Fichte

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814), a German philosopher, was born in Lusatia. He was educated at a Saxon royal school, and studied at Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg, and then spent some time as a privat-docent, enjoying meantime the society of Kant. At Konigsberg in 1792 he published an Essay of Criticism of all Revelation, and this procured him a Professorship of Philosophy at Jena. In 1800 appeared his Theovy of Science, which was founded upon Kant. Being suspected of atheistical views on account of an article he wrote in his Philosophical Journal, he resigned his professorship, and went into private life at Berlin, in which city, after the close of the war between Prussia and France, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy (1810). In 1813, when the war with France had begun again, Fichte's wife aided in nursing the sick and wounded French and Prussians in the hospitals, and caught hospital fever, of which she died; and Fichte, who had nursed her, likewise caught it and died. In philosophy he is the offspring of Kant, but he completes the idealistic development which Kant himself rejected. He divided things into the thinking (absolute) ego, and the non-ego created by the thinking ego, a perfect idealism; while in practical ethics he both taught and practised virtue, integrity, and self-denial. His Closed Commercial State, a protest against all foreign trade, is an unintentional reductio ad abswrdum of Protectionist views. He gave a great stimulus to German patriotism. Many of his works have been translated into English, and his son published his biography and literary correspondence.