Fichte, Johann Gottlieb

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) is one of the founders of the philosophical movement known as German idealism. He is most often discussed as a transitional figure between Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, but he deserves to stand in his own right as one of the greatest innovators in modern ethical philosophy. Fichte can be considered the first existentialist philosopher on account of his emphasis on the individual's free act of self‐creation. His theory of conscience as an absolute criterion for moral action makes him look like an advocate of an ethical subjectivism in which the individual has the last word on what is right and wrong. Yet Fichte is also the originator of a political philosophy that reaches fruition in Hegel, Marx, and a host of twentieth‐century thinkers who focus on the social conditions of agency. With his theory of mutual recognition in particular, Fichte invented a conceptual tool through which freedom could be treated as a social category. One of his main claims is that an individual can be free, and therefore can be human, only through interactions with other individuals under determinate social conditions.