THE ENLIGHTENMENT: FLUNCKING FICHTE (5)

October 11, 2020

THE ENLIGHTENMENT: FLUNCKING FICHTE (5)

The present is a series of essays on the roots of modern European political philosophy. These ideas shaped many states on the continent, determined the nature of their Governments, and defined the role of the people as subjects of the state. The result is a distinct European culture that since the Enlightenment, has been working towards the destruction of its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots. In this installment, J.G. Fichte.

Continued from The Counter-Enlightenment: Heckling Hegel (4)

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"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished."

Meet the Professor from hell, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Head of the Philosophy and Psychology Dept. of the Prussian University of Berlin, in 1810.

He blamed all but God for the German defeat against Napoleon Bonaparte: corrupt royals, the nobility, the decadent influence of reason, and a succession of weak governments that undermined religion as a moral force.

Fichte wanted the German losers to emulate the burghers of the Middle Ages, who made the Holy Roman Empire great because they weren't individuals, but sacrificed to the common good.

The emphasis in Fichte's educational system was on compulsion. With Kant he was pushing duty for its own sake and worked tirelessly for the elimination of self-interest; obedience, the crush of free will, prohibition, fear for punishment, religious immersion -- pupils must become 'fixed and unchangeable machines' and 'links in the eternal chain of spiritual life in a higher social order.'

Fichte is Kant applied to education

Fichte applied Kant to education. Generations of kids grew up in this oppressive educational system that in the German cultural sphere of influence lasted well into the 20th century.

The following quotation reveals how deeply Kant's Platonic roots were woven into continental thinking:

"Under proper guidance, the student will find at the end that nothing really exists but life, the spiritual life which lives in thought, and that everything else does not really exist, but only appears to exist."

A belated reaction to Fichte's will-crushing -- but in full accordance with the extremes of the Hegel dialectic -- was uttered by Frankfurt School inspired, anti-authoritarian education of the 1970s. The Head Master from hell had become the guidance counsellor on slippers called Bill.

As National Socialism differed from Marxism in national versus international application, intellectuals of the Counter-Enlightenment movement exerted German, ethnic nativism. In Fichte's case, on education:

"Only the Germans, the salvation of Europe from the Napoleontic Enlightenment, are capable of true education."

In Fichte we have a good example of Left and Right Socialism as mirroring ideologies, instead of opposing social systems. Like so many of the anti-modernist movement, Fichte was undoubtedly a man of the Right, but pursuing what would today be seen as a liberal tenet: egalitarian public education.

State conditioning

The first elected President of the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert in his inaugural speech in 1919 stressed the relevance of the Right-wing Socialist, Fichte:

“In this way we will set to work, our great aim before us: to maintain the right of the German nation, to lay the foundation in Germany for a strong democracy, and to bring it to achievement with the true social spirit and in the Socialistic way. Thus shall we realize that which Fichte has given to the German nation as its task.”

The Head Master from hell may well have inspired Marx to view school as a microcosm of Utopian society.

Related: Fichte and education: Dr Sanity

Free Download of Stephen Hicks primer on Postmodernism (PDF)

First posted on Politeia on March 3, 2008 and subsequently on PomoNews.

In this series of the Counter-Enlightenment

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Rousseau's Ravages
Part 3: Countering Kant
Part 4: Heckling Hegel
Part 5: Fluncking Fichte
Part 6: Secular Law, Common Culture and Personal Liberty

Part 7: Internationalism

Nederlandse bewerking

Deel 1: Inleiding

Deel 2: De Ravage van Rousseau

Deel 3: Contra Kant