Introduction

      A while back  - I’m too embarrassed to tell you how long ago this all started -  I decided to undertake a biography of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). It would have been perfectly normal, I suppose, to begin the work with some hesitation. I faced a formidable task.  But “hesitation” doesn’t quite capture my state of mind. The fact is, I was nagged by anxiety – and I’ve never really shaken it.

      I knew I couldn’t expect much sympathy from other biographers. After all, I had an open field – the last major biography of Fichte appeared in 1922 – and, if only because I had been foolish enough to choose such a forbidding subject, I had little reason to fear competition. Most of the grueling detective work that biography usually entails had been done for me. Since 1962 twenty-nine volumes of the Complete Works of Fichte have been published. The editors uncovered every scrap of surviving evidence, including papers that Fichte’s last direct male descendant had stored (if that’s the word) in his chicken shed. In addition to the writings Fichte published, there are diary fragments, private meditations, lecture notes, and, perhaps most important, five thick volumes of correspondence. Even if you can’t read a word of German, it’s worth leafing through a few of the volumes of this splendid scholarly edition. The editors have been stunningly meticulous about dating documents, identifying references, providing background information. It is as though they wanted to spoil the biographer by catering to his every need. Their achievement meant that I didn’t have to trudge through the two Germanies in search of documents (I considered withdrawing that remark; it’s too precise about the duration of the project); that I didn’t have to squint at faded handwriting on moldy paper in poorly heated archives; that I didn’t have to haul out my halting, American-accented German to beg and plead with the unforgiving clerks who stand guard over archival documents in the Mother Country of Scholarly Thoroughness. In the eyes of most biographers, I was on Easy Street. 

      I had another enviable advantage.  My subject was clearly significant enough to be worth the trouble. From the 1780s, under the impact of Immanuel Kant’s great Critiques, German philosophy entered a “transcendental” turn. We’ll circle back to that term. Suffice it to say now that it signifies a sharp divergence from the more familiar paths of Anglophone and French philosophy, which has given German educated culture a distinctive orientation to this day.  By the late 1790s Kant’s Critical Philosophy was losing ground to the more uncompromising form of transcendentalism we now call German Idealism. Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge, first published in 1794, was the pivotal text in this shift. Its author was a controversial, even notorious figure – and there is nothing more appealing to biographers and their readers than controversy, preferably in the form of notoriety. Fichte’s more overtly political writings stigmatized him as a German “Jacobin,” one of those wild-eyed radicals who wanted to inflict on Germany the catastrophe unfolding in revolutionary France.  In 1799 he was accused of infecting university students with “atheism,” and he responded with an uncompromising defense of academic freedom. More than any other thinker of his day, he gave Romanticism a philosophical point of departure.  He has been hailed (or condemned) as a precursor of  a wide array of other modern “isms,” from anarchism to totalitarianism.

       I am, by trade and by inclination, an historian, and so my purpose seemed reassuringly simple: to reconsider Fichte’s historical significance as a philosopher and as a personality. So why the anxiety? One reason – and this is painful to admit – is that at first Fichte himself intimidated me.  I imagined myself explaining to him, ever so delicately, what I planned to do, and being rewarded with an unrelenting stare of contempt. “Historical” significance indeed! Fichte believed that the mission of the philosopher was to discover universal and timeless Truth, and that he himself was doing just that. To his way of thinking, the fact that he formulated his philosophical system at the close of the eighteenth century, and at the University of Jena, in the heartland of German-speaking Europe, was irrelevant to its truth value. He would have dismissed as perverse my effort to explain his transcendental idealism as an historical product, shaped by, and at least to some extent limited by, its specific contexts.

       Over time Fichte’s contempt lost its power to unnerve me. That was in part because, as the research progressed, I learned that he was vulnerable to contempt himself (I hope you’re asking why. You should read the book). On a more practical level, I kept reminding myself that, fortunately for many biographers, dead people can’t determine whether books about them will be read. The question I couldn’t shake was how my projected audience – and I did, after all, want an audience, however small - would read the book. As I worked I imagined an historian peering over one shoulder – a relentless digger, never shirking the historian’s duty to stand firm on solid ground and ignore the wispy clouds of  theory that strange birds like Fichte prefer. I was ready for this type. You, I would say with slightly arched eyebrows, are the kind of naïve, tunnel-visioned empiricist who perpetuates an ugly tradition of anti-intellectualism in our discipline. Peering over the other shoulder, however, was The Philosopher. I pictured him as a Bertrand Russell type, tall, gaunt, with sunken eyes, brandishing a pipe.  Even philosophers who find Fichte’s thought worthless tend to share his contempt for historians meddling in their preserve. It’s not that they hate biography. My editor assures me that contemporary philosophers are avid readers of biographies of their predecessors, and in my less paranoid moments I think he’s right. But they read for entertainment, and not because they expect biography to yield something of importance to their own efforts to engage their predecessors as philosophers. And they’re ready to toss the book, I suspect, as soon as the historian starts doing what they fear she will do: explain the subject’s philosophical thought as a function of, or as a rationale for, something else, rather than taking it seriously on its own terms. They don’t want to hear that Philosopher X advanced Theory Y because he hated (or loved) his mother; or because he sought acceptance by the bourgeoisie, or was bent on destroying it; or even because he had been raised a Protestant or a Catholic or a vegetarian.  If we accept this “reductive” way of reading philosophical texts, they object (not without justification), then we may as well consign the entire philosophical corpus to a remote museum. 

       So here was my dilemma, the source of my lasting anxiety.  I was intent on writing an historical study. But I wanted to do so in a way that, far from provoking philosophers to dismiss what I had to say, would prod them to ask whether the Fichte they thought they were engaging was the thinker they ought to be engaging (or, to put it another way, whether it was philosophically worthwhile to recover the historical Fichte, because he would be a more interesting and challenging interlocutor in current philosophical debates).

      This agenda made the document I’ve asked you to read – the “Some Aphorisms on Deism and Religion” – at once a goldmine and a minefield. The trick was to mine the lode without blowing myself up. You’ll have to judge whether I pulled it off.

Next: The Document