It should not come as a surprise that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the famous and infamous philosopher of the I (Ich), is at once the philosopher of the You (Du) - in fact, he is the first philosopher to have accorded serious, systematic attention to the second person. Most of Fichte’s philosophical work could even be described as a sustained reflection on the complex interrelations between the various perspectives on ourselves that find their linguistic expression in the grammatical distinction between the first, second, and third person. Yet the proper appreciation of the precise contribution that Fichte made to our understanding of the second person, as well as to its relation to the first and third person, has been hampered by a persistent twofold misunderstanding. Fichte’s transcendental theory of the I as the principle and ground of all knowledge and its objects - a project inspired by Kant’s transcendental philosophy and developed by Fichte under the programmatic title Wissenschaftslehre (literally, “Doctrine of Science”) - has been mistaken for a psychological theory about the cosmological import of the individual self. And Fichte’s transcendental theory of the You as the I’s original counterpart has been mistaken for a social ontology involving the equi-primordiality of I and You and their interaction on equal terms.
As a result of this twofold misapprehension Fichte’s integrated account of I and You typically has been split up into a highly speculative theory of the I’s absolute self-positioning along with its counter-positioning of all else, and a comparatively commonsensical theory of I’s original sociality. What is lost in this twofold one-sided reception is the ingenious intrinsic linkage set forth by Fichte between the primacy of the I over everyone and everything else and the concurrent and complementary, but by no means contradictory, primacy of the You over the I. A closer look at Fichte’s interconnected treatment of I and You reveals that his theory of the I is less egoistic (in a theoretical, non-moral sense) than it might first appear to be, and that his account of the You is less altruistic (the word again taken in a theoretical, non-moral sense) than one might be led to believe.
The following six sections address as many systematically different aspects of Fichte’s treatment of the second person. They follow, approximately, the order of Fichte’s own treatment of the topic in the elaboration of his philosophical system, from its foundational parts to its applied parts as well as its propaedeutical parts. The focus is not on Fichte’s supposed philosophical development in the sense of alleged doctrinal changes, but on the successive unfolding of his philosophical thought in a comprehensive, coherent and original system. Due to the intrinsic systematic nature of Fichte’s thought, any piecemeal reception of his treatment of a particular topic or problem in his work is prone to miss the organic relatedness of a given part or aspect of his system to the system as a whole and to fail to grasp the functional dependency of particular doctrines on their respective position in the entire system.