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1. For a detailed account of these events and discussion of the significance of the same, see Yolanda Estes, “Commentator’s Introduction: J. G. Fichte, Atheismusstreit, Wissenschaftslehre, and Religionslehre,” in J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800), trans. Curtis Bow‑ man (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). Introduction The Checkered Reception of Fichte’s Vocation of Man Daniel Breazeale The Vocation of Man was published in January 1800, barely a year after the events of the “atheism controversy” that transfixed a large portion of the contemporary German reading public and eventually led to Fichte’s dismissal from his professorship in Jena.1 In this book, which is explicitly addressed not to professional philosophers but to “anyone capable of under‑ standing a book,” Fichte is clearly trying to set the record straight and to present a broadly accessible account of his own system, the so‑called Wis‑ senschaftslehre or “doctrine of scientific knowledge,” an account designed to defend the transcendental idealism of the latter against the competing claims of dogmatic realism and to emphasize the moral foundations of the former and its compatibility with popular religious sentiments. The book was a resounding literary success and received more contemporary reviews than any of Fichte’s other writings, and to this day it remains his most widely read and translated work. This, however, is not to say that the original reception of this work was wholly positive. On the contrary, though it certainly had its enthusi‑ astic admirers, it was greeted by many of Fichte’s philosophical allies and opponents with a certain amount of confusion and consternation, as is exemplified in Schleiermacher’s scathingly ironic review in the Schlegel 1 2 / DANIEL BREAZEALE brothers’ Athenaeum, which parodies the form and style of The Vocation of Man.2 Many of Fichte’s contemporaries were surprised—sometimes pleas‑ antly, sometimes not—by what they took to be his radical departure in this work from the idealism of the earlier Wissenschaftslehre and by his adoption, in Book III, of what appears to be a dualistic metaphysical realism. Thus, Fichte’s old acquaintance from Zurich, Jens Baggessen, writing to Jacobi, expressed his astonishment at the way “each line of this book refutes the Wissenschaftslehre” (the standpoint of which Baggesen, like so many oth‑ ers, associated with Book II) and added that “it is edifying to see such an old sinner undergo such a sudden conversion.”3 This is also how the book was understood by Jacobi himself, whose public criticism of the Wissen‑ schaftslehre as speculative “nihilism” seems to have been at least partially responsible for Fichte’s decision to publish this new, “popular” presentation of his philosophy. Indeed, Jacobi even went so far (in a letter to Jean Paul) as to accuse Fichte of plagiarizing from his own “philosophy of belief,”4 and he complained (with justification) that Book III employs a vocabulary and manner of expression uncomfortably close to Jacobi’s own. Rather than viewing Die Bestimmung des Menschen as making a sharp break with Fichte’s earlier philosophy, other contemporary readers simply interpreted the latter in the light of the former. Thus, Hegel based many of his familiar criticisms of Fichte’s “subjective idealism” and “philosophy of reflection” upon his critical reading of this popular work of 1800, in which he claimed to find not just an objectionably one‑sided variety of transcen‑ dental idealism, but also an insurmountable and philosophically untenable epistemological dualism of knowledge and belief, as well as a pernicious metaphysical dualism of sensible and supersensible worlds.5 Schelling agreed 2. Schleiermacher’s Athenaeum review is republished, along with the other thirteen con‑ temporary reviews, in Fichte in Rezension, ed. Erich Fuchs, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, and Walter Schieche (Stuttgart‑Bad Cannstatt: Frommann‑Holzboog, 1995), Vol. 3, 1–173. In his letter of June 28, 1800, to A. W. Schlegel, Schleiermacher describes The Vocation of Man as “a tricky and cursed book” (ein verzwicktes verdammtes Buch) (in FiG, vol. 2, 360). 3. Baggesen to Jacobi, April 22, 1800 (FiG, vol. 2, 328–29). In an earlier letter to Jacobi (April 14, 1800), Baggesen expresses his enthusiasm for The Vocation of Man, as well as his “astonishment” at the way the this book seems to directed “against the previous Fichte” (FiG, vol. 2, 323–24). 4. F. H. Jacobi to Jean Paul, March 16, 1800 (FiG, vol. 2, 308–309). 5. Though Hegel’s criticisms of Fichte’s philosophy in general and of Die Bestimmung des Menschen in particular occur over and...

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