Fichtean Meta-Kantian OntoMorality

An Excerpt from Afterword to Fichte’s 1792 Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Versuch einer Critik aller Offenbarung) by Hester Shemmon

The Leipzig Years: A Meeting between an old Kant and a young Fichte

The intellectual landscape of late 18th-century Germany possessed a deceptive calm, yet it was a world of intense intellectual ferment awaiting a new catalyst after the seismic force of Kant’s critical philosophy. Fichte seemed an unlikely candidate to provide it, emerging not from academic privilege but from the rustic backdrop of Saxony. His prodigious intellect, however, was apparent from a young age; legend holds that as a boy he was discovered by a local nobleman, Baron von Miltitz, after perfectly reciting the entirety of a sermon he had missed. This patronage was his entry ticket into a world of letters, securing Fichte’s admission to the prestigious Pforta school, followed by theological studies at the universities of Jena and Leipzig. These early years were marked by persistent financial hardship and the drudgery of private tutoring, a precarious existence that sharpened his sense of self-reliance and unyielding ambition.

It was during this period of struggle that Fichte’s philosophical destiny was forged. In 1790, while working as a private tutor in Leipzig, Fichte was tasked with instructing a student in Kant's philosophy, a body of work he had until then largely ignored. This engagement, undertaken as a mere professional duty, proved to be a watershed moment, a "revolution" in his own thinking that would set him on a path to philosophical renown. Immersing himself in the dense arguments of the Kantian system, Fichte discovered not an abstract intellectual puzzle, but a liberating doctrine. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason offered Fichte a framework for reconciling his deeply held belief in human freedom with the rigorous demands of intellectual inquiry, by demonstrating that the deterministic laws of nature applied only to the world of appearances, not to the moral self.

This newfound passion led Fichte on a pilgrimage to Königsberg in 1791, seeking an audience with the aging Kant himself. The initial meeting was a disappointment; Kant was preoccupied and seemed indifferent to the unknown young scholar. The reality of the encounter, however, proved to be a crushing disappointment. When Fichte finally gained an audience, he found not an eagerly engaged intellectual partner, but an elderly man, preoccupied, perhaps weary of the endless stream of admirers, and seemingly indifferent to the passionate young scholar before him. Kant was courteous but distant, offering little of the philosophical dialogue Fichte had craved.

For a man of lesser resolve, such a rejection from the highest intellectual authority of the age might have been a final, dispiriting blow. Yet, for Fichte, this moment of failure became the catalyst for his most decisive action. Instead of retreating into obscurity, his disappointment galvanized his ambition and activated his core belief in the power of the active will. He concluded that words were insufficient; he would have to demonstrate his philosophical worth through a deed, an undeniable intellectual act. If Kant would not engage with him as a person, then he would be forced to engage with him through the sheer power of his ideas, presented in a form that the master could not ignore.

This resolution gave birth to a period of astonishingly focused and rapid creation. Fichte rented a small room and, in a matter of a few weeks, poured all of his energy into composing a philosophical treatise, the Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation). The strategic brilliance of this move was twofold. First, he chose a topic, the relationship between reason and religious revelation, that was of great interest to Kant but which Kant himself had not yet publicly addressed in a major work. Second, he wrote the entire piece not in his own emerging voice, but as a deliberate and masterful imitation of Kant’s complex style and argumentative structure, aiming to prove he was not just a student but a master of the critical method itself.

The publication of the Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation in 1792 created an immediate sensation throughout the German intellectual world, but not for reasons Fichte could have anticipated. Due to an oversight by the publisher, the book appeared anonymously, without Fichte’s name on the title page. Given the subject matter and the impeccably Kantian style of the argument, the public and critics alike unanimously concluded that the work was the long-awaited treatise on religion from Kant himself. The book was widely discussed and praised as a major new piece from the master of Königsberg, adding another chapter to his towering legacy.

Fichte, still languishing in provincial obscurity and poverty, found himself in the bizarre position of being the secret author of a celebrated work attributed to another man. The situation was resolved only when Kant himself stepped in to correct the public record. He issued a public statement clarifying that he was not the author of the treatise, and he took the opportunity to lavish praise on the brilliant young philosopher who had actually written it: Fichte. This public anointment from the highest authority in philosophy had an instantaneous and dramatic effect.

Overnight, Fichte was transformed from a struggling, unknown tutor into one of the most famous thinkers in Germany. The story of the book's mistaken identity became a legend, a compelling narrative of hidden genius revealed….He was offered, and eagerly accepted, a professorship at the University of Jena, the very epicenter of the German intellectual ferment, a position that gave him the platform to develop and disseminate his own philosophical system.

…

The Jena Atheism Controversy

"From it the Forberg passage is to be explained: Is there a God?... His words mean, in the terminology of the opponent, as much as: "Is God matter in space?" And there Mr. Forberg, in my judgment, is philosophically wrong and inclines far too much to the side of the opponent, in that he merely answers it with: it is uncertain. But atheistic this his skepticism is surely not; and least of all does it befit the opponent to accuse Mr. Forberg because he half and half admits the corporeality of God, in that he accuses me because I decidedly deny it."

Fichte, Against the Charge of Atheism, 1799

The Atheism Controversy that engulfed Fichte in 1798-1799 stands as one of the most consequential philosophical disputes in German intellectual history, compelling the philosopher to resign his position at the University of Jena and reshaping the trajectory of post-Kantian idealism. The dispute emerged from Fichte's essay "On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World," published in the Philosophical Journal that he co-edited with Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer. When Friedrich Karl Forberg's essay questioning the possibility of proving God’s existence appeared alongside Fichte's piece, accusations of atheism spread rapidly through the German states, leading to official charges in Saxony and Dresden which threatened the journal itself with confiscation. The controversy exposed deep fissures between Enlightenment philosophy and traditional religious orthodoxy, but it also revealed the tensions inherent in Fichte's own philosophical project, which sought to radicalize Kant's critical philosophy while maintaining its ethical foundations, and ultimately rested on a concept of the absolute I that was frequently misunderstood by his critics

To Fichte, the unshakeable command of duty within us, “I ought,” implies the conviction that “I can,” and this, in turn, implies that the world itself must be ordered in such a way that our moral actions can be effective. This “living and working moral order,” Fichte declared, is God. We need no other God, and can grasp no other.

“That living and working moral order is itself God, we need no other God and can grasp no other. The concept of God as a particular substance is impossible and contradictory.”

This doctrine, which Fichte saw as the most consistent extension of Kant’s own moral theology, was immediately branded as atheism. The ensuing controversy became a public spectacle, forcing Fichte to defend himself in his powerful “Appeal to the Public” and his meticulous “Legal Defense.” In these works, he brilliantly transformed his personal crisis into a public lesson on the freedom of inquiry, the nature of religious belief, and the responsibilities of the state. He castigated his accusers for worshipping an “idol,” a mere giver of enjoyments, and passionately defended his own view as the only one compatible with a true and demanding morality.

“The true atheism, the genuine unbelief and godlessness consists in one’s calculating about the consequences of one’s actions, in one’s not wanting to obey the voice of one’s conscience until one believes one foresees the good outcome. You must not lie, even if the world should thereby fall into ruins.”

… Fichte's controversial doctrine remains deeply and fundamentally Kantian in its origins and commitments, representing not a break from his predecessor but the radical culmination of their shared philosophical commitment to the primacy of practical reason. This position marks the logical endpoint of a Protestant intellectual tradition that had been slowly, if unintentionally, devouring its own transcendent object through its very attempts to protect it. Fichte's so called “atheism” is thus the most radical and consistent form of Kantian piety manifesting from the Reformation’s materialistic metaphysical turn, a courageous attempt to live fully within a world recognized not merely as created by God, but as being, in its deepest moral law, God itself. It is also, however, the complete vindication of the atheist's deepest suspicion, that the more one tries to defend God by making Him relevant to human life, by grounding Him in human needs and experiences, the more one makes Him merely human, a projection of our own moral consciousness onto the blank canvas of the cosmos. The Protestant Kantian defense of God, carried to its logical conclusion in Fichte's system, becomes indistinguishable from its denial. The God who was to be saved by practical reason turns out to be nothing more than practical reason itself, worshipped under another name. The defender, in the end, has become the most effective accuser, and the house of faith has been demolished by the very tools meant to reinforce its walls.

——

Driven from Jena, Fichte entered a new phase of his career, one marked by an even greater engagement with the broader public. In his 1800 masterwork, The Vocation of Man, he presented the core of his philosophy as a three-act spiritual drama. The first part, “Doubt,” leads the reader into the cold and deterministic universe of materialism, a world of strict necessity where freedom is an illusion. The second, “Knowledge,” performs a radical critique of our claims to know this external world, showing that we are always and only ever conscious of our own mental states. The final part, “Faith,” offers the resolution. It is only through a free and willed act of faith in the command of our own conscience that a real world, and our own vocation within it, is restored to us.

“Not mere knowledge, but according to your knowledge doing is your vocation. I have found the organ, with which I grasp this reality. It is faith, this voluntary resting with the view that naturally offers itself to us, because we only with this view can fulfill our vocation.”

The Napoleonic Wars provided the urgent and often brutal backdrop for the final and most explicitly political phase of Fichte’s thought. He turned his attention to the philosophy of history, the state, and the nation with an intensity born of crisis. In The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), he laid out a grand philosophical history of humanity in five epochs, diagnosing his own time as the third: an age of “absolute indifference toward all truth,” an age of empty, self-satisfied freedom that had liberated itself from all authority but had not yet found its way to the higher law of reason.

This period of intense political engagement culminated in his most famous public act, the Addresses to the German Nation, delivered in French-occupied Berlin in the winter of 1807-1808. These lectures were a direct and courageous summons to national renewal. The path to this renewal, he argued, was not through politics in the ordinary sense, but through a radical and total reform of education. He called for a new pedagogy that would shape not just the mind, but the very will of the student, creating a new and unshakeable character, a character for whom acting in accordance with the good would become a matter of joyful necessity.

“In contrast, the new education would have to consist precisely in that it on the ground whose cultivation it undertakes entirely annihilates the freedom of the will, and produces in its place strict necessity of resolutions, about the impossibility of the opposite in the will, on which will one could then surely reckon and rely on it.”

Horen-Dispute with Schiller

The intellectual alliance was formally tested when Schiller, in his capacity as editor of the new journal Die Horen, invited Fichte to become a contributor. The journal was intended to be the primary vehicle for Schiller's cultural project, a publication that would avoid partisan politics in favor of elevating public discourse through philosophy and art. Fichte accepted the invitation and submitted an essay, presenting his work not as a piece of popular writing but as a serious philosophical argument demanding judgment from his intellectual peers.

Schiller’s reply was not the collegial critique Fichte might have expected but a thorough and devastating rejection that targeted both the form and the content of the essay. From Schiller's viewpoint, the piece failed on aesthetic grounds, which for him were inseparable from philosophical effectiveness. He found its style jarring and its composition wanting the graceful fusion of concept and image that he believed was needed to communicate ideas without doing violence to the reader’s sensibility. He made his dissatisfaction clear in his critique of Fichte’s exposition.

I confess that I cannot at all be satisfied with yours in these letters. Of a good exposition I demand above all equality of tone, and, if it is to have aesthetic value, an interaction between image and concept, not alternation between both, as often occurs in your letters.

The critique went far beyond stylistic preferences to attack the very philosophical foundation of Fichte's argument, specifically his classification of the human drives. For a thinker like Fichte, whose entire system was built upon the claim of absolute methodical rigor and exhaustive deduction, this was a charge against the core of his intellectual project. Schiller was not merely disagreeing with a conclusion; he was asserting that Fichte's approach was fundamentally flawed and arbitrary, a claim that Fichte could not possibly accept.

Your division of the drives seems to me wavering, arbitrary, and impure. It lacks a principle of division; one does not see which sphere is exhausted.

Fichte’s reaction to this comprehensive rejection was characteristic of his unbending intellectual persona, a mixture of supreme self-confidence and a proclaimed indifference to opinion. He did not retreat or apologize but instead doubled down on the rightness of his own approach, framing his style not as a failure of aesthetic sensibility but as a necessary consequence of his commitment to unvarnished philosophical truth. His letters reveal a thinker who believed he was operating on a different plane, one where the approval of his peers was of little consequence compared to the internal coherence of his system.

This stance was rooted in a deep conviction that his work was not for his own time but for the future. He felt no need to humble himself before what he considered to be a public unqualified to pass judgment on his project. This attitude, which many of his contemporaries perceived as sheer arrogance, was for Fichte a matter of intellectual principle, a refusal to compromise the rigor of his thought for the sake of popular appeal or even the approval of an intellectual giant like Schiller.

I know that you will call my tone arrogant. It may be so. I confess to you that I feel in this matter not the least humility; on the contrary, I feel a proud confidence. I know that here I am right, and I despise a public that wishes to dictate laws to me.

The judgment of my age is nothing to me; it has not yet produced anything before which I bow. What I do, I do for mankind, not for my contemporaries. They may misunderstand me; posterity will understand me.

Heidegger's Critical Retrieval: Fichte's Subjectivism and the Unasked Question of Being

Heidegger's 1928 lecture offers a penetrating critique of Fichte's foundational project in the Wissenschaftslehre, particularly the 1794 Grundlage. While acknowledging Fichte's attempt to radicalize Kantian subjectivity, Heidegger argues that Fichte remains trapped within traditional metaphysics by failing to interrogate the meaning of "Being" itself and misconstruing the ontological structure of human existence (Dasein).

Heidegger identifies the core limitation in Fichte’s project as his uncritical adoption of the metaphysical equation of Being with "Positing," inherited from Kant and the scholastic tradition. This reduction of ontology to epistemology is evident in Fichte’s foundational act of the ego’s self-positing ("I am I"), which presupposes that Being is equivalent to the subject’s act of assertion:

"Setting (sentence) and being... positing or positio... is not a concept of logic... but... a metaphysical-ontological concept; ponere: to lay, to leave lying, to leave present, to leave being; being and truth-being... Positing = proposition = being." (§7)

Heidegger portrays Fichte as radicalizing Kant's transcendental philosophy by making the ego the absolute ground of metaphysics. In Kant, the problem of metaphysics involves the identity of ego and non-ego, echoing ancient concerns with being (ens) and self. Fichte amplifies this by positing the ego as the site of absolute certainty:

"We know from earlier that the problem is first posed in Kant's discussion of the identity of ego and non-ego, and that therein lies the problem of the old metaphysics which referred to the ens and the ego. These two points mark historically essential points that led us to expect the necessity of absolute idealism. The ego has the function of absolute certainty. While Kant radically poses the problem of metaphysics by drawing these poles together, the problem is intensified again so that the base of the problem is taken in the ego. And this is the knowledge of knowledge."

Here, Heidegger interprets Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge) as transforming metaphysics into a science of self-consciousness, where the ego posits itself and the non-ego in opposition. This opposition is not arbitrary but reveals Fichte's aim to overcome dualism through a higher unity, prefiguring absolute idealism in Schelling and Hegel.

Central to Heidegger's reading is Fichte's formulation of the ego-non-ego opposition, which he sees as a dialectical facticity rather than a mere logical construct. Fichte's philosophy begins with the ego's self-positing, leading to the non-ego as a limit or "check" (Anstoß) that enables self-awareness. Heidegger discerns in this a hidden acknowledgment of human facticity, the thrownness of existence, masked by systematic ambition:

"This dialectic and construction is basically the illumination of the facticity of the ego."

Although this quote appears in a contextual note, it encapsulates Heidegger's phenomenological lens: Fichte's elaborate deductions "illuminate" the factual givenness of the self, but subordinate it to an absolute system. Fichte's drive for certainty, rooted in the ego's activity, aligns with the modern metaphysical tradition from Descartes, where method (ratio) secures knowledge. Yet, for Heidegger, this overlooks the temporal, finite horizon of being, reducing metaphysics to a "knowledge of knowledge" that culminates in Hegel's absolute spirit.

Heidegger further critiques Fichte in relation to contemporary philosophical tendencies, such as anthropology and metaphysics. Fichte's ego-centric idealism exemplifies the "tendency towards anthropology," where human self-understanding becomes the measure of reality. However, this anthropocentrism erodes genuine metaphysical inquiry by prioritizing subjective certainty over the question of being as such:

"The tendency towards anthropology is ultimately the intention to decide what is real and what is not, what reality and being mean, and thus also to decide what truth means. [...] Because the psychological explanation is to be the last and first, every answer to the question of the nature of man is ultimately and initially only explained psychologically."

Fichte's philosophy, with its emphasis on the ego's practical and theoretical activity, feeds this tendency by making the human subject the arbiter of existence. Yet, Heidegger argues, this leads to a "monster that consumes itself," as the ego's oppositions (e.g., freedom vs. law) demand resolution in an absolute identity that Fichte initiates but Schelling and Hegel complete:

"This development, this shaping of the problem of metaphysics finds its expression in the catchword that determined Schelling's and Hege's philosophizing: the question of absolute identity. If one overlooks the discussion of the metaphysical problem in Fichte and Schelling, then it is noticeable that this opposition, which in Fichte is given with ego and non-ego, emerges quite freely and arbitrarily as the question of finitude and infinity, freedom and law, and so on. This arbitrariness indicates that the problem is not linked to the facts, to what is meant, but that the aim is to determine this opposition, i.e. to overcome it."

In this view, Fichte's arbitrary framing of oppositions signals a detachment from factual existence, prioritizing systematic unity over ontological depth.

Heidegger's engagement with Fichte serves his broader project of destructing (Destruktion) Western metaphysics. Fichte advances the modern quest for certainty but remains ensnared in the forgetting of being (Seinsvergessenheit). By contrasting Fichte's infinite ego with his own emphasis on finitude and temporality, Heidegger repositions philosophy as a confrontation with existence's groundlessness:

"In Hegel: the completion of Western metaphysics, for us not a completion, but the original question. Ours, however, does not fit in with what has gone before, so that Hegel's position must be abolished. [...] For us, the position towards history is a totally different one."

By invoking a "power of reason," Fichte sidesteps a genuine confrontation with the temporal, finite ground of human understanding, instead reinforcing the illusion of an absolute, self-grounding subjectivity. For Heidegger, this exemplifies the "embarrassment" (Verlegenheit) of metaphysics, its tendency to conceal its own ungrounded foundations through systematic constructs.

Heidegger thus views Fichte as a crucial yet ultimately confined figure. While Fichte’s absolutization of subjectivity exposes the crisis within modern metaphysics, his system remains a "powerful but ungrounded construct" (§3) that reinforces the tradition’s core oversight: the failure to ask the question of the meaning of Being itself. Fichte’s "I" becomes the culmination of the metaphysics of presence, not its overcoming. His project thus stands as a testament to what Heidegger would later call the "forgetfulness of Being", a forgetfulness only overcome by returning to the finite, temporal horizon of Dasein’s existence as the site where Being reveals itself. Heidegger casts him as a bridge from Kantian critique to absolute idealism, illuminating facticity through dialectical oppositions while ultimately subordinating it to systematic certainty. This interpretation underscores Heidegger's own turn toward finitude, revealing German Idealism as both a culmination and a limitation of metaphysical thought. Heidegger appreciates Fichte's radicalization of the ego as a historical necessity but critiques it as perpetuating metaphysics' closure, urging a return to the "original question" of being amid contemporary crises.

Schopenhauer’s Kantian Offense: Dismissal of Fichte as a Misinterpreter of Kant

Schopenhauer's notes reveal a critical stance toward Fichte, viewing him as a philosopher who fundamentally misunderstands Kant's critical philosophy. Instead of advancing Kant's separation of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, Fichte is accused of reverting to dogmatic metaphysics, elevating the understanding to an absolute status, and constructing elaborate but baseless systems that parody Kant's insights.

"Fichte, instead of recognizing from Kant's great discoveries: that the world of understanding is one standing for itself and enclosed in the cage of the sensory world, and that there is a completely different world that expresses itself among other things... in the Categorical Imperative... instead of seeing all this, Fichte has considered understanding and its laws as absolute, as before, but has viewed philosophy as the art of explaining the world... satisfactorily to understanding... and has like the dogmatists sought to build a world according to its (understanding's) laws... Fichte sought a hypothesis... as the simplest: God finds it good to portray himself: the Categorical Imperative is the pantograph, through which, in the sensory world... the silhouette comes about.; There is the high wisdom! Now at least understanding knows what the Categorical Imperative is up to.

"This is however not the only mischief that misunderstanding Kant has caused in Fichte... Kant proves the knowledge of what takes shape in space and time from an intuition a priori. Fichte has intuition a priori for that which is free from space and time... Fichte deduces the entire consciousness = I from; one proposition of this consciousness... and this necessity, what is it based on? on laws of understanding... to demonstrate the condition of all demonstration; that is a more transcendent undertaking than any dogmatics has ever dared... The crown of Fichte's doctrine is that he makes the Categorical Imperative comprehensible... Has ever an imitator parodied his model more by misrecognizing the essential and exaggerating the inessential? Further, to ground his fairy tales, he needed absolute intellectual intuition... the intellectual intuition grabbed all sorts of curious propositions out of the air, and from these was derived through proofs, in which the most boring prolixity plays the role of thoroughness, what he just needed." (From "On Fichte in general")

Central to Schopenhauer's project is the defense of Kant's categorical imperative as inherently incomprehensible, a "gift" revealing the limits of understanding. Fichte's attempt to make it comprehensible is seen as a grave error, reducing morality to a mechanistic, understandable process and ignoring the freedom of non-willing.

"Comprehensibility of the categorical imperative! Fundamentally wrong thought! Egyptian darkness!; Heaven forbid that it should become comprehensible! Precisely that there is something incomprehensible, that this misery of understanding and its concepts is limited, conditioned, finite, deceptive; this certainty is Kant's great gift.

The freedom of will could be called a freedom of non-willing... But the freedom of will is the ability to annihilate the entire self-will, and its highest law is 'you shall will nothing.' Once it has entered, my action is determined by a supersensible principle... all individuality has ceased, therefore Kant establishes this as an objective moral law... Although I have now ceased all willing in this case; my doing still appears as a consequence of willing, it only seems so: I act as if the object were my concept of purpose... but I still do not act as I will, but as I should, and this Should negates the willing... I, my self, my individual no longer acts at all, but is the instrument of an Unnameable, an eternal law... hence Kant calls the moral law a formal one... Thus: 1) The moral law is purely objective... 2) The moral law is nevertheless merely formal... 3) From this follows: My individuality, i.e., my self-will should... be destroyed... Thus: what is demanded by the moral law is a mere relation (the deed) of the subject to the object and this relation is a determined one... From this finally follows: Instead of my will, the relation between object and subject (the deed) should be determined by something else (the Unnameable). (The virtuous person acts as if they willed, but they no longer will. One can compare them to the tamed falcon, who still acts as if it were hunting, but no longer hunts, rather hunts for its master.)"

(From "On Fichte's Theory of Ethics," p. 205-209)

Schopenhauer's alternative vision of morality as the annihilation of self-will contrast sharply with Fichte's active, comprehensible system, and underscores his project of emphasizing the supersensible over the empirical. Schopenhauer writes:

"The fanatic is as innocent as the murdering sleepwalker... Another objection against my spontaneous becoming loud of the moral law is that we often have great doubts about which of two actions is the right one.; This is only possible in two cases: 1) Through a so-called collision of duties... then I consider which is the greater... 2) I often doubt and consider carefully what is right... this happens merely because I want to fulfill only the duty of right, not the duty of virtue, and is a lack of virtuous disposition... Often the consideration of a duty is merely a search for excuse, after the moral law has already spoken." (From "On Fichte's Theory of Ethics," p. 214-216)

Schopenhauer frequently employs satire and ridicule to dismantle Fichte's foundational concepts, like the "I" and the "Science of Knowledge," portraying them as logically impossible and whimsically anthropomorphic, aligning with his broader aim to expose post-Kantian idealism as pretentious nonsense.

"Fichte's leaden fairy tale in a nutshell: ... There is a Being... This Being gets a desire to view itself... This self-viewing of Being is an act of procreation... It immediately thereafter gives birth to Knowledge. Knowledge now gets... desire to be active... thus gives birth... to the little child I... This now... has acquired... a restless drive to activity: so that it might not perhaps attack mother and grandmother... a soft mass is thrown before it... the same is called World, is merely there so that little Principle I might bite on it... This interaction of the two upon each other is called the Synthesis of World-intuition... But after Grandmother Being has watched the thing for a while... She thus sends to little Principle I the extraordinary ambassador Ought... This insinuates to the little Principle that it should... prettily bite out Grandmother's counterfeit. Little Principle I lets most obediently report that it will do its best... and nibbles further." (From "On Fichte's Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge")

This parody encapsulates Schopenhauer's disdain for Fichte's idealism as a contrived myth, reducing profound concepts to childish absurdity.

"Every demonstration presupposes possibility and impossibility, and necessity, from which actuality follows. As long as this proposition stands... the Science of Knowledge cannot arise. For those conditions of all demonstration are the categories of modality: and these are only in relation to experience... The Science of Knowledge thus already presupposes what it wants to demonstrate... From this follows a priori the impossibility of a Science of Knowledge. Against that set up by Fichte however, it is now further to be shown that he not only... presupposes those categories of modality, but also all others and in addition the laws of space and time, as absolute in his demonstrations. E.g., when he says: The I strives for unlimited activity: but feels itself limited..."

(From "On Fichte's Natural Right")

Fichte emerges as a pivotal but ultimately transitional figure. He brilliantly and ruthlessly systematized the turn to subjectivity, establishing the absolute I and its dialectical self-development as the central problem of German Idealism. Yet, this system remains trapped within its own formalistic and certainty-driven ambitions. By prioritizing the logical justification of the absolute subject, the Wissenschaftslehre bypasses the fundamental question of being, neglects the independent reality of nature, and ultimately seeks to abolish, rather than authentically confront, the problem of human finitude. He thus stands as the architect of a subjective idealism whose inherent contradictions and narrowness created the essential problems that later thinkers were compelled to address.

Fichte’s legacy persists as an unresolved provocation oscillating between metaphysical audacity and deconstructive unraveling.