704 Chapter XXIX
freedom of teaching. The university was in the grand duchy of Weimar, and it hap-
pened that the grand duke’s minister for cultural affairs was none other than
Goethe. The memoranda of Goethe on the Fichte case make curious reading.
Goethe was well aware of Fichte’s Jacobin principles at the moment of appoint-
ment; he hoped he would be discreet; he understood that the new professor es-
poused democracy only in a theoretical sense, with no actual intent of subversion,
etc. Fichte, however, would not be silent, and was loudly accused of atheism by his
critics. Since there were many German professors who taught Fichte’s views on the
divine nature with impunity, it seems that the objection against him was really
aimed at his politics. “I have never believed,” he wrote, “that they are pursuing my
so- called atheism; they are pursuing in me the freethinker who begins to make
himself understood (Kant’s good fortune was his obscurity)—and an infamous
democrat. They are terrified as if by a ghost by the independence that my philoso-
phy awakens.”^47 Goethe and the grand- duke tried to protect him, but were finally
forced to yield. He was allowed to submit a presumably voluntary resignation.
Lehrfreiheit and everyone’s dignity were technically preserved, but many outraged
students departed when Fichte left, and the enrollment at Jena suffered for several
years. It was a sign that the youth were not gained for the counter- revolution.
Fichte, who had been eager in 1795 to be accepted as a kind of official philoso-
pher of the French Republic, was made even more pro- French by this experience
at Jena. In the spring of 1799, as the War of the Second Coalition began, he
thought that “only the French Republic can be considered by a just man as his true
country... on its victory depend the dearest hopes and even the existence of hu-
manity.... The present war is a war of principles.... If the French do not obtain an
overwhelming predominance, and if they do not bring about a transformation in
Germany, or at least in a considerable part of it, there will be no peaceful place for
any man in Germany who is known to have had a free thought in his life.”^48 Fichte,
like the Cisrhenanes, believed that the Republic was too great and too universal an
enterprise to be left to the French alone.
He began to put his hopes also in Prussia, where signs of reform were stirring,
and it was to the Prussian minister, Struensee (the one who told a Frenchman that
the King of Prussia was really a democrat) that Fichte dedicated his next book, The
Closed Commercial State, published in 1800. The book drew in part on the Kantian
doctrine that the purpose of the state was to improve the moral character of its
citizens, and partly on what Fichte recalled of the French Republic in the Year II,
when France, because of the war, had in fact been a “closed” state governed by a
revolutionary dictatorship. The general idea of the book was to restrict individual
liberty, and avoid dependence on foreigners outside one’s own control, as a means
to building a more just and desirable civil community. How Fichte became an ex-
treme German nationalist some ten years later need not be told. In conclusion, one
may agree with Leonard Krieger on both Fichte and Hegel: that they separated
47 Briefwechsel, II, 105; Droz, Allemagne, 272; Fichte exhibited a certain caution in his Appellation
an das Publikum gegen die Anklage des Atheismus (1799) in Werke (Berlin, 1845), V, 193–332. The whole
episode of Fichte at Jena, and the state of the university at the time, are examined at length in Léon,
I, 269– 629.
48 Briefwechsel, II, 100–101, 104; Droz, Allemagne, 279.