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The author of the Wissenschaftslehre was the son of a poor ribbon maker, and was born at Rammenau in Lusatia in 1762. The talents of the boy induced the Freiherr von Miltiz to give him the advantage of a good education. Fichte attended school in Meissen and in Pforta, and was a student of theology at the universities of Jena and Leipsic.
The same year saw the birth of the Wissenschaftslehre. Accordingly he took leave of absence, and spent the summer of 1795 in Osmannstädt. The so-called atheistic controversy resulted in Fichte's departure from Jena.
Fichte was a man of high moral enthusiasm, very uncompromising, unable to put himself in the place of an opponent, in incessant strife. The great work of his Jena period was his Wissenschaftslehre, 1794. His popular Works, Die Bestimmung des Menschen and Anweisung zum seligen Leben, belong to his Berlin period. The disasters of 1806 drove him out of Berlin.
Therefore, although the Kantian philosophy is established as far as its inner content is concerned, there is still need of earnest work to systematize the fragments and results which he gives into a firmly connected and impregnable whole. The Wissenschaftslehre takes this completion of idealism for its mission.
The world for Fichte is at bottom a spiritual order, the revelation of a self-determining ego or reason; hence the science of the ego, or reason, the Wissenschaftslehre, is the key to all knowledge, and we can understand nature and man only when we have caught the secret of the self-active ego.
Can we not, in all such cases, rather say: 'Take it, thou too-ravenous individual; take that pitiful additional fraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wantest; take it with a blessing: would to Heaven I had enough for thee! If Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre be, 'to a certain extent, Applied Christianity, surely to a still greater extent, so is this.
His aim is a constructive psychology in the Fichtean sense, a history of consciousness, and the execution of his design as well closely follows the example of the Wissenschaftslehre. Since truth is the agreement of thought and its object, every cognition necessarily implies the coming together of a subjective and an objective factor. The problem of this coming together may be treated in two ways.
Philosophy must, therefore, be Wissenschaftslehre, for in it all natural and mental sciences find their ultimate roots; they can yield genuine knowledge only when and in so far as they are based on the principles of the Science of Knowledge mere empirical sciences having no real cognitive value.
He was called to Berlin in 1841 to help counteract the influence of the Hegelian Philosophy, but met with little success. He died in 1854. The earlier writings of Schelling either reproduced the thoughts of the Wissenschaftslehre or developed them in the Fichtean spirit.
Fichte's chief contribution to German thought was the Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling's the Naturphilosophie, and Schleiermacher's the philosophy of religion. All these thinkers took account of the prevailing tendencies of the times Aufklärung, Kantian criticism, faith-philosophy, Romanticism, and Spinozism and were more or less affected by them.
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