The philosopher son of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, credited by Steiner with grasping the etheric human being, the formative-force man within the physical body, more precisely than the geniuses before him.
Immanuel Hermann Fichte in Anthroposophy is the philosopher Rudolf Steiner names as a forgotten forerunner of spiritual science: the son of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, living 1796 to 1879, who taught that a higher, etheric human being dwells within the sense-perceptible one. In the Berlin lecture of 25 February 1916, printed in From Central European Intellectual Life (GA 65), Steiner counts him among the lesser minds who caught the path into the spiritual world more precisely than the geniuses who opened it. This etheric human being carries the formative forces that build the physical body before it receives its hereditary substance from the parents, and that remain when the body passes through the gate of death. Fichte's Anthropologie, which Steiner quotes in its 1860 edition, even closes by raising anthropology to anthroposophy, the very word Steiner adopted. Historians of personalism now claim him as a source of their tradition.
Immanuel Hermann Fichte appears in Steiner's wartime Berlin lectures as living proof that nineteenth-century German philosophy already strove toward spiritual science. Steiner groups him with the spiritual idealists Hermann Ulrici and Johann Ulrich Wirth, then singles him out as the one who went more deeply into things: deep enough to describe, from the philosopher's chair, an etheric human being inside the physical one.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus we see in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, how he strives in his own way for a spiritual science, and in such a way that he seeks a higher human being in the sensual human being who stands before us, who is grasped by the outer senses and outer science, whom he calls an etheric human being, and in whom lie the formative forces for this physical human being, which are built up before the physical body receives its hereditary substance from the parents, and which are maintained as the sum of the formative forces when the physical body passes through the gate of death.
What it Means Today
For most of the twentieth century, Immanuel Hermann Fichte survived mainly as a footnote to his famous father. The historian of ideas Jan Olof Bengtsson changed that with The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (Oxford University Press, 2006), which traced personalism, the philosophy that treats the person rather than matter or an impersonal absolute as the fundamental reality, back to the speculative theism of the younger Fichte and his colleagues Christian Hermann Weisse and Hermann Ulrici. Bengtsson argued that the movement later made famous by the Boston personalists began in exactly the circle Steiner defended before his Berlin audience in 1916.
The convergence deserves attention. Steiner called Fichte's work a forgotten quest for spiritual science; ninety years later an Oxford monograph called the same circle the forgotten origin of personalism. Both readings agree on the essential point: the human person cannot be accounted for by inherited substance alone. Thalira synthesis: Immanuel Hermann Fichte is the hinge where university philosophy and esoteric anthropology still touch, because his etheric human being names from the lecture hall the same formative-force organism that Steiner described from spiritual research, and both men reached it by asking what in the person precedes the body. Readers who want the primary text can begin where Steiner did, with the closing pages of the Anthropologie, where anthropology, pressed to its final result, gives way to anthroposophy.
Where to Read More
- From Central European Intellectual Life, GA 65
- Find The Riddles of Philosophy, Steiner's survey of nineteenth-century thought, at SteinerBooks
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse: An Esoteric Reading
- Demian by Hermann Hesse: The Gnostic Coming-of-Age
- Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse: The Magic Theatre of the Soul