Liberation of culture in fichte's philosophy

Abstract

Fichte's The Vocation of the Scholar defines the notion of culture as the means of man's identity. There he understands the culture simultaneously as the process of man's acquisition of the skill to subjugate to the mind everything that is not under its authority and as the acquired degree of that skill, which is the factual situation of man's historical moment. Man's identity, as his complete harmony with himself, is reflected by Fichte as moral acting. The culture that is subordinated to the moral freedom is the culture of the act, which is free from all empirical purposes, and, consequently, cannot be reduced to the assembly of the scientific, artistic, religious, linguistic and historical facts. The Author considers Fichte's understanding of the culture in the broader context of the philosopher's early science of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), while the introductory and final chapters are trying to point to the elements of Fichte's later understanding of culture which represents limitations of the initiated process of the liberation of human culture.