Fichte's Vocation Of Man

8 Pages 2116 Words

Choosing ones ‘vocation’ is not only based upon deep reflection of self but also of the world and how you receive it. There are many facets that can influence how each individual sees that world and their position in it. This is the essence of vocation and that which Johann Fichte explores in his Vocation of Man. It is grounded in three schools of thought, deterministic realism, theoretical idealism, and practical idealism. These schools are the basis of this paper, and through them I will give an explanation of Mr. Fichtes struggle to define his own vocation. Along with it I will show which vocation I have chosen and whether or not I have agreed with Mr. Fichte’s argument.
In book one, Fichte describes deterministic realism. This philosophy is thought to be a system of continual caused events that interconnect all previous and future events. This chain is what brought you as a living agent, into being. The causal chain is that by which we derive our knowledge of our world, what we know must be based on prior causes that are events in nature. These events according to Fichte are due to Nature, and the reality of nature is all there is. All that a person does is preordained through the causal chain of nature. Throughout the text Fichte is confronted with the idea that he is part of nature, so much a part in fact that he himself is just an expression of that nature. And in being this expression we discover that our being is a product of prior events of condition, we begin no new events that are not based on a previous event and we stop nothing based on the same reasoning. For Mr. Fichte this presents a problem of freedom and self-determination.
Fichte states this in book one,
The time of my coming to be and the character with which I came to be were determined by this general force of nature; and all the various ways in which these, my inherited characteristics, have found expression since then and will find expression so long ...