Fichte's Vocation of Man

New Interpretive and Critical Essays

Daniel Breazeale, Tom Rockmore

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438447650
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Written for a general audience during a period of intense controversy in the German philosophical community, J. G. Fichte's short book The Vocation of Man (1800) is both an introduction to and a defense of his philosophical system, and is one of the best-known contributions to German Idealism. This collection of new essays reflects a wide and instructive variety of philosophical and hermeneutic approaches, which combine to cast new light upon Fichte's familiar text. The contributors highlight some of the overlooked complexities and implications of The Vocation of Man and situate it firmly within the intellectual context within which it was originally written, relating it to the positions of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schlegel, Jacobi, and others. In addition, the essays relate the text to issues of contemporary concern such as the limits of language, the character of rational agency, the problem of evil, the relation of theoretical knowledge to practical belief, and the dialectic of judgment.

1

“An Other and Better World”

Fichte’s The Vocation of Man as a Theologico-Political Treatise

GÜNTER ZÖLLER

Habent sua fata libelli*

Like Plato before him and Heidegger after him, Fichte was a prolific author but not really a writer of books. In the comprehensive edition of his collected works undertaken by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, which comprises some thirty-five volumes, the works published by Fichte himself only amount to ten tomes. Moreover, most of those works originated in academic lectures at the universities of Jena, Erlangen, and Berlin and were subsequently, or in one case simultaneously, published by Fichte, chiefly in an attempt to expand their audience to a more general learned readership. Among Fichte’s early works only the political writings on the French Revolution (Contribution to the Rectification of the Public’s Judgments About the French Revolution, Revindication of the Freedom of Thought From the Princes of Europe) and the pseudo-Kantian essay in the philosophy of revealed religion (Attempt At a Critique Of All Revelation) did not originate in prior public or private lectures. In fact, all three of those publications predate Fichte’s first academic appointment, just as Fichte’s later genuine book publications—The Vocation of Man (1800), Crystal-Clear Report (1800), The Closed Commercial State (1801), and Friedrich Nicolai’s Life and Literary Opinions (1801)—all date from a period of time in which Fichte was without an academic appointment and even without a substitute extra-academic audience. Moreover, after the fiasco of the so-called atheism dispute and the ensuing loss of his professorship at Jena, Fichte even desisted from lending book form to many of his later academic lectures, including all of those on the Wissenschaftslehre, effectively limiting his remaining published work to popular, lecture-based treatments of the philosophy of history, political philosophy, and philosophy of education, as well as condensed presentations of the philosophy of law and ethics.

The motivation behind Fichte’s lifelong reticence regarding the writing of books and his equally lifelong preferred practice of turning his lectures into books—and thereby making his books into lectures—is his deep conviction of the eminently pneumatic nature of philosophy. For Fichte, philosophy proper does not have a subject matter (Stoff) that lends itself to doctrinal fixation and transmission. Rather, philosophy is an individual intellectual activity that is to mirror the active, spontaneous, and free character of its sole subject matter, viz., the human mind (Geist), the I (Ich), or knowledge (Wissen), viewed not as an entity, a faculty, or a body of cognitions but as the normative sum total of principled reason (Vernunft). Accordingly, communication of philosophical matters is targeted at conveying the elusive “spirit” (Geist) of philosophy and resorts to the “letter” (Buchstabe) only for practical purposes and with the ultimate intention of leaving behind the medium as well as its artificial product, namely, literature.¹

Fichte’s horror libri is, to a large extent, responsible for the failed, fragmentary, and faulty reception as well as effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) of his philosophy in general and that of its speculative core, the Wissenschaftslehre, in particular. After an initial phase of tremendous philosophical and cultural influence on his contemporaries, Fichte—traumatized and rendered oversensitive by the tendentious and hostile readings of his philosophy in the so-called atheism dispute—virtually withdrew from participating in the ongoing public debate about the development of post-Kantian philosophy, effectively leaving the terrain to his junior rivals, Schelling and Hegel. It was only the posthumous publication of some of his later Berlin lectures in the mid-nineteenth century and the complete edition of his later lectures in Jena, Berlin, Erlangen, and Königsberg in the last third of the twentieth century that returned Fichte to his rightful place as an early equal to the efforts and accomplishments of Schelling and Hegel and as the remaining rival to their mature late works.²

In the context of Fichte’s self-chosen exile from the reading public and from the ongoing philosophical debates of his time, the long-standing and continuing popular success of his book The Vocation of Man (Die Bestimmung des Menschen), published in two authorized editions—and one unauthorized one—in 1800 and 1801, is almost an embarrassment.³ For one, the work had a crass commercial purpose and was written in order to secure some revenue to its author, who recently had lost his professorial salary. Moreover, the work is of an overtly occasional nature, responding to the recent public portrayal of Fichte as an antireligious atheist with a decidedly religious and even pious self-portrayal of Fichte’s philosophical position. Most importantly, the work is a direct and detailed response to the challenge posed to Fichte’s philosophy by F. H. Jacobi, an influential and highly regarded philosophical and literary author at the time, who just had exposed the alleged “nihilism” underlying Fichte’s post-Kantian radical idealism.⁴

To be sure, the immediate reception of the work was nothing short of a disaster, and the long-range consequences of the work’s one-sided reception proved equally deleterious to Fichte’s philosophical reputation. Fichte immediately found himself critiqued and ridiculed for religiously overreacting to the attacks on his person and position by the joint forces of church and state and came to be regarded as a transcendental philosopher turned pious populist. In the long run, The Vocation of Man contributed more than any other of his publications to the widespread, lasting, and even ongoing perception of Fichte, especially of the later Fichte, as metaphysically oriented, religiously minded, and mystically inclined. In fact, The Vocation of Man came to be regarded as the watershed in Fichte’s literary production, marking the transition, if not the change, from a youthful political and philosophical revolutionary to a matured metaphysician of divine love and order.⁵

In addition to serving as the legendary link between Fichte the philosopher of the I and Fichte the philosopher of the absolute, The Vocation of Man was put into service as an essential part of Fichte’s popular works, or those of his writings intended not primarily for an academic audience or readership—like the multiple successive presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre—but for a larger educated public.⁶ Yet while not originally intended for academic instruction, The Vocation of Man, with its popular presentation of highly speculative matters, has served for a long time and often still serves as the main text representing its author’s philosophical legacy in academic courses on German idealism or nineteenth-century philosophy.

To be sure, recent research has returned The Vocation of Man to its proper place in Fichte’s philosophical production. In particular, the work’s continuity with Fichte’s later Jena lectures and writings has been asserted and established. A significant factor in this reassessment of Fichte’s work from 1800 was the discovery and publication of transcripts detailing Fichte’s “New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre,” or Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, from the winter semesters 1796–97, 1797–98, and 1798–99, of which previously only two introductions and a first chapter published by Fichte himself in 1797–98 had been known. In light of the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, with its original focus on the intertwined conceptions of the will and intersubjectivity, the treatment of the divine will and the spiritual realm in The Vocation of Man appear not as a novel development foreshadowing or even inaugurating the later Fichte but as a popular rendition of a developmental stage of Fichte’s thinking that can be dated back to the second half of his Jena period, which hence must be considered as extending all the way from 1796 through 1800 or even 1801.⁷ While this recent and widely recognized reassessment of the place of The Vocation of Man leaves open the possibility of a later change or development in Fichte’s philosophy, the work from 1800 can no longer be drawn on to date and characterize such a change, which would have to postdate it.

Further advances in understanding the place, the function, and the significance of The Vocation of Man were achieved as a result of increased familiarity with the formative role of F. H. Jacobi in Fichte’s overall philosophical development, from the first emergence of the Wissenschaftslehre through the so-called atheism dispute to his later and last works. To judge from Fichte’s correspondence and literary remains (Nachlaß), Jacobi was not so much an occasional opponent and confrontational critic for Fichte as a respected senior colleague whose radical opposition to Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy constituted a formidable challenge to Fichte’s philosophical project. In particular, Jacobi’s eloquent insistence on the extraphilosophical ground and goal of philosophy in life (Leben) and on the basis and warrant of knowledge (Wissen) in faith (Glauben) influenced Fichte’s philosophical thought and development, to the point of making it seem like the seeking of a synthesis of Kantian rigor and sobriety with Jacobean pathos and enthusiasm.⁸

In light of Fichte’s lifelong philosophical engagement with Jacobi’s metacritique of the critical philosophy, The Vocation of Man presents itself as tragic-comical masquerade in which a crypto-Jacobi attacks a pseudo-Fichte reduced to a caricature of its original and Fichte defends himself by assuming the persona of a super-Jacobi attempting the artificial blending of fideism and Fichteanism.⁹ Under the deceptive surface of a popular piece, The Vocation of Man leads a complex double life of intertextuality and interreferentiality. The parody and irony involved in this literary-philosophical tour de force were destined to escape the naive reader who becomes entrapped and intrigued by the work’s apparent pious pretensions.

The Vocational Tradition

Despite the significant advances made in disentangling the highly involved web of referral and deferral that is The Vocation of Man, another layer of meaning and message underlying this enigmatic work so far has remained largely unassessed and underappreciated. The Vocation of Man forms part of a literary-philosophical tradition in the German Enlightenment posing and answering the question of the calling or destination of the human being, a question that arose in a situation of increasing disorientation about the place and the prospect of the human being in a world marked by rapid scientific discoveries and immense cultural and social changes.

The very title of his work from 1800—Die Bestimmung des Menschen—is not original with Fichte but goes back to part of the title of a book published more than a half-century earlier, in 1748, by the Lutheran clergyman Johann Joachim Spalding (1714–1804), who had served in high church offices in Berlin starting in 1764 and had been among the founding members of the inner circle of the Berlin Enlightenment, the Wednesday Society (Mittwochsgesellschaft), in 1783. Over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century Spalding revised and expanded his booklet, entitled “Considerations on the Vocation of the Human Being” (Betrachtungen über die Bestimmung des Menschen), which originally had comprised only twenty-six pages and subsequently grew substantially with each new edition until the thirteenth edition of 1794, which included 274 pages, of which 165 pages constituted the main text and the remainder included various additions. There were also two contemporary translations of the work into Dutch, one into Latin, and another one into Italian.¹⁰

In character, Spalding’s book is a work of moral edification that describes in a personal narrative style the course of thinking of someone who has decided to recommence the investigation of what he (or she) is meant to be. The successive candidates for the goal, end, or purpose indicated in the title of the work—the German word Bestimmung, with its root of Stimme (voice), had been coined earlier in analogy to the Latin vocatio—each taken up in a separate section of the book, are sensuality (Sinnlichkeit), intellectual delights (Vergnügen des Geistes), virtue (Tugend), religion (Religion), and immortality (Unsterblichkeit).¹¹ While the first two stages of the gradual vocational self-reflection are to be left behind once and for all, the meditator of Spalding’s book retains the insights and attitudes of the subsequent mundane stages (law and morality, religion) even when making the final transition that is to go beyond the world (immortality).

Two further features stand out in Spalding’s proto-Vocation. Rather than employing the neutral, general phrase “the vocation of the human being,” which appears only in the title of the work, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Key to Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: The Checkered Reception of Fichte’s Vocation of Man
• 1 “An Other and Better World”: Fichte’s The Vocation of Man as a Theologico-Political Treatise
• 2 Fichte’s Philosophical Bildungsroman
• 3 Bestimmung as Bildung: On Reading Fichte’s Vocation of Man as a Bildungsroman
• 4 Knowledge Teaches Us Nothing: The Vocation of Man as Textual Initiation
• 5 J. G. Fichte’s Vocation of Man: An Effort to Communicate
• 6 “Interest”: An Overlooked Protagonist in Book I of Fichte’s Bestimmung des Menschen
• 7 The Dialectic of Judgment and The Vocation of Man
• 8 The Traction of the World, or Fichte on Practical Reason and the Vocation of Man
• 9 Fichte’s Conception of Infinity in the Bestimmung des Menschen
• 10 Intersubjectivity and the Communality of Our Final End in Fichte’s Vocation of Man
• 11 Evil and Moral Responsibility in The Vocation of Man
• 12 Jumping the Transcendental Shark: Fichte’s “Argument of Belief” in Book III of Die Bestimmung des Menschen and the Transition from the Earlier to the Later Wissenschaftslehre
• 13 Determination and Freedom in Kant and in Fichte’s Bestimmung des Menschen
• 14 “There is in nature an original thinking power, just as there is an original formative power.” On a Claim from Book One of The Vocation of Man
• 15 Erkenntnis and Interesse: Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism and Fichte’s Vocation of Man
• 16 Faith and Knowledge and Vocation of Man: A Comparison between Hegel and Fichte
• 17 The Vocation of Postmodern Man: Why Fichte Now? Again!
• Index
• Back Cover