Jakob Fries

Fries, Jacob Friedrich (1773–1843)

Fries was a German post-Kantian philosopher, active chiefly in Jena and Heidelberg. He was a personal as well as a philosophical enemy of Hegel. Fries’ version of Kantian philosophy opposed the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, developing an ‘anthropological critique of reason’. Fries also emphasized subjectivity in ethics and religion. In politics he was a republican and a German nationalist. For his participation in the Wartburg Festival of 1817 (a gathering of radical student fraternities), Fries was removed from his professorship at Jena in 1820, but restored in 1824. He wrote both scholarly and popular treatises on metaphysics, logic, ethics and politics, as well as mathematics and natural science. His continuing influence early in this century was mediated chiefly by the Göttingen Neo-Kantian Leonard Nelson and by Rudolf Otto’s theory of religious experience.

Fries accepted Kant’s distinction between sensibility and understanding, the transcendental ideality of empirical objects and the consequent unknowability of things-in-themselves (see Kant, I. §5). Early in his career he defended a critical Kantian position against the emerging speculative idealism in the polemical essay Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling (1803). In his Neue Kritik der Vernunft (New Critique of Reason) (1807, revised in 1838 under the title Anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft (Anthropological Critique of Reason)). Fries was critical of Kant’s strategy of arguing for a priori principles by transcendental deduction from the possibility of experience; Fries claimed that a priori principles must instead be known ‘anthropologically’. Accordingly, he admitted that we cannot prove the objective validity of Kantian principles such as substance and causality, but only that such principles are indispensable for our own cognitive activities. Fries’ approach is sometimes described as psychologism; it does not deny the Kantian a priori, however, but claims that it is knowable through the observation of our faculties.

In ethics, Fries placed primary emphasis on an agent’s possession of a ‘pure will’, one which follows the dictates of conscience and acts solely from the motive of duty (see Kantian ethics). In his Handbuch der praktischen Philosophie (Manual of Practical Philosophy) (1818), Fries maintained that we know our duty through the exercise of moral sentiments leading to conscientious ‘convictions’; but conscience is always ‘educable’, and moral judgment fallible. Erring moral judgment, however, does not imply that conscience itself is fallible. An agent whose convictions are objectively wrong still has a pure will, and is therefore to be esteemed rather than blamed. Hence, when judging the acts of others, the standard should always be their convictions, rather than objectively right convictions.

Like Kant, Fries based religion on a faith in divine providence which is rationally justifiable on moral grounds (see Kant, I. §11). But Fries’ religious upbringing in Moravian pietism led him to emphasize far more than Kant both the specifically Christian and the experiential aspects of religion. Fries drew the categories of the beautiful and the sublime from Kantian aesthetic theory and – again like Kant – he interpreted these aesthetic experiences as having a moral-religious significance (see Kant, I. §12). For such experiences Fries coined a special term, with a deliberately archaic spelling: ‘Ahndung’; it might be translated ‘presentiment’, ‘divination’ or ‘inkling’. Inklings do not count as empirical cognitions of any kind, but they do reveal, through feeling, the limitation of the sensible world by the supersensible, and thus count as a kind of experiential awareness of a higher spiritual reality. Fries’ philosophy of religion was first expounded in Wissen, Glauben und Ahndung (Knowledge, Faith and Inkling) (1805), but later popularly presented in his dialogue Julius und Evagoras: ein philosophischer Roman (Julius and Evagoras: A Philosophical Novel) (1813, revised 1822).

Fries is sometimes described as a ‘liberal’ in opposition to the ‘conservatism’ of Hegel. This terminology certainly involves a grosser distortion of Hegel’s thought than of Fries’, but it is oversimplified and misleading in his case too. Fries was a defender of individual rights and liberty, and an egalitarian in economic as well as political matters; he hated the fact that modern society is unified by a cash nexus rather than by moral ties, and he was outraged by the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Fries’ views on both points have a German nationalist as well as a communitarian bent, which the term ‘liberal’ is not well suited to capture. In Von deutschem Bund und deutscher Staatsverfassung (German Federation and German Constitution) (1816), Fries advocated the unification of all German states into a single federated constitutional republic – which entailed the abolition of the various monarchical forms of government prevailing in all of them at the time. His German cultural nationalism, however, made him as hostile to the French Republic and the ideals of the French Revolution as any ultra-reactionary monarchist. While Fries was a social egalitarian, like Kant he favoured a representative republic with a voting franchise limited by property and occupational restrictions (as well as by those of age and gender). Hence he was hostile to the idea of a democratic government, which he equated with mob rule.

Fries was also an anti-Semite, as appears in his pamphlet: Über die Gefährung des Wohlstandes und Characters der Deutschen durch die Juden (On the Danger Posed by the Jews to German Well-Being and Character) (1816). He did not recognize Judaism as a religion at all, but saw Jewry as a politico-economic state within a state, one founded on ancient and barbarous principles and hostile alike to individual freedom, moral universality and human dignity. Blaming Jews for the rule of money in society, he opposed any toleration of Judaism, as well as the extension of political and civil rights to Jews. To qualify for such rights, Fries maintained, Jews must first declare their allegiance to the German state (requiring that they renounce Judaism). Judaism was to be ‘extirpated root and branch’ from German society.

In later life Fries wrote on mathematics and natural science. In general he took Kantianism in a moralistic and empiricist direction, in opposition to the speculative tendencies of German idealism.