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

Preface

ix Preface This volume collects seventeen previously unpublished essays by an international group of scholars, all focusing upon different aspects of and offering diverse perspectives upon a single, seminal text, J. G. Fichte’s “popular” tract of 1800, Die Bestimmung des Menschen.1 The Vocation of Man has been translated into English no fewer than three times, first in 1846 by Percy Sennet, then again in 1848 by William Smith, whose translation was subsequently revised and reissued on several different occasions, and most recently, in 1987, by Peter Preuss.2 Though it is unquestionably the best known of Fichte’s writings among Anglophone readers and students of German Idealism, there is in fact and has long been a great deal of controversy among Fichte scholars concerning its significance and its relationship to Fichte’s other, less popular—or, as he himself would have put it, more “scientific”—treatises, especially the various versions of his distinctive philosophical system, the so-called Wissenschaftslehre or “doctrine of 1. All of these essays are revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the Tenth Biennial Meeting of the North American Fichte Society, held April 27–30, 2010, in Lisbon, Portugal, with the generous support of the Unidade de Investigação LIF (Universidade de Coimbra), the Centro de Estudos Filosóficos (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas/ Universidade Nova de Lisboa), the Fundação Engenheiro António de Almeida, and the Fundação Luso‑Americana. 2. J. G. Fichte, The Destination of Man, trans. Mrs. Percy Sinnett (London: John Chapman, 1846); J. G. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. William Smith (London: John Chapman, 1848), 265–554; 2nd., substantially rev. ed. in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Popular Works (London: Trübner, 1873), 233–379 (later reissued several times as a single volume, The Vocation of Man, with an introduction by E. Ritchie [LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1906, 1931, 1965]); 3rd. rev. ed. in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (London: Trübner, 1889), 319–478 (further rev. and with an introduction by Roderick Chisholm [Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts/ Bobbs-Merrill, 1956]; J. G. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). x / PREFACE scientific knowledge.” These issues are summarized in Daniel Breazeale’s introductory essay on the history of the reception of this text. This volume aims to illuminate The Vocation of Man by exploring some of the issues and controversies that have surrounded it from the start and by offering fresh and varied examples of contemporary scholarly approaches to the same. A number of these essays directly address the question of precisely what kind of work this is and propose a variety of different contexts within which it might be understood. Günter Zöller offers a “theological‑political” interpretation of The Vocation of Man; Benjamin Crowe and Elizabeth Millán propose two different readings of it as philosophical “novel” or Bildungsroman; Michael Steinberg offers a “performative ” interpretation of Fichte’s text as a device for initiating readers into a liminal state beyond mere knowledge; whereas Yolanda Estes situates the task of The Vocation of Man squarely in the context of the immediately preceding “Atheism Controversy” and stresses its continuity with Fichte’s earlier philosophy, albeit in a new communicative register. Other authors address specific, often neglected themes in this work. Mário Jorge de Almeida Carvalho calls attention to the crucial function of “human interest” in the rhetorical strategy of Book One of The Vocation of Man; Wayne Martin examines the dialectical tension between personal self‑determination and objective evidence in Fichte’s account of judgment in this work; Tom Rockmore argues that Fichte’s account of practical reason in The Vocation of Man represents something of a retreat from his earlier advances upon Kant’s conception of the same; David W. Wood examines Fichte’s conception of “infinity” in this work; Kien‑How Goh analyzes ­ Fichte’s new understanding of human “community” in The Vocation of Man and indicates how this differs from his earlier account of the same in his System of Ethics; Jane Dryden explores Fichte’s distinction between physical and moral evil in The Vocation of Man and how this is related to his view of personal responsibility; and Daniel Breazeale offers a highly critical reading of the “argument of belief” in Book Three and argues that this signals a fateful turning point in Fichte’s intellectual development. A third group of essays investigates the relationship between the views expressed in The...