The Vocation of Man

A short, deliberately popular book in which Fichte presents his philosophy to a general reader, written in Berlin after the 'atheism controversy' had cost him his chair at Jena in 1799. It is told in the first person and divided into three books. In 'Doubt', the narrator studies nature and is led to a strict determinism in which he is only one expression of a necessary natural force; this horrifies him, because it leaves no room for freedom. In 'Knowledge', a dialogue with a Spirit shows him that everything he knows of the world is a product of his own consciousness, but this idealism dissolves reality into images with nothing behind them, a kind of dream. In 'Faith', he finds a way out through practical reason: the call of conscience to act gives him certainty of a real world, of other persons, and of an infinite moral will in which all are united. Our vocation, he concludes, is moral action.

It is the most accessible way into German Idealism, and it stages the clash between scientific determinism, radical idealism and moral conviction in a form any careful reader can follow.