What Was the Atheism Dispute?

The atheism dispute was a controversy that erupted in the German intellectual scene during the 18th century in response to the publication of an essay by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Exploring the relationship between belief and reason, the essay challenged fundamental religious dogma, triggering a fierce public debate that led to Fichte’s dismissal from his post at the University of Jena.

Gottlieb Fichte’s notorious essay, On the Ground of Our Belief in A Divine World-Governance, was published in 1798 while he was working as a professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Jena. The essay marked Fichte’s first attempt at developing a philosophy of religion within the framework of his Wissenshaftslehre. The Wissenshaftslehre, otherwise known as the philosophy of Science, aims at establishing the foundation of human experience, which Fichte believed was the only purpose of philosophy. Centered around a profound examination of subjectivity, Fichte argues that the first principle of his philosophy is self-consciousness, which he explains as the self-reverting activity of the ‘I’.

In his essay, Fichte grounds the belief that there is a purposeful Divine order that governs phenomena that manifest in the world within human consciousness rather than in revealed religion. His view is distant from the perspective of a transcendental law-giver deity that designs the events we experience for a desired outcome. He contends that this belief rather springs from an intuition, or “sentiment of the mind”, of a higher moral order that has a profound impression on our consciousness. Fichte argues that morality does not involve adhering to externally imposed laws, be it ordained by revealed religion or by logical necessity, but rather involves the free and active participation of the self-conscious subject in generating and implementing ethical values. 

The Rise of Controversy

Fichte’s views sparked controversy due to their denial of a Divine transcendent being. God, in this theoretical framework, is rather immanent, inherent to the world in as far as the Divine is the moral world order itself. The history of revealed religion or practices was thus deemed irrelevant in his philosophy of religion, which infuriated his contemporaries. The controversy started with an anonymously published pamphlet that accused Fichte of atheism and demanded his dismissal from the University of Jena. Fichte’s essay quickly stirred a major public upheaval. Powerful social figures, including several German princes, threatened to no longer send their children to the University of Jena, which was the most prestigious university in Germany at the time. A plethora of publications flooded the German intellectual scene attacking Fichte’s alleged heresy, although other publications were written in his defense. 

A central theme during what later came to be known in the history of philosophy as ‘the atheism dispute’ revolved around the relationship between object and subject. Among the most famous figures who addressed this dichotomy was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Jacobi was a German thinker who is known for his fideism. During the atheism dispute, Jacobi famously characterized Fichte’s philosophy as a saltomortale, which is a fatal jump where one’s head is upside down. He employs this term to criticize the tendency of philosophers to become so attached to their philosophical systems that they must blindly accept any conclusions that result from it, no matter how divorced from reality it may be. The image of the saltomartale is not only an illustration of this tendency depicted in the unrealistic position of the jumper but also a warning of the fatal danger of relying solely on rational reflection and not faith.

Jacobi warns that Fichte’s Wissenshaftslehre results in nihilism, a complete annihilation of the objective validity of the object or the ‘other’, where the latter is reduced to be a mere product of the subject’s activity. Jacobi argues that the ‘I’ “becomes a world-creator, indeed its own creator”, rendering Fichte’s system to be “from nothing, to nothing, for nothing, into nothing” (Jacobi, 1799). 

Did Fichte Fight Back?

The threats and the nationwide dispute about Fichte’s philosophy eventually led the University of Jena to force him to resign from his post in 1799. In response, Fichte published a manifesto called Appeal to the Public where he denied the allegations of atheism, arguing that the Wissenshaftslehre does not deny the existence of God but rather seeks to establish the rational foundations of belief via morality, an attempt that his critics undermine and misunderstand. Fichte insists that consciousness reflects a higher order of reality, one that cannot be found in the material world, which provides the ground of knowledge and ethics.

In the same year, Fichte published The Vocation of Man, where he responds to Jacobi’s critique in a chapter called Faith. He writes that nihilism is “a thought which natural sense considers ridiculously stupid”, and the validity of the external world is warranted in the ethical principle inherent to the Wissenshaftslehre (Fichte, 1799). This is because the Wissenshaftslehre is grounded on the freedom of the ‘I’, which Fichte calls ‘pure will’. Morality is only possible with the awareness of intersubjectivity, consciousness of other rational beings, which stands against the pure will. We recognize our freedom when we are confronted by something that resists it.

As Richard Fincham notes, “my consciousness of my capacity for free self-determination is thus at the same time a consciousness of an ‘external’ physical universe resisting me and vice versa” (Fincham, 2005). The validity of the world is derived from the consciousness of moral duty when one must freely act in, and against, objects of the empirical world. By the end of 1799, Fichte fled to Berlin to avoid the aftermath of the atheism dispute and continue his academic and philosophical work.