“Was heißt es, heute ein Idealist zu sein? Fichte über Freiheit und Geschichte” Douglas Moggach University of Ottawa/University of Sydney The period 1780 to 1830 is one of the most fruitful times in the history of European philosophy and political thought, rivalling the achievements of classical Athens. German idealism, the philosophical current originating in the critical works of Immanuel Kant, is an extended reflection on the idea of freedom and on the prospects for its realisation in the modern world. It is both ‘German’ and ‘idealist’ in special senses. The German territories at the beginning of this period were a welter of kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, bishoprics, and city states, under the titular leadership of the Holy Roman Empire (founded by Charlemagne in 800 AD) until Napoleon abolished it in 1806, leaving various political institutions and movements to struggle for hegemony in its wake. Scattered throughout these lands, from the extreme north-east to the south-west, were intellectual centres such as Kant’s own Königsberg (geographically remote, but a commercial hub in close communication with Britain); Goethe’s Weimar; Jena, where Schiller and Fichte both lectured, and the site of a budding Romanticism; and the Tübingen of Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling.1 Later in the period, with its newly- founded university (of which Fichte was elected as the first Rector), Berlin was to play a leading cultural role. In these centres, the effects of the European Enlightenment, and receptions and critiques of the indigenous theoretical traditions stemming from Leibniz, were distilled into a philosophical revolution. The essence of this revolution was an engagement with modern society, and an account of its emergence and potentialities, undertaken in works by Fichte, Schiller, and Hegel, with Kant in the vanguard.2 It is this resolute yet critical modernism which imbues German idealism with its particular characteristics: for all its inner divergences,3 it is a practical idealistic approach, a brilliant vindication of freedom. 1 With its focus on freedom, German idealism from Kant to Hegel differs from previous types of idealist thinking.4 As Hegel will maintain, the unity of thought and being is the core of all true philosophy;5 but throughout its history, this central idea has been conceived in many different ways. Even philosophical materialism asserts this unity, but inverts it, making thought the pale reflex of being. For Fichte, materialism is not only a theoretical doctrine, but a practical attitude toward the world whose proponents take themselves to be acting deterministically, without critical consciousness or responsibility.6 Conversely, German idealism is the stance of self-conscious, critical freedom. It does not imply that being dissipates into thinking, or that only consciousness exists, but affirms the causal power of thought in objectivity, the ability of reason to realise itself, to engage with and change the objective world. For the German idealists, the unity of thought and being refers to a historical process by which the structures of objectivity can gradually be made consonant with the evolving claims of reason, itself not timeless and static, but dynamic. Such an idealism is distinct from that of Plato, because the German formulation rejects the metaphysical distinction between an unchanging transcendent order of Ideas, and the fluctuating material world as its inexact replica. In its striving to bring the domains of thought and being into closer accord, German idealism has greater affinity with Aristotle’s concept of energeia, the shaping presence of the ideal or form in matter, but it is more insistent than Aristotle on the activity of subjects as the sources of form. (The root of energeia, -erg preceded by a digamma, is lexically cognate with Hegel’s technical term Wirklichkeit, the effective force of reason in objectivity). Nor is German idealism to be confused with the phenomenalism and subjectivism of Bishop Berkeley, where all being is mere perception, for which we are not entitled to assert an objective correlate. Against such ‘dogmatic’ or ‘empirical’ idealism, as Fichte calls it, the Kantian tradition mounts a decisive assault.7 The world as it appears to the 2 senses is not unreal, but derivative; German idealism directs our attention to the formative activity which underlies the objects of experience and the processes of self-shaping. It develops ideas of practical reason as the capacity to be self-legislating and autonomous, and it stresses the self-causing, spontaneous quality of human action. The fundamental issue of German idealism is not to impugn the external world, but to ask how we can rationally and freely relate to it, act in it, and transform it. This practical idealism is fundamentally critical of objective historical and social conditions which hinder free self-determination. In his text, “What is Enlightenment,” Kant describes the Enlightenment as an epochal turning point for humanity: the shaking off of self-imposed tutelage, marking the historical maturation of the species.8 Traditional and transcendent sources of authority in Church and state are deprived of their unreflective, unexamined influence, and must yield to critical adjudication and self-legislation by rational subjects. Kant had formulated this idea earlier, in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: “Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.”9 Enlightenment subjects no longer derive their ethical and political standards from the traditional idea of a fixed natural order, with its hierarchies and hereditary statuses, nor are these standards to be accepted unquestioningly as the command of an external authority. The criteria of action and value must be interrogated and freely endorsed: they derive from an idea of the self and its purposes. Building on Enlightenment conceptions, the Kantian tradition also undertakes a critique and reformulation of these ideas. Empiricist and materialist theorists in the Enlightenment 3 (Helvetius, Holbach, and later Bentham, with Hobbes as an early progenitor) had indeed understood and endorsed the centrality of the modern subject, but had done so through categories like utility and its cognates; the world existed as material for the satisfaction of need, and the maximisation of happiness. This modern revival of ancient materialism, notably Epicureanism, entails a fundamental revision of the older position. Epicureans had shared the views of classical (idealist) philosophies that nature set intractable limits on our efforts; from this the Epicureans concluded that our aim should be to minimise pain, not to maximise pleasure. Otherwise we committed hubris, overstepping the appropriate bounds of the natural order, and we invited nemesis or retribution, not from divine agency, but as a direct consequence of excess. But modern materialisms typically take a more expansive view of human capabilities, and of the responsiveness of nature. Thus for Hobbes the objective is to maximise pleasure; felicity consists in the constant satisfaction of desire, the attainment of pleasure after pleasure, ending only in death.10 In this quest, Hobbes reduces individuals to the status of obstacles or means to each other’s purposes, and defines freedom as the ability to secure the objects of one’s (naturally determined) desire. The state thus appears to Hobbes as the result of a social contract, providing the instrumental context for a more secure pursuit of private ends. On the Kantian account, these materialist currents had failed to grasp the genuine nature of subjectivity. The materialists had promoted an overly naturalised and overly deterministic picture of the human subject, undermining its specific capacity for freedom by subsuming it again under natural imperatives of a new kind. The natural order had been deprived of its older normative force, as a source of values, of boundaries, and of circumscribed places within which subjects ought to confine their efforts. Nature was now viewed as a field of scientific investigation, manipulation, and usefulness, at the disposal of subjects, and yet natural necessity 4 was simultaneously deemed to control these subjects themselves through the mechanisms of their needs and desires. This simultaneous emancipation and subsumption process constitutes the dialectic of modernity. For Enlightenment materialism, subjects’ ends were determined by the pushes and pulls that objects exerted on them. The ends of activity were largely fixed by the effects of sensibility or of nature upon subjects.11 On this account, reason was reduced to an ancillary restraining role in the guise of prudential or instrumental reason: it did not operate to set ends, but only charted the most efficient and least dangerous means to obtain them, or warned if subjects were pursing ends that were inconsistent or contradictory. For all their centrality, such subjects (as Marx, too, later observed)12 are essentially passive, and fully integrated within the causal nexus of the natural order (as modernity conceives it).13 For Kant and the German idealists who further developed his thought, the error of the materialists is to minimise the capacity of subjects to abstract from motives of sensibility and immediate desire and interest, and to submit these, too, to rational examination and critique, just as all prevailing values and relations are to be critically assessed. The error is to deny to subjects their intrinsic spontaneity. Spontaneity for idealism does not mean thoughtless, groundless, arbitrary action, but self- determined activity on inner grounds. To develop and systematize this insight is the task which Fichte assigns to himself, and which he executes in his writings. Kant and his successors thus redefine the model of rational action which underlies the Enlightenment project.