Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ So long as this baseness remains in darkness, it is continually disquieted, goaded, and impelled by the unceasing claim to freedom, and it presents a point of attack to the attempts to improve it. But clearness completes it and rounds it off in itself; clearness imparts to this base state of mind a cheerful resignation, the calm of a good conscience, and self-satisfaction. As their belief is, so is the result; from now onwards they are in fact incapable of improvement; at the most they serve to keep alive among their betters a pitiless loathing of evil or a resignation to the will of God ”

“ This German philosophy does, indeed, raise itself by the act of thinking—not merely boasting about it, in accordance with a dim notion that it ought to be so, without being able to put it into practice—it raises itself to the ‘more than all infinity’ that is unchangeable, and in this alone it finds true being. It perceives time and eternity and infinity in their rise from the appearing and becoming visible of that One which is in itself invisible and which is only comprehended, rightly comprehended, in this invisibility. ”

“ This is for it the mainspring, whose life proceeds from itself, and which has perpetual motion; the mainspring which will regulate, and continually keep in motion, the life of society. The German art of the State understands that it cannot create this spirit by reprimanding adults who are already spoilt by neglect, but only by educating the young, who are still unspoilt. Moreover, with this education it will not turn, as foreign countries do, to the solitary peak, the prince, but to the broad plain which is the nation; for indeed the prince, too, will without doubt be part of the nation. ”

“ This belief in death, as contrasted with an original and living people, we have called the foreign spirit. When once this foreign spirit is present among Germans it will, therefore, reveal itself in their actual life also, as quiet resignation to what they deem the unalterable necessity of their existence, as the abandonment of all hope of improvement of ourselves or others by means of freedom, as a disposition to make use of themselves and everyone else just as they are, and to derive from their existence the greatest possible advantage for ourselves ”

“ Now, in these shadows of the shadows of shadows that philosophy of being, which believes in death and becomes a mere philosophy of nature, the deadest of all philosophies, remains a captive, and dreads and worships its own creature. ”

“ All who either are themselves alive and creative and productive of new things, or who, should this not have fallen to their lot, at any rate definitely abandon the things of naught and stand on the watch for the stream of original life to lay hold of them somewhere, or who, should they not even be so far advanced as this, at least have an inkling of freedom and do not hate it or take fright at it, but on the contrary love it—all these are original men ”

“ For those people, whose will has never yet raised itself to a higher sphere than the one in which it is held that a will merely appears in them, the belief in freedom is, of course, a delusion and a deception, proceeding from a view that is casual and does not go beneath the surface. ”

“ From this closer kinship it follows also that this philosophy of history, which we call ours, is able to understand the efforts of foreign countries through and through; and, although this view of history is no longer expressed very often in those countries, they go beyond expression, for they are acting in accordance with it and constructing once more a golden age. This philosophy is even able to prophesy, and to point out to them the path they have still to take; it can pay them the tribute of genuine admiration, which one who thinks as a German cannot pretend to do. ”

“ Tell me how you are going to bring perpetual motion into your clockwork, which, though properly designed and constructed, does not go. Is, perhaps, as you sometimes say in your embarrassment, the whole machine itself to react and to set its own mainspring in motion? ”

“ The more deeply rooted anyone is in this mechanical view of society, and the better he understands how to simplify the mechanism by making all the parts of the machine as alike as possible and by treating them all as if they were of the same material, the higher is his reputation as an artist of the State in this age of ours: and rightly so, for things are even worse when those in control hesitate and come to no decision and are incapable of any definite opinion. ”

“ Indeed, it is a main effort of our age, stimulated by foreign countries as we are, not merely to lay hold of the material of science with the memory, as our forefathers may be said to have done, but to turn it over in our own independent thought and to philosophize upon it. So far as the effort is concerned, our age is in the right; but when, in the execution of this philosophizing, it proceeds, as is to be expected, from the death-creed of foreign philosophy, it will be in the wrong. ”

“ Now, where this ‘more’ actually enters as such a visible ‘more’—but it can only enter in an act of will—there essence itself, which alone exists and alone can exist, and which exists of itself and by itself, divine essence enters into appearance and makes itself directly visible; and in that place there exists, for that very reason, true originality and freedom, and so there is also a belief in them. ”

“ But, apart from this need of thinking it, it exists, this ‘more than everything infinite,’ which has the power of presenting itself eternally; this ‘more,’ I say, exists in pure simplicity and invariability from the very beginning, and in all infinity it does not become more than this ‘more,’ nor does it become less. Nothing but its visibleness as more than the infinite—and in no other way can it become visible in its highest purity—creates the infinite and all that appears to appear in it. ”

“ Whoever believes in stagnation, retrogression, and the round dance of which we spoke, or who sets a dead nature at the helm of the world’s government, wherever he may have been born and whatever language he speaks, is non-German and a stranger to us ”

“ Now, the thinking of man, as we have mentioned several times already, represents man to himself just as he actually is, and always remains the true copy and mirror of his inner being. For this reason, although such a decision of the will appears at first sight to be free, just because it is called a decision of the will, yet it cannot appear so at all to deeper and prolonged thinking; on the contrary, the latter must think that it is a result of necessity, which, of course, it actually is in fact. ”

“ But how can one be sure of finding someone who by nature is capable of receiving the education that is to make a prince? Even if by a stroke of luck he were to be found, how can one be sure that he, whom no man can compel, will be ready and willing to submit to discipline? ”

“ Even infinity is, according to this philosophy, nothing in itself, and there is in it no true being whatever. It is solely the means by which the One thing that exists, and exists only in its invisibility, becomes visible, and the means by which there is built up for the One an image, a form, and a shadow of itself in the sphere of imagery. ”

“ In holding that the establishment and government of States should be looked upon as an independent art having its own fixed rules, non-German countries have undoubtedly served us as forerunners, and they themselves found their pattern in antiquity. But what will be regarded as the art of the State by such a non-German country, which in its language, the very element of its thinking and willing, has a support that is fixed, closed, and dead? ”

“ In the preceding address we saw that the means by which foreign countries stimulate their motherland at the present time is philosophy, which we defined as free-thinking released from all fetters of belief in external authority. Now, when this stimulus has not resulted in a new creative act—and it will result thus in extremely few cases, for the great majority have no conception of what creation means—the following effects are observable. For one thing, that foreign philosophy which we have already described changes its own form again and again. ”

“ In all these points it is right, and far surpasses the philosophies prevailing in foreign countries at the present day; for German philosophy in its love of everything foreign is far more thorough and more consistent than the foreign countries themselves. Now this foundation, which is to be the basis of mere appearance, is for those philosophies, however much more incorrectly they may further define it, always fixed Being, which is just what it is and nothing more, chained in itself and bound to its own essence. ”

“ Just as those animal species, the beavers and the bees, still build in the way they built thousands of years ago, and have made no progress in the art during that long period of time, so it will be, according to that nation, with the animal species called man in all branches of his development. These branches, impulses, and capacities it will be possible to survey exhaustively, and indeed to see on examining a few members; and then it will be possible to indicate the highest development of each one of them. Perhaps the human species will be far worse off than the bee or beaver species ”

“ The human species, so these people think, will undoubtedly have attained such culminating points in education in the past, and enjoyed more than one golden age; to discover these points in history, to judge all the efforts of humanity by them, and to lead humanity back to them, will be their most strenuous endeavour. ”

“ It expresses itself first of all in their own philosophy. German philosophy of the present day, in so far as it is worthy of mention here, strives for thoroughness and scientific form, regardless of the fact that those things are beyond its reach; it strives for unity, and that also not without the example of foreign countries in former times; it strives for reality and essence—not for mere appearance, but to find for this appearance a foundation appearing in appearance. ”

“ Just as the State, in the persons of its adult citizens, is the continued education of the human race, so must the future citizen himself, in the opinion of this art of the State, first be educated up to the point of being susceptible to that higher education. So this German and very modern art of the State becomes once more the very ancient art of the State, which among the Greeks founded citizenship on education and trained such citizens as succeeding ages have never seen. ”

“ As it undoubtedly takes time for the stimulus to result in a creative act, it is plain that such a relationship will bring about periods of time in which the original people must seem to be almost entirely amalgamated with foreign peoples and similar to them, because it is then being stimulated only, and the creative act which is to be the result has not yet forced its way through. It is in such a period of time that Germany finds itself at the present moment in regard to the great majority of its educated inhabitants ”

“ He who is in fact no more than a link in the chain of appearances may, perhaps, for a moment be under the delusion that he is free; but this delusion cannot hold its ground when he thinks more strictly. Of necessity he thinks that all his fellows are in the condition in which he finds himself. On the other hand, he, whose life is possessed by the truth and has become life direct from God, is free and believes in freedom in himself and others. ”

“ He who believes in a fixed, rigid, and dead state of being believes in it only because he is dead in himself; and, once he is dead, he cannot do anything but believe thus, so soon as ever he becomes clear in himself. He himself, with all his kind from beginning to end, becomes something secondary and a necessary consequence of some presupposed primary element. This presupposition is his actual thinking, and by no means a merely fancied thinking; it is his true mind, the point at which his thinking is itself directly life. ”

“ That stage depends on the foundation of the language, and the nation will experience a golden age. Unless such a nation is extremely modest and self-depreciative, it cannot fittingly think more highly of the whole race than it does of itself, from its own knowledge; hence, it must assume that there will be a final, highest, and for ever unsurpassable goal for all human development. ”

“ This intention is to make the whole of life in society into a large and ingeniously constructed clockwork pressure-machine, in which every single part will be continually compelled by the whole to serve the whole. ”

“ But how will your final part, from which proceeds the whole compelling power present in the machine, be itself compelled to compel? Suppose you have overcome absolutely all the resistance to the mainspring that might arise from the friction of the various parts, and suppose you have given that mainspring a power against which all other power vanishes to nothing, which is all you could do even by mechanism, and suppose you have thus created a supremely powerful monarchical constitution ”

“ All continuous existence that appears as non-spiritual life is only an empty shadow projected from the world of sight and enlarged by the intermediary of the nothing—a shadow, in contrast to which, and by recognizing it as a nothing enlarged by transmission, the world of sight itself ought to elevate itself to the recognition of its own nothingness and to the acknowledgment of the invisible as the only thing that is true. ”

“ I will suppose that you have made your machine as perfect as you intended, and that each and every lower part of it is unceasingly and irresistibly compelled by a higher part, which is itself compelled to compel, and so on up to the top. ”