The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  The pronounced parallelism of scholarliness and popularity in Fichte’s mature and late thinking was philosophically motivated. For Fichte philosophy was not to be a self-sufficient academic exercise in pursuit of some rare and superior knowledge, but the acquisition and application of a range of insights informed by natural and social reality and bent on acting back on that reality by way of transformation and with the end of emendation. In line with Fichte’s thorough conviction of the essential freedom of human existence, any such improving influence of philosophy on the wider population had to take the form of intelligent instruction rather than indolent indoctrination.

  Fichte’s covering term for the extra-philosophical origin of philosophical insight as well as for its extra-philosophical telos was “life,” the latter term not taken in a narrow biological sense but as a designation for the self-contained inherently dynamic realm of reality which philosophy might mirror in sustained reflection (“speculation”) without ever achieving the latter’s vitality and independence. The point of philosophy for Fichte was to give a comprehensive account of life that could in turn serve to redirect the latter’s course.

  The overall trajectory of Fichte’s mature and late philosophy was marked by his growing concern with the distance that separated philosophical speculation from a real life that was to exhibit the very freedom considered in the abstract by his own system of freedom. Rather than offering his philosophical insights as lessons to be learned, Fichte came to understand and present them as insights that the philosopher-apprentice had to become. Philosophy was not to be a matter of simply having some knowledge but of actually being that knowledge—of instantiating the knowledge about the grounds and conditions of reality in one’s own thinking and doing, in the process turning knowledge obtained into wisdom lived.

  The chief step toward the serial presentations of Wissenschaftslehre from Fichte’s later years was undertaken with the second lecture course from the year 1804. The later Fichte abandoned the earlier focus on the (positing, oppositing, and compositing) I in favor of a two-staged account of knowledge as grounded unconditionally or absolutely in some inscrutable prior dimension (“the absolute,” “being,” “God”) and grounding in turn the world as the sum-total of possible or actual objects of knowledge. According to Fichte, the basic move from being to knowing was marked by conditional necessity. While it was to be regarded as a matter of cosmic contingency, not to be derived from any law or decree, that the absolute manifested itself or “appeared,” the appearance itself, once it had to be taken to have occurred, followed strict rules, chiefly including the absolute’s original manifestation as knowledge, rather than as (objective) being, and the derivative status of thing-like as a lawful product of non-empirical, “transcendental” subjectivity (“knowledge”).

  The overtly metaphysical, even theological, language (“God,” “revelation”) to be encountered in the later Fichte was probably adopted in an attempt to comply with the changing conceptual practices of his philosophical contemporaries (F. H. Jacobi, F. W. J. Schelling) and resulted from Fichte’s intent to reach an audience no longer inclined to Kant’s sober critique of reason. The changed character of the later works has led many interpreters, past and present, to sever the later Fichte from his earlier, specifically critical phase, even saddling him with the diagnosis of mysticism, offered alternatively as an attribution of praise or of blame.

  Still, to the unprejudiced reader who takes into account Fichte’s entire literary production, Fichte appears as far more consistent in his views and continuous in his developments. The “absolute I” of the early Fichte, which designated more the aspect of absoluteness or the unconditional character underlying the finite I than an independent entity of its own, anticipated the later figuration of the unconditional ground of knowledge as “the absolute.” Just as the close connection of the absolute with knowledge in the later Fichte took up his earlier exclusive emphasis of the unconditional, self-regulated, “free” character of knowledge independent of natural factors and preternatural dictates.

  The later Fichte went to great lengths in maintaining the close correlation between the absolute, which was said to manifest itself only in knowledge, as knowledge and for knowledge, and knowledge as such, which was essentially absolute in its basic character as objectively conceived cognition independent of psychological, physiological, and physical conditions, which might contribute to its occasional articulation but did not constitute its validity. In particular, Fichte presented the core insight of philosophy as the intuitive grasp of the mutual requirement of thinking and being, of the real and the ideal, of subject and object, reflecting an original point of unity that was as much the origin of differentiation as of unification, of disjunction as of conjunction, and that properly constituted what was absolute and not subject to anything else.

  A further feature uniting the early and the later Fichte was the articulation of knowledge as the central topic of first philosophy into a fivefold structure of the chief domains of knowledge and their associated world views. Building on earlier discussions of the fivefold cyclical set-up of knowledge (“synthetic periodic structure”), the later Fichte distinguished and interrelated the ascending series of world views, reaching from nature through (juridical) law, ethics, and religion to their integration and sublimation through philosophy.

  Compared to the detailed doctrines contained in his earlier works, the elaborate reflections of the later Fichte on the absolute and its appearance, i.e. knowledge, can seem monotonous and repetitious. While limiting the doctrinal core of his later philosophy to ever fewer basic propositions, ultimately reducing them to the “one thought” that the absolute “is” and has knowledge as its “appearance,” Fichte insisted ever more on the existential import of philosophical insight, eventually sending off his listeners with the admonition: “Now that you have knowledge, become wisdom!”

  The basic continuity between the early and the later Fichte notwithstanding, one central feature was conspicuously absent from Fichte’s later thinking in general and from the later presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre in particular. The former “system of freedom,” with its constitutive linkage of knowledge and freedom, seemed to have turned into a system of absolute knowledge—a system of knowledge as the absolute-in-appearance, which was at once a system of knowledge about the absolute and a system about knowledge instantiating the absolute. Freedom now resided primarily in the inscrutable contingency of the absolute’s apparition, which involved, according to Fichte, an “irrational hiatus” that defied rational rules.

  1.6 A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND RELIGION

  The former focus on freedom that seemed to elude Fichte’s later work in first philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) found a new outlet in Fichte’s later popular philosophy, chiefly in his philosophical reflections on the course of political history past, present, and future and an allied developmental account of religion. In these works—chief among them Basic Traits of the Present Age (1805–6), Addresses to the German Nation (1808), and The Doctrine of the State (1813)—Fichte stepped forth as a cultural critic, political preacher, and religious philosopher bent on illuminating the past, castigating the present, and preparing the future of humanity.

  Drawing on Kant’s conjectural history of human development in the juridico-ethical sphere as a natural history of freedom and anticipating Hegel’s developmental history of the ever-increasing consciousness of freedom, Fichte read human history as the gradual emergence of regulated social life from instinctual guidance through selfishly employed reason to socially responsible practical rationality. The overall development of human history traced by Fichte ran from the initial clandestine rule of reason under the guise of instinctual control through the contrarian and chaotic liberation of reason from natural guidance to an eventual return to lawful order and secured stability on the basis of enlightened freedom and insight.

  After first having located the nadir of human history in his own present—citing the la
tter’s materialist world view, naturalist philosophical outlook, and cult of common sense—Fichte came to see the beginnings of a world-historical reversal from selfish reason to social reason in the fateful situation of the German lands, in particular his adopted home country, Prussia, in a situation marked by the complete military defeat through Napoleon and the ensuing total collapse of the old political life. Tracing an ancient German—or rather, Germanic—lineage of political freedom and quintessentially republican rule, Fichte appealed to his fellow countrymen to undertake a twofold cultural-political revolution, outwardly from imperial rule and inwardly from princely power, effectively calling for a unified “republic of the Germans.”

  While couched in a markedly nationalist language, involving aggressive appeals to the cultural and intellectual superiority of the “German nation” over the civilized nations in the orbit of the ancient Roman Empire, chiefly among them France, Fichte’s philosophy of political liberation was cosmopolitan in scope and intent. Fichte outright defined patriotism as the political practice of advancing the universal human goal of equal freedom in one’s own nation first, only to move on from there beyond national bounds and borders. On Fichte’s instrumentalist understanding, nationalism was cosmopolitanism-in-progress. In Fichte’s vision post-Napoleonic France and politically liberated Germany were to form the core of an enlightened Europe of the future.

  The concrete outlines of the new European order that lay beyond the previously prevalent political oppression from within and without emerged in Fichte’s late political philosophy, which was developed as a political history of religion from the ancient world to the new, modern world. In particular, Fichte stressed the political advances brought about by the universal claims of the Christian religion that had overturned the exclusive tie of human dignity to civic status, to be found in the pagan ancient world, in favor of the dignity of each and every human being independent of socio-political status.

  While evidencing a philosophical appreciation of its socio-political advancements, Fichte’s selective appropriation of Christianity disregarded even discarded specific teachings, notably those concerning sin and salvation, maintaining instead the mutual corruption of human beings in social relations marked by the arbitrary exercise of power but also their ability to establish a political order based on the reign of right. For Fichte, as for Kant before him and Hegel after him, human history was—or rather, was to be—the history of establishing a rightful political order at the national and international level.

  An integral part of the political progress from force to right and from unfree domination to free self-determination envisioned by Fichte was the eventual substitution of external constraint through free, voluntary compliance in the maintenance of just laws and political order. In particular, Fichte contrasted the earlier observance of law through “blind faith,” characteristic of traditional societies, and their casting of political obligations as religiously sanctioned rules, with the free compliance borne from “insight” into the nature of right and its basis in the equal freedom of everyone.

  Still, Fichte’s writings, especially those from his later years, largely because of their overt theological language, lent themselves to religious appropriation, just as his insistence on the strict moral or political laws correlated with universal freedom lent itself to a reading that stressed authority rather than autonomy and submission rather than liberation in the governance of human conduct. It should not come as a surprise, then, that the spectrum of positions that lay claim to Fichte’s profoundly political philosophy ranged from liberals, even libertarians, through socialists and communists to nationalists and religious reactionaries. In contemporary academic philosophy, though, Fichte has chiefly been read, regarded, and respected as a critical thinker in the tradition of Kant who made major contributions to the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of law, ethics, and political philosophy and who initiated the move from Kant’s plural foundations of philosophy to a unitary but complexly organized system of philosophy under the guiding principle of freedom.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Complete Editions of Fichte’s Works

  Fichte’s Werke,ed.I.H.Fichte, 11 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971).

  J. G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth et al., 42 vols. in four series (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1962–2012).

  English Translations of Fichte’s Main Works

  Addresses to the German Nation, ed. G. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2009).

  Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

  Fichte, J. G. and Schelling, F. W. J. The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802), trans. and ed. M. G. Vater and D. W. Wood (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012).

  Foundations of Natural Law, ed. Frederick Neuhouser and trans. M. Baur, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) Nova Methodo (1796/99), ed. and trans. D. Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

  Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, ed. and transl. D. Breazeale (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994).

  The Science of Knowing: J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. and ed. W. Wright (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005).

  Science of Knowledge with the First and Second Introductions,ytrans. P. Heath and J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

  The System of Ethics, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale and G. Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  The Vocation of Man, ed. R. Chisholm (New York: Macmillan, 1986).

  English-language Monographs on Fichte

  Beck, Gunnar, Fichte and Kant on Freedom, Rights, and Law Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008).

  Breazeale, Daniel, Thinking Through the “Wissenschaftslehre”: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds., Fichte, Historical Context/Contemporary Controversies (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993).

  Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds., New Essays on Fichte’s Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001).

  Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds., Bodies, Rights, and Recognition: New Essays on Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

  Breazeale, Daniel and Rockmore, Tom, eds., Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2010).

  Breazeale, Daniel, Rockmore, Tom, and Waibel, Violetta, eds., Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2010).

  Henrich, Dieter, “Fichte’s Original Insight,” Contemporary German Philosophy, 1 (1982): 15–52.

  James, David, Fichte’s Social and Political Philosophy: Property and Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  La Vopa, Anthony J., Fichte. The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762—1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  Martin, Wayne M., Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

  Nakhimovsky, Isaac, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  Neuhouser, Frederick, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  Rockmore, Tom, Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).

  Seidel, George J., Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1794: A Commentary on Part I (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993).

  Williams, Robert R., Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992).

  Wood, David W., “
Mathesis of the Mind.” A Study of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012).

  Zöller, Günter, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  CHAPTER 2

  SCHLEIERMACHER (1768–1834)

  ANDREAS ARNDT

  2.1 LIFE AND WORKS

  FRIEDRICH Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born on 21 November 1768 in Breslau as the son of a Reformed Prussian army chaplain.1 He was educated by the Moravian Brethren (Herrnhuter), whom he left in 1787 to study theology and philosophy in Halle with the support of his uncle, Samuel Ernst Timotheus Stubenrauch (1738–1807). In 1790 he completed the first theological examinations and then took on a position as private tutor in the house of Count Dohna in Schlobitten (East Prussia). In 1794 he became an assistant pastor in Landsberg an der Warthe, before he was appointed the Reformed pastor at the Charité hospital in Berlin, where he served until 1802. In Berlin he entered into the world of intellectual society and literary salons, where he also met Friedrich Schlegel, with whom for a while he shared a flat.2 Schleiermacher worked on the Schlegel brothers’ journal Athenaeum, and at the urging of his friend Friedrich Schlegel he presented his first writings to the public. Encouraged through Friedrich Schlegel’s project of a co-translation, he also began an intensive study of Plato.

  Schleiermacher’s participation in the early Romantic movement, his association with the Jewish salons and not least his relationship with the wife of a colleague, Eleonore Grunow (1770–1839), whom he had urged to divorce her husband, led to his demotion to a position as court pastor in the town of Stolp in Pomerania. It was here that he completed his Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803) and began with the publication of his translations of Plato. At the beginning of 1804 Schleiermacher was offered a professorship at the University of Würzburg. He remained, however, in Prussia and was appointed for the winter semester 1804/05 professor of theology and philosophy and university pastor in Halle. In his lectures in Halle he laid the foundations for his theological and philosophical system. After the university was closed in the wake of the Prussian defeat against Napoleon, Schleiermacher went to Berlin, where at first he held private lectures before becoming pastor of the Berlin Dreifaltigkeitskirche in 1809 and in 1810 professor of theology at the newly founded University of Berlin, the organizational structure of which Schleiermacher had decisively influenced through his policy paper Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn (‘Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense’) (1808). In 1810 Schleiermacher was also inducted into the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which gave him the right to hold philosophical lectures at the university as well. Politically, Schleiermacher was close to the Prussian reform party, for whom he also worked conspiratorially during the Napoleonic occupation, and was active chiefly in the reform of the educational system. After the victory over Napoleon he was suspected of demagoguery; his lectures and sermons were put under surveillance and he found himself confronted with the threat of dismissal from office; the harassments only ceased in 1824. In church politics, Schleiermacher was a proponent of the independence of church and state and worked toward the union of the Prussian Lutheran and Reformed churches, which was achieved in 1817. Schleiermacher died on 12 February 1834 and was buried in the cemetery of his Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Berlin.