Fichte's first book was mistaken for a new work by Kant
In 1792 an anonymous essay on revelation appeared and readers assumed Immanuel Kant had written it. The real author was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a struggling tutor who had dashed it off in five weeks to impress Kant. Once Kant named him, Fichte became famous overnight, and German idealism had a new founder.
Fichte was born in 1762 in Rammenau, in Upper Lusatia, the son of a ribbon weaver in a devout Lutheran family. His break came from a feat of memory. According to the story, a landowner, the Freiherr von Miltitz, missed a Sunday sermon and was told a local boy could recite it almost word for word. Impressed, the baron paid for the child's education, placing him with a pastor near Meissen and then at the famous school at Pforta, later attended by Novalis and Nietzsche.
When Miltitz died, the money dried up. Fichte studied theology at Jena and Leipzig but left without a degree and scraped by as a tutor to Saxon families. In Zurich he met his future wife, Johanna Rahn, and the educator Pestalozzi. He only began reading Kant in 1790 because a pupil asked about him, and the encounter changed his life, even as financial trouble in the Rahn family delayed his wedding.
In 1791 he travelled to Königsberg, had a disappointing meeting with Kant, and locked himself away to write the Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation. The first edition came out without his name or preface, hence the mix-up. The poet Jens Baggesen marvelled at news of a third sun in the philosophical heavens. Kant, though, waited seven years before publicly distancing himself, remarking that God should protect us from our friends.
Fichte's lasting contribution lies in his analysis of self-consciousness, pursuing the problem of subjectivity that had occupied Descartes and Kant. He also devised the pattern of thesis, antithesis and synthesis often wrongly credited to Hegel, and his political writings earned him a reputation as a father of German nationalism. He died in 1814.
Source: Johann Gottlieb Fichte
