Summer becomes fall, bringing with it preparations for the upcoming academic year; recent high-school graduates look forward to their next step, professors craft syllabi, and students prepare for their lives after academia. But, as with all times of preparation, the late heat of summer can bring about introspection. Students ask themselves not just what they want to do with their lives, but also why they want to do it; students and professors alike look back on their choices, consider where they might have chosen differently, and, perhaps, question the ends which they have sought thus far in their personal and professional lives.
Such questions are natural, if profoundly complicated to navigate. When we question the point of what we do, whether personally or professionally, compelling answers are rarely self-evident. Philosophy can offer a path through this kind of self-doubt, a way for you to ground your everyday life in something larger than yourself. But it also takes more than merely studying philosophy; it requires living it out, allowing one’s philosophical beliefs to be apparent not just in the most significant of decisions, but also the most mundane. The eighteenth-century German idealist Johann Fichte thought of philosophy in this way: he believed that endorsing a philosophical claim is not just some academic exercise, but is instead a reflection of who you are. This is why, when Fichte himself sought to understand the point of his work as a scholar, he did not merely make a series of normative claims: he offered a much more compelling answer.
. . .
Johann Fichte was the son of a ribbon weaver, part of an impoverished family which had lived and died in a municipality of Saxony for generations. Young Johann was bright, but an education was not accessible to a boy of such standing; Fichte, rather, spent his time herding geese to help support his family. It was only by the grace of a local baron that Fichte received a formal education. Though the story is perhaps apocryphal, it is said that the baron was too late one Sunday (or, in some versions, too ill) to hear the morning’s sermon from the mouth of the clergyman who delivered it, but was advised by the townspeople that young Fichte would be able to recite the whole of the sermon verbatim. Finding the boy and hearing the sermon, the Baron agreed to sponsor Fichte’s education.
Some twenty years later, Fichte was offered his first academic appointment as the chair of Critical Philosophy at the University of Jena. He was now a short but broad-shouldered man, a man who was animated by a passion which bordered on hotheadedness (and led his student J. G. Rist to call him “the Bonaparte of Philosophy”). Immediately upon his arrival in Jena, he announced a series of public lectures, now remembered as the Lectures on the Scholar’s Vocation. The first of these, held at the largest auditorium in the city of Jena, was full well before the beginning of the lecture; in a letter to his wife afterwards, Fichte described students standing on the benches and tables in the auditorium’s courtyard. So, to a crowd of his nation’s young elite, in a university which represented the cultural and political privilege of the aristocratic class, Johann Fichte approached the podium.
“[He] did not stand calmly at his lectern like a secular sage,” Rist would later write, “but stood angrily and combatively.” The peasant boy from Rammenau had come to shake the foundation upon which his students stood. He argued for what one might take to be a simple claim: that we can only come to understand ourselves through our relationships with the world around us and those who occupy it. Or, to use Fichte’s words: that “The pure I [or self] can be represented only negatively, as the opposite of the not-I” (Fichte and Breazeale, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, “Some Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” VI, 296). Building on this claim, Fichte painted an intuitive picture of society, where we both stand in and are reciprocally defined by our relationships to one another. (VI, 302).
But upon these innocuous grounds, Fichte built the foundation for a much more radical argument. His reciprocal and relationship-oriented understanding of society led him to argue that to achieve one’s self-perfection, one must also seek the perfection of one’s society: we all, Fichte argued, are dependent on one another, and one’s self-perfection is, therefore, dependent on uplifting all (VI, 310). Fichte told these young elites that the purpose of an education, then, was not to benefit oneself, or one’s family; it was not to rise in class, or achieve great heights of knowledge; the purpose of an education, rather, is to work for the benefit of our society, and repay our community for all it has done for us. He told his students: “No one has the right to work merely for his own private enjoyment, to shut himself off from his fellowmen and to make his education useless to them; for it is precisely the labor of society which has put him in a position to acquire this education for himself” (VI, 321). He argued that the scholar “properly exists only through and for society” (VI, 330), and demanded of his students their utmost effort in bringing about the satisfaction of all needs and the flourishing of all people (VI, 325).
To do so, he told them, they would need to perfect themselves and their art: to seek progress in their chosen field, and to apply that progress for the benefit of their community (VI, 327-8). They would not rest but for the sake of fortifying themselves for their continued work, he said, and should never think to have discharged their duty till a better world was actualized (VI, 329). This was the duty demanded of his students, and, Fichte would argue, the duty demanded of us today.
. . .
What is the point of an education?
The answers you have heard to this question—and, perhaps, even been convinced by—may reflect one of many modern schools of thought. Perhaps the point of education is the pursuit of knowledge in all of its forms; perhaps it is to prepare students for participation in the workforce; perhaps it is to shape well-informed citizens, or help students achieve mastery of critical, independent thinking. Fichte, however, takes an entirely different—and perhaps radical—approach, according to which the pursuit of an education is not just for the sake of improving oneself or magnanimously benefiting one’s community. Rather, it is pursued because one is indebted to their community.
You are only where you are because of the people who grew your food, built your shelter, and taught you to read. And, on Fichte’s view, pursuing your education is how you repay those many, many, many people whose work allowed you to flourish. In the course of your education, both formal and informal, you will perfect your talents: you will work hard, and you will become an expert in one of the many domains of human knowledge. But Fichte challenges you to consider for whom those talents will be applied, and who that expertise will serve. Fichte would not deny that your education should benefit you, in some way: after all, education is a way in which we strive towards our own perfection. But, for Fichte, perfecting yourself requires the uplifting of one’s society, and the application of your education towards that end.
Perhaps you’re a high schooler or undergraduate, preparing to enter the workforce and pursue a career. Rather than basing your choice of major on what would be most profitable or allow for the most comfortable working hours, Fichte would challenge you to ask: what are my talents, and how can those be applied for the good of those around me? Perhaps you’re a professional, with years of experience and a wealth of hard-earned expertise. Fichte, too, would challenge you: how does your labor benefit society, and in the case that you find the answer unsatisfactory, how can that experience and expertise be used to make the world a better place for all?
Fichte himself took such challenges as inspiration: “Only with great effort do I here restrain my feelings from being carried away by the lofty idea which is now before us,” he said (VI, 328). He told his students:
“Our sense of our own dignity and power increases when we say to ourselves what every one of us can say: My existence is not in vain and without any purpose. I am a necessary link in that great chain which began at that moment when man first became fully conscious of his own existence and stretches into eternity. All these people have labored for my sake. All that were ever great, wise, or noble—those benefactors of the human race whose names I find recorded in world history, as well as the many more whose services have survived their names: I have reaped their harvest. Upon the earth on which they lived I tread in the footsteps of those who bring blessings upon all who follow them. Whenever I wish, I can assume that lofty task which they had set for themselves: the task of making our fellowmen ever wiser and happier. Where they had to stop, I can build further. I can bring nearer to completion that noble temple that they had to leave unfinished.” (VI, 322)
To this very day, the temple remains incomplete; and, in every choice you make, from the focus of your education to the ends of your labor, you can take Fichte’s challenge, and share in the work of making our world a better place.
Eli Schantz
Eli G. Schantz is a third-year medical student at Indiana University School of Medicine—South Bend, where his research centers on ontology and its application to debates in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine. He serves a delegate to the Indiana State Medical Association and the Medical Student Section of the American Medical Association, where he has sat on the AMA-MSS Committee on Bioethics and Humanities and advocates for ethics-informed healthcare policy. He is also a regularly contributing author at the Prindle Post.
