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.