This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores the conditions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical foundations of Christian belief. It proceeds from the conviction that theology exists because these questions exist and that theology's first responsibility is to render Christian doctrine intelligible without diminishing, translating away, or replacing the reality to which it refers.
Late in May I spent an afternoon in Jena.
Like many university towns, Jena is full of students. Cafés advertise student prices. Young people fill the sidewalks. The university is everywhere. It is a pleasant place, situated in the beautiful countryside of Thuringia, not far from Weimar, where Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and so many others once reflected upon what it meant to become fully human.
But I had not come primarily for Goethe.
I wanted to visit the Fichte House.
Finding it required leaving the main streets and wandering down a quieter side lane until I came upon a modest building that could easily have been overlooked. A man downstairs collected the small admission fee. He seemed genuinely pleased to be there, though I doubted he knew very much about Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the Schlegel brothers, Griesbach, Schelling, or the remarkable constellation of minds that once gathered in that house. None of that mattered. The house itself remained.
I spent nearly three hours there.
During that entire time I saw only one other visitor, a young woman who appeared to have wandered in almost by accident. She slowly walked through the rooms, glanced briefly at the displays, read a few placards, and left perhaps ten minutes later. Toward the end of my visit I heard voices upstairs and discovered what sounded like one of the curators talking with his children about a soccer match. Their conversation was cheerful, ordinary, and entirely disconnected from the world I had entered.
The contrast stayed with me.
Inside those rooms one encountered an intellectual world almost impossible for us to recover imaginatively. Fichte was there. One could almost hear him asking his students, "Gentlemen, think the wall." Then came the second instruction: "Now think about the one thinking the wall."
The point was never the wall. It was the astonishing discovery that what we ordinarily take to be simply "the world" might itself become a philosophical question. If the non-I is known only through the activity of the I, then freedom, knowledge, responsibility, and even history must all be rethought. The Wissenschaftslehre was not an abstract exercise in conceptual ingenuity. It was an attempt to uncover the conditions under which finite rational existence is possible.
The excitement of those years is difficult to exaggerate. Jena at the turn of the nineteenth century was not merely a university town. It was one of those rare places where philosophy, literature, theology, politics, and ordinary life converged around a common conviction: that human beings ought to understand the conditions of their own existence. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and Goethe all participated, each in different ways, in the remarkable belief that coming to understand reality was inseparable from becoming more fully human.
Their disagreements were immense. Their shared vocation was greater still.
One sees this perhaps most clearly in Fichte's little book The Vocation of Man. The title itself now sounds strangely foreign. It assumes that human life possesses a vocation and that this vocation is bound up with understanding. One does not simply accumulate information. One comes to know the conditions under which one lives, and in so doing one becomes free. Knowledge was not merely descriptive. It was transformative. One could not understand reality deeply and then simply continue living as before.
Whether Fichte's philosophy ultimately succeeds is beside the point. What matters is that the question itself made sense. It made sense to devote one's life to understanding the deepest conditions of existence because such understanding was believed to disclose what it meant to become genuinely human.
When I finally left the house and stepped back onto the streets of contemporary Jena, I found myself struck less by what I saw than by what I no longer saw. The students hurried past carrying backpacks and laptops. The cafés were busy. The university library was filled with young people working diligently before glowing computer screens. Curious, I wandered into the philosophy section. The shelves remained lined with the great works of German Idealism. Fichte was there. Schelling was there. Hegel was there. They stood patiently where they had always stood, waiting for readers.
Very few appeared interested. Most students were working on spreadsheets, preparing presentations, solving technical problems, or completing assignments in fields Fichte himself could scarcely have imagined. There is, of course, nothing wrong with such work. Every age has its necessary tasks. Yet I could not suppress a question. To come to Jena merely in order to prepare for employment would have been almost unimaginable to those who once made this city famous. They believed that education existed because there was something more fundamental than employment. There was a destiny to human reason. There was a vocation to become intellectually free by coming to understand the conditions under which one thought, acted, and lived.
What struck me most was not that contemporary students no longer shared Fichte's convictions. Cultures change, and questions change with them. What struck me was something subtler. The loss itself no longer appeared to be experienced as a loss. The Fichte House had become a historical curiosity rather than a window into a fundamentally different way of inhabiting the world. The life pursued within those walls had become quaint, almost unintelligible, not because people had carefully considered it and rejected it, but because they could scarcely imagine why anyone would organize an entire life around such questions in the first place.
That realization has remained with me ever since. In recent reflections I have suggested that our culture has largely lost the sense that understanding reality constitutes a genuine human vocation. Standing in the Fichte House, however, I realized something even more unsettling. We have also largely lost the ability to wonder why that vocation has disappeared. The disappearance itself no longer seems puzzling. It has become simply the way things are.
Perhaps that is one of the defining characteristics of late modernity. It is not merely that the vocation of intelligibility has faded. It is that the fading of that vocation no longer appears to require explanation. The students who walked past the Fichte House that afternoon were not making a philosophical mistake. They were living within an intellectual horizon in which the questions that once animated that house had largely ceased to be live possibilities. Their indifference was therefore not something to criticize. It was itself something to understand.
And that, I increasingly suspect, is the philosophical task before us. Before we ask whether Fichte was right or wrong, perhaps we must first ask how it became possible for the world that produced The Vocation of Man to become so thoroughly unintelligible that even its disappearance scarcely invites our curiosity. That question now interests me more than ever.
Dennis, you say, "our culture has largely lost the sense that understanding reality constitutes a genuine human vocation." When you say "our culture," what exactly are you referring to, I wonder. Are you suggesting that today, in our culture, the possibility of stepping back, in a kind of phenomenological reduction, distancing ourselves from experience itself, from our engagement with the world, to contemplate experience itself, even the conditions of being an experiencer, that such a possibility is now no longer possible?
ReplyDeleteClearly, you don't mean that. Are you saying, then, that a cultural practice and endeavor that it is culturally rare, so rare that it is hardly noticed? I suspect that has largely and for the most part always been the case: these rare endeavors and practices are assigned largely to the few, many, if not most of whom, are unknown and perhaps left no record of their contemplations.
It is, I think, a spirit that you are seeking, a spirit of a people that finds some allure to these rare pauses in our daily rush and demand. It is possibly the appeal of a transcendent reality, one out of reach but is concealed in the lip of the ordinary. I'm not here so interested in those rare Fichtes, but in a general mood, in the hoi polloi. It seems that religion can entice us and provide opportunity for such endeavors. And yet the predominant imaginary can also drag it back into the ordinary, draining it of mystery profound.
Here, I pause. Perhaps I am missing your mark. It is not so much the thin exploration of the invisible, always-present, transcendent that you might seek, but what lies behind the behind. If we do that to religion, do we strip it of its reality? This has always been the problem of phenomenology: finding our way back to an objective, external reality. If we always probe our experience and ourselves as experiencers, where do we stop. There must be a full stop, the end of our pulling away curtains for a deeper level. How does this "reality," the Stopping point, play in your venture? Does it end in Dante's beatific vision, wordless? Or does it turn back on ourselves as the transcendent source enabling the vision itself? Perhaps I've got this all wrong.
Bill, thank you for this. You have put your finger on exactly the ambiguity in my phrase “our culture.” I do not mean that it is no longer possible for persons within late modern Western culture to step back from ordinary engagement with the world and ask about the conditions of experience, intelligibility, and reality. Clearly that remains possible. Indeed, your own comment is evidence that it remains possible.
DeleteNor do I mean that most people in any age have lived explicitly contemplative or metaphysical lives. You are surely right that such practices have always belonged, in a concentrated form, to relatively few persons, many of whom left no record of their thought. My claim is more modest, but perhaps also more unsettling. I am trying to describe a change in the surrounding cultural imaginary, especially in the North Atlantic world: the loss of a shared sense that such inquiry names a genuine human vocation, even when only a few pursue it with intensity.
Your language of “a spirit of a people” is very close to what I am after. I am not chiefly concerned with producing more Fichtes. I am asking whether there remains, in the general mood of a people, some sense that the ordinary is bordered by mystery, that reality exceeds its immediate usefulness, and that human beings become more fully themselves when they are drawn into disciplined wonder before what is. Religion can indeed preserve such openings, but as you say, it can also be pulled back into the ordinary and made merely therapeutic, moralistic, institutional, or culturally useful. When that happens, even religion can lose its capacity to awaken wonder.
Your final question is the deepest one. I am not seeking an endless phenomenological reduction in which we forever examine experience and never reach reality. That would simply turn the quest back upon the experiencing subject. Nor do I want a theology that dissolves reality into our own conditions for apprehending it. There must be a full stop. There must be something that is not merely another curtain behind the previous curtain.
For me, that stopping point is not the self, nor the structures of consciousness, nor even “transcendence” as a vague horizon. It is reality itself, finally grounded in the God who is not constituted by our experience of God. The vocation of intelligibility is therefore not an infinite retreat into the subject, but a disciplined movement of answerability toward what is. In Christian terms, it is ordered by the conviction that the Logos is not our projection upon reality, but the ground through whom reality is intelligible at all.
So perhaps the question does end, in one sense, in something like Dante’s beatific vision, where speech finally gives way before what exceeds it. But on the way there, theology does not become wordless. It remains bound to the Word, to judgment, to proclamation, and to the difficult labor of saying truly what can be said truly, while knowing that reality always exceeds our saying.