The Age of Kant and Goethe

Uncompromising devotion to the moral order of the world, acting from the deepest core of man's ethical nature: these are the demands that give life value and meaning. This view is the basic motif that runs through all these speeches and writings. In the "Fundamental Features of the Present Age", he reproached this age in flaming words for its selfishness. Everyone goes only the way that his lower instincts dictate. But these instincts lead away from the great whole that encompasses the human community as moral harmony. Such an age must lead those who live in its spirit towards destruction. Fichte wanted to revive duty in the human mind. And when Germany was about to lose its independence through foreign rule, his lively spirit was presented with the most beautiful opportunity to intervene in the course of events. In the midst of the enemy, in the winter of 1807-1808, he delivered his "Speeches to the German Nation". Just as he had said in Jena, when he began to develop his world view in front of his students, that his person was not a consideration, but only the truth, so he thought now, when he knew quite well that at any moment the enemy could make it impossible for him to speak with a bullet, through which he wanted to arouse the enthusiasm in his nation to defend its autonomy and independence against this enemy. "The good thing is enthusiasm, elevation; my personal danger does not come into play at all, but could rather have a highly advantageous effect." He pointed out to the Germans their own nature. Everything about this nature is original: the language, the poetry, the science. The Germans speak their original language; they have not adopted the Roman language like the Western European peoples. Language, however, is the expression of the spirit. Whoever speaks the original language that emerged from his tribe expresses his most independent spiritual being in it. Those who, like those western peoples, have lost this original language and adopted a foreign one, have also given up the individuality of the spirit. And look at the poetry of both tribes. German poetry sounds out of the deepest character of the people; the spirit of its western neighbors is created in external forms. Therefore, even if German art is sometimes rough and harsh in its expression, it is an art of the deepest needs of the soul; even if Western art is elegant and graceful, it springs from an outward spirit of beauty. Science is no different. German philosophy is in touch with the popular soul; French philosophy is the property of a learned caste that has lost touch with the people. How can a nation that has a culture of its own succumb to one that has implanted a foreign one? It cannot succumb if it only remembers its originality. "A people that is capable, even if only in its highest representatives and leaders, of firmly grasping the face of the spirit world, of independence, and of being seized by love for it, like our oldest ancestors, will certainly triumph over one that is only used as an instrument of foreign domination and for the subjugation of independent peoples, like the Roman armies; for the former have everything to lose, the latter only a few things to gain." Only a mind to which the highest regions of the world of ideas are accessible could provide such a thoughtful characterization of its people, and only a personality with confidence in the victorious power of ideas could add these spiritual weapons to the physical ones that were then fighting against the foreign conqueror.