The Vocation of Man and Addresses to the German Nation

Introduction

The Vocation of Man is Fichte's introduction to philosophy for the general reader, written in the first person in three books, 'Doubt', 'Knowledge' and 'Faith'. The narrator first finds that if everything in nature is governed by necessity, man is only a link in nature's chain, with no freedom at all; next he finds that the external world is merely a product of self-consciousness, but then everything becomes a dream; at last he finds the way out in moral action: we exist in order to act, and man's vocation is freely to realise the moral law. The Addresses to the German Nation are fourteen public lectures Fichte gave in Berlin under French occupation in the winter of 1807 to 1808. The way to the rebirth of the German nation, he argued, lies in an entirely new national education that will form new human beings with independence of spirit and moral will. This volume contains both works.