9. The World View Of German Idealism. A Consideration Regarding Our Fateful Times

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is clear to a certain extent that German intellectual life has always tried to avoid one-sidedness and to find something that can shine through the whole of the individual shades of the soul. To do this, however, German intellectual life had to penetrate again and again into the innermost part of the human soul. And in order to show – I would like to say – by the facts how the German tried to get to the essence of the world, to the essence of what the world springs from and wells up from, I would like to present three German figures today. Not because, dear attendees, I believe that one could somehow dogmatically accept what these three figures have created as a world view within German idealism, but because I believe that there are indeed three figures that have emerged from the innermost essence of German nationality, the German national soul. I would like to say: Today we can go far beyond regarding a figure that appears in the world history of the spirit in such a way that we accept what he has expressed as individual sentences, as individual ideas, as individual opinions, as if it were a dogma. We can look at people as they have striven, as they stand in their search for a world view. Here we encounter a German figure whom I tried to point out from a different point of view here in this city last winter, and who is much talked about now. First of all, we encounter the figure who was aware that what he had to say about a world view had been created entirely, as it were, through a dialogue with the German national soul itself: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I would like to give just a few traits of this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to show that he is indeed a figure that could only have emerged from the wholeness of German intellectual life; for such a figure as Fichte really did arise out of German intellectual life. When we see Fichte in the blue peasant's coat, we can meet him as a seven-year-old boy standing on the bank of a stream, the stream that flows past his father's house, throwing a book into the stream, the Siegfried saga. His father comes along. The father is angry about it because he gave Fichte the Siegfried saga as a present last Christmas. But it turned out that Fichte, who had been a good student until then, became completely absorbed in the Siegfried saga and was now less inclined to study. He only needed to be made aware of his duty, and he would immediately say: “Duty must give way to everything.” And we can find the seven-year-old boy throwing the Siegfried saga, which has kept him from his duty, into the stream. The soul felt and sensed everything in the deepest, most intimate connection with this soul.