losophy with the methods of the sciences, whose advance Kant argued took
place through intensified, systematic investigation rather than random obser-
vation, through theory rather than raw empiricism. Metaphysics was to be
restored to its “royal place among all the sciences” (Kant [1781] 1966: A.vii),
for it alone could answer Hume’s skepticism and demonstrate how scientific
knowledge is possible. At the same time, religion—and even law—could sur-
vive in this secular age only with the support of philosophical reason.^25 In
1798, in his last published work, Der Streit der Fakultäten, Kant would go to
on argue that philosophy has the task of establishing the limits and character
of knowledge in all other disciplines; it should judge the claims of theology,
and not vice versa.^26 For good measure, he threw in the claim of philosophy
over the scope of law and medicine as well.
Fichte, who widened the claims of Idealism beyond Kant’s critical method,
was similarly aggressive in agitating for university reform. Simultaneously with
the announcement of his metaphysical system, in 1794 Fichte’s Lectures on the
Scholar’s Vocation argued for the negation of selfish and material interests and
called on pure intellectuals as the saviors of the country. At Jena, Fichte created
a storm by attempting to abolish the student dueling fraternities, emblems of
the aristocracy-emulating, carousing style of the old universities, dominated by
the legal faculty. Other Idealists joined in; Schelling (in his 1802–3 Lectures
on the Method of University Study) and Schleiermacher wrote and agitated for
intellectual freedom and university reform. Hegel, concerned with educational
reform since the 1790s, put his plans into action during his Berlin period
(Dickey, 1993: 306, 337; Harris, 1972: 1–47).
In 1807 Fichte proposed a plan for reorganizing the universities. They
would contain no vocational, professional training—exactly the opposite of
the Enlightenment model of educational reform—but would offer general
education through philosophy, which would awaken understanding of the
interrelatedness of knowledge. Fichte himself would hold a seminar for pro-
fessors to tell them how to teach. Philosophy was to be a free inquiry and a
critique of all other forms of knowledge (echoing Kant’s critiques). Fichte’s
new university would educate the elite of the entire nation. In his 1808 Ad-
dresses to the German Nation, delivered at patriotic meetings in Berlin under
French occupation, Fichte proposed that Germany would reattain greatness
not through military but through spiritual might. He proposed to overcome
disadvantages of poverty by setting up a system of public schools, operated as
economic cooperative communities, enrolling youths of all social classes. At
the university the needy would be supported at state expense. Germany would
become like Plato’s Republic, built around educational leadership. The univer-
sity degree would give its holders claim to the most important positions in the
state, replacing the old hereditary aristocracy.
It was Fichte’s program, stripped of its utopian politics, that Wilhelm von
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^647