ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that J. G. Fichte political views are very different from what the Nazis, including Martin Heidegger, made of them. It focuses on Fichte’s influence on Heidegger’s political views, which depend indirectly on Volksideologie and directly on his own revisionary reading of Nazism. Fichte would have been pleased by the opportunity to influence the world outside the university. Hans Sluga’s view of Fichte raises several issues loosely grouped around the relation between philosophical theory and political practice. Fichte’s theoretical views of politics have mainly been forgotten, but his efforts to intervene politically continued to attract attention well into the twentieth century. Sluga claims that Heidegger’s interest in Fichte was political based on the need to solve an existential crisis. Fichte has long enjoyed an unsavory reputation as a kind of proto-Nazi, precisely the view which Sluga develops. There is an enormous difference between what Fichte is saying and what the German Nazis later made of it.
