ABSTRACT
Fichte served as a rootless tutor, eking a living from affluent households in Zurich, Krakow, and various Saxon towns. Once, on the eve of his twenty-sixth birthday, he fell into a nearly suicidal depression. The two bright moments during this dismal period of Fichte's life were his discovery of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy, which released him from the trammels of material determinism and fatalism, and his introduction to Johanne Rahn, who accepted his pledge of affection and marriage. The Atheismusstreit and Fichte's Religionslehre constitute rich fields for contemporary scholars of Fichte, German idealism, and the Enlightenment. Anyone who eschews study of Fichte's Religionslehre will be denied egress to the central recess of the Wissenschaftslehre. Any scholar wanting to solve the puzzles related to the concept of intellectual intuition or the development of the Wissenschaftslehre would be well-rewarded by a long and deep exploration of Fichte's Religionslehre..
