty may always remain uncertain, as is
any matter of theoretical judgment. We may never be able to be certain, as a matter of
theoretical judgment, what we should do, or in retrospect what we ought to have done.
In fact, this must be so, if, as Fichte holds, all certainty on any subject pertains to convic-
tion, and is never a theoretical but always a practical matter. Certainty, in other words,
never belongs to any theoretical judgment; it always involves a practical commitment.
“There is no certainty but moral certainty and all that is certain is certain only insofar
as it points to our moral conduct” (GA I/5, 40). (See a thoughtful discussion of this
point in Breazeale 1996, pp. 35–59; and, again, an account contrasting with my present
one in Breazeale 2012.)
Theoretical understanding presents us with evidence, and suggests judgments; but
it does not act, or make practical commitments. So it cannot result in conviction: “All
my conviction is only belief, and comes from disposition (Gesinnung), not from
understanding” (BM 2:254). Whatever the theoretical issue is—even the issue about
what it is right for me to do, or to have done—thinking may, and even must, continue
to pursue it, freely and independently of conscience.
Judgment, in Fichte’s view, is always tentative and lacking in certainty, simply
because inquiry must always be free and open-ended. As a theoretical matter, we might
always second-guess our judgment about any question, including what we thought
was right for us to do. In the case of many actions, it may be forever impossible
to avoid the risk of theoretical error. When Fichte says that it is a matter of “chance”
(SL 4:164) or “good luck” (SL 4:166) whether our theoretical judgment about duty
is correct, I think we must take him to be stating (perhaps with rhetorical hyperbole)
Conscience 161
a position he holds to be true. Its truth remains unaffected by the feeling of practical
certainty, which is conscience. The point is that even where it always remains possible
that we are in error about what to do, we nevertheless must act; if we are conscien-
tious moral agents, where the moral question is serious, our action must be resolute,
not frivolous. It must be grounded on a conscientious conviction that is practically
certain for us.
It surely is exaggeration for Fichte to say that it is only “chance” or “good luck” that
our theoretical judgment about what to do may be correct. For if we do carefully and
intelligently compare our judgment about what is right for us to do with the whole
range of evidence, argument, and our other convictions, then the result will far more
likely be correct than erroneous. Responsible theoretical inquiry, if that is what we
have engaged in, would not make it merely a matter of chance that we arrive at correct
results. Nevertheless, I think Fichte has a good reason for overstating his case: he
regards theoretical inquiry as always open-ended, forever open-minded. Its judgments
as always fallible and vulnerable to error. It is this open-endedness and fallibility that
he means to emphasize by saying that it is only by “chance” that our theoretical judg-
ment is correct.
One reason, not mentioned explicitly in §15, why the nature of these theoretical
reasons must be open-ended is that Fichte thinks our reasoning about what to do
ought to involve the free give-and-take of communication with others, and there-
fore that anything should be allowed to count as a possible reason that others might
propose to us as a reason (SL 4:233–6; cf. VBG 6: 307–11). In Chapters 6 and 7, we
will see that even in the “scientific” account of the content of ethics, Fichte takes
the truth about the content of duty to be always provisional, subject to the free give-
and-take of rational communication. This is perhaps the most basic reason that
what I ought to do can never be determined with certainty, remaining always a theo-
retical question about which my judgment forever runs the risk of error. In that
sense, it is always to some degree a matter of luck whether I get it right. Nevertheless,
morality requires resolute action. That means certainty. This is the paradox Fichte’s
theory of conscience is trying to resolve. Until it is resolved, we can never act
conscientiously.
§7: The Certainty of Conscience

Goethe famously said: “The one who acts is always conscienceless; nobody has a
conscience but the one who considers” (Goethe 1907). We can now recognize this
as the position arrived at in §11 of Fichte’s System of Ethics: at that stage of the discus-
sion, conscience reacts to what has been done with feelings of approval or disap-
proval, but is incapable of motivating any present or future action. This is a position
Fichte regards as practically defective. We must advance beyond it. It is as if Goethe
had read only that far before giving up on his sometime academic protégé—we can
imagine him saying to himself: “that upstart from Rammenau, with his brilliant
mind, radical politics, and impossible personality.” Fichte’s theory of conscience and
conviction in §15 of the System of Ethics can be seen as intended precisely to prove
Goethe wrong.
As Fichte sees it, the issue for conscience to decide is not what I am to do, but instead
whether I am to act at all, and with what attitude. This is how we should understand
Fichte’s argument that there must be an “absolute criterion” for correct conviction (SL
4:165). Fichte is not claiming that there must be an infallible criterion for the correct-
ness of the judgment that this is what I ought to do. He is concerned instead with the
decision to do it.
Fichte consistently holds that there can be no absolute criterion for the truth of
any theoretical judgment. Even the principles of the Doctrine of Science, as we saw
in Chapter 2, must always await external confirmation through completion of the
transcendental system (which Fichte never achieved). But the absence of an abso-
lute criterion for theoretical judgments applies especially to judgments about what
we ought to do. The theoretical questions “Should I do this, or that?” “Should I have
done this, or that?” may be to some extent forever open. Conscience must deal with
the fact that, despite this theoretical uncertainty and fallibility, I must act, here and
now, and I must act in a spirit of moral seriousness or resolute dutifulness. Therefore,
there must be a criterion that enables me to do this with the certainty that moral reso-
luteness demands. Essential to this certainty is the feeling of self-harmony (SL 4:167–8,
174–6). It is this practical certainty alone to which Fichte gives the name “conviction”
(Überzeugung).
Truth and rightness. That in each particular situation I must do something in obedi-
ence to the moral law is what the ethical drive demands unremittingly. This drive, how-
ever, cannot determine (“materially”) which action I must do. That determination is to
be made by the “power of judgment, reflecting freely.” The ethical drive instead directs
me to two things. First, it “determines judgment to search for something. The moral
drive thus manifests itself as a drive toward a determinate cognition” (SL 4:166). Its other
requirement comes into play when judgment has found what it was driven to find—
even if this is theoretically uncertain, even if it has to be admitted that it is a matter of
luck whether it is correct. The ethical drive’s second demand, then, is that I do, with
the certainty of dutiful conviction, what moral judgment says I should do:
Let us assume that the power of judgment were to find X, a discovery that would seem to
depend on good luck: the original I and the actual I will now be in harmony, and from this
there will arise a feeling.
Fichte characterizes this feeling as one of “cold approval”: “What is approved in this
manner is in the case of actions called right and in the case of cognitions called true”
(SL 4:166–7).
Notice that for Fichte certainty is practical regarding both theoretical and practical
cases. Sometimes, for purposes of action, we need to be certain about a theoretical
judgment, and there too certainty is a matter not of theoretical evidence alone, but
Conscience 163
is ultimately a practical commitment. This commitment is not a choice—to which

another possible choice might be opposed—for that would leave me hovering or
wavering, still uncertain. It is rather a commitment based on a feeling of self-harmony.
Some philosophers, adopting so-called “deflationary” theories of truth, think that a
judgment of the form “p is true” is merely a “meta-judgment.” This trivializing of the
issue of truth is precisely what Fichte passionately rejects. Where deflationary theories
see in “right” and “true” only redundant theoretical meta-judgments, Fichte sees
something altogether different, and profoundly important: namely, practical commit-
ment. The distinction Fichte wants to draw separates the grounds or reasons for consid-
ering an action right (or a cognition true) from the conviction that it is right (or true).
Certainty, whether in theory or practice, is always a matter of will, based on a feeling of
harmony between the pure drive and the empirical drive.14
Consideration of grounds or reasons is the business of the theoretical faculty or
power of judgment, which may, and even must, search freely for what the practical
drive demands. There, “the power of imagination continues to hover or waver [schwe-
ben] between opposites”—for instance, between the thought that action X is my duty
and the thought that an opposed action Y is my duty. This hovering or wavering,
Fichte says, is a condition of doubt, which, he insists, is not something cognized by the
theoretical faculty but instead something felt. And it is connected with a practical
concern (Besorglichkeit), demanding resolution. Just as doubt is something felt, so it
is also resolved through feeling—a feeling of self-harmony. This feeling constitutes
the certainty—the certainty that p is true, or that X and not Y is the right action for me
here and now. In the case of dutiful action, it is this certainty that permits me to act
seriously and resolutely. It is practical decisiveness, and the feelings associated with it,
that is the business of conscience and conviction. Fichte observes that it is not through
argumentation that I know whether I am in doubt or certain, but only through an
immediate feeling (SL 4:169). This feeling is the criterion for the correctness of our
conviction, giving us the certainty we need in order to act resolutely (SL 4:170).
The perilous Strait of Messina. Fichte’s worry is not that I might remain theoretically
uncertain what to do, so that I need to coerce my understanding to overcome this
uncertainty. Such a coercion of my understanding would result only in a “material duty
of belief ”—in his view, that would be absolutely morally prohibited. Instead, Fichte’s
worry is that when I honestly acknowledge the theoretical openness of questions
14
Fichte’s position here may thus be seen as a version of what is sometimes called “doxastic voluntarism”—
whose historical proponents also include Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, and William James. There are many
species of this doctrine. A good discussion of the varieties of doxastic voluntarism is Audi (2001). Fichte’s
version does not involve (as William James’s position does) the thesis that we can ever directly choose or
decide what to believe, still less the Jamesian thesis that we should let our “passional nature” determine our
beliefs. The feeling of self-harmony that brings about certainty and conviction has a rational basis and is
quite different from what James is defending. It is also not clear that all certainty for Fichte results from
doubt and concern leading to a practical resolution through feeling. As Daniel Breazeale has pointed out
to me, Fichte does not seem to regard mathematical certainty in this way, nor the certainty involved in
transcendental philosophy (the Doctrine of Science) itself.
c oncerning the content of my duty, this might paralyze me and make me unable to act
at all. Even worse, it might lead to my acting irresponsibly, casually, lightheartedly in
matters of grave moral importance. I might “take a chance” that what I have done is
right—much as a drunken gambler in a Dostoyevsky novel might, in a spirit of whimsy
or frivolity, just for the thrill of it, wager his entire patrimony on a single spin of the
wheel or throw of the dice. A moral agent, in this same spirit, might say:
It is uncertain what I ought to do in this situation. The matter is controversial. So nobody can
blame me whatever I decide to do. I might as well do what seems to me easiest, most pleasant,
most advantageous, and then tell everyone (starting with myself) that I also consider it the
(or at least a) “moral” thing to do.
To act in this spirit—whatever I might do—might be even worse than not acting at all.
As a moral agent, I am faced with a dilemma like that of Odysseus. If I turn one way,
moral doubt threatens to paralyze me as I gaze at the many heads of Scylla—the many
actions and omissions open to me, with the right one to some degree forever theoret-
ically uncertain: “Which of them is the right thing to do?” I know I am fallible, so
I remain uncertain and do nothing. If I turn the other way, I risk moral frivolity,
which would pull me down into the fatal vortex of Charybdis. Conscientious convic-
tion, as Fichte conceives it, represents the only way to sail safely through the perilous
Strait of Messina. Conscience does not improve the theoretical or epistemic situation,
which may remain forever uncertain. The attempt to pretend otherwise would be dis-
honest. Conscience gives me the certainty I need in order to act, while also taking my
action seriously as a matter of duty.
Fichte’s account of conscience and conviction turns out to be very similar to
Kant’s. Kant distinguishes the judgment of understanding that a certain action is
right from a different judgment—that of conscience. Conscience is not concerned
directly with the question of what I should do, or even with whether what I did (or
am thinking of doing) is objectively right or wrong. Instead, conscience is an inner
forum or court—in which the moral agent is simultaneously the prosecutor, the
accused, and the judge. The court decides whether I am to be judged guilty or inno-
cent in what I am going to do, or in what I have done (MS 6: 437). Kant thinks that I
may be guilty before this court even if I did the right thing, if I did not reflect as I
should have, if I did not do it conscientiously. Alternatively, I may be acquitted before
this court even if my understanding errs in its judgment that the action I have per-
formed, or am proposing to perform, is the right one. I am pronounced “not guilty”
as long as, in doing what I did, I acted conscientiously. For nothing more can be
required of me (MS 6:440).
The infallibility of conscience does not imply infallibility in moral judgment. Or rather,
it implies the infallibility only of my judgment that this is the right (the conscientious)
thing for me to do, here and now. That does not preclude my second-guessing at a later
time whether there might have been error in the judgment on which my conscientious
conviction was based. In this way, Fichte thinks that the feeling of harmony constituting
Conscience 165
the conscientious conviction that my action is right must be distinguished from

the theoretical deliverances of my power of judgment. These must remain free, even as
I act, to consider arguments and evidence for and against the claim that X is really the
action to be done. The certainty that conscience provides for Fichte may be seen as
analogous to the way that for Kant conscience provides a court of last instance. We
must act. Conscience is certain in the sense that beyond it there is, for our present
action, no further court of appeal.15 But we may continue to think about the moral
quandary and change our mind at a later time about the correctness of our theoretical
judgments concerning it.
We might be tempted to say that for Fichte, the certainty involved in conscientious
conviction is a certainty only for practical purposes. That would be true, but also mis-
leading, because it ignores Fichte’s doxastic voluntarism. For Fichte all certainty—all
belief, all theoretical inquiry, our entire view of the world—is not only ultimately to be
related to our practical vocation, but all certainty, properly speaking, is also practical in
nature—a matter not merely of judgment, but of practical commitment.
This is how Fichte understands the Kantian thesis of the “primacy of practical rea-
son” (SW 4:165) “My world is the object and sphere of my duties . . . The consciousness
of the actual world is derived from the necessity of action. We act not because we know,
but we know because we are called upon to act” (BM 2:261, 263, cf. GGW 8:184–5).
“The criterion of theoretical truth is not a theoretical one, [but] a practical one”
(SL 4:170). Fichte understands this in such a way that it does not conflict with the total
freedom of our theoretical judgment to consider evidence and arguments. It involves
no “will to believe,” and also no “material duty of belief.” My conviction that X is right
for me to do now is manifested in my feeling of certainty, even though the arguments
for and against the judgment in question continue to be considered freely by my
understanding. We will explore this point further in Chapter 6 §7.
Now we can see why Goethe’s famous aphorism gets things exactly wrong. The theo-
retical faculty, which merely considers the reasons pro and con, is never the true locus
of conscience. Such consideration has nothing to do with feelings of doubt or certainty,
nor with the care and concern which the feeling of certainty resolves—nor, therefore,
with the conviction needed to act resolutely here and now. Through the feeling of
self-harmony, I acquire the capacity to act conscientiously. The issues that conscience
addresses are, as Kierkegaard clearly saw, not intellectual but existential:
It is here that the road swings off, and the change is this: whereas objective knowledge goes on
leisurely on the long road of approximation, itself not actuated by passion, to subjective knowl-
edge every delay is a deadly peril and the decision so infinitely important that it is immediately
urgent, as if the opportunity had already passed by unused.
(Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, SV 7:168)
15
A similar role for the voice of conscience has recently been defended by David Velleman (2006). It
would obviously take us too far afield to explore further the similarities and differences between Velleman
and either Kant or Fichte.
Kierkegaard’s “subjective knowledge” is Fichte’s conscientious conviction, which is

needed to act in every situation; Kierkegaard’s “passion” is the feeling of certainty
needed for conscientious action. I must be prepared to endure the risk that the theo-
retical judgment about duty on which I act is in error. As a cognitive being I must
continue to search freely concerning this question. As a moral agent, however, I must act,
and with conviction. Fichte’s position, then, is this: it is always possible that later the
arguments will yield the judgment that it was not X that was my duty, but Y. But if in
the situation of action my conviction that X was the right action was confirmed by the
conscientious feeling of certainty, then I should not withdraw my judgment that I acted
rightly in doing X at the time I did it. That alone constitutes the infallibility of con-
science, its immunity to error.
This position will still be controversial. We may worry that it provides insufficient
room for regret over or repentance of wrong past decisions. If I did the wrong thing
and realize later that I should have done otherwise, Fichte still tells me that, having
acted with conviction at the time, I should feel no regret, no matter how wrong my
action is now seen to have been. Some will think this cannot possibly be correct.
Fichte’s position does allow for many kinds of regret and repentance. Of course
I can be sorry about the unavoidable bad results of even the most obligatory action.
I may then even be obligated to apologize or make reparations for the harm I have
done, even if I remain certain that, at the time, what I did was right. I can also repent
of a bad choice whenever it was made against my conscientious conviction, in the
absence of a genuinely formed conviction, or when I deceived myself into thinking
I was acting according to conscience. If, after acting, I acquire new information,
I might also say: “If I had known then what I know now, my conviction would
have been different, and I would have acted differently.” Fichte’s view forbids only
my saying that if I did act according to conscientious conviction, then I acted
wrongly at the time. The one thing I must not say is that I ought to have acted against
my conscience.
Hegel and the “ethics of conviction.” Hegel seems to be among those who would
reject Fichte’s position. He distinguishes between “formal” conscience and “true” (or
“truthful”—wahrhaftig) conscience. Formal conscience countenances whatever moral
opinion an agent may have at the time, based on whatever specious reasons or subjec-
tive feelings the agent has. Truthful conscience involves only those judgments that are
objectively true, according to valid standards of right, morality, and ethical life (Hegel,
PR §§138–9). Views such as Kant’s and Fichte’s would seem to Hegel too close to J.F.
Fries’s “ethics of conviction,” which Hegel places far down in the descending series of
the circles of moral evil (PR §140). To make the subject’s own conviction the proper
ethical measure seems to Hegel to do away altogether with the objectivity of ethics. It
opens the door, Hegel thinks, to all kinds of self-serving deceptions.
“Conviction,” as Fichte means it, is not just any subjective opinion. It could not be a
conviction if it involved self-serving deception or misrepresentation. A conviction
Conscience 167
has to be grounded on the best theoretical judgment that free thinking can achieve at
the time and place of action. It is this fact that is being registered by the feeling of
self-harmony that constitutes conscientious conviction. The feeling that gives rise to
conscientious conviction must be a genuine feeling of self-harmony, not a compla-
cent evasion. Fichte admits that our judgment might nevertheless be erroneous. If
further reflection convinces you that you erred in your earlier judgment about what
to do, Fichte’s position tells you that just as you cannot now retract your past action,
so you need not, and must not, retract your conviction that you acted rightly at the
time. But you might form an equally certain conscientious conviction that it would
be wrong to continue on the same path, and decide that duty now requires you to take
the opposite one.16
Hegel holds that conscience is valid only when the moral judgment is also objec-
tively correct. That leaves wholly unaddressed, however, the hard question about
moral uncertainty that Fichte is trying to answer. To act is always to make oneself
subject to the self-righteous judgment of those who were not there and who are una-
ble (or unwilling) to put themselves in our shoes. But it is my own conscience, not
their judgments, to which I am subject as a moral agent. To act is to expose myself to
the risk that my judgment may be wrong, or even that I am being self-deceptive and
hypocritical.
Hegel saw this very well, since he posed a very similar dilemma about conscience
in Chapter 6 of The Phenomenology of Spirit (PhG ¶¶632–71). This is the conflict
between an inactive but judging “beautiful soul” and an evil but hypocritical acting
consciousness.17 In that discussion, Hegel does not seem to allow that there could be
a mistaken moral judgment that is conscientious and not hypocritical. He may even
be assuming that if we take an act performed from genuine conscientious conviction
to be immune from blame, we are committed to thinking there are no objective princi-
ples of moral judgment. Fichte’s position, however, turns on the thought that I might
have erred objectively in my judgment but still have acted rightly in the sense that
I followed my conscientious conviction. The outcome of the discussion in the
Phenomenology is apparently to admit the unavoidability of evil and hypocrisy, and
then to transcend moral action through religious forgiveness. This is not a rejection of
Fichte’s theory of conscience; it leaves unaddressed what the moral agent should do in a
situation of moral uncertainty, where my judgment may be in error but I nevertheless
must act. It also leaves unaddressed the even more important question of how I should
16
According to Fichte, the “sole true criterion” of conscientious certainty is whether you can take the
risk that your present conviction will never change (SL 4:169). Here Fichte was clearly influenced by
Kant’s Religion (R 6:68–9). This is not the same as saying that you must have made a stubborn and unal-
terable decision that it will not change. In that case, there would no longer be any experience of risk for
the feeling of conscience to overcome. It means only that you employed this test at the time you acted
conscientiously.
17
Hegel’s treatment of these topics was apparently based on F.H. Jacobi’s philosophical novel Woldemar
(1796). See Speight (2001), pp. 112–21.
think about what to do, avoiding moral paralysis while also remaining conscientious
and aware of my fallibility.
If we want to reject Fichte’s position, we must face up to the problem he is raising,
and say how we would navigate the treacherous moral Strait of Messina. Philosophical
positions are often easily dismissed by those who see the objections they invite but
are unable or unwilling to think seriously about the hard problems they set themselves
to solve.
§8: Self-Deception and Moral Conversion

A prominent theme in Fichte’s moral psychology is self-deception. Fichte holds that
the clear consciousness that something is my duty is incompatible with a decision not
to do it (SL 4:191). He infers that some form of culpable self-deception is involved in all
moral evil. It is possible to fall into theoretical error, even error about what to do, with-
out self-dishonesty, but in order truly to do evil one must in some way “darken one’s
understanding” (Romans 3:21) or “render obscure within oneself the clear conscious-
ness of what duty demands” (SL 4:192). Both the person who uses uncertainty as an
excuse for inaction and the person who acts with moral carelessness are guilty of this.
Fichte’s theory of conscience is based on the thought that conscientious conviction is
our only conceivable protection against it.
Self-inflicted incapacity. The most common form of this obscured consciousness is
that of the Schlendrian (“stick-in-the-mud”) or Gleisner (“hypocrite”) (SL 4:200, 193).18
This is the path of those who passively follow the easy, customary, or socially conserva-
tive way, and those who give in unreflectively to their natural drives and desires.
Immoral self-indulgence goes naturally together with social conservatism, and they
are contemptible for similar reasons. People who exemplify this form of evil, Fichte
says, are formally free, but materially they remain dependent on nature (SL 4:184). The
basis for it in human nature is inertia or laziness; when challenged by reality, inertia
protects itself through cowardice, then masks its fears and failings through falsehood
or deception (SL 4:198–205). This condition is the lowest stage of moral development,
an inferior stage from which, Fichte thinks, most people never emerge (on this point,
see Ware 2015). We would misinterpret Fichte, however, if we understood him as pos-
iting different degrees of formal freedom, implying greater or lesser degrees of moral
responsibility. Of course Fichte is willing to recognize cases in which free agency, and
responsibility, are absent or diminished (as in cases of immaturity or insanity). But the
self-deceptive inertia involved in giving in passively to one’s situation and desires does
18
Those who need help catching on to the overtones of the German term Schlendrian should acquaint
themselves with J.S. Bach’s “Coffee” Cantata, BWV 211. Herr Schlendrian, its comic protagonist, is a stuffy
authoritarian father who tries (unsuccessfully) to prevent his spirited daughter Ließchen from drinking
coffee—a delicacy that conservative Schlendrians of the age wanted to forbid to women. It was a Leipzig
coffee house that commissioned this delightful work.
Conscience 169
not fall under this heading.19 St. Paul’s “darkening of the understanding,” is, after all,
meant to justify the conclusion that they are “without excuse” (Romans 1:20). The
lower level of reflection involves a kind of agential incapacity. But such a self-inflicted
incapacity does not mitigate the evil; it even aggravates it. Fichte regards the compla-
cent and self-indulgent Schlendrian as standing at a “lower level of reflection” than the
conscientious moral agent. The agent is responsible for the culpable self-deception this
involves.
He absolutely ought to have raised himself to a higher level of reflection, and he also could have
done this. He is to blame for not doing this, and hence he is also to blame for the maxim of
incapacity [untaugliche Maxime] that flows from his failure to raise himself to a higher level
(SL 4:181) . . . If, therefore, one acts without being certain of the pronouncement of one’s con-
science, then one acts unconscionably [gewissenlos]; one’s guilt is clear, and one cannot pin this
guilt on anything outside oneself. There is no excuse for any sin.
(SL 4:174)
People can always emerge from this condition of darkened moral consciousness, but
only through a kind of moral conversion. It is this conversion that Fichte hopes his
writings and lectures may be able to bring about in at least some of his readers or
auditors.
Who is in a position to blame? Although moral agents are responsible for their pas-
sivity, self-deception, and consequent moral incapacity, we might still raise the ques-
tion: Who could be in a position to judge the guilt of a person who remains at this
lower moral level? As we had occasion to note in Chapter 3, Fichte’s conception of the
conviction that we are free is not c oncerned with justifying “reactive attitudes” directed
at others. Fichte’s reflections on moral guilt are oriented almost exclusively to the
agent’s own point of view. If I am a person who has failed to act according to con-
science, I ought to realize that my self-inflicted moral incapacities are my own fault,
and reproach myself. “The individual [who becomes aware of this] would have to see
himself in his contemptible shape and feel disgust toward himself ” (SL 4:204). If we
suppose that I have rendered myself unable to see things from the higher standpoint
from which such judgments might be made, then until I see through my self-deception,
perhaps no one is in a position to blame or condemn me. But I can, and I ought to, put
myself in the position to hold myself accountable precisely by reflecting and overcom-
ing my self-inflicted moral incapacity.
19
Kosch ascribes to Fichte the view that since moral passivity and self-deception involve an incapacity,
they also involve a degree of involuntariness and hence diminished responsibility: “Responsibility varies,
then, with moral success: one is responsible for virtue to the extent that it is the result of exercise of formal
freedom, but one is not in the same way responsible for vice” (Kosch 2011, p. 167). This directly contradicts
what Fichte explicitly says. Kosch also thinks Fichte disagrees with Kant in holding that vice involves
self-deception (ibid., pp. 165–7). But both Kant and Fichte hold that vice involves culpable self-deception.
Moral incapacity is no excuse when it is self-deceptive and self-inflicted. See Wood (2014b), pp. 50–2, and
Wood (2015).
The duty to promote morality in others. For Fichte it is an important duty not only
to cultivate one’s own morality, but also to promote morality in others. Institutionally,
Fichte thinks this is one of the main offices of religion (SL 4:205, cf. §33, 348–53). But
it is also the task of each of us to have a morally edifying effect on the individuals
with whom we interact (SL §25, 4:313–25). Fichte cautions us, however, regarding
the ways we may permissibly attempt to fulfill this duty. First, human beings are
required by right to respect one another’s formal freedom. Except in cases of crime
falling under rules of legal coercion, they may not force one another in order to make
one another better (SL §23, 4:276–99). “One may not make any rational being virtu-
ous, wise or happy against his own will” (VBG 6:309).20 Second, in Fichte’s view, the
chief means for the improvement of our species is free and respectful communica-
tion between people (SL 4:23–253; cf. VBG 6:315–16). Therefore, we may not do
anything with the aim of improving others morally that undermines the conditions
for such communication. Not only is compulsion forbidden, but so is indoctrina-
tion—the attempt to make people better through producing theoretical convictions
in them (SL 4:314–17). Finally, although Fichte regards feelings of shame and dis-
gust with oneself as the most potent motives for radical self-improvement, he insists
that these feelings must come from within. It is not the office of our fellow human
beings, still less of religion, to express disgust toward us for our moral failings. The
blaming and shaming of others is wrong in itself and also violates our duty to improve
them morally.
Fichte thinks the chief means open to us in having a morally beneficial effect on
others is that of doing the right thing ourselves in the right spirit, and thus present-
ing others with a good example in our own person (SL 4:322–5). This should be the
very reverse of demonstrating our superiority, or morally lording it over them.
Rather, the only point is to enable others to see that it is possible to respect oneself,
that humanity can live up to its moral vocation. This may lead some to feel disgust at
their own attitudes and behavior, and thereby to a moral conversion. There is, of
course, the danger that one would be sending them the message of one’s own superi-
ority—being “holier than thou.” Fichte urges us to set a good example without send-
ing such a message. But there is also the danger that even a good example—and still
more, the danger that moral preaching or scolding—could lead them to give up on
themselves and give way to moral despair (SL 4:318–22; cf. 4:266–7, 311). This would
be directly counter-productive, and is to be avoided at all costs. Fichte especially
emphasizes these dangers in discussing the moral influence of religion (SL 4:351).
We must therefore always treat others with “modesty and respect for the human dig-
nity and self-sufficiency of every person” (SL 4:352).
20
I have heard it suggested that one cannot make another more virtuous against his own will. But this
seems dubious, and it is not what Fichte is claiming. One of the stated aims of ancient systems of coercive
legislation was to make citizens wiser, happier, and more virtuous. Fichte holds that even if coercion could
do these things, it would be wrong to do them by coercive means. Freedom has priority over happiness,
wisdom, even virtue.
Conscience 171
Did Fichte himself live up to these doctrines? It seems he often did not. He is an
extremely thin-skinned philosophical controversialist. His typical tone in moral writ-
ings is severe and even scolding. His conception of moral stages of reflection leaves it
open to him to consider many people hopelessly deluded and depraved (SL 4:136; EE
1:434–5). And he often seems to despair over his contemporaries, or the great majority
of them. The number of people capable of “raising themselves to the level of ideas,” he
says, “has always been a minority in every age [but] has never been smaller than it is
right now” (VBG 6:292). We have seen how Fichte’s theory of the moral stages of
human history underwrites this judgment. In the two Introductions of 1797, Fichte
repeatedly emphasizes his inability to communicate with his critics, insisting that he
has nothing in common with them (EE 1:434–5, ZE 1:508–11). He even seems to revel
in this situation of mutual incomprehension. “We have no wish to persuade them,” he
declaims, “since one cannot desire the impossible” (ZE 1:510). “I would be sorry if they
understood me” (EE 1:422). At the same time, Fichte continually tells us (and himself)
that no one is beyond hope, that there is no innate difference between human beings,
that reason is common to all (ZE 1:506–7). Our most sacred duty is to raise both our-
selves and others, both through rational communication and through open, sincere
emotional engagement, to a higher moral level (VBG 6:307–9; SL 4:313–17). Above
all, we must never despair of others, or to let them despair of themselves (SL 4:318–22).
We have a duty to set others the best example that we can of openness and willingness
to communicate with one another on these terms (SL 4:322–5).
There seems no way to reconcile Fichte’s statements about the moral hopelessness of
his foes with his own account of his moral duties. But the inconsistent combination
nevertheless makes perfect sense. For we do, or at least we should, warn most persis-
tently and emphatically against what we take to be the very worst vice to which we
know we ourselves are susceptible. In Fichte’s case, that vice was his tendency to dis-
trust the people with whom he had to interact and to despair over the social world
around him. Which of us is wholly free of that vice?
6
The Self-Sufficiency of Reason
The Systematic Doctrine of Duties
Fichte’s transcendental justification of the ordinary moral standpoint (or moral common
sense) involves mainly the deduction and application of certain concepts. Thus far, the
main concepts are first, moral authority or the moral law, and second, conscience or
conviction about our duty in any given situation. Fichte’s account of the ordinary moral
standpoint, as we have seen, offers little in the way of criteria or decision procedures as
moral philosophers often understand them. Thus far it has been provisionally assumed,
in accordance with common sense, that the moral law has a determinate content. Now
it has been shown that to the ordinary moral agent, this content is present to in the
form of a conscientious conviction about duty in each given situation. In Part Three
of the System of Ethics, Fichte’s task is to supplement his philosophical defense of
the ordinary standpoint with a more systematic, “scientific,” or philosophical theory
of our moral duties.
Fichte has already introduced one idea that is surely not usually recognized as part
of moral common sense. This is that moral duty is ubiquitous in a strong sense: there
are no morally indifferent actions; at each moment, and in every situation, there is
exactly one course of action that is our duty; all other courses of action are wrong or
contrary to duty (SL 4: 139, 151, 155–6, 207).1 Fichte defers until his “scientific” treat-
ment of duty in Part Three both his philosophical account of why duty applies in every
situation, and also his account of the ends or moral rules that apply to ordinary moral
agents. He supposes that ordinary moral agents usually do have convictions about what
they ought to do that are situation-specific and based on varied and heterogeneous
reasons. Fichte is supposing that ordinary moral agents seldom have a philosophical
theory from which they derive these convictions. Intelligent people would look to
moral philosophy to provide such a basis for their convictions. Fichte’s procedure, as
1
As Peter Baumanns says, “Moral actions are not a class of actions among others . . . like cleaning house
or playing the piano,” but instead a “character, aspect or moment of all action” (Baumanns 1990, p. 145).
This is Fichte’s position too, but it is not the crucial claim. For this much virtually any moral philosophy
would admit: any action is a possible object of moral judgment, and that is an aspect of any action. But the
point is that when the ethical drive is seen as the fundamental drive of all free action, even cleaning house
or playing the piano must be seen as ethical duties if they are to be even morally permissible. There will
always be many actions open to you that can’t be seen as a fulfillment of your moral vocation. Those
actions, as Fichte sees it, are all wrong, contrary to duty.
explored in this chapter and the next, confirms his view that transcendental philosophy
does not undermine common sense but justifies it. Fichte’s theory, as we will see, rep-
resents the quest for principles of moral philosophy as a matter of ongoing rational
communication among people. This means that any philosophical theory must be only
provisional, a contribution to this free and open-ended communicative process.
§1: The Final End of Self-Sufficiency: a Form of

Consequentialism?
The basis for Fichte’s scientific treatment of duty is the final end of every rational being,
which is absolute independence or self-sufficiency. But this end is unreachable. How,
then, is it supposed to figure in a philosophical account of our more immediate ends
and other moral reasons that apply to ordinary moral agents?
For Fichte, the terms Selbständigkeit (self-sufficiency) and Unabhängigkeit (inde-
pendence) have two closely related meanings. They refer to the independence of the free
will from causal determination by any reality external to it, but also to the final end of
the free will, which is furthered by each dutiful action. These two meanings correspond
to the distinction between formal freedom and material freedom. Formal freedom is
what I am aware of as a rational being when I know that, within the range of free choices
presented to me by my situation, I am able to resist any drive or desire, so that the way
I act depends on my free choice alone. Material freedom is what I achieve through
every action that obeys the moral law by following my conscientious conviction about
my duty.
The two senses of freedom, independence or self-sufficiency, are set in relation
to each other when Fichte says that in responding to the ethical drive and acting
according to duty, the rational being wills freedom for the sake of freedom (SL 4:139,
153). We act with formal freedom in order to achieve material freedom, and a materi-
ally free act is one which aims at (and approximates) the final end of absolute freedom
as independence or self-sufficiency. This final end has so far been conceived as the
self-sufficiency of the individual rational being; we will see in §§7–8 below that, fol-
lowing the synthetic method, this eventually becomes instead the self-sufficiency of
reason, or (as Fichte will argue) of the entire community of rational beings.
Fichte repeatedly insists that this final end is unreachable, the quest for it endless or
infinite. It is “a determinate goal [Ziel] that can never be achieved” (SL 4:166); “the final
end of a rational being necessarily lies in infinity” (SL 4:149, 150).
The final end of the moral law is absolute independence and self-sufficiency, not merely with
respect to our will . . . but also with respect to our entire being. This goal is unachievable, but
there is still a constant and uninterrupted process of approximation to this goal.
(SL 4:209)
The moral law determines for each of us, in our particular situation, a determinate
series of actions that it is our duty to do (SL 4:149): this series constitutes the “matter of
The Self-Sufficiency of Reason 175
freedom” (SL 4:153). Each action has its own specific or “finite” end, but it also has as
its “final end” our absolute self-sufficiency, or in its further development, the absolute
independence or self-sufficiency of reason. The pure drive, and also the ethical drive,
aim at “a series through the continuation of which the I would have to become independ-
ent (unabhängig)” (SL 4:149). “The aim of my drive as a whole is absolute independ-
ence and self-sufficiency” (SL 4:171). In every dutiful action, we “must act in order to
draw nearer to this final end” (SL 4:131; cf. 4:209).
The final end of everything that is demanded by the ethical drive is complete independence
(Unabhängigkeit). But what, in turn, is the end of this complete independence? Is it perhaps
some enjoyment, or anything similar? Absolutely not. Absolute independence is its own end.
I ought to have this final end in view absolutely because I ought to have it in view—because
I am an I.
(SL 4:152)
Kosch’s interpretation reconsidered. How are we to understand this doctrine of

the final end of independence or self-sufficiency? In the last chapter, we considered
the interpretation proposed by Michelle Kosch, who takes Fichte’s moral theory to be a
“material ethics” in the Kantian sense, a form of calculative consequentialism based on
technical-practical reason. She thinks the series of dutiful actions is to be determined by
what maximizes, in each situation, the self-sufficiency or independence of the rational
being—or later, of reason. In Chapter 5 it was argued that this cannot be correct as an
account of Fichte’s presentation of the ordinary moral standpoint. The moral agent, as
Fichte sees it, is subject to a categorical imperative. This is a law that requires us to
choose each action for its own sake, and also for the sake of the particular end internal
to the required action. Fichte describes the judgment about which action to perform as
a matter for theoretical judgment (SL 4:166), but he never considers it a matter for
“technical-practical” reason. In fact, he explicitly denies this (SL 4:57).
Many consequentialist theories, however, draw a distinction between two stand-
points: (1) that of ordinary moral agents, and how it is best for them to think about
morality, and (2) the standpoint of moral theory, which determines the philosophical
truth about right, wrong, and duty. Some theories hold that whatever way ordinary
moral agents may think about the matter, this truth is determined by consequentialist
calculations relative to a specifiable final end—usually aiming at the maximization of
its achievement under the present circumstances. Fichte’s theory could be interpreted
as a consequentialist theory of this kind, based on maximizing the final end of absolute
independence or self-sufficiency. Kosch’s interpretation of Fichte seems most promis-
ing when understood in this way.
In order to understand Fichte’s philosophical or “scientific” theory of duties as a
form of calculative consequentialism, however, we would need a sufficiently determi-
nate conception of “absolute independence or self-sufficiency” to enable us to calculate
which particular actions would serve to maximize this end. Maximizing theories
virtually never hold that the entirety of the desired end is completely achievable by us.
For instance, hedonistic utilitarians do not hold that the perfect happiness of all sen-
tient creation is an attainable end. But they think our actions can maximize, relative to
our circumstances, the extent to which this end is achieved. The right actions can then
be determined as those that serve as means for the end’s maximum feasible attainment.
On the interpretation we are now considering, that would have to be what Fichte
means when he speaks of “approximating,” “furthering,” or “drawing nearer to” the
final end of absolute independence or self-sufficiency.
Do we have a determinate enough conception of absolute self-sufficiency to enable
us to use “the end” in this consequentialist, calculative way? To Kosch’s chagrin, as we
have already seen, the System of Ethics does not tell us clearly enough what he means by
“absolute independence and self-sufficiency” to make this possible. Her interpretive
suggestion, based mainly on Fichte’s popular writings, is that what Fichte really means
by the final end of independence or self-sufficiency is the degree of rational human
control over nature. People can never expect this control to be total, but they can aim,
both individually and collectively, at maximizing it under contingent empirical
circumstances.
In Chapter 5 §4, I have suggested several reasons why Kosch’s interpretive suggestion
will not work. Fichte never identifies human control over nature with the final end of
self-sufficiency. Control over nature is not to be valued as a final end, and it does not make
us independent of nature. Fichte values only certain kinds of control over nature: namely,
those that would help to liberate the laboring classes from the dominion of the privileged
classes. Besides, for Fichte it would be a form of evil to seek unrestricted dominion over
nature (SL 4:186). I will not repeat those arguments any further here. There is also clearly
one crucial aspect of what Fichte means by “independence and self-sufficiency” of which
this interpretation takes no account at all: namely, the human choice of dutiful actions for
the sake of duty, exhibiting the independence of our will from all natural drives and from
every enjoyment of their satisfaction only for its own sake (SL 4:130, 141–2, 161). Fichte
insists that this independence results in a whole new series of actions that nature could not
have produced (SL 4:139; cf. Chapter 5 §4).
Fichte does sometimes employ means–ends reasoning in thinking about our
duties. But the “means” in question are never actions or rules and policies of action,
as Kosch’s interpretation would require. These means are always things or persons.
We are to shape things in such a way that they serve the ends of reason (whatever
these ends may turn out to be). This is even called by Fichte the final end of any
given thing (SL 4:171, 210–11). We are also to shape ourselves through our actions,
and seek to educate others, or influence them through rational communication—
especially through our own good example—so that all persons become free and
rational tools of reason or the moral law (SL 4:255–9, 268–70, 277–9, 303, 313–25).
But if we search in the System of Ethics for any claim of the form that a specific
action is right or wrong because its consequences maximize self-sufficiency or
independence, then we will search in vain. This is simply not the way Fichte thinks
about how to choose our actions.
The impossibility of absolute self-sufficiency. There is also a paradox surrounding

the whole idea of the final end of self-sufficiency. It was mentioned in Chapter 5; now it
is time to explore it in greater depth, since it concerns the philosophical content of the
idea of absolute independence or self-sufficiency. When utilitarian or other conse-
quentialist theories seek for actions that maximize an end, because we cannot reach the
end in its complete perfection, this inability is always understood to be contingent and
empirical. We don’t have the knowledge or capacity to make all sentient beings as
happy as they might in principle be made. Nor could we ever achieve total human
control over nature. In neither case, however, is it an a priori or necessary truth that
perfection is unattainable. There are some ends of morality that Fichte declares unat-
tainable because they are only contingently impossible in this way—for instance, the
end of achieving complete agreement among all rational beings regarding their ends
and moral convictions. Regarding absolute independence or self-sufficiency, however,
Fichte does argue that the unattainability of the end, even in principle, is a necessary
truth. For it is a transcendental condition of the I’s activity itself that it be opposed by
the contrary activity of a not-I, and hence that it should always be dependent on that
limitation of its activity. “The human being must approximate, ad infinitum, a freedom
he can never in principle attain” (GWL 1:117). To interpret Fichte in a way that trans-
forms the end of absolute self-sufficiency from something “unhelpfully abstract” or
even “absurd” into something more definite, which can be understood in calcula-
tive-consequentialist terms, is therefore necessarily to misinterpret him. Absolute
independence or self-sufficiency is supposed to be transcendentally absurd. No “help-
ful” consequentialist version of this end is even conceivable. That’s not how the end is
to be pursued.
Fichte does not think of absolute independence or self-sufficiency as control over
the not-I, but rather as a striving for the total abolition of the not-I: “a general elimina-
tion of the object” (GWL 1:269). “Let there be no not-I at all!” (GWL 1:144). To achieve
fully the object of this striving would be to abolish a transcendentally necessary condi-
tion for the practical striving itself. Sometimes Fichte describes this impossible striv-
ing as the striving to encompass or incorporate the not-I: “The I demands that it
encompass all reality and exhaust the infinite” (GWL 1:277). Or again, he describes the
object of this striving as the Gleichheit (identity, equivalence, or likeness) of the object
with the I itself (GWL 1:260). On any of these accounts, absolute self-sufficiency would
abolish the necessary condition for the I’s own self-positing.
Can the world become for me what my body is? A similar point is actually being made
by Fichte in the System of Ethics when he says something that might lead us to think that
he does identify the final end of self-sufficiency with human control over nature:
Self-sufficiency, which is our ultimate goal, consists in everything depending on me and my not
depending on anything, in everything that I will to occur in the sensible world occurring
purely and simply because I will it to occur—just as happens in my body, which is the starting
point of my absolute causality. The world must become for me what my body is. This goal is of
course unreachable, but I am supposed to fashion everything in the sensible world so that it can
serve as a means for achieving my final end. This process of drawing ever nearer to my final end
is my finite end.
(SL 4:229)
The thought here is: absolute self-sufficiency would involve the entire sensible world
becoming for me what my body is. It seems to Kosch that “the world becoming for me
what my body is” would be something like: my achieving total control over nature. So
approximating or drawing nearer to absolute self-sufficiency consists in following
consequentialist calculations about how to maximize our control over nature. Thus
she thinks of this passage as supporting her interpretation (Kosch 2014, p. 7). But if we
look at the context, we see that this passage is only a premise in a reductio ad absurdum
argument leading to exactly the opposite conclusion. Fichte’s whole point is that the
world cannot, even in principle, become for me what my body is.
As I interpret the argument in this passage, it goes as follows:
(1) It is a condition of the activity of the I that it should be limited by the not-I and
thus dependent on it. My body is the starting point of my activity in relation to
the not-I.
(2) So if the sensible world were for me what my body is, there would cease to be
any distinction between my activity and the limiting counter-activity of the
sensible world. But that would make the I’s own activity impossible.
(3) That is why this goal is unreachable.
(4) Therefore, this goal is unreachable, not merely contingently or empirically, but
as a matter of transcendental necessity.
If, per impossibile, absolute self-sufficiency were to be reached, then a fundamental

transcendental condition of the possibility of the I would thereby be cancelled. The
I itself would be annihilated. In short, the world cannot in principle “become for me
what my body is.” If, therefore, “the world becoming for me what my body is” is sup-
posed to be a representation of the final end of self-sufficiency, then my concept of this
end breaks down in incoherence. The I’s striving for it aims at something that would
abolish the I itself.
The passage thus leads to a characteristic Fichtean antinomy, from which a new con-
cept, that of specific ethical duties, can be transcendentally deduced. It consists in the
synthesis of the conditions of I-hood with the I’s striving for absolute self-sufficiency.
The duties will be seen to fall into three groups, ordered according to Kant’s categories
of relation: there are duties concerning the body (causality), cognition (substance),
and intersubjectivity (reciprocity). Each of these duties will take three forms, accord-
ing to Kant’s categories of quality: negative, positive, limitative. The duties are deontic
in form (kinds of actions we must do or omit). They are based on determining that for
which the drive for absolute self-sufficiency could not in principle strive, and thereby
specifying the classes of actions that are absolutely obligatory or forbidden.
The presentation and resolution of this antinomy will occupy us in §3 of this chapter;
the remainder of the chapter (§§4–9) will be spent on the derivation of the specific duties
just outlined above. But first I want to suggest an interpretation of what it means to strive
for, approximate, or approach the final end of self-sufficiency. This interpretation will
be seen to be a more defensible alternative than the calculative-consequentialist one
proposed by Kosch.
§2: The Final End as a Recursive Projection of our

Finite Ends
The I is necessarily limited by the not-I. The body, whose actions are our actions, is
therefore also necessarily distinct from the external world, which resists and opposes
the actions of the I. These necessary distinctions lead to a problem about how we can
think of absolute self-sufficiency and independence as an end at all. For there can be no
fundamental drive within the I, Fichte says, that aims at the I’s own annihilation
(SL 4:211). It would be impossible for me even to aim at turning the entire sensible
world into a direct means to my other ends, still less that this should turn out to be the
real meaning of my final end of absolute self-sufficiency.
In Chapter 5, I quoted Fichte as saying: “The end does not determine the com-
mandment; on the contrary, the immediately given purport of the commandment
determines the end” (BM 2:264–5). This is stated in the context of a popular work, and
seems intended to express how things are seen from the ordinary moral point of view.
But it also suggests a way of thinking about our actions in relation to an unreachable
final or ultimate end which is in clear contrast to the calculative-consequentialist way.
The consequentialist way must begin from some fairly definite conception of the final
end itself. The conception must be definite enough that we can calculate which actions
are suitable means to achieving it, or at least the means to maximizing the extent to
which we achieve it. We then think of this end as something determinate, say 100 per-
cent of something (such as the general happiness or human control over nature), but
we realize that we are unable ever to achieve the whole of it. We may at one time have
achieved 25 percent of it, but then, guided by our conception of the end and our knowl-
edge of causal relations within the world, we achieve perhaps 28 percent of it, and strive
to achieve more in the future, though we never expect to achieve the whole. In this way,
our end remains unreachable, and our striving infinite, though over time it does draw
nearer, approach, or approximate the final end.
We could, however, think about the relation in just the opposite way, starting from
the other end of the process. That is, we could start from our immediate actions and
their finite ends. Our conception of the final end would then always remain quite
indefinite—too indefinite to serve, through instrumental calculation, for the determi-
nation of which actions are the right means to its maximization. It could even remain
indefinite in principle, especially if we regard it as infinitely distant from us and
unachievable not due merely to our contingent limitations but as a matter of transcen-
dental necessity. Then we would approach our final end through the series of actions,
each with its determinate finite ends, which at each stage we would extend ever further,
projecting it onward as an endless series.
If we proceed in this way, our choice of the next member of the series is not guided
calculatively, by a conception of the final end and the action calculated as a means to
it. It is guided instead by the actions we have already taken. The next action is chosen
as the further extension or projection of these same actions, when they are considered
as a series. We do not think about our actions calculatively or instrumentally, as maxi-
mizing something of which we have a definite conception. Instead, we think about
them recursively, as the continuation of a series of finite actions, each with its own
determinate end within the limited range of what it can accomplish, but then each
also leading to a next member in the series. Each action has its own end and achieves
something within certain limits. The next action in the series goes beyond these limits
and posits some further finite end. The choice of each new action in the series is
guided not by an overarching conception of the final end, or even of its maximization,
but instead by the determinate boundary set by the previous action in the series. We
then think of our final end only as the (impossible) terminus of this recursive series.
Our concept of the final end therefore necessarily remains indefinite. We could not
use it in calculative or consequentialist reasoning to determine which actions belong
to the series. Our only concept of the final end is that it is that ideal (or even that
transcendentally impossible) “whatever-it-might-be” toward which the (infinite)
series of actions tends, whenever we think of each action as drawing nearer, approach-
ing, or approximating it.
My moral vocation. If we look closely at what Fichte says about our striving for abso-
lute self-sufficiency, we see that he does think about it in the recursive way just
described.
How, it is asked, can one draw nearer to an infinite goal? . . . I draw nearer to it for myself. I can,
however, never grasp infinity; hence I always have before my eyes some determinate goal, to
which I can undoubtedly draw nearer, even though after I have achieved this determinate goal,
my end might well be extended that much farther. In this general regard, therefore, I never
draw nearer to the infinite. My goal lies in infinity, because my dependence is infinite. Yet
I never grasp my dependence in its infinity, but only with respect to some determinate range;
and within this range I can undoubtedly render myself more free.
(SL 4:150)
How, according to this passage, does the I strive toward infinity? It does so by setting
a determinate, finite end, reaching that end, but then in the very act of reaching it,
positing a new end, a new limit for itself. The striving to transcend this limit is what
posits a new finite end. The only determinate goal spoken of here is the proximate one,
not the final end of absolute self-sufficiency. This process of setting finite ends recurs
without limit, and is therefore infinite. The recursive setting of ends generates a series
of actions, each with its own limited end; the final end means nothing but the infinitely
distant result toward which the recursive series tends:
Nothing I am able to realize in the sensible world is ever the final end commanded by morality;
this final end lies at infinity, and anything we may realize in the sensible world is only a means
of approaching the latter end. Thus the proximate end of each of my actions is a new acting in
the future.
(SL 4:261)
The new end set at each stage is not determined by some general conception of a final
end that all actions are striving to achieve—the general happiness, for instance, or
complete control over nature. There could of course be a kind of recursiveness there
too, because the final end would be pursued by a series of actions each of which would
maximize it to the extent possible within its situation. Whether this would always
involve drawing nearer to it, however, is unclear; that would be contingent on circum-
stances. It might turn out that under unfavorable circumstances, external obstacles to
my end might make maximizing it consist in actually placing myself farther from it in
the next action than I was in the last. (If I maximize the strength of a dying person, the
best I might be able to do today is make the person weaker than the person was yester-
day.) The maximizing of any end under contingent conditions could guarantee neither
a linear progress toward it, nor the “drawing ever nearer” to it required by Fichte’s
series of actions leading toward absolute self-sufficiency.
For Fichte, each action belonging to my moral vocation lies on the path toward the
final end, and necessarily draws us nearer to it. Each recursion, moreover, involves
setting only a new end within a determinate range, and not also setting the final
end according to some determinate concept of it. On the contrary, my only conception
of the final end is that it is what lies at infinity along the path determined by this
recursive series of actions. Thus when Fichte speaks of my actions as “means” to abso-
lute self-sufficiency, he is not thinking of the actions calculatively, as maximizing some
determinate object in the sensible world. All he means is that each action leads to a new
action belonging to the same series.
This is how Fichte already thought of the I’s infinite striving in the Foundation of
1794:
If the I’s activity did not extend into the infinite, it could not itself set limits to this activity . . .
The activity of the I consists in unbounded self-positing; to this there occurs a resistance. If it
yielded to this obstacle, then the activity lying beyond the bounds of resistance would be utterly
abolished and destroyed; to that extent the I would not posit at all. But for all that, it must also
posit beyond this line.
(GWL 1:214)
The I is finite and bounded . . . . But where does its boundary lie? The boundary lies wherever in
the infinite the I posits it. The I is finite because it is subjected to limits; but it is infinite within
this finitude, because the boundary can be posited ever farther out, to infinity.
(GWL 1:258)
We can see this same conception of our relation to the final end of self-sufficiency
operating in Fichte’s approach to determining the material content of the moral law.
The final end of the moral law is absolute independence and self-sufficiency . . . This goal is
unachievable, but there is still a constant and uninterrupted process of approximation to this
goal. Accordingly, there must be a constant and uninterrupted series of actions by which one
draws nearer and nearer to this goal, a series that starts from the initial standpoint occupied by
each person . . . Our question can therefore be restated as follows: what are the actions that lie
on the line we have described?
(SL 4:209)
Objects and their final ends. In terms of their matter or content, he says, the actions
belonging to the series treat each object according to its final end (SL 4:210). This is
determined by what one might want to use the object for. It is not determined, how-
ever, by just any end one might have arbitrarily posited for the object. It does not aim at
control over the object—since this would mean only putting the object at the disposal
of whatever other ends for which we might use it. Once again, this would be the maxim
of “seeking unrestricted and lawless dominion over everything outside us,” which
Fichte condemns as supremely evil (SL 4:186). Rather, the final end of the object is the
end that relates the object to my original drive (SL 4:210)—the drive that grounds all
others (see Chapter 5 §5). “This drive,” however,
aims at many different things [and] can be satisfied only gradually, through intermediate
states . . . Even in individual cases, the end of the original drive can be divided into a manifold by
free reflection. (At every possible moment the drive strives after something determinate = X . . . )
Only in this way does a manifold acting arise.
(SL 4:207)
Thus far, of course, it remains obscure how the “division” of the original drive through
“free reflection” is supposed to result in determining the “final end” for any given object,
and thereby in determining the series of actions that lie on the line that leads toward
absolute self-sufficiency. But there is no sign that any role would be played here by con-
sequentialist calculations about how any specific determinate end could be maximized
under contingent conditions. On the contrary, Fichte again emphasizes the diversity of
aims arising from the original drive, the specificity of what this drive demands at each
particular moment, in each particular situation, as well as the limitedness of the original
drive in any form in which the I can act on it. As noted earlier, the argument is leading
up to a characteristic Fichtean antinomy, whose proposed resolution is the next step to
providing a scientific or systematic theory of the matter of our duties.
Personal identity. Before we take up that antinomy, however, it is worth pausing
briefly to note some of the implications of Fichte’s recursive conception of materially
free action for the conception of personal identity. Fichte thinks of each I as situated in
time. The I makes itself into what it is progressively through the recursive process of
projecting its own freedom into a determinate future that is self-chosen. My identity
with my future self, and even with my past self, is something I am constantly making
and re-making through my own choices. These are choices not only of actions but also
of the values on which those actions are based, and of the self that is committed to
those values. Who I am (my authentic or materially free self) is constituted by the series
of actions through which I strive for absolute self-sufficiency. This series is not fixed in
advance (as by consequentialist calculations). Instead, it is being constantly made and
re-made by the limit set by each new action, and the recursive process of transcending
that limit through each new action in the series.
My identity, in other words, is not a “fact” of any kind. It is not an empirical fact, such
as Lockean continuity through memory, or a metaphysical fact, such as the identity of
some non-extended spiritual substance. My identity is a norm, the demand I make on
myself to integrate and unify my individuality, including all my drives, unconscious as
well as conscious, natural as well as social. Morality for Fichte becomes the project of
fashioning my own authentic identity, my authentic self. It is not “forensic,” oriented
toward holding other people responsible, but results solely from a self-chosen respon-
sibility to myself as a free being.
It lies beyond this study to develop fully the implications of Fichte’s position here.
But we may catch a glimpse of them from the following insightful remarks by Dieter
Henrich:
Original self-reference, as Fichte and the existentialists would say, not only leads to but already
implies a process. This is tantamount to claiming that original self-reference is a kind of devel-
oping of mental life, which can also include and explain the moral and active aspects of human
life. Fichte’s interpretation of personal identity fundamentally altered the significance of the
question as it had predominated in philosophy. It moved away from the dominance of the
Lockean-Humean problem, which was essentially directed to the criteria over time for the
identity of a person. With Fichte, the question of identity becomes the development of a per-
sonal value system over various stages of an integrated motivational structure. Seen from just
this point of view, Fichte’s new construal of the problem of identity helps us to grasp the histor-
ical relationship between Fichte and various forms of psychological and psychoanalytic theory.
We could even say that the notion of the psychological identity of the person as we find it in
today’s psychological theory bears the imprint of Fichte’s orientation.
(Henrich 2003, p. 251)
The recursive conception of the I’s striving for absolute self-sufficiency is the principal
form taken in Fichte’s ethical theory by the new conception of personal identity to
which Henrich is here referring. One prominent later expression of Fichte’s new
conception of personal identity is Kierkegaard’s conception of what it means for a self
to exist:
The existing subjective thinker . . . is continually in a process of becoming, that is, striving . . . That
the existing subjective thinker is continually striving does not mean, however, that in a finite
sense he has a goal toward which he is striving, where he would be finished if he reached it. No,
he is striving infinitely, is continually in the process of becoming.
(Concluding Unscientific Postscript, SV 7: 62, 72)
Another expression of Fichte’s thought is the phrase made famous by Nietzsche:

“Become who you are.”2 In §8 of this chapter we will see, as already anticipated in
Chapter 3 §9, that for Fichte my personal identity—my individuality—also has an
interpersonal dimension. Who I am is always who I am making myself to be—always
in the context of my communicative relation to others. Identity thus includes social
identity—ethnic, racial, gender identity—which is socially constructed and yet nor-
mative, because it constitutes the situation of authentic ethical choice.3
§3: The Antinomy: Self-Sufficiency vs. the Conditions

of I-hood
Our final end, Fichte holds, is absolute self-sufficiency, but this end must be pursued
under the conditions of limitedness that transcendentally constitute being an I. This is
a limitedness which directly contradicts the concept of absolute self-sufficiency. As
Fichte puts the same antinomy in the Foundation of 1794:
The I is infinite, but merely with respect to its striving; it strives to be infinite. But the very
concept of striving already involves finitude, for that to which there is no counter-striving is
not a striving at all. If the I did no more than strive, if it had an infinite causality, it would not
be an I; it would not posit itself, and therefore would be nothing. But if it did not endlessly
strive in this fashion, again it could not posit itself, for it could oppose nothing to itself; again
it would be no I and would therefore be nothing.
(GWL 1:270)
The problem Fichte is setting at SL 4:207–11 is therefore how to resolve the antin-
omy. How can we understand our striving toward absolute independence and self-
sufficiency in a way that avoids the contradiction? We must try to conceive of
actions that approach, approximate, or draw nearer to absolute self-sufficiency in
such a way that they do not at the same time abolish the conditions of I-hood itself.
“The way to discover the material content of the moral law,” therefore, “is by syn-
thetically uniting the concept of I-hood and the concept of self-sufficiency”
(SL 4:211). This cannot be done by treating our striving for self-sufficiency as lim-
ited only empirically (for instance, by the contingent limitations on our power to
control nature).
This limitedness is supposed to be an original and necessary limitedness, grounded in reason
itself, and by no means an empirical and contingent limitedness . . . There can be no drive within
the I to cease being an I . . . for in that case, the I would aim at its own annihilation, which is
2
Nietzsche was plainly quoting Pindar: γένοι’ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών (Pythian Ode 2, line 72). Pindar’s version
includes the thought that your identity consists in what you have learned (μαθών) about yourself. You are
to become who you authentically choose to be in the light of yourself and your situation as you authenti-
cally know them.
3
See Appiah (2005), Haslanger (2012).
contradictory. Conversely, any limitedness of the drive which does not follow immediately
from I-hood is not an original limitedness.
(SL 4:211)
The limitedness of absolute striving. The limitedness of our free agency constitutes
our “situation” (SL 4:225). The material of our duties is determined by the way we are
able to pursue self-sufficiency within the limits of our situation. Each of our dutiful
actions changes our situation, and therefore leads to another situation: “I determine my
individuality further through each action” (SL 4:221). But we must reconcile the striving
for absolute self-sufficiency with the conditions of the I’s self-positing (of I-hood in
general)—in other words, with the transcendental necessity that it cannot be absolutely
independent and self-sufficient. The way to do this is to discover that for which the drive
for absolute self-sufficiency is in principle unable to strive: “The limitedness in question
would therefore have to be a material one: the drive would have to be unable to strive
after certain things” (SL 4:211).
The limitation of the striving for absolute self-sufficiency cannot consist merely in
what we are (contingently) unable to achieve. Therefore, we cannot derive our duties
from the drive for absolute self-sufficiency by calculating which actions would maxi-
mize “self-sufficiency.” We can’t act for the sake of absolute self-sufficiency as we would
act for the sake of other ends we pursue in that way. It would be self-contradictory to
strive to maximize the abolition of the transcendental condition of one’s striving.
Instead, in §18 of the System of Ethics Fichte proceeds by determining which limited or
finite ends are such that the drive for absolute self-sufficiency, owing to the finitude of
the I, could not strive after them. Then, based on the determination of these ends, he
determines which actions are incompatible with the striving for self-sufficiency, which
are required, and what principles limit the latter actions. Fichte further divides these
questions into three classes according to the way the I must ask them under the tran-
scendental conditions of free agency. Fichte systematizes the three areas under which
duties are to be determined using the triad of Kant’s categories of relation, with the first
two reversed:
Causality: Duties pertaining to the body, which is the condition of the I’s
causality.
Substance: Duties pertaining to our cognitive faculty, which represents to us the
substantiality of the moral law.
Reciprocity: Duties in relation to other rational beings, which must be reciprocal.
(SL 4:216)
How do these three topics involve the synthesis of the end of absolute self-sufficiency
with the concept of I-hood? They involve the Kantian categories of relation. Fichte
thinks of these as the categories through which the synthesis of opposites occurs.
I relate to my body as the cause of efficacious action in the material world. My intellect
gives me information about the objective realities of my situation and my duty, which
form the substance on the basis of which I make decisions about what to do; also,
substance is causa sui, grounded on nothing beyond itself; that is what the moral law or
categorical imperative has been shown to be. Finally, I stand in a relation of reciprocity
or community to other rational beings. As we will see later in this chapter and in the
next, this last relation is the most decisive one in determining the ends of morality and
the content of our duties.
In synthesizing the final end of self-sufficiency with our original limitedness, Fichte
also follows the Kantian categories of quality (reality, negation, limitation), but again
with the first two categories reversed. He begins with negative obligations—not to do
certain things. They include, as we will shortly see in §3, reacting passively to one’s
bodily desires: seeking their satisfaction as final ends without relating them to the
rational ends of material freedom. The forbidden strivings also include, as we will see
in §6, not inquiring freely but subordinating our intellect to something else, such as
dogma or authority. Finally, as we will see in §7, negative duties also include the prohi-
bition on adopting ends that cannot be shared by other rational beings. These ends are
contrary to the drive for absolute self-sufficiency, which cannot strive for them. Hence
they are morally prohibited.
Fichte then introduces positive duties, relating our actions to possible ends of reason
or morality. These will be strivings that coincide with the drive to self-sufficiency. They
include keeping our bodies healthy and satisfying the natural drives needed to enable
us to do what we ought; cultivating our intellects; and also communicating with others
to reach rational agreement on our ends. There might indeed be some instrumental or
consequentialist reasoning involved in the pursuit of these ends, but the ends are not
derived by calculative-consequentialist or technical-practical reasoning from some
conception of absolute self-sufficiency, regarded as something that we might try to
maximize. They instead concern only enhancing our capacities to pursue whatever
finite ends (thus far undetermined) we might rationally choose to pursue.
Finally, there are limitative duties, which constrain the kinds of actions we can do in
pursuit of the positive duties. These prohibited actions are once again specified by ways we
could not strive after our ends consistently with the drive for absolute self-sufficiency.
The duties, negative, positive, and limitative, resulting from the synthesis of the
drive to self-sufficiency with the conditions of I-hood are always conceived in strictly
deontological terms. That is, they are actions and omissions required and also per-
formed for their own sake, and for the sake of the ends projected in the actions them-
selves, but not for the sake of any end given prior to the actions, to which they serve
only as means. This is precisely what we should have expected from so unyielding a foe
of any material ethics and of every form of consequentialism.
§4: The Body: No Enjoyment Only for its Own Sake

The body is the most immediate expression of our limitedness, since it is through the
body that the I interacts causally with the material world, with the not-I which limits it.
Regarding the body, the focus is on the natural drives arising from the body as a living
organism. “What is demanded by the original drive is always supposed to occur within
experience if I freely determine myself to this end. This is here the case: the natural
drive belongs to the original drive” (SL 4:213). Fichte now represents, as we have said,
the three duties according to the Kantian categories of quality, again reversing the
order of the first two:
Negative: The body must not be treated as a final end.

Positive: The body ought to be cultivated in a manner that makes it suitable for
the ends of freedom.
Limitative: Every enjoyment that cannot be related with sincere conviction to our
efforts to cultivate our body in a suitable manner is impermissible.
The negative duty. At first hearing, these duties pertaining to the body sound repel-
lently austere. Apparently Fichte intends them to sound that way, since (as we noted
earlier) he adds: “A person to whom such an ethics appears austere and painful is
beyond help, for there is no other ethics” (SL 4:216). To understand what the duties
really demand, I think we need to look more closely. On closer inspection, his position
may not seem so unreasonable.
“Enjoyment” (Genuß) has for Fichte a technical meaning: “Satisfaction for satisfac-
tion’s sake one calls mere enjoyment” (SL 4:128). As an organized being of nature, my
body strives to unite natural things with it—for example, to “incorporate determinate
parts of nature into itself ” (SL 4:122). This striving, merely as an indeterminate sensa-
tion of need, is felt as a longing (Sehnen); when it is determined as to its object, it
becomes a desiring (Begehren) (SL 4:125–6). This striving in relation to nature is an
aspect of my free activity, but it is an aspect that is experienced passively, in the form of
a natural drive (SL 4:126–7). Every natural drive aims at its own satisfaction
(Befriedigung), which consists in bringing natural things into a determinate relation-
ship with our own nature (SL 4:128). As the fulfillment of this aim, every satisfaction is
in one sense for its own sake, and is therefore always a form of “enjoyment.” But the
ethical drive, as we have seen, is a mixed drive. The pure drive itself would demand
only “continuous self-denial,” and could not result in any positive action (SL 4: 147).
The ethical drive, however, combines the form of the pure drive with the matter of an
empirical drive, whose object is always the satisfaction of a natural drive (SL 4:148).
Therefore, it would seem that every ethical action must also involve the satisfaction of
some natural drive, hence also some form of enjoyment.
Fichte claims, however, that giving in to “mere enjoyment” is something that it is
within our power not to do (SL 4:130), and also that doing it makes us an object of
self-contempt (SL 4:152). So a natural question is this: Is enjoyment in general, satis-
faction for its own sake, something morally permitted or not? In order to grasp Fichte’s
answer to this question, I think we need to distinguish between “enjoyment” and “mere
enjoyment.” Enjoyment includes satisfaction of a natural drive when it belongs to satis-
faction of the ethical drive. But mere enjoyment is the satisfaction of a natural drive
solely for its own sake, considered apart from the ethical drive. Enjoyment is therefore
permitted (or even indispensably necessary) when it consists in the satisfaction of any
natural drive which is a component of the ethical drive. Mere enjoyment occurs only
when the natural drive is detached from the ethical drive and pursued apart from it.
The ethical drive should be involved in all acting, hence in all enjoyment.
I am never supposed to obey the sensible drive as such, even though, according to what was
said earlier, I am subject to this drive every time I act. The ethical drive must therefore be
involved in all acting, since otherwise no action could ensue in accordance with the moral law.
(SL 4:156)
The positive and limitative duties. The negative command of duty regarding the
body—that it must not be regarded as a final end—should, therefore, not be understood
to forbid all bodily pleasures, satisfactions, or enjoyments. It does not even forbid these
for their own sake—since any drive aims at its own satisfaction, and any satisfaction, by
its very concept, is always for its own sake. The negative command of duty regarding the
body forbids only those satisfactions that are not related to my ethical vocation as a free
being. The limitative command should be understood as having an analogous import.
The positive command—to cultivate the body so as to make it suitable for the ends of
freedom—permits, or even requires, whatever I might do in relating the condition of
my body, including my bodily enjoyments, to my vocation as a rational being. Those
who see something austere and painful in this, Fichte believes, could only be those who
prefer a life of passive self-indulgence, a life more suitable to thoughtless grazing ani-
mals than to human beings, over a life of free and reflective activity. That way of life
makes any rational being who leads it an object of self-contempt. It is those who
choose to live this way that Fichte regards as “beyond help.” As we have seen several
times already, Fichte believes that in the present age of human history, most people—
especially those from the “so-called ‘better’ classes” who belong to Fichte’s literary and
academic audience—do in fact live on this lower level of reflection. In dogmatism, they
even find a philosophy that rationalizes their contemptible moral laxity. They must be
shocked out of it. That’s the point of Fichte’s strict and austere language.
It is true that the import of this positive command remains unclear until we under-
stand better the “ends of freedom.” A more informative account of our duties regarding
the body is therefore deferred until we are in a position to understand better how those
ends are to be determined. The same will be true of our duties regarding cognition. We
get more answers later, in the third and final main part of §18 (III–V), which deals with
the I’s intersubjectivity. This will be taken up in §§8–9 of this chapter, and even more in
Chapter 7.
§5: Fichte’s “Rigorism”: No Indifferent Actions, No

Meritorious Actions
As we have just seen, Fichte argues that “The ethical drive must be involved in all
acting, since otherwise no action could ensue in accordance with the moral law”
(SL 4:156). As the first clause of this last sentence implies, the prohibition on “mere
enjoyment” must be considered along with Fichte’s doctrine—apparently an even
more forbidding one—that there are no indifferent actions. Every action is either a
duty, belonging to the series that draws us nearer to absolute self-sufficiency, or else it
falls outside that series and violates the moral law (SL 4: 153, 156, 207, 264; cf. NR
3:13). It is now time for us to address directly the meaning of this doctrine.
Kantian objections. Fichte repeatedly denies there are any “indifferent” actions. This
seems to imply, first, that there are no merely permissible actions: every action that is
not a duty is impermissible. Fichte seems to be, from Kant’s standpoint, one of those
extreme rigorists who would “strew all his steps with duties as with man-traps” (MS
6:409). Second, it apparently implies not only that there are no “supererogatory”
actions, but also that there are no degrees of moral merit or blame. No right action can
do more than is required, and no wrong action can be worse than any other – it’s just
wrong. All this would contradict, for example, Kant’s theory of imputability, as well as
his doctrine that there is a distinction between strict, perfect, or owed duties, and wide,
imperfect, or meritorious duties (MS 6:388–94, cf. G 4: 421, KpV 5:66). If we accept
these implications, many (including Kantians) may find Fichte’s ethics unacceptable.
But I think both apparent implications are questionable. The first is one Fichte must
accept, if it is properly understood. But rightly understood, it is not as threatening as it may
seem. It merely represents Fichte’s expansion of the moral realm, mentioned in Chapter 4.
In the following section, we will consider this further, and try to show how it may be more
sympathetically viewed. The second implication, I believe, is more doubtful. I think it
involves not a direct denial of Kantian doctrines about merit, but rather a way in which
Fichte’s project in the System of Ethics altogether avoids issues about supererogation,
merit, and degrees of imputability. Just as Fichte’s position on the first issue may represent
his expansion of the moral, so his position on the second issue may represent his determi-
nation—perhaps his contraction—of the task of moral philosophy.
Fundamental to a correct understanding of Fichte at this point is the recognition
that he is concerned chiefly, perhaps exclusively, with the application of the principle of
morality—that is, with identifying those actions required by the moral law (which, as
we have seen in Chapter 4, Fichte equates what I have called “the concept of moral
authority”). This means that he is interested in the evaluation of actions only from the
agent’s standpoint, and especially from the prospective standpoint of the agent. Fichte’s
ethics is for the agent who is deciding which possible actions to perform in the rela-
tively immediate future and which ones to omit.
Actions and ends. Fichte’s claim that there are no indifferent actions does not apply to
everything that many philosophers nowadays might consider an “action.” For the pur-
poses of Fichte’s doctrine, not every detail of my bodily movement in doing something,
even where the detail might be intended, and not every variation in my choice of the
way to do something, would for Fichte count as a distinct “action.” “As I continue along
a course of acting,” Fichte says, “I must constantly, in accordance with the concept of
freedom, make some selection from among all of the actions that still remain possible
for me” (SL 4: 221). An “action,” in the sense that there are no indifferent actions, is
therefore a “course of action” or (as Fichte also puts it) “a determinate part of the mani-
fold of possible actions” that are possible for me (SL 4:207). The question to be
answered, always in the context of my situation, is this: What part of that manifold
must I select? The size and shape of these parts of the manifold are to be determined by
the considerations that govern the choices to be made. Differences in what I do that
don’t involve relevant “selections of part of this manifold” do not count as “actions” for
the purposes of Fichte’s doctrines. They may not be indifferent actions not because
they aren’t indifferent, but because, being indifferent, they don’t count as (individu-
ated) actions. At most they might be included somewhere in the larger manifold that
constitutes an action.
What characterizes this manifold, properly speaking, is systematically limited. Fichte
tells us repeatedly that an “action” (in the sense in which actions matter, hence in which
there are no indifferent actions) is what projects the concept of a (finite) end (NR 3:19,
37, 59; SL 4:2, 5, 9, 66–71). The choice of the means to that end would have moral signif-
icance only insofar as moral considerations might play a role in deciding when and how
to project the end. These would be considerations invoking moral authority: in other
words, purely deontic constraints. Otherwise, taking an alternative means to your end
does not count as a different action from the standpoint of the moral principle. Once an
end is projected, and if there are no other moral considerations involved, any further
instrumental reasoning that might lead me to choose one way or another of reaching
the end is indeed morally indifferent. That’s because the choice of means would in this
case not constitute a different course of action, or a different determinate part of the
manifold open to me. The different, morally insignificant, variations would all belong to
the very same “determinate part of the manifold of possible actions.”
Some philosophers think that we do not rationally choose our ends. They think all
action—all rational choice—is to be understood merely as a result of instrumental,
calculative-consequentialist reasoning. Fichte’s concept of action belongs to a wholly
different philosophical universe from the frigid and desolate dwarf planet these unfor-
tunate philosophers inhabit. Far from making choices based on instrumental reason-
ing the basis of ethics, Fichte thinks that merely instrumental choices are without
ethical significance. They are so far beneath the notice of ethics that they do not even
count as distinct actions. For Fichte, the choice of means to a given end would not
count as a choice or an action, at least to the extent that—and just because—it would be
morally indifferent. Only the projection of the concept of an end truly counts as an
action. Among actions in this sense, there are none that are morally indifferent. All our
ends matter morally; the choice of means matters only to the degree that it might
involve deontic constraints.
Merit and “supererogation.” Fichte’s ethics is addressed to an agent who is deciding

what he or she ought to do now. The notions of supererogation, merit, and blame, and
their degrees, are not naturally thought of as part of the answer to that agent’s ques-
tions. In order to decide what I ought to do now, I do not need to say which alternatives
would be, or would have been, more meritorious, or whether I would have deserved
greater praise or blame if I had chosen some other alternative. Supererogation and
degrees of merit or blame would seem to be mainly “appraiser values”—positive or
negative valuations that others (or I myself, taking an appraiser attitude toward my
actions) might apply either prospectively or retrospectively. They would not determine
what I ought to do now. For me to care about such appraiser-values now, when faced
with a serious choice, looks like vanity or guilt-tripping, which could only distract me
from my task of deciding what I ought to do now.
Perhaps this shows that in addition to the philosophical project Fichte is undertak-
ing in the System of Ethics, moral theory also needs a theory of these appraiser values—
how an agent that does the right thing might have done something better or worse, or
an agent that does the wrong thing might have committed some act more or less blam-
able. That would at most show that Fichte’s ethical project, as he chooses to execute it, is
lacking an important component that belongs to other moral philosophies. It would
not show that he is wrong, from the standpoint of his own system, in claiming that—
for me, in deciding now what to do—there are no indifferent actions.
For this reason, we might want to reproach Fichte for unduly narrowing the con-
cerns of philosophical ethics. That would be the correct way to articulate our objection
to his apparent “rigorism.” But then we should also note that insofar as Kant’s ethical
theory brings appraiser values, such as degrees of merit or blame, to bear on actions
from the agent’s standpoint, it brings trouble on itself. If all that matters is whether I act
with a good will—which “shines like a jewel having its full value in itself ” (G 4:394)—
then why should a Kantian care about the imputability of consequences, about degrees
of merit and blame that attach to them? (See Wood (2014a), pp. 223–4.)
Further, among Kantians there are controversies about how wide or meritorious
duties should bear on our particular decisions. Some think that wide duties are such
that it is quite permissible to omit some actions that might have been done in fulfill-
ment of them.4 Others argue that we may omit such actions only if they conflict with
actions that fulfill some other duty (strict or wide). On that interpretation, Kant’s posi-
tion appears to converge with Fichte’s rigorist view. Non-Kantians, such as Shelly
Kagan, have sometimes ably defended a rigoristic position perhaps even more extreme
than Fichte’s, despite the fact that others, and even Kagan himself, are less than com-
fortable with such drastic conclusions (Kagan 1989). This controversy itself, however,
4
This more lax and reasonable interpretation of Kant appears to be the more popular one. It is taken, for
instance, by Hill (1992), “Kant on Imperfect Duty and Supererogation.” I think my own treatment of the
theme in Kant, developed in the mild climate of Bay Area California, also fits into this more comfortable
latitudinarian and laid-back category. See Wood (2008), pp. 168–70. A somewhat stricter version of Kantian
doctrine, but one whose implications for particular decisions is less clear, is taken by Baron (1995),
pp. 21–110, and also by Timmermann (2010). An even more ferociously rigorist reading of Kant (of which
I am sure Fichte would approve) is given by Rivera-Castro (2006).
shows that it would be unwise to decide that we may reject out of hand Fichte’s position
that there are no indifferent actions.
Part of the problem, as we noted in Chapter 4, is that people tend to approach these
issues with the assumption that moral duties represent external side-constraints on us,
interfering with a course of life that we reasonably set independently of them. It is
important to realize that Fichte approaches things in an entirely different way. Fichte
radicalizes the Kantian idea that morality is fundamentally a matter of autonomy or
self-government. Every choice, as an expression of my freedom, takes on a moral sig-
nificance. This should not suggest to us that we are being coerced, pressured, or manip-
ulated to conform our actions to demands made on us by others. Instead, morality is
now seen exclusively as the demand we make on ourselves, even where this demand
has a strong social content and requires us to sacrifice enjoyments for the sake of higher
claims that humanity may make on us. For the whole point, as Fichte sees it, is that
even these heavy demands are nothing but the claims of our own freedom.
Given the way Fichte has derived the notion of moral authority, it should be expected
to apply to every issue in which our freedom is at stake. It is at stake constantly, in all
our actions, because it is always my vocation to be the free being that I am. Every free or
self-determined action has its objective or normative side, which turns out to be a
claim possessing moral authority. I ought to be constantly true to myself as a free being,
even in my sensuous enjoyments. In order to do this, I must always relate these enjoy-
ments to my moral vocation. Even eating and drinking should, in Fichte’s biblical
homiletic language, be done for the glory of God.
§6: Kierkegaard’s “Ethical Man” as a Fichtean

Relevant to the interpretation of Fichte’s doctrine at this point, I believe, is the answer
to an interesting question arising about a later figure—Kierkegaard: in particular, to a
question about his “ethical man” (“B” or “Magistrate William”), the pseudonymous
author of Volume II of Either/Or. When Michelle Kosch asks the question: “To what
position in German Idealist ethics does Kierkegaard’s ethical man bear the strongest
resemblance?” her answer is: to Fichte in the System of Ethics.5 I believe she is abso-
lutely correct about that, and that this connection can help us better understand the
ethical in both Fichte and Kierkegaard.
“My duty.” Kierkegaard’s ethical man declares:
There is no such thing as “duty” in general; there is only one’s own duty, and this is always
something concrete. I never say of a man: He is doing duty or duties; but I say: He is doing his
duty; I say: I am doing my duty, do your duty.
(Kierkegaard, Either/Or, SV 2: 236).
5
Kosch (2006). As Kosch acknowledges, similar claims for Fichte’s presence in Kierkegaard’s concep-
tion of the ethical were made earlier by Emanuel Hirsch and Helmut Fahrenbach.
My situation always presents me with my duty. This is always the particular action that
is required of me here and now. Duty is never some alien (social or divine) authority
invading my life or constraining my freedom. It is the claim on me made solely by my
freedom itself. The ethical man asserts his freedom precisely by choosing himself—
which means: making every aspect of his life—his profession as a judge, his friend-
ships, above all his love and his marriage—an expression of his freedom. This turns his
every action—to the extent that he has truly chosen himself and remained faithful to
this choice—into an ethical duty. Freedom, integrity, authenticity lie only in doing
one’s ethical duty. Freedom from duty, if we can use such an expression at all, would be
freedom only from yourself; it would be the ultimate loss of yourself, the total loss of
your freedom.
“The universal.” The presence of the moral principle, or what I have called “moral
authority,” in the life of Kierkegaard’s ethical man is indicated by what he calls “the
universal.” His task as a human being is to discover this universal in all his actions. In
Fichte’s terms, he does this by conforming his actions to his conscientious conviction
of his duty. Every action, if it remains authentic to what the ethical man calls the choice
of oneself, is at the same time a fulfillment of duty. In every action, one either chooses
oneself or fails to live up to one’s self-choice. One’s entire life in its concreteness, says
the ethical man, is “the material with which it is to build and that which it is to build”
(Either/Or SV 2:227). “The person who lives ethically expresses the universal in his life.
He makes himself the universal human being, not by taking off his concretion . . . but by
putting it on and interpenetrating it with the universal” (Either/Or, SV 2: 229). “The
universal emerges through the concreteness” (Either/Or SV 2: 234–5). There are no
choices in life that fall outside the scope of ethical duty. Moral authority is ubiquitous
in the strong sense.
“Ground projects.” One way of looking at Fichte’s (and Magistrate William’s) posi-
tion is to see it as yet another way of replying to philosophers such as Bernard Williams
and Susan Wolf, who fear that the demands of morality threaten to deprive us of our
integrity, and our lives of their fundamental meaning, by overriding our “ground pro-
ject,” or our “categorical desires” (Williams 1981 and Wolf 2003). Fichte reconceives
morality in such a way that everything belonging to our ground project becomes our
moral duty. Or, if you prefer, Fichtean morality is nothing but the system of our “cate-
gorical desires.”
For Fichte, of course, these must have a content that is integrated into our moral life:
our love for another could easily lead to our choosing to save the beloved from drown-
ing when we might have saved others instead (we will see in Chapter 7 §8 that it neces-
sarily includes such a choice). But it should not include letting the beloved manipulate
us into participating in treachery, fraud, armed robbery, or mass murder. If Williams
and Wolf are asking us to find attractive a personal ideal that might sanction the love-
driven conduct of such people as Macbeth, Dzhokar Tsarnaev, Bonnie and Clyde, or
the children of Bernard Madoff, then they are asking far too much.
A Fichtean response to Williams’s and Wolf ’s concerns, however, is quite distinct

from the standard Kantian one presented, for example, by Barbara Herman. Herman’s
response is that moral considerations place certain limits or constraints on our ground
projects, but without displacing them or alienating us from them (Herman 1993,
pp. 23–44). Herman might make the same point just made at the end of the previous
paragraph, but Fichte goes far beyond that. He does think that my moral vocation dis-
places other projects—all other projects. It displaces any desire or project not inte-
grated by moral reflection into my project of being the free self that I am. That is
because no other desires and projects could be expressions of my freedom or true self-
hood. There is no conflict between the rational impartiality of the moral law and the
concrete demands of my situation. For Fichte, they are the same. My care for other
people, the projects and causes to which I devote myself, all belong to my moral voca-
tion. When saving a loved one from drowning there could no longer be two thoughts:
“To be authentically myself, I must save L” and “Saving L is morally required.” To be an
authentic self is for these to be just one thought, the very same thought. That is the only
right way for me not to have “one thought too many.”
“Choosing myself.” What actions this might involve, and how far in the direction of
particularity (and “partiality”) they might extend, is a question that must be decided
by my conscience in my concrete situation. Magistrate William would say they are to
be decided by my choice of myself. Kierkegaard’s ethical man thus presents us with
an appealing interpretation of Fichte’s moral rigorism. At the same time he shows us
how Fichte’s ethics eventually shows itself in such existentialist conceptions as “self-
choice” and “authentic selfhood” in later existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger
and Sartre. “Doing one’s duty” is nothing but Fichte’s way of referring to the ethical
expression of one’s material freedom. We can say, if we like, that Fichte “moralizes”
all our decisions. But it is never a question of letting some alien force, “morality,” take
over our lives.6 Once we understand morality as Fichte does, our freedom and integ-
rity have nothing to fear from morality. The only conceivable threats come from
outside morality.
§7: Cognition: Fichte’s Ethics of Belief

The body is the first and most immediate aspect of the I’s necessary limitedness—its
causal interaction with the not-I that limits it. Our cognition of the world is another
6
“While there is a moralizing tone to these descriptions that can strike us today as quaint or even
priggish, this may be more a matter of Fichte’s mode of speech than of what he is actually saying.”
(Wright 1996, p. 104). Walter Wright is talking here about Fichte’s later lectures in Berlin on the Doctrine
of Science (1804). His statement might equally be applied to much of what Fichte wrote, especially to
those passages of the System of Ethics in which he seems most austerely moralistic. But it is not merely a
matter of Fichte’s manner of speaking. It has to do with the way Fichte radicalizes the Kantian concep-
tion of autonomy, creating the existentialist concept of self-choice and reshaping (expanding) morality
in terms of it.
aspect, since as Fichte has argued, cognition of the world that limits and situates us is
necessary for the I’s action. Here again Fichte uses a modified version of the Kantian
categories of quality:
Negative: Never subordinate theoretical reason to anything, but inquire with
absolute freedom.
Positive: Cultivate your power of cognition as far as you are able.
Limitative: Refer all your reflecting to your duty, and inquire in order to discover
what your duty is.
(SL 4:218)
As we have seen, Fichte holds that theoretical and practical reason mutually require
each other; they are mutually dependent (SL 4:1–2): I must cognize in order to act, and
act in order to cognize. But he also holds that practical reason has a priority over theo-
retical reason: my cognition is ultimately for the purpose of freely acting. Practical
considerations ground my “faith” in freedom of the will, which cannot be demon-
strated to the dogmatist, or even proven in the way that other propositions of the
Doctrine of Science can be, because freedom constitutes the foundation or first princi-
ple of the entire system.
Evidentialism or anti-evidentialism? This priority of the practical might be
thought to compromise the standards of theoretical reason. Practical (moral) inter-
ests, independent of theoretical evidence or proofs, may be thought to dictate to us
what we must believe. Fichte is then easily seen as an “anti-evidentialist,” if evidential-
ism is the position that our beliefs must be grounded solely on epistemic grounds, not
on practical interests (and assuming the two must be distinct).7 This kind of anti
evidentialism would seem to be Kant’s conception of the priority of the practical, in
relation to the postulates of God and immortality, as he presents it in the Critique of
Practical Reason:
I will that there be a God, that my existence in this world be also an existence in a pure world
of understanding beyond natural connections, and finally that my duration be endless . . . for
this is the only case in which my interest, because I may not give up anything of it, unavoidably
determines my judgment.
(KpV 5:143)
Kant is taking it for granted that there exists a set of wholly theoretical grounds for
assent, and that these leave the questions of God and immortality undecided. He
maintains that in this one exceptional case it is permissible to believe certain proposi-
tions not capable of theoretical grounding based solely on practical grounds: to let
interest rather than evidence determine my judgment. This, he claims, is because the
practical interests here are those of morality.
7
“Anti-evidentialism” is the way Fichte’s doctrine of the primacy of the practical is understood by
Hoelzel (2014), p. 367. For my own defense of evidentialism see Wood (2002), Chapters 1–2.
Fichte’s conclusions about freedom and God (or the moral order) are similar. He is
probably thinking of Kant when he says concerning the conviction that we are free,
that this is a “faith,” which rests not on “any theoretical insight, but a practical interest”
(SL 4:26). Nevertheless, Fichte does not see things quite the same way Kant does. He
does not regard it as permissible to subordinate theoretical reason to anything distinct
from it. That would betray the “pure interest in truth” which must never be forsaken for
any reason. In Fichte’s view, nothing except the results of theoretical inquiry should
ever pre-determine your theoretical conclusions. For inquiry, the pure interest in truth
ought to be the exclusive concern (SW 8:342–52). “Do not set for yourself in advance
some goal that you want to reach—for from where might you obtain such a goal?” (SL
4:218). As I interpret this, it means that practical considerations may and even must,
via the feeling of self-harmony and certainty, determine your convictions, especially
about matters such as freedom of the will and the moral order. But this is not adverse to
the “pure interest in truth.”
Fichte holds that we grasp freedom and the moral order (or God) by “faith.” But as
we saw in Chapter 3, for him this is not a question of believing something lacking in
theoretical support because morality (or anything else) gives you an interest in believ-
ing what is independent of, or even opposed to, theoretical grounds. Fichte does not
see it as a case where the understanding, or theoretical considerations, has dictated one
decision—such as the decision to suspend judgment, or deny freedom of the will—and
practical considerations have dictated another. Instead, Fichte’s position is that theo-
retical and practical considerations must always work together, with the latter having
primacy (SL 4:165). Only theoretical considerations support a judgment, but every
conviction, every certainty, when arrived at by the understanding out of a state of doubt
and concern, is practical in character.
As we saw in Chapter 5 §§6–7, for Fichte the understanding by itself, except in
mathematics and transcendental philosophy, never reaches certainty; it only ques-
tions, inquires, judges, and offers possible convictions. Certainty in moral matters
always depends on conviction, whose orientation is practical. Fichte thinks that
although we cannot prove freedom theoretically, based on empirical evidence or dog-
matic metaphysical arguments, it is also true that we cannot coherently regard our-
selves as continuing to act, or even to inquire theoretically, unless we affirm our
freedom. This argument is transcendental. The grounds of the judgment that we are
free are theoretical grounds; but they result in a conviction, a certainty that we are free,
which is practical.
Fichte’s position here is anti-evidentialist only if we are operating with a conception
of “evidence” (or “epistemic grounds”) which is at odds with Fichte’s own conception.
For Fichte, some transcendental considerations are theoretical or epistemic in nature.
For example, it would be self-undermining to claim to understand or be convinced of
anything, or to make what one regards as a materially free choice, while refusing to
affirm that one is free. The acceptance as true of the appearance of freedom in order to
avoid this incoherence constitutes a theoretical or epistemic ground for affirming one’s
own freedom. It is from that theoretical ground that we accept the conviction (the
“faith”) that the appearance of freedom is not an illusion (SL 4:25–6).
Fichte seems to hold analogous views about belief in the world’s moral order. “What
is involved here is not a wish, nor a hope, nor an act of evaluating reasons pro and con,
nor a free acceptance whose opposite one still considers to be possible. Once one has
resolved to obey the law within oneself, then the acceptance that this goal can be
accomplished is utterly necessary” (GGW 5: 183). As moral beings we cannot coher-
ently represent ourselves as acting without accepting the conviction of a moral order.
This is required for coherence between our beliefs and our actions. Although the prac-
tical commitment comes first, the demand for this coherence is an epistemic require-
ment.8 For Fichte, “the subordination of the theoretical to the practical” entails that “all
theoretical laws are based on practical laws, or rather, since there can be only one of the
latter, on one and the same law;” consequently, “even in the context of theory, there is
an absolute freedom of reflection and abstraction, and the possibility of directing one’s
attention to something from something else as a matter of duty” (GWL 1:294–5).
Absolute freedom of inquiry, and determination of theoretical judgment solely by
theoretical grounds, are likewise moral requirements. They are the only acceptable
grounds for any decision to adopt a conviction. We must not inquire with some pre-
given aim regarding the outcome of our inquiries—such as that they must harmonize
with some favored world-view (e.g. with theism or naturalism). We must follow the
evidence and arguments, whether empirical or transcendental, leading either to
knowledge or to belief, wherever they lead. Regarding our cognitive powers, Fichte
holds that duty requires us to direct them exclusively to finding the truth, according to
the appropriate norms of inquiry and argument, and not to other ends. Fichte’s ethics
of belief does not permit us to believe something because we wish it were true, or
because we wish we believed it (GGW 5:182). It forbids any “material duty of belief ”—
the duty to hold some belief because it has a certain content (SW 4: 165). We should
form our beliefs by considering only the appropriate norms, and these are only the
norms that direct us to believe what is true. That is an acceptance, not a rejection, of
evidentialism.
We might understand in the following way how a kind of practical faith—in free-
dom, or in a moral order—can be consistent with evidentialism. Faith originates in a
commitment to a practical project, which, however, involves presuppositions of a the-
oretical kind. For instance, acting with material freedom presupposes that we are free,
and striving to better the future of humanity presupposes that the success of such
8
See Martin (1997), Chapter 6. Martin shows how Fichte’s conception of the primacy of practice is
grounded on what he calls the “striving doctrine”—that without practical striving, there could be no object
of cognition, and therefore that the norms of theoretical reason, transcendentally regarded, are instances
of norms of practical reason. A similar interpretation of Fichte is offered by Pippin (2000), who interprets
Fichte’s supposedly “subjective, psychological idealism” as in fact something quite different: an assertion of
“the self-sufficiency or autonomy of the normative domain itself ” (p. 156). These claims must be seen as
made from the transcendental, not the ordinary standpoint. This is another way of defending conclusions
argued in Chapter 2.
striving is possible. There is a theoretical commitment involved already in undertak-

ing the project, but the project need not require a prior belief in what is presupposed. It
requires only a weaker attitude, such as hope or acceptance-for-practical-purposes.
Then the need to maintain theoretical consistency together with one’s practical com-
mitment might eventually result, perhaps over time and through a continued relation
between the practical striving and the theoretical acceptance, in an epistemic justifica-
tion of a more firm theoretical commitment—perhaps even the stronger propositional
attitude we call belief. The theoretical presuppositions of one’s project could not be
clearly contrary to the evidence, and practical acceptance and hope must never pro-
duce a strength of belief that is disproportionate to evidence. For this reason, rational
faith confirms the acceptance of what is presupposed and helps move it in the direction
of belief, if we acquire even a little evidence in its favor, as through the partial success of
our project. Acceptance (for practical purposes), though it is not belief, may be given
in advance of evidence supporting belief. If it does eventually result in belief, the belief
must remain proportional to evidence, and if the eventual success of one’s project is
uncertain, it should include the concernful mixture of hope, belief, and doubt. This is
what has led some liberal Christian theologians to say: “The opposite of faith is not
doubt but certainty.”9
This is the structure, I think, of Kant’s moral arguments, and also of Fichte’s practical
faith. What is required for the arguments to succeed is that the practical commitment
be justified unconditionally—as by a categorical imperative—and not be clearly con-
trary to theoretical reasons or evidence. The theoretical presupposition of the practical
project must be linked to it on good theoretical grounds. These requirements are not
easy to satisfy. Whether Kant’s or Fichte’s arguments satisfy them might be questioned.
But if they were satisfied, then we would have a practical faith—even a form of belief—
that meets reasonable evidentialist standards.
The friend of truth. This entails a rejection of any ethics of belief that would permit us
to form our beliefs in order to reach some other end than truth (e.g. happiness, or the
faith of some religion, or some moral requirement that might be inconsistent with love
of truth for its own sake). It therefore equally condemns any indirect strategy for max-
imizing our true beliefs through a sophistical self-manipulation that might more relia-
bly produce true beliefs but by counter-rational, self-deceptive, or dishonest means.
Here Fichte’s resolute anti-consequentialism is present in full force. The norms that
direct us toward truth, as Fichte understands them, do not direct us to maximize true
beliefs (or minimize false beliefs).10 They instead command us to form each of our
9
This saying is usually attributed to Anne Lamott (2005), pp. 256–7. But she there attributes it to a
Jesuit friend, whom she calls “Father Tom.”
10
The most famous proponent of this approach is probably William James, who advocates letting our
“passional nature” determine what we believe on the ground that it best enables us to “believe truth.” He
seems to admit that this is not a good way to “avoid error,” but he dismisses this consideration on the
ground that “our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things” (James 1968, p. 727). (Let James tell that
to Ajax, Creon, Othello, or King Lear.)
beliefs by epistemic standards and “the pure interest in truth” for its own sake. Fichte
acknowledges that forming our beliefs only from “the pure interest in truth” might not
maximize true belief; it might contingently lead us into error. Even if it does, we still
remain “friends of truth,” whereas the sophistical true-belief-maximizers remain ene-
mies of truth.
The friend of truth is distinguished from the sophist in the following manner: If we consider the
things they say, then the former may be wrong and the latter right. Yet the former remains a
friend of truth even when he is in error, and the latter remains a sophist even when he speaks the
truth (perhaps because it serves his purpose to do so). The friend of truth proceeds straight
along his path. The sophist is always changing paths; his movements describe a crooked, serpen-
tine line as the point which he would like to reach changes. The friend of truth aims at no par-
ticular point; he proceeds in a straight line, no matter what points turn out to lie along this line.
(BHW 8:345)
“Friendship for truth” in this sense could be seen as lying at the very heart of eviden-
tialism. It is our duty to ask questions, consider arguments, make observations, per-
form experiments, interpret their results, and draw conclusions from all these. If, as
Fichte maintains, theoretical norms are not independent of practical norms, and the
only practical norm relevant to cognition is the search for truth, then there can be no
question of the “interests” of practical reason offering us “non-epistemic grounds” to
settle a question that theory has left open. It is only a question of seeing how practical
considerations themselves ultimately determine the theoretical norms and the epis-
temic grounds on which we, as volitional agents, ultimately decide for ourselves ques-
tions about freedom, moral order in the world, or anything else.
The negative duty governing cognition, therefore, is to let nothing external to the
search for truth interfere with our inquiries or prejudge their outcome. The positive
duty is to cultivate your power of cognition. This parallels one part of Kant’s duty of
self-perfection. We will soon see that for Fichte, the duty of cultivating your cognitive
power merges into a duty to engage in free, rational communication with others, and
becomes a duty difficult to separate from the task of determining the ends and duties
of morality itself, as well as establishing a community with others that accords with
these ends.
The positive duty, therefore, naturally passes over into the limitative duty regard-
ing cognition. This is to let your cognitive powers be directed by your duty. You are
not to ask questions from mere curiosity or idleness—by interests detached from
your moral vocation. Above all, Fichte insists, you should inquire as to the sub-
stance and content of the moral law itself, seeking “to cognize what your duty
is . . . Do not think in a certain way in order to discover precisely this or that to be
your duty—for how could you know your duties in advance of your cognition?” (SL
4:218). The only duty even conceivably prior to the results of free inquiry is the duty
of free inquiry itself.
For Fichte, the basis of violations of duties regarding cognition is always dishon-
esty—ultimately, dishonesty with oneself. This is rooted in cowardice, which in turn is
rooted in complacency or inertia: cowardice makes people afraid to tell the truth, or
even to face up to it. People lie because they do not want to act: they are “afraid to exert
the power it takes to assert their self-sufficiency.—Only in this way is slavery among
human beings, physical as well as moral, to be explained: submissiveness and mechan-
ical imitation [Nachbeterei]” (SL 4:202). The real origin of falseness for Fichte is always
social and political: “All falsehood, all lying, all treachery and cunning arise because
there are oppressors; everyone who subjects others holds fast to it” (SL 4:203).
§8: Intersubjectivity: the Limits of Individual

Self-Sufficiency
As we saw in Chapter 3, Fichte argues that the very possibility of the I’s self-conscious-
ness depends on its relation to others, by whom the I is summoned to exercise its free
agency. This argument was presented very early in the Foundations of Natural Right
(NR §3, the Second Theorem). But from the standpoint of its principle and its motiva-
tion, Fichte’s ethics is a first-person ethics, not a second-person ethics. Fichte post-
pones introducing the theme of intersubjectivity until quite late in the System of Ethics.
It is not the ground of the moral law, but relates only to its application.11 The explana-
tion for this, I think, is that Fichte regards the moral law as most fundamentally an
expression of the freedom of the individual person. Its ground is not a set of demands
made on us by others, but the self-legislated imperative we impose on ourselves for the
sake of our freedom.
Although the theme of intersubjectivity apparently arrives surprisingly late in the
System of Ethics, when it does arrive it transforms the entire spirit of Fichte’s ethics
from that point onward. Not in its motivation, but in its application, we will see that
Fichte’s ethics is a second-person ethics. Further, we should not forget what I attempted
to argue in Chapter 3: for Fichte, our capacity to be rational agents requires education
or upbringing (Erziehung) by way of a summons from other rational beings. Our
rational faculty itself for Fichte is not simply something “in” us, simply part of our
mental (or neural) “equipment,” but something that has to be elicited and formed
through interaction with others. Reason itself for Fichte is essentially a collective,
co-operative, above all a critical-communicative faculty. In that sense, the capacity to
form a moral law or categorical imperative for ourselves (SL 4:155), and the possibility
11
Fichte has a second-person theory of right, which we will examine in Chapter 8. But he has a first-person
theory of ethics. Thus the creative use made by Stephen Darwall (2006) of the second-person standpoint in
Fichte in developing a distinctive version of Kantian ethics is not faithful to Fichte’s own conception of the
foundation of ethics. This point was made by Daniel Breazeale (2008) quite soon after the appearance of
Darwall’s book. To make this scholarly point about Darwall and Fichte is not, of course, to detract from the
philosophical merits of Darwall’s second-person approach to ethics—except, of course, to say that it differs
in this way from Fichte’s approach. Breazeale’s point must also be qualified in other ways that I hope are
clear from what I say here.
of rational motivation, as well as the application of the moral law, are not merely
first-person or subjective, but intersubjective.12
It is fitting that the theory of right, whose fundamental aim is to protect the free-
dom of individuals, should start with, and be grounded on, the relation of right in
which these individuals stand to others. It is equally fitting that ethics, which will be
seen to make great demands on us on behalf of others and of the community of
rational beings, should have begun with, and be grounded on, the individual’s actual-
ization of freedom. In that sense, Fichte’s ethics is fundamentally self-regarding, and
devoted exclusively to the agent’s own freedom. Our ethical duties, however, as Fichte
sees them, require an attitude of extreme selflessness. Our life as free individuals is a
life devoted to the good not of ourselves but of the community of rational beings. The
application of the moral law itself, as we will now see, is intimately involved with our
life in society.
It is fundamental to Fichte’s moral philosophy that the values of individuality and
community are not competing values, but only contrasting sides or aspects of the same
basic value: free action. Others are free only if they collectively safeguard my freedom;
conversely, I actualize my freedom only if I live my life for others. Those who think that
individuality must be bought at the cost of community, or that the good of community
requires a sacrifice of individuality, do not understand either value. More importantly,
they will never actualize the freedom—at once individual and social—which is the
foundation of both.
In the Foundations of Natural Right, the focus of Fichte’s transcendental deduction
of our relation to other rational beings was the possibility of free action itself: the sum-
mons as the necessary object of the I’s present free action. But Fichte soon drew out the
corollary that it is only through its relation to others that the I becomes an individual I.
In the System of Ethics, the I’s individuality is central to the argument that being an I
necessarily involves being summoned (educated or brought up) by others. Only my
free agency makes me into the individual that I am, but this free action of individuali-
zation is possible only in the context of a relation to others.
Properly speaking, who am I? I.e., what kind of individual am I? and what is the reason for my
being who I am? . . . From the moment I become conscious, I am what I freely make myself to be,
and this is who I am because this is what I make of myself.— . . . Under the present presupposi-
tion, however, . . . my first state, which is, as it were, the root of my individuality, is not deter-
mined by my freedom but through my connections with another rational being.
(SL 4:222–3)
12
This is a point about human reason often made in connection with Hegel. It is important to see that
Fichte is the immediate source of Hegel’s social or intersubjective conception of reason. On some interpre-
tations of Hegel, however, ethical normativity depends, both in form and content, on contingent social
understandings and traditions, and is immune to rational critique. I think this is a serious misreading of
Hegel; but it is not even a thinkable reading of Fichte, for whom the intersubjective dimension of ethics is
seen as part of an ongoing, normatively guided process of free and rational communication. For Fichte,
rational critique is even the essence of the process.
In determining my duties that follow from my intersubjectivity, Fichte does not

explicitly organize his discussion, as he did with the body and cognition, using the
Kantian categories: negative, positive, limiting. But I think he in fact follows this same
order. The big difference is that when he comes to defining the positive and limitative
duties, he does so in a way that transforms his theory of duty from this point onward,
and determines the rest of his scientific or theoretical account of duty in the System of
Ethics.
The negative duty. Fichte argues that it follows from the fact that my final end is abso-
lute independence and self-sufficiency that “I am supposed to fashion everything in
the sensible world so that it can serve as a means for achieving my final end” (SL 4:229).
When we bring this proposition into juxtaposition with the intersubjectivity of the I, it
generates an antinomy. For among the beings in the sensible world are other rational
beings, other I’s. Their freedom is a condition of my own self-consciousness, but “my
drive for self-sufficiency absolutely cannot aim at annihilating the condition of its own
possibility, that is, the freedom of the other.” The drive for self-sufficiency therefore
contains within itself its own negation or limitation: “an absolute prohibition against
disturbing the freedom of the other, a command to consider the other as self-sufficient,
and absolutely not to use him as a means for my own ends” (SL 4:221). But it is not only
to other rational beings themselves—to their bodies and their actions—that this pro-
hibition applies: I am also not permitted to modify other objects in such a way that this
modification undermines the freedom of others. For any given external object, “I am
not permitted to modify this object in accordance with my own end . . . If I alter prod-
ucts of their freedom then I disturb that freedom, for these objects are for them means
to further ends” (SL 4:230). This represents the negative duty in regard to my intersub-
jectivity. The issue is not merely how the external freedom of each is to be protected
according to laws of right. I might have a right to act in such a way as to frustrate anoth-
er’s ends, but when, if ever, is it morally permissible for me to exercise it? This leads to
yet another crucial Fichtean antinomy.
The positive duty and the antinomy: my ends and the ends of others. I am required
by my ethical drive for absolute self-sufficiency both to modify the entire external
world to serve as means to my own ends, and also not to limit or frustrate the ends of
any other rational being. This leads to a Fichtean antinomy, whose resolution will be
the positive duty regarding intersubjectivity—our reciprocal relation to others.
Thus we encounter a contradiction of the drive to self-sufficiency—and hence of the moral
law—with itself. The latter demands:
(1) That I subordinate everything that limits me (… which means everything that lies within
my sensible world) to my absolutely final end: that I make it into a means for my drawing
nearer to absolute self-sufficiency.
(2) That I do not subordinate to my own end those things that certainly do limit me . . . but that
I leave them as I find them.
Both of these are immediate commands of the moral law: the first, when one considers this law
in general or as such; the second when one considers a particular manifestation of the same
[namely, in its effect on the drive for self-sufficiency in other rational beings].
(SL 4:230)
The antinomy arises only because my ends and those of others may be in conflict.
There can be only one solution to it, therefore, and this is a radical one: “The only way
to resolve this contradiction and to establish the agreement of the moral law with itself
would be to presuppose that all free beings necessarily share the same end” (SL 4:230).
§9: Moral Truth is Constituted by Universal

Rational Agreement
The resolution of this antinomy radically transforms both the final end of the moral
law and also our conception of the subject of the drive for self-sufficiency which is this
law’s final end.
This drive is not the self-sufficiency of [this individual rational being] but rather the self-suffi-
ciency of reason as such. Our ultimate goal is the self-sufficiency of reason as such and not the
self-sufficiency of one reason [or one rational being, Einer Vernunft], insofar as the latter is an
individual rational being.
(SL 4:231)
In these claims, the term “reason” must now refer to the communal or collective striv-
ing of rational beings, and the end (or ends) of this striving must be viewed as the ends
on which they must be presupposed to agree. This has radical consequences both for
the means–ends relationship involved in obedience to the moral law, and also for the
actions required by the moral law, and the ends of these actions.
First the ethical drive was taken to be the drive for self-sufficiency of the individual I;
this I was seen as that which set the ends whose recursive extension leads toward this I’s
absolute self-sufficiency, and the most immediate means to these ends was the body of
this individual I. Now, however, the ethical drive is viewed as a collective drive, shared
by all rational beings, the drive not of any individual but of “reason,” or what Fichte
now also calls “the pure I.”
[My entire individuality, therefore, must be regarded as] the sole instrument and vehicle of the
moral law. (Previously, this tool was the body, now it has become the entire sensible and empir-
ically determined human being; and with this we have at the same time sharply distinguished
the empirical I from the pure I, which is very beneficial both for ethics in particular and for
philosophy as a whole.)
(SL 4:231)
Fichte’s doctrine that I must treat my entire individuality as only a means—a tool or
instrument (Werkzeug)—of the moral law is bound to shock and offend us. It seems
immediately to contradict, for instance, the Kantian principle that the person of each
of us is an end in itself. Fichte will later take up this question and will argue that the
two doctrines are compatible, if only his own doctrine is properly understood
(SL 4:255–6). This will be the focus of our Chapter 7 §4.
Second, and of more immediate concern in Fichte’s text, is the obvious empirical falsity
of the claim that human beings all share the same end. Yet this is the claim whose truth
Fichte argues we must presuppose if the contradiction of the moral law with itself is to be
resolved. In fact rational beings have very different, even conflicting ends. Even their
moral convictions—the actions they think morality requires of them, and of others—
often conflict. The end which we must be presupposed to share, however, is not your end
or my end, the end of your I or my I, when we are considered as individuals, but rather the
end of the pure I, of the reason we both share. From the standpoint of common sense, this
end is the end of “universal morality.” In order to pursue this end and perform the actions
it requires, we must be concerned to search for and identify this common end.
The limitative duty: human ends must actually agree. This search may be regarded
as the third or limitative duty we have in regard to our intersubjectivity. It is the topic of
a lengthy discussion, which occupies the last twenty pages of the long §18 of the System
of Ethics (SL 4:233–54). It will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter and well into
the next one.
The problem Fichte is raising here is in some ways a familiar one for contract theo-
ries of the state, and contractualist moral theories more generally. The norms of such
theories depend on some kind of unanimity: unanimous consent to the terms of a
social contract, or to the norms according to which people are to be treated. Here it is
unanimous agreement on the ends people share that Fichte takes to be equivalent to
agreement on the commands of the moral law. Where there is no actual unanimity,
contract theorists want to substitute ideal or rational unanimity—a set of norms on
which all would agree if only they were being reasonable.13
There then arises a dilemma: a choice between requiring (a) actual unanimity, per-
haps using some notion of tacit or implicit consent, which the theorist claims all people
do actually give; or else substituting for it (b) ideal unanimity—that on which all people
would unanimously agree under certain idealized conditions of knowledge and rea-
sonableness, even if in fact they never do actually agree. Contractualism of this second
sort holds that we must act toward others in a way they could not reasonably reject,
whether or not they reject it in fact.
The gap between actual unanimity and ideal unanimity creates a serious problem
for contractualism. Neither option is satisfactory; both do leave us uncomfortable and,
I think, ought to leave us uncomfortable. We can see why if we think of an analogy.
Imagine a case where I owe you an obligation but find myself in circumstances where it
would seem unreasonably burdensome to fulfill it—it might be either excessively
onerous on me, or excessively harmful to a third party. Under these circumstances,
13
The two best-known theories of this kind are those of Rawls (1971) and Scanlon (1998).
I might seek to escape the obligation by asking you to release me from it—to get you to
consent to my not fulfilling it. Here a gap might open up between what you actually do
and what would be reasonable for you to do. It might be reasonable for you to grant my
request, even unreasonable for you not to. But it might not be so unreasonable that we’d
say there was no longer any obligation at all.
In such a situation, we are bound to feel discomfort unless it is both judged reasona-
ble, by some ideal standard, for you to release me from the obligation, and you also do
in fact release me from the obligation. If you refuse to release me, I may think the obli-
gation is still of dubious validity if I think you ought to have released me. But if you do
release me from the obligation, I might worry that I have manipulated you into releas-
ing me against your best interests. In either case, if what is reasonable for you to do
does not match what you in fact do, we feel—and except in the most extreme cases, we
rightly feel—that the situation is morally unsatisfactory, or at best morally ambiguous.
We would be comfortable in a situation like this, and would be entitled to be comforta-
ble, only if it was clearly reasonable for you to have released me from the obligation and
you also did in fact release me from it.
An analogous dissatisfaction, or at least moral ambiguity, I suggest, attaches to
contractarian political and moral theories—both actual consent theories and ideal
consent theories—in cases where only the condition of actual consent or only the con-
dition of ideal consent is satisfied. We are not, and shouldn’t be, satisfied with either
actual consent alone or ideal consent alone.
Fichte clearly intends his claim that we must presuppose unanimous agreement
among all rational beings on their ends to involve actual agreement, not merely
ideal agreement. He even regards it as a conspicuously distinctive feature of the
moral theory he is proposing. “The necessary goal of all virtuous people is therefore
unanimous agreement concerning the same practical conviction and concerning
the uniformity of acting that issues therefrom. This is an important point,” he
emphasizes, “and is a characteristic feature of our presentation of morals” (SL
4:236). From this Fichte draws two important conclusions. First, any conviction we
may hold about duty is only provisional; we must act “as though [agreement on our
final ends] were realized” (SL 4:234). Second, we have a duty to strive for actual
unanimous rational agreement on moral convictions, even if we will never reach
our goal.
A third conclusion is perhaps even more fundamental: when we seek actual and
explicit agreement with others, we do so based on the transcendental presupposition
that our ends and principles already do implicitly agree—“that all free beings neces-
sarily share the same end” (SL 4:230)—since if they did not, the antinomy (my ends
vs. the ends of others) could not be resolved. When we regard our own convictions as
provisionally valid for others, and seek actual or explicit agreement with them
through free, rational communication, we do so based on this presupposition that the
unanimity we are projecting provisionally, and also seeking to actualize, is implicitly
present already.
The heuristic criterion. One possible theory of ideal rather than actual agreement, as
Fichte realizes, might take as its criterion the Kantian principle of universalizability.
Fichte is willing to accept this criterion, but only as a heuristic one, “by no means con-
stitutive” (SL 4:234). That I cannot will my maxim to be a universal law is a good sign
that it could not be unanimously and rationally agreed upon as a valid principle of
action. But this is only heuristic because the true criterion requires actual agreement,
not merely conformity to this ideal test.
The relationship in question is not that something ought to be a maxim of my will because it is
a principle of universal legislation, but conversely, because something is supposed to be a
maxim of my will it can therefore also be a principle of universal legislation.
(SL 4:234)
It is important to appreciate that Fichte’s claim that the Kantian universalizability for-
mula is “only heuristic” is not a rejection of the Kantian formula. It is an interpretation
of it, and quite possibly a correct interpretation of it, as Kant intended it. Kant himself
uses the universalizability test only to show certain maxims to be impermissible. Kant
never concludes (no, not even once, in all his writings) that a maxim is permissible just
because it passes the universalizability test. (His readers often draw this conclusion,
but Kant is not to blame for their hasty inferences.) Passing the Kantian universaliza-
bility test, as Fichte understands it, is only a heuristic; it provides a necessary condition
for the permissibility of whatever passes it.
Kant’s proposition only talks about the idea of agreement and by no means about any actual
agreement. We will see that this idea has real use, that one ought to seek to realize this idea of
agreement and must to some degree act as though it were realized.
(SL 4:234)
Three important conclusions are drawn in this passage. First, although people do not
in fact agree in their ends and moral convictions, in order to act we must proceed pro-
visionally as if they did. Second, the Kantian formula, properly used, represents to us
heuristically the idea of actual rational agreement. Third, we must seek to bring about,
or at least approximate, actual rational unanimity, through a process of rational com-
munication with others.
Yet another conclusion that follows is this: if actual agreement between all human
ends is a transcendentally necessary presupposition, then I must also presuppose that
my actions constitute one common system in relation to the actions of others. I must
presuppose they constitute such a system not only in relation to the actions of people
now living, but even in relation to past generations long dead and future generations
yet unborn. Starting in Chapter 7 §4, we will see that Fichte in fact draws this conclu-
sion, and then from it draws further conclusions about the ultimate meaning and value
of our individual lives.
Free reciprocal communication. The relation of the I, and of reason, to things is one
of subordination: free and rational beings must treat things in a way that serves the
ends of reason. But their relation to other rational beings must be co-ordination (VBG
6:308). Our action in relation to others, and also our collective subordination of things,
must be determined by mutual freedom. For Fichte, the mode of conduct by which free
beings relate is rational communication, free give-and-take, the ability to communi-
cate with others and the receptivity to communication from them (VBG 6:330). It fol-
lows that although Fichtean ethics is a first-person conception in its motivation, at a
very fundamental level it is second-person in the application of the moral principle.
Fichte’s conception of the moral dignity of persons is an essentially interpersonal
conception. He would agree with the position taken over half a century ago by Bertram
Morris, when he wrote:
To respect a man is not to consider that he possesses a quality inherent in himself but is rather
to enter into communication with him, to challenge and be challenged by him, and to be will-
ing to follow the dialectic of the human association wherever it may lead.
(Morris 1946, p. 63; cf. the restrospective on this article by Debes 2015)
In Chapter 7, we will see how Fichte thinks this reconciles the thesis that all rational
beings must regard themselves (and one another) as tools of reason or the moral law
with the seemingly contrary claim that all are ends in themselves, and how this forbids
us, even in treating everyone as a tool of morality, from ever weighing the instrumental
value of one person against that of another. For all human beings are most fundamen-
tally partners in the communicative enterprise of rational mutual agreement on col-
lective ends and universal principles.
Fichte admits that the goal of total rational unanimity is unreachable. But it is not
unreachable in the way that absolute self-sufficiency is unreachable. Absolute inde-
pendence or self-sufficiency of the I would abolish I-hood itself; unanimous agree-
ment among human beings would not abolish them, or their community: on the
contrary, it would be the fullest perfection of both. Unanimous agreement is not
impossible in itself or necessarily, either logically or transcendentally, but it is impossi-
ble circumstantially or contingently, owing to human imperfection and the complica-
tions of life. For this reason, it is possible, and desirable, for us to act “as if this
unachievable goal [namely, universal agreement] is nevertheless thought of as
achieved” (SL 4:253). Moral truth is always a work in progress; our judgments are
always provisional.
Fichte therefore accepts the Kantian formula when used heuristically, by one person,
and to exclude maxims on which unanimous rational agreement would not be possible.
This formula, however, has only a heuristic use for the following reason: a proposition from
which an absurdity follows is false; now it is absurd that I ought to do X if I cannot think that
all human beings ought to do X in the same situation.
(SL 4:234)
Fichte also takes this to be “Kant’s proposition.” In other words, Fichte claims that the
use of the Kantian formula is both negative and heuristic. Further, he thinks this is the
way Kant himself meant it to be used. As we have seen a couple of pages ago, Fichte is
right about that too. To take Fichte’s discussion of Kant’s universalizability principle as
a rejection of Kantian ethics is thus to misunderstand both Kant and Fichte, and to
claim there is a disagreement between them where there is none.14
Of course it is a separate question whether Kant also accepts Fichte’s further view
that morally permissible ends, and objectively valid convictions about duty, depend on
the presupposition that all rational beings must in fact rationally and unanimously
agree. How do we act on this presupposition when we know it is in fact false? Fichte’s
answer: we do so through a process of rational communication, which is supposed to
lead in the direction of making it true.
Fichte’s thesis that moral truth consists in universal rational agreement provides a
response to the common criticism of Enlightenment (and especially Kantian) ethics,
that it rests on an abstract, ahistorical conception of reason. In fact, this is false even
for Kant, whose account of the character of the human species is that it is a rational
species, and that reason is a faculty historically self-made and self-making (Anth
7:321–5). Many standard critiques of Enlightenment rationalism offered, for exam-
ple, by post-modernists, or by self-described “Hegelians” or “historicists,” are invali-
dated by this shallow and elementary misunderstanding of their intended target.
Fichte adds to Kant’s historical conception of reason the further idea that the norms
of reason are always a work in progress, determined simultaneously by the actual
results of human communication, but always with the condition that these results are
arrived at by free and rational communication, not by coercion, deception, or other
forms of domination and non-rational manipulation. Some might think it is now
time to revisit the metaethical issues that were addressed—and from Fichte’s stand-
point, dismissed—at the end of Chapter 4. Realists may say that if ethical truth con-
sists in what rational beings would unanimously agree upon through an as yet
uncompleted process of free and rational communication, then there is an objective
fact of the matter about what this would be. Anti-realists may counter that since this
process of rational communication is always a work in progress, never completed,
and also something we do, and are committed to doing, then there can be no ethical
fact of the matter: the only ethical “truth” there could be is what we are projecting
through the aspirations we express in our process of rational communication. There
is no need to revisit any of those questions, but only to remind ourselves why Fichte
14
It is a commonplace in the literature for reports of Fichte’s views to assert simply that Fichte rejected
the “formalism” of Kantian ethics, sometimes citing this discussion of the criterion of universalizability as
evidence. Kant does of course at several points prominently defend an ethics of “formal” rather than “mate-
rial” principles (G 4:427–8, KpV 5:27–31, 41–2). But as it is commonly used, the phrase “Kantian formal-
ism” takes for granted a common misreading of Kant which supposes him to be deriving all duties from the
Formula of Universal Law (or of the Law of Nature). When Fichte rejects this misreading, he is taken to be
rejecting Kantian ethics. But it is seldom noted that Fichte himself rejects this misreading of Kant. For two
examples see Baumanns (1990), p. 133, and Kosch (2011), p. 150. Kosch is virtually alone among those who
cite Fichte’s alleged “anti-formalism” in admitting that it is based on a “controversial” reading of Kant. But
she does not note that Fichte himself was one of the first to reject the common misreading of Kant, and she
seems to accept that misreading herself.
rejected the questions and also the standard answers to them. We saw in Chapter 4
that it is a transcendental condition of practical self-consciousness that we should
conform our actions to what is for us an objective ethical truth, which is at the same
time legislated by us.
The transcendental grounds for accepting the existence of an objective, independ-
ent reality constituting the truth-conditions for moral claims are of precisely the same
kind as the transcendental grounds for accepting the existence of an objective material
world. Neither is the “reality in itself ” presupposed without justification by dogmatic
philosophy, but both are real and mind-independent as demonstrated by transcenden-
tal philosophy. Anti-realist projectivism, in denying the objectivity of ethical truth,
gives us less than can be coherently accepted, while dogmatic moral realism would
give us more than can be made coherent. Moral truth is always a work in progress,
always provisional and always fallible. Yet it is for us every bit as real and objective as
the material world. We are bound to it by the concept of moral authority whose deduc-
tion was discussed in Chapter 4. As moral agents we deal with the problem of fallibility
by employing the concepts of conscience and moral conviction deduced in Chapter 5.
The endless search for this truth, which is our positive duty regarding intersubjectivity,
projects a conception of the rational society, which will be the principal topic of our
next chapter.
7
The Social Unity of Reason
The Human Vocation
The antinomy of intersubjectivity provides a transcendental deduction of the presup-

position that human ends are ultimately in agreement. We must, on the one hand,
provisionally assume our ends implicitly agree, and on the other, seek to bring about
their actual agreement.
One consequence of this is that the moral law, in its application, is now reinterpreted
as having as its final end the self-sufficiency of reason, and not the self-sufficiency of
the individual I. A second is that in forming our own individual moral convictions, we
must suppose that they represent the ends and principles on which all rational beings
are in implicit agreement. To express a moral conviction, or to act on one, is to claim
provisionally that it represents not only something on which all rational beings could
agree, but something on which, as a matter of transcendental presupposition, they
already do implicitly agree, and on which they actually will come to agree if rational
communication between them continues long enough and successfully enough. A fur-
ther conclusion is that we have a duty to communicate freely with others, striving
toward actual agreement on such a universal morality.1
My moral convictions, however, in fact differ from yours; both differ from a third
person’s. Fichte asks: “Who is to be the judge who passes universally valid judgments
on this issue? . . . If the other person claims to have acted according to his best convic-
tion, and if I act differently in the same situation, then according to his conviction I am
acting immorally, just as he is acting immorally according to mine. Whose conviction
is supposed to guide that of the other?” (SL 4:233). Fichte’s answer is of course that no
individual’s conviction can play this role. Each of us is bound by conscience to obey
our own conviction. But we also cannot “simply part ways, so that everyone would
allow others to follow their own paths.” For the morality in which all of us must believe
must also be believed to be universal. “Therefore, we must seek to make our own judg-
ment harmonize with that of the other” (SL 4:233). The presupposition that we ulti-
mately do share common ends entails that
1
Thus Hegel is asking a question posed directly by Fichte’s ethics when, in the Preface to the Philosophy
of Right, he wonders “how to distinguish and discover, among the infinite variety of opinions, what is uni-
versally acknowledged and valid in them” (PR Preface, p. 11).
Everyone with whom we are in any way acquainted becomes assigned to our care simply by
virtue of this acquaintance; he becomes our neighbor and part of our rational world
[Vernunftwelt], just as objects of our experience belong to our sensible world [Sinnenwelt].2
(SL 4:235)
Morality, as we saw in Chapter 4, is just as objective as the material world, since both
have the same kind of transcendental foundation. Each person’s duty is to try to
convince the other of the correctness of his conviction, and not to abandon that con-
viction. The end of convincing others is to arrive at a common or communal end. So
we necessarily will universal moral cultivation, which is to be achieved by reciprocal
interaction (SL 4:236). To engage in this reciprocal communicative interaction is the
limitative duty of intersubjectivity, because it involves contrasting activities: mutual
activity and passivity, communicating with others and receiving their communica-
tions (VBG 6:308).
§1: Ethical Intersubjectivity in Kant and Fichte

As Peter Rohs observes, Fichte is the ultimate inspiration for the more recent theories
of “discourse ethics” and “domination-free communication” developed by twenti-
eth-century philosophers such as Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas (Rohs 1990,
p. 109). Fichte’s thoughts on this topic, however, are really only another instance in
which he radicalizes ideas that can already be found in Kant.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant advocates for freedom of communication on
the ground that “the very existence of reason depends on freedom [of communica-
tion]” (A738/B766). In What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (1786), Kant
offers the following rule as the criterion for “thinking for oneself ”: When you are asked
to accept something, ask yourself whether it would be feasible to make the ground or
rule according to which you accept it as a universal principle of reason (O 8:146n).
A couple of years later, Kant formulated three rules for the use of understanding:
1. Think for yourself.
2. Think from the standpoint of everyone else.
3. Think consistently.
(Refl 1486 Ak 15:715, VA 25: 1480; KU 5:294–5, Anth 7:200, 228, VL 9:57)
Kant’s orientation essay also explains why it is consequent to pass directly from the first
rule to the second. If thinking for yourself means thinking in a way that could be valid
for all others, then the best way to be sure you are truly thinking for yourself is to think
from the standpoint of all others. The best way to do this, Kant argues, is to think from
2
This is another one of the passages in which Fichte identifies the “intelligible world” not with some-
thing metaphysically transcendent or supernatural, but rather with the world of human rational commu-
nication, especially insofar as this rational world becomes an object of transcendental philosophy. See
Chapter 2 §2.
The Social Unity of Reason 213
the standpoint of as many others as you can, and to this end, to communicate with
others, using their thoughts as a criterium veritatis externam for your own thoughts
(Anth 7:128). This explains why Kant thinks the very existence of reason depends on
free communication (KpV A738–9/B766–7). It also explains why he thinks that the
only way to encourage enlightenment—the process of releasing oneself from self-
incurred tutelage and coming to think for oneself—is for there to be a communicative
forum, a “learned audience” or “scholarly public” (gelehrtes Publikum), in which as
many as possible can participate (WA 8:36–7).
Kant’s ethics, since it is grounded on the self-legislation (autonomy) of reason, is
clearly intended for a society undergoing a process of enlightenment. Kant does not
say explicitly, as Fichte does, that it would be the ultimate criterion of the moral cor-
rectness of ends and principles that they are in fact rationally agreed upon by all. But
Fichte is correct in describing Kant’s formulas of universal law, law of nature, and
autonomy as heuristic principles that might serve to distinguish principles on which
all might rationally agree from principles on which they could not agree. For Kant, the
most fully developed and at the same time the most intuitive formula of the moral law
is the formula of the realm of ends, which treats moral laws as those that could hold in
an ideal community of rational beings all of whose ends would harmonize and form a
mutually supporting system of shared ends (G 4:433–5, 438, 439). Thus the ideal of
universal rational agreement on ends and principles clearly lies at the heart of Kantian
ethics; and free communication lies at the heart of the Kantian conception of how rea-
son operates.
The chief differences here between Kant and Fichte are two. First, for Kant, intersub-
jectivity is merely an empirical fact. In the sensible world, a rational being stands in cer-
tain contingent relations to other rational beings. Communication between rational
beings is a contingent causal condition for the existence of reason. These seem to be for
Kant only contingent facts about how reason in fact operates among human beings. For
Fichte, however, as we saw in Chapter 3, it is a transcendental condition for the possibility
of rational nature that there be a plurality of rational beings, addressing or “summoning”
one another to rational activity. Fichte even identifies the intelligible or noumenal world
with the world of rational beings in communication with one another. This is not, as we
argued earlier, a supernaturalist metaphysical theory, but a reinterpretation of the tran-
scendental meaning—the human meaning for us—of the intelligible world.
Second, although Kant and Fichte both regard freedom of communication and the
agreement among rational beings regarding their ends as moral ideals that will never
be fully realized in our world, Fichte thinks of the actual striving toward this agree-
ment as a duty, even as fundamental to all duties, because he holds that the true crite-
rion of morally binding ends and principles would be the actual rational agreement on
them by all rational beings, resulting from a process of communication. Ideal tests for
this, such as Kant’s universalizability principles, are only heuristic aids in identifying
which ends and principles might be the ones on which all human beings would ration-
ally come to agree. For Fichte, the claim that an end or principle is morally valid is
equivalent to the claim that it should be presumptively regarded as something on

which all would agree, and eventually will agree, if rational communication goes on
long and successfully enough.
Kant made consistent. We can see why Fichte thinks he is only being a consistent
Kantian in taking all these positions (perhaps more consistent than Kant himself). In
Chapter 3, I suggested that Fichte may have seen an outright inconsistency in Kant’s
position, insofar as it did not provide a transcendental foundation for the intersubjec-
tivity of human reason. If the faculty of reason consists in the capacity for rational
communication and the process of reaching agreement by means of it, then this capac-
ity must be as essential to our powers of action and cognition as any of the other facul-
ties on which Kant rests his account of our experience and agency. A transcendental
deduction of intersubjectivity, therefore, seems at least as necessary as a transcenden-
tal deduction of the categories, the principle of causality, the existence of objects out-
side us, or the moral law. If the content of the moral law is the systematic agreement or
community of human ends, then it should be a fundamental human duty to engage in
such communication with that agreement as its object. A further consequence follows
specifically concerning the theory of ethical duties. If human beings rationally com-
municate with the purpose of reaching agreement on their ends, then the relationships
and institutions that result from this agreement would have to be an important focus of
ethics, an essential part of the objective theory of ethical duties.
This gives Fichte’s theory of duties a very different character from Kant’s. In the
Groundwork, Kant defined a “metaphysics of morals” as an exclusively a priori theory
of duty; the application of it to the empirical conditions of human life was to be a sep-
arate part of moral philosophy, which he called “practical anthropology” (G 4:388).
By the time he came to write a work entitled Metaphysics of Morals, however, Kant had
changed his mind about the meaning of that title. He now draws a distinction: some
duties can be derived from the pure principle of morality by applying it to the “par-
ticular nature of human beings” (MS 6:217). Kant distinguishes these general human
duties from the “ethical duties of human beings toward one another with regard to
their condition”; the latter “cannot properly constitute a part of the metaphysical first
principles of a doctrine of virtue” (MS 6:468–9). Kant means that particular social
relationships and institutions can define a class of duties pertaining to the roles peo-
ple may occupy in them. Kant places these outside the “metaphysics of morals” that
defines the duties he undertook to systematize. In his theory of right Kant offers an
account of the coercively enforceable duties connected with political life or a “condi-
tion of right.” But he offers no theory of the ethical duties relating to non-coercive
social institutions. The only exceptions are the relation of friendship (MS 6:469–73),
and in the Religion, the church (R, Third Part). By contrast, Fichte’s theory of ethical
duties is at the same time a theory of the structure of the rational society—not only as
found in the political state, but in social life more generally, and especially in the
economy.
§2: The Republic of Scholars

Fichte’s ethical theory is also a theory of the rational society. The rational society must
be a society freely and collectively self-made through rational communication. The
starting point for a system of ethical duties, therefore, is a theory about the way human
beings ought to communicate with one another in order to progress toward agreement
on their ends, principles, and common way of life. The starting point for this commu-
nication, as Fichte presents it in §18 of the System of Ethics, is the existing social institu-
tions that can be viewed as promoting rational communication. Fichte draws his
conception of these institutions mainly from Kant. They bear the marks of the time
and place where Kant and Fichte encountered them. As Fichte develops and criticizes
these institutions, however, they soon outgrow their time and place, and open the way
to a conception of relations between human beings that must look like a distant ideal—
not only to Fichte, but to us as well.
Society as state and church. It seems to Fichte that there are two necessary social
pre-conditions for free, rational communication aiming at agreement. One is the
external freedom to exercise one’s right to free action within one’s own proper
sphere, including the right to express oneself freely. The other is that communication
aiming at agreement must begin from some point on which the participants already
agree. The first of these conditions is supposed to be provided by the political state.
The second is to be provided by society organized as a church. Fichte thinks that
communication aiming at agreement must begin from some point of agreement,
and for society as a whole, he conceptualizes this as the Symbol or creed on which all
are presumed to agree. It is unclear what, beyond this common creed, he means by a
“church.” Fichte appears to accept the institutions of church and state, at least provi-
sionally, but the thrust of his discussion is to advocate their radical reform. Any
existing state is a Notstaat (a necessity or emergency state) and any religious creed is,
analogously, a Notsymbol. Both we must accept for the present, provisionally, in our
condition of dire need or distress (Not). Neither is acceptable in its present form, but
at present we desperately need something of the kind, and may have nothing better
available (SL 4:238–42).
The creed of society, regarded as a church, cannot be fixed or permanent. It must be
constantly changing, as society undergoes changes in what people can accept in com-
mon (SL 4:236). No specific creed should be taught to people, or adherence to it
required of them, because the function of any creed is only to serve as the common
starting point for further discussion and inquiry (SL 4:244). The basis of the creed
accepted up to now—as Fichte tries to formulate it as the starting point for anyone
capable of moral cultivation—is the idea that “there is something supersensible and
elevated above all nature.” Evidently Fichte’s conception of this supersensible is associ-
ated historically with monotheism. The belief in it, he says, originally arose among the
ancient Jews, and was later adopted in different forms by Christians and by Muslims
(SL 4:242–3). But Fichte insists that “the supersensible” is capable of as many different
interpretations as there are interpreters. We know that Fichte’s own interpretation was
not acceptable to Christians in his time. It is unclear whether Fichte means to set any
determinate doctrinal limits to the starting point from which moral cultivation can
proceed. Does he think that atheists—or those who deny anything “supersensible”—
are incapable of moral development? One might think so, except that his doctrines
about freedom of communication stand in the way of this conclusion. Interpretations
of “the supersensible,” even the creed itself, must constantly be questioned: “I simply
must not allow any scruples to prevent me from inwardly doubting everything and
from continuing to investigate everything, no matter how holy it may appear; nor may
any church force me to have such scruples” (SL 4:237). In philosophy, moreover, there
can be no creed. “Here it may well be the case that philosophizing individuals cannot
agree on even a single point” (SL 4:241).
The state is necessary in order to protect the freedom of individuals, and it must be
presumed to rest on unanimous agreement or a civil contract. “It is an absolute duty of
conscience to unite with others in a state” (SL 4:238). As we will see in Chapter 8, how-
ever, Fichte thinks that existing states are very far from achieving justice. Fichte’s polit-
ical thought evolved in important ways after his 1793 defense of the French Revolution.
But he still thinks that a justified revolution requires only that the common will be
clearly ascertained by those who make the revolution (SL 4:240). Fichte’s attitude
toward political revolution was always more favorable than Kant’s, but the common
hope of both is that the existing state will gradually reform itself from within and pro-
gress toward the ideal of justice. Fichte regards this progress too as endless, its goal
unreachable. A gradually progressing state, one committed to its own reform, at least
approximates the conditions of legitimacy (SL 4:361).
The learned public. Fichte presents this predicament as an antinomy and uses it to
provide a transcendental deduction, according to the synthetic method, of the concept
of a social institution distinct from the church or the state, which is required by the
human moral vocation.
Thesis: “I am not permitted to express this private conviction, since in so doing

I would be working to overthrow the state.”
Antithesis: Yet at the same time, “The development of my convictions is absolutely
commanded . . . The communication of my private convictions is an absolute duty”
(SL 4:247).
Synthesis: There must be a limited sphere, a public forum in which freedom of
communication is absolute. This is the “learned public” or the “republic of schol-
ars” (das gelehrte Publikum, die gelehrte Republik) (SL 4: 248, 251).
The new concept, “the learned public,” that resolves the antinomy is also borrowed
from Kant. But Kant and Fichte appear to have slightly different conceptions of this
social institution. For Kant, it seems to be defined by the venue: a given person (e.g. a
soldier or clergyman) must be restricted when he is speaking in his “private” capacity

(when on military duty or when representing the church), but not when speaking in
his “public” capacity, as in books or articles addressed to the general learned public
(Kant, WA 8:36–8). The soldier on duty must not disobey orders, but he can write arti-
cles criticizing the high command and its strategies; the clergyman, in his professional
capacity, must not question church doctrine, but he can do so in theological treatises
meant for the learned audience.
For Fichte, however, the learned public seems to be a determinate association of
people who have “thrown off the fetters represented by the creed of the church and the
legal concepts of the state,” who speak to one another in “the forum of a communal
consciousness before which any conceivable thing can be thought and investigated
with absolute, unlimited freedom” (SL 4:248). At a time when only a minority were
even literate, these two conceptions—that of the public forum and that of the commu-
nity of intellectuals who address it—might have amounted to the same thing. Both
Kant and Fichte regard the university, or at least its philosophical faculty (as distinct
from the state-sponsored professionally licensing faculties of law, medicine, and theol-
ogy), as the center of the learned public (SL 4: 250, cf. Kant, SF 7:21–36). But Fichte’s
conception of the republic of scholars might sooner make us think of a loosely organ-
ized “intelligentsia,” possessing a certain esprit de corps and devoting themselves col-
lectively to the reform of society.
Fichte devoted an important part of his lectures and his popular works to defining
the task or vocation of the scholar and defending the freedom of communication for
scholars. His early essay directly accuses the princes of Europe of suppressing freedom
of thought (SW 6:1–35). As we saw in Chapter 1, this was the focus of his first set of
popular lectures at Jena, possibly the high point of his entire philosophical career. As
Peter Rohs rightly notes, these lectures served as a prelude to his ethical thought.3
I hope the above discussion helps to explain why: free, rational communication is for
Fichte the medium in which progress toward the unity of ends and principles among
rational beings becomes possible, and it is this progress itself—rather than the conse-
quences of any principle invented by philosophers—that determines the objective
content of our ethical duties, when these are taken up by the science of ethics.
Freedom of communication—then and now. Issues about freedom of communica-
tion and social progress have changed greatly since the late eighteenth century. At that
time, the main question is whether the state and the church would permit the free dis-
cussion of matters regarded as sensitive to their institutional interests. The threat to
3
Rohs (1990), p. 99. After Fichte’s dismissal from his professorship at Jena, his writings about the voca-
tion of the scholar were understandably devoted largely to defending academic freedom. The sixth lecture
in Fundamental Characteristics of the Present Age (1804) is a defense of freedom of learned thought and the
press (SW 7:78–96). Academic freedom is the main topic of Fichte’s lectures at Erlangen, On the Essence of
the Scholar, and his Appearance in the Domain of Freedom (1805) (SW 6:350–447), and also of his inaugural
address as first rector at the founding of the University of Berlin, On the Only Possible Disturbance of
Academic Freedom (delivered October 19, 1811, published 1812) (SW 6:449–76).
free communication under twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, some of them

claiming to be “Marxist,” was both powerful and brutal. There are still many socie-
ties—China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Russia, and Turkey come imme-
diately to mind—in which freedom of communication is drastically curtailed.
Questioning of the regime in power is brutally suppressed. But even in so-called “free”
or “democratic” societies, issues of academic freedom still persist: academic tenure is
increasingly under attack, and professors are still excluded from certain positions, or
even dismissed from tenured positions, on account of their expression of opinions
unpopular to the general public, or at least to those in power. These tactics have much
in common with the suppression of free communication and expression by state and
church that were familiar to Kant and Fichte. But such tactics, in many societies, if dis-
played too crudely, would prove counter-productive. They might win for the targeted
opinions and individuals the larger audience that martyrs always attract.
Therefore it has come to be an aim of the powers that be—they clearly recognize it as
a condition for the survival of their rule—that a society’s intellectual community
should be alienated from the mass of the people. Progressive ideas, and those who dis-
seminate them, are to be viewed with mistrust and hostility. A great deal of political
propaganda is devoted to this end. Nineteenth-century thought, in Marx and a critical
tradition after him, became aware of subtler threats to rational communication in the
form of ideology, and the way the dominant ideas of a time reflect the dominant class
interests. Thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Kant and Fichte, pinned their
hopes on the process of free communication and the gradual self-education of a
learned public. This process still exists, but in many ways it has been skillfully sub-
verted and corrupted. There are important normative questions about how communi-
cation should be carried on.4
For us today, at least in most Western societies, the pervasive issue about free, rational
communication is not what communications are permitted, but rather which opinions
are made widely available to the public and permitted to influence it. Those who own
and control the mass media can squelch and marginalize without having to prohibit or
persecute. Academic books like this one, for instance, are freely presented to their pre-
dictably limited audience. Those whose power they might threaten have calculated
ahead of time that their influence will be negligible. Political communications are more
tightly controlled, yet not by brute force and crude suppression but by the power of
money, which determines which opinions get widespread expression in the media.
The biggest threat to free communication in our time is the constant and pervasive
presence in our mass media not of free, rational communication but instead of of prop-
aganda, deception, disinformation: products of mass media designed to distort
rational debate and silence informed opinion and the viewpoints of oppressed groups.
4
These questions have been explored recently mainly in the context of political discourse. See Rawls
(2005), Lecture VI; Estlund (2008); Cohen (2009); and Stanley (2015), Chapter 3. Feminist epistemology
has been the main contributor to consideration of these issues in a broader context. For example, see Code
(1987), Antony and Witt (eds.) (1993), and Fricker (2007).
Increasingly, the entire population identifying itself with the right-ward side of the
political spectrum has come to live in its own fantasy world, filled with left-wing con-
spiracies, in which all government is evil (except when corporate subsidies benefit the
powers that be), cutting taxes on the wealthy helps everyone (by “stimulating the econ-
omy”); in short: ice warms, fire cools, and above all the rich deserve their privileges and
the poor their wretchedness. Even the undisputable findings of science are dismissed
by influential forces when they threaten the powerful. Our institutions cultivate the
public itself to be an audience whose prejudices are predictably favorable to the inter-
ests of the cultivators—a tiny minority, the wealthy and the management of corpora-
tions, whose interests are directly adverse to both the vast majority and the public
interest.5 As long as mass communication takes this form, it is a lie to assert that we live
in a free society.
Kant and Fichte cautiously hoped that the learned could convince the powerful
through reason to renounce their unjust privileges and promote the good of humanity.
Philosophers still make the attempt, but the dynamic remains remarkably similar. The
deafening institutional megaphone through which power shouts down truth is always
louder than the merely human voice with which truth speaks to power.
§3: The Human Social Vocation

Fichte’s thoughts about free, rational communication may seem out of touch with our
issues about freedom of communication; in some ways they are. But they still present
us with a kind of ideal, not only of free communication but of the free society itself.
This ideal transcends their own age and ours as well. It offers us a standard by which we
may be able to recognize the true goals at which we ought to be aiming. Today the
standard itself may easily be lost sight of amid the distortions to which we are con-
stantly subject. Fichte is worth studying as long as our study of him enables us to catch
a glimpse of it.
Social freedom, social unity. In his 1794 Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation, Fichte
introduces a preliminary definition of society (Gesellschaft) as “the relation in which
rational beings stand to each other” (VBG 6:302). He then develops a new and more
substantive concept of society: as “interaction (Wechselwirkung) governed by con-
cepts, a purposive community, or community of ends (zweckmäßige Gemeinschaft)”
(VBG 6:305–6). The social drive within every rational being “aims at interaction, recip-
rocal influence, mutual give and take, reciprocal passivity and activity: not at mere cau-
sality, not at mere activity over against which the other behaves only passively.” By the
“social drive,” Fichte means the striving to seek free, rational beings outside me and to
enter into community with them, where “community” means not “subordination, as in
5
The classic study here is Chomsky and Herman (1988/2002). For a new look at the same phenomena
from a philosophically sophisticated perspective, see Stanley (2015).
the corporeal world, but co-ordination” (VBG 6:308). The social drive strives not to
master others, as if they were trained animals, but to liberate them.
Rousseau has said that many a person who considers himself the master of others is actually
more of a slave than they are. He might more accurately have said that anyone who considers
himself a master of others is himself a slave . . . He only is free who wills to make free everyone
around him, and whose influence, the cause of which has not always been remarked, actually
does so.
(VBG 6:309)
One may not use others as mere means for one’s ends, or even for ends you think of as
their own: “One may not make any rational being virtuous, wise or happy against his
own will, . . . or even wish to do this, even if it were possible” (VBG 6:309). By means of
free communication through concepts, rational beings should seek to perfect them-
selves by perfecting one another, communicating to one another each one’s ideal of
humanity, seeking both to raise the other to that ideal and to perfect that same ideal
through rational give-and-take. “The winner in this spiritual struggle is always the one
who is the higher and better human being. Thus the improvement of the species has its
origin within society, and thus we have discovered the vocation of all society as such”
(VBG 6:307).
Perfection: harmony, identity, equality. The drive for absolute self-activity, from
which Fichte derived the principle of morality, was a drive “for the whole I” which
seeks absolute harmony and unification (SL 4:44). The same applies to the social drive:
The law of complete, formal self-harmony also determines the social drive positively, and from
this we obtain the actual vocation of the human being within society. All the individuals who
belong to the human race are different. There is only one thing in which they are in complete
agreement: their ultimate goal—perfection.
(VBG 6:309–10)
Perfection, for Fichte as for Kant, is the unification of a manifold, “the completeness of
the many insofar as it constitutes a one,” or “the totality of something composite
through co-ordination of the manifold in an aggregate” (Ak 20:228). At the same time
it is “the relation of the manifold in a thing to an end” (KU 5:346), which is the con-
formity of a thing to a concept of what it is supposed to be (KU 5:226–7). As applied to
human society, this concept of perfection identifies the human vocation in society (the
end or purpose of society, what human beings are supposed to be in their relation to
one another) with a relationship between them that accepts their differences, but
coordinates different individuals into a harmonious unity.
Perfection is determined in only one respect: it is totally self-identical [sich selbst völlig gleich];
if all human beings could become perfect, and reach their highest and final goal, then they
would all be fully equal to one another [alle einander völlig gleich]; they would be only One; a
single subject.
(VBG 6:310)
This formulation characteristically combines Fichte’s sublime rhetoric with his dizzy-
ing philosophical abstraction. On both counts, it calls for explication. An entity is per-
fect when its parts, components, or elements are organized to form a whole. The
concept of this whole, and the way the elements are harmonized or combined in order
to form it, is the standard of perfection, by which less perfect specimens of the same
kind can be judged, and the striving toward perfection can be guided. In the case of
society, the elements of the whole are free human beings and their rational activities;
the harmonious combination is the way they choose to relate themselves and their
activities to one another. The concept that serves as the standard of perfection is a con-
cept on which people freely agree as a result of free, rational communication.
Human beings are different from one another by nature in their predispositions and
talents. The perfection of society consists in combining their capacities and activities
into a single harmonious whole. The social drive, Fichte says, is a synthesis of two
drives:
the drive to communicate, that is, the drive to cultivate in other persons that aspect of personal-
ity in which we ourselves are especially strong and, as far as possible, to make everyone else
equal to our own better self; and also the drive to receive, that is, the drive to allow others to
cultivate in us that aspect in which they are especially strong and we are especially weak.
Nature’s mistakes are in this way corrected by reason and freedom . . . Reason will make the
individual’s deficiencies into a common burden and thus infinitely reduce them . . . [The social
drive] requires us to share the good we possess with those who need it and to receive what we
lack from those who have it.
(VGB 6:315–17)
Social perfection makes alle einander völlig gleich. The German word gleich is multiply
ambiguous: it can mean identical, similar, equivalent, or equal. Human beings are not
identical to one another, and their capacities are dissimilar. But when they harmonize
or unify their activities into a whole whose concept is freely agreed upon, they thereby
become identical: they come to be “only One; a single subject.” In forming this whole,
they treat one another as equals, both because the concept of the whole must be freely
agreed upon by all, and because from the standpoint of that self-identical whole what
the whole receives from each is equal to what it receives from everyone else. Within
such a whole, no one would claim greater credit than anyone else for what they achieve
together, and no one would claim higher status than anyone else. Each would be free;
the only dependency would be the dependency of each on the whole. That dependency
is entirely mutual and therefore entirely equal. “Equal results must always follow from
equal cultivation of equal predispositions. And thus we arrive at the same result …: the
final aim of all society is the complete equality of all its members” (VBG 6:314–15).
Society as end in itself. Equality means that all are equally members of society and
that they treat one another as equals. But it does not imply that there is anything of
which all should be given equal shares. Distributive justice is in any case a matter of
right, not of ethics. We will look at it more closely in Chapter 8.
For now we can say this: Fichte holds that each person has a right to labor, and to a
livelihood from labor, free from personal dependency on others. The rational state
would provide this freedom as a matter of right. We all depend on the whole, but no
one has a master. Charitable beneficence should aim not at doling out goods, but
chiefly at procuring for beneficiaries “a secure estate” (einen festen Stand) (SL 4:296).
Those unable to live from their own labor have a right to a livelihood from the state;
conversely, no one has a right to support from others unless they do labor, or cannot
labor. The proper remuneration for any labor is what is needed to pursue that occupa-
tion, and this might be different for different estates (NR 3:213–15; cf. GH 3:402). The
state also has no claim on a person’s “absolute property”—that is, on the goods they
own after their taxes have been paid (NR 3:240). There may be significant differences
in what people own. But none should own so little as to be personally dependent on
others; and none should own so much that they can subject others to their will. Human
beings necessarily depend on one another. Wherever possible, dependency must be
reciprocal; it should not involve the ownership by one person of the conditions under
which others live.
The end of all human activity is to be able to live; and based only on this possibility do all who
have been placed by nature into life, have an equal claim to right. Hence the division must first
be made so that all can subsist with it. Live and let live! . . . The division [of wealth] must be
made according to this equality of their right, in such a way that all and each can live as agree-
ably as possible, if as many human beings as are present are to subsist in proximity to one
another; hence that all can live approximately equally agreeably. “Can,” I say, but by no means
“must.” It must depend on himself, and by no means on any other, if one lives more agreeably.
(GH 3:402)
Fichte agrees with Rousseau: “With regard to equality, this word must not be under-
stood to mean that degrees of power and wealth should be absolutely the same,
but . . . as for wealth, no citizen should be so very rich that he can buy another, and none
so poor that he must sell himself ” (Rousseau 1997, On the Social Contract II, 11 [1–2]).
Fichte realizes that the human species is still very far from social perfection. At the
center of the striving for it is the activity of free communication:
The vocation of the human being within society is accordingly unification, a unification which
constantly gains in internal strength and expands its perimeter. But since the only thing on
which people are or can be in agreement is their ultimate vocation, this unification is possible
only through the search for perfection . . . that is, perfecting ourselves by freely making use of
the effect which others have on us and perfecting others by acting in turn upon them as free
beings.
(VBG 6:310)
It is the vocation of the scholar (or learned person) to direct this process. “The true
vocation of the learned estate is the supreme supervision of the actual progress of the
human race in general and the unceasing promotion of this progress” (VBG 6:328). This
vocation is not a privilege or source of superiority; that would contradict the very idea
of what is to be promoted. But it is the special responsibility of scholars: “Accordingly, it

is his particular duty to cultivate to the highest degree within himself the social predis-
position of receptivity and the art of communication” (VBG 6:329). Fichte says that a
society of rational beings relating to one another through free interaction is not merely
a means to the ends of those who participate in it, but is its own end (ist selbst Zweck)
(VBG 6:307). It is good in itself or for its own sake, not because we care about it, or even
because we ought to care about it. This is as close as we are likely to come to having a
conception of the independence or self-sufficiency of reason—the final human end.
§4: The Final End of Reason

The “afterlife.” Fichte concludes §18 of the System of Ethics by offering a summary of
“the complete final end of the human being, considered as an individual” (SL 4:252).
All a person’s efficacious acting within society has the following goal: All human beings are
supposed to be in agreement . . . This ought to be the goal of all our thinking and acting, and
even of our individual cultivation: our final end is not ourselves but everyone.
(SL 4:253)
It is important to understand what “everyone” must mean here. In §9 of Chapter 6, we

saw that the presupposition that human ends agree entails that my actions form a com-
mon system with the actions of past generations and also future ones. Thus “everyone”
has to mean for the past and also the future generations of human beings:
Whoever you may be, because you bear a human face, you are still a member of this great com-
munity. No matter how countlessly many intermediaries may be involved in the transition, I nev-
ertheless have an effect on you and you have an effect on me . . . We share a common calling.
(VGB 6:311; cf. On Human Dignity SW 1:416)
This is what Scheffler (2013) has called “the afterlife.” He is arguing that it is this that gives
our lives meaning, and not what that term has traditionally designated. Fichte agrees:
My existence is not in vain and without any purpose. I am a necessary link in that great chain
which began at that moment when the human being first became fully conscious of his own
existence, and which stretches forward toward eternity . . . Where [past generations] had to
stop, I can build further. I can bring nearer to completion that noble temple they had to leave
unfinished.
(VBG 6:322)
Again, like the human community itself, the meaning of my life is not for me a merely
self-interested good; nor do I care about it only because I have a moral duty to do so. If
it is also either of these things, then that is because it is good simply in itself, for its own
sake, or good simpliciter.6 Pursuit of the rational society as something good in itself is
the human vocation.
6
There is a good discussion of this point in Scheffler (2013), pp. 53–8.
The continuity of human history that gives our lives meaning is the theme of Fichte’s
1805 lectures Characteristics of the Present Age (GGZ). In that work Fichte argues that
the human species emerged from an age of innocence into an age of authority and has
now reached an age of lawless liberty. Our lives have meaning insofar as we contribute
to the search for truth and strive toward the goal of finding a better way to live together.
Someone may say that if for Fichte our lives acquire their meaning only through
their contribution to the human “afterlife,” then this must after all involve a kind of
consequentialism. There may be a trivial sense in which all acting is “consequentialist,”
since to act is to set an end to be actualized in the future. Fichte does not deny that. But
it is important to see that consequentialist ethical theories go far beyond this triviality.
Fichte’s ethics does not involve choosing your actions based on specific calculations
about their consequences, especially their long-term consequences. For Fichte, we do
not decide what to do by calculating what actions would achieve or maximize some
determinate good. Our immediate ends are simply the ends of those actions we ought
to do. Regarding more remote ends—absolute self-sufficiency, the afterlife—their con-
tent is something we are still seeking. What we ought to do is act as we ought. These
actions are their own ends as well as having other ends. We also hope our actions will
contribute to a better human future. But its content must remain too vague for conse-
quentialist calculations because part of what we ought to do is to engage with others in
the endless search for that content.
The unachievable thought as achieved. Fichte now asks: “If this unachievable goal is
nevertheless thought of as achieved, what would then happen?” On the way to it, he
thinks:
The distinction between a learned and an unlearned public falls away, as do the church and the
state. Everyone has the same convictions, and the conviction of any single person is the convic-
tion of every person. The state falls away as a legislative and coercive power . . . Employing one’s
individual force in accordance with this common will, each person would do his best to modify
nature suitably [zweckmäßig] for the usages of reason. Accordingly, anything that any one per-
son does would be of use to everyone, and what everyone does would be of use to each individ-
ual . . . —Now this is already how things stand, but only in idea. In all that one does, each person
would think of everyone. And this is precisely why one is not allowed to do certain things:
because one cannot know that this is something everyone wills. Then, everyone will be allowed
to do everything he wills because all will will the same.
(SL 4:253)
In this passage Fichte is doing two quite distinct, but related, things. First, he is trying
to describe what would be the case if all human beings did rationally agree on their
ends. He is declaring that things already stand this way “in idea”: that is, as a goal or
norm for us here and now. Second, from this last claim he is drawing some conclusions
about how we should behave in our present (nonideal) circumstances.
It might be thought that the third sentence in the passage just quoted—with its ref-
erence to “modifying nature suitably for the uses of reason”—supports Kosch’s idea
that for Fichte “the self-sufficiency of reason” is to be identified with complete human
control over nature. That thought would be mistaken. The passage is not about how we
should behave now, but how people would behave if their ends all in fact agreed. Each
person would do his best to modify nature suitably (or purposively, zweckmäßig) for
the usages of reason. But it is gratuitous to interpret this as saying we would choose our
actions calculatively so that they maximize human control over nature. Still more gra-
tuitous is the inference that we should do this now. The emphasis in the passage is not
on how human beings would treat nature, but rather on how they would treat each
other: what each does would be of use to everyone, and what all do would be of use to
each. This is not a consequentialist maximizing principle, but a principle of social reci-
procity. It is a virtual repetition of Fichte’s social ideal from the lectures on morality for
scholars: “an association in which one cannot work for himself without working at the
same time for others, or work for others without at the same time working for himself ”
(VBG 6:321).
The conclusion Fichte draws for us here and now, moreover, is exclusively a deontic
one: in fact, a moral prohibition. The reason, he says, that we are prohibited from cer-
tain actions is that we cannot know that they are something everyone wills. This the
(Kantian) negative and heuristic principle Fichte cited earlier: I must not act in any
way such that I cannot will that all others should do the same in the same situation.
This is because I cannot now think that all others, if they agreed on their ends, would
agree to my acting this way (SL 4:234). Only when actual agreement between people is
achieved would there no longer be that prohibition, because then all would will the
same (SL 4:253). Calculative-consequentialist reasoning cannot now decide what to
do, because such reasoning would need to presuppose that we knew on what ends all
are agreed. But that is precisely what we cannot yet know. At most, we can attempt to
act in ways that would promote those ends, whatever they might turn out to be. We will
see presently that this is the basis of Fichte’s claim that it is our duty to turn ourselves
into active tools of reason or the moral law.
What kind of agreement? For Fichte our highest ethical duty is to participate in free
and all-inclusive rational communication whose aim is complete agreement on ends
and practical principles. That on which all would agree would constitute ethical truth.
There is in this a prefiguration of Peirce’s famous idea that truth is that on which all
rational inquirers are destined to agree—and also its subsequent incarnations in later
pragmatists, as well as in the discourse ethics of Habermas and Apel. Fichte accepts the
in practice unattainability of complete agreement, but he looks upon convergence
toward agreement as the only acceptable goal.
But how is this goal to be understood? How much agreement, and agreement on
what? If the goal is understood to be complete agreement on all principles and com-
plete sharing of all ends, then not only does it seem unattainable, but even convergence
toward it may look undesirable. Even in science there seems to be no convergence of
theories toward unity, but instead an increasing plurality of research projects and
s pecializations (see Suppes 1978, Cartwright 1999). In philosophy too, we know that

communication often takes the form of arguments, counter-arguments, endless dis-
putes, with no prospect of unanimous agreement. When philosophers find they agree,
this usually means only that further philosophical conversation is pointless. There
always have been a plurality of human ways of life, of ethical systems, of possible solu-
tions to the problem of people living together and cooperating on mutually acceptable
terms. Even though we may see some glimmerings of the emergence of a “world cul-
ture,” it is not clear that we should even want, much less hope for, an increasing conver-
gence toward a complete unification of human value systems and ways of life.
The question really is: What kind of agreement, considered as an (unreachable)
goal, best resolves the antinomy presented in Chapter 6 §8? What kind of agreement is
needed for us to share our ends and principles to the extent necessary for each rational
being’s materially free actions to harmonize with the materially free actions of all oth-
ers? As we will see presently in §9 of this chapter, Fichte holds that the rational society
will involve a plurality of estates—life-activities, ways of living, interdependent social
roles. These might well be seen as involving a plurality of life-projects, different ways of
finding meaning in the human condition. Diversity of ends, characters, ways of finding
a meaningful life do not necessarily impede harmony. They may even be necessary for
it. Fichte himself even says so (VBG 6:314–18; cf. SL 4:343).
What human beings need out of the rational conversation about ethical values,
principles, and ends is not total uniformity or even convergence toward it. No doubt it
is desirable for people to share some ends—for example, protection of the rights and
dignity of all, increasing achievement and dissemination of reliable information about
the world, protection of the natural environment on which the afterlife depends. But
we do not require that all directly share all the ends we pursue, or the principles by
which we live, but only that we provide one another with the freedom and resources to
pursue them and live together on terms that all can reasonably accept. Problems of
coordinating our ways of life must not be settled by war, violence, or irrational manip-
ulation, or on terms of domination and subjection. That is the kind of convergence our
rational conversation should seek, and not total unanimity on all value judgments,
ethical principles, and ends. Ethical truth consists in agreement on general terms of
human interaction that are mutually acceptable and allow everyone an acceptable way
of life. This is consistent with our continuing to disagree about which ends and activi-
ties are in fact good. Rational conversation may be about those too, but requires only
that such disagreements be left for future conversations. We presuppose that there are
right answers, but our discussions need never reach a final resolution.
§5: End in Itself or Tool of the Moral Law?

The thought that we cannot know on what ends rational beings would rationally agree
grounds Fichte’s main positive conclusion about our duties: that they are based on the
duty to turn ourselves into tools of the moral law. As we communicate with others to
determine the ends of reason, we must simultaneously turn ourselves into suitable
means for whatever ends the community of rational beings agrees upon. Fichte’s asser-
tion of this proposition is repeated and emphatic (SL 4:215, 231, 236, 255, 259, 270,
280, 311). It is this attitude toward ourselves, and even toward others, rather than an
instrumentalist-consequentialist conception of our choice of actions, that gives Fichte’s
ethics at times a teleological or means–ends flavor.
An active tool. The term “tool” (Werkzeug) implies passivity. A “tool” is used by
someone—even if the tool is a person, by someone else—to do something. But Fichte’s
use of the term in this context must entirely reject that implication. For it is we who are
to turn ourselves into “active tools” of reason or the law (SL 4:270). It is never a question
of someone else turning me into a tool for ends I have not chosen. Fichte’s entire theory
of right concerns the possibility of a community of those whose rights are protected,
and in which coercion is permitted only to protect freedom. Even later, when Fichte’s
lectures assign the state a greater role, he still warns against the tendency of the age to
“make the citizen into a mere tool of the state,” gradually turning everyone’s resources
into “a sacrifice on the altar of the fatherland” (GGZ 7:208–12). Fichte’s ethics says that
I should choose to regard myself as a tool of the moral law; it does not say that others
may make this choice for me.
The biggest apparent contrast with Kant would appear to lie directly in Fichte’s claim
that we are only tools or instruments: “I am for myself—i.e. before my own conscious-
ness—only an instrument, a mere tool of the moral law, and by no means its end”
(SL 4:255); “I am a mere tool [of the moral law], and by no means its end” (SL 4:255);
“no one is an end for himself ” (SL 4:256). These assertions appear to conflict—directly,
even flagrantly—with Kant’s Formula of Humanity: “So act that you use humanity, as
much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as an
end, never merely as a means” (G 4:429). It even appears to conflict directly with some
of Fichte’s own emphatic assertions, especially in the Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation,
where it is not only strenuously denied that any person may be treated as a means
(VBG 6:309), but also asserted that every person is “his own end” (VBG 6:295). Fichte,
however, sees no conflict. He insists that “the Kantian proposition [‘every human being
is an end in itself ’] is compatible with mine, when the latter has been further elabo-
rated” (SL 4:255).
For myself . . . not an end. There is always a qualification: it is only “for myself . . . before

my own consciousness” that I am not an end. “Within me and before my own con-
sciousness, the moral law does not address itself to other individuals outside me but
has them only as objects. Before my own consciousness, these others are not means but
the final end” (SL 4:255). “A person looking at the goal does not see himself, for the goal
in question lies outside the person . . . the subject loses itself and disappears into . . . its
intuited final end” (SL 4:255).
The qualification “for myself ” says that when I undertake an action I focus on its end
or goal, and my attention is not on myself. This would seem to be especially true when
the goal is a moral one, devoted to the good of others or to ends that are presumed to be
shared by all human beings. At least part of what Fichte means is that I am not sup-
posed to care whether a right action benefits me or reflects well on me. If I do, then my
attitude is morally questionable. That would be quite compatible with the end of the
action including myself or my good as one of its components. For of course if the ends
of reason are the ends of all, then my ends would be included in them too. So it is not
regarding the objective effects of my actions, but only regarding my attitude or orienta-
tion, that Fichte insists on the “disappearance and annihilation of one’s entire individu-
ality,” so that “everyone becomes a pure presentation of the moral law, and thus
becomes a pure I, in the proper sense of the term” (SL 4:256).
There must, however, be more to it than merely my attitude toward myself. For Fichte
repeatedly insists that for me others too are mere “tools of the moral law”: “Everyone
ought to regard everyone else as a tool of the moral law” (SL 4:312; cf. 4:277, 279, 280,
281, 283, 302, 303, 304, 311, 336). Even when “others are not means but the final end,”
they too are to be regarded as “tools of the moral law.” But keep in mind that to regard
them as tools of the moral law is to regard them as tools of their own self-legislated law.
To regard them as “tools of reason” is to regard them as tools of their own reason. The
very first consequence Fichte draws from my regarding others as tools of reason is that I
must “preserve the freedom of all individuals” (SL 4:256). Moreover, Fichte thinks that
regarding oneself as a tool of reason is in no way a devaluation of oneself, but on the
contrary, “this does not diminish the dignity of humanity; instead, it elevates it [because]
everyone is, for himself and before his own self-consciousness, charged with the task of
achieving the total end of reason” (SL 4:256). For Fichte, however, this always means
doing what is assigned to you by your situation, not making yourself responsible for
maximizing some whole, in the manner of an act-consequentialist.
Treating a person as an end. Fichte maintains that his position is consistent with the
Kantian proposition that all human beings are ends in themselves, and even with the
proposition that I should regard myself as an end: “Someone might object that every-
one expressly ought to be an end for himself; and we can concede this point as well.
Everyone is an end, in the sense that everyone is a means for realizing reason”
(SL 4:256). Fichte even maintains that you regard a person as an end just because you
regard the person as a means for realizing reason or a tool of the moral law. This is one
of those Fichtean paradoxes; its aim is that we should reflect on and understand it.
In order to gain this understanding, we need a better grasp of two things: first, what
it means to regard a person as an end, and second, what Fichte means when he says that
a person is a tool of the moral law. The first is a familiar puzzle about Kantian ethics.
Critics have often complained that the Kantian notion that persons are ends in them-
selves is too vague to yield any determinate conclusions. It must be reduced to a set of
injunctions about how persons are to be treated. The correct Kantian response to this
ought to be that this reductive approach misses something important. The worth or
dignity of a person as an end in itself is supposed to be what provides the ground or
reason for these injunctions. Whatever actions or omissions are required to treat a per-
son as an end, they are the ones that follow from appreciating this value and expressing
this appreciation in action. Valuing the worth of a person, for example, may entail val-
uing the fact of their existence or continued survival, but is definitely not to be equated
with that. It is the person him- or herself who has the value in question, not some state of
affairs involving the person. Kantian ethics involves dethroning states of affairs from
the position as fundamental objects of value that they have in consequentialist theo-
ries. Fichte is in this respect also a Kantian.
For both Kant and Fichte, the valuable entity in question consists in the person as
exemplifying rational nature—the person as a free, rational agent. The actions required
to treat a person as an end are therefore chiefly two: first, leaving the person free to act,
and second, valuing the ends the person sets through free action, since these give us a
reason for helping the person to further those ends. Equally fundamental to (perhaps
inseparable from) valuing a person’s freedom and rationality is entering into a certain
relation with the person. The name for it in both Kant and Fichte is “recognition”
(Anerkennung). Kant and Fichte chose this key term independently, each without the
influence of the other, and the context in which they apply it is different. For Fichte, the
term applies mainly in the context of right, while in Kant it applies to ethical duties of
respect. In Kantian ethics, we must value the freedom of a person, and care about
whether they can or do consent to the way we are treating them or can share the end of
the actions we take that affect them (G 4:429). If the appropriate attitude is to have its
full effect on us, we must make their ends our own ends (G 4:430). Recognition of the
dignity of a person precludes behaving toward them in ways that show contempt rather
than respect for them. Kant cites three such ways: arrogance, defamation, and ridicule
(MS 6:462–8).
When we look at the conduct Fichte thinks follows from treating persons—ourselves
as well as others—as tools of the moral law, we find that it corresponds closely to what
Kant thinks is required by treating persons as ends in themselves. We are to value the
life of every person, and their bodily well-being (SL 4:261–5, 277–82). We must respect
the formal freedom of every person, which entails that we avoid deception and also
respect their property, including their means of livelihood, which enables them to live
and act freely, independently of the constraint of others (SL 4:282–99). Perhaps above
all, we must not let a person—neither ourselves nor others—so lose the sense of their
own worth that they despair—give up hope, either of achieving worthwhile goals or of
their own moral improvement (SL 4:266, 318–19, 352). If a person’s honor or reputa-
tion, including our own, is under attack, then we must defend it (SL 4:312–13). These
conclusions are all defended by Fichte based on the principle that every person is
equally a tool of the moral law, and must be treated accordingly. Crucial to many of
Fichte’s arguments for these conclusions is the claim that a person is not a mere thing,
but is a tool of morality only as an active principle (SL 4:270).
This may still leave us (at least us Kantians) dissatisfied. For while it attempts to draw
the same moral conclusions Kant would draw from the claim that rational nature in
persons is an end in itself, it seems to draw them from a diametrically opposed prem-
ise: that persons are mere means or tools (albeit free and active ones). We may doubt
that Fichte’s conclusions follow from his premise. Even if they do, we may think that he
accepts the conclusions for the wrong reason.
Membership in the community of rational beings. In order to deal with these wor-
ries, we need to address our second puzzle: what does Fichte mean by the claim that a
person is a tool of the moral law? But we have seen the answer already. The moral law
directs us toward our moral vocation, the pursuit of our final end, and commands us to
become instruments in its service. That final end, “the self-sufficiency of reason,” as far
as we can form a definite conception of it, turns out to be a certain kind of human
society. It is one in which “anything any one person does would be of use to everyone,
and what everyone does would be of use to each individual” (SL 4:253), or in which
“one cannot work for himself without working at the same time for everyone, nor work
for others without working for himself ” (VBG 6:321). Being a tool of the moral law is
nothing different from active membership in such a society—to the extent that it
already exists—and working to create it insofar as it does not. The relations between
human beings in such a society would be one of mutual respect, mutual assistance, and
collective effort in reaching rational agreement among all human ends and in realizing
the system of shared ends that results from this. The Kantian name for such a society
would be “the realm of ends.” For Kant it is “only an ideal” (G 4:433–6), but Fichte
thinks of it as a real social order, one that partly exists already, and is to be brought
about. Being a tool of the moral law is not different from being a member of this
rational society, if you are also striving to bring it into being.
This is precisely the way Fichte presents things. He introduces the topic by distin-
guishing the empirical or individual I, the person subject to the moral law, from the
pure I, which is to be seen as “reason outside me”; and he identifies the latter with “the
entire community of rational beings,” or (in Fichte’s Christian terminology) “the com-
munion of saints” (SL 4:254–5).7 Each member of this community aims at the commu-
nity itself as a final end. This final end includes the freedom, the mutual recognition,
and the well-being equally of every member.
For every rational being outside me, to whom the moral law certainly addresses itself in the
same way it addresses itself to me, namely as a tool of the moral law, I am a member of the
community of rational beings; hence I am from his viewpoint an end for him, just as he is from
my viewpoint an end for me. For everyone, all others outside oneself are ends, but no one is an
end for himself. The viewpoint from which all individuals without exception are a final end is
a standpoint that lies beyond all individual consciousness; it is the viewpoint from which the
7
This phrase is drawn from the Apostles’ Creed, which concludes: “And I believe in . . . the communion
of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen.” The commun-
ion of saints is usually understood to be the Holy Catholic Church—that is, the union of the faithful on
earth and the blessed in heaven, constituting a single spiritual community with Christ as its head.
consciousness of all rational beings unites into one, as an object. Properly speaking, this is the
viewpoint of God, for whom each rational being is an absolute final end.
(SL 4:255–6)
Fichte says that “everyone is an end in the sense that everyone is a means for realizing
reason. This is the ultimate end of each person’s existence” (SL 4:256). The implicit
premise is: A person him- or herself is treated as an end insofar as the ultimate end of that
person’s existence is treated as an end. “The subject loses itself and disappears into . . . its
intuited final end” (SL 4:255). Since the ultimate end of my existence is to be a tool of
the moral law, I treat myself and others as an ends when I regard myself, and them, as
tools of the moral law. I treat anyone as an end when think of them as a means to realiz-
ing reason in the world.
Everyone is, for himself and before his own consciousness, charged with the task of achieving
the total end of reason; the entire community of rational beings is dependent on the care and
efficacious action of each person, and he alone is not dependent on anything. Everyone becomes
God, to the extent that one is permitted to do so . . . one preserves the freedom of all individuals
[and acts] for the community, by means of which one may forget oneself completely.
(SL 4:256)
§6: My Own Happiness

There may seem still to be something important left out. If I truly treat myself as an end
in the Kantian sense, don’t I need to think about myself at least to the extent of includ-
ing my happiness or well-being—at any rate, at least the happiness of which I have
made myself worthy—among my ends?
Even for Kant, however, this is not so clear. Kant denies that there is a direct duty to
promote one’s own happiness. There may be an indirect duty to promote my happiness,
insofar as unhappiness may tempt me to violate the moral law (G 4:399, KpV 5:93,
MS 6:388). This seems to be precisely the way in which Fichte too would approve of
care for one’s own happiness—insofar, that is, as this care is needed to preserve oneself
as an effective tool of the moral law. Morality, even the principle that you must treat
yourself as an end, does not require you to pursue your own happiness. On this point,
Kant and Fichte completely agree.
Kant, however, also holds that I am permitted to pursue my happiness for its own
sake, whenever this pursuit does not interfere with my duty (KpV 5:93, TP 8:281,
MS 6:388). That claim is possible only because Kant does not think—as he puts it—that
our entire path is “strewn with duties as with man-traps” (MS 6:409). Some of our
actions need not be strictly required by duty. We have seen that here Fichte disagrees,
and we have tried above to show that his position is not threatening to our freedom, our
personal projects, or our integrity. Indeed, it is precisely the right way to defend them.
Kant has another argument, however, which might create more trouble for Fichte:
“A maxim of promoting others’ happiness at the sacrifice of one’s own happiness, one’s
own needs, would conflict with itself if it were made a universal law” (MS 6:393).
According to this, if everyone were to sacrifice their happiness for the sake of others,
no one would be happy.
In order to see how Fichte might reply to such an argument, we need to explore fur-
ther his views about what our individual happiness consists in, and how it is to be
achieved. There might seem to be a conflict here between the positions Fichte takes in
the Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation and in the System of Ethics. In the earlier text,
Fichte boldly disagrees with Kant’s conception of the highest good, and the relation
between virtue and happiness:
This highest good by no means consists of two parts, but is completely unitary; the highest
good is the complete harmony of the rational being with itself . . . The concept of happiness itself
and the desire for happiness first arise from the human being’s moral nature. Not what makes
us happy is good, but rather only what is good makes us happy. No happiness is possible apart
from morality. Of course, feelings of pleasure are possible without morality, and even in oppo-
sition to it, . . . But pleasurable feelings are not happiness; indeed, they often contradict
happiness.
(VGB 6:299)
Fichte here appears to take a view of happiness like the one Kant finds among the
Stoics: happiness is virtue (KpV 5:126–7). Or perhaps Fichte’s view is closer to that of
Aristotle, and to some contemporary eudaimonistic forms of virtue ethics: happiness,
or at least its dominant component and its necessary condition, consists in virtuous
activity.8 This is of course quite different from Kant’s conception of happiness, which
consists not in our conduct, or in the worth of our person, but rather in the desirability
of our state or condition (Zustand), as measured by our wishes and by the satisfaction
of our inclinations (G 4:415–16, KpV 5:25–6). But Kant’s view appears quite close to
what Fichte later, in the System of Ethics, calls the “maxim of happiness” or of “self-
interest,” which “aims only at enjoyment and has pleasure as its incentive” (SL 4:180,
183). It might therefore seem that between 1794 and 1798, Fichte changed his mind
about the nature of happiness. He seems to have become less Stoical and more Kantian.
The pursuit of happiness vs. being happy. The key to understanding Fichte’s posi-
tion, however, lies in seeing that there was no change of mind here at all. When we
understand why, we can also see why Fichte thinks that, in addition to duty—to the
self-concern required to be a tool of the moral law—we need no (Kantian) permission
to seek our own happiness. The Lectures tell us what happiness is. It is virtuous activity:
“only what is good makes us happy.” But the “maxim of happiness” specifies what it is to
pursue your own happiness or self-interest, merely for its own sake, and not as it is
included in your duty to be a tool of the moral law. The crucial insight is that selfish-
ness—pursuing your own happiness for its own sake—is not the way to be happy.
8
For a compelling defense of such a view, see Annas (1993). But we will see, in §9 of this chapter, that
Fichte thinks the meaning of our lives consists in what we create or produce, not only in what we do—in
Aristotelian terms, in our ποίησις, not only in our πρᾶξις.
Instead, the way to be happy is to forget about yourself and become a well-functioning
member of the moral community, a tool of the moral law. It is hardly a new observation
that selfish people—those who directly make their own happiness their end, and espe-
cially those for whom it is their primary or even their exclusive end—are usually
unhappy. The happiest people are those who are not concerned with their self-interest,
but occupy themselves with other worthwhile aims, such as the happiness of others.9
Within the moral community, people concern themselves mainly with the well-
being of others, and with their own happiness only insofar as it is necessary in order to
equip them for active membership in the moral community and promotion of the ends
of reason. Beyond that, in the moral community—to the extent that it already exists,
and even more when it is perfected far beyond its present condition—my happiness
results more from how others treat me than from my self-interested conduct, just as
their happiness results more from the way others treat them than it results from their
selfishness. In short: the only happy people are those who care about people and causes
other than themselves. This might seem like an incredibly soft saying, even an insipid
one. But given the way many live, it is really an incredibly hard saying. For it explains
why so many people in our world are self-condemned to wretchedness. Another
expression of this thought is this verse from Bertolt Brecht’s Song of the Insufficiency of
Human Striving:
Ja; renn nur nach dem Glück Yes, run after happiness
doch renne nicht zu sehr! But don’t run too fast!
Denn alle rennen nach dem Glück For everyone runs after happiness
Das Glück rennt hinterher. But happiness is running after them.
Fichte’s version of the thought would be: those who adopt the maxim of happiness won’t
be happy, and those who are happy won’t adopt the maxim of happiness. Perhaps some
who do not adopt the maxim of happiness fail to be happy because others—those who do
adopt this maxim—make them unhappy, as well as making themselves unhappy. But the
only way to have a chance at happiness yourself is to make yourself into an effective tool
of the moral law: become an active member of the human moral community. Make your
chief concern that the world should become a better place. Devote yourself to the afterlife
(in Scheffler’s sense). If you must worry about happiness, worry mainly about other peo-
ple’s, and your own only to the extent necessary to enable you to do your duty. Then, if all
goes well, and you don’t run too fast after happiness, it might just catch up with you.
The point is still likely to be misunderstood, however. It is not that I should pursue
happiness indirectly, by pursuing other things and manipulating myself into being
9
For just two famous examples of this insight in moral philosophers one might not associate with either
Kant or Fichte, see Butler (1726), especially Sermon XIII, and Mill (2001), especially Chapters 2 and 3. Mill
puts it excellently: “Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some end other than
their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind . . . Aiming thus at some-
thing else, they find happiness along the way . . . Ask yourself whether you are happy and you will cease to
be so” (Mill 1957, p. 92).
happy. This is what some therapists call “thought suppression”—a technique sometimes
used by people afflicted with “intrusive thoughts” characteristic of certain obses-
sive-compulsive disorders (see Wegner 1989). Following this technique of self-manipu-
lation, you can succeed in not thinking about a white bear, or about washing your hands
or yelling at your boss, by making yourself think about something else. The point about
happiness is not that you need to use this technique in order to be happy. For with
thought suppression, your end really is not thinking about a white bear; it is not the case
that the other thing you think about instead (whatever it might be) really is more worth
thinking about for its own sake than the white bear. But here the whole point is that
there really are more important things than your own happiness—such as your duty, the
happiness of others, the improvement of humanity, the ends of reason, the human
future, the afterlife. It just so happens that valuing correctly—caring about these other
things more than you do about your own happiness—is necessary if you are to be happy.
This even makes it fortunate, from the standpoint of my own happiness, that there
really are things much more important than what Mill calls “your own miserable indi-
viduality”—your individual happiness (Mill 2001, p. 14). What really matters are the
ends of reason—the good of others, the quest for truth, ultimately the fate of future
generations—the afterlife—without which our individual lives can have no meaning
or value. Your happiness will naturally turn out to be part of what you achieve by pur-
suing the ends of reason, but those ends are what really matter. Further, there is little
chance of anyone’s being happy unless enough people do pursue the ends of reason.
It is not misleading, then, for Fichte to say that for myself, I am only a tool of reason.
This turns out to be the best way for me to be happy, but that’s because the best way for
me to be happy is to realize that my happiness matters only as a part of a larger rational
good—the final end of reason, the good of future humanity, the afterlife. Here I think
Fichte was once again influenced by Spinoza, who held that what is best for you, look-
ing at the matter from the standpoint of your self-interest, is that you should cease to
look at the matter from the standpoint of your self-interest, and instead cognize things,
as far as possible, with adequate ideas—that is, from the standpoint of God (1992,
IIP38–40, VP14–17).10 As we have already seen, Fichte puts it in a similar way:
“Everyone becomes God, to the extent that one is permitted to do so . . . one preserves
the freedom of all individuals [and acts] for the community, by means of which one
may forget oneself completely” (SL 4:256).
When selfishness is all that’s left. In the “rational society,” as Fichte conceives it,
everyone depends on the community, and can live independently only on that condi-
tion. Each person has a “secure estate,” in which there is room for leisure as well as
labor, and privacy as well as service to others. In American society, however, we are
taught that the best life is “the American dream”: success in life, where wealth, prestige,
and power are the measure of success. We are told we must take care of ourselves and
not depend on others, especially on the state. But in fact, as Fichte sees, the truth is the
10
For an interpretation of Spinoza that brings out this doctrine, see Rutherford (2008).
very reverse of this: taking care of yourself in the right way is the very opposite of refus-
ing help to those who need it on the pretext that you are forcing them to be “self-reliant.”
No one can be forced to become self-reliant, just as you cannot come to think for your-
self by being ordered to do so on my authority.11 We need to depend on others, and they
on us.
Where there are extremes of wealth and poverty, and all base their lives on the
Jeffersonian inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, this pursuit becomes a recipe
for universal unhappiness.12 The poor have no access to a good life, while the wealthy
always live off the labor of others. They then disgrace their humanity by living the lie
that they deserve what they have. They think that they are necessary and the needy are
expendable. This is the lie that Fichte places at the heart of dogmatism. The wealthy in
most societies need to believe this lie if they are to be content with themselves, and they
nearly always do believe it. They usually get those they oppress and exploit to believe
it as well.13
Fichte’s ethics is one of selfless devotion to humanity, but not one of self-abnegation.
The privileged cannot earn back their dignity by feeling guilty, or by depriving them-
selves of a good life—impoverishing themselves by donating their income to Oxfam,
as some egalitarian consequentialists now advocate. In an unequal world, happiness
with dignity might be possible, but you have to reject the mentality of the world around
you, moderating your pursuit of happiness enough to let happiness overtake you—
which it may, or it may not. If it does, you must strive to deserve your good fortune,
even though you know you cannot. Fichte’s solution in his own life was to use his posi-
tion of privilege to advocate a more rational and equal society. But he was never very
comfortable in this role, and the world made him pay a high price for his attempt.
In a society like ours, surrounded by greed, mistrust, and mean-spiritedness, you
may be less badly off if you are selfish, but that’s only because happiness is impossible
for nearly everyone. Spike Milligan’s cynical saying holds: “Money can’t buy you happi-
ness, but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.” Fichte agrees: “Pleasurable
feelings are not happiness; they often even contradict happiness” (VBG 6:299).
Milligan’s saying goes hand in hand with another cynical saying from Bertolt Brecht:
“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.”14 Don’t think for an instant that
11
There is an upside-down Orwellian logic (“Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”) to the argu-
ment that people are rendered “dependent,” hence unfree, when the state provides them with services. All
individuals depend on the state—the wealthy most of all, since it is the state that protects their property,
and that dependency is never seen as a threat to their freedom. Yet it is supposed to be a threat to the free-
dom of the less well off when the state guarantees them food, housing, medical care, or other social services
that make them less vulnerable to the power of private persons or corporations. This argument tries to
convince the powerless that their freedom lies precisely in being vulnerable, that they are stronger for being
ignorant of the way others control and enslave them.
12
Ronald Dworkin has said it well: “There are no winners in this macabre dance of greed and delusion”
(Dworkin 2011, p. 422).
13
This is well documented by Stanley (2015), Chapters 6 and 7.
14
“First comes the grub, then comes morality.” The verbal noun Fressen refers to animal eating. Brecht
means that it is the sustaining of our animal existence, which is basic, not the refined dining that is charac-
teristic of the upper classes.
Fichte, with all his austere moral rhetoric, did not understand what this latter saying
conveys. His moral philosophy is directed mainly at the privileged classes. He wants
them to see that not only their duty, but also their best chance at happiness, lies in
becoming a tool of the moral law, striving to create a world in which neither of these
cynical sayings would have to apply to anyone.
§7: The Taxonomy of Duties

Baumgarten. In the late eighteenth century, philosophical theories of ethics included,
or were even built around, a taxonomy of duties. The principal model for these was:
Baumgarten, Ethica philosophica (1751)
duties of religion duties to ourselves duties to others
general special general special general special

self-knowledge soul love soul
conscience body candor body
self-love external state judgment external state
internal external
(There is an appendix on duties regarding non-rational animals.)
Kant. Kant offers us a similar taxonomy, presented as the “Doctrine of Elements” in

the second part of the Doctrine of Virtue.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (1798), Doctrine of Virtue: Doctrine of Elements
duties to oneself duties to others
perfect imperfect respect love

against: benificence
egotism gratitude
contempt sympathy
scandal
as an animal as a moral being natural moral perfection | |
being perfection
opposed opposed
vices: vices:
arrogance envy
defamation ingratitude
ridicule malice
against: against: as duties
suicide lying self- regarding
lust avarice judge non-human
gluttony and servility beings
drunkenness
Kant eliminates Baumgarten’s special category of religious duties. We have no duties

toward any but finite rational beings. Duties regarding God are included under duties
toward oneself, along with duties regarding non-rational animals and the beauties of
nature. Among duties toward oneself, he distinguishes not between general and spe-
cial duties but between natural and moral perfection; and among duties toward others,
between duties of love and duties of respect.
Fichte. In the Third Part of the System of Ethics, Fichte provides a similar taxonomy of
ethical duties.
Fichte, System of Ethics (1798): Third section, §§19–33

Doctrine of Duties in the proper sense of the term
conditioned duties unconditioned duties
universal particular universal particular

self-preservation estate membership the well-being of others the morality of others
nourishment choice of an estate
sacrificing your life education for your
estate
homicide prohibition virtue may not be
veracity compelled
property and welfare of conviction not compelled
others preventing moral despair
setting a good example
particular duties relating to one’s estate
the social estates
the natural estate [family]
duties of spouses
parents and children
the professions
the higher class
scholars
moral teachers [clergy]
fine artists
state officials
the lower classes
We do not know whether it was consciously modeled on Baumgarten, and it could not
have been modeled directly on Kant, since the Doctrine of Virtue was published after
the writing of the System of Ethics. The terminology used in the taxonomies also dif-
fers, even when the conceptions are closely related. Like Kant, Fichte eliminates the
special category of religious duties. As we have seen, for Fichte morality itself consists
in doing everything you do for the glory of God, since God is identified with the living
moral order, the spiritual life of the rational community, and the end of its striving.
Fichte rejects the term “duties to oneself,” since he thinks it tends to imply duties “for
the sake of myself ” or directed to one’s own self-interest—and that is a conception
Fichte utterly rejects (SL 4:257). Nevertheless, the most basic division in Fichte, as in
Baumgarten and Kant, is between duties to oneself and duties to others. Both are
reconceived through the idea that all ethical duties are only different ways to make
ourselves into tools of the moral law. Fichte here renames “duties to oneself ” as “medi-
ate” or “conditioned duties.” “If the moral law wills something conditioned (that is, the
realization through me of the dominion of reason outside me), then it also wills the
condition (namely, that I be a fit and capable means for this end)” (SL 4:257). Particular
duties are the particular contribution of each to the moral community as a member of
a family and a profession. Those duties “commanded absolutely [not conditionally] are
to be called immediate (or direct) and unconditioned duties.” Though they typically
concern our treatment of particular other people, they are really duties to the entire
moral community, “duties with respect to the whole” (SL 4:258).
The division here between “universal” and “particular” duties may be derived from
Baumgarten. Universal duties apply to all of us equally, simply as human beings. They
encompass the entire territory of duties covered by Baumgarten and Kant. Particular
duties, however, are those pertaining to our social estate: this includes the “natural
estate”—the family—and a structured system of social estates or professions pertain-
ing, as Fichte sees it, to the rational society. In this way, Fichte’s ethics clearly anticipates
Hegel’s conception of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), which Hegel explicitly regards as replac-
ing the traditional “doctrine of duties” (PR §148R).15 Particular duties are those involv-
ing what is delegated to us—that is, transferred by society to our particular care;
universal duties concern only what cannot be delegated (SL 4:258).
In expounding ethical duties, Fichte’s moral opinions on various topics are pre-
sented—in typically Fichtean style, forcefully, even passionately. Fichte clearly intends
his discussion to strike us as morally strict and demanding. His tone is hortatory; he is
given to preaching and scolding. Fichte’s tendency to preach and scold is among his
least attractive traits; he seems utterly unaware of the fact that it can be counter-pro-
ductive. Fichte may have learned this mode of discourse studying for the Lutheran
clergy, but it is also well suited to his personality. Fichte seems especially to adopt this
approach when addressing his academic or learned audience—members of the privi-
leged class, whom Fichte regards as having special responsibility for the moral progress
of humanity, but also as spoiled and self-indulgent, in need of both a good scolding and
fundamental reform in their entire depraved way of life.
Both Kant and Fichte deny that social change for the better occurs through the
moral resolve of individuals. It requires changes in social practices, which then bring
with them changes in individual perceptions, beliefs, and emotions. This was the
essential point Marx had in mind when he advocated changes in “practice,” and viewed
consciousness, even social consciousness, in abstraction from practice, as mere “ideol-
ogy”—involving a misunderstanding both of oneself and of society.
15
In effect Hegel’s Sittlichkeit replaces only Fichte’s system of particular duties, while the theme of gen-
eral duties is taken over by Hegel’s exposition of the sphere of morality (Moralität) (PR §§105–40).
In his discussion of “particular duties” Fichte discusses at length the ethical duties of
the “higher class”—scholars, clergy, fine artists, state officials (SL 4:343–61). This may
indicate some awareness of Marx’s point, since it is the “higher class” which, both
through administration and education, is most in a position to direct changes in social
institutions and practices.
In the System of Ethics, the duties of the varied estates of the “lower class” (which
estates provide for the basic needs of all) are lumped together under one heading. In
Fichte’s day, capitalism was just emerging; he plainly does not envision the rational
society as including a class of capitalists or corporate managers who exercise control
over the productive process and reap the largest share of its benefits, and to whose
authority most laborers are subject. It takes little imagination to guess what he would
have thought of that relationship. We will see in Chapter 8 §8 that the foundation of
each individual’s rightful property is the ownership over what empowers that individ-
ual to earn an independent livelihood free from personal dependency on others.
Fichte’s “lower class” are those who actually do the work, not those who manage and
exploit them. The responsibilities of those who labor for the good of society are dis-
cussed at greater length in the context of right than of ethics (NR 3:215–37). Fichte’s
discussion of the moral duties of the laboring class is briefer and presented at the very
end of the work (SL 4:361–5). Unlike many Americans, Fichte does not blame the ills
of society mainly on the poor and oppressed. On the contrary, he emphasizes the
supreme worth or dignity of a laborer who fulfills his occupation (SL 4:362) and the
importance of the recognition of this worth by members of the higher class (SL 4:364).
He evidently regards them as far less in need of a scolding than the higher class. Again
he agrees with Brecht: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.
§8: Matters of Life and Death

There is no space in this book for a detailed discussion of each item in Fichte’s ethical
taxonomy. But treating a few topics may help us better grasp the spirit of Fichte’s ethics,
and see how it might contribute to our thinking about certain topics still discussed
today. I select the following topics on these grounds, and because what he says is likely
to be interesting or controversial.
Self-preservation: the prohibition on suicide. Fichte’s discussion of the prohibition
on ending one’s own life is strict (SL 4:263–8). It involves less ambivalence about the
issue than Kant’s. Life itself, Fichte claims, has no value for its own sake, but only as a
means to activity (SL 4:264; cf. NR 3:118). Duty may require us to expose our life to
danger, even to sacrifice it, but the direct, intentional taking of one’s own life is never
permitted (SL 4:263). Suicide, Fichte thinks, is usually a consequence of despair, and
we have a duty not to despair (SL 4:266).
It is not clear that Fichte’s intended conclusions about suicide really follow from
his stated premises. If my life has no value in itself, but only a means to doing my
duty as a tool of the moral law, then if I reach a stage where I am unable to promote
the ends of reason, but am only a drag on others who are promoting them, it might
seem to follow that ending my life would be not only permissible, but might even be
a duty. If Fichte’s reasoning is to be consequent, then his claim that there is always
something more I can do for the moral community cannot be a contingent empirical
or factual claim, such as might be used in the calculation of actions to maximize
good consequences. It must instead be the principled position that my continued
existence as a member of the community is always an end in itself. I think this is his
real view.
Two of Fichte’s other opinions on this topic are worth noting. First, he thinks most
suicides occur in a state of insanity (Sinnlosigkeit). This takes most suicides out of the
category of moral judgment altogether. Second, suicide is one of those topics on which
Fichte’s moral strictness is strikingly paired with his firm conviction that we should be
free from external state coercion in everything self-regarding: “Everyone has an
unlimited external—not internal, moral—right to one’s own life, [so] the state cannot
pass a law against suicide” (NR 3:331). In other ways, Fichte sharply restricts the rights
of the state in matters of life and death. Killing in self-defense is permissible, by indi-
viduals and by the state. But death can never be a just punishment for any crime
(SL 4:279–80; cf. NR 3:277–84). Fichte opposes the death penalty.
Sacrificing your life. Some of Fichte’s other strict principles about the value of human
life might be of interest to philosophers who devote their lives to thinking about the
ugly moral dilemmas posed by such fortunately uncommon occurrences as lifeboat
shortages and runaway trolleys.16 Because being a tool for realizing the moral law is
equivalent to being a member of the moral community (SL 4:277), and because we are
all equally tools of the moral law (SL 4:256, 302), it is a principle that no human life can
have greater value than any other.
This again cannot be a contingent empirical principle, such as might be used in cal-
culations aimed at maximizing consequences. The equally high value of all human
lives is rather taken to have absolute priority over all other considerations. No human
life may ever be sacrificed merely for goods (however useful these may be to others, or
to human control over nature). “Life goes beyond property; for life is the condition of
property, and not vice versa property is not the condition of life” (SL 4:307). The value
of a human life could not be something to weigh in consequentialist calculations aimed
at maximizing the good. It could not be permissible, for example, to sacrifice a human
life merely in order to maximize human control over nature.
From these principles, Fichte infers that I must be impartial as regards the value of
human lives, but also not think of my own life as an end. Therefore, I may be required
to risk my life, even to sacrifice it, in order to save another person.
16
I have had my say about the way such examples often mislead moral philosophers in “Humanity as
End in Itself,” in Parfit (2011), Volume 2, pp. 66–82.
Judged by the moral law, every human life possesses equal value; as soon as any human being
is endangered, all other human beings, whoever they may be, no longer have a right to be safe
until this person’s life is saved . . . As soon as someone is in danger, I absolutely ought to go to his
assistance, even if this should endanger my own life.
(SL 4:281–2)
But I must not sacrifice another’s life to save mine:

[If] the only way I can fulfill the command of the moral law (namely the command that I pre-
serve myself) is at the cost of another person’s life, [then this too] is prohibited by the moral
law . . . [In this case,] the law remains completely silent . . . I ought not to do anything at all, but
should calmly await the outcome.
(SL 4:302–3)
There is a noteworthy difference between these two passages. The first deals with risk-
ing someone’s life, the second with sacrificing it in a case where it is certain that some-
one or other will die. There is for Fichte a strict prohibition on the deliberate choice to
end a life, your own or another’s, but it might be required for you to put your life at risk
in order to save the life of another. I am forbidden to kill myself, but not forbidden to let
myself die in order to save another’s life.
Regarding the death of others, Fichte sees no distinction between “killing” and “let-
ting die.” Except in cases of self-defense, I am equally forbidden to kill another or to let
another die in order to save my own life. About a case like the lifeboat shortage, where
I supposedly must choose between letting one drown and letting five drown, Fichte
says this:
Suppose the bodies and lives of several of my fellow human beings are in danger. I ought to save
them; but I cannot save them all or save them all at once. How shall I choose whom to save?
My end must be to rescue them all; for all are tools of the moral law . . . I will first help those
who are in greatest danger, . . . either on account of their own situation or because of their help-
lessness and weakness, for example, with children, sick people and old people.
(SL 4:304)
Although Fichte had never read any articles about trolley problems, I think it is clear
that his principles entail certain judgments about them. These principles would permit
you, and it might even require you, to let the trolley run over you in order to save oth-
ers. But you would not be permitted to throw yourself into the path of the trolley, nor
would it be permissible deliberately to set the switch so that it runs over either you
yourself or even one other person; it doesn’t matter how many other lives this might
save. Finally, if only the lives of others are at stake, you would not be able to choose
between letting it run over one person or over five people. In that case you must refrain
from action and “calmly await the outcome.”
These are all ethical (non-coercible) obligations. What you might have a right to do,
and what external legislation might rightfully permit you to do, could be much less
restrictive. It would permit some courses of action that are directly self-interested.
Reasonable laws might also drastically restrict someone’s conduct in certain ways—
forbidding a mere bystander, for instance, to touch the switching points of a trolley for
any reason.17
“My people.” Fichte’s only qualification to the ethical judgment that I must rescue
all, and first those most in danger, is that I have an obligation to give preference to
those whose welfare has been especially entrusted to my care (SL 4:304). As we have
seen, Fichte regards many of our duties as concerned with matters delegated by
society to our care. These would include those for whom we have a special love,
such as a parent or spouse. Love and other empirical desires for Fichte are to be
integrated into our moral vocation, so that they become an expression of it, not
constraints on it imposed from an “impartial standpoint.” As we have just seen, it
would not occur to Fichte that someone might choose to save his wife out of love,
but then need to add Williams’s “one thought too many”: namely, that this choice is
permissible from an impartial standpoint. On the contrary, as parts of our moral
vocation, expressions of our authentic self-choice, these are one and the same
thought. If they are seen as two distinct thoughts, then for Fichte there is something
deeply defective both in our view of morality and in our view of ourselves and our
relation to our loved ones.
Another Fichtean principle, once again, is that we must not “investigate which per-
son might be a better tool of the moral law” (SL 4:303). Based on these two principles,
Fichte clearly could not agree with William Godwin, who thinks, based on consequen-
tialist considerations, that he should sooner rescue Fénelon—“the illustrious
Archbishop of Cambray, [author of] the immortal project of Telemachus, promoting
the benefit of thousands”—than rescue his own valet, his chambermaid, or even his
own wife, mother, or benefactor. Fichte might agree with Godwin that “it is better that
I should have died than that Fénelon should die.” But by Fichte’s principles, Godwin’s
wife, mother, benefactor, or chambermaid would have claims on Godwin prior to
those of Archbishop Fénelon.18
Fichte insists that regarding myself and others, my consideration of the good must
be wholly impartial; whether some good benefits me or another must not matter (SL
4:260–1). But he equally rejects any distinctions between people based on impartial
consequentialist considerations: “It is simply impossible to judge from whose preser-
vation the greatest good will follow” (SL 4:303). Here too Fichte cannot mean this last
judgment as an empirical one, of the sort that might be used in consequentialist
17
It is a depressing defect in discussions of “trolley problems” and “lifeboat shortages” that philosophers
often pay too little attention (or none at all) to the ways people’s conduct in these extreme situations might,
or even should, be subject to legal constraints that are often profoundly incompatible with the moral intu-
itions the philosophers intend to elicit using these examples. This obvious point invalidates most “trolley
problem” moral philosophy.
18
Godwin (1793) Volume I, Book II, Chapter II: “Of Justice.” Godwin’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft,
through her writings on the rights of women, may well have contributed more to the good of humanity
than Archbishop Fénelon ever did. But that fact plays no role in the moral claim that Godwin should save
her first.
c alculations. Fichte holds that in principle, as tools of the moral law, we are also all
equally members of the moral community, hence ends in themselves. Therefore, any
choice between lives based on judgments of relative worth or, therefore, on consequen-
tialist considerations is strictly forbidden.
Veracity. Fichte’s views on lying appear at first to be extremely strict, and are surely
intended by him to appear that way. They even seem to be stricter than Kant’s views on
this topic—which, as in the case of suicide, and contrary to their common reputation,
are far more subtle and reasonable than they are often thought to be (see Wood 2008,
Chapter 14). Fichte utterly rejects the concept of the “necessary lie” (Notlüge)
(SL 4:286–8). Taking up the example of the “murderer at the door” (disputed by Kant
and Benjamin Constant), Fichte thinks you should refuse to tell the murderer where
his intended victim is hiding, even if he kills you for refusing: “Death takes precedence
over lying” (SL 4:288–90). In Constant’s example, however, it is stipulated that you can-
not avoid answering; Fichte omits to consider this stipulation. He also omits to ask
what you should do if the murderer would infer from your silence the whereabouts of
his victim, when you might have saved him by lying to the murderer. This leaves
Fichte’s discussion of this famous example with serious gaps, about which he has noth-
ing to say.
Fichte’s account of the duty of veracity is based exclusively on the principle that since
others are all tools of the moral law, you owe others the information they need in order
to act freely (SL 4:282–4). Deceiving another, or even withholding information based
on the judgment that others will misuse it, seems to him to involve despairing of the
possibility of the other’s moral improvement, which I must not do (SL 4:284). It is not
clear that this is consistent with Fichte’s judgment that I should withhold the truth
from the murderer at the door. Should I not rather tell him the truth, and have faith
that he will choose to do the right thing with it?
Toward the end of his discussion Fichte draws a further inference from his principle,
in the form of a qualification: one need not communicate to others information that is
not “immediately practical” for the individual in question. On this basis, he draws a
distinction between information to which someone is and is not entitled (SL 4:290).
Fichte does not tell us how far this distinction should reach. Does the judgment that it
is not “immediately practical” for someone to know something include the possibility
that it is none of that person’s business to know it—because, for instance, this would
violate the privacy of a third party, or even one’s own privacy? If we say so, then that
might entail that we should withhold a lot of information from people, or even deceive
them, if deception is the only way to keep them from knowing what they are not enti-
tled to know. That was in fact Benjamin Constant’s claim in the dispute with Kant. It
makes a valid point.
Fichte also holds that we are entitled to withhold information that would lead to a
person “acting contrary to his end” (SL 4:290–91). Here too it is not clear how far this
principle should extend. Some information that would lead the other to the attainment
of an immediate end (say, getting hold of an addictive drug) might be contrary to some
more important end (remaining free from drug addiction). Once we are allowed to
consider larger ends, this qualification greatly expands the scope of the permissible
withholding of information, or even permissible deception. Is it not, for instance, con-
trary to the murderer’s own end as a rational being—insofar as, along with the rest of
us, he is a tool of the moral law—to commit this murder? Which immoral actions of
another ought I to permit, or even facilitate? Which am I entitled to prevent, either by
withholding information or even by deceiving the person? In many situations, these
kinds of questions cannot be decided by the very strict and general principles Fichte
lays down.
If Fichte thought these principles could settle all issues involving veracity and decep-
tion, then he clearly overestimated them. At times there is, it seems to me, a conspicu-
ous tension between the “scientific” account of ethics Fichte provides in his system of
duties and the situated choice represented by the conscientious conviction of the ordi-
nary agent. Where this occurs, I think we should prefer Fichte’s theory of conscience
over his “scientific” account; better yet, we should view the latter as only a set of broad
guidelines within which conscience ought to operate. Fichte’s stern principles, together
with the moralistic declamations and scoldings with which he accompanies them,
should be seen as nudging the moral judgments of his readers in ways that may help
correct their defects of character. Seeing Fichte’s principles this way would avoid both
the absurd strictness with which “deontological” theories are unfairly saddled, and
also the equally mistaken “particularist” position of some philosophers, who seem not
to know what moral rules are for (or to have learned it only from misguided philo-
sophical theories). This approach is also in line with the spirit of Fichtean ethics if, as I
have been arguing, Fichte eschews any strict decision procedure, whether a conse-
quentialist calculus or a “CI-procedure,” through which moral philosophy tries to tell
us what to do. What it is right to do is always a matter of our freely formed judgments of
the understanding about our situation, grasped decisively in conscientious conviction.
Fichte’s most basic principle of scientific ethics is: “Everyone simply must do whatever
his situation, his heart and his insight order him to do” (SL 4:270).
§9: Choosing an Estate: the “Afterlife” and God

Both Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right and his System of Ethics include, toward the
end, an account of the system of estates (Stände) that constitute the rational society
(NR §19, 3:215–59, SL §§28–33, 4: 343–65).This includes an account of “the natural
estate”: marriage and the family (NR 3:304–68, SL §27, 4: 327–43). Fichte’s most com-
plete and perspicuous account of the estates constituting the economic system, how-
ever, is to be found in the Closed Commercial State (1800). We will say something more
about this in Chapter 8.
The concept “estate” (Stand) is distinct from the concept “class” (Klasse). In Fichte
and Hegel, as well as in Marx, classes divide people into higher and lower, especially
into those who rule and those who are ruled. Estates refer to social positions within an
organic social system in which each estate plays a determinate role in advancing the
common ends of the whole. Marx sees the concept “estate” as a quaint holdover from
feudal social relations, masking their class oppression. For both Fichte and Hegel,
however, estates are the essential components of the rational social order, a system of
human cooperation.
The foundation of all our particular conditioned duties is the duty to choose an
estate (SL §21, 4:271–4). This choice, however, requires the consent of others, so it is
the individual’s responsibility to qualify for an estate, to train or educate oneself for it,
and to apply for it (SL 4:273). You cannot occupy any estate for which you are not qual-
ified, and you need the permission of society to occupy a given estate. But Fichte is
opposed in principle to any social system in which people are simply assigned their
estate by someone else—especially when it is assigned merely on the basis of birth.
Further, he insists on the moral equality of all estates: “From the standpoint of moral
judgment, all estates have the same worth . . . If everyone dutifully does all that he is
able to do, then everyone is of equal rank before the tribunal of pure reason” (SL 4:273).
Equality of education. Qualification for membership in an estate depends on education.
One of Fichte’s most radical proposals is that “until the maturity of humanity . . . human
beings should be educated in the same manner and should educate themselves in the
same manner; and only then should they choose an estate” (SL 4:272). At the heart of
the Addresses to the German Nation is the proposal for an educational system in which
elementary education should be compulsory, free for all, and provided by the state.
Schooling should combine learning with labor. All are to be educated in the same way,
boys and girls together (RDN 7:411–43). Every (male) citizen is to have equal opportu-
nity to join any estate. The choice of an estate is to be based on “one’s best conviction
concerning the estate that is most appropriate for one, taking into account the quantity
of one’s forces, one’s education, and those external circumstances over which one has
some control” (SL 4:272). All (male) individuals should be equally eligible for univer-
sity education. Individuals should be free to change their estate, and a decent political
order should make it easy for them to do so (SL 4:359–60). As we can see from this,
Fichte accepts the subordination of women as it existed in the bourgeois society of his
time. It is easy now to see this as inconsistent with his principled egalitarianism. We
will return to this point in Chapter 8 §8.
There is another tension among Fichte’s views, directly involved in his conception of
social estates. He wants the members of all estates to have equal status and the freedom
that belongs by right to every rational being. He holds that moral truth is constituted
by the outcome of free, rational communication, whose outcome is not to be deter-
mined or even influenced by any relations of authority or domination. The only con-
sistent way to understand this is that such communication must equally include all
human perspectives and be equally open to the experiences and arguments of the
occupants of all perspectives. At the same time, however, Fichte accepts not only the
subordination of women to men, but also the division of estates into two classes. He
accepts, at least for the present and the immediate future, the traditional distinction
between the “higher” class, whose contribution to society is mental or intellectual, and
the “lower” class consigned to manual labor and the material needs of society.
All members of society are to have equal primary education, and all (all males) are to
be eligible for higher education (SL 4:359). But he excludes women from higher educa-
tion and argues that the “lower class” needs less of the education that creates “more
cultivated human beings” (SL 4:274, 362–5). Despite his best intentions, Fichte still
accepts the basic ideology that deprives most of society of the epistemic capacities
needed for a politics based on representative institutions and a society based on free,
rational communication. How far have these traditional errors been corrected even
in us?19
We saw in Chapter 4 that Fichte views the human dominion over nature through
science as aimed ultimately at abolishing the distinction between the majority who toil
and the minority who do the thinking (BM 2:267–9). Even now, in the rational society,
whatever my estate I am to be a tool of the moral law, but I must be an active, autono-
mous, and self-directing tool, never merely a passive tool in the hands of others. No
one is to be excluded in principle from the rational communication through which the
presupposed unanimous agreement on moral truth is to be determined. Fichte may
accept the distinction between a higher (“learned”) class and a lower class only because
admitting everyone to the “learned republic” will be untenable at least until there is
free and equal public education for all—something Fichte advocated but was unable to
assume as a reality. He does claim, however, as we have seen, that the distinction
between the learned and unlearned is destined to fall away (SL 4:253), and he holds
that as the learned class becomes more enlightened, it will abandon its privileges of
itself (SL 4:360). Consistency should have led him to say the same thing about men and
women.
Fichte surely thinks that if human moral progress goes far enough—if humanity
passes from the fourth epoch of “incipient justification” to the final epoch of “com-
pleted justification and sanctification” (GGZ 7:11–12)—then the efficient promotion
of the good of the whole will be united with universal participation in learning and free
communication. Thus the anti-elitist strain in Fichte’s thought clearly runs deeper than
the elitist one. Fichte may even call attention to the division of estates into “higher” and
“lower” classes precisely because he is not comfortable with it. But there is no denying
the tension between his acceptance, at least temporarily and to a degree, of a division of
society into a “first sex” and a “second sex,” and also into a “higher” (intellectual) and a
19
It is the basic thesis of Stanley (2011) to challenge the epistemic foundations of the distinction
between theory and practice, intellectual knowledge and practical knowledge, by showing that there is
ultimately no difference between “knowing how” and “knowing that.” The argument was all along intended
to have precisely that political meaning. See Stanley (2015), pp. xviii–xix. Fichte’s incorporation of theory
into practice (see Chapter 6 §7) was at least a step in the right direction. So is Fichte’s uncomfortable rela-
tion to his doctrine of higher and lower classes.
“lower” (laboring) class. Fichte’s limitations again reveal him to be a child of his own
time.
My estate and my afterlife. For Fichte, my devotion to my estate is always to be seen
as also devotion to the entire human species. In the immediate future, Fichte’s way of
dealing with the tension in his thought is that all estates are to be seen as equal in status
because they are all engaged in a single common labor. It does not matter what your
estate is, but only that you perform your calling as you ought (VBG 6: 31–320, cf.
SL 4:362, GGZ 7:224–5).
The tension remains, because it is ultimately impossible to reconcile that thought
with the existence of a “higher” (intellectual) class and a “lower” (laboring) class. This is
a tension that goes right to the core of Fichte’s personality—to the contradiction at the
center of his life. He was the son of a destitute linen weaver who had been born a serf, but
he treated with utmost seriousness his responsibilities as a literate person, a learned
person, a scholar—the estate that had been thrust upon him by Baron Miltitz, then by
Lavater and Rahn, by Kant and Goethe, even by Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Struensee,
and Humboldt—his friends in Berlin who protected him in his time of trouble and cele-
brated him as a martyr to the cause of academic freedom. In his heart of hearts, however,
Fichte did not believe in the distinction between a “thinking” class and a “laboring”
class. The ultimate vocation of the learned class is to work for its abolition. As Marx put
it: the realization of philosophy is its Aufhebung (Marx, MECW 3: 182).
Eternal good and temporal good. Devotion to the human species is always seen by
Fichte as first and foremost a devotion to the future of humanity—to “the afterlife”:
It is a happy fate [says Fichte] to have a particular calling that requires one to do just that which
one has to do for the sake of one’s general calling as a human being . . . Within my special area
the culture of my age and of future ages is entrusted to me. My labors will help determine the
course of future generations and the history of nations yet to come . . . My life and destiny do
not matter at all, but infinitely much depends on the results of my life.
(VBG 6:333)
Insofar as my action contributes to the species as a whole and to future ages, it lives on in
the lives of future generations. When Fichte says “my life and destiny do not matter at
all,” he is rejecting the thought that I care about my contribution to humanity because it
is good for me; still less is his thought that I should care whether my name is remem-
bered. The human future, and what I have contributed to it, are instead valued simply
for their own sake, valued because they are simply what matters—what matters in itself.
They do not matter only because we happen to care about them, or even because we
have a moral duty to care. This mattering in itself is simply what it is for our lives—or
anything in this world—to have a meaning. If a meaningful life is also something good
for me, or something I have a moral duty to strive for and care about, that is only because
it is valuable in itself; it matters in itself. If it did not matter simply in itself, I would have
no reason or duty to care about it and no reason to consider it part of my good.
Dworkin (2011) distinguishes between the “product value” and the “performance
value” of a life, and says that the meaning of a life must depend entirely on the latter—
on “how well you have lived.” Dworkin thinks that if lives were measured by their
“product value”—what the person has achieved and left behind—then “all but a few
lives would have no value” (p. 198). Fichte strongly disagrees. You must live well—act
according to the moral law; but Fichte locates the very meaning of your life in its prod-
uct value—your contribution to the collective work of humanity. When Dworkin dis-
misses most lives as valueless for their product value, he is apparently supposing that
such value exists only when the person’s contribution is specifically remembered (per-
haps along with their famous name) (see Dworkin 2011, p. 421). Fichte would insist
that is false. The product value of my life belongs to the entire system of human actions
in history. Transcendentally considered, this is a unity: it is that on which we must
presuppose that all human ends implicitly agree. It is an illusion to think that the his-
tory of humanity is the work of only a few, or that credit for what humanity accom-
plishes belongs more to those with famous names than to those who labored in the
shadows in order to make their achievements possible.
Aristotle distinguishes πρᾶξις or action, which is valuable for its own sake, from
ποίησις or production, whose value lies outside the activity, in its product. πρᾶξις is
ενέργεια or actuality, which involves completeness, whereas ποίησις is mere κίνησις or
motion, not complete in itself (Aristotle 1999, 1139a35–b4, 1140b6, 1174a19–b5).
Dworkin’s distinction reflects this Aristotelian view, as he admits (p. 198). Aristotle’s
distinction belongs to a culture that separates a higher class who have the leisure to
engage in political action and philosophical contemplation from a lower class who
must labor under necessity. Fichte, however, anticipates Marx’s idea that true human
πρᾶξις is itself a form of production. If “we produced things as human beings,” Marx
says, then “in my individual activity, I would have immediately confirmed and realized
my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature” (Marx 1975–2004 MECW,
3:228). For Fichte and Marx, true πρᾶξις is also ποίησις: the meaning of any human life
is its collective product value.
For Fichte, the human afterlife is related intimately to me because it is also my true
immortality or eternal life. It is the only victory there is over my own death:
Therefore, just as surely as it is my vocation to assume this task, I can never cease to act and thus
I can never cease to be. That which is called “death” cannot interrupt my work. For my work
must be completed, and it can never be completed in any amount of time. Consequently, my
existence has no temporal limits: I am eternal.
(VBG 6:322)
The life of God. In later religious writings, Fichte presents himself as accepting some-
thing like the traditional idea of the afterlife. He proclaims that after death we will join
a supersensible spiritual realm constituted by the infinite life of God (BM 2:315–17;
ASL 5:538–43). But in fact this turns out to be Fichte’s mystical and symbolic way of
expressing, in traditional religious terms, the very same conception of the afterlife. We
must not forget that for Fichte the intelligible or supersensible world is to be identified
with the human community, especially insofar as it is constituted by rational commu-
nication tending toward harmony and agreement (see Chapter 2 §3). In his 1806 lec-
tures on the doctrine of religion, Fichte explicitly identifies the life of God with the
“new world that the higher morality creates within the world of sense” (ASL 5:579, cf.
ASL 5:523–7). Further, there Fichte continues to identify our immortality with the
higher future of the humanity that will come after us (BM 2:317–19). The way you
should think religiously about the afterlife is simply that you should love humanity by
contributing, along with others, to the (earthly) human future. That is what eternity
means for creatures like us:
From the eternal spring of love that flows within him, he is always driven to a new attempt, and
if this should not succeed then to another new one; always presupposing that what has not
succeeded up to now can succeed this time, or the next time, or some time, and in case it does
not succeed through his own individual effort, then by the labors of those who come after
him . . . Let him look beyond the present to the future! For in that view he has the whole of
eternity before him, and posits millennia upon millennia, as many as he will, which cost him
nothing.
(ASL 5:548–9)
Fichte’s conception of the afterlife—of human immortality—is very close to his con-
ception of God. Both are based on his idea that all rational beings implicitly share the
same ends, and that their vocation is to contribute to the same system of spiritual activ-
ity. They find meaning, and immortality, in their contribution collective activity, and
the collective activity itself is God. God is the spiritual life though which rational
beings live (BM 2:299–304); or the moral order they create (GGW 5:186); or the
never-actualized end toward which they strive (SW 1:416). Are these different concepts
of God mutually consistent? It might seem they are not. How can an actual common
life, an actual striving and an actual order, even if always imperfect, be identical with a
never-to-be-actualized ideal? But they are consistent if one begins with the idea that
God is the collective vocation of the human species, the spiritual striving in which all
rational beings are united. For then the common life can be identified with the striving,
and the striving can be identified both with the never-realizable end it strives to achieve
and with the living order it actually creates. The focal point is: “All individuals are
included in the one great unity of pure spirit. Let this serve as my concluding word, with
which I commend myself to your memory—as well as the memory to which I com-
mend you” (SW 1:416).
Fichte’s religion, so understood, is a kind of rationalist humanism. His enemies in
Jena were not wrong when they called it a “cult of reason.” Fichte’s religion is “atheistic”
if “theism” is limited to belief in a particular person, existing alongside (or rather
“above”) you and me, who, however, happens to be infinite, supernatural, and beyond
our comprehension. As Fichte declared in the passage that got him into so much trou-
ble, we do not need and cannot make sense of such a God. The orthodoxy that religious
dogmatists want to enforce has only the unintelligible as its object. Unless their
urpose is (as Fichte always suspected) simply to destroy all freedom of thought, they
p
should welcome, or at least tolerate, all attempts to make rational sense of it.
Fichte’s rationalist religion is deliberately expressed—as in his 1806 Doctrine of
Religion (ASL)—in mystical or “spiritual” terms drawn mainly from the Christian reli-
gious tradition. For Fichte, the spiritual is simply the pure I—freedom (VBG 6:294).
More precisely, spirit is the expression of freedom through the productive imagination,
“the capacity to raise feelings to consciousness” (GA II/3:316). In other words, the
spiritual is our aspiration to human freedom as expressed in terms that are aestheti-
cally evocative and inspirational. Expression of the same ideas, but without this aes-
thetic power, is Fichte’s definition of the “spiritless” (GA II/3:317).
For Fichte, an adequate expression of the human vocation requires the spiritual
power drawn from the images and feelings of the religious tradition. Among these for
Fichte is our tendency to personify God—addressing the spiritual unity of human
striving as if it were itself a person to whom we relate (VKO 5:55; cf. BM 2:302–5).
Today, fashionable forms of rationalist humanism either deny freedom of the will or
adopt “compatibilist” accounts that dissolve it in the thin ice-water of naturalism and
materialism. Disgusted with the dishonesty, inhumanity, and spiritual backwardness
of traditional religion, they abhor the “G-word” and are eager to cut themselves off
even from its symbolism and emotional power. For Fichte such an outlook is also
inhuman, shallow—and literally spiritless.20
Fichte’s reflections on God and immortality—the mystical “unity of pure spirit”—
appear to assume that the human future is unlimited—endless, and in that sense liter-
ally eternal. They do not help us deal with the virtual certainty based on geological and
astronomical knowledge that the life of the human species on earth must eventually
come to an end. But they do indicate what we must think of ourselves if we do nothing
when scientific evidence tells us that our actions are putting at risk the continued sur-
vival of our species for even an easily countable number of generations. Traditional
religions preach that we should always choose eternal goods over temporal goods. For
Fichte, our merely temporal goods are those we enjoy while we are alive, while our
eternal good lies in our afterlife. Fichte’s “modernist-humanist” reinterpretation gives
the religious choice between the temporal and the eternal a new meaning, and also for
us a new existential urgency.
20
Even some today who explicitly reject belief in God nevertheless also reject “naturalism” and subscribe
to a religious vision something like Fichte’s. See Nagel (1997), Nagel (2012), and also Dworkin (2013).
8
Right
Freedom, Property, and the State
This is a book about Fichte’s ethics, which (as we shall see shortly) is quite distinct from
his theory of right: his philosophy of law, politics, or in short, of just coercion.
Nevertheless, it will help us to understand Fichte’s ethics better if we see how it relates
to his theory of right. Ethics and right differ in their foundations, but they do stand in
significant relations to each other. Fichte’s theory of intersubjectivity is clearly one area
of overlap. Also, as we saw in Chapter 7, Fichte holds that we have ethical duties to
respect the rights of others, and in Fichte’s view, the state forms an indispensable con-
dition for ethical progress.
I will also wander briefly into a discussion of Fichte’s later views about the state.
Some have thought these represent a radical—even an ominous—departure from his
theory of right in the Jena period. I will contest such thoughts. This chapter, like
Chapters 1 and 2, is not intended as a definitive treatment of its topic, but instead
relates to the main topic of the book by enabling us to put Fichte’s ethical thought in its
proper context within his philosophy as a whole.
§1: The State in Fichte’s Later Thought

For Fichte, freedom and community are not opposed values; they are merely two
mutually necessary aspects of the same value. Fichte’s ethics of freedom therefore leads
to a vision of the ideal society. The ideal or rational society is not to be identified with
the political state, even the ideal or (as Fichte calls it) the “rational state.” In his Lectures
Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation (1794), Fichte declares:
Life in the state is not one of the human being’s absolute aims. The state is, instead, only a
means for establishing the perfect society, a means which exists only under specific circum-
stances. Like all those human institutions which are mere means, the state aims at abolishing
itself. The goal of all government is to make government superfluous.
(VBG 6:306)
On the way to reaching the unattainable goal of complete agreement among the ends
of human beings, “the state falls away as a legislative and coercive power” (SL 4:253).
Fichte’s later popular works, especially Fundamental Characteristics of the Present

Age (1804) and Direction to the Blessed Life (1806), involve two significant shifts in his
thought. The most dramatic is the increased importance of religion.1 A second is that
Fichte not only endorses German cultural nationalism but also comes to think that in
the coming age, the state will appear as the principal vehicle of human moral pro-
gress. The state appears to assume a major role in his vision of the next stage of human
moral progress.2 Fichte distances himself from those philosophers who consider the
state as “almost only a juridical institution” (GGZ 7:143). One might have thought of
Fichte himself as one of these; Hegel certainly always did. According to the later
Fichte, however, the function of the state is to “direct a necessarily finite sum of indi-
vidual powers toward the common purpose . . . toward the end of the species [Gattung]”
(GGZ 7:144).
The moral function of the state, however, is for Fichte restricted mainly to education.
The educational theory presented in the Addresses to the German Nation assigns to the
state the task of educating the German people for their higher moral vocation (RDN
7:428–44). In some of his late fragments, Fichte imagines a political leader
(a rechtmäßige Oberherr or Zwingherr) who could also play an important role in lead-
ing humanity to a new realm of freedom (SW 4:447, 7:549, 576).
A “tutelary state” and a “perfectionist” politics? A tradition in Fichte scholarship,
including some recent literature, has argued that after leaving Jena for Berlin, Fichte
underwent a decisive change of mind regarding the role of the state in human life (a
good review of the literature on this topic is found in Moggach 1993). Instead of think-
ing of right and politics as separate from morality, Fichte is supposed to have embraced
a “perfectionist theory of law, politics and rights,” in which “all men essentially share
one collective end to be realized by politics” (Beck 2008, pp. 129–84). Fichte’s later the-
ory of national education, it is argued, involves a denial of the separation of right from
ethics, and a “tutelary state”—as if Fichte thinks the state should not only educate chil-
dren but also indoctrinate adults and do their thinking for them; that would indeed be
a state far less compatible with the idea of human freedom than the state found in
Fichte’s earlier thought (Beck 2008, p. 160, James 2011, pp. 201–5).
1
“Religion consists in regarding all earthly life as a necessary development of the one, original, perfectly
good and perfectly blessed divine life.” Fichte now even describes his own thought as “a religious thinking;
all our considerations were religious considerations and our view and our very eye in this view was reli-
gious” (GGZ 7:240–1). Fichte defends the person of “pure morality in the absence of religion” to the extent
of saying that such a person does their duty and cannot be morally reproached. But, he asks, “Does he in
this understand himself?” (GGZ 7:231–2). According to the later Fichte, religion provides morality itself
with its deeper meaning: “Religion discloses to the human being the significance of the one eternal
law . . . The religious human being comprehends this law” (GGZ 7:233). The standpoint of the “higher
morality,” therefore, is the standpoint of religion. The “higher vocation” of the human being is to be found
only in the “blessed life” disclosed by religion (ASL 5:530–5).
2
The later development of Fichte’s social philosophy is discussed by Verweyen (1975), §§19–36,
pp. 175–320.
right 253
This literature seems to me one-sided at best. It is correct insofar as it perceives the

continuation of the dangerously “elitist” strand in Fichte’s thought discussed at the end
of Chapter 7. It correctly criticizes this strand especially when it is increasingly inte-
grated into Fichte’s conception of the powers of the state. But this strand was present
already in the Jena period and is nothing new to Fichte’s thought. This literature is
blind, however, when it comes to the continued presence in Fichte of the opposed,
“anti-elitist” strand, its emphasis on social equality, individual freedom, universal edu-
cation, and freedom of communication. These themes are just as fully present in
Fichte’s Berlin period as in his Jena period. The later Fichte sees the moral progress of
this community, at least for the immediate future, as occurring within the framework
of the political state. Perhaps some scholars ignore the “anti-elitist” themes in the later
Fichte because they are painfully aware of the way in which in real life, ideals of a dem-
ocratic culture and individual freedom for all have been hijacked by either the state or
capitalist-corporate promotion of technological and economic efficiency, substituting
an elitist “managerial” mentality for a democratic one. Lip-service to democracy often
serves as propaganda for class rule.3
It is important, therefore, that the later Fichte thinks of the state, and the Oberherr or
Zwingherr, as rechtmäßig—that is, constrained by right, and also as promoting a free
society. We will see in §7 of this chapter that it is the function of the state to protect,
never to infringe, individual freedom, whose scope is very broad. Fichte continues to
think of a learned community, engaging in free, rational communication, and not a
political ruler, as leading the way to a better human future. Fichte also continues to
insist, moreover, that it is the principal aim of any progressive political ruler to make
himself superfluous (SW 7: 564).
David James cites passages in the Addresses in which Fichte aims at educating the
young so that they will not be susceptible to self-deception and moral error. He com-
ments: “It is hard to see how Fichte here leaves any space for human freedom in the
making of ethical judgments” (James 2011, p. 198). This confuses the aim of educating
citizens so that they will be less susceptible to error and deception with the quite differ-
ent aim (which Fichte never endorses) of indoctrinating a population with the moral
opinions of rulers who might take themselves to be infallible. To read Fichte as James
does here requires us either to ignore, or to dismiss as patently hypocritical, Fichte’s
continued insistence on freedom of inquiry and expression, which is emphasized in
the Addresses (especially in the Eighth). When the later Fichte thinks of devotion to the
state as the vehicle through which people express devotion to humanity—to that
which, following Scheffler, I have called the “afterlife”—this is always voluntary and
ethically motivated devotion. It is never state-coerced devotion, or state-manipulated
devotion.
The limits of politics. The later Fichte does think that the state can be a vehicle for the
fulfillment of the human vocation, the unification of human ends. It can be so precisely
3
See Stanley (2015), Chapter 7.
because its principal function is to protect “civil freedom, and in fact equality of civil
freedom for all” (GGZ 7:155). The state brings human ends into harmony largely
through the way in which it regulates the economic life of society—the activities of man-
ufacture, commerce, and industry (GGZ 7:163–6). For in this sphere people’s freedom
is affected, and the state’s task is to regulate human activities to eliminate wrongful coer-
cion and promote the harmony of human ends. For the later Fichte, just as for the Fichte
of the Jena period, the state has no business interfering in self-regarding matters, or
constraining what Fichte calls “the higher branches of rational culture—religion,
science, virtue” (GGZ 7:166).
In this context, by “science” Fichte means philosophy. The state must never dictate
thoughts, or philosophical or religious convictions, to adults. By its very existence,
Fichte says, the state also conduces to virtue simply by protecting rightful external
freedom (GGZ 7:168). It can even “facilitate the development of love of the good, by
frightening the opposed love of evil back into the secret inwardness of the human
breast” (GGZ 7:170). The state is to educate children to think for themselves and to
value truth for its own sake. In Fichte’s later thought, as much as in his Jena period,
“virtue can be no end of the state.” For the later Fichte every bit as much as Fichte in
Jena, the state lacks the right to coerce people to fulfill their ethical vocation:
The state, in its essential property as a constraining authority [zwingende Gewalt], must reckon
on an absence of good will and an absence of virtue, even on the presence of an evil will . . . If all
members were virtuous, then it would altogether lose its character as constraining authority,
and would become the guide, leader and faithful advisor of the willing.
(GGZ 7:168)
Political “realism.” One development in Fichte’s later thought is that he seems increas-
ingly aware of the ways in which political rulers must contend with human evil and injus-
tice, and with the fact that principles of right are neither followed nor enforced, especially
in international affairs. This awareness is most evident in his 1807 essay On Machiavelli
(SW 11: 401–53). Fichte’s approach in this essay displays a degree of hard-headed realism
about human political life that is not apparent in his earlier works, where the spirit of
hopeful and high-minded idealism is the principal impression we get. I agree with
Moggach, however, that Fichte’s engagement with Machiavelli is “not evidence of a radi-
cal change in his political allegiance,” nor is it “an incongruous encounter of moral rigid-
ity with political realism.” It is instead a “serious confrontation,” an honest engagement of
a morally serious philosopher with the stark realities of human life.4
It is important to distinguish two senses in which we might use the word “realism”
when talking about political affairs. One sense refers simply to facing up to the unpleas-
ant facts of the way human vice and weakness constrain the well-intentioned politi-
cian’s actions and aspirations. A second sense is when we let realism in this first sense
serve as a rationalization for politicians to engage in ad hoc violations of principles of
4
Moggach (1993), p. 573; for an illuminating account that locates Fichte’s essay within the context of the
contemporary German thought about Machiavelli, see Zöller (2015).
right 255
right and morality, usually under some euphemistic name such as “pragmatism” or
an “ethics of responsibility.” Realism in the first sense does not entail realism in the
second; I submit that the later Fichte became a realist in the first sense, but not in the
second. We will see presently that Fichte holds that existing states lack legitimacy,
though we should treat them in our condition of Not (need or emergency) as if they
had it as long as they aim at improvement. He might have used the illegitimacy of exist-
ing states as a justification for ruthlessness on the part of rulers or politicians. But he
does not. Fichte advocates the use of political power always within the constraints of
the principles of right he established in the Foundations of Natural Right (1796–1797)
and the Closed Commercial State (1800). Perhaps some who see inconsistency in this
do so because they underestimate the influence for good that rulers and the educa-
tional system might have even while operating within the strict constraints of justice
and respect for individual liberty.
§2: The Separation of Right from Ethics

Misreadings of the later Fichte, I believe, arise in part from a failure to understand the
concept of right as developed in the Foundations of Natural Right. Many theories of
right begin from a general moral principle and derive an account of justice, law, and
politics from the way this principle applies to the conditions that make political life
necessary. In 1786, Kant critically reviewed one such theory, that of Gottfried
Hufeland, who derived a theory of right from Wolffian perfectionism (RH 8:127–30).
Kant had done essentially the same thing in his lectures on natural right given in 1784,
contemporaneous with his writing the Groundwork (1785). There he derived right
from the Formula of Humanity, basing it on our ethical duty to treat rational beings as
ends in themselves (NRF 27:1319–20). Some scholars think the same account is pres-
ent in Kant’s Doctrine of Right (1797). But in those same lectures, Kant noted that the
right to coerce others pertains only to the conditions of universal freedom, and com-
plains that “all of the authors have failed to explain this” (NRF 27: 1335). He should
have included himself among these authors. It is only later that Kant himself explains
that the Doctrine of Right depends not on any ethical principle, but only on the condi-
tions under which an action is compatible with the like freedom of others according to
universal law (MS 6:230–1).5
As several scholars have pointed out, Fichte’s early treatise defending the French
Revolution was also grounded in the traditional way on ethics (see Baumanns 1990,
pp. 38–41; Beck 2008, Chapter 2, pp. 65–80; James 2011, p. 112). This changed radi-
cally when Fichte moved to Jena in 1794. Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right appeared
a year earlier than Kant’s Doctrine of Right, so he could not have known that account.
5
For a defense of this account of Kant on right, see Wood (2014a), Chapter 3, pp. 70–89. For a contrary
view, see Guyer (2005), pp. 203–22. In comparing Kant and Fichte in this chapter, I am going to assume
that my account of Kant is correct.
But based on Kant’s earlier political writings, especially Perpetual Peace (1795), Fichte
conjectures that Kant agrees with his own position that right is independent of ethics
(NR 3:13). If there might be room for doubt about whether Fichte interprets Kant cor-
rectly, there can be none when it comes to Fichte’s own position. Fichte denies repeat-
edly and emphatically that right can be derived from the moral law (NR 3:10, 13, 50,
54, 140) (see also Ferry 1988 and Neuhouser 1996).
The distinctness of right and ethics: two versions. Kant and Fichte do both deny that
right is derived from ethics or the moral law. Both maintain that right and ethics have
separate foundations. They treat right as prior to ethics. But their positions are by no
means the same.
Fichte treats right as entirely separate from ethics. He thinks it depends only on the
relation of right, which can be transcendentally deduced from the conditions of
self-consciousness (NR 3:30–55), and on the transcendental conditions that follow
from the hypothetical end of creating a community of rational beings standing in rela-
tions of right (NR 3:9, 84–5, 92–3). For Fichte, there is no obligation, either of morality
or of right, to create or to join such a community, so that all the requirements conse-
quent on membership in it are conditional or hypothetical, based on reasoning that is
only “technical-practical” and contingent on the individual’s consent to join the com-
munity (NR 3:9–10).
For Kant, by contrast, the existence of rational beings outside a condition of right is
itself contrary to right, and persons may be rightfully coerced to join a civil society
enforcing right among themselves (MS 6:312). Fichte infers from his position that
every person has an absolute right to emigrate from any community and to immigrate
to any other community of his choosing, as long as he consents to obey the laws of the
community he joins (NR 3:14, 384). On Fichte’s view, the Berlin Wall and the US
immigration system would be equally violations of basic human rights, and for pre-
cisely the same reason.
Perhaps the deepest disagreement between Kant and Fichte, however, is this:
Fichte thinks that right and ethics are not only separate in their foundations, but
also wholly separate as philosophical systems. The Foundations of Natural Right is a
separate treatise from The System of Ethics. Both are grounded on the Doctrine of
Science as a whole, and their contents bear various relations to one another (which
will be described presently). But they do not constitute a single system of practical
philosophy. To the extent that the laws of right are based on the arbitrary choice to
establish a community based on the relation of right, the system of right might even
be c onsidered a theoretical rather than a practical system, as Fichte in fact suggests
(NR 3:7–13).6
6
In his lectures, however, Fichte soon reclassifies right, along with religion, as a mixed theoretical-
practical science, belonging to the structural plan of the late Jena period which was never completed
(WLnm, pp. 467–74). But Fichte never treats right and ethics as two parts of a single system of “morals,” as
Kant does in the Metaphysics of Morals.
right 257
For Kant, however, right (Recht) and ethics or virtue (Ethik, Tugend) form two parts
of a single system of practical philosophy or metaphysics of morals (Sitten, Moral).
They do so because, although their foundations are separate, right borrows from ethics
the concept of obligation (though not the ethical principle), and it then represents the
requirements of right as duties (MS 6:239). For Fichte, there are no duties or obligations
of right—in right, there is only just coercion, and there are duties – including duties to
respect the rights of others – which fall under the distinct system of ethics. For Kant,
pure or strict right makes no use of the concepts of duty or obligation; as in Fichte, it
determines only which actions may be rightfully coerced (MS 6:232). But for Kant, the
borrowing by right from ethics of the concept of obligation enables right to be expli-
cated in terms of a separate legislation and separate set of duties; it also enables right
and ethics to be brought under the common heading of “morals.”
Kant and Fichte are agreed on several other points of considerable importance.
These are worth listing, since their neglect has often led to confusion and error con-
cerning their common thesis that right is independent of ethics.
(1) Kant and Fichte agree that there is an ethical duty—or at least an ethical incen-
tive—to respect the rights of others (MS 6: 220–1, SL 4:282–312). Those ethical
duties can be derived from the principle of morality (ethics). The separate
foundations of right and ethics in both do not make right independent of eth-
ics in that sense.
(2) Both Kant and Fichte think that a perfectly constituted system of right would
not have to depend on the good will or moral virtue of the members of the
community. Kant’s best known expression of this idea is his claim that the task
of creating a condition of right “is soluble even for a nation of devils (if only
they have understanding)” (EF 8:366).
(3) Despite this last point, neither Kant nor Fichte would deny that moral virtue
on the part of citizens, and especially on the part of rulers and administrators,
might in practice be necessary for a system of right to operate. Both emphasize
the ethical duty of those who hold power to use it rightfully (EF 8:370–86,
SL 4:356–61). Although a system of right would ideally be designed not to
need ethical incentives in order to work, it might in fact also be true that under
the non-ideal conditions of human life, moral virtue on the part of subjects
may also be needed for justice to prevail. The separation of right from ethics
need involve no disagreement whatever with the well-known saying of
Machiavelli: “Just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the
laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals”
(Machiavelli 1965, Volume I, Discourses 1.18., p. 24).
(4) Finally, and most importantly, Kant and Fichte also agree that a law-governed
condition of right is necessary for the moral virtue of those subject to it. They
think that perfecting and executing laws of right in fact promotes the ends of
ethics. This is fully consistent with the separation of right from ethics found in
the Jena-period writings. It also does not imply that the way right makes ethi-
cal virtue possible, or the way the state might educate or otherwise foster the
moral progress of humanity, is in any way the foundation of right or of the
state’s authority. Both Kant and Fichte are foes of “ethical perfectionism” about
the state and political life.
It may be that, in the grand scheme of things, for both Kant and Fichte the contribution
made by right to humanity’s perfection is the greatest good that right makes possible.
For neither philosopher, however, could that fact constitute a satisfactory foundation
for right, because for both, no ethical duty, no human benefit, and not even the fulfill-
ment of humanity’s highest moral vocation could ever constitute a justification for
coercing any rational being. As Fichte puts it: “One may not make any rational being
wise, virtuous or happy against his will” (VBG 6:309). The only possible justification
for coercion must lie in the way coercion makes possible rightful external freedom for
all. Coercion can be justified only in order to protect that very freedom which coercion
itself threatens.
We might put the point most sharply in this way: if there were no foundation for right
that is wholly separate from its contribution to human moral progress, then it would be
absolutely forbidden to achieve moral progress through the external coercion employed
by right and the state. We may not use coercion to drag people along toward the fulfill-
ment of the human moral vocation, unless we can do so entirely on grounds of right (not
of ethics).7 It would be equally forbidden to obtain the cooperation of self-governing
rational adults by “educating” them through propaganda or indoctrination. Moral con-
viction must be produced solely by means that are consistent with the free give-and-take
of rational communication. These means might include emotional appeals, through the
fine arts or religion, but they would have to be free of manipulation that would be subver-
sive of free, rational communication.
Accordingly, for both Kant and Fichte the most important consequences of the
separate foundations of right and ethics are these:
First, ethical duties may not be coerced, while right is always in principle capable of
coercive enforcement. There can be no ethical duty, as such, that can be exacted from a
person through coercion, and this requires that right must have a foundation separate
from that of ethics.
Second, it is not required for membership of a community standing in relations of
right that all subscribe to any ethical principle, or agree on any points of moral
7
In the interpretation of Kant, Robert Pippin and Dean Moyar both distinguish “derivationists” from
“separationists.” The former hold that right is derived from ethics; the latter, that right and ethics have
separate foundations. They argue for a third interpretation, which they call “realizationist.” It grounds right
and the state on the way they promote the historical realization of the human ethical vocation. Pippin, in
Guyer (2006), 416–46; Moyar, in Thorndike (2011), pp. 139–41. Pippin and Moyar regard “realizationism”
as a friendly interpretation of Kant. But it ascribes to Kant the very same position to which Beck and James
object when they (mistakenly) think they find it in the later Fichte. Neither Kant nor Fichte, however,
would ever permit the state to coerce people to realize their moral vocation. For both, and at all stages of
their thought, “realizationism” is a pernicious doctrine.
right 259
hilosophy. What matters is that all are subject to a condition in which, as Kant would
p
put it, there is the same external freedom for everyone under universal law. Fichte
would express the same idea by saying that all must belong to a community where
there is mutual recognition according to the relation of right.
§3: Recognition and the Relation of Right

Fichte’s task in §4 (the Third Theorem) of the Foundations of Natural Right is to estab-
lish the relation of right between rational beings, which is to provide the foundation for
norms of right. The argument begins where our exposition in Chapter 3 left off: inter-
subjectivity—mutual activity between the I and other I’s, other rational beings—is a
transcendentental condition of self-activity, and in particular of the I’s individuality.
To be an individual is to be actively related to other individuals. More specifically, it is
to be summoned by them, and to respond to a summons. Both the summons and the
response to it are free actions with efficacy in the world.
Fichte’s argument is a complex one, interweaving theoretical and practical consider-
ations, combining the factual (often transcendental “facts”) and the normative. It
makes use of the Fichtean principle that the I itself is a free act requiring the truth of
transcendental propositions as conditions of its possibility. Acts can have normative
consequences, especially the cooperative acts of several agents, for those who are party
to them. Theoretical norms (of self-consistency) can require that if you perform one
act, then you must then also perform other acts. This is especially true if the acts in
question are expressive acts, such as the summons, or acts of treating others in certain
ways, or expecting certain treatment from them.8
Summoning and being summoned. The starting point of the argument is the claim
that individuality depends upon being summoned by another rational being to exer-
cise free agency. You must distinguish yourself from the other who summons you,
and this presupposes that both you and the other are free agents, and free agents
exercising free agency within different external spheres of action (NR 3:41–2). To
summon and be summoned also involves treating each other in a certain way—each
limiting their own freedom in such a way that the other can exercise freedom. To
summon is to request, invite, require a certain free action. It presupposes an exter-
nal sphere in which the one summoning does not interfere. To be summoned is to
view the one who summons you as free to do so, and also as free from your interfer-
ence in issuing the summons. Each individual thus treats the other as a free being,
8
Michael Nance (2012) realizes that both theoretical and normative claims are involved in Fichte’s argu-
ment, but in his simplified summary of the argument, all the claims are framed equally in terms of a modal
“must,” and Nance thinks that Fichte faces a fatal dilemma: the “must” is either theoretical (“metaphysical”)
or else normative. If both are involved, then Nance thinks the argument involves a fallacy of ambiguity.
I hope that a more accurate account of Fichte’s reasoning will show that this is a false dilemma, based on an
oversimplified reading of the argument.
“limiting one’s own freedom through the concept of the freedom of the other.” This
treatment by the other, moreover, is something of which each is aware, and of which
both are mutually aware: “This manner of treatment is conditioned by the first’s
treatment of the other; and the first’s treatment of the other is conditioned by the
other’s treatment and knowledge of the first, and so on ad infinitum” (NR 3: 44). This
manner of treatment—leaving the other an external sphere of freedom—is what
Fichte calls “recognition” (Anerkennung). It is a condition of the I’s individuality that
it should recognize and be recognized reciprocally by another.
In summoning and being summoned, each acknowledges to the other that both
are free beings, and this implies that each in fact has an external sphere in which
that freedom is exercised. Each recognizes the other as a rational being only in the
sense that each understands the other to have formal freedom in the sense relating
to right (see Chapter 3 §1, and especially note 3). That mutual understanding is
what is normative between them. But the mutual acceptance of a norm involved in
recognition is very limited. Treating another as a rational being means no more
than conceding that each in fact has the external sphere whose existence is theoret-
ically understood in the mutual summons, and creating the expectation that each
will continue to acknowledge the existence of this sphere as long as the mutual rec-
ognition lasts. There is no assumption that either accepts the norm in a moral sense.
Moral motivation for Fichte would introduce considerations discussed in
Chapter 4. It plays no role whatever in the argument. In fact, there is not even the
expectation that either is motivated at all to abide by the norm established by their
mutual recognition. The mutual expectation of mutual treatment is limited to the
expectation that the other will continue to concede theoretically the freedom of the
one recognized. We will see presently that this very absence of motivation is what
grounds the need for coercion.
The German term “expectation” (Anmutung), however, implies more than predic-
tion; it has normative content. It is the sense of “expect” that is used when we say that a
professor expects all his students to turn their work in by the due date even though he
may reasonably predict that some will not, or that a landlord expects all his tenants to
pay their rent on the first of every month even though he knows some are invariably
late with it. In both these cases, the failure to meet the expectation, whatever anyone
thinks about it morally, constitutes a basis for some coercive action—the threat of a
lower grade for the student, of possible eviction of the tenant. More specifically, in rec-
ognition my expectation consists in the other’s
recognition of me in conformity with my and his consciousness, synthetically united in
one . . . just as surely as he wants to be regarded as a rational being, I can compel him to acknowl-
edge that he knows me as one as well.
(NR 3:45)
The justified expectation, with its normative implications, is a consequence of the tran-
scendentally necessary fact that the giving and receiving of a summons involves a
right 261
mutual understanding, a mutual acceptance of the other as a rational being, free to

operate within a certain external sphere.
Recognition creates a kind of normativity quite distinct from the ethical. For Fichte
as for Kant, this is essential to understanding the sphere of right, and its essential sepa-
rateness from ethics. Those who cannot comprehend a non-ethical species of norma-
tivity, generated solely by mutual understanding, will never understand the relation of
right as Kant and Fichte conceive it.
Mutual understanding and recognition. Fichte’s argument now proceeds in two
main stages. The first argues, based on the mutual understanding involved in recogni-
tion, for a normative expectation that each individual has regarding treatment by the
other. The only norms involved here are those created by the mutually recognizing
parties themselves, based on their reciprocal treatment and understanding, and the
purely theoretical norm of self-consistency. The second stage of the argument deals
with the normative consequences if the mutual expectation is not met. The result will
be the concept of the distinctive norm that pertains to right. Because it is grounded
only on the mutual act of recognition and requirements of self-consistency, it is a
norm independent of any ethical considerations.
The first stage of the argument depends on a conditional: “I can expect a particular
rational being to recognize me as a rational being only if I myself treat him as one”
(NR 3:44). The antecedent is that I treat another as a rational being. This claim holds,
Fichte argues, factually, not normatively, as a matter of transcendental necessity. For it
is a condition of my self-consciousness that I regard myself as summoned by another
rational being. But a summons is an act of freedom, and to accept a summons (whether
or not I act on it) is to treat the being who issues the summons as a rational being. The
consequent of the conditional is that in turn I expect the other rational being to recog-
nize me.
The ground of the connection between the antecedent and the consequent in the
conditional is that unless I treat the other as a rational being, the other has no ground
for treating me as one, but if I do, then I have an expectation (Anmutung) that the other
will reciprocate. This is because my treatment of the other as a rational being, and the
other’s acceptance of that treatment, creates a common or shared consciousness; it sets
up norms of mutual treatment, accepted on both sides. Recognition, in other words, is
not only a way of knowing about others, or about one’s relation to others. It is also a way
of treating others. The treatment is necessarily mutual, and it presupposes a shared
norm, according to which each limits his own freedom in order to allow the other a
distinct sphere of freedom.
Since the antecedent of the conditional is equivalent to a condition of my self-
consciousness, the validity of the conditional yields the necessity of the consequent: in
other words, in relation to others with whom there is a relation of mutual recognition,
I do have the (normatively justified) expectation (Anmutung) that they will treat me as
a rational being by respecting the external sphere of my free action.
Now Fichte argues that I may generalize this result to all self-conscious rational
beings who come into this kind of interaction with one another. For what is true of any
individual from whom I distinguish myself must be true of all (NR 3:45). I can there-
fore expect (anmuten) that every individual will recognize me, and recognize every
other, and treat every other as a rational being by limiting his activity to his own exter-
nal sphere and not encroaching on the spheres of others (NR 3:47). Every individual is
bound by theoretical consistency to recognize all others, to accept these norms, and
then to limit their actions according to the relation of right (NR 3:48).
The concept of an individual rational being, according to the deduction we explored
in Chapter 3, is a “reciprocal concept.” That is, it involves a relationship (the relation-
ship of recognition) between different rational beings. It may seem paradoxical to say
that the concept of an individual involves a relationship to other individuals, but not if
you take seriously Spinoza’s principle omnis determinatio est negatio, which was so
important to the post-Kantian idealists.9
As has been demonstrated, the concept of individuality is a reciprocal concept . . . This concept
can exist in a rational being only if it is posited as completed by another rational being. Thus this
concept is never merely mine; rather, it is—in accordance with my admission and the admis-
sion of the other—mine and his, his and mine; it is a shared concept within which two con-
sciousnesses are unified into one.
(NR 3:47)
The shared concept necessary for individuality is that of recognition. It involves

action—expressive action, an admission on both sides, and one which is shared. This
shared act gives rise to a distinctive norm, which is different from any ethical norm.
The normative consequences of mutual understanding. The complete development
of this norm requires the second stage of Fichte’s argument. That stage deals with the
possibility that the other from whom I expect to be treated as a rational being might
instead violate the shared norm of recognition. A rational being is also necessarily an
embodied being, with a sensible existence. This makes it possible for the other to treat
me as a mere thing, violating the sphere of freedom accorded me in our shared concept
(NR 3:49, 51). In relation to this possibility, my summons (Aufforderung) thus becomes
a demand (Anforderung) that the other remain theoretically consistent in relation to
our shared normative concept (NR 3:52). In relation to the theoretical norm of consist-
ency, our shared normative concept now appears as a law. In demanding consistency
from the other,
I posit myself as a judge [at the same time inviting] him to be a judge along with me. . . . Hence
the positive element in the concept of right, whereby we believe we impose on the other an
obligation not to resist our way of treating him, but even to approve of it. The source of this
9
The truth that lies in this paradoxical claim is basic to Hegel’s discussion in Chapter II of the
Phenomenology of Spirit and also to his treatment of the individuality as being-for-self and being-for-
another in the Science of Logic.
right 263
obligation is certainly not the moral law: rather, it is the law of thought [i.e. the purely theoret-
ical norm of self-consistency].
(NR 3:50)
The only obligation that may be spoken of in relation to right is the theoretical one of
self-consistency. The inconsistency of the other, Fichte argues, also permits me, with-
out inconsistency, now to treat the other as a mere thing or object (NR 3:50). This argu-
ment seems problematic. The other’s encroachment on my sphere of freedom might be
treatment of me as a mere thing only within a narrow range, and my treating the other
as a mere thing in response seems to be an inconsistency with our shared recognition.
What Fichte’s argument justifies, and also the conclusion he needs, is rather something
more like this: “An act of coercion is consistent with right if it protects the external
sphere of freedom posited by mutual recognition, and thus accords with the will, as
expressed in this recognition, of the very person coerced.”10
We should consider Fichte’s argument both from the standpoint of the conclusion
he draws and from the standpoint of this weaker conclusion, which follows from his
premises. (We will soon see that this does not matter, at least for the deduction of the
norm of right.)
§4: The Normative Concept of Right

In §§5–6 Fichte next undertakes a lengthy development of the conditions of embodi-
ment that make possible the expressive acts involved both in recognition and in the
violation of the norms it establishes (NR 3:56–85). He then returns to the point just
made, introducing a new concept: that of the right of coercion.
The fact that two rational beings mutually recognize one another, though it makes
them subject to a theoretical norm of self-consistency, does not necessarily give them a
reason for acting consistently with the volition expressed in this recognition. “It is not
possible to provide an absolute reason why the rational being should be consistent and
why it, in consequence of this, should adopt the law that has been established”
(NR 3:86).11 But if another has not left me free within my external sphere, then, Fichte
concludes,
I am absolved from adhering to the law requiring me to treat him as a free being, [i.e.] I have a
right of coercion against him. These claims [can] mean nothing other than: this person cannot,
through the law of right alone, prevent my coercion of him (although he may well do so through
other laws, by physical strength, or by appealing to the moral law).
(NR 3:90)
10
This principle would then play the role analogous to Kant’s claim, which he takes to be analytic, that
an act of coercion is consistent with right if it hinders a hindrance to rightful freedom (MS 6: 231).
11
There is a moral (ethical) reason why every rational being is obliged to will the freedom of others
(NR 3:88), but this provides no guarantee of freedom for anyone, because moral obligations may not be
coerced, and right must not be made to depend on moral motives.
Unlike Kant, Fichte does not employ a distinctive sense of duty or obligation that
applies to right, borrowing the concept of duty from ethics (MS 6:239). Fichte recog-
nizes no “juridical duties” in Kant’s sense (MS 6:218). We have a moral obligation to
conform to right, but within the sphere of right itself, there are no obligations except in
the sense that there are theoretical obligations of consistency and right-authorized acts
of coercion. All attempts to “moralize” Fichte’s concept of right involve a fundamental
misunderstanding of the motivation as well as the content of his theory of right.12
The right of coercion. The claim arising from another’s violation of my right can be
understood either in the sense that I may treat the other as a mere thing, or alterna-
tively, that I may coerce the other within the restricted sphere of the other’s violation of
my freedom. Either way, this puts us in a position to state more clearly what is distinc-
tive about right as a normative concept. As a norm, right is not addressed directly to
the person whose actions are fall under it. It is instead addressed to those who might be
in a position to coerce those actions: it tells those others what, consistently with the
norm of right, they may and may not do. Norms of ethics tell each of us what we ought
to do. Norms of right do not, in the first place, tell me what I ought or not to do. Instead,
they tell others what I may and may not be forced to do, consistently with the shared
norm of right constituted by a mutual understanding.
Though he sets up the problem differently, Kant nevertheless sees this point very
clearly. This is why his principle of right does not tell us what to do or not to do, but tells
us only which actions are right: “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s
freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of
each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law”
(MS 6:230). On the next page, he formulates the law of right, which tells us to limit
ourselves only to actions that are right. But he adds:
[This law] does not expect, much less demand, that I myself should limit my freedom to those
conditions just for the sake of this obligation; instead, it says only that freedom is limited to
those conditions in conformity with the idea of it and that it may also be limited through deeds
[tätlich] by others.
(MS 6:231)
Fichte would agree that norms of right do not tell us what to do but only tell others
what they may, consistently with right, coercively require us to do or prevent us from
doing. Like Kant, Fichte would say that norms of right are grounded solely on free-
dom—what Kant calls “external freedom”: independence of the constraining choice of
another (MS 6:237). In other words, freedom can be limited only for the sake of free-
dom, not for any other end or benefit, or any ethical duty. This rests on the important
idea that freedom is not always the opposite of coercion or constraint: some of the
12
One might see such attempts in Neuhouser (1996), in Darwall (2005), and in Nance (2012). But both
Neuhouser and Nance seem to realize they are arguing against Fichte rather than interpreting him; Darwall
is self-consciously appropriating Fichte—irrespective of Fichte’s own intentions—for his own purposes in
moral philosophy.
right 265
most basic freedoms are possible at all only through coercion or constraint. Rousseau
was absolutely correct: we can be free, in the sense pertaining to right, only by being
forced to be free (Rousseau, Social Contract 1997, Book I, Chapter 8).
Being coerced in accordance with your own will. Fichte, however, would add
another related idea that is not present in Kant: norms of right tell you what you may be
coerced to do in accordance with your own will. That idea too may sound paradoxical,
but it is perfectly straightforward.13 We have just seen how it emerges from the very
conditions of self-conscious individuality. For in entering into a relationship of recog-
nition, I will to limit my freedom to my own rightful external sphere, just as I will that
others should likewise limit their use of freedom to their respective rightful spheres. If
I behave inconsistently with this volition, and am then coerced to limit my use of free-
dom to my rightful sphere, then it follows that I am being coerced only to act in a way
that is consistent with my own will. Such coercion is right, and that is the primary thing
that the norm of right is about.
It may help to clarify Fichte’s deduction of the concept of right if we distinguish
some things he thinks he has shown from some that he does not yet claim to have
proven. At the end of §4 (Third Theorem), he provides a list of five “Corollaries”:
1. Right follows from rational self-consciousness alone. The concept he has deduced,
he claims, follows from “the essence of reason,” and shows that no human being
can exist in isolation and that “a certain way of judging things [in particular,
human actions] is necessary to the rational being as such” (NR 3:53). He is pre-
pared to call the deduced concept “right” (Recht), but warns us that it may not
correspond in every respect to the ordinary meaning of that term.14
2. Right is independent of morality. The deduced concept “has nothing to do with
the moral law, is deduced without it.” The moral concept of duty is even opposed
to the concept of right in several respects. Right only permits—indicates ways in
which a rational being may not be coerced in accordance with this concept—
but does not command. “The moral law very often forbids a person to exercise
his right.” You may have an ethical duty to be generous and forgo what is yours
by right. Where coercion fails, morality might provide an incentive for limiting
one’s actions to what right permits. But “the question whether the moral law
might provide a new sanction for the concept of right is not part of the doctrine
of natural right” but belongs only to the sphere of morality. “Right must be
enforceable, even if there is not a single human being with a good will . . . [In the
domain of right] physical force, and it alone, gives right its sanction” (NR 3:54).
13
There is also nothing paternalistic in this concept. “Your will” does not mean “your happiness.” The
coercion in question does not aim at your welfare, but only preserves the conditions of your freedom, and
everyone’s freedom.
14
One difference is that we may think one person’s rights correspond to another’s duties. Kant, as we
have seen, attempts to preserve this feature of the concept of right. Fichte does not, in order to keep the
sphere of right strictly separate from that of ethics, where duties do occur.
3. There is a right only to actions. Fichte rejects every claim of the form that there
is, in the direct sense, any right of ownership over things or land. Such rights
have to be understood as rights to act in certain determinate ways with respect
to those things—the right to have an object or part of the earth’s surface availa-
ble to one’s use for certain purposes. As regards other persons, “a right in rela-
tion to the other person [is only] a right to exclude him from using the thing”
(NR 3:55). Right to the use of land may extend only to certain uses of it. A farmer
and a miner, Fichte argues, may have rights to use the same piece of land, each
for his own purposes, as long as the one use does not interfere with the other
(GH 3:441–2).
4. There is no right in relation to “inner actions”—thoughts, convictions, etc. Rights
pertain only to external expressions of freedom in the sensible world. Beliefs,
the setting of ends, and the like, apart from their expression, cannot be made the
object of coercion. I think we are to understand this to mean not only that we
do have a right to beliefs, ends, etc. but also that any attempt to coerce them (for
instance, by coercing acts expressing them, if this is done solely for the purpose
of coercing the inner action) is necessarily contrary to right (NR 3:55).
5. The relation of right obtains only between rational beings standing in some external
relation to one another. There is no right in relations between beings whose actions
cannot externally affect one another. Fichte infers from this that although we may
have moral duties regarding the dead, the dead have no enforceable rights (NR
3:55–6). This entails a rejection of Kant’s doctrine that the dead have a right to a
good posthumous reputation (ius bona fama defuncti) (MS 6:295–6).15 It also
entails that there is no natural right of inheritance—none at all!—except insofar as
it might be provided for by positive legislation (NR 3:257–9).16
The extent of one’s external sphere. Although recognition requires that each rational
being have an external sphere of freedom upon which other rational beings must not
encroach, nothing in Fichte’s concept of right directly implies how large the respective
spheres must be. When, after deducing the concept of a community of right, Fichte
articulates the concept of an “original right” (Urrecht) pertaining to each member of
the community, he argues that each person’s external sphere must include their own
body, and also as much of the sensible world as is needed for the external efficacy to
which the division of the world among them assigns them a right (NR 3:114–19). The
concept of right and the relation of right entails nothing beyond this. Fichte says explic-
itly that the formal concept of a sphere of external freedom is qualitative only and does
15
Fichte holds that it falls within the right of the state to protect citizens by declaring publicly, based on
sound evidence, that a person is dishonorable and not to be trusted; but the state may not do this unless he
has committed a criminal offense (NR 3:244–6).
16
Therefore, by natural right the so-called “death tax” must always be set at 100 percent. We have no
relation of right to the dead. The state may, however, legislate that a dying person may dispose of its (the
state’s) rightful property by bequeathing it to the deceased person’s natural or chosen heirs.
right 267
not determine how much external freedom each should have, or over what spaces,
things, or goods (NR 3:122). The inference from the qualitative to the quantitative con-
cept of right must proceed by way of mutual consent and a reciprocal declaration,
within the context of a community of right—even the concept of which is at this point
still to be deduced (NR 3:122–36).
The inconsistency involved in violations of right. The relation of right does require
that in recognizing the other, I acknowledge that the other is a free being, with a right
to a sphere of freedom. This is admitted merely by the fact that I address the other as a
rational being, rather than (say) push his body around like a sack of flour, or send ver-
bal signals to him not as rational communication (a summons) but only as means of
mechanical control, as I might give verbal commands to a dog or a horse (SL 4:315). If
you give rational commands to a person you regard as your servant or slave, Fichte’s
argument entails that this acknowledges already that the other is a rational being, enti-
tled to a sphere of freedom—and therefore not merely a thing which is your property,
like a domesticated animal. Relations of right must be mutual or reciprocal.
Fichte’s argument is that if the master—or indeed, the entire social order, including
the servants or slaves themselves—should accept a conception of their relation
according to which only some have rights, while the others have none, then this
involves a theoretical inconsistency in the way people are being regarded. Fichte does
not deny, of course, that such social systems can persist, can be supported by over-
whelming force, can even prevail in human affairs for many centuries, despite the
profound theoretical inconsistency that lies at their root. He does hold that the incon-
sistency entails that the conception of people’s relations to one another in such sys-
tems is both fundamentally irrational and contrary to right. What makes it contrary
to right, however, is not mere logical inconsistency. (It would be an absurd misinter-
pretation to think that for Fichte every case in which one contradicts oneself involves
a violation of right.) Rather, it is such an inconsistency in the context of the common
normative understanding presupposed by mutual recognition that results in an under-
standing that is contrary to right.
Perhaps Fichte’s argument needs assistance from a kind of indirect proof of his con-
clusion. Such a proof would begin from the mutual understanding shared by masters
and servants or slaves, and then show that there is in fact an incoherence in the way
they understand their mutual relations. A successful indirect proof of this kind was,
I believe, later provided by Hegel, in his famous master-servant dialectic in the
Phenomenology of Spirit (PhG ¶¶ 189–99).17
How far does recognition extend? Fichte also realizes that there is a question how far
the concept of another rational being should empirically extend, and devotes a
17
I have provided a comparative discussion of Fichte’s and Hegel’s arguments regarding recognition in
Wood (2014a), pp. 214–28.
rolonged discussion to this question. He denies that Kant’s formula of humanity or

p
principle of universal legislation answers this question.
How do I know whether the protection afforded by that universal legislation befits only the
white European, or perhaps also the black Negro; only the adult human being, or perhaps also
the child? And how do I know whether it might not also befit the loyal house-pet?
(NR 3:80–1)
Fichte’s detailed exploration of this question inventories the human capacities of

historical-social self-development—the acquisition and rational transmission of skills
and ways of life (NR 3:82), self-provided clothing for the body (NR 3:82–3), upright
gait (NR 3:83—a feature of humanity especially emphasized by Herder). But Fichte
finally settles on the expressive properties of the human face, which “self-actively cre-
ates an image for a freely projected mental concept” (NR 3:83–5). “No one whose face
bears the stamp of reason, no matter how crudely, exists for me in vain” (VBG 6:311).18
Regarding all those beings in which we recognize “a human shape,” Fichte says that
“every human being is inwardly compelled to regard every other human being as an
equal” (NR 3:80). Non-human animals, having no capacity to express rational thoughts
either through words or through facial expressions, therefore have no rights (NR 3:91).
Children are not yet fully rational beings. Fichte thinks, as does Kant, that adults,
especially parents, have an obligation to care for children and educate them so that
they fully acquire the capacities of free rationality possessed by adults (MS 6:280–3,
NR 3:358–64). There are requirements of right here that fall to both the parents of the
child and to the state. The authority of adults over children must always be used in the
interest of the children, not of the adults (MS 6:280, NR 3:358).
Fichte’s discussion about which of these rights are coercibly enforceable contains
some subtlety and complexity (NR 3:362–4). Parents may be rightfully coerced to
care for and bring up (erziehen) the child, but providing a “higher upbringing,” e.g.
teaching the child moral virtue, cannot be rightfully coerced (NR 3:359). The state
may establish educational institutions for children—this is in large part the topic of
Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. In the Foundations of Natural Right, he
denies the state any right of coercion regarding these institutions (NR 3:363). Later in
the Addresses he modifies this, arguing for a system of elementary education that is
universal, equal for all children (girls as well as boys), state-supported, and also compul-
sory (RDN 7:396–427).
18
The evident conclusion is that the sphere of recognition extends wholly to all human adults (both the
“white European” and the “black Negro” as well as every other shade and variation of the human face).
Fichte does say that in the individual, “as the race becomes more animal-like and more self-seeking, the
mouth protrudes more; as the race becomes more noble, the mouth recedes beneath the arch of the think-
ing forehead” (NR 3:84). Here he was evidently influenced by his sometime mentor J.C. Lavater (1783). The
supposed science of “physiognomy’—which attempts to discern moral qualities through facial features—
was also discussed by Kant (Anth 7: 297–302) and Hegel (PhG ¶¶ 131–325). Fichte does not see such dif-
ferences as exceptions or qualifications to the basic human equality we necessarily perceive in the rational
human form, wherever it may be found (NR 3:80).
right 269
§5: The Civil–Political Contracts

Fichte’s development of the political state out of the concept of right is complex and
involves a long and involved argument. The twists and turns are impossible to present
systematically in the space available here. It only adds to the difficulty that Fichte wrote
the Foundations in two parts, presenting Part One, the “deduction” (NR 3:17–55), then
the “application” (NR 3:56–190) of the concept of right in the 1796 version, but adding
Part Two, “Applied Natural Right,” in the 1797 edition (NR 3:191–384). Consequently,
the subject matters of Parts One and Two somewhat overlap, and it is unclear how
much of the ordering of these materials is determined by the transcendental method
Fichte claims to be strictly following, and how much by the contingent facts of the
work’s two-stage publication. A complete exposition of Fichte’s theory of right cannot
be presented in a single chapter. The following is a summary of the results of his
arguments.
Conditions of political legitimacy. The Foundations is indeed intended as an exer-
cise in transcendental philosophy. The project is to begin with the concept of right, on
the assumption (whose arbitrariness and contingency Fichte emphasizes) that we seek
the end of a community of free beings. It then develops the transcendental conditions
for the possibility of such a community. This puts Fichte’s social contract theory in a
special light. He is not claiming, as traditional social contract theories appear commit-
ted to doing, that the states we see around us are founded on the actual (whether
express or tacit) consent of citizens to the arrangements grounding political authority.19
Instead, Fichte is investigating the conditions of the possibility of a hypothetical politi-
cal community which might actualize the concept of right in its relations among that
community’s members. The claims his theory makes about contractual relations, con-
sent, and so on are not claims about what actual human beings must have done in
order to create the states we see around us. Still less does his theory offer any account of
how they might have given such consent. The theory says only that if there is to be a
rightful community, then these are the conditions that must be fulfilled.
The plain conclusion to be drawn is that to the extent these conditions are not ful-
filled, existing political institutions are unjust and lack legitimacy. I think that although
he does not rub our noses in it, Fichte quite evidently thinks all existing, and all past,
political orders lack legitimacy. All states are, to put it in Kant’s technical terms, condi-
tions not of right but of barbarism—force without freedom or law (Anth 7:331). But
they do approximate, to one degree or another, a condition of right. Fichte’s continued
commitment to an in-principle right of revolution can best be understood in these
19
Rousseau goes a long way toward framing the issues in the same way. For at the outset, he distin-
guishes the question “How did the transition [namely from natural freedom to the chains of civil society]
take place?” from the question “How can it be made legitimate?” and then declares that he has no idea
regarding the first question, but will try to answer the second. Rousseau (1997), On the Social Contract,
Book I, Chapter 1. This leaves it an open question where the conditions of legitimacy have been fulfilled,
and even whether they have ever been fulfilled anywhere.
terms, since even Kant would approve resistance to barbaric rule. Kant, by contrast,
holds that existing states are mostly not forms of barbarism but conditions of right,
albeit imperfect ones. In practice, however, Fichte’s attitude toward existing political
institutions is similar to Kant’s. He argues that they may be accepted provisionally, on
the condition that they are striving to perfect themselves. We live not in the rational
state, or even in a legitimate state, but in a Notstaat—a state of necessity or emergency,
which must be accepted only because we desperately need some political order and
nothing better is now available. Such a condition may be treated as if it were legitimate,
but only if it aims at progressing to something better. Any conservative state, which
seeks to preserve what is, is necessarily contrary to right (SL 4: 361).
Fichte’s deduction lays down the conditions that must be met for there to be a
rational state. The relation of recognition leads Fichte to the concept of right and its
coercive enforcement. As long as we see this coercion as exercised only by one mutu-
ally recognizing party whose external sphere has been violated by another, it leads to a
series of problems or paradoxes. These require, and receive, resolution through the
synthetic method.
One problem is that rightful coercion presupposes the right to judge that another
has violated my right, and neither party to the relation of recognition has a right to pass
judgment that is binding on the other (NR 3:95). Another problem is that any peace
between one whose right has been violated and the one who has violated it depends
upon confidence about how the other will act in the future. Any assurance that one
gives will have to be conditional on that party’s assurance about how the other will act.
The possibility of peace therefore leads us in a vicious circle (NR 3:99).
Fichte argues that these problems admit of a solution only if both parties receive a
warranty or guarantee (Gewährleistung, Garantie) for the future. They can do this only
by placing their entire power in common in the hands of a third party to which they
entrust the coercive enforcement of right. This party will have both the right of judg-
ment (Recht des Gerichts) and also the physical power to coerce in accordance with that
judgment (NR 3:100–1). The establishment of such a power depends on a contract or
agreement to subject oneself to it. “Above all else, I must subject myself [to such a
power] with complete freedom” (NR 3:102). This I can do only if I can know in advance
that my right will be protected. That knowledge is possible only if I know the power
will act according to positive laws that are publicized (NR 3:103). These laws must
express a common or general will (gemeinsame Wille), shared by all parties to the
agreement (NR 3:108).
Consequently, Fichte argues, the state must be founded on express consent: a mutual
declaration establishing a will common to all members of a state, that is, a “civil–
political contract” (Staatsbürgervertrag) (NR 3:191). Fichte argues for the necessity of
a series of such contracts, the necessity of each successive one dependent on that of the
one preceding it, as a transcendental condition of the possibility of relation of commu-
nity or mutual recognition between free beings. The common governmental power
which is to make possible a relation of right between people can be consistent with
right 271
their freedom only if it is the result of their mutual consent. Again, Fichte is not claim-
ing that actually existing states rest on such consent, but only that a rational state would
have to rest on it. Our acceptance of any existing state is at most provisional, based not
on any actual legitimacy but solely on our need or emergency (Not).
The property contract. The relation of right assigns each individual an external
sphere for free activity. This sphere begins with the individual’s body, but extends to all
the individual’s property. The first condition of a relation of right between persons is
therefore an agreed determination of the limits of their respective external spheres of
action. Each lays claim to a determinate sphere of action, while relinquishing the rest
to others, with the respective limits of these spheres mutually agreed upon by all. For
Fichte as for Kant, property rests on omnilateral consent. This is different from the
so-called “Lockean proviso,” which says that I may appropriate something unilaterally
if I leave “as much and as good” for others. Kant and Fichte reject this on the ground
that what justifies the assignment of property cannot be welfare, but will. Welfare
comes into it for Fichte, as we will see below and especially in §9, only when it is evi-
dent that some could not rationally consent to a distribution of property that leaves
them destitute and without the minimal conditions for freedom. The basis of right,
including property, is always external freedom, not happiness, welfare, or any benefit
other than freedom from coercion by the will of others within one’s rightful external
sphere.
The protection contract. This agreement Fichte calls the “property contract”

(NR 3:196). Omnilateral consent to a distribution of property is delegated to the state
under its right of judgment. That agreement confers no right unless each has reason to
believe that everyone’s property rights will be coercively enforced by all. Hence the prop-
erty contract presupposes an agreement that all will unite their strength in protecting the
property of each. This second agreement is the “protection contract” (NR 3:197).
The protection contract differs from the property contract in that the former
requires only refraining from interference in the external sphere of others, whereas
the property contract requires a positive action, and indeed a continued disposition
to act positively in the protection of others’ rights. For Fichte this raises a serious
problem about the possible validity of the protection contract, hence of the property
contract, hence of the relation of right in general. This is because he maintains that
the bindingness of a contract on me is conditional on the reasonable expectation
that the other party will actually fulfill their side of the contract. In the case of the
protection contract, as long as we must rely solely on the individual dispositions of
the contractors, there can be no assurance that this condition will be met for the
future (NR 3:200–1).
The unification contract. Assurance can be given, Fichte argues, only if each person
enters into an agreement not with another, or even with all the others taken severally,
but with a real whole made up of all united together (NR 3:202). This whole must, he
says, be thought of by analogy with a natural product, an organism, each of whose

parts is determined in its nature, and even made possible, only through the whole. An
injury to any part of a living body is felt by all organs as an injury to the whole, and each
reacts as if the injury were to itself. In the same way, the social whole is one in which
each one is disposed to protect the right of any other as if it were one’s own right (NR
3:203). The agreement through which such an organic whole is established Fichte
names the “unification contract”; it is concluded between each individual and this
whole (NR 3:204). (This parallels Rousseau’s account, when he describes the civil con-
tract as one between “each” and “all”; Rousseau 1997, On the Social Contract I, 6.)
Fichte takes issue with Rousseau’s claim that in the social contract, each must give
himself to the whole completely (Rousseau 1997, On the Social Contract, I, 6). Fichte
holds, on the contrary, that no one’s consent to the unification could be valid unless
they have something to be protected. This means that it is a condition of the contract
that each have property assigned by the whole which it is committed to protect
(NR 3:204–5n). This property for Fichte consists fundamentally in the conditions of
labor free from the arbitrary power of any other individual. We will see in §8 of this
chapter that this provision has far-reaching consequences for the economic organiza-
tion of society.
The transfer contract. In order for the unified people to exercise power, they must
appoint specific persons to legislate, judge, and enforce the general will. This they do
through a “transfer contract” (NR 3:165).20 In relation to a given government, the citi-
zen also enters into a “subjection contract,” pledging obedience to the laws. But this last
contract, Fichte adds, is “only hypothetical,” since citizens may always withdraw from a
given state if they are willing to emigrate (NR 3:206).
Only under these conditions are any of the contracts valid, and hence these alone are
conditions for the actualization of right.
§6: The Form of Government

Fichte follows Rousseau in distinguishing the government from the law it administers.
Unlike Rousseau, he does not understand this as a separation of the legislative power
from the governing power. On the contrary, all law is understood merely as the appli-
cation of a fundamental law or constitution. All particular acts of the community,
including acts of legislation (applying or amending the constitution), are to be per-
formed by a single governmental power. Fichte acknowledges the difference between
20
Here Fichte parts company with both Locke and Rousseau, who hold that the transfer of power to a
government is not a contract; see Rousseau (1997), II, 1; III, 1. Fichte’s view on this seems to be of a piece
with his denial of the doctrine of a separation of powers (NR 3:14). For that denial makes legislation a
function of government rather than separating it from government and treating it as an exercise of sover-
eignty prior to and having authority over government, as happens with Rousseau, or, as in Locke, treating
the institution of government as a trust bestowed by the people. As we shall see, however, Fichte shares with
Locke the idea that the people may dismiss the government.
right 273
legislative, executive, and judicial functions of government, but rejects the assignment
of these functions to distinct governmental powers. All legitimate governments, how-
ever, must be representative in the sense that their powers are conceived of as delegated
to them by the whole people according to the constitution.21 Considered as the founda-
tion of a state, the constitution is unchangeable, though it may be added to or amended.
Since the constitution must be a law freely accepted by everyone bound by it, its adop-
tion must be unanimous, not merely by a majority vote (NR 3:152). Those who cannot
consent to it must emigrate and find another place on earth where they can consent to
enter into relations of right with others (NR 3:14).
Democracy. Representation in this sense excludes only two forms of government:
“despotism,” in which the ruler is not subject to the law, as in all the contemporary
absolute monarchies; and “democracy,” in which the people as a whole directly admin-
isters the law instead of delegating its power to representatives (NR 3:159–60). Fichte
distinguishes “democracy” in this (pejorative) sense from “democracy in a narrower
sense of the term,” which means the popular election of representatives (NR 3:162).
Democracy in the latter sense is a legitimate form of government—in fact, it is the
form Fichte most approves. He nevertheless insists on the legitimacy of other forms,
including mixed and hereditary forms of aristocracy, as long as the people consents to
them. It is unclear whether Fichte recognizes the legitimacy of any hereditary monar-
chy, even in a constitutional form, although he allows for a “president of the govern-
ment in perpetuity,” as in an “elective commonwealth” (Wahlreich) (NR 3:162).
The ephorate. Why does Fichte oppose the doctrine of separation of powers? He
regards it as “futile” to separate the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, or else
such a division exists only “in appearance” (NR 3:161). If the executive must obey the
judicial power, he argues, then it has in fact no power; and if the judicial power must
obey the legislative power, then it too is lacking real authority. The only way to conceive
of a governmental power is to think of it as undivided, except in its performance of all
three functions. Fichte nevertheless insists that the government (especially in its exec-
utive function) must be accountable to the law. He was not content, as Kant was, to
regard the rights of the people against the government as real but in principle unen-
forceable. Instead, he proposes what is his most innovative political idea: that of the
“ephorate.”
The term “ephor,” meaning “overseer” (in Greek, επι+οραω), was applied in antiquity
to a Spartan political institution, but Fichte insists that what he means is entirely differ-
ent and that the closest ancient analogue to what he has in mind were the Roman trib-
unes of the people (NR 3:171, n). The ephors, as Fichte conceives of them, are a group
of highly respected citizens elected by the people for fixed terms (NR 3:163). They are
to remain entirely independent of the government and their persons are inviolable
21
Here Fichte parts company with Rousseau (1997), II, 1, who rejects the idea of representative
government.
(NR 3:173–5). The ephors are to exercise no governmental function, but they are to
possess an absolute negative power: the power to suspend the existing government and
to call for a convention of the people for the purpose of trying the government on the
ephorate’s indictment (NR 3:172–5).
But what if the government and the ephorate together collude to oppress the people?
Fichte insists that despite the precautions taken in his proposals to prevent this, it may
happen. In that case, there is no recourse except that the people as a whole should rise
up against the government. Fichte responds to the charge that he is here advocating the
legitimacy of popular rebellion:
But—and this should be noted well—the people is never a rebel, and the expression Rebellion
used of it is the highest absurdity that can ever be said . . . Only against a higher power can there
be rebellion. But what on earth is higher than the people? It could rebel only against itself,
which is absurd. Only God is superior to the people; hence if it should be said that a people has
rebelled against its prince, then it has to be assumed that the prince is a god, which might be
hard to establish.
(NR 3:182)
Fichte’s conception of an ephorate, he insists, should not be seen as an institutional

lever for popular uprisings against the government, but instead as a way of guarantee-
ing that such uprisings would never be necessary to protect the people against a des-
potic government:
These arrangements are introduced not in order to be invoked, but rather only to make impos-
sible the cases in which they would have to be invoked. Just where they are introduced will they
be superfluous, and only where they are not present would they be necessary.
(NR 3:187)
Fichte’s later political theory, in the System of Right (1812), retains to a surprising
degree the doctrines of the Foundations (1796–1797) and the Closed Commercial State
(1800). The most conspicuous modification, however, is the withdrawal of his pro-
posal of an “ephorate” as a way of preventing governmental abuse of power. Fichte
continues to believe in the correctness of the principles that motivated the suggestion,
but “on riper reflection” has come to doubt its workability (SW 10:632). First, he objects
that there is nothing to prevent the ephorate itself from abusing its authority; second,
he fears that it will suffer oppression from the government—as the Roman tribunes
were controlled by the patrician class. Finally, though Fichte still accepts the view that
in trying the government the judgment of the people must be formally just, he fears
that in such a case it might do material injustices (SW 10:632–3). The revolutionary
assembly of the people, he thinks, is apt to result merely in replacing one bad state of
affairs with another (SW 10:634).
Fichte’s abandonment of the doctrine of the ephorate is by no means a retraction of
his worry that governmental power, especially if undivided (as Fichte thinks it must
be), is open to abuse. His argument is rather that the constitutional provision for an
ephorate is unworkable as long as people are as bad as they now are, and that if they
right 275
improve enough to make it workable, they will no longer need it (SW 10:633). He
admits he has no ultimate solution to the problem of government abuse, but he does
not deny the problem or minimize its importance. As things are, he says, the only real
protection we can have against abuses of power by the government is an educated and
thinking public (SW 10:633–4).
Fichte was clearly aware that his anti-absolutist, republican, and egalitarian concep-
tion of individual right and political legitimacy left the regimes he saw around him
quite beyond any hope of justification. At the same time, despite his reputation as a
Jacobin, Fichte agreed with Kant that the most effective and lasting political improve-
ment would come not from popular uprisings but through gradual, principled reforms
from above. Illegitimate regimes might thus gradually legitimize themselves through
enlightened self-transformation. Even the provisional legitimacy of a political order is
therefore contingent on its tendency to fundamental self-change (SL 4:361).
§7: Personal Freedom and Penal Law

In self-regarding and private matters, Fichte takes a highly restrictive view of the pow-
ers of the state on issues of individual freedom. The entire aim of the state is to protect
the original rights of free persons in accord with the civil–political contract. This
means that the external sphere of freedom must be inviolable, and that the state’s right
of interference with individual freedom extends only as far as is necessary to protect
the rights of others. As we shall see in §9, however, he takes a very different view of the
role of the state regarding people’s behavior when it can affect the interests, and espe-
cially the freedom, of others. Above all, this applies to the economic realm. There his
view of the state’s role, both its rights and its duties, is expansive.
The private and public spheres. In the rational state, there is a strict distinction
between the private and the public. The state has no right to a person’s body, or their
absolute property, or in their domicile. But on the public street, the police may ask any
citizen for identification. Fichte thinks all should have to carry with them a picture ID
to show the police, and the citizen must be able to give an account of his business while
in public (NR 3:294–5). On the other hand, in the public sphere the police as much as
private citizens must conduct their business openly. Police should wear uniforms and
be easily identifiable. The state must not spy on citizens. Fichte regards the practice of
“undercover” police spies (at the time, thought of as a British practice) as a basic viola-
tion of civil liberty (NR 3:302).
The property owned by a person after taxes have been paid is, according to Fichte,
their “pure” or “absolute” property. It is a “surrogate” for the person’s body, and the state
has no rights whatever over it (NR 3:240). Another proper extension or “surrogate” of a
person’s body is that person’s domicile (NR 3:242). “Domestic right” to freedom from
state interference is therefore as absolute as it is possible to make it. A person’s right
within their dwelling, as over their own body, is sovereign. My house, says Fichte, is
beyond the jurisdiction of the state, which may enter it only upon my explicit request
(NR 3:243 GA I/4:47).
Right is enforceable; morality is not. For Fichte, for anyone to attempt to coerce peo-
ple to fulfill duties of conscience is a violation of their basic human rights. Consequently,
there are a number of actions and practices which Fichte’s ethical theory regards as
utterly immoral but which, according to his theory of right, the state is absolutely for-
bidden to criminalize or punish: suicide, adultery, incest, concubinage, or prostitution
(NR 3: 323, 325–32)—even infanticide (when committed by the child’s mother while it
is still young enough to be helpless and wholly dependent on her) (NR 3:363). The
moral prohibitions on all these acts are strict, but exclusively ethical, and may not be
coercively enforced by the state.
Consequent upon this is that Fichte insists on very strong rights of individual pri-
vacy. One focus of this is the right of the house or domicile: “The state does not know
what goes on in my domicile, it has no right to know this publicly or to act as if it knew
it” (NR 3:247). The state may not keep track of how much cash a person has, or of other
possessions housed in a person’s domicile (NR 3:241). Since the state has no jurisdic-
tion over the domicile, Fichte even has to worry about whether the state has a right to
enter one’s home in order to prevent a murder, or enforce the law against murder. In the
end he decides that it does, but this requires a special argument, depending on the
presumptive consent of the potential victim and the fact that dying is always an act
with public consequences (NR 3:248–50). The rational state would altogether prohibit
the private sale of weapons. Even at a time when a sword was still regarded as part of
the elegant gentleman’s proper attire, Fichte insists that citizens may not carry weapons
on the street, or even bring them into their homes (NR 3:294). Individuals must be free
from coercion by other individuals; weapons belong in the hands of the state, which
uses them to protect individual freedom and to serve the common good on which all
are implicitly agreed.
Coercion and punishment. Where the rights of others or the legitimate powers of
government are concerned, violations of right are subject to a “law of coercion.” A law
of coercion is a mechanism which brings it about that whenever someone attempts to
violate the laws of the state, the opposite of what they intend should happen, so that
such intentions would always annihilate themselves (NR 3:137–49). A law of coercion,
subject to the laws and powers of the state, is the basis of penal law.
Fichte’s rejection of all retributive theories of punishment (such as were defended by
Kant before him, and Hegel after him) is both clear and emphatic. The idea that pun-
ishment is an “end in itself ” required by justice he regards as an unprovable assertion,
based on an “inscrutable categorical imperative” (NR 3:283). The attempt to imple-
ment it in the state involves claiming prerogatives for human institutions which could
belong only to God (NR 3: 261–5).
The expiation contract. Every crime, Fichte argues, whatever its nature or magni-
tude, is a direct violation of the social contract. This contract therefore becomes void
right 277
regarding criminals, rendering them “rightless” (rechtlos) and excluding them from
the protection of the state; this would permit anyone else to do with right any act what-
ever to them (NR 3:123, 260). This seems to be a consequence for Fichte of the infer-
ence, which we noted earlier, from someone’s violation of the relation of right to the
conclusion that the other party may treat them like a mere thing.
In fact, however, Fichte does not conclude that a criminal is entirely without rights.
This is what would occur, he thinks, were it not for the fact that in order to secure their
continued membership in the community in case they should violate the right of
another, rational beings must necessarily agree to yet another civil contract: the “expi-
ation contract.” All citizens agree that should they commit a crime, they may be
deprived of rights in proportion to the wrong they have committed, and on this con-
dition they promise to extend to criminals the opportunity to rejoin society again
(NR 3:261–3, 272–7).
Despite his use of the term “expiation” (Abbüssung), Fichte’s theory of punishment
recognizes deterrence and civil amelioration of the criminal as the only legitimate
functions of punishment. Fichte sharply distinguishes civil reform from moral
improvement, since it deals solely with external conduct. Just as ethical duties are not
subject to coercive enforcement, so the inner morality of a person is beyond the juris-
diction of the state, as far as its penal institutions are concerned (NR 3:265, 273). This
point needs to be kept in mind when we consider Fichte’s later views about the state as
vehicle of moral education, since it implies limits on the scope and means that the
state may employ in educating citizens. The system of education advocated in the
Addresses is meant for children, who are still subject to the tutelage of others—their
parents and their fellow citizens. It would not be consistent with Fichte’s theory of
right at any stage of its development for the state to treat adult citizens in the same way
it treats children.
The only crime that is not subject to the expiation contract is murder, which always
condemns its perpetrator to a condition of “rightlessness” (NR 3:60). Fichte appears to
regard rape as a crime equal in gravity to murder (NR 3:318–19). It too is regarded as
inexpiable, and he thinks the proper treatment of a rapist would be to award all the
rapist’s property to his victim (NR 3:319). As we saw in Chapter 7 §8, Fichte opposes
the death penalty—even for murder. Because it must always occur outside the expia-
tion contract, death at the hands of the state can never be a legitimate punishment, even
for murder. If the state kills a murderer, it may not do so by its judicial power but only
by its police power, treating the murderer as a being without rights, from whom it is
protecting its citizens, as it would protect them from a wild animal (NR 3:280–2).
Fichte thinks murderers may be dealt with by exiling them from the state. States are,
however, permitted to attempt to reform murderers on the condition that the public
can be guaranteed to be safe from them (NR 3:277–8).
Fichte holds that intentional killing, except in cases of self-defense against immedi-
ate threat of bodily harm, is always morally wrong even when it is not contrary to right.
Fichte’s views about lifeboat and trolley problems, discussed earlier, are views about
morality; in his view, questions of right might be settled differently. What is contrary to
morality may be permitted by right. Fichte describes in some detail the right of self-
defense and duties of right involving aid to others who call upon our assistance
(NR 3:250–5). “There is no positive right to sacrifice the life of another to save my own,
but neither is it a violation of right to do so” (NR 3:253).
§8: The “Natural” Estate and the “Second Sex”

Sexual desire and the origin of love. Fichte’s vision of the fundamental equality of all
rational beings does not extend to the civil or economic equality of the sexes. Fichte’s
theory of family right is based on the idea that sexual intercourse involves the activity
of the male and the passivity of the female (SL 4:329). The “first sex” may have the satis-
faction of the sexual drive as an end, but it is shameful, degrading, and reprehensible
for the “second sex” to do so.22 “In its raw state, a woman’s sexual drive is the most
repugnant and disgusting thing that exists in nature” (SL 4:330).
“The female sexual drive must therefore appear in a different form—it must even
appear as a drive toward activity” (NR 3:306–8; cf. SL 4:329). It takes the form of a
self-sacrificing emotion, “freely making oneself into a means, on the basis of a noble,
natural drive, that of love” (NR 3:310). In love, “the woman is not in every sense a
means for the man’s end; she is the means for her own end, satisfying her heart”
(NR 3:311). Love comes into the world only through women; men must learn it from
the women in their lives. “Love, the noblest of all natural drives, is innate only to
women; it is only through women that love comes to exist among human beings”
(NR 3:310). In marriage, the male is to be superior, but at the same time, “the two as moral
beings are supposed to be equal. This is possible only because a completely new level, one
completely lacking in the first sex, was introduced into the second” (NR 3:308–9).
In Fichte, this idea may repel us, since it takes for granted the social superiority of
the male. It is inevitable, and surely at least in part correct, to view Fichte’s treatment
of women as a betrayal for half the human race of the basic insight of idealism: that
rational beings are not objects. For it seems that Fichte regards women as willing their
own objectification by men, their own secondary status among rational beings.
Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that Fichte clearly intends love to be some-
thing more than submission or willing self-objectification. If it is through women that
love comes into the world, then Fichte is also anticipating at this point an idea many
now associate with feminism: namely, that an “ethics of care” is important for our
humanity and also that it is the special contribution of women. As is true of many of
Fichte’s ideas, he holds this one in an extreme form. Because Fichte thinks of morality
as fundamentally selflessness, the woman’s “chastity of heart” is “the principle of all
her morality” (SL 4:330). Fichte even suggests that it is only love—woman’s unique
22
I am unable either to confirm or disconfirm the conjecture, which nevertheless seems to me likely
true, that Fichte is the source of the classic title of Beauvoir (2010 [1949]).
right 279
gift to the human species—that makes moral motivation and virtue possible at all
(NR 3:315). The fact that these ideas can be combined with quite objectionable views
about the status of women in society might perhaps make us think twice about cele-
brating an “ethics of care,” and especially about claiming it to be an unambiguously
feminist ideal.
The subjection of women. In theory, all rational beings are equal and none is to be
subject to any other. But Fichte argues that it is impossible, or at least unnatural, for a
woman to assert this equal right: “The concept of marriage entails the wife’s most lim-
itless subjection to the husband’s will, not because of juridical but because of moral
reasons” (NR 3:325). In marriage, the wife’s juridical personality is “annihilated.” In
return for her loving submission to him, the husband is supposed to feel such gratitude
that he seeks magnanimously to “discover all her wishes and to fulfill them as if they
were his own will” (NR 3:314). “The man must govern himself in accordance with the
will and slightest wish of this one woman so as to make her happy” (NR 3:316). But the
state ceases to regard the wife as a juridically distinct person. From the standpoint of
others (but not in relation to her), the wife’s property becomes the husband’s
(NR 3:326).
The rights of women. In some surprising ways, however, Fichte’s adventurous mind
opens up possibilities even here in relation to his own time. Fichte favors representa-
tive institutions and universal manhood suffrage. However, husbands should confer
with wives about how they vote. Moreover, if the husband chooses not to exercise his
vote, the wife should be entitled to cast his vote in his place. Also, unmarried women—
single women, widows, divorced women—should all have the right to vote, and be able
to exercise all the civil rights of male citizens (except eligibility themselves to hold pub-
lic office) (NR 3:348).
Fichte holds very strict, and to us sometimes absurd or offensive, views about sexual
morality. But he denies, almost without qualification, the right of the state to interfere
with people’s sexual behavior. Fichte’s extreme views about individual liberty have some
radical conclusions when it comes to the state’s right to criminalize behavior relating to
sex, especially the behavior of women. As we have already seen, the state may not legally
prohibit incest (NR 3:322–3), adultery, concubinage, or prostitution (NR 3:327, 331–2,
335). The only exceptions would be cases in which the woman is coerced into sexual
relations, and also the regulation of prostitution insofar as it is an economic activity—
since for Fichte all market exchanges put the rightful freedom of individuals at risk, and
therefore require strict state regulation (NR 3:334–5). Among the cases Fichte regards
as coerced sexual relations would be those in which parents compel a daughter to marry
a man she does not love; he thinks parents may compel a son to marry, but to compel a
daughter seems to him even worse than rape (NR 3:320–2).
Because a fetus is a part of a woman’s body, it is not a separate person. In Fichte’s
view, this even extends to a newborn child, which has against its mother no natural
right, even a right to life, that she can be coerced to fulfill (NR 3:356). Infanticide of a
newborn by an unwed mother, Fichte concludes, is not a violation of any natural right
the child has against her; the state may prohibit it only insofar as it has passed laws
requiring that children be brought up. The state may not treat maternal infanticide as
an act of murder (NR 3:361).23
“A child of his own time.” Fichte clearly endorses the subordination of women in family
and society as he saw it around him.24 Despite his social and political radicalism, this was
one respect in which Hegel’s saying applies to him: “Each individual is a child of his own
time . . . It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary
world as that an individual can overleap his own time or overleap Rhodes” (PR Preface).
At any given time, there are usually a few superior minds, marginalized in their own age,
who do know better. Regarding the role of women in society, for example, there were in
Fichte’s time, or even before, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Émilie du Châtelet,
Olympe de Gouge, Kant’s friend Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, and others. It does not
excuse Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, or Hegel, who saw less far, that they were children of their
time. Still less does it excuse us from having the historical sense to grasp that it was not as
easy for them as it now is for us to see that the fewer better minds were right and that the
dominant views were wrong. Their blindness should not be compared to that of those in
the present who continue to defend traditional errors in the context of a culture where
they have been clearly exposed. Our judgment of past thinkers, even as we condemn their
views, must always take this into account. We too are children of our own time, limited by
its perspective. History is not at an end. Our own thoughts no doubt need correcting every
bit as much as those of the past philosophers we now rightly condemn for their backward-
ness. We would display an absurd arrogance if we thought we could hope to correct them
without learning from those very philosophers we might foolishly scorn merely because
they were children of their own time, just as we are children of ours.
§9: Property and Economic Justice

Through his exceptional talents and tireless application, Fichte achieved a position of
academic and cultural prominence that was at least the equal of any of his contempo-
raries. But he was born into a condition of want and degradation, and never became
reconciled to any human being’s subjection to conditions of poverty. Fichte realizes
that vulnerability to servitude is inseparable from a condition of want. He regards it as
23
This is clearly a reaction to the alarmingly common occurrence in Fichte’s day that an unmarried
woman, seduced and abandoned, would bear a child, kill it to hide her shame, and then be prosecuted and
executed for murder, while the man went free. The monstrous injustice involved was noted even by Kant
(MS 6:336–7). It became the focus of the Gretchen story in Goethe’s Faust, Part One, and was later also
depicted by George Eliot in the novel Adam Bede.
24
According to Isabel Hull, the bourgeois radicalism of philosophers such as Fichte may even have
increased the oppression of women within the family. Hull (1996, pp. 299–332) discusses Fichte’s role in
developing the modern bourgeois conception of the family and the social role of women, along with Kant’s
and Hippel’s.
right 281
an elementary question of justice that no human being should ever be vulnerable to the
oppression of another.
The protection of property, especially private property, is crucial to most modern
theories of the state. Fichte’s is no exception. The right of private property was defended
as a necessary protection of the freedom of individuals. What makes Fichte’s theory
different from most others at this point is that he conceived the right of property as a
right safeguarding freedom of action, and also the freedom of all, not only the freedom
of the wealthy, who—he was fully aware—systematically use their property to deprive
others of freedom.
With the same ruthless consistency Fichte brings to every philosophical question,
his political theory is animated throughout by the conviction that it is the first respon-
sibility of the political state to protect each individual in the possession of an inde-
pendent life, secure and free of the threat of destitution, as the most elementary
demand of their right of private property.
We have seen that for Fichte, all rights refer to actions, never to things. The basis of
the right of property is the right of a person “to demand that in the entire region of the
world known to him everything should remain as he has known it, because in exercis-
ing his efficacy, he orients himself in accordance with his knowledge of the world”
(NR 3:116). As we will see presently, this refers above all to the person’s orientation in
regard to the laboring activities through which he produces the conditions of his con-
tinued survival and activity. The distribution of property depends on an “equilibrium
of right” that is the necessary condition of the civil–political contract (NR 3:120).
All property, according to Fichte, depends on the property contract, through which
people apportion their respective external spheres for free action. For each party to it,
“the object of the property contract is a particular activity” (NR 3:210). “Each person
possesses property in objects only insofar as he needs such property to pursue his
occupation” (NR 3:214). The fundamental action that belongs to the property of each
person is that through which the person can continue to live.
The end of all human activity is to be able to live; and based only on this possibility do all who
have been placed by nature into life, have an equal claim to right. Hence the division must first
be made so that all can subsist with it. Live and let live!
(GH 3:402)
For Fichte, the basic right of private property is a right to labor under conditions that
give you a free mode of life, a life suitable to a rational human being. It is the right to
einen festen Stand, a “secure estate” (SL 4:296). In late writings, Fichte also declares that
a person’s “absolute property” also includes a right to “free leisure for ends of your own
choosing” (SW 10:542).25 This was already his position in 1800:
It is not merely a pious wish for humanity, but rather it is an unremitting demand of its right
and its vocation, that humanity should live in just as easy, as free and as commanding a way
25
On Fichte and the right to leisure, see James (2011), p. 73, and James (2012).
over nature, that it should live just as genuinely human a life, as nature permits it. The human
being ought to labor; but not like a beast of burden, that sinks into sleep under its load, and
after only the most meager rest and recreation is roused again to bear the same load with his
exhausted powers. He ought to labor without anxiety, with pleasure and joy, and also retain
some time to raise his spirit and his eyes to heaven, for whose prospect he has been formed. He
should not eat with his beasts of burden; but should distinguish his food from their fodder and
his dwelling from their stall, just as the structure of his body is distinguished from the structure
of theirs. This is his right, just because he is a human being.
(GH 3:422–3)
The fundamental purpose of entering into the property contract is to acquire a suffi-
cient external sphere to perpetuate one’s free activity in the future, that is, to satisfy
one’s external needs (NR 3:212). Fichte infers that they only are parties to the property
contract who thereby acquire some property; but not only that—they must also have
enough property that they can live independently by what they own (NR 3:197–8,
210–12). The state’s fundamental responsibility for protecting the private property of
every citizen therefore charges the state with the requirement that it redistribute
property in such a way that no individual falls into destitution. Conversely, every citi-
zen must have an occupation, which is known to the state and which the state can
guarantee as a sufficient means of livelihood (NR 3:214).
Property rights, for Fichte as for Kant, depend on omnilateral consent, given
through the laws and judgments of the state. The condition of anyone’s rightful prop-
erty depends on everyone’s being able to consent to the distribution. From this Fichte
directly concludes that where anyone is in poverty, unable to live independently
through his own labor, the right of property for all is cancelled.
All property rights are grounded on the contract of all with all which says this: We all retain this
on the condition that we allow you what is yours. Thus as soon as someone cannot live from his
labor, that which is absolutely his is not being allowed him, and regarding him the contract is
cancelled completely, and he is not bound by right to recognize the property of any other
human being.
(NR 3:213)
The property from which one labors and lives counts as one’s absolute property. It
therefore lies outside the rightful jurisdiction of the state, and it is contrary to right for
the state to permit another person to appropriate it. This imposes on the state strict
requirements regarding the distribution, and re-distribution, of property. No individ-
ual may fall into destitution. Any social order in which there are poor people is an ille-
gitimate social order. Those who possess in such a condition have no right to what they
possess, but hold on to it by mere force, “by accident and violence,” without right
(GH 3:403). For a legitimate state to exist, everyone must have enough property to live
independently of others. For Fichte, as for Rousseau and Kant, all citizens of a state are
rightfully dependent on the whole, but none must be personally dependent on any
other. Every citizen must be sui iuris—one’s own master. Neither one’s body and life
right 283
nor the conditions of one’s life may be the property of another individual. Conversely,
every citizen must have an occupation known to the state that can guarantee a suffi-
cient means of livelihood (NR 3:212).
Fichte rejects the traditional claim of early modern political philosophy that it is the
state’s first responsibility to protect property. “I would say against this opinion that it is
the vocation of the state first to give to each what it is his own, first to install each into
his property, and only then to protect him in it.” (GH 3:399; cf. GH 3:403). Whoever
lacks the necessities of life has first claim on them:
If someone is unable to make a living from his labor, he has not been given what is absolutely
his, and therefore the contract is completely cancelled with respect to him, and from that
moment on he is no longer obligated by right to recognize anyone else’s property.26 Now in
order to prevent property rights from being destabilized in this way, all the others must (as a
matter of right and in consequence of the civil contract) relinquish a portion of their property
until he is able to live. As soon as someone suffers from need, that portion of the others’ prop-
erty that would be required to spare him from such need no longer belongs to those others;
rather, it rightfully belongs to the one in need. The civil contract must provide for such a repar-
titioning of property.
(NR 3:213; cf. GH 3:445–6)
First all must be well-fed and securely housed before any dwelling is decorated; first all must be
comfortably and warmly clothed before any can be dressed finely . . . It counts for nothing that
someone may say: “But I can pay for it.” For it is an injustice that anyone can pay for luxuries
while there are some of his fellow citizens who cannot acquire necessities or cannot pay for
them; that with which the former pays is not rightful property; in a rational state, it would not
be his.
(GH 3:409)
The economic structure of the rational state

The lower class (SL §33, GH 3:403–14)
Producers: Those who gain raw or natural products (GH 3:403–7)
Agriculturalists (NR §19 (A))
Miners (NR §19 (B))
Domesticators of animals (NR §19 (C))
Artisans: Laborers on raw or natural products (NR§19 (D))
Merchants: Facilitators of the exchange and delivery of goods (NR §19 (E))
The higher class (SL 4:343)
The teaching estate (GH 3:407)
26
This is plainly related to Fichte’s view that the existing order is not legitimate, but only a Notstaat. But
one might ask Fichte why the wealthy should be obliged to respect the rights of the poor if the poor are not
obliged to respect the property of the wealthy. Fichte does not consider this question explicitly, but I think
his answer would be that the wealthy need to represent themselves as possessing by right, while those who
possess nothing do not. Only those who presently get that to which they have a genuine right should be
committed to respect the rights of others, since only they need care whether the existing order is legitimate,
and are committed to will that it should be legitimate.
Scholars (SL §29)

Moral teachers of the people: clergy (SL §30)
Fine artists (SL §31)
State officials (SL §32, GH 3:405)
The military estate (GH 3:405, 407)
The lower class consists of the three estates that provide for the material needs of soci-
ety. As we observed in the previous chapter, Fichte makes no room within this “lower”
class for a privileged class of owners or managers, as distinct from those they employ
and who do the bulk of the work. He would certainly never see some wealthy proprie-
tary and managerial group as the real producers, and those employed by them as mere
“takers.” The higher class is so called because it exercises either coercive rule or cultural
(educational) influence over the rest of society. As we have seen, however, Fichte insists
that all citizens, simply as citizens, must be considered equal in status whatever their
estate. The estates belonging to the higher class are even said to exist for the sake of the
estates belonging to the lower class: “The members of the government, as well as the
estate of teachers and guardians, exist only for the sake of these first three estates”
(GH 3:405–6).
There is something in this last doctrine that is analogous to Rawls’ Difference
Principle, which holds that inequality in the distribution of primary goods can be justi-
fied only if it benefits the worst off. But instead of dealing with the distribution of pri-
mary goods, Fichte’s principle concerns the exercise of authority and influence that are
necessary for the existence of a rightful community. The principle has to do not with
goods but with freedom. It requires that those who exercise power over others should
always do it in a way that protects the freedom of those over whom the power is exer-
cised. We may see this as Fichte’s way of attempting to deal with the tension in his views
discussed at the end of the last chapter. I suggest that like Rawls’ Difference Principle, it
may ultimately be inadequate to that formidable task. I doubt that any specific principle
of equal distribution is defensible, but no principled way of defending inequalities, and
especially distinctions between a ruling and a ruled class, is defensible either.
Property contracts in the rational state. Property is to be regulated by contracts
between the three private estates: the producers, the artisans, and the merchants. The
producers bind themselves to gain sufficient products that they and the artisans can
live from them, and also that the artisans can have matter for their labor. The artisans
bind themselves reciprocally to provide the producers with manufactures. And both
these estates bind themselves to bring to the merchants those products that they them-
selves do not need for consumption; and the merchants bind themselves to distribute
products in accordance with prices that will make them available to the other two
estates (GH 3:404–6).
It is the responsibility of the government to enforce these contracts, and the govern-
ment must therefore have the power necessary to do so. It must limit the number of those
belonging to each estate, but it must also accept applications for estate membership
right 285
ithout restriction. There are to be no qualifications of birth or wealth attaching to estate

w
membership (GH 3:408). The state must be able to regulate the quantity of commodities
in circulation, and also set the prices of commodities (GH 3:411–18). Every citizen who
is able must be required to join an estate, each of us must work both for our own liveli-
hood and for the good of the whole. But equally, the state owes all citizens without excep-
tion an opportunity to work, to benefit themselves and others, to live freely and decently,
independently of the will of others, and to contribute to the common good.
How does Fichte’s theory relate to the institution of wage-labor, especially capitalist
wage-labor? There is no reason why one person, in Fichte’s rational state, could not
perform services for another in exchange for payment. This seems a private and volun-
tary matter. But each person’s estate consists in the opportunity and the resources
needed to earn a living through their contribution to the good of society, as regulated
by the various contracts between estates. A person’s estate even constitutes the
foundation of the person’s “absolute property”—of which neither a private individual
nor the state may rightfully deprive them. For this reason, one person’s estate could not
be the private property of another person. When private property takes the form of
private ownership over other people’s opportunities to labor and gain their living, then
it constitutes an assault on those people’s absolute property rather than a defense of
freedom. Under a system of capitalist wage labor, the estate of a worker has become the
private property of a capitalist. That would make the specifically capitalist form of
wage-labor fundamentally unjust.
In order to do justice for its citizens, the state must have ample resources to regulate
the economy and provide assistance to those in need. What states need to do justice for
their citizens generally exceeds what the citizens, particularly the wealthy and power-
ful citizens, will permit to be collected from them in taxes. If justice prevailed, the rich
would be forced to pay the state to take their wealth away from them.
The rational state . . . collects as much taxes as it needs. With the majority of actual states, one
will proceed very safely if one assumes that each will collect as much as it can. Nor can this be
held against them, since they are as a rule unable to collect as much as they need to accomplish
those purposes that, mostly for the want of this wealth, still remain to be accomplished.
(GH 3:459)
Fichte is especially hostile to practices which sacrifice economic stability and the public
good in order to enable a few ambitious risk-takers to profit at everyone else’s expense (as
happens under the present US financial system, with its periodic crises and banker-made
disasters, from which the state then rescues the bankers to their great advantage).
It delights them more to strive for things cunningly than to possess them securely. It is these
people who incessantly cry out for freedom—freedom of trade and acquisition, freedom from
supervision and policing, freedom from all order and morality . . . Such people must be repelled
at the very thought of an arrangement of public commerce in which swindling speculation,
accidental profits and sudden wealth would no longer occur.
(GH 3:511)
The closed state and the open society. Fichte advocates a market economy highly
regulated by the state to guarantee that every citizen’s labor should earn a livelihood.
Wages and prices must be subject to state control, and the state must guarantee that
there is never an oversupply of labor in any branch of production. Trade must always
be carried on within the state-regulated system and foreign trade must be carried on
through the state, not by private parties (hence the title of the treatise).
Fichte sees no inconsistency—on the contrary, he sees a mutual dependency—
between a self-inclosed and tightly self-regulating state economy and the promotion of
a cosmopolitan world community, grounded on free, rational communication and a
common human culture. “It is the vocation of our species to unite itself into one single
body, all of whose parts are known to one another and educated everywhere in a single
way” (BM 2:271). The state, while necessary for the foreseeable future, and even (in its
support of progressive education) an aid to human moral progress in the near future, is
fundamentally a coercive mechanism. It is therefore the wrong vehicle for promoting
the true human vocation. But the state can do justice among its citizens within each
limited territory, and these systems of justice, independently of one another, would
promote a world community. If each state were “closed” and self-sufficient economi-
cally, Fichte thinks this would even promote a cosmopolitan spirit:
There is not a single state on the face of the earth that would have the slightest interest in keep-
ing its discoveries from any other, since each will use these only for its own needs inside its
borders, and not to oppress other states and provide itself with superiority over them. Nothing,
consequently, will prevent the scholars and artists of all nations from entering into the freest
communication with one another.
(GH 3:512–13)
Fichte’s proposals: in his own time, and later times. Seen in their own historical
context, Fichte’s economic proposals clearly have reference to ideas emerging from the
French Revolution. Fichte’s aims include not only economic justice within the state,
but also a proposal that an international system in which states are economically inde-
pendent of one another is most conducive to keeping peace between them. It therefore
seeks to develop the ideas Kant had offered five years earlier in Toward Perpetual Peace
(1795). Recent literature is divided over the question whether they should be seen as
affiliated with the radical ideas of the communist Gracchus Babeuf, or instead with the
more moderate views of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès.27
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Fichte was viewed by some as a socialist.28
It is tempting to compare Fichte’s recommendations with the system that prevailed in
Eastern Europe for most of the past century. Those systems certainly bear a much
27
The argument for Fichte’s Babouvism is made by David James (2011), Chapter 2, pp. 57–82, while a
sustained and very broad-based historical argument for his affiliation with the position of Sieyès is
mounted by Nakhimovsky (2011).
28
For instance, Marianne Weber (1900). This comparison of Fichte’s “socialism” with Marxism was the
first book by this sociologist and women’s rights activist with socialist leanings—who was, of course, also
the wife of Max Weber.
right 287
closer resemblance to Fichte’s economic proposals than they do to anything one could
find in the writings of Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels.29
Before we let ourselves be carried away by such twentieth-century comparisons, we
should recall some features of the rational state that are just as necessary to it as its reg-
ulation of the economy:
(1) The state must not spy on citizens or inquire into their private business (no
Stasi, no KGB, also no FBI or NSA). The privacy of citizens in their own dom-
icile and making use of their absolute property must be sacrosanct. The state
must not interfere even with the most extreme forms of moral depravity, as
long as no violation of the rights of others is involved.
(2) The state must not infringe freedom of communication among the learned. It
must not impose dogmas or try to settle disputes in science or religion. It must
place no limits on the freedom to inquire or to challenge any opinion, however
“dangerous or terrible” such challenges may seem (SL 4:251). The foundation
of every rational society is freedom of rational communication. A well-edu-
cated and freely communicating citizenry is the only true protection against
abuses of governmental power.
(3) The ideal form of government for a state would be a representative republic (or
a “democracy in the narrower sense”). Any other form is legitimate only inso-
far as it makes possible progress toward that. Since all existing states are obvi-
ously and flagrantly unjust, any conservative state—one that aims at preserving
everything as it is—lacks legitimacy (SL 4:361).
(4) The right of emigration and immigration is absolute—no Berlin Wall, or Iron
Curtain, but also no US border patrol or Immigration and Naturalization
Service—unless its sole function were to welcome immigrants and secure
them work and a free estate in their new and freely self-chosen homeland.30
(5) If we are still tempted to describe the rational state as “socialist,” we must also
contend with the fact that Fichte’s state-regulated market economy exists solely
in order to secure all citizens their rightful private property.
If Fichte’s philosophy exercised a powerful influence on Eastern European socialism,
then it was at most only partial, largely unacknowledged, and now largely unappreci-
ated. That has been the fate of Fichte’s philosophy more generally. What should we
make of this fact? In the Postscript, I will briefly reflect on that question.
29
Along with Kant, however, Fichte was referred to obliquely by Hegel as “antisocialistic” due to his
emphasis on individual rights (WNR 2:454/70). Hegel actually says that Kant and Fichte go beyond even
those who are called “antisocialistic” because their view “posits the being of the individual as the primary
and supreme thing.” As this shows, the term “socialistic” (and its opposite) had other connotations in 1802
than those they were later to acquire.
30
Convicted murderers are apparently the only exception to the absolute natural right to live wherever
you choose. But this is not really an exception, because murderers by their crime have chosen not to be
members of that community.
The chief obstacle to justice in Europe is European world domination. Certainly

the direction that the world economy has taken has made impossible, for any future we
can now imagine, the Fichtean idea of a “closed commercial state”—a political state
that is economically self-sufficient and trades with others only on a state-to-state basis.
But it is worth noting that Fichte himself knew already that what he was proposing in
the Closed Commercial State is something European states in his time would never
accept.
Fichte’s reason for thinking this is significant:
The ground of this unwillingness, whether thought distinctly or indistinctly, [is] that Europe has
a great advantage in commerce over other parts of the world . . . that every individual European
state, however unfavorable its balance of commerce stands in reference to the other European
states, nevertheless draws advantages from this common exploitation of the rest of the
world, . . . and it would obviously have to abstain from this advantage if it exited from the greater
European society of commerce. In order to remove the ground of this unwillingness, it must be
shown that a relation like that of Europe to the rest of the world, which is not grounded on right
or equity, cannot possibly last.
(GH 3:392–3)
In short, Fichte does not expect European states to listen to him because if they pur-
sued the course prescribed by right, they could no longer colonize, exploit, and enslave
non-European peoples. Fichte obviously thought that European dominance over the
rest of the world was not only wrongful in its treatment of non-Europeans but also
unjust for Europeans themselves. (We might reflect on the possible parallel connection
between the often bloody and unjust pax Americana that has ruled the world for much
of the past century and the internal oppression, both economic and political, exercised
in the United States by capitalism and plutocracy.)
Fichte also thought that European world dominance had to be only temporary, since
no region of the earth can expect forever to treat the inhabitants of other regions as
slaves. To that thought he expects the following reaction:
Even after this proof is presented, someone could always say: “This relation has at least lasted
until now—there lasts the subjection of the colonies to their motherlands, the slave trade
lasts [so] let us draw advantages from it, so long as it holds . . . we cannot even will your end,
and so we need no advice about how to carry out the means to it.” I confess I have no answer
to this.
(GH 3:392–3)
“Thus [says Fichte] the reproach that the suggestions the speculative politician has
made from time immemorial cannot be immediately executed, is conceded”
(GH 3:389–90). Fichte’s aim, however, was never to make suggestions that would
necessarily be immediately practical politically. To devise the policies that are to be
pursued right now is the task of the politician, not the philosopher. The philosophi-
cal task is only to determine what right requires. Fichte adds, however, that the
philosopher
right 289
will never concede or presuppose the absolute impossibility of executing his suggestions. He
will assert that his prescriptions, even if they cannot be executed immediately and are set up
only purely theoretically, because in their highest universality they fit everything, and just for
this reason fit nothing determinate.
(GH 3:390)
It is a time-worn objection that progressive ideas are “incompatible with human

nature.” Fichte was well aware of this line of objection:
The situation is the same [wherever] one speaks of the technical and practical aspects of
executing what is demanded by pure reason; and the proposition “we are not able to do this”
always means the same thing . . . “These proposals cannot be carried out”—meaning, of course,
they cannot be carried out if the old abuses remain in place. But who says the latter are always
to remain?
(SL 4:197–8)
Fichte condemns in the harshest terms those who repudiate his end merely because
they benefit from the injustice. He might also condemn, though with less harshness,
the inertia and cowardice of those who let themselves be oppressed and wronged. We
have an ethical duty, he might say, to resist oppression, to be unwilling both to accept
an unfree mode of life and to reject the rationalizations of it offered by their oppressors.
We must not be unwilling to make the effort to think beyond the injustices of the pres-
ent, and we must be willing in the long run to make the sacrifices necessary to liberate
our children, and our children’s children.31
31
On the duty to resist oppression, see Hay (2013), especially Chapter 4, pp. 117–57.
Postscript
This book has argued, whenever the opportunity presented itself, that Fichte is the
philosopher who has had the greatest influence on the continental tradition in the past
two centuries. It is not inconsistent with this to claim that Fichte’s philosophy has been
an object of unjust neglect. Fichte’s ethics, in particular, is not widely discussed; even
its historical importance is not properly appreciated. Some of Fichte’s ideas are still
current, even if his authorship of them remains unacknowledged.
Some ideas commonly associated with Kant are really Fichtean ideas that are not
actually present in Kant. One is that the moral principle is something we humans actu-
ally legislate for ourselves. Another is usually presented as a criticism of Kantian ethics:
that Kant’s moral principle—especially in his formulas of universal law and law of
nature—is purely formal and cannot offer us a criterion of right and wrong. For Fichte
this was only an observation intended to guide us as to the proper role of the moral
principle. Fichte was also the originator of the ideas, now associated with Hegel, that
personal morality exists only in the context of a rational social order, and that a free life
in such an order must provide for a system of “estates” in which all individuals may
participate. Also still prominent in our moral thinking is the existentialist idea that an
individual’s ethical duties must reflect that individual’s authentic selfhood, arising out
of conscientious reflection on the individual’s situation. Fichte also brought into prom-
inence embodiment and intersubjectivity as conditions of knowledge and action, and
that the search for ethical truth is an open-ended collective work in progress, to be
carried out through free, rational communication. When these ideas are now dis-
cussed, Fichte’s name is almost never mentioned.
I have tried to present Fichte’s ethics sympathetically, but I have also not spared it
from criticism. Fichte’s economic proposals, whatever their merits, can surely never be
executed in anything like the form he made them. Fichte’s views of women, while con-
taining moments of insight, are deeply objectionable in obvious ways. His conception
of the rational society tolerates, at least for the near future, a division of society into
“higher” (intellectual) and “lower” (laboring) classes. Aspects of Fichte’s modernist
religion remain obscure and intellectually evasive. Fichte over-moralized the concep-
tion of an authentic human life—or alternatively, expanded the scope of morality in a
Romantic or existentialist direction. In Fichte himself, this moralism went with a
self-righteous and scolding attitude toward his audience, which displays clearly the
tragic flaw in his own personality. Even with its flaws, Fichte’s ethics is a powerful
292 Postscript
expression of Enlightenment culture. It also anticipates later cultural movements:

German Romanticism, Marxist socialism, existentialism. Fragments of it haunt our
culture, but the whole represents a road not taken.
Some philosophers, such as Hegel, have been tempted to believe in the inevitable
rationality of human history. Fichte may have done so as well. Such people should
be constantly reminded that in any area of human life—in politics and economics,
certainly, but also in natural science, in philosophy, and even in the history of
philosophy—the best roads may always be among those that were never taken.

Would the community of philosophers have done better to consider Fichte, rather

than Kant, Hegel, or someone else, the most important philosopher of the past two
centuries? We will never know.
Many roads not yet taken may still be open, however, and it is up to us to find them.
This is where Fichte’s thought might help us, if we are prepared to consider it more
seriously than we have so far. Fichte’s conceptions of the rational state, the rational
society, the moral striving of individuals, and of social reason, toward absolute inde-
pendence or self-sufficiency—these may still describe worthwhile ends which we may
still pursue, perhaps by means not yet invented.
Fichte knew that the social order around him was fundamentally irrational,
depraved, and illegitmate. He was living, as he put it, in an epoch of completed sinful-
ness. We may not share his theological language, but today anyone with eyes to see
knows that our present social system deforms our humanity. The road we have taken is
a wrong road. Our social order excludes the vast majority from a fulfilling mode of life,
or even a free life. It leaves those who labor in servitude to those who own and manage.
They are told by the dominant propaganda that they are free, even tell themselves they
are free, and believe they are free. Rousseau said that those who believe themselves the
masters of others are greater slaves than they; but to this thought we must now add that
for those in our world who believe they are free, this belief is among the heaviest and
most degrading chains they wear. It is not only to the oppressed that our society does a
terrible injustice. It treats even the oppressors unjustly, since everyone deserves to live
in a world in which all are free and, as Fichte formulated it, you cannot work for yourself
without also working for others, or work for others without also working for yourself.
It remains an open question how to bring ourselves closer to that kind of world
before humanity exterminates itself through its unwise choices, rejecting every possi-
bility afforded human beings through their finite freedom, forever renouncing every-
one’s afterlife, and closing off with finality all the better roads that have never been
taken. I have related Fichte’s views about the human future to arguments found in
Scheffler (2013). In work still in progress, Scheffler argues that even as we have tried to
become less parochial in our view of the world considered culturally and geographi-
cally, we have become more parochial temporally, failing to reflect on our relationships
to the human past and human future. In many earlier and non-Western cultures, it
has been vital to think about the relation of those now living both to ancestors and
to descendants. For us, of course, it is just as well that we engage neither in the
Postscript 293
a ncestor-worship found in these cultures nor in their sometimes obsessive identifica-

tion with the success of direct biological progeny. Modern enlightenment culture can
learn from tradition without venerating it, and care about future generations so that
they have a richer, freer, and more communal life than we have. Providing for the
human future should not be seen as a moral burden imposing deprivations on us, since
it is what gives our own lives the only true meaning and value they can ever have. But
do we even know how to think in this way about ourselves, our lives, and the human
future? It may be vital to humanity’s even having a future that we learn how.
I have argued that this was an important theme in Fichte’s philosophy; it even lies at
the heart of his modernist, humanist re-interpretation of traditional religious ideas
about God and the afterlife. Those who appropriate Fichte’s philosophy—whether or
not they realize they are doing so—may be able to think better about all these ques-
tions, and find better answers to them. To the extent that this occurs, they will prove
Hegel at least partly wrong. They will bring it about that Fichte did after all manage to
overleap Rhodes. Although all human beings are children of their own time, those
who preceded us can always overleap Rhodes by sharing in their afterlife, which we are
still living. We ourselves too, though children of our own time, can overleap Rhodes by
helping to create a better afterlife that others may live after we are gone.
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Index
abstraction: anti-realism 84–5, 134

from acting 126–7, 145, 238 anti-semitism 27n27
antimoralism and 107 Antony, Louise 218n4
dogmatism and 38, 41, 57, 82 Apel, Karl Otto 212, 225
freedom of 197 Aphorisms on Religion and Deism (Fichte) 4–5,
of I 9, 38, 52–6, 57, 58–9, 99, 117 7–8, 18, 37, 65
philosophy and 37–40, 43–4, 45, 57, 144 apperception (Kant) 50–1, 53, 54, 56–8, 59, 67,
willing and 114–15 86, 119, 145
see also synthetic method; thing in itself; appraiser values 191
transcendental deductions “appropriate” (gebühre) 120, 121
academic freedom 20, 22, 24, 217n3, 218, 247 approval 155, 162–3
accountability 73, 74–5, 83, 169 a priority 50, 86, 87, 108n4, 214
see also blame; responsibility Aquinas, Thomas 163n14
Achelis, H.N. 66 Arendt, Hannah x
acting (action) (agency): aristocracy 273
abstraction from 126–7, 145, 238 Aristotle x, 232, 248
intellectual intuition and 58–9, 120 arrogance 41, 229, 236, 280
intersubjectivity and 49, 85–7, 93–9, 201 arts and artists 13, 239, 258
as manifold 189–90 atheism 216
normativity and 68, 126–7, 173n1, 197 atheism controversy 17–22, 23, 24, 36,
rights to 266 249–50
transcendental conditions of 135 Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Fichte)
see also bodies and embodiment; xi, 6, 7, 8n3, 9, 18, 20, 62n28, 86n13
determination; ends; freedom, formal/ Attempt at a New Presentation of the Doctrine of
material; self-activity Science (Fichte) 30, 46
Addresses to the German Nation (Fichte) 24, Audi, Robert 163n14
25–6, 245, 252, 253, 268, 277 Aufforderung, see summons
adultery 276, 279 authenticity 105, 125, 152, 183, 184, 193, 194,
Aenesidemus, Fichte’s review of 8–9, 18, 30 242, 291
aesthetics 14–15, 16, 25, 37, 45, 89, 146, authority, traditional 19, 23, 45, 146, 186
155, 250 see also parents; religion; state
“afterlife” (Scheffler) xii, 101, 223–4, 225, 233, autonomy, see self-legislation
234, 247–9, 253, 270, 289, 292–3
agape 151 Babeuf, Gracchus 286
agility (Agilität) 59–60, 114, 119–20, 122n11 Baggesen, Jens 66
Allison, Henry 38n10 Baron, Marcia 191n4
Altizer, Thomas 19n18 Baumanns, Peter 34, 138, 173n1, 208n14
Ameriks, Karl 29n1 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 236, 237, 238
analytic procedures 63 Beauvoir, Simone de ix, x, xii, 41, 152, 278n22
Anderson, R. 152 see also existentialist tradition
Anerkennung, see recognition Beck, Gunnar 258n7
animals 67, 142n7, 237, 267, 268 “Become who you are” 184
see also natural world being, see reality; thing in itself
Anmutung (expectation) 260–1 beneficence 126–7, 222
Annas, Julia 232n8 Berkeley, George 32, 54, 60, 84, 107
annoyance 155 Berlin Wall 256, 287
Anscombe, Elizabeth 124n12 Bernstein, Alyssa xiv
anti-elitism, Fichte’s 246–7, 253 Bestimmung, see vocation
antimoralism 107–8 Bild (image) 36
antinomies 61–2, 66 Bird-Pollan, Stefan 108n4
see also transcendental deductions Blackburn, Simon 107n1
304 index
blame 72n5, 73, 74–5, 122, 145n8, 167, 169–70, chance (contingency) 68, 78–9, 81, 97, 113, 116,
171, 190–1, 239 122, 161, 240
see also accountability; responsibility charity 222
bodies and embodiment: children 268
acting and 39, 67, 69, 87, 140–3 Chisholm, Roderick xiii
antinomies of 178–9 Chomsky, Noam 219n5
deduction of 87–8 church 214, 215–16, 217, 224
duties concerning 178, 185, 186–8 see also religion
as Fichte’s concept 49, 291 class (Klasse) 239, 242, 244–7, 248, 253,
persons as ends in themselves and 229 283–4, 291
recognition and 263 clergy 217, 237, 239, 284
right and 266, 275, 282–3 climate disruption 42, 250
summons and 95 Closed Commercial State (Fichte) 23, 244, 255,
unconscious aspect of 142n6 274, 286–8
world as 177–9 clothing 96, 268, 283
see also desires; disembodied I; drives; Code, Lorraine 218n4
material things coercion:
Boétie, Étienne de la 42 in accordance with own will 265–6
Breazeale, Daniel xiii, xiv, 30nn3, 4, 38n11, antinomies and 270–1
40n13, 57n23, 58n25, 60n26, 86n13, duties and 105, 258
159n13, 160, 163n14, 200n11 education/parents and 268
Brecht, Bertolt 27, 233, 235–6, 239 higher class and 284
Butler, Joseph 233n9 legislation/state and 124, 141n3, 214,
240, 241
Campbell, Eric 107n2, 109n6 morality and 276, 277
capitalism 239, 253, 285, 288 promotion of morality and 170
categorical imperative: right of 263, 264–5
categorical desires and 104–5, 193 sexuality/parenthood and 279–80
consciousness and 58 summons and 92, 95–6, 260–1
described 103, 120, 121, 137 unanimity and 251
drives to form 133n20, 154–5, 157 universal freedom and 227, 255, 258, 259,
ends and 120, 127–8, 150, 175 263, 264–5, 271
intersubjectivity and 200–1 vocation and 2, 58, 254, 258n7, 286
see also moral authority; moral principle; see also punishment
self-sufficiency cogito (I think) 49–50, 51
categorical imperative (CI) (Kant) 102, 103, cognition (Erkenntnis):
106, 107–8, 150, 198, 244 antinomy of 143–4
categories of quality/relation (Kant) 178–9, conviction versus 163
185–6, 187–8, 195, 199, 202 dogmatism and 76
causality: duties and 178, 185, 194–200
consciousness and 53n20, 57, 60–1, 72, embodiment and 140–2
80, 85 feelings and 130, 155, 162
deduction of 63, 140 Fichte versus Kant on 55, 56–7, 59, 60, 85–6
drives and 118, 144 freedom and 84–5, 139, 143, 199
duties of 178, 185–6 objectivity and 87, 89, 90, 130, 139
intersubjectivity and 82, 86, 93–6, 98, 140 practical interest and 194–200
material freedom versus 147–8 reason and 214
normative necessity versus 120, 135, 138–9 see also I’s active relation to not-I; ordinary
practical versus transcendental freedom standpoint; subject/object synthesis;
(Kant) and 66–8 theoretical reason; thing in itself
self-determination versus 113, 115–16, Cohen, Joshua 218n4
122, 140 coherence 35–6, 47–8, 57, 63, 197
see also chance; coercion; determinism; collectivism 101
dogmatism; empirical approaches; colonialism 288
naturalism; necessitarianism; willing common sense, see ordinary standpoint
certainty 46–7, 78–9, 157–68, 196 common will 216, 224, 225, 270
see also conscience see also universal rational agreement
index 305
communication: defined 155, 158

antinomy of 216–17 duties and 64, 137–8, 157, 160, 193
causality versus 97–8 feeling and 106, 154–5, 158, 160, 161, 163,
conviction and 258 166, 196
duties and 64, 186, 199, 212, 213, 243 metaethics and 135
Enlightenment and 23 moral law and 103, 124–5
estates and 245–6 moral philosophy and 173
Fichte’s anti-elitism and 253 ordinary standpoint and 124–5, 137–8
Fichte’s behavior and 171 risk and 167n16
as Fichte’s concept 291 scientific ethics versus 244
freedom and 217–19, 221 state and 216
identity and 184 theoretical judgment and 157–61, 167
intelligible world and 212n2 see also duties
Kant on 85–6, 212–14 consciousness:
objectivity and 208–9 categorical imperative and 58
philosophy and 174 causality and 53n20, 57, 60–1, 72, 80, 85
promotion of morality and 170, 176, 215, 220 drives and 118
reason and 161, 200, 201n12, 212–14 freedom and 30, 53, 59, 84
right and 267 Marx on 238
scholars and 223 possibility of 131n16, 132
unanimity and 205, 206, 207, 208, 211 principle of (Reinhold) 46
world community and 286 self-consciousness and 56, 110, 111
see also learned public; scholars; summons; subject/object synthesis and 46, 89, 112–14
universal rational agreement transcendental conditions and 34, 39, 44, 96,
community of rational beings (moral realm): 133–4
deduction of 99n22 see also apperception; experience; I; ordinary
duties and 238, 240 standpoint; practical reason; self-
as end in itself 230–1, 240, 243 consciousness; theoretical reason
in Fichte’s later thought 37n9 consent 204–5, 270–1, 273
freedom and 201, 251 consequentialist interpretations 64, 148–51,
happiness and 233–4 152, 174–9, 186, 190, 224–5, 228–9, 240,
right/ethics separation and 256–9 242, 244
social drive and 98 see also happiness; utilitarians
state and 253, 270–1 conservatism 41, 42, 270, 287
as supersensible 249 Constant, Benjamin 243
see also intelligible world; intersubjectivity; constraints:
realm of ends; reciprocity; society; striving; categorical desires versus 104–5
universal rational agreement freedom and 87–8, 121–2
community of right 266–7, 269, 272, 277, 284 moral law as 66–7
compatibilism 73, 83–5, 122, 250 self-determination and 122
see also naturalism summons as 92–3
complacency 6, 200 see also coercion; limitation
conatus 63n30, 115n7, 130 contempt 155, 229
see also striving see also self-contempt
“the concept” 36–7 contentment 155
“concept of a concept” 95 contingency (chance) 68, 78–9, 81, 97, 113, 116,
concepts 59 122, 161, 240
see also abstraction; cognition; direction of fit; contracts, civil-political 269–72, 275, 276–8,
ends; I; practical reason; theoretical reason; 281–5
transcendental deductions see also property and property rights
Concerning the Concept of a Doctrine of Science contractualism 8, 204–5, 270
(Fichte) 9, 10, 30, 46–7 conviction (Überzeugung):
condition (Zustand) (Kant) 232 antinomy of 216–17
conscience (conscientious convictions): communication and 216, 258
application of moral principle and 101 conflicting 211–12
certainty of 161–8 described 157
deduction of 138, 158–9 existence preceding essence and 79
306 index
conviction (Überzeugung): (cont.) dialogical approach 52

Fichte’s 101 difference 62
of freedom 69, 71–8, 80–1, 83, 196–7 dignity x, 41, 42, 73, 81, 147, 151, 170, 207, 226,
practical/theoretical character of 196–8 228, 229, 239
reasons versus 163 direction of fit 58–9, 89, 111, 116–17, 126–8,
unanimity and 205, 224 134, 138–9
see also conscience see also representations
convincing others 212 Direction to the Blessed Life, or the Doctrine of
coordination 98, 206–7, 220 Religion (Fichte) 23, 252
corporations 219, 235n11, 239, 253 disapproval 155
cowardice 152, 168, 199–200, 289 discourse ethics 212
crimes 276–8, 279 disembodied I 67, 87, 140–1
cult of reason 15, 249 see also bodies and embodiment; supernatural
culture 25, 106, 107, 151 metaphysics
disgust 170
Darwall, Stephen 200n11, 264n12 dishonesty 199
the dead 266 distinction/divisibility 62
see also killing and murder Doctrine of Religion (Fichte) 250
“death of God” theology 19n18 Doctrine of Science (Wissenschaftslehre):
death penalty 240, 277 background 9, 10, 12–13, 29–30
deception, see illusion; lying; self-deception epistemology of 45–50
defamation 229 first principles of 30, 46–51, 55
deliberation (Deliberieren) 93n18 Jena period versus later 22–4, 36–7, 71, 77n9,
demanding (Fordern) 154, 262–3 194n6
democracy 253, 273, 287 overviews 51–2, 64
denial 106 see also faith; finding oneself as will;
deontological interpretations 149, 150, 178, self-activity; synthetic method; System of
186, 190, 225, 244 Ethics (Fichte); System of Right (Fichte);
dependency 221–2, 235, 235n11, 281, 285 transcendental philosophy and
Descartes, René 49–50, 51, 60, 83, 140–1, transcendental standpoint
163n14 dogmatism:
see also disembodied I absolute I and 34n8
desires (impulses) (inclinations): abstraction and 38, 41, 57, 82
categorical 104–5, 193 causality and 41–2, 45, 53n20
defined 144–5 common sense and 38n11, 39, 40,
determination and 187 43–4, 107n1
drives and 118, 133n20, 144–5, 146–7 contemporary 69
duties and 186 empirical science and 40, 42
freedom and 70, 105 freedom and 5, 38, 40, 45, 70–3, 76, 82–5,
moral law versus 62n28 135, 139
motivations and 130 illusion and 38, 41, 45, 53n20, 70–1, 73, 76
reasons and 94, 106, 107n1, 130 metaethics and 131, 132, 135
unfreedom and 69 morality and 39n11, 40–3, 53n20, 70, 72nn5,
see also drives; enjoyment; subjectivism 6, 73, 77, 133, 188
despotism 273, 274 objectification and 68–9, 76, 84
detachment versus impartiality 152 oppression and 235
determination (determinacy) 62, 64, 67–70, religion and 249–50
77–82, 93n18, 100, 114–15, 118, 120, 190 self-deception and 70–2, 107n1, 109, 129n15
see also agility; causality; duties; ends; summons and 53, 75–6
indeterminacy; moral law, application of; transcendental standpoint versus 36, 37–45,
moral principle, application of; objectivity; 71–3, 75–7, 83
schematisms; self-determination wavering of imagination and 78
determinism 4, 68–9, 73, 80–1 wealth and 235
see also causality; necessitarianism see also determinism; metaphysics;
De Witt brothers 74n7 naturalism; necessitarianism; realism;
dialectical method xii, 7, 63n29 Spinoza, Baruch; thing in itself
see also synthetic method domiciles 275–6
index 307
doxastic voluntarism 163n14, 165 Dworkin, Ronald 131n16, 235n12, 248,

drives: 250n20
deduction of 143
defined 118, 143–4 economic systems 244, 253, 254, 279,
ethical 106, 108n4, 156–7, 162, 173n1, 285–6, 291
187–8, 203 education 25, 26, 96–9, 100, 176, 200, 201,
feeling and 106, 118, 119, 144, 147 245–7, 253, 268, 277
to form categorical imperative 133n20 see also Addresses to the German Nation
for freedom 105, 147, 253 (Fichte); indoctrination; state
natural 75, 105, 143–8, 155, 156–7, 176, 186–8 elections 273, 279
necessity and 118, 144 Elementarphilosophie 8
original (fundamental) (proto) 108n4, 154, Eliot, George 280n23
157, 182, 187 elitism/anti-elitism 246–7, 253
pure 143–8, 154–7, 175, 187 emigration 256, 273, 287
recursive ends and 182 emotions 74, 108, 258, 278
reflection and 145–7, 154 see also feeling
social 219–20, 221 empirical approaches 36, 39, 40, 42, 109,
tendency versus 115, 118 129, 213
for whole I 64, 105, 118–21, 145, 220 see also causality; material things
see also desires; harmony; self-determination; ends (Zweck):
self-sufficiency categorical imperative and 120, 150
duties: deduction of 87–91
Aphorisms and 65 determination of commandments and 149
communication and 211–12, 214, 217 final human 182–3, 223–6
conscientious conviction and 64, 137–8, indifferent actions and 189–90
157, 160 intersubjectivity and 100, 119, 199, 202–3,
consequentialism and 173–4, 186 204–5, 220
deductions of 64, 178–9, 185–8 moral authority and 102–3, 109n6, 126,
Fichte’s concept overturned 65 127–8
freedom and 66, 73, 193, 194, 197, 201 morality and 104, 105, 173
happiness and 231, 233–4 normativity and 109n6, 149
Hegel on 238 objects and 88, 89, 95, 98, 182
intersubjectivity and 178, 185, 186, 200–9, practical reason and 150–1
212, 238 of reason 153, 223–6, 228
Kant on 103, 150, 185–6, 189, 199, 208n14, recursive 179–84, 203
236–7, 239, 243, 264, 265n14 summons and 93
Kierkegaard on 192–3 willing and 111, 117
material duty of belief 163–4, 165, 197 see also direction of fit; drives; happiness;
morality and 125 means-ends relations; project; realm of
objectivity and 126, 208, 214, 217 ends; reasons; self-sufficiency; striving;
to oneself 236, 237–8 tendency; universal rational agreement;
permissible actions and 173n1, 231 vocation
promotion of morality and 171 ends in themselves, rational beings as 123,
of right 257, 278 131n18, 204, 220–5, 229, 231, 240, 255
rights and 257, 265n14 see also moral law, tools of
for the sake of duty 176 Engels, Friedrich 6, 42, 287
specific 185–209 enjoyment (Genuß) 145, 154, 155, 176, 186–8,
to strive for meaningful life 248 189, 232
taxonomy of 236–9 enlightenment 213, 246
to be tools of moral law 225, 226–8 Enlightenment 10, 23, 108n5, 208, 218,
ubiquity and 173 292, 293
unanimity as 213–14 entwerfen, see project
to unite in state 216 ephorate 273–5
universal/particular 238, 239–40 Epicurus 83–4
wide 103, 189, 191–2 equality 66, 220–3, 253
see also coercion; cognition; conscience; see also gender; women
moral law, content of; situationality Erkenntnis, see cognition
308 index
Erziehung (upbringing) 96–9, 100, 200, 201, later years and death 24–8
268, 280 life of x–xii, 1–17
essence, see Existence precedes essence; nature moral behavior of 74n7, 171, 235, 238,
of I 244, 291
estate (Stand) 151, 226, 234, 244–8, 278–85, 291 see also Doctrine of Science (Wissenschaftslehre)
see also labor (lower estate) “finding oneself ” 93
Estlund, David 218n4 finding oneself as will 110–14, 131n16
eternal life 248, 249, 250 “fitting” (gehöre) 120, 121
eternal/temporal goods 247–8, 250 Fletcher, Joseph 151
ethical life (Sittlichkeit) (Hegel) 238 Føllesdal, Dagfinn xiii, 33n7
ethical obligations 241 Foot, Philippa 107n1
ethical vocation 150 Forberg, Friedrich Karl 17–18, 19
see also self-sufficiency Fordern (demanding) 154, 262–3
Ethica philosophica (Baumgarten) 236 Förster, Eckart 21n23, 63n31
ethics, see morality; right Foundation (1794) (Fichte) 77, 181
Ethics (1812) (Fichte) 37n9 foundationalism 47, 48
Ethics (Spinoza) 81 Foundation of Natural Right (Fichte), see right
ethics of care 278–9 Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science
“ethics of responsibility” 255 (Fichte) 10, 12, 18, 30, 46, 87, 138
European states 288 Frank, Manfred 14n13
evidentialism 195–200 Franks, Paul W. 29nn1, 2
evil 98–9, 145n8, 155, 166, 168–71, 176, freedom:
182, 254 absolute 59, 65–71, 73, 74, 75–6, 80–1, 114
see also vices conviction of 69, 71–8, 83, 196–7
evolutionary advantages 106–7, 109 deduction of 64
Existence precedes essence (Sartre) 69, 79, external 73, 92n17, 96, 138, 142, 202, 215,
115–16 254, 258, 259–67 (see also right)
see also “Become who you are” illusion of 72, 74, 75–6, 80–1, 114, 197
existentialist tradition ix–x, 33, 39–40, 126, 140, moral progress and 6
141, 152, 194, 291 practical 66–7
see also Kierkegaard, Søren and other for the sake of freedom 127, 147, 150,
existentialists 157, 174
expectation (Anmutung) 260–1 subjective/objective 39–40
experience 35, 43, 44, 47, 50–1, 55, 58, 59, 64, see also cognition; dogmatism;
81, 111 intersubjectivity; moral law; necessity;
see also consciousness; I, absolute; self-activity; theoretical reason; willing
self-consciousness freedom, formal/material:
external things, see material things authenticity and 152
causal necessity versus 75
faculty (Vermögen) 116–17 deductions of 156
Fahrenbach, Helmut 192n5 definitions 70n4, 147, 174
faith 40, 71–3, 75–7, 83, 195, 197–8, see instead described 70–1, 147–54
religion desires and 186
family 238, 244, 278, 280 drives and 144, 145–6, 154, 155, 157
Fanon, Frantz 108n4 intersubjectivity and 226, 229, 260
feeling (Gefühl) 4–5, 14, 69, 94, 106, 140 moral law and 66–7, 74, 75, 121, 122–3
see also aesthetics; conscience; drives; see also imagination, wavering of;
emotions; harmony and other feelings responsibility; self-sufficiency
feminist epistemology 218n4 freedom of speech/press 215, 217, 266
Feuerbach, Ludwig ix, 18 freedom of thought 266
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: freedom of religious thought 20
Berlin period 22–4, 253 freedom of thought 7, 250
as child of own time 280, 293 French Revolution 3, 7, 8, 15, 16, 19, 216,
described 11, 16–17 255, 286
historical influence of 22, 26, 291, 292 see also right of revolution
Jena period 9–15, 29, 36–7, 57n23, 253, 254, Freud, Sigmund and psychoanalytic theory
255–6, 258 107–8, 118, 183
index 309
Fricker, Miranda 218n4 on conflict of convictions 211n1

Fries, Jacob Friedrich 21, 166 on conscientious conviction 166–8
Fuchs, Erich 26 ethical life of 238
functionalism 84 Fichtean ideas associated with ix–x, xii, 12,
Fundamental Characteristics of the Present Age 108, 291
(Fichte) 23, 146, 252 on Fichte on state 252
on Fichte’s antisocialistic view 287n29
Garner, Richard 107n2 Fichte’s life and 13, 14, 27
Gefühl, see feeling on Fichte’s “self-sufficiency” 150n10
gehöre (“fitting”) 120, 121 on individuality 262n9
gelehrtes Publikum (learned public) 213, intersubjectivity of reason and 201n12
215–19, 224 Jena and 21
gender 26, 245, 246–7, 268, 280n23 master-servant dialectic of 267
see also women Niethammer and 17n17
Genuß, see enjoyment on physiognomy 268n18
German nationalism 25–6, 27n27, 252 on punishment 276
Gessellschaft, see society on rationality of history 292
Gibbard, Allan 107n1 synthetic methods and xii, 7, 55, 63n29
Gibson, James J. 142n5 see also idealism, objective
Gliwitzky, Hans 26 Heidegger, Martin ix, xii, 33, 39–40, 125,
God 5, 7, 18–19, 24, 36–7, 81, 131n18, 195–6, 140n1, 194
234, 237, 248–50, 276 see also existentialist tradition
see also religion Henrich, Dieter 56n22
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 4, 9, 13, 16, 20, Herbart, Johann Friedrich 13
21, 161–2, 247, 280n23 Herder, J.G. 4, 25, 96, 268
Goh, Kienhow 68, 142n5, 145n8 Herman, Barbara 193–4
government, form of 272–5 Herman, Edward S. 219n5
Green, Garrett xiii Herz, Henriette and Markus 22
Grene, Marjorie 152 Hill, Thomas, Jr 191n4
grounds, see reasons Hinckfuss, Ian 107n2
Grunewald, Constantin de 23n24 Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von 280
Gueroult, Martial 29n1 Hirsch, Emanuel 192n5
guilt 191, 235 history 23, 146, 208, 223, 224, 246, 248, 267–8,
280, 292–3
Habermas, Jürgen ix, 212, 225 Hoelzel, Steven 195
happiness: Hölderlin, Friedrich 13, 17n17
coercion and 265n13 honor 229
duties and 231, 233–4 Horstmann, Rolf-Peter 30n3
freedom and 170n20, 220 Hufeland, Gottlieb 255
God and 7 Hull, Clark 118
Kant on 149n9, 231–2 Hull, Isabel 280n24
maximization of 176 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 26, 27, 247
person as end in itself and 234–6 Hume, David 8, 49, 50, 60, 106, 107n1, 183
pursuit of versus being happy 232–4 Hussain, Nadeem 135
wealth and 235 Husserl, Edmund xiii, 33, 33n7
see also consequentialist interpretations; Hutcheson, Francis 106
utilitarians hypocrisy 167, 168
harmony 152–3, 155, 158–9, 162–5, 167, 220, hypothetical imperatives 107n1, 108
221, 226, 232, 253–4
see also universal rational agreement; I:
wholeness absolute 34n8, 40, 54n21, 55, 59, 80, 102
Haslanger, Sally 41, 98 abstraction and 9, 38, 52–6, 57, 58, 99, 117
Heath, Peter xiii “the concept” and 36–7, 36n9
Hegel, G.W.F.: concept of 52–3, 54, 55, 110, 112, 117
absolute I and 40 finitude of 5, 139–40, 181
as child of own time 280, 293 freedom of others and 97
on class 244–5 pure 2, 147, 203, 204, 228, 230, 250
310 index
I: (cont.) individualism 15, 101, 227, 228

thing in itself versus 37–9 individuality 53, 86, 99–100, 125, 200–3, 227,
see also bodies and embodiment; 228, 230, 234, 260, 262
consciousness; identity, personal; see also identity, personal; persons
individuality; I’s active relation to not-I; indoctrination 170, 252, 258
persons; self-activity inertia 152, 168, 200
idealism, see abstraction; idealism, subjective; infanticide 276, 279–80
social construction; transcendental infinite regresses 63
philosophy and transcendental standpoint inheritance 266
idealism, critical, see transcendental philosophy insanity 240
and transcendental standpoint instincts 96, 125, 146
idealism, German 14 institutions, social 214, 215, 216–17, 219
see also Hegel, G.W.F.; Kant, Immanuel see also church; state
idealism, objective 30 instrumental reasoning 154, 190, 207, 227
idealism, subjective 30, 32, 33–5, 40, 197n8 instrumental value 109
see also metaphysics; representations integrity 104, 107n2, 109, 193
ideas 60, 66, 224 intellect and intellectual intuition 38–9, 55–61,
see also abstraction; concepts; representations 63, 74, 79, 81, 110, 119–20, 147, 185–6
identity (sameness) 62 see also cognition; knowledge
identity, personal 5, 49n17, 182–4 intelligible world 37, 44–5, 83, 99n22, 212n2,
identity, social 184, 220 213, 249
ideology 238 see also communication
illusion: intentions, see ends
common sense and 31, 32 interest versus evidence 195–6, 199
convictions and 80–1 internalism 130, 133
freedom and 72, 74, 75, 76, 114, 197 international affairs 254, 286
history and 248 intersubjectivity (other rational beings):
metaphysics and 54n21 accountability and 74–5
moral authority and 109 acting and 49, 85–7, 93–9, 201
possibility of 82–3 antinomy of 211, 228
slavery and 74 causality and 82, 86, 93–6, 98, 140
transcendental limits of 79–80 deduction of 85–8, 89, 95
see also dogmatism; self-deception duties and 178, 185, 186, 200–9, 212, 238
image (Bild) 36 embodiment and 49
image of God 36 freedom and 65–101, 292
imagination 6, 14, 63, 250 happiness and 233
imagination, wavering of 6, 77–80, 81–2, 89–90, I-hood and 97, 101
139, 163 I’s active relation to not-I and 87–91
immaterial things 68 Kant on 85–6, 199, 200n11, 212–14, 230,
immortality 37, 151, 195, 223, 248–9, 250 238, 262
impartiality versus detachment 152 liberation and 98
impartial standpoint 242–3 moral authority and 104–5
impossibilism 68–9 promotion of morality and 170–1
impulses, see desires reason and 94–9, 200–1, 204, 213, 221
imputability 189 reasons and 93–5, 97, 161
incapacity, self-inflicted 168–9 rights and 251, 266
incest 276, 279 self-activity and 259
inclinations, see desires self-sufficiency and 97, 200–3
incompatibilists 83, 121–2 standpoint of 212–13
independence (Unabhängigkeit), see summons and 52, 64, 93–6, 213
self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit) unity of ends and 119
indeterminacy 67, 68, 78–9, 81, 114, 115, 117, vocation and 100, 101, 211–50, 216, 217,
118, 121, 187 219–23, 286
see also chance; freedom, formal/material; see also “afterlife”; communication;
imagination, wavering of community of rational beings; recognition;
indifferent actions 103, 188–90, 191–2 society
indignation 74–5 Irwin, Terence ix
index 311
I’s active relation to not-I: on skepticism 29–30

absolute self-sufficiency and 177–9 on states 269, 270, 273, 275, 282
antinomies of 61–3, 89–91, 178 subjectivism and 106, 107n1, 149n9
causality and 63, 67 supernaturalism and 44
embodiment and 140–1 on thing in itself 38, 43
intersubjectivity and 86–91 tools of moral law and 227
permanence of not-I and 88–9 on vice 169n19
representations and 60–1 vocations and 194
self-consciousness and 110–11 on willing 67–8, 84, 141
as tearing away 2 on women 280nn23, 24
time and 139–40 see also categorical imperative (CI) (Kant);
see also intersubjectivity; limitation; duties; intersubjectivity; moral law;
objectivity; practical reason; subject/object self-legislation
synthesis; thing in itself; willing Kierkegaard, Søren ix, x, xii, 40, 89n16, 125,
146, 165–6, 183, 192–4
Jacobi, F.H. 4, 20, 22, 29–30, 33, 37, 167n17 see also existentialist tradition
James, David xiv, 253, 258n7, 281n25, 286n27 killing and murder 241, 276, 277–8, 280,
James, William 68n1, 118, 163n14 287n30
Janke, Wolfgang 29n1 Klasse, see class
Joyce, Richard 107n2, 109n6, 129n14 knowledge 49, 56, 72, 128, 135, 166, 197,
judgments, see theoretical reason 246n19, 281, 291
justice 216, 221, 276, 283, 286 see also certainty; conviction;
justice, economic 280–9 foundationalism; objectivity; theoretical
reason; truth
Kagan, Shelly 191 Königsberg 6, 25
Kant, Immanuel: Korsgaard, Christine 131n17
antiformalism and 148, 208n14 Kosch, Michelle xi, xiv, 22, 145n8, 148–51, 153,
on apperception 50–1, 53, 54, 56–8, 59, 67, 169n19, 175–6, 192n5, 208n14
86, 119, 145 Kühn, Manfred 1n1, 2n2
categories of quality/relation of 19, 178–9,
185–6, 187–8, 195, 202 labor 281–2, 283, 286
on coercion 263n10 see also estate; justice, economic
on cognition 55, 56–7, 59, 60, 85–6 labor (lower estate):
on conscience/conviction 164–5, 166, Aristotle on 248
167n16, 196 capitalism and 239, 285
deductions of 64, 85, 87, 91, 155–6 control over natural world and 152, 153,
Fichte influenced by ix, x, xi–xii, 5–9, 20, 22, 176, 246
57n24, 65, 247, 255–6 duties of 239
on freedom 65–71, 84, 123, 156, 196 education and 246
Freud and 107–8 Fichte’s experience and 247
on happiness 149n9, 231–2 person as end in itself and 229
indifferent actions and 103, 189, 191–2 property and 272
intellectual intuition and 55–9, 60n26, 155 pursuit of happiness and 235
learned public and 216–17, 218, 219 rational society and 234
on organism 142 states and 222
on peace 286 see also colonialism
on person as end in itself 100, 203–4, 220, Lachs, John xiii
228–30 Landsmannschen 15
on physiognomy 268n18 language 25, 95
on practical/theoretical reason 77, 149 languages 97
on property 271, 282 Lauth, Reinhard 26, 40n14
on punishment 276 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 3–4, 8, 10, 20, 247,
on religion 7, 8, 18–19 268n18
on representations 32, 60 La Vopa, Anthony 27n27
on right/ethics separation 255–9, 261 laws, positive 62n28, 66–7, 99, 105, 146, 240,
on rights 264, 265, 266, 273 241–2, 252, 270, 272–3, 276
schematisms of 85, 95, 96 see also coercion
312 index
laziness 168 representations; schematisms;

learned estate 222–3, 246, 247, 253, 287 situationality
learned public (gelehrtes Publikum) 213, meaning of lives:
215–19, 224 “afterlife” and 101, 223–4, 234, 247–9, 293
lectures (Fichte) 86, 99n22, 256n6 collective activity and 249
lectures on doctrine of religion (Fichte) 249 creativity and 232n8
lectures on right and morality (1812) estate and 151
(Fichte) 36n9 ground projects and 193
Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation (Fichte) moral authority and 126
219–20, 227, 232, 251 plurality and 226
Leibniz, G.W. 4, 80, 92 rational society and 223
leisure 281–2 see also authenticity; vocation
Lessing, G.E. 4 means-ends relations 153–4, 176, 186, 190,
Lévinas, Emmanuel ix, 52, 96 203–4, 227, 239–40, 278
liberation 74–5 see also consequentialist interpretations
lifeboat shortages 240, 241, 242n17, 277–8 Mendelssohn, Moses 4
life of human being 40–1, 222, 239–44, 278 meritoriousness 103, 137, 188–92
see also meaning of lives; murder and killing; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice ix, 142n5
suicide metaethics 106, 128–35, 208
limitation: metaphysical deductions 33, 64, 85, 91, 95,
as category of quality 186, 187, 195, 202 131–2, 156
duties and 178, 185, 186–8 metaphysics 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44, 53n21,
freedom and 90, 91, 92n17 57, 128
by freedom of other 260 see also dogmatism; metaethics; supernatural
I’s active relation to not-I and 39, 139–40, 141 metaphysics; thing in itself
self-determination and 113 Mill, John Stuart 233n9, 234
self-sufficiency and 149–50, 184–5, 184–6 Milligan, Spike 235
summons as 92, 259–60 Miltitz, Ernst Haubold von 1–2, 3, 8, 14, 247
see also bodies and embodiment; coercion; Moggach, Douglas 252, 254
constraints; determination ; I’s active moral authority:
relation to not-I; nature; situationality; deductions of 64, 131, 138–9
summons deflation of 106–7, 108
Locke, John 49, 60, 183, 271, 272n20 freedom and 122, 126–8
longing (Sehnen) 118, 144–5, 154, 187 morality of 125–6
Longuenesse, Béatrice 108n4 objectivity and 117, 124, 132, 133–4
love 193, 194, 237, 242, 249, 278–9 ordinary standpoint and 105–6, 108–9, 117,
see also agape 126, 137, 173, 175
lying 200, 243–4 overview 102–5
questioning 105–10, 107n2, 108n5, 129n14
Machiavelli 254, 257 see also categorical imperative; morality;
Mackie, J.L. 129n14 moral law; moral principle; normativity;
Maimon, Salomon 9, 29–30, 79 norms; ordinary standpoint; self-
Markovits, Julia 107n1 legislation; ubiquity and overridingness
Martin, Wayne 29n1, 197n8 moral conversion 53n20, 54, 71, 75, 163,
Marx, Karl and Marxism ix, 63n29, 126, 152, 168–71
218, 238, 239, 244–5, 247, 248, 286n28, moral despair 170, 171, 229
287, 292 morality:
see also socialism Fichte’s expansion of 125–6, 189, 194n6, 291
mass media 218–19 Hegel on 238
material duty of belief 163–4, 165, 197 Kant on 86
materialism 5, 6, 42, 250 see also normativity; truth
see also dogmatism moral law:
material things (empirical) (external) 23, 31, applicability of 138
60–1, 132, 134 application of 132, 137, 174–5, 200, 201,
see also bodies and embodiment; idealism, 211, 214
subjective; intersubjectivity; I’s active as condition of experience 40
relation to not-I; natural world; reality; content of 124–5, 133n21
index 313
deduction of 120–3, 134, 137 nature, philosophy of 40n14

ethical drive and 162, 188 nature of I 68–9, 112n11, 117, 144, 213, 214,
as formal 133n21 221, 289
freedom and 66–7, 74, 122–3 see also situationality
Kant on 86n13, 102, 123, 124n13, 131n18, Nazism 25–6
133n21, 213 necessary thoughts 58, 110
material content of 182, 184 necessitarianism 6, 65–7, 75, 82
normative necessity of 120, 126, 132 see also desires; determinism; dogmatism
objectivity and 7, 34, 62n28, 124–5, 126, 131, necessity:
132, 133n21, 135 animals and 142n7
realm of ends (Kant) and 213 deduction of 63
religion and 252n1 of normativity 83, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 132
right and 265 transcendental 35, 81–2, 83, 98, 118, 261
situationality and 194 see also causality; determinism
substantiality of 185–6 need or distress (Not) 215, 282–3
synthetic method and 62n28, 184 negation 62, 63n30, 186, 187–8, 195, 199, 202,
tools of 100, 154, 176, 225, 226–34, 236, 238, 207–8
240–1, 242, 243 Neuhouser, Frederick xiii–xiv, 10n5, 29n1,
see also duties; moral authority; moral 77n9, 132n19, 264n12
principle; norms; self-legislation; Niethammer, Friedrich Philipp Immanuel 17
self-sufficiency Nietzsche, Friedrich ix, x, xi, xii, 2, 33, 125,
moral order 5, 18–19, 23, 197, 291 126, 184
moral principle: nihilism 22, 30, 128, 129n15, 130
applicability of 118, 125, 128, 137, 155 Nisbet, H.B. xiii
application of 101, 118–19, 128, 189, 214, 291 non-determination 113
deduction of 64, 101, 109–15, 121–3, 131–3, normativity:
155–6 freedom and 59, 84, 120–1, 132n19
intellectual intuition and 58–9 intersubjectivity of reason and 201n12
Kantian 291 mutual understanding and 262–3
objectivity and 132–5, 212 necessity of 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 132
promotion in others 170–1, 243, 244, 277 objectivity and 116, 122, 192
see also categorical imperative; conscience; of transcendental necessity 35, 83
metaethics; moral authority; moral law; see also moral principle; norms; reasons; willing
normativity; norms norms 59, 68, 69, 70, 97n21, 259, 260–1, 262–3,
moral progress x, 6, 252–3 264, 265
moral realism, see metaethics see also ends; moral principle
moral realm, see community of rational beings Not (need or distress) 215, 282–3
moral sense theory 106 not-I, see I’s active relation to not-I
Morris, Bertram 207 Notstaat/NotSymbol 215, 255, 270, 271, 283n26
motivations 62n28, 109n6, 123, 133, 145, 156, noumena 44, 83, 213
161–2, 200, 201, 260, 279 see also intelligible world
see also desires; expectation; reasons
Moyar, Dean 258n7 objectification 41–2, 57, 65, 68–9, 76, 84, 85,
murder and killing 241, 276, 277–8, 280, 287n30 263, 277, 278
Muslims 215–16 objectivity:
mutual understanding 260, 261–3, 267 cognition and 87, 89, 90, 130, 139
“my people” 242–3 dogmatism and 41
drive for whole I and 118–19
Nagel, Thomas 250n20 duties and 126, 208, 214, 217
Nakhimovsky, Isaac 286n27 Heidegger on 140n1
Nance, Michael 259n8, 264n12 intersubjectivity and 86, 93–6, 208
naturalism 37, 38–9, 42, 59, 106, 107n1, 109, of moral judgments (Hegel) 166, 167
129, 197, 250 practical activity and 36n9, 126–7
see also compatibilism reasons and 92–3, 94, 113–14, 117, 126, 130
natural world 152–4, 153, 176, 177–9, 182, self-activity and 77, 87, 88, 112, 114
224–5, 237, 246, 282 self-determination and 113–14, 116, 117, 192
see also animals self-legislation and 132
314 index
objectivity: (cont.) permissible beliefs 195, 196

summons and 92, 93, 96 permissible/impermissible actions 137,
transcendental deductions and 64 173n1, 178, 187, 188, 191–2, 206, 208,
transcendental philosophy and 35, 40, 43, 77, 231, 232–3, 242
90, 91, 209 see also indifferent actions
see also bodies and embodiment; material persons 18, 70n4, 228–31, 250
things; moral principle; normativity; Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 26
realism; reality; subject/object synthesis; phenomenology 111
willing philanthropy, universal 37n9
On the Essence of the Scholar, and its Appearances Philonenko, Alexis 29n1, 39n13, 97n21
in the Realm of Freedom (Fichte) 24, 217n3 philosophy (speculative standpoint) x, 23, 31,
“On the Grounds of Our Belief in a Divine 36, 39, 40, 55–9, 280
Government of the Universe” see also abstraction; dogmatism; metaphysics;
(Fichte) 17–18 transcendental philosophy; transcendental
On Human Dignity (Fichte) 10, 18 standpoint
Open Letter to Fichte (Jacobi) 20, 30, 57n24 philosophy of nature 40n14
openness 37n9 physicalism 84
oppression 42, 200, 218, 235, 274, 280n24, 281, Piché, Claude 9n4
286, 288, 289, 292 Pindar 184n2
see also justice; labor (lower estate); “so-called Pippin, Robert 30n3, 197n8, 258n7
better classes” pity 72n5
ordinary standpoint (common sense): pleasure/displeasure 94, 155, 232, 235
consciousness and 38–9 see also enjoyment
drives and 154–5 plurality 225–6
“error theory” and 129 plutocracy 288
metaethics and 131, 134 police 275, 277
quasi-realism and 106–7 politics 42–3, 219, 246n19, 248, 252–5
realism and 30–5, 43–4, 129–30 positivism 33
reflection and 145–6, 147 post-modernism 208
self-sufficiency and 117, 174–9 postulates 52, 111
sentiments and 106, 108 power 23, 41, 42, 284
speculative philosophy and 39, 61 powers 140–1
System of Ethics and 137, 153–4 practical philosophy 30, 36n9, 46, 63n31
transcendental philosophy and 30–7, 45, practical reason 41–2, 77, 112, 116–17, 126–8,
115, 137, 144, 147, 154, 173–4, 197n8 134, 150–1, 195–7, 246n19
see also conscience; dogmatism; moral see also direction of fit; reasons; theoretical
authority; thing in itself reason; willing
organism 142–3, 272 pragmatism 225, 255
other rational beings, see community of rational preaching 170, 238
beings; intersubjectivity privacy 243, 275–6, 287
the ought, see normativity privileges 8, 41, 73
Outline of the Distinctive Character of the see also “so-called better classes”; wealth
Doctrine of Science With Respect to the product/performance value 248
Theoretical Faculty (Fichte) 12, 46, 63 professions 238
overridingness and ubiquity 103–4, 105, 120, project (entwerfen) 127, 141, 180, 183, 190,
121, 122, 123, 124, 127–8, 130, 133, 173, 193 193, 194
propaganda 258, 292
pantheism controversy 4 property and property rights:
parents 268, 279 contracts and 181, 182, 184–5, 271–2,
Parfit, Derek 94n19, 107n1, 240n16 284–5
paternalism 265n13 dependency and 235n11
peace 270 distribution of 281–4
Peirce, Charles S. 225 economic justice and 280–9
perception 6, 50, 60, 143n5 freedom and 229, 281
see also representations; senses human life and 240
perfection 220–1, 222, 237 independence and 239
performance/product value 248 inheritance and 266
index 315
marriage and 279 “realm of necessity”/“realm of freedom”

protection of 283 (Marx) 152
state and 266, 271, 275–6, 282–3, reason (rationality):
284–5, 287 cult of 15
wealth and 283n26 ends of 153, 223–6, 228
prostitution 276, 279 first principle and 49
Proudhon, Pierre 63n29 freedom and 65, 77–85, 133
psychology, modern 13, 35, 97n21, 106, 109, God and 7
118, 142n5, 183, 234 as historical 208
see also Freud, Sigmund and psychoanalytic intersubjectivity and 94–9, 200–1, 204,
theory 213, 221
public and private spheres 275–6 self-sufficiency of 174, 203–9, 211
punishment 73, 276, 277 see also faith; philosophy; practical reason;
theoretical reason; universal rational
quaestio quid facti/iuris 85, 86–7, 96 agreement
quality/quantity 63 reasons (grounds) 62, 68, 80–1, 82, 103, 105,
quasi-realism 106–7, 129n15, 132 130, 134, 151–2
see also conviction; desires; faith;
racism 42, 268n18 intersubjectivity; objectivity
Radrizanni, Ives 30n4, 95n20 reciprocity 178, 185, 186, 202–3, 219, 222, 225,
Rahn, Hartmann 3, 4, 8, 15, 247 261, 262, 267
Rahn, Johanna Marie (Fichte) 3, 13, 27 recognition (Anerkennung) 229, 259–63, 265,
rapists 277 267–8, 270–1
rational beings, other, see intersubjectivity reflection:
rationalism 19, 208 on abstraction from self-positing I: 55–6
rationalist humanism 37, 249–50 blame and 169–70
Rawls, John xi, 204n13, 218n4, 284 conscience and 164
Raz, Joseph 94n19 determinism/freedom and 68
realism: drives and 145–7, 154
acting and 43–4 duty and 197
coherence and 209 formal/material freedom and 147–54
Husserl and 33n7 freedom of 197
Kant and 131n18 I’s activity and 111
metaethics and 127–8, 134 moral stages and 168–9, 171
ordinary standpoint and 32, 33, 34, 43–4, 61, not-I and 60
129–30 ordinary standpoint and 74n7, 146
quasi- 106–7 situation ethics and 151
transcendental philosophy and 132–3 reflective judgment (Kant) 95
see also dogmatism; illusion regret 166
realism, political 254–5 Rehberg, August Wilhelm 7, 8
reality: Reid, Thomas 32
as category of quality (Kant) 186, 187, 195, Reinhard, Franz Volkmar 20
199, 202 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 8, 9, 17n17, 30,
experience and 43, 44, 77 46, 63
finding oneself as willing and 112 see also Aenesidemus (Schulze)
freedom and 76–7 religion:
the intelligible or noumenal and 44–5 “afterlife” and 248–9
self-activity and 43 common sense and 44
transcendental standpoint and 30–6, 38, communication and 258
44, 76–7 duties and 237
see also I’s active relation to not-I; knowledge; faith and 71, 72
material things; metaphysics; objectivity; Fichte’s 248–50
realism; representations; subject/object Fichte’s modernism and 19, 23, 250,
synthesis; thing in itself 291, 293
realizationism 258n7 Fichte’s shifty thought and 252
realm of ends 85–6, 123, 213, 219, 230 function of 7
see also community of rational beings as mixed science 256n6
316 index
religion: (cont.) as mixed science 256n6

naturalism and 250n20 normativity and 139, 252, 259n8, 263–72,
promotion of morality and 170 264, 265, 278
sin and salvation 4–5, 37 original (Urrecht) 266
state and 254 practical impossibility of 288–9
symbols and 19, 37, 45, 86n13, 215–16, 248–9 promotion of morality and 170
see also anti-Semitism; atheism controversy; recognition and 259–63
church; God responsibility and 73
repentance 166 self-consciousness and 256
representations (Vorstellungen): summons and 92n17, 96, 259–61
abstraction and 60–1 violations of 267
dogmatism and 72, 76–7 see also coercion; politics; rights; state
of I’s body 142 right, theory of 227, 251
“I think” and 50, 51, 54 rightness 162–3
subjective/objective 35 right of judgment (Recht des Gerichts) 270, 271
summons and 94 right of revolution 8, 216, 269–70, 274
synthetic method and 63 “right” or “right in itself ” 120–1
transcendental standpoint and 32–3, 34 rights 251, 257, 265n14, 266
willing and 87, 114 see also laws, positive; property and property
see also direction of fit; idealism, subjective rights
representative institutions 246, 273, 287 Rist, Johann Georg 11, 16
reputations 229, 266 Rivera-Castro, Faviola 191n4
respect for others: Robinson, John A.T. 19n18
communication and 207 Rohs, Peter 153, 212, 217
community of rational beings and 230 roles, social 214
duty to promote morality and 170 romanticism 13–15, 292
ephorate and 273–4 Rosenzweig, Franz 19
Kant on 229, 236, 237, 257 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 220, 222, 265, 269n19,
for law (Kant) 124n13 272, 273n21, 280, 282, 292
love versus 237
Notstaat and 283n26 salauds 41n15
recognition and 229, 261 sameness (identity) 62
for rights of others 251, 257 Sartre, Jean-Paul ix, x, xii, 39–40, 41n15, 83n12,
sexuality and 108 89n16, 194
summons and 92n17 see also Existence precedes essence;
see also authority, traditional; self-respect existentialist tradition
responsibility 68, 73, 75, 145n8, 168–9, 169–70, satisfaction 145, 187, 232
171, 183 see also enjoyment
see also accountability; blame Scanlon, Thomas M. 204n13
revelation, divine 7–8, 62n28 Scharding, Tobey xiv
ridicule 229 Scheffler, Samuel, see “afterlife”
Riefenstahl, Leni 25–6 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 12, 13–14,
right: 17n17, 21, 22, 24, 30, 34n8, 40, 43
causality compared 138–9 schematisms 64, 85, 95–6
conservatism and 270 see also material things
constraint of leaders and 253 Schiller, Friedrich 16
deduction of 256, 265, 269 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 14, 19, 247
distributive justice and 221 Schlegel, Caroline/Dorothea/Friedrich 14,
ethics separated from 200n11, 255–9, 261, 22, 125
263n11, 264, 265 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel 14, 15,
first principle of 111 22, 125, 247
formal and material freedom and 70n4 Schlendrian 168, 169
individuality and 99, 262 scholars 10–12, 217, 222–3, 225, 239, 247, 287
intersubjectivity and 201 see also learned public; Lectures on the
knowledge of the world and 281 Scholar’s Vocation (Fichte); On the Essence
labor and 239 of the Scholar, and its Appearances in the
law of (Kant) 264 Realm of Freedom (Fichte)
index 317
Schopenhauer, Arthur ix, 8, 115n7, 141n3 as Fichte’s concept 194n6, 291

Schulte, Günter 24nn24, 25 freedom distinguished from 123
Schultz, J.F. 7, 18, 20, 57–8 intersubjectivity and 200
Schulze, Gottlob Ernst 8–9, 29–30, 46 Kant on 15, 65–7, 121, 124n13, 131, 133n21,
Schüssler, Ingeborg 39n12 194n6, 213, 291
scolding 170, 171, 238, 244, 291 moral authority of 45, 123–8
secular humanism 37, 44 moral law and 66–7, 132, 200
secularism 19 “of normative domain itself ” 197n8
Sehnen (longing) 118, 144–5, 154, 187 rational society and 246
Selbständigkeit, see self-sufficiency reason and 213
self-activity (self-positing I): selflessness 37n9
abstraction and 43, 53–5, 99 see also life of human being
embodiment and 87–8 self-positing I, see self-activity
as first principle 30, 36n9, 46–9, 51–2, 72 self-reliance 235
intersubjectivity and 86, 95 self-respect 7, 104, 105, 109, 170
for its own sake 115, 116–17, 118–21, 220 see also respect for others
normativity and 58–9, 68, 69 self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit):
self-consciousness and 53–5, 55–61, 58–9 antinomy of 202–3
see also I’s active relation to not-I; reflection; consequentialism and 174–9
self-determination; summons; willing deductions of 184–6, 203–4
self-alienation 155 defined 67, 70, 174
self-awareness, see apperception drive for whole I and 64, 105, 118–21,
self-consciousness: 145, 220
dogmatists and 53n20, 73, 76 as end 64, 67, 148–50, 153, 154, 177–8,
freedom and 82, 87, 144, 155 182, 224
intersubjectivity and 65, 93–7, 200, 261 intersubjectivity and 97, 200–9
modern psychology and 13 limitation and 149–50, 184–6
moral authority and 87, 132 moral authority and 105, 132
right and 87, 256, 265 moral law and 121, 174, 182
self-deception and 80–1 norms and 70, 73, 75–6, 197n8
tool of moral law and 227–8 of others 170
willing and 110–12, 132 pure drive for 155, 156
see also apperception; cogito; reflection; of reason 174, 203–9, 211, 223
self-activity; subject/object synthesis; recursive projection of ends and 179–84
summons self-activity (self-positing I) and 71–2, 117,
self-contempt 155, 187, 188 177, 184
self-deception 70–1, 98–9, 107n1, 109, 129n15, see also agility; I; individuality; natural world;
146, 166–71 self-legislation; situationality; striving
self-defense, right of 278 senses 50, 56–7, 60, 63
self-determination: see also perception; representations
causality versus 113, 115–16, 122, 140 sentiments 106, 108, 130
described 116–17, 127 separation of powers 272–3, 273–4
drives and 118–20, 133n20, 143, 145 sexuality, human 108, 278–9
normativity and 59, 68, 69–70, 113–14, Shah, Nishi 135
120–1, 122–3, 126–8, 132, 192 shame 73, 170
subject/object synthesis and 91, 113, 127 Shapiro, Lawrence 142n5
summons and 75, 91–3, 95, 100 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph 286
theoretical reason and 77–85 simplicity 37n9
see also agility; conscience; drives; Existence Sittlichkeit (ethical life) (Hegel) 238
precedes essence; freedom, formal/material; situationality:
moral authority; self-legislation; self- act-consequentialism and 228
sufficiency; vocation; volition; willing, authenticity and (Pindar) 184n2
finding oneself as conscientious conviction and 244
self-interest 232, 237–8, 241–2 defined 140
selfishness 232–3, 234–6 determination and 69, 117
self-legislation (autonomy): drive for the whole I and 118–19
deduction of 119–21 duties and 174–5, 185, 193
318 index
situationality: (cont.) dependency/destitution and 221–2, 235n11,

existentialism and 291 281, 285
freedom and 141 education and 245, 246, 252, 255, 258, 268,
moral agency/motivation and 145 275, 277
moral law and 194 in Fichte’s later thought 251–5
willing and 114 form of government and 272–5
see also direction of fit; limitation individual freedom and 253, 254, 275
situation ethics 151–2 labor and 221–2, 282
skepticism 29–30, 65, 138 legitimacy of 3n26, 255, 269–71, 273, 275,
see also Hume, David 282, 283n26
slavery 200, 220, 235n11, 267, 288, 292 moral progress and 252–3
Smith, Adam 106 private and public spheres and 275–6
“so-called better classes” 66, 99, 188, 219, reputations and 266n15
235n13, 236, 238, 239 unanimity/unity and 216, 224
see also privileges; wealth vocation and 253–4, 258n7
social change 238, 276–7 see also justice; laws, positive; politics;
social construction 98–9 property and property rights; right
social contract 269, 272 state officials 239, 279
socialism 286–7, 292 steel spring example 114–16, 155n7
socialization 106, 108n4 Steffens, Heinrich 21n22
social philosophy, Fichte’s 252n1 Stein, Karl Freiherr vom und zum 23–4, 25, 26
social relations 152–4, 214 Steiner, Rudolf 17
see also institutions, social; intersubjectivity Stirner, Max 107n2, 126
society (Gessellschaft) 219–23, 230, 234, 238, Stoics 232
244–7, 251, 286, 291, 292 Street, Sharon 129n15
see also community; intersubjectivity striving:
sophists 199 antinomies of 178–9, 184–6
space 63, 140n1 community of ends and 219–20
speculative standpoint 23, 31, 36, 39, 40 conditions of 150, 177
see also metaphysics; philosophy deduction of 178–9
Spinoza, Baruch: freedom and 197–8
Aphorisms and 4–5, 65 God and 5, 18–19, 37
communication and 95–6 I’s active relation to not-I and 63n30, 150, 177
conviction of own philosophy and 77 natural 187
on determination 60 primacy of practice and 197n8
on embodiment 140n2 rational society and 98, 101
on freedom 6, 72n6, 73–5, 122n11 reasons and 105
on imagination, wavering 78n10 recursion of ends and 179–84
imagination/time and 81–2 for self-sufficiency 118–19, 178–9, 186
indignation and 74n7 Spinoza and 63n30, 115n7
objective absolute of 40 steel spring example and 114–16, 155n7
on reasons 81 theoretical cognition and 139, 197–8
on reciprocal individuality 262 for universal rational agreement 18, 203, 205
on self-determination of one’s willing versus 93n18
nature 116n9 see also drives; I, pure; universal rational
on self-interest 234 agreement
striving and 63n30, 115n7 Struensee, Karl August von 22, 23, 247
spiritual activity 36n9 subjectivism 32n5, 82, 106, 131, 132–3
spirituality 5, 42, 250 see also desires; feeling; idealism, subjective
Stand, see estate subject/object synthesis:
standpoint of God 231, 234 consciousness and 46, 89, 112–14
standpoint of life 39 drive for whole I and 119
Stanley, Jason 218n4, 235n13, 246n19 embodiment and 142
state: experience and 35, 51
closed commercial 286–8 finding oneself as willing and 110, 112–14
coercion and 227 I as 90–1
communication and 217–18 intellectual intuition and 56–9
index 319
pure apperception (Kant) and 50–1 moralizing tone of 194n6

Reinhold’s “principle of consciousness” overviews 8, 64, 101, 111
and 46 Part One overviews 64, 102, 103, 145
representations and 35 Part Two overviews 64, 137–8, 153
self-consciousness and 56, 89–91 Part Three overviews 64, 153–4, 173, 237
self-determination and 91, 113, 127 see also ethics; synthetic method
summons and 53, 94 System of Right (Fichte) 274
see also abstraction; direction of fit; Existence see also right
precedes essence; I; objectivity; synthetic
method taxes 266n15, 285
subjects 39, 55, 56, 57, 70n4 technology 253
see also persons; self-consciousness teleological theories 150, 227
subordination 41, 98, 202–3, 206–7, 219–20, temporal/eternal goods 247–8, 250
245, 280 temporality, see time and temporality
substances 63, 66–8, 83, 85, 139, 178, 183, tendency (Tendenz) 115, 116–17, 118, 120
185–6 theoretical reason (judgment) (understanding):
see also supernatural metaphysics activity and 52, 87
suicide 239–40, 276 conscientious convictions and 124–5,
summons (Aufforderung): 157–63, 164–5, 167
Aufforderung, meaning of 92 freedom and 35, 77–85
consciousness 52–3, 94 moral law and 124, 133, 138, 175, 198
deduction of 91–6, 201 practical reason and 77, 78–9, 143, 162, 195–9
described 51–5 right and 262–5, 267
as education or upbringing 96–9, 200 synthetic method and 63
freedom and 92, 259–60 see also abstraction; cognition; concepts;
individuality and 99–100, 259–60 determination; direction of fit;
intersubjectivity and 52, 64, 93–6, 213 imagination, wavering of; intellect and
normativity and 260–3 intellectual intuition; recognition;
right and 92n17, 96, 259–61 self-deception; thinking for oneself
self-consciousness and 52, 95–7 “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” 62n28, 63
see also dogmatism see also synthetic method
A Sun-Clear Report (Fichte) 22, 32 thing in itself (being):
supererogation 190–2 abstraction and 33, 37–8, 60–1
supernatural metaphysics 44, 83–4, 109–10 common sense and 38–9, 110
the supersensible 215–16, 248–9 dogmatism and 38, 84, 209
“swerve” 83 moral law and 131
symbols, religion and 19, 37, 45, 86n13, 215–16, normativity and 134
248–9 self-positing I and 54
synthetic method: synthetic method and 90
abstraction and 61, 63, 90, 93, 119–20 transcendental standpoint and 43, 209
Aphorisms and 7–8 see also dogmatism; metaethics; metaphysics;
described 61–4 substances; supernatural metaphysics
Hegel and xii, 7, 63n29 thinking and thoughts 43, 121, 266
Kant’s 50 see also cogito; intellect and intellectual
see also antinomies; subject/object synthesis; intuition; self-activity; theoretical reason
transcendental deductions thinking for oneself 212–13
systematic philosophy x, xi, 12, 14, 21, 29, 31, Thou 53, 86, 87
45, 46–8, 256 see also intersubjectivity
see also coherence; Kant, Immanuel and other thought suppression 234
systematic philosophers; transcendental Tillich, Paul 19
philosophy and transcendental standpoint time and temporality:
“system morality” 107n2 acting and 88–9, 141
System of Ethics (Fichte): cognition and 63
contraction of task of moral philosophy conscience and 138, 154–5
and 189, 191 defined 139
Doctrine of Science and 12, 29, 131n16 existence preceding essence and 116
influence of 291 freedom and 89, 139–40
320 index
time and temporality: (cont.) universal validity 86

imagination and 78–9, 81–2, 89, 139 University of Berlin 26, 27
judgment and 78–9, 80 upbringing (Erziehung) 96–9, 100, 200, 201,
objectivity of (Kant) 85 268, 280
situationality and 151–2 Urrecht (original right) 266
universalizability and 206 utilitarians 150, 176, 177
see also “afterlife”; ends, recursive; Existence
precedes essence; history Vater, Michael 14n12
Timmermann, Jens 191n4 Velleman, David 165n15
tradition 146, 292–3 Vermögen (faculty) 116–17
transcendental conditions 67, 76, 85–7, 98, 138, Verweyen, Hansjürgen 252n1
142n6, 259 vices 145, 152, 169n19, 171
transcendental deductions 55, 64, 85 Vihvelin, Kadri 68–9
see also abstraction; antinomies virtue 7, 66, 73, 152, 170n20, 220, 232,
transcendental philosophy and transcendental 254, 258
standpoint: vocation (Bestimmung):
dogmatism versus 36, 37–45, 71–3, “afterlife” and 248, 249–50
75–7, 83 coercion and 2, 58, 254, 258, 286
metaphysics versus 31, 212n2 education and 252
nihilism and 22 intersubjectivity and 100, 101, 216, 217,
overviews 31–6, 43–5 219–23, 286
subjectivism versus 32n5, 132–3, 197n8 labor and 152
see also Doctrine of Science moral law and 227, 230, 242
(Wissenschaftslehre); freedom; synthetic natural world and 281–2
method permissible actions and 173n1
trolley problems 240, 241, 242, 277–8 projects and 194
truth 168, 199, 203–10, 225, 253 promotion of morality and 170
see also conscience; knowledge; objectivity; recursion of ends and 180–2
reality religion and 252n1
truthfulness 37n9 state and 253–4, 258n7, 283, 286
Tugendhat, Ernst 132n19 unity of drives and 157
twentieth century 128–35 see also happiness; meaning of lives; scholars
The Vocation of Man (Fichte) 5, 23, 148,
Überzeugung, see conviction 149, 153
ubiquity and overridingness 103–4, 105, 120, volition:
121, 122, 123, 124, 127–8, 130, 133, 173, 193 coercion and 141n3
Unabhängigkeit (independence), see deduction of 99n22
self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit) embodiment and 140–2
unanimity, see universal rational agreement normativity and 62n28, 99, 126, 130,
uncertainty, theoretical 160 132, 133
the unconscious 142n6 for sake of its own freedom 127
understanding and judgments of understanding, see also ends; willing
see theoretical reason Vorstellung, see representations
United States 19, 234, 235, 239, 256, 285, 287, 288
see also right-ward side politics Ware, Owen xiv, 168
unity 18, 58, 119, 157, 183, 219–23, 224, 250 wealth x, 218, 219, 222, 235, 281, 283n26
see also wholeness see also privileges; “so-called better classes”
universalizability (Kant) 151, 206, 207–8, weapons 276
213–14, 225, 232, 268 Weber, Marianne 286n28
universal law 123, 213, 232, 255, 264, 291 Wechselbestimmung (reciprocal
see also categorical imperative determination) 62
universal rational agreement (unanimity) Weischedel, Wilhelm 40n13
203–9, 211–15, 216–17, 223–6, 228, 248, Weisshuhn, F.A. 65
251–2, 273, 282 wholeness 64, 105, 118–21, 145, 156–7, 220,
see also common will; communication; 221, 222, 271–2
harmony see also harmony; unity
index 321
Wildt, Andreas 97n21 see also common will; determination;

Williams, Bernard 107n2, 193, 242 direction of fit; ends; freedom, formal/
willing (Wollen): material; self-determination; volition
causality and 66, 67–8, 72n6, 83–4, 174 wisdom 170n20, 220
cognition and 140 Wissenschaftslehre, see Doctrine of Science
content of law and 133n21 Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo (Fichte) 12,
defined 67, 111–12 30, 46, 58, 95n20, 138
determinacy and 93n18, 114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 31, 33
embodiment and 141 Witt, Charlotte 218n4
finding oneself as 110–14, 131n16 Wolf, Susan 193
freedom and 67, 135 Wolffianism 4, 255
good or bad 141 Wollen, see willing
independence from 176 Wollstonecraft, Mary 242n18, 280
normativity and 84, 113, 132n19 women 242n18, 244, 245, 246, 268, 278,
objectivity and 110, 112, 114–17, 121, 279–80, 286n28, 291
126, 127 world community 286
possibility of 132 worldhood 139–40, 141
property and 271 see also situationality
self-consciousness and 110–12, 132 Wright, Walter 194n6
subjugation of others and 222
substance and 67–8 Zöller, Günter 12n10, 29n1, 44, 254n4
thing in itself and 83–4 Zustand (condition) (Kant) 232
time and 139 Zweck, see ends

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 02/29/2016, SPi

Fichte’s Ethical Thought

1. Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 1

§7: Self-Legislation 123

My own first interest in philosophy—when I was still in my teens—began with the

GEW Outline of the distinctive character of the Wissenschaftslehre

PhG Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke 3. Cited by paragraph (¶)

KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787). Cited by A/B

On the common saying: That may be correct in theory but it is

Marx and Engels

§1: Background and Education

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§2: An Impoverished Upstart Philosopher Makes his

Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 3

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Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 5

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Fichte became an immediate and ardent convert to Kant’s critical philosophy.

Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 7

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Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 9

§3: Professor in Jena: the Years of Greatness

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Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 11

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These inspiring—yet also combative—popular lectures, as well as the more specialized

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Frank (2003), especially Lecture 1.

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(which is probably best known through Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion of

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Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 17

§5: The Atheism Controversy

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§6: Exile in Berlin

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§7: The Napoleonic War

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§8: Last Years: Professor at the Humboldt University

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§1: Philosophy and Common Sense

Mind-independent reality. Fichte sees himself as a transcendental philosopher. A

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§2: Rejection of Dogmatism or the “Thing in Itself”

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transcendental conditions for becoming conscious of the world, so it is not concerned

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dogmatism as a closed circle of illusion and self-deception which people inflict on

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§3: Transcendental Idealism

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­ ecessary from a transcendental standpoint. Again, Fichte’s religious opponents in

1. Who was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? 1

§7: Self-Legislation 123

ecessary from a transcendental standpoint. Again, Fichte’s religious opponents in

inference, grounded on a determinate “warrant” through which the first principle