The Vocation of Man

Fichte's excellent little treatise is both an outline of the argument for transcendental idealism and a passionate response that finds the Kantian position to be inadequate to speak to our deepest sentiments. It is intended as a popular treatise, but is not lacking in profundity and not an easy read -- it is popular in the way that Descartes' Meditations is popular: there is a line of thinking that is easy enough to trace throughout the book but the details can be quite daunting. The beginning of the book is in fact clearly set as an intriguing contrast to that of Descartes. Where Descartes says that for as much as he knows he can't be sure of anything, Fichte says that even if we could be sure of everything, that still wouldn't answer the most fundamental question of what to do, of how to find one's true vocation. The treatise is broken down into three books, one on "Doubt," one on "Knowledge," and one on "Faith" (as another reviewer notes, the culmination of his position in faith is intended as a response to the charges of atheism that were levelled against Fichte, but for those who understand his argument and what he proposes in the book on faith, it should be clear that his avowal of faith is not exactly a commitment to Christian dogma). The first book sets up what seems to be an ordinary or natural conception of the world. We are free agents faced with a reality outside of us that is governed by causal laws. Seems obvious enough, but Fichte shows that this conception is ultimately contradictory: if the world is governed by laws then so are we, or at least so are our bodies, and our bodies form the only basis for interaction with the world. Without bodies we are not agents, able to make a difference in the reality we face. On the other hand, if we are agents, then we interrupt the causality of the world, and where there are exceptions there can be no law. So, it seems, either we are not free, or the world is not subject to law. The second book is set up as a dialogue between Fichte and an unknown Spirit (seemingly not malicious, but as a literary trope to be compared with Socrates' daemon and Descartes' evil genius). The Spirit pushes Fichte to realize that whatever law he discovers out there in nature can be nothing other than what he himself posits as the structure to his experience. Causality (as in Kant) is not something that exists out there in the thing itself but is something we bring with us, and only by representing the world as a causally structured totality is experience of the world possible. But that means that the order we discover in the world is not "out there" but of our own making. What we call "the world" or "reality" is nothing more than representation. This seems to solve the contradiction of the first book insofar as the idea that we are determined in our actions does not proceed from an objective knowledge of true causes outside of us. The problem is that it replaces the despair over determinism wi

This book was written by Fichte to discredit the charges of atheism which were brought against him which forced him to leave the University of Jena. The book is written for non-professional philosophers, he intended it for the greater public; because of this, it is among the easier reads in philosophy. Fichte challenges reality itself in this book. He leads you down his path of thought from doubt to belief in a supreme moral being. He essentially illustrates the historical stages of metaphysical thought within his lucid self directed dialogue. I read this book for a philosophy course on German Idealism. It was a pleasant preface to other German idealism philosophers.