Fichte and Schelling

Summary

Intellectual historians have often remarked that German thought from its earliest beginnings is marked by two major features that distinguish it from the greater part of the remainder of Western European thought. These are, first, the tendency to seek some kind of participatory relationship with nature and the universe conceived in quasi-animistic terms, which represents a kind of reversion to a much older, much more primitive way of conceiving the world and man's place in it, and has led to all kinds of mysticism. It is a strain in the history of German thought which has been brought out very clearly by Lévy-Bruhl and others. In all its forms the essential core of this view consists in the thinker's desire to place himself in the position of the creator, to become in some sense privy to his master-plan and, by engaging the productive part of his own nature, thereby himself to enter into the great act of creation by a species of co-creation. The second defining characteristic is that of antinomianism, that is to say, a hatred of laws and rules as such. This usually went hand in hand with a distrust of traditional forms of logic and reasoning and, in the more extreme cases, of all conceptual thought.