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in the evolution of freedom. He never turned against the French Revolution. He
did not have to, since his dialectic allowed him to see it conveniently in retrospect
as a “stage,” which, even though now superseded, had been necessary and right in
its own time and conditions. When he delivered his Lectures on the Philosophy of
History in the 1820’s he made the French Revolution in a broad sense their con-
clusion and climax—finding that “world history is nothing else but the develop-
ment of the concept of freedom.”^44
Fichte, more of a firebrand than Hegel, owed his general philosophical orienta-
tion to Kant, but was inspired by the French Revolution in his most essential
metaphysical insight. His doctrine was one of absolute liberty, of a liberty unre-
stricted by outer reality or by the Thing- in- Itself, since it was the task of the self to
employ the Not- Self in the building up of a distinctive universe of its own. It was
a doctrine long admired for its stern view of self- reliance, but which in the twenti-
eth century may seem open to debate on both social and psychiatric grounds, not
to mention those of theology, and which in any case hardly reflected the civic
emphasis of the French Declaration of 1789. In 1793 Fichte wrote a long tract
defending the French Republic against hostile criticism at the very moment when
it was moving into its period of Virtue and Terror.^45 A year later he published his
Theory of Knowledge, or Wissenschaftslehre. In his own mind the two books were
closely connected. The French Revolution and the Fichtean Revolution were, for
him, two manifestations of a common impulse, two battles in the one war for free-
dom. “My system,” he wrote in 1795, “is the first system of liberty. As that nation
[France] liberated man from external chains, my system liberates him from the
chains of the Thing- in- Itself, or of external influence, and sets him forth in his first
principle as a self- sufficient being. It was in the years when the French were fight-
ing for political liberty against external forces... when I was writing a book on the
Revolution, that there came to me as a compensation the first inklings and intima-
tions of my system. Hence the system belongs in a way to the [French] Nation,
and the question is whether that Nation wishes to adopt it openly and officially as
its own, by giving me the wherewithal to develop it further.”^46
It was not to France, but to the University of Jena, that Fichte was called as
professor of philosophy in 1794. He proved to be a sensational lecturer, attracting
streams of students who became his personal devotees. He eloquently preached
the liberty and equality of all men, lectured on Sundays, became involved in the
affairs of the student orders, and engaged in journalistic controversy on the nature
of God. The extreme counter- revolutionary paper, Eudämonia, of which more will
be said shortly, mounted a press campaign against him; and parents began to com-
plain of the atheism and democratic radicalism to which their sons were exposed.
The University of Jena, even then, strongly upheld the principle of Lehrfreiheit, or
44 See the last chapter of the Philosophy of History in any translation, or the Sämtliche Werke, Vol.
XI, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1928), 557, 568.
45 Beitrag zur Berechtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (1793) in Werke
(Berlin, 1845), VI, 39–288. Translated into French in 1859, but never into English.
46 H. Schulz, ed., J. G. Fichte: Briefwechsel, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1925), I, 449–50. See the discussion
in Droz, Allemagne, 260–73; Guéroult, op.cit.; X. Léon, Fichte et son temps, 2 vols. (Paris,
1922–1927).