Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer


Friedrich Philipp Immanuel Niethammer, later Ritter von Niethammer, was a German theologian, philosopher and Lutheran educational reformer.

Biography

He received instruction at the Maulbronn monastery, and in 1784 became a student at Tübinger Stift, where he met Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. In 1790 he moved to Jena, where he studied Kantian philosophy under Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Subsequently, he became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Jena, where he remained until 1804. In 1806, he was Protestant Oberschulkommissar of Franconia, and the next year, he became Central Commissioner of Education and a member of the Protestant General Consistory of Bavaria.
In 1797, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Niethammer was co-editor of the Philosophische Journal. In 1798, the journal published Friedrich Karl Forberg's Entwicklung des Begriffs der Religion, an essay that Fichte prefaced with Über den Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung. Reaction to the article included accusations of atheism, sparking the so-called 1798–99 Atheismusstreit, an event that eventually led to Fichte's 1799 departure from Jena.
In 1808, Niethammer published Der Streit des Philanthropinismus und des Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziehungs-Unterrichts unsrer Zeit, a book that was a reaction to philanthropinism, an educational concept that was developed during the Age of Enlightenment. Philanthropinism valued practical and physical education and largely rejected rote-learning of the classics. Niethammer agreed with the philanthropinists in that a measure of autonomy was important in education, but he found their teaching philosophy too extreme. He believed that a sense of civics and civility were vital in a child's education, and made efforts to combine the best of philanthropinism with the best of "humanism", a word that he derived from Cicero's "humanitas".

Selected works