Swept up in the ideals of the French Revolution, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and several other young German philosophers argued in the 1790’s for increases in individual liberty, including relaxations of censorship.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a child of his time, and that time was revolutionary on unprecedented levels. Recent revolutions in America and France had overthrown centuries of monarchic tradition, encouraged common citizens with expectations of increased liberty, and inspired philosophers the world over. The French Revolution
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788; Critique of Practical Reason, 1873),
Modern ideas of civil freedom
The spirit of the time included such progressive writings as Ernst Ferdinand Klein’s Über Denk und Drukfreiheit (1784; On Freedom of the Press and of Thought: For Princes, Ministers, and Writers, 1996),
A bold and precocious youth from a poor background, Fichte was impatient to advance his career as a philosopher. In 1791, he made a pilgrimage to Königsberg, East Prussia, where Kant held his professorship. Fichte managed on July 4 to gain an audience with Kant. Shortly thereafter, Fichte submitted to Kant a manuscript that interpreted Kantian ethical concepts within a philosophy of religion. Kant was favorably impressed and arranged for his own publisher, Hartung, to print it as Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, 1978)
In 1793, Fichte published anonymously in Danzig two books on social and political philosophy and topical issues: the eighty-six-page Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit (reclamation of freedom of thought) and the two-volume Beitrag zur Berichtigung über die französische Revolution (contribution to the rectification of the public’s judgment of the French Revolution). These two books laid out a clear philosophy of the individual expression of human freedom. While some of his similarly inclined contemporaries, notably Bahrdt, claimed that the right to free speech was ordained by God, Fichte instead regarded the justification of free speech as social. That is, any civilized society requires that its citizens be educated. Education requires that ideas be freely available for discussion and evaluation. Therefore, free speech is the linchpin of any society that aspires to develop its culture to the highest possible level.
Mainly on the strength of the general praise given to his Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation and despite the two polemical and radical works of 1793, Fichte was appointed to succeed Reinhold as professor of philosophy at the University of Jena in May, 1794. He remained in that post until dismissed in 1799, amid charges, probably true, that his Kantian humanism was a thinly disguised atheism.
Napoleon I’s
Fichte, on the other hand, became a fervent German nationalist and increasingly conservative. In 1806, he offered personal encouragement to Prussian troops defending the homeland against the French invaders. In 1808, he published Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation, 1922),
With the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the consequent return to conservative values in the German states, and especially the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819,
Many professors were fired or persecuted during this reactionary era. Even Hegel,
Hegel, a lifelong constitutional monarchist, remained as liberal as one could be in Prussia and still keep an academic job, and he never turned as far toward the conservative end of the spectrum as did Fichte. Nevertheless, Hegel’s respect for Fichte remained so high that he requested to be buried next to him. The two philosophers and their wives lie side-by-side in Dorothea Cemetery in Berlin.
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Ameriks, Karl. Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Includes interpretations of Kant’s, Fichte’s, Reinhold’s, and Hegel’s respective concepts of freedom, placing them within the context of one another. -
La Vopa, Anthony J. Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Biographical study of the young Fichte. -
Rockmore, Tom. Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. An account of Marx’s appropriation of Fichte’s theory of the human self as a free and active moral agent. -
Schmidt, James, ed. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Part 1 is a collection of key texts from the German 1780’s and 1790’s pertaining to personal reason and autonomy; parts 2 and 3 provide the perspectives and interpretations of seventeen important twentieth century thinkers. -
Smith, Lindsley Armstrong. “Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Free Speech Theory.” American Communication Journal 4, no. 3 (Spring, 2001). Available at http:\www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol4/iss3/articles/lsmith.pdf. A clear exposition written by a lawyer from the perspective of a philosophy of law, in a peer-reviewed, online-only scholarly journal.
Early Enlightenment in France
Hume Publishes A Treatise of Human Nature
Condillac Defends Sensationalist Theory
Helvétius Publishes De l’esprit
Voltaire Publishes A Philosophical Dictionary for the Pocket
Publication of Holbach’s The System of Nature
Kant Publishes Critique of Pure Reason
Herder Publishes His Philosophy of History
Edmund Burke; Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Immanuel Kant; Thomas Paine; Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Voltaire.