Jean Paul as an "appendix to the first comical appendix to Titan," which in a series of articles under various headings, exhibits the philosophical system of Fichte in the most ludicrous light. As a specimen of this kind of persifflage, we give the article
" Leibgeber. 'It strikes myself,' said I, as I was taking a cursory review of my system whilst bathing my feet, and looking significantly at my toes, the nails of which were being paired—'the I am the All and the Universe; it is impossible for me to become more in the world to the world itself, and God, and the spiritual world and the bargain. Only I ought not to have spent so much time (which, after all, is of my own making) before I discovered, after half a score of metamorphoses à la Vishnu, that I am the natura naturans, and the demiurgos and the pulley-lever of the universe. I feel exactly like that beggar, who, waking from sleep, finds himself all at once a king. What a wonderful being, producing everything except itself, (for it only rises into existence, and never exists,) is that absolute "I" of mine, which is the progenitor of all else!
" Here I was unable to keep my feet any longer in the water, but paced to and fro, barefooted and dripping. 'Come for once,' said I, 'make a rough estimate of thy creations—space—time (as far down as the 18th century)—whatever exists in both,—the world's—whatever is on them—the three kingdoms of nature,—the beggarly kingdoms of royalty,—the kingdom of truth,—the kingdom of the reviewers;—and last, not least, all the libraries! And consequently, the few volumes too which Fichte has written: first, because I must produce or suppose him before he can dip his pen; for it depends entirely upon my moral politeness whether I shall concede him any existence; and secondly because even if I do concede it, we can neither of us, being both anti-influxionists, ever listen to our respective 'I's', but we must both invent what each reads of the other, he is my Clavis, and I his sheets. Therefore, I call the epistemology[1] unhesitatingly my work, or Leibgeberianism, supposing even that Fichte did exist and entertained similar thoughts; in that case he would only act the part of Newton with his fluxions, and I that of Leibnitz with the differential calculus, two great men like ourselves. Even as there is a like number of philosophical messiahs, Kant and Fichte; and the Jews also reckoned two messiahs, one, the son of Joseph, and the other, the son of David."—Clavis Fichtiana, s.W., t. xxvii. pp. 41, 42.
Poor Schoppe, a determined Fichtian, by irony and hypothesis, continues to dwell upon the keynote of Fichte's philosophy, the "I," until at last it begins to haunt him like an evil spirit.
- ↑ The title of one of the principal works of Fichte is, “Wissenschaftslehre,” which, after the analogy of technology, τεχνολογία, we render epistemology.
