All is I - A Burlesque by Querkopf von Klubstick
A burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus entitled ‘The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic God, ETQENKAIIIAN: a dithyrambic Ode, by Querkopf Von Klubstick, Grammarian, and Subrector in Gymnasic,’ was quoted by Samuel Coleridge, who said, "The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus may, perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of Fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature."
Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,
(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:
I, I, I! I itself I!
The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,
The inside and outside, the earth and the sky.
I, you and he, and he, you and I,
All souls and all bodies are I itself I !
All I itself I !
(Fools! a truce with this starting!)
All my I ! all my I !
He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
Thus cried the God with high imperial tone;
In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone—
Then substantive and plural-singular grown
He thus spake on ! Behold in I alone
(For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
In 0 !, you, the vocative of duty!
I of the world's whole Lexicon the root!
Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
The genitive and ablative to boot:
The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,
And in all cases the case absolute!
Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
Imperative, from nothing we derive us;
Yet at a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedence I assign
To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus!
Coleridge warns his readers against getting the wrong impression of Fichte, and quoted one William Smith, who, in On the Nature of the Scholar, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1806) published lectures on Fichte’s work:
"Few perhaps of any time, exercised a more powerful spirit stirring influence over the minds of his fellow-countrymen. The ceaseless effort of his life was to rouse men to a sense of the divinity of their own nature—to fix their thoughts upon a spiritual life as the only true and real life—to teach them to look upon all else as mere show and unreality, and thus to lead them to constant effort after the highest Ideal of purity, virtue, independence, and self-denial."
SEE: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. III, Ed. Professor Shedd, Harper and Brothers: New York 1858
posted by David Arthur Walters at 5:49 AM
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