Kant's Reception: Fichte, Schiller, Jacobi, and Religion

Kant's critical philosophy immediately generated an intense and often unstable reception among younger German philosophers eager to complete or correct his system, launching the movement known as German Idealism. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), in his Wissenschaftslehre ("Doctrine of Science," first presented in 1794), argued that Kant's postulation of a thing-in-itself existing independently of and affecting the mind was internally incoherent, since the category of causality was, on Kant's own account, valid only within experience and could not legitimately be applied to explain experience's origin. Fichte instead grounded his entire philosophy in an absolute, self-positing "I" that posits both itself and a "not-I" as the condition for consciousness and morality, a move some contemporaries initially welcomed as the logical completion of Kant's system, but which Kant himself explicitly and publicly repudiated in an open declaration published in 1799, insisting that the Wissenschaftslehre was not an authentic development of critical philosophy.