Centering on the debate over whether Fichte’s philosophy of religion underwent a shift between his early and late periods, existing studies have largely taken changes in terminology and content as their basis, understanding it as a move from an early, practical moral religion to a late, ontological religion; other studies maintain that the late period, with themes such as God, being, and love, transcends and develops the early framework. This paper argues that, once we return to the Jena Wissenschaftslehre’s genetic construction of spiritual freedom, the so-called shift does not hold. Through the logical structure of “absolute I–finite I–feeling,” the Jena Wissenschaftslehre provides a model of how the Absolute manifests itself within finite consciousness and completes its actual manifestation in free action. The early philosophy of religion unfolds the same genetic logic in the structure “God–the finite–faith,” while the structure “being–image–love” in the late philosophy of religion represents not a negation of the early view or a move beyond it, but rather a renewed clarification and interpretation of the same logic of spiritual freedom.
Jun Wang (Fri,) studied this question.