The Calling of Existenz

The metaphorical interpretations of life such as journey, labyrinth, and vocation or calling are different depending on whether one is in the first-, second- or third-personal perspective. We have taken advantage of the analogy of the vocation as career in explicating the general will pervasive of the person’s life and as a way to speak of the teleology of personal life. Fichte, and following him, Husserl, find an exemplary disclosure of oneself and one’s calling in what Husserl named “the truth of will.” This is a disclosure of one’s Existenz in terms of what one must do or ought to do, what one foremost wants to do, what one alone can do, and the not doing of which is a fundamental self-denial. For this claim to be sustained we have to evaluate the claim that all senses of Ought require the second-personal perspective (see the final section of this Chapter.) The truth of will as the fulfillment of the Absolute Ought resembles what others have called teleological determinism and passionate freedom. The disclosure of the truth of will is always a disclosure of oneself both as Existenz and as capable of endless love and devotion. We here resume a discussion of love that we began in Book 1, Chapter IV. If we think of the limit-situations as not merely negative undoings of our being in the world but also as the ineluctable positive horizons that encompass us, we may then think of vocation, especially as revealed in the truth of will, as a limit-situation. Clearly the person as Existenz facing its destiny is not a reflection about what is merely a natural kind, and its purposes cannot be determined completely by the ends proper to its being human; on the other hand, to think of purposes apart from an ontological order points to a mad world. Vocation as an at least metaphorical address to oneself presupposes a sense of oneself as so-addressed. This is a prior sense of oneself and a prior esteem of oneself. We discuss various senses of self-love and self-esteem as rooted in a transcendental self-love. Calling as address is primarily a second-personal interaction. This is an important consideration for our theological meditations in the next chapters