Lecture 8: Freedom, Work and the Body Outline: Self-Positing and Freedom: Toward a Solution

Lecture 8: Freedom, Work and the Body • Outline: • Self-Positing and Freedom: Toward a Solution • Freedom and Work • Work and the Body • Fichte and Marx

Aenesidemus, which I consider to the one of the most remarkable products of our decade, has convinced me of something which I admittedly already suspected: that even after the labours of Kant and Reinhold, philosophy is still not a science. Aenesidemus has shaken my own system to its very foundations, and, since one cannot very well live under the open sky, I have been forced to construct a new system. I am convinced that philosophy can become a science only if it is generated from a single first principle, but that it must then become just as self-evident as geometry. Furthermore, I am convinced that there is such a first principle, though it has not yet been established as such. I believe that I have discovered this principle, and I have found it to hold good, to the extent that I have advanced my inquiries so far. Before too long I hope to have advanced to the investigation of freedom. Letter to Flatt (EPW 366)

"Come celebrate the harvest with me! I have discovered a new foundation. … It is amusing when Reinhold tries to make everything that happens in the human soul into a representation. Anyone who does this can know nothing of freedom and the practical imperative." Letter to Stephani (EPW 371)

If the I nevertheless ought always to be at one with itself in this respect too, then it must strive to act directly upon those very things upon which human feeling and representation depend. Man must try to modify these things. He must attempt to bring them into harmony with the pure form of the I. (VI, 297-298)

“I ought to do something” means: I ought to produce the thing in question outside of me; or even if I could never complete what I ought to do, inasmuch as an infinite goal is undoubtedly posited for me thereby, a goal I could never realise and which therefore never is but only ought to be: in that case I at least always ought to act efficaciously in a manner that advances me along the path toward my goal. In the latter case I certainly ought actually to produce a good many things that lie along this path. (IV, 66)

Far from ever referring me to another life, the moral law always demands, in every hour of my life, something for me to do, and the sphere in which this has to be done is the present world. Thus, not only actual suicide but even the mere wish not to live any longer is a violation of duty, for this is to wish to discontinue working in the only manner in which we can conceive of working; it is an inclination that stands opposed to the truly moral way of thinking; it is a weariness and listlessness, which a moral human being should never allow to arise within himself. [IV 265-266]

Atheism Work The Comportment of Idealism The Vanguard of the People The Withering Away of the State

Despite what a very great man as said, life in the state is not one of man’s absolute aims. The state is, instead, only a means for establishing the perfect society, a means which exists under specific circumstances. Like all those human institutions which are mere means, the state aims at abolishing itself. The goal of all government is to make government superfluous. (VI, 306; EPW 156)

Lecture 8: Freedom, Work and the Body Outline: Self-Positing and Freedom: Toward a Solution