Addresses to the German nation. Translated by R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 513 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohann Fichte. (n.d.). Addresses to the German nation. Translated by R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/johann-fichte/addresses-to-the-german-nation-translated-by-r-f-jones-and-g-h-turnbull
- MLAJohann Fichte. "Addresses to the German nation. Translated by R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/johann-fichte/addresses-to-the-german-nation-translated-by-r-f-jones-and-g-h-turnbull.
- ChicagoJohann Fichte. Addresses to the German nation. Translated by R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/johann-fichte/addresses-to-the-german-nation-translated-by-r-f-jones-and-g-h-turnbull.
What it is about
The fourteen addresses with which Fichte, in 1808, tried to remake a defeated and occupied Germany from within, making education and language the foundation of the nation.
Context and history
Delivered in Berlin in the winter of 1807-1808, with the city occupied by Napoleon's troops. Fichte does not call for military revenge but for a refounding through education: he holds that a people is defined by its language and that its salvation lies in forming a new generation. From this comes one of the most influential formulations of European cultural nationalism, and also its uncomfortable half — the claim that German is an 'original' language and the Romance languages are not — which should be read whole rather than in stray quotations. WARNING: the catalogue contains TWO English editions of this same work, one credited to the Jones and Turnbull translation and the other unattributed. They have not yet been compared; the reader should know that he is probably reading the same book twice, and that a citation must say which edition it uses.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
I. THE addresses which I now commence I have an nounced as a continuation of the lectures which I gave three winters ago in this place, and which were published under the title : " Characteristics of the Present Age." In those lectures I showed that our own age was set in the third^reat^epoch of time,1 an epoch which had as the motive of all its vital activities and impulses mere material t self-seeking ; that this age could comprehend and under-1 [In accordance with his fundamental conception that the aim of human life on earth is that mankind may consciously and voluntarily order all its relations according to reason, Fichte distinguishes five epochs in the life of the human race : (i) that in which those relations are ordered by reason acting in the human race as blind_ instinct, i.e., without man having any insight into the grounds of its activity ; (2) that in which those relations are ordered by reason acting as an "external ruling authority upon the human race through its more powerful individual members, in whom reason appears as the desire to raise the whole race to their level by compelling blind faith and unconditional obedience ; (3) that in which mankind frees itself, directly from the rule of reason as an external ruling authority, indirectly from the dominion of reason as instinct, and generally from reason in any form, and gives itself over to absolute indifference towards all truth and to unrestrained licentiousness ; (4) that in which mankind becomes conscious of reason and understands its laws with clear scientific knowledge ; (5) that in which mankind, with clear conscious ness and by its own free act, orders all its relations in accordance with the laws of reason. See Lectures I. and II. on the Characteristics of the Present Age in Smith's translation of Fichte's Popular Works.] I