The Skeptical Embodiment of German Idealism: Jean Paul and the Clavis Fichtiana (1800)

Abstract

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter's literary production consists almost exclusively in ravaging attacks on his time's diverse attempts to provide coherent systems of knowledge. This article examines how he develops this pervasive skepticism into a critical method and applies it in arguably his most devastating and humorous take down, the satirical infiltration of Fichte's subjective idealism in his Clavis Fichtiana (1800). His method consists primarily of “extreme embodiment,” in which he attacks a position by means of a parasitic infiltration, carrying its logic to the extreme, and revealing the humorous absurdity when a subjective system confronts the concrete immediacy of bodily existence. In this way, Jean Paul offers both a local critique of the dangers of an idealism abstracted from concrete reality, and a broader intervention into the rapid proliferation of late Enlightenment “systems of knowledge” that compromise particularity and individuality in favor of unified systematicity.