Morale inferiore e morale superiore: Fichte a confronto con F. Schlegel e F. D. E. Schleiermacher

This paper focuses on the development of Fichte’s ethic after 1800, considering the main critics that F. D. E. Schleiermacher and F. Schlegel move to him, respectively in the Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803) and in Schlegel’s review about Fichte’s popular trilogy published on the Heidelbergische Jahrbücher (1808).On the one hand, Fichte accepts Schleiermacher’s critic of stoicism - connected with that of having built a merely juridical and limitative ethic – concerning Jena’s System der Sittenlehre: the distinction – that he introduces in the works after 1800 - between an «inferior morality» and a «superior morality», founded on a «creative» law and on the divine love, can be seen as an answer to such a critic. On the other hand, Fichte apologises the stoicism as a necessary intermediate step in the way to the «beatitude» and as indispensable antidote against the eudemonism and the mysticism, that he blames on Schleiermacher and on F. Schlegel. Further the critical confrontation with F. Schlegel is one of the main reason that leads Fichte, after the Anweisung zum seligen Leben, to reduce the role of the enthusiasm (Begeisterung) in the moral life, revaluing the form of the duty and insisting on the clearness as only possible instrument to reach and diffuse the true morality