The exercise describes four steps. Even as I write that, I realize that I’m confirming the observation (made by several other contributors to this Website) that biography orders memory in ways that inevitably distort lived experience.  So I’ll admit to you that I did not make sense of the document in an orderly series of steps. I fumbled and stumbled around, often missing what eventually became obvious, and usually unaware of how I had found meaning in the document until well after I had done so. But steps we must have. This a pedagogical exercise, and pedagogy requires order!

4STEP 1:
Let’s start by placing the document in its setting. For that we have to combine its internal signals with other information, derived mostly from the correspondence. We learn from Fichte’s note to Aphorism 15 that, by the time he wrote the document, he was familiar with “Kant’s Antinomies.” And we know from the correspondence that Fichte first read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where the antinomies are explained, sometime in the late summer of 1790.

      So we have a time and a place. In the summer of 1790 Fichte was a twenty-eight-year-old former theology student living in Leipzig, where he had once studied. His origins were unusually humble – he was the eldest son of a village ribbon-weaver – and that put him at serious disadvantage in finding a career opening. He had survived over the previous several years – like many other university graduates in his dilemma – by working as a tutor in private homes. He was informally betrothed to Johanna Rahn, from a respectable family in Zurich (where he had last tutored), but was in no position to marry and set up a household. In fact he was on the edge of complete penury; in May he had written Johanna to send cash ASAP to save him from “ruin.” He had returned to Leipzig in the hope of finding a patron who might secure him an appointment, but he despised the kowtowing, the fake displays of deference, that being someone’s client required. His friends from his student days had moved on. We can picture him in a shabby rented room or maybe in a cheap café. Perhaps partly out of loneliness, and partly for want of anything else to do, he is setting down some thoughts in the form of aphorisms. Unfortunately the original handwritten document has not survived; we have only the printed version, published by his son. But let’s imagine that he’s down to his last quill pen and has to scratch very hard on the paper.

      What he’s scratching down is, in part, his conclusion that determinism is the only position to which a serious thinker – one who thinks “straight ahead” (Aphorism 15), with ruthless objectivity – can commit himself. In the light of that conclusion, we’re likely to be a bit jolted by several letters Fichte penned just a few weeks later.  In them he announced that determinism – he now called it “the principle of the necessity of all human actions” – was an erroneous and pernicious doctrine.  Kant had proven once and for all the unconditional freedom of human beings as moral agents.

      The Aphorisms are critical to understanding one of  most the dramatic moments - perhaps the most dramatic moment  – in Fichte’s adult life. It was not simply that Kant’s Critiques convinced him. They wrenched him away from a position he had laboriously justified to himself. In a letter to his fiancee on September 5 he described this wrenching as a “revolution” in his “entire way of thinking.” We might think of it as the  philosophical equivalent of a Bekehrung. Bekehrung is the German term for a Christian conversion experience, from the verb “to turn” (kehren). Fichte had turned away from determinism to its polar opposite, as the Christian, in the grip of God’s saving Grace, turned from corruption to sanctifying faith.

4Step 2:
By now The Philosopher is losing patience. This is not a movie, he reminds me, and characterizing Fichte’s position in the “Aphorisms” simply as determinist is, from a philosophical standpoint, uninformative. I agree. It’s time to take a closer look at the philosophical argument Fichte laid out in the “Aphorisms.”  Let’s limit ourselves (for the moment) to the first fifteen, which contain the core of the argument. I want you to try to distill them into a few written statements that today’s reader can understand.  (I’ll do it too, in the paragraph below, but don’t cheat!) It may help to look up “anthropomorphism,” and to know that in Fichte’s usage “speculation “ meant, broadly speaking, philosophical thinking.

Here’s what I come up with:

1.  Since Christian beliefs are purely subjective, philosophical reasoning has no bearing on them. They are emotionally self-evident and hence do not require objective proof. They fulfill our emotional needs as human beings. We need to feel in contact with what we now call a “personal” God – a God who can be entreated as a merciful father, and even addressed as a friend, and whom we can at least hope to persuade to help us.

2.  The philosophical reasoning that results in a “pure deistic system,” on the other hand, is objective. It is a search for causes and effects, without regard for the emotional consequences of our findings. There is no place in it for a personal God.  What we call God is simply a logically necessary idea, the needed First Cause in an ineluctable chain of causes and effects. That means a) that our sense of Contact with the Divinity is an illusion, and b) that our feeling of being morally free is also an illusion.  Whatever we do or feel is what we must do or feel in the causal chain. And, since that is the case, the notion of sin – an act for which God can hold you responsible and punish you – is  meaningless.  Moral responsibility, and indeed moral meaning, has no place in a world of causal necessity.

3.  Hence there is no point in trying to mix religion and philosophy, as some less rigorously philosophical forms of deism (“philosophical religion” and “religious philosophy”) seek to do. Each forms a self-sufficient  system - one with subjective validity, the other with objective validity.

4STEP 3:
Now The Philosopher has something to sink his teeth into. I’m the one who’s getting impatient.  Once we’ve traced the logic of the “Aphorisms,” the philosophical meaning of Fichte’s conversion to Kantianism seems fairly obvious. As an historian I want to reach deeper into the document, to flesh out its philosophical skeleton with other kinds of meaning. I want to know how the document illuminates, and in turn is illuminated by, Fichte’s life experience as a young, penurious, isolated German Protestant intellectual who had come of age in the late Enlightenment. And I want to use the document to explain why Fichte was so powerfully gripped by Kant’s philosophy, and what meaning he found in it. Surely this is not just a story of a philosophically inclined mind recognizing the logical supremacy of one argument over another.

            Am I asking the document to yield what it cannot possibly yield? There’s reason to think so. If  the “Aphorisms” were the only surviving document from this period of Fichte’s life, we would know nothing about his career frustrations, or his penury, or his betrothal, or any other detail of his personal life. It records, to be sure, a private meditation, but there is something self-consciously impersonal about its form as well as its language. The author  proceeds “straight ahead,” as though determined not to allow his surroundings or his circumstances to intrude on his “speculation.” In fact the title “Aphorisms” is misleading; the document is more accurately described as a step-by-step exercise in syllogistic reasoning, a series of theses with accompanying observations. We move from Thesis 1 to 18; and in Thesis 15 (where we reach the crux of the matter), from sub-theses “a” to “e.” Only three times – when he discusses his view of Christianity - does Fichte write in the first person (“I” and “me”).  Arguably in the last three theses he talks about himself, but it is a measure of his commitment to speculative detachment that he uses the third person. The “I” remains hidden behind the “he.”

        It’s time to start practicing the art of biography in earnest. It is, among other things, an art of  association, requiring that we move back and forth among documents, perhaps long after we’ve begun to yearn for a more stationary life. One question we may want to pose, of course, is what each document tells us about the factual reliability of the others. But for our purposes the key question is what each might tell us about the others’ meaning, so that each eventually yields something it would not yield if left standing by itself.

        Eventually this approach will return us to Fichte’s descriptions of his philosophical conversion in the correspondence. But first we have to move back in time  – to two drafts of sermons that Fichte wrote sometime in the mid-1780s. That he was writing sermon drafts in those years is not surprising; his most likely fate was to become the minister to a local parish, and that required that he demonstrate proficiency in the pulpit. At first perusal, I will admit, I found these documents virtually impenetrable.  Each draft combines the worst of both worlds: it’s a fragment (you’re left wondering what Fichte might have revealed if he had finished it), but it’s also repetitious (you find yourself growing tired of certain themes as Fichte – who is, of course, using this exercise to hone his rhetorical skills – rephrases them again and again). And then there are the topics. Fichte begins the first draft by asking why Christ surrounded his Resurrection with so much mystery. Why didn’t he simply prove his divinity by making the Resurrection a public demonstration? The second draft explores the meaning of the “Annunciation,” the announcement to Mary that she was to be the Mother of God.  Two themes dear to the hearts of eighteenth-century theologians, but – at least on the face of it – not likely to offer much in the way of self-revelation.

       But they do offer something, if we, as historians, have developed an ear for their language. We have to come at them not through the philosophical field of argument in the late eighteenth century – a field about which the young Fichte knew very little - but through the language of Protestant theology in which he was steeped. Running through the sermon draft on the Resurrection is a familiar distinction in the theology of the era between the “head” and the “heart,” rational conviction and emotionally-grounded belief. It tells us something important: several years before the “Aphorisms,” Fichte was already pondering the issue of moral freedom, and indeed already trying to resolve it in terms of the relationship between reason and emotion. Here’s where we begin to practice the art of association. In the “Aphorisms” the two ends of the distinction will become water-tight compartments: religious subjectivity and rational objectivity. In the sermon draft, however, Fichte relates them in a different way. His underlying logic is  eminently Lutheran: if religious faith is to be an act of freedom, it has to be a matter of “inner” emotional spontaneity; to be persuaded rationally about religious truths is to submit to “external” coercion. If Christ had staged a public Resurrection, he would have contradicted the essence of  Christian belief. Though the “proofs” of the new religion had to be “correct and satisfying to the sharpest spirit of research,” they could not be “too strong, too powerful.” A truly “popular” religion – one accessible to the great mass of humanity – had to activate “inner feeling of the true and the good.” This did not mean that the “few good heads” were excluded; but they could remain bonded with the mass in a community of belief only if their “understanding” was continually “warmed” by the emotional impulses of their “good hearts.” Without that bonding, they could not hope to exercise “influence on practical life.”

      This is the other young Fichte or, perhaps better, the other voice in the young Fichte’s internal argument. In contrast to the grim author of the “Aphorisms,” he faces life with a measure of optimism.  He thinks – or at least wants to think - that it is possible to be a “speculator’ and a Christian believer at the same time. There’s nothing unusual about his perception of choice. Many young Lutherans of his generation struggled to reconcile the modern and the traditional, the Enlightenment’s culture of  rational inquiry and the thoroughly Christian spirit of their upbringing and early schooling. Can we give him a more distinct profile – one that connects this struggle, with its conventional choice between “head” and “heart,” with his particular effort to fashion a sense of self and formulate a life purpose? That is precisely what the sermon draft on the Annunciation, as unpromising as its topic may seem, allows us to do. It makes apparent that the optimistic Fichte wanted to have it both ways. On the one hand, he sought a way to justify himself as a rare case. Why had this ribbon weaver’s son – who would normally have entered his father’s trade – been lifted out of the plebeian world of his family and his village and allowed to, or at least given the chance to, ascend into the “learned estate,” the tiny elite of educated men?  In what sense could he consider himself deserving of this privilege? On the other hand, how could he remain integrated into a larger Christian community despite his critical distance on the simple piety of the world he had left?

      If we conclude that Fichte, like so many other intellectuals then and now, wanted to re-connect with his “roots,” we’re in danger of distorting the past by reading present preoccupations back into it. His correspondences reveals a man determined to shake off any surviving traces – in his dress, his speech, his manners - of his humble background (Take a good look at the portrait of him. Is this a man affecting a populist style?) The issue was whether, from the distance of the world he had entered, he could remain connected somehow with the emotionally-charged symbolic meanings of an inclusive Christian community of belief. To put it another way, he feared that, without such a connection, he would be confined to an academic ghetto. The larger public audience on which he aspired to have a “practical” influence would be beyond his reach.

       If we read the second sermon draft from this angle, it’s something of a private tour de force.  Fichte works through his personal dilemmas – at least for the moment – by identifying with Mary! Here, in paraphrase, is how he does it. What the choice of Mary revealed was the meaning of election, to use the Protestant term. In election God does not suddenly hurl a thunderbolt, but rather works gradually – unobtrusively, one might say - through the person’s entire biographical formation: her upbringing; her education, her adult social experience. He forms the person’s life to provide her with opportunities to develop “a better natural understanding.” The “fortunate,” the “few good heads,” form an elite of moral and intellectual freedom, a kind of vanguard endowed with privileged insight. But they can justify this privileged freedom only on two conditions: that they ceaselessly strive to “climb higher’ in virtue; and that their superior understanding remains nourished by the stirrings of the heart, and indeed by “a better, softer, more pliant heart.”

      With all these associations in mind, I want you to reread the entire series of “Aphorism,” much more carefully this time. I’m not going to do all your work for you; you’re now in a position to make sense of all sorts of things you may have ignored the first time around. But I will fill in the map a bit more, and suggest where it’s leading us. Perhaps needless to say, by stopping at the fifteenth thesis I’ve mislead you about the tenor and the meaning of the document as a whole. In the sequential logic of those steps we seem to hear Fichte’s resolve to put a deeply troubling issue behind him once and for all. There is even a muted sense of liberation, if only because the sheer rigor of the logic will preclude turning back (it’s worth taking a closer look at his use of “cut off” and “necessary” and “necessarily”). When we move on to the final three theses (16 through 18), we realize that he has not achieved resolution. He’s still arguing with himself, and the other side of the argument is lying in wait, so to speak, ready to reassert itself. In these final steps the use of the third person camouflages, but cannot hide, a sense of personal loss, regret, even embitterment.

       You may already have noticed that something interesting happens at the very end of Thesis 16 (“But it has the effect of a certain inflexibility …”). There is a shift not only in the author’s tone, but in his very way of being present in the text. The theses begin to become personal laments. The “speculator” faces “moments when the heart takes revenge on speculation.” He finds himself trapped in a compulsion for rationality, “a certain inflexibility,” that has become “interwoven with the entire turn of his spirit.” Believing Christians – he calls them “non-speculating mankind” - are to be pitied for their inability to transcend emotional “need”; but they are also to be envied as the “good and simple souls” who can find sustenance in “the pleasant feelings that flow from religion” and in membership in a community of belief.  Fichte was lamenting the fact that the speculator’s capacity to “proceed straight ahead” brought a double-edged freedom. He is free to prove to himself that prayer can have no effect on an “inexorable” God, beyond human reach, but he cannot suppress the “hot desire” to be heard in prayer, to be recognized as a person in the eyes of a personal God.  And his unfulfilled human needs are not just personal; they are the needs of a social being or, to give this point a bit more precision,  the needs of  an intellectual who aspires to exercise his freedom socially. He has achieved, to be sure, a certain privileged insight into the rational order of things. But he has also cut himself off from the community of shared emotional need – the community through which the voice of an intellectual, if it was to be of any real significance, had to resonate. This was a freedom to be endured in isolation.

4STEP 4:
We can now, at last, return to Fichte’s descriptions of his Kantian conversion in the letters.  Reading the letters against the backdrop of the preceding documents, I was struck by the very narrow notion of  philosophical meaning that had guided their use in Fichte scholarship. This is not to deny that we can extract from the letters a plot line focused purely on a philosophical process of discovery.  In the period between the “Aphorisms” and the conversion descriptions, Fichte’s reading of Kant had advanced from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason. The latter Critique made him embrace the conviction he had just taken such pains to reject: that as moral agents human beings are unconditionally free, and that “only under this assumption are duty, virtue, and morality in general possible.” There is no denying that he was gripped by the sheer cogency of Kant’s arguments.

      But that does not suffice to explain what Kantianism meant to him or how it promised to change his life. The standard quotations from the letters – the one about the “revolution” his thinking had undergone, for example – hardly begin to convey their riches. Consider the advice he sent his fiancée in early September, 1790. Only misguided “reasoners” like himself, he wrote her, needed Kant’s “head-breaking” antidote to the philosophical errors of the day. She should “believe only in [her] own feeling,” since she was one of the “honorable people” who had always “felt” but had not “thought” the truth of Kant’s message. If  we practice the art of association to these comments, we begin to understand why Kant’s philosophy liberated Fichte from the depressing conclusion of the “Aphorisms,” though without returning him to the position he had tried to justify in the sermon drafts. It was critical to Fichte’s reading that, on the one hand, Kant insisted that our rational capacity to choose the good was not to be confused with an emotional embrace of moral truth; but also that, on the other hand, the Moral Law, because it was purely rational in form, induced a feeling of reverence for itself. In that limited but important sense, “the heart” had a vital role in Kant’s moral theory.  And that meant that, far from threatening to cut Fichte off from the masses, Kantianism offered him a way to reconnect. Kant had told Fichte what he needed to hear: that as abstract as the Moral Law was in its various formulations, its self-evident rationality, reinforced by the  emotional response it induced, made it accessible to ordinary uneducated people. To clarify the Moral Law for such people was not to coerce them with purely rational persuasion (the Lutheran still in him would not allow that), but to activate their latent capacity for moral insight and hence to induce them to emancipate themselves from deterministic illusions.

       And that is what Fichte set himself the task of doing. Another passage in the letters, largely ignored to this point, speaks volumes about the sense of mission he had acquired – and about the sense of release that came with it. He could not, to be sure, return to the Christian community of belief, but that did not mean he had to endure in isolation. He would become a Kantian preacher, the author of the sermon drafts now informed a friend, and would make philosophy “popular” and “effective in the human heart through eloquence.” His vocation was to “imprint [Kant’s] moral principles on the heart of the public with energy and fire, in a popular form of presentation.” Fichte would soon try to practice that vocation by addressing to “the common man” a Kantian defense of the French Revolution. And in one way or another he would use philosophy to imagine an inclusive community – one bonding intellectuals with the great mass – for the rest of his life.

Exercise 2:

Given what you now know about the context of Fichte’s conversion to Kantianism, what biographical significance do you attribute to the passages below?

a)  This passage is from the same letter (Sept. 5, 1790) in which Fichte announced to Johanna his plan to imprint Kantian principles on “the human heart” as a preacher.

In an effort to reassure her about his health, he described the new daily routine he had begun to practice roughly five weeks earlier (“previously,” he noted, “I was too unsteady to follow a fixed order”):

At five o’clock I get up – which at the beginning was very difficult, because I have gotten up late my entire life: hence the more strenuously I tried to force this from myself, because thereby I wanted at the same time to force myself to self-overcoming. From then until eleven o’clock ( with the exception of the half hour I use to dress) I study. From 11 to 12 I give a young man a lesson in Greek. I sought this task industriously, so as not to neglect, through endless thinking, the gift of presenting something to others, and to give the lungs something to do after the work of the head. From 12 to 1 at table, in a tolerably pleasant and entertaining group. From 1 to 2 a walk in nearby gardens in town, and usually not thinking about anything very serious. From 2 to 3 reading something lighter or writing letters, when there are such to write. From 3 to 4 I give a student private instruction in Kantian philosophy (this was the opportunity that induced me to study it). This is of course from one angle a head-gripping work, but from another angle a work to make things clear, thus one that belongs to the power of the imagination and hence contributes to constructing an equilibrium among the powers of the soul. From 4 to 6  o’clock, whatever the weather,  I go not for a stroll but for a real walk, and let my power of imagination have free play, stirred by fields and woods – especially when the rain is heavy or it’s very windy. From 6 o’clock  until nightfall again a little studying. The use of the first twilight you know already. As soon as light comes, continued serious study, but no later than 10 o’clock. Judge for yourself whether such an order is very damaging to the health. Also I find myself really feeling so well, thanks in part to getting up early and in part to serious intellectual work, that I would like to shout with joy about my health, am in entirely in a good mood the whole day, and see no annoying minute in my whole day. Add to that an exercise which promotes, to the same degree, the health of the body and that of the soul. That is, I seek to become fully ruler over myself, and with that intention commit myself to do something that I would prefer not to do; forbid myself something that I would like to have had, because I would have liked to have it; declare war on every  rising passion, as it lets itself be observed, and so I am forever released from these disturbers of our peace and our health.

b) In the same letter (November, 1790) in which Fichte described the “revolution” he had experienced in his “entire way of thinking,” he went on to observe that the error into which he himself had fallen – the error of  determinism – was largely responsible for “the great corruption of the so-called better social orders.” And he continued:

Furthermore, I am very strongly convinced that here below is not at all the land of enjoyment, but rather the land of work and toil,  and that every joy should be nothing more than a strengthening for greater toil; that what is demanded of us is not at all the preparation for our fate, but simply the cultivation of our selves. Don’t bother at all about things that are outside me. Strive not to appear, but to be. And I thank these convictions for the deep peace of soul that I now enjoy. My external situation is entirely what it must be for such a disposition. I am no one’s lord or servant. I have no prospects whatsoever; since the condition of the Church here, like that of the people here, does not please me. So long as I can maintain my present independence, I will do so at any price.