Johann Gottlieb Fichte, son of Christian and Johanna Dorothea Schurich Fichte, was born in the small town of Rammenau near Bischofswerda in Saxony on May 19, 1762. He received financial sponsorship to attend the foundation school of Schulpforta, near Naumberg, from 1774 to 1780, where he was deeply influenced by the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Baruch Spinoza. Honoring his mother's desires for him to become a minister, Fichte entered Jena in 1780 to study theology. After a year, he enrolled at Leipzig, where he remained until 1784 when financial difficulties forced him to withdraw. He took work as a family tutor, a job for which he was not particularly well suited due to his volatile and temperamental nature. He tutored first in Zurich and then Warsaw and Danzig. While in Zurich he met Johanna Maria Rahn, whom he married in 1793. They had one son, Immanuel Hermann.

In the late 1780s, Fichte studied...