- Length
- 160 pagesPreuss, The Vocation of Man, Hackett, 1987
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
The Vocation of Man
The book in which German idealism becomes readable. Fichte takes a man from determinism through idealism to a conclusion neither could reach, and argues that certainty about the world comes from being obliged to act in it rather than from any proof.
- Date
- 1800
- Author
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- Region
- Jena and Berlin
- Language
- German
- 1848 English, William Smith Public domain Attested
- 1987 English, Peter Preuss The standard modern version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
- Years back to what it answers
- 19 years
The most accessible statement of the position that carried German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, by the figure that route is usually named after and least read for.
What the book says
Three books, titled Doubt, Knowledge and Faith, following one person through a crisis. In the first, the narrator looks at nature and concludes that he is a part of it like any other - every thought and choice the necessary product of prior causes, so that the sense of deciding anything is an illusion. The conclusion is stated with real force and the narrator finds it unbearable rather than merely false. In the second, a spirit appears and takes him through an argument that dissolves the problem by dissolving its object: everything he knows of the external world is a representation, the qualities he attributes to things are conditions of his own perceiving, and the system of nature that seemed to determine him turns out to be his own construction. But this leaves him worse off - now there is nothing but images, and no reason to act at all. The third book supplies what knowledge could not. What breaks the deadlock is not another proof but the recognition that he is required to act, and that in acting he must take himself as free and the world as real; the certainty is practical and comes from being under an obligation.
What it argues
That the practical comes first, and that the theoretical questions are answered by seeing what acting requires. The first two books are constructed to exhaust the alternatives: a consistent naturalism eliminates freedom, and a consistent idealism eliminates the world, and neither can be refuted on its own ground. What escapes the impasse is the fact of obligation - I find myself required to do something, and I cannot coherently be required to do what I am not free to do, nor act on a world that is not there. So freedom and reality are established not as conclusions from premises but as the conditions of a demand I cannot get out from under. This is Kant's primacy of practical reason taken further than Kant took it, and made the foundation of everything rather than a supplement to theory.
What it answered
Kant, and the readers who had concluded that the critical philosophy left an unknowable reality behind the appearances. Fichte holds that this misunderstands the enterprise: the thing in itself is an inconsistency in the system, and removing it makes the philosophy consistent rather than mutilating it. He also answers the determinism of the Enlightenment naturalists, and does so by stating their case in the first book better than most of them did.
How it argues
As a first-person narrative in three movements, which is why it is readable when his technical work is not. The reader is taken through each position from inside, allowed to feel its force, and then shown where it fails - and the failures are emotional as much as logical, since Fichte thinks a philosophy that leaves you unable to act has been refuted by that fact. The device also lets him state the opposing view at full strength, and the first book is one of the best short statements of determinism in the language.
The moment
Fichte had been the most celebrated philosopher in Germany, appointed at Jena on Kant's recommendation and lecturing to enormous audiences. In 1798 an essay he had edited was accused of atheism; he mishandled the response, offered his resignation as a bargaining move and had it accepted, and lost the chair in 1799. The Vocation of Man was written in Berlin the following year by a man who needed a book for the public, and the crisis in it is not entirely fictional.
How it travelled
As a bridge and then as a footnote. Fichte's removal of the thing in itself set the direction that Schelling and then Hegel followed, and for a decade he was the central figure in German philosophy; Hegel's rise displaced him, and the nineteenth century read him mainly as a stage on the way to someone else. His later nationalist writings, particularly the Addresses to the German Nation of 1808, dominated his reputation in the twentieth century and did it no good. Serious philosophical interest revived in the later twentieth century, particularly around his account of self-consciousness and of recognition.
The strongest objection
That the practical solution is a refusal rather than an answer. Fichte establishes that a consistent naturalism and a consistent idealism each lead somewhere intolerable, and then declines both on the ground that he is under an obligation - but the naturalist's position, if sound, entails that the sense of obligation is itself a product of causes, and pointing out that this is unbearable does not show it false. The move works only for someone who has already decided that a philosophy which cannot be lived is thereby refuted, which is a substantive commitment rather than a neutral requirement. Jacobi made the related charge that Fichte's idealism, having removed the thing in itself, leaves the self spinning representations out of itself with nothing to answer to, which he called nihilism - and coined the word for it in a letter to Fichte.
Why read it
Because it is short, dramatic and the only readable door into German idealism. The first book stands alone as a statement of the determinist problem. Read it before Hegel rather than after; it makes clear what problem the whole movement thought it was solving, which the Phenomenology assumes you already know.
- First printed
- 1800
- First in English
- 1848
- Digitised
- Yes
Fichte reworked his system repeatedly and the successive versions of the Wissenschaftslehre differ substantially; The Vocation of Man is a popular presentation from the middle of that sequence and should not be taken as the technical doctrine.
Smith's nineteenth-century English is public domain. Preuss' 1987 translation is in copyright and is the standard.
Where it stands
Historical as a system and quietly present in current work. Nobody defends the Wissenschaftslehre, but Fichte's account of self-consciousness as an activity rather than a thing, and his argument that recognising others is a condition of being a self, are taken seriously in contemporary work on subjectivity and on social ontology.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain and Smith's Victorian English is too, but it renders the technical vocabulary in terms now regarded as misleading. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How far this popular presentation matches the technical Wissenschaftslehre is disputed, and Fichte's system changed repeatedly, so which version is his position is a real question. Whether he is an idealist in the sense his critics meant, or is making a claim about the conditions of self-consciousness rather than about what exists, is the central interpretive dispute and has been reopened in recent scholarship. And how much the Addresses to the German Nation should colour the reading of the earlier philosophy is argued, with positions ranging from continuity to a sharp break under the pressure of the French occupation.