Fichte takes the promotion of freedom rather than happiness as the legitimate end of political action. He revises the concept of spontaneity, especially in his System der Sittlenlehre, equating it with labour as the transformation of the sense-world under the command of an idea. The political system proposed in his Geschlossener Handelsstaat is a further application of this idea, together with attention to the conditions (epistemic, material, and intersubjective) necessary for the effective transposition of subjective intentions into objective results. Fichte’s political interventionism is fundamentally distinct from Wolff’s because of its commitment to the primacy of freedom, even when his own concrete prescriptions appear to undermine this objective. The political programmes of Fichte and Humboldt are alternative Kantianisms, but both exemplify post-Kantian perfectionist commitments to enhance the capacity for free activity.

Jacobi famously contended that Fichte’s transcendental philosophy ultimately leads to metaphysical nihilism, while Fichte himself continued to see a close harmony between the Wissenschaftslehre and Jacobi’s thought. This chapter explores a middle path between these positions in the writings of the two philosophers.

After his controversy with Schelling, Fichte orally presented several new versions of his Science in which he adopted, if not a new standpoint, certainly a new methodology that had repercussions for the earlier standpoint. Where the “I is I” was the principle of the earlier Science, the trope of “light,” used alternatively with Evidenz and Reason, was the new principle. Where Fichte had earlier urged his auditors to engage in productive thinking, he now encouraged them to practice “attention,” an attitude of being actively engaged in the passive reception of the objects that presented themselves to their grasp. They had to detect in them, but only indirectly, the source of the intelligibility that made their presence compelling yet itself remained unseen. The aim was to let this source pervade one’s life. Fichte was adopting a new kind of realism which was in fact more consistent with the monism to which he had been committed from the beginning. Chapter 3 explores in detail a key text of 1804 in which these changes are introduced. The ontological quietism to which Fichte’s Science now led was one possible existential attitude that the assumed monism fostered.

The general introduction briefly presents the historical-philosophical context in which Fichte's System of Ethics was published and its connection to Fichte's overall project of a philosophical system. The Introduction stresses the complexity of the plan of the System of Ethics, and surveys the main issues discussed in the work, thereby presenting the topics of each chapter in the volume.