Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)

1998 / 1. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: Is there a place for God int he inn of Philosophy?

have as much confidence in it as Fichte does, especially when the human self is so much at the center. Fichte had high dreams for the cultural mission of the German nation and emphasized this in the face of Napoleonic domination. Napoleon invaded Prussia in 1806. In the following year Fichte gave his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Speeches to the German Nation) His high praise for Germany’s cultural mission would later be exploited in ways that he had not intended. Fichte could not realize how history would go in the first half of the twentieth century and how the German cultural mission was to become so perverted under Hitler’s Holocaust. But it is a sobering thought to ask if German idealism could not have provided a better self-critique. After all, Kant had restricted our knowledge of the divine, and Fichte had inflated the self: what would guarantee that autonomous humanism would truly remain human?

Fichte and the on-going eclipse of God

Since Fichte did not want to speak about God as personal he wrote that the "living and acting moral order is itself God. We need no other God, and we cannot conceive any other." This involved him in a public atheism controversy and he had to leave his teaching position at Jena in 1799 and went to Erlangen in 1805 and then in 1810 to the new university of Berlin.

Dooyeweerd comments that from a Christian viewpoint we must notice here that philosophy is denying the cosmic structures of God’s sovereign creative will. The human ego now becomes creator of all reality and understanding. Starting with Fichte, modern philosophy moves toward a Faustian longing for power. It is humanity who will bring order into a confusing world by means of creative thinking and titanic activity. Fichte is radically humanist in his praise of the possibilities of mankind. Because of the progress of the ego (human understanding and action) everything will keep improving. "Man shall bring order into the confusion, and a plan into the general destruction.... This is man, when we consider him merely as observing intelligence; what would he not be, when we think him as practically active power!"1 2

It is well said (by Dooyeweerd) that the difference between Kant and Fichte lies in their view of autonomy - which had become one of

S7s there a place for Shoe/..?

1 Dooyeweerd, A New Critique (vol.I), p.432.

2 Fichte, W.W.I, p. 413:"Der Mensch wird Ordnung in das Gewühl, und einen Plan in die allgemeine Zerstörung hineinbringen ... Das ist der Mensch, wenn wir ihn bloss als beobachtende Intelligenz ansehen; was ist er erst, wenn wir ein als praktisch-thatiges Vermögen denken!"

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