of animator of other figures upon the stage. Jacobi’s own solution to the
thing-in-itself was merely to declare it an item of miraculous faith, on a par
with other items of religion. As key opponent, Jacobi was as central as Kant.
It was around these two energy poles that the networks of the older generation
were transformed into new intellectual tensions.Proliferation of the Idealist Network
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason attracted little attention when it first appeared
in 1781, leading him to restate the doctrine several times (1783, 1785) in more
popular form. Once the rivalries broke out, Kant’s reputation was assured.
Kant became a magnet for critical opposition, which, far from destroying his
popularity, focused attention on it. Jacobi and Herder in the 1780s were
followed by a flood of Kantian expositions, commentaries, and critiques.^6 Kant
was energized by the attention; now in his 60s and 70s, he published critiques
of ethics, aesthetics, and teleology in 1788 and 1790 and a dozen books in the
1790s, cashing in on fame to express his position on religion, world peace,
educational reform, and other political questions.
Königsberg became a center for pilgrimages by admiring followers. Among
them was Fichte. He had been an undistinguished Jena theology student in the
early 1780s, then (like many others) a household tutor. He first made contact
with the central network in 1788, when in Zurich he met Lavater—the old
instigator of intellectual action in the early days of the Deist-sentimentalist
controversy.^7 In 1791 Fichte made his long trek on foot to Königsberg to meet
Kant. Rebuffed at first contact, to gain Kant’s favorable attention Fichte wrote,
in Kantian fashion, his Critique of Revelation. It was a shrewd judgment about
filling the slot in public attention, for Kant’s own writings on religion were
expected—at the very time when the French Revolution was abolishing Chris-
tianity^8 —and Kant’s similar work appeared the following year as Religion
within the Bounds of Mere Reason. Kant recommended Fichte’s work to his
own publisher; when it appeared in 1792, the printer omitted the author’s
name, no doubt in order to promote sales, and it was initially mistaken for a
work of Kant’s. Swept up by the enthusiasm of expectant audiences and
entrepreneurial anticipations into identification with the most avant-garde
tendencies of the Kantian movement, Fichte became famous. When Reinhold,
the academic champion of Kantianism, resigned his professorship at Jena,
Fichte was appointed to succeed him in 1794. Flushed by his success, in that
year Fichte in his Science of Knowledge stepped beyond Kant’s critical restric-
tion of thought to the categories of the understanding, eliminated the thing-in-
itself, and dialectically reconstructed metaphysics out of the process of criti-
cism. On this turf there now proliferated a full-scale Idealist movement.
630 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths