The German Genius

example, he said that we have immediate certainty of our own bodies. Therefore, Jacobi said, if this is so, why should we not trust the “immediate certainty” we have of God? He became convinced that Idealism was a form of nihilism, a term he coined. 39
    In 1786, and again in 1790, Karl Leonhard Reinhold released a series of letters, later brought together as a book, Briefe über die kantische Philosophie ( Letters on the Kantian Philosophy ). These letters supported Kant’s viewpoint and did so with such panache that Reinhold was briefly—but only briefly—regarded as an even brighter star in the philosophical firmament than Kant himself. A Jesuit novitiate who had converted to Protestantism, he was appointed a professor at Jena in 1787, and one of his self-appointed tasks there was to systematize Kantian thought into a formal science. 40 This is perhaps the origin of the tendency in German thinking at that time to attempt to construct elaborate interlocking systems, exploring as much as possible from first principles, and in an internally consistent way, an approach that would culminate in Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Reinhold added to what had gone before by asserting that consciousness had the quality of immediate certainty, and this moved it center stage as the entity to be explained, over and above Kant’s emphasis on experience and intuition. 41
    G OD R EPLACED BY THE S ELF
     
    There was another side to all this. As we have seen, Königsberg had good links with Britain, and many shared the views of Scotland’s down-to-earth school of common sense. To such people, the entire paraphernalia of “transcendental Idealism” seemed far-fetched, and there was in Germany no shortage of critics and skeptics. 42 More fruitfully, perhaps, there was a whole generation of people who, while not accepting all that Kant had to say, found enough in his philosophy to try to take it further. Among these, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were the most interesting. Schelling will be considered in the section on Romanticism, Hegel in the chapter on alienation. Fichte is another matter.
    Bertrand Russell thought that Fichte’s system “seems almost to involve a kind of insanity.” 43 Certainly, Fichte represents above all the example of the speculative philosopher trying to build a whole system on the basis of one central idea or construct. He is also an important stage in the emergence of what we now call psychology. 44
    Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was the poor son of a ribbon weaver in Saxony, and, like Herder, was given an unexpected chance for an education when, as an eight-year-old, he showed total recall of that day’s sermon in church, a feat witnessed by a local noble who was so impressed that he decided to give the boy a proper schooling. 45 This was not a complete success but did help in that Fichte eventually made his way to Königsberg to meet Kant. At first the master was not overly impressed and so, in order to improve his standing, Fichte composed a short piece, “Ein Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung” (An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation). Kant liked what Fichte had written and helped to get it published. However, the publisher—deliberately or otherwise—left Fichte’s name off the finished product and, since the text showed such a command of Kantian theory, everyone assumed the author was the master himself. After the truth came out, Fichte’s fame was assured and when Reinhold was offered a better-paying job at Kiel in 1794, Fichte was seen as his natural successor, a meteoric rise from nowhere. He was thirty-two.
    In Jena he threw himself into the fray, taking on a work that had itself created a commotion. This was the Aenesidemus , by G. E. L. Schulze, professor of philosophy at Helmstedt. Schulze’s argument, refuting Reinhold, and therefore Kant, was that we cannot know with certainty anything of things-in-themselves. Instead, he insisted, all we can be certain of is our own mental states. Fichte argued against this but in doing so he constructed, or tried to construct, a whole system of thought with interlocking parts. 46 The subsequent book, Die Grundlage der gesamten Wis senschaftslehre ( The Foundations of the Whole Doctrine of Science ), was that which Schelling included with Goethe and the French Revolution as one of the three great “tendencies” of the age—see Chapter 4. * 47
    Fichte’s key insight, which he thought deepened Kantianism, was that the distinction