SOURCE: "Fichte and German Idealism," in Idealism: Past and Present, edited by Godfrey Vesey, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 111-26.

In the following essay, Gardiner considers Fichte's claim that his works are arguments for human freedom. This purpose might be difficult to believe, Gardiner contends, until one puts Fichte's writings into historical and cultural context.

Fichte's reputation at the present time is in some respects a curious one. On the one hand, he is by common consent acknowledged to have exercised a dominant influence upon the development of German thought during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Thus from a specifically philosophical point of view he is regarded as an innovator who (for good or ill) played a decisive role in transforming Kant's transcendental idealism into the absolute idealism of his immediate successors, while at a more general level he is customarily seen as having put into currency...