Schleiermacher (also of the Romantic circle) and with Humboldt to establish
the new-style university; here Hegel eventually comes and founds his school,
and Schopenhauer lectures fruitlessly in competition. There is a good deal more
to these connections: the analysis will occupy us in Chapter 12.
The point is not to extol Fichte; he plays a part in a structure, the typical
role of organizational leader.^1 The moving from group to group, finding or-
ganizational resources and then moving on to set up centers elsewhere, is
typical of persons in this structural position. The organizational leader is not
necessarily the intellectual leader; a successful theory group is one in which
both are present. This enables us to comprehend the role of Kant, who is the
intellectual progenitor of Idealism, although he is also socially tangential, as
well as a good deal older than the others. Nevertheless, in far-away Königsberg,
a crescive network was forming, in which several members (Hamann, Kant’s
pupil Herder) got their creative fame before Kant himself. Kant initially was
not an Idealist; his first Critique prohibits just the kind of philosophy that his
followers went on to develop. Kant was playing in a different intellectual arena.
His ideas were picked up and transformed into a billowing philosophical
movement precisely when an organized group appeared. Kant’s late work was
turned Idealist by the presence of this movement. Here again the link is Fichte:
he was the one member of the Idealists to make personal contact with Kant,
and launched his own career on Kant’s sponsorship.
Fichte, one may say, made Kant what he turned out to be for the history
of philosophy. But this is not to substitute one hero for another; better to say
“Fichte” made “Kant” what he turned out to be. “Fichte” is shorthand, a way
of designating a social movement within the intellectual community. It is a
movement which drew in new recruits, charged them with creative energy,
and presented them with fruitful tasks in lines of thought then opening up.
This movement has both an internal structure and external conditions at a
second level of social causation. The Idealist movement emerged at just this
time in the struggle to transform the German universities, which resulted in
the autonomy of the philosophical faculty and the birth of the modern research
university.
Dissidents are as much a part of the network structure as are favorites: here
we find Schopenhauer hanging on the edge of the group, never able to break
into it, and Schelling, once the movement’s darling, later its embittered outcast.
These patterns too are part of the field of structured possibilities, apportioned
among participation at the core of the attention space, unrequited attraction
and repulsion at the periphery. To see the development of ideas as the length-
ened shadows of imposing personalities keeps us imprisoned in conventional
reifications. We need to see through the personalities, to dissolve them into the
network of processes which have brought them to our attention as historical
figures.
4 •^ Introduction