Time & Perspective Quote by Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte doesn’t let you sneak into salvation on a technicality. “By mere burial” is a brutal little jab at the idea that death itself is a moral upgrade, as if the grave were a passport stamp to bliss. He’s writing in an age when Europe is watching old religious certainties wobble and modern subjectivity surge forward; German Idealism is busy relocating the sacred from church architecture to consciousness itself. So he aims his fire at the comforting superstition that the “future life” is a different marketplace where happiness is finally in stock.

The engine of the passage is its bait-and-switch: you expect an argument about heaven, and you get a critique of craving. Even in an “infinite range,” he says, the same mistake replicates. The afterlife becomes a mirror that exaggerates our habits rather than erases them. That’s the subtext: the self doesn’t magically become wise by changing scenery. If your happiness depends on “aught else” - possessions, status, outcomes, even a neatly packaged paradise - you’ve built it on contingency, and contingency can’t deliver rest.

Then comes the twist that makes the line philosophically aggressive: the Infinite is not postponed. It “so closely surrounds them here.” Fichte’s intent is to collapse the distance between the transcendent and the everyday, insisting that the Absolute isn’t a prize at the end of time but the medium we already live in. He’s not offering consolation; he’s issuing a diagnosis. The hunger for happiness is misdirected, and the cure is not death, but a reorientation of attention toward the Infinite that was never absent.