Johann Gottlieb Fichte

We have now to trace, within the limits prescribed by the nature of this work, the development of philosophy under Kant's German successors.

Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herbart.

the critical philosophy won its first success in germany less as a new epistemology than as what in fact its author mended to be a rehabilitation of religious belief the limits of reason had been drawn so closely only to make room for faith but the current of rationalism was running too strongly to be so summarily stopped and so with kant's ablest successors faith is altogether abandoned while the claims of reason are pushed relentlessly through Among these more logical thinkers, the first is J. G. Fichte, 1762 to 1814.

In him, for the third time in modern history, for the first and last time in Germany, the hero as philosopher finds a worthy representative.

born in silesia like kant of humble parentage and bred in circumstances of more oppressive poverty he also received a severely religious and moral training as a preparation for the pastoral office The bounty of an aristocratic patron gave him an excellent public school education, but as a university student, first at Jena and then at Leipzig, he had to earn a scanty living by private tuition, finally abandoning his destined career to accept a post in a Swiss family at Zurich.

Dr. Temple long afterwards used much the same phrase when Bishop at Exeter, finding it presumably compatible with official theism.

But such was not the impression created in Saxony.

a cry of atheism arose much to the disgust of fichte whose position would have been better described as pantheistic but what incensed him most was the suspicion of an attempt to interfere with the liberty of academic teaching with his usual impetuosity he talked about resigning his chair with a hint that others would follow his example were the authorities at weimar to permit such an outrage goethe who was then minister observed that no government could allow itself to be threatened and fichte was at once relieved of his post settling at berlin he became professor of philosophy in the new university founded after the french conquest of prussia having previously done much to revive the national spirit by his addresses to the german nation eighteen o seven eighteen o eight these were in appearance the programme of a new educational utopia but their real purpose was so evident that the speaker lived in daily expectation of being summoned before a french court-martial and shot Unlike his countrymen, Goethe, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Fichte passionately resented the Napoleonic despotism, throwing himself heart and soul into the great uprising by which it was finally overthrown.

End of An Ascent of Kilauea by Anna Brassy.

Fichte and Kant on Censorship by Johann Fichte and Immanuel Kant.

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For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Fichte to Kant, 22nd January 1792.

A friend whom I respect has written to me a kind and touching letter upon this subject, in which he requests that in the event of a possible revision of the work during the delay which has occurred in printing, I should endeavor to set two points upon which we are at issue in another light.

I have said that faith in a given revelation cannot reasonably be founded upon belief in miracles, because no miracle is demonstrable as such.

But you will not easily make this distinction acceptable to a censor who, it is to be feared, makes historical belief an unconditional religious duty.

Our comrade Dufar had not when this book was published made his appearance in public life as a lawyer.

The translator of Fichte, the expositor and friend of Balanche, was already interested, as I myself was, in metaphysical questions.

We often talked nonsense together about God, ourselves, and nature.

He at that time affected Pyrrhonism.

At the moment of their concentration into a movement, the German romanticists found this boon in the Berlin salons presided over by the enthusiastic, inspiring women, the sibyls of the Romantic movement.

Among the habitués at Henriette's receptions were Schadow, the sculptor, Fichte, Gentz, the two Humboldts, Tieck, Jean Paul Richter, Friedrich Schlegel, Engel, Moritz, Rahel, and Varnhagen von Ense, Schleiermacher.

Moses Mendelssohn was her fatherly friend, and his daughter, Dorothea Veit, met in her salon Friedrich Schlegel, whose wife she afterwards became.

The episode of Friedrich and Dorothea caused great excitement in Romantic circles.

In France, the revolution and its train of writers, thinkers.

In Germany, Lessing uttered his great parable of religious tolerance, Nathan der Weise.

Herder, Kant, Fichte, all taught and proclaimed freedom, the unloosening of mental fetters.

Goethe and Schiller were raising German poetry to undreamed-of heights.

It was otherwise with his successors, the idealists, for whom his system was the point of departure, though they rejected its essential feature, the limitation of human thought.

With Fichte and Hegel, progressive development was directly deduced from their principles.

If their particular interpretations of history have no permanent value, it is significant that in their ambitious attempts to explain the universe a priori, history was conceived as progressive, and their philosophies did much to reinforce a conception which, on very different principles, was making its way in the world.

But the progress which their systems involved was not bound up with the interest of human happiness, but stood out as a fact which, whether agreeable or not, is a consequence of the nature of thought.

The process of the universe, as it appeared to Fichte, tends to a full realization of freedom.

That is its end and goal, but a goal that always recedes.

It can never be reached, for its full attainment would mean the complete suppression of nature.

The process of the world, therefore, consists in an indefinite approximation to an unattainable ideal.