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1776-1786 - proto-realism
(Jacobi, Hamann, Herder, Claudius, Wizenmann)
1787-1820 - realism
(Jacobi, Herder, Neeb, Jean Paul, Köppen, Bouterwek, Krug, Rückert, Weiß, Reinhold, Salat, Weiler)
1820-1890 - dissemination
'What are you doing humanity! With metaphysics? Do you want to be adrift in melancholy again? That time is over. Work, work you must, for bread and for the poor, who multiply daily. Humanity for humanity!'
'As understanding, reasonable [beings] one can really do nothing else.'
'Reality without appearance [Schein], what it is of itself is completely unknown to us, after Kant. Why then does the entire human nature desire it?'
'and when I look up at the Godly eye from the immeasurable world, an empty bottomless eye-socket stares back at me'
'Nothing, nothing, thoroughly nothing in the divine is something sensible in our thinking I.'
'What a notion! The only and true name of the divine is ''inconceivable.''
'For since I regard the consciousness of non-knowing as what is highest in man, and the place of this consciousness as the realm of the true inaccessible to science; so I am bound to be pleased with Kant that he preferred to sin against the system rather than against the majesty of this realm. In my opinion, Fichte sins against this majesty when he wills to include the realm within the domain of science, allowing it to be looked down upon from the standpoint of speculation, allegedly the highest, or the standpoint of truth itself.'
'But is Fichte not inconsistent too? - One has accused his philosophy of atheism quite unjustly, because Transcendental Philosophy cannot, as such, be atheist any more than can Geometry or Arithmetic. But for that same reason it cannot in any sense be theist either. If it wants to be theist, namely exclusively, it would thereby become atheist, or at least appear in such a way, for it would show how God too certainly catches the non-existence in itself, become only philosophically valid, yes altogether becomes a real. Why then did Fichte give his philosophy the reputation that it wants, and can be, theist? Why did he not guard himself more carefully against the appearance that through Transcendental Philosophy a new, singular, theism was to be introduced, and through it the old theism of natural reason was to be banished as thorough nonsense? He has thereby brought himself and his philosophy into disrepute quite unnecessarily. It would not be any reproach to Transcendental Philosophy that it does not know anything about God, for it is universally acknowledged: God cannot be known, but only believed in. A God who could be known would be no God at all.'
'The naked think-reason only wants to rule and judge totally alone over all. In the end he knows their total scope, excepting only their real-ground. His own immediately clear prime-ground is in itself less than nothing.'
'Inextinguishable, like the ideas, there prevails in man a consciousness of an ability and a drive, which raises itself above all that is mere nature, with spirit, with intent, resolution and thought. With conscious superiority it opposes itself against this (that, which is mere nature), and dominates it.'
'Inseparable from this consciousness there is in humans the glance at a being above him, that is not merely the highest, but God, the singular; to an almightiness, which is not merely a blind omnipotence, itself the necessity obeying nature- or world-soul (in truth merely the fantasized ghost of necessity itself), but rather the will of a constant who, knowingly and with freedom lets everything which gives joy to existence become out of love.'
'The reasonable finite beings being, consciousness and acting is conditioned through a double externality: one nature below and one God above him.
Only God can be in and through itself, the absolute perfected. He separates the human soul from nature, like he, through freedom raising himself above nature, separates himself from nature: through spiritual consciousness he becomes divine intuition.'
'As little as a false God can exist outside of the human soul, so little can a true one appear outside of it. Like man feels and forms [bildet] himself, so he imagines the divinity, only more powerful.'
'The God we then have, the one who becomes human in us, and to cognize another is not possible, also not through better instruction.'
'Both of us, living only in spirit, and honest seekers at any cost, are well enough in agreement, I think, about the concept of science. That is to say, we agree that science as such consists in the self-generation of its object; it is nothing but this very generation in thoughts. Hence the content of every science as such is only an inner activity, and the entire being of the science is constituted by the necessary mode and way of this activity which is free per sé . Every science, I say just as you do, is an object-subject according to the prototype [Urbilde] of the /. This / alone is science in itself, and for that reason it is the principle and the means of resolution of all objects of cognition, the ability of their destruction and reconstruction from a mere scientific point of view. In all and from all the human spirit seeks only itself, shaping concepts again and again; striving and resisting [widerstrebend], incessantly tearing itself away from the momentary conditioned existence that would swallow it, in order to save its selfhood and in-it-selfness [in-sich-sein], to carry on in individual activity [alleinthätig] and with freedom. This activity of the intelligence is in it a necessary activity; it is not where there is no such activity. According to this insight, it would be the greatest foolishness to want to inhibit the desire for science in oneself or in others; the greatest foolishness to believe that one could indeed overdo philosophizing. To overdo philosophizing would mean to overdo reflection [Besinnung].'
'And so we both wish, with similar earnestness and fervor, that the science of knowing - which is the unity in all sciences, the world-soul in the world of cognition - be completed; with only this difference: you want to show that the ground of all truth lies in the science of knowing; /, so that it be made evident that this ground, the true itself, is necessarily available outside it. Yet my aim does not in the least stand in the way of yours, just as yours does not stand in the way of mine, because I distinguish between truth and the true. You take no notice of what I mean by the "true"—nor, as a practitioner of the Wissenschaftslehre, are you permitted to do so – also in my judgment.'
'All human beings, in so far as they strive for cognition at all, posit that pure philosophy as their final end, without knowing it. For man only cognizes as he conceives, and he conceives only as he - changing thing [Sache] into mere shape [Gestalt] – makes shape into the thing and thing into nothing.'
'And it would be so, even if I were obliged to call your doctrine atheist, like that of Spinoza; I would still not consider you, personally, an atheist for that reason; nor a godless man. Whoever knows how really to elevate himself with his spirit above nature, with his heart above every degrading desire, such a one sees God’s face, and it is not enough to say of him that he merely believes in God.'