The German philosophical tradition from Leibniz to Heidegger has more often than not centered its work around the study of that being that is closest to us and from the perspective of which everything else comes into view, viz., our own existence as conscious, world-related self or subject. Since Leibniz, the inquiry into the structure of subjectivity has moreover tended to employ a double characterization of the self as subject of cognition and subject of volition. More importantly, the cognitive and the conative elements of human subjectivity have typically been characterized in terms of each other, stressing both the volitional component in knowing and the cognitive component in willing. Finally, the post-Leibnizian German tradition has almost always regarded human subjectivity not as part of the natural world but as belonging to an order of its own, an order that underlies the natural world as the very condition of the cognizability of the natural order if not as its very ground of being. The latter feature has given the classical German philosophy of subjectivity the status of a “first philosophy,” which can lay claim to being the successor discipline to the ontology of traditional metaphysics.

An important stage in the development of a first philosophy of subjectivity is marked by Fichte's project of the Wissenschaftslehre. In a series of daring lecture courses, most of which were never published during his own lifetime, Fichte provided innovative, highly complex and equally controversial accounts of the constitution of the subject and its world.