"Which law is the man in his effectiveness?": Pedagogy and Media in Fichte's Encounter with Mesmerism

The author explores how Fichte's encounter with Mesmerism and the Mesmerist cure puts pressure on his conception of pedagogy and communications media. For Fichte, Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism offers a competing model of interpersonal relation undescribable by the logic of the self-conscious subject. The author argues that Fichte's consideration of Mesmerism in light of the oral lecture-a fixture of German scholarly culture and of Fichte's engagement as a public intellectual-reveals certain fundamental tensions at work in concepts of mediation, communication, autonomy, and intersubjectivity, concepts that in turn organize the idealist-neohumanist notion of Bildung.