Fichte's Vocation of Man: New Interpretive and Critical Essays

4. Knowledge Teaches Us Nothing: Vocation of Man as Textual Initiation

4 Knowledge Teaches Us Nothing The Vocation of Man as Textual Initiation Michael Steinberg And yet nothing has been changed except what is Unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all. —Wallace Stevens, “As you leave the room” It is a widespread though not universal commonplace that The Vocation of Man aims to place its readers outside discursive knowledge. This is not so unusual an ambition for a work of classical German philosophy, yet it is hard to see how a mere text could achieve this goal. If discourse fails to convey the real, there is no use substituting new ideas or judgments for old ones. Nor can we indulge in anything like traditional theology, for that is nothing more than a system of judgments elaborated from something that nobody will admit is also a judgment. Something other than conventional philosophizing is needed—indeed, something unlike conventional writing as well. What is more, Fichte suggests that once we pass beyond discourse we need do nothing but open our eyes and see.1 But this, too, is problematic; 57 1. VM(PW), 146–47; SW, II, 311. I have generally retained the phrasing of the original translator, William Smith. 58 / MICHAEL STEINBERG as Georgia O’Keeffe said, really to see takes time. Fichte himself argues that what we take for appearances are not even appearances, they are ideas and judgments on appearances, our own desires and thoughts projected outside of ourselves. If the movement outside of discourse is to clarify our vision, then, it must bring about some form of self‑transformation. This, too, is notoriously difficult to pull off by means of a text. Fichte was always concerned with pedagogical method, and the proj‑ ect of The Vocation of Man might best be viewed as a self‑conscious response to these two connected problems. His own situation likely called for such a response; he was writing in the wake of the atheism dispute, when his customary and not unjustifiable belief that he was being misunderstood was surely at its most intense. This alone would suggest the need for a new form of presentation—a kinder, gentler attempt to force the reader to understand. Whatever the motivation, the rhetorical structure of the Vocation of Man as much as its content shows a deep engagement with the problems of bringing readers beyond the text they are reading, orienting them to the very different expectations proper to that stance, and spurring the self‑transformation that makes the passage one of genuine illumination. The text thus does not so much set out the position beyond discourse as it enacts the movement to that position (or, rather, that non‑position). Fichte was always insistent that the only way to understand the Wissenschaftslehre was to reproduce its fundamental acts for oneself. In The Vocation of Man, though, the text itself is performative. The readers’ identification with the narrator/hero induces the experiences that Fichte wants them to undergo. The very format of the book suggests that something other than dis‑ course is afoot. Not unlike many other cultural productions of its revolu‑ tionary epoch, it is an essay in mixed genres, part tract, part monologue, and part closet drama.2 Charles Rosen claims that “[t]he mixed genre in the eighteenth century is a sign of indecorum,”3 and though one could hardly consider The Vocation of Man to be indecorous, it is at least unsettling. Its opening sections are calculated to overturn readers’ expectations and cast doubt on the very subjects that they purport to address. One turns to a philosophical text for illumination, but for much of The Vocation of Man Fichte appears determined to plunge his readers farther into darkness. 2. Examples are the “dramma giocosa” Don Giovanni, the synthesis of low and high art in Die Zauberflöte, Tieck’s play which runs backward, the constant self‑referentiality of Byron’s Don Juan, and—later on—the apparently random interweaving of stories from different genres and milieus in Hoffman’s Kater Murr. 3. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, 2d. ed. (New York, W. W. Norton, 2009), 322. KNOWLEDGE TEACHES US NOTHING / 59 There is nothing similar to this in the academic presentations of the Wissenschaftslehre. But Fichte’s method here does the same work as the painstaking analysis of the substructures of self‑consciousness found in those texts; for the aim of Fichte’s interrogation...