Fichte and Romantic Self-Assertion
The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library THE ASSAULT ON THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 3 Fichte and Romantic Self-Assertion This is a lightly edited transcript of a text of a lecture in Isaiah Berlin’s papers. No attempt has been made to bring it to a fully publishable form, but this version is posted here for the convenience of scholars. I MUST NOW TURN to a very different figure, namely, Fichte, who was neither, like Herder, a man of very generous character, nor, like Kant, a man who was totally dedicated to the truth. Nevertheless, his influence in some respects was perhaps wider than that of either Kant or Herder. Schiller’s classification of mankind, at least of the history of mankind, into three stages is what affected the imagination of his contemporaries. First comes what he called the savage stage, when men are simply victims of impulses, and a kind of Hobbesian universe prevails in which men, acted upon by their passions, fight each other and in general try to live with each other in conditions of considerable savagery and chaos, until finally order is restored by the stronger and more unscrupulous among them. The second stage is the development of rational ideas, in which certain persons are set up in authority over others and certain intellectual ideals develop. Schiller called this stage, in which men begin believing in principles, begin behaving in accordance with strict principles, indeed to an almost idolatrous extent, not the stage of slavery, but the stage of barbarism, because any total subjection to principles without any criticism, any total submission to principles for their own sake – and I am afraid this was a kind of side-swipe at his great teacher, Kant – he regarded as a form of idolatry, and this is the kind of thing which only barbarians do.
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