Addresses to the German Nation by Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Author:Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 2013-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

Eighth Address

What a People, in the Higher Sense of the Word, Is; and What Love of One’s Country Is

The last four addresses have answered the question: what is a German, by contrast with other peoples of Germanic descent? The evidence that all this will provide for our investigation as a whole will be completed by adding one more question: what is a people? Answering this question serves as an answer to yet another, one that is often raised and answered in different ways. This third question is the following: what is love of one’s fatherland, or more properly: what is the love of the individual for his nation?

If our study has so far proceeded on the right lines, then it should at once become plain that only the German, the original man who has not been deadened by arbitrary rule, truly has a people upon which he can rely. Furthermore, only the German is capable of a genuine and rational love of his nation.

We will approach a solution to the task we have set ourselves in the following manner, although in so doing we might seem to deviate from the line of argument taken so far.

As already remarked in our Third Address, religion is capable of transporting us beyond time, beyond our present sensual life without in any way detaching us from the justness, morality, and sanctity of a life lived in such belief. We might be quite convinced that all our work on earth will leave behind not the slightest trace, nor bear the least fruit, and that the divine can even be perverted into an instrument of evil and be used for even more harmful corrupting purposes. We might believe all this, yet still proceed about our work so that we might maintain the divine life we have adopted, relating us to higher things in a future world where nothing that is God’s perishes. The belief of the apostles, and more generally of the early Christians, in the existence of heaven set them entirely apart from worldly things; they were quite indifferent to worldly matters such as the state, their earthly fatherland, their nation. However possible and easy such belief might be, and no matter how joyfully one submits to a faith that our lack of an earthly fatherland is the unalterable will of God, and to the fact that on earth we are outcasts and menial servants; this is nonetheless no natural condition, and the way of the world, but is a rare exception. It is moreover a misconception of the Christian religion, an assumption often made quite thoughtlessly about Christianity regardless of prevailing conditions, that genuine religious conviction requires a detachment from the affairs of states and of the nation. If such conviction is true and real, and not simply the product of religious fervor, then the temporal life loses all autonomy, and becomes simply a preliminary to the true life and a demanding scrutiny that can be passed only through obedience and submission to the will of God.

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