In 1810 he was elected rector of the new university founded in the previous year. This post he resigned in 1812, mainly on account of the difficulties he experienced in his endeavour to reform the student life of the university.
In 1813 began the great effort of Germany for national independence. Debarred from taking an active part, Fichte made his contribution by way of lectures. The addresses on the idea of a true war (Über den Begriff eines wahrhaften Kriegs, forming part of the Staatslehre) contain a very subtle contrast between the positions of France and Germany in the war.
In the autumn of 1813 the hospitals of Berlin were filled with sick and wounded from the campaign. Among the most devoted in her exertions was Fichte’s wife, who, in January 1814, was attacked with a virulent hospital fever. On the day after she was pronounced out of danger Fichte was struck down. He lingered for some days in an almost unconscious state, and died on the 27th of January 1814.
The philosophy of Fichte, worked out in a series of writings, and falling chronologically into two distinct periods, that of Jena and that of Berlin, seemed in the course of its development to undergo a change so fundamental that many critics have sharply separated and opposed to one another an earlier and a later phase. The ground of the modification, further, has been sought and apparently found in quite external influences, principally that of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, to some extent that of Schleiermacher. But as a rule most of those who have adopted this view have done so without the full and patient examination which the matter demands; they have been misled by the difference in tone and style between the earlier and later writings, and have concluded that underlying this was a fundamental difference of philosophic conception. One only, Erdmann, in his Entwicklung d. deut. Spek. seit Kant, § 29, seems to give full references to justify his opinion, and even he, in his later work, Grundriss der Gesch. der Philos. (ed. 3), § 311, admits that the difference is much less than he had at the first imagined. He certainly retains his former opinion, but mainly on the ground, in itself intelligible and legitimate, that, so far as Fichte’s philosophical reputation and influence are concerned, attention may be limited to the earlier doctrines of the Wissenschaftslehre. This may be so, but it can be admitted neither that Fichte’s views underwent radical change, nor that the Wissenschaftslehre was ever regarded as in itself complete, nor that Fichte was unconscious of the apparent difference between his earlier and later utterances. It is demonstrable by various passages in the works and letters that he never looked upon the Wissenschaftslehre as containing the whole system; it is clear from the chronology of his writings that the modifications supposed to be due to other thinkers were from the first implicit in his theory; and if one fairly traces the course of thought in the early writings, one can see how he was inevitably led on to the statement of the later and, at first sight, divergent views. On only one point, the position assigned in the Wissenschaftslehre to the absolute ego, is there any obscurity; but the relative passages are far from decisive, and from the early work, Neue Darstellung der Wissenchaftslehre, unquestionably to be included in the Jena period, one can see that from the outset the doctrine of the absolute ego was held in a form differing only in statement from the later theory.
Fichte’s system cannot be compressed with intelligibility. We shall here note only three points:—(a) the origin in Kant; (b) the fundamental principle and method of the Wissenschaftslehre; (c) the connexion with the later writings. The most important works for (a) are the “Review of Aenesidemus,” and the Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre; for (b) the great treatises of the Jena period; for (c) the Thatsachen des Bewusstseyns of 1810.
(a) The Kantian system had for the first time opened up a truly fruitful line of philosophic speculation, the transcendental consideration of knowledge, or the analysis of the conditions under which cognition is possible. To Kant the fundamental condition was given in the synthetical unity of consciousness. The primitive fact under which might be gathered the special conditions of that synthesis which we call cognition was this unity. But by Kant there was no attempt made to show that the said special conditions were necessary from the very nature of consciousness itself. Their necessity was discovered and proved in a manner which might be called empirical. Moreover, while Kant in a quite similar manner pointed out that intuition had special conditions, space and time, he did not show any link of connexion between these and the primitive conditions of pure cognition. Closely connected with this remarkable defect in the Kantian view—lying, indeed, at the foundation of it—was the doctrine that the matter of cognition is altogether given, or thrown into the form of cognition from without. So strongly was this doctrine emphasized by Kant, that he seemed to refer the matter of knowledge to the action upon us of a non-ego or Ding-an-sich, absolutely beyond consciousness. While these hints towards a completely intelligible account of cognition were given by Kant, they were not reduced to system, and from the way in which the elements of cognition were related, could not be so reduced. Only in the sphere of practical reason, where the intelligible nature prescribed to itself its own laws, was there the possibility of systematic deduction from a single principle.
The peculiar position in which Kant had left the theory of cognition was assailed from many different sides and by many writers, specially by Schultze (Aenesidemus) and Maimon. To the criticisms of the latter, in particular, Fichte owed much, but his own activity went far beyond what they supplied to him. To complete Kant’s work, to demonstrate that all the necessary conditions of knowledge can be deduced from a single principle, and consequently to expound the complete system of reason, that is the business of the Wissenschaftslehre. By it the theoretical and practical reason shall be shown to coincide; for while the categories of cognition and the whole system of pure thought can be expounded from one principle, the ground of this principle is scientifically, or to cognition, inexplicable, and is made conceivable only in the practical philosophy. The ultimate basis for the activity of cognition is given by the will. Even in the practical sphere, however, Fichte found that the contradiction, insoluble to cognition, was not completely suppressed, and he was thus driven to the higher view, which is explicitly stated in the later writings though not, it must be confessed, with the precision and scientific clearness of the Wissenschaftslehre.
(b) What, then, is this single principle, and how does it work itself out into system? To answer this one must bear in mind what Fichte intended by designating all philosophy Wissenschaftslehre, or theory of science. Philosophy is to him the rethinking of actual cognition, the theory of knowledge, the complete, systematic exposition of the principles which lie at the basis of all reasoned cognition. It traces the necessary acts by which the cognitive consciousness comes to be what it is, both in form and in content. Not that it is a natural history, or even a phenomenology of consciousness; only in the later writings did Fichte adopt even the genetic method of exposition; it is the complete statement of the pure principles of the understanding in their rational or necessary order. But if complete, this Wissenschaftslehre must be able to deduce the whole organism of cognition from certain fundamental axioms, themselves unproved and incapable of proof; only thus can we have a system of reason. From these primary axioms the whole body of necessary thoughts must be developed, and, as Socrates would say, the argument itself will indicate the path of the development.
Of such primitive principles, the absolutely necessary conditions of possible cognition, only three are thinkable—one perfectly unconditioned both in form and matter; a second, unconditioned in form but not in matter; a third, unconditioned in matter but not in form. Of these, evidently the first must be the fundamental; to some extent it conditions the other two, though these cannot be deduced from it or proved by it. The statement of these principles forms the introduction to Wissenschaftslehre.
The method which Fichte first adopted for stating these axioms is not calculated to throw full light upon them, and tends to exaggerate the apparent airiness and unsubstantiality of his deduction. They may be explained thus. The primitive condition of all intelligence is that the ego shall posit, affirm or be aware of itself. The ego is the ego; such is the first pure act of conscious intelligence, that by which alone consciousness can come to be what it is. It is what Fichte called a Deed-act (Thathandlung); we cannot be aware of the process,—the ego is not until it has affirmed itself,—but we are aware of the result, and can see the necessity of the act by which it is brought about. The ego then posits itself, as real. What the ego posits is real. But in consciousness there is equally given a primitive act of op-positing, or contra-positing, formally distinct from the act of position, but materially determined, in so far as what is op-posited must be the negative of that which was posited. The non-ego—not, be it noticed, the world as we know it—is op-posed in consciousness to the ego. The ego is not the non-ego. How this act of op-positing is possible and necessary, only becomes clear in the practical philosophy, and even there the inherent difficulty leads to a higher view. But third, we have now an absolute antithesis to our original thesis. Only the ego is real, but the non-ego is posited in the ego. The contradiction is solved in a higher synthesis, which takes up into itself the two opposites. The ego and non-ego limit one another, or determine one another; and, as limitation is negation of part of a divisible quantum, in this third act, the divisible ego is op-posed to a divisible non-ego.