Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte was the son of a ribbon-weaver in Saxony, too poor for school. Legend says a baron who had missed the sermon was told that the nine-year-old could repeat it word for word; having heard him, the baron paid for his education. He studied theology at Jena and Leipzig and spent years as a tutor. In 1790, preparing to teach a pupil, he read Kant and said he now lived 'in a new world'.

In 1791 he visited Kant at Königsberg, was received coolly, and within weeks wrote the Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation. Kant helped get it published; the publisher omitted the author's name, readers took it for Kant's new work, and when Kant set the record straight Fichte was famous overnight. In 1794 he was appointed professor at Jena, where in five years he wrote the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre and drew crowds of students; Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis and the Schlegel brothers all felt his influence. In 1799 an essay brought a charge of atheism; he resigned in anger and moved to Berlin.

His Wissenschaftslehre begins from an absolute act: the I posits itself. To act, the I must meet resistance, so it posits a not-I, the world. All experience can be derived from the reciprocal limitation of I and not-I, and the thing in itself is superfluous. The first principle of philosophy is not a fact but a deed; freedom is not discovered but enacted. His ethics demands that each person ceaselessly remake the world in the image of reason.

In 1806 Napoleon occupied Berlin, and in the winter of 1807–8, under the eyes of French troops, he delivered the Addresses to the German Nation, calling for the rebuilding of Germany through national education; nationalists later exploited them. When the University of Berlin opened in 1810 he became first dean of philosophy and then its second rector. In 1814 his wife caught typhus nursing wounded soldiers and passed it to him; he died at fifty-one.