Resumen de Fitches republicanism: Education, philosophy and the bonds of reason

D. James

• The article shows how Fichtes rarely discussed Deduced Plan for a Higher Institute of Learning to be Established in Berlin plays an essential role in his thought from around the time of the more famous Addresses to the German Nation, and in so doing it identifies some of the essential features of the future German republic that he has in mind. For Fichte, the university prepares individuals for the standpoint of the Wissenschaftslehre, while the love of learning for its own sake demanded and fostered by this philosophical science helps to produce the kind of ethical disposition, namely, love of fatherland, that the members of the German nation need to possess if this nation is to free itself from subjection to an alien, external power. Moreover, the systematic unity aimed at by true philosophy finds its practical correlate in the idea of the nation. However, by identifying the laws of pure reason as the bonds that unite themembers of a future German republic in the way that he does, Fichte ends up reducing ethical acts to a matter of necessity rather than freedom.