Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ But if you unite the will of all of them in one conception, as one will, then that one will divides the amount of possible freedom in equal parts amongst all; desires all to be free, and hence desires the freedom of each to be restricted by the freedom of all others. The only possible point of union for their will is, therefore, the Law, and, in our case—where a fixed number of men of various inclinations and occupations live together—the Law, in its application to them, or their Positive Law. As sure as they are united, they must will the law. ”

“ We are in search of a will which shall have power only where the law wills, and which shall have no power whatever where the law does not will; a will, in short, which is an infallible power, but only when in conformity with the will of the law.
Superior power over a free being can only be realized by the union of many free beings, since the sensuous world holds nothing so powerful as a free being—for the very reason that it is free and can direct its forces with matured consideration—and nothing more powerful than a single free being, except many. ”

“ It always remains possible, that all the rest of mankind will come and dispute my right of property to something recognized as mine by the few with whom I have entered into a legal relation. There is, hence, no sure and absolute title to property except a title recognized by the whole human race. To obtain this recognition seems an infinite task, and yet it is easy of solution, and has, indeed, been solved long ago by men. To wit, each citizen of a commonwealth guarantees to each other citizen thereof his right of property to his selected possession. ”

“ Through the will, therefore, and only through the will, is the future embraced in the present; though the will alone is the conception of the future, as such, made possible, and the will not only embraces, but also determines the future. ”

“ THESIS. The freedom of the person, according to the Conception of Rights, is limited only by the possibility that other persons are also to live with him as free persons, and hence as also having rights. Whatsoever does not violate the rights of another, each person has the right to do, and this, indeed, constitutes each person's right. Each one, moreover, has the right to judge for himself what is, and to defend, by his own powers, what he so judges to be, the limit of his free actions. ”

“ Man, indeed, can not be thought as one individual. Original Rights are, therefore, a pure fiction, but a fiction necessary for the purpose of Science. It must also be always remembered, that the conditions of personality should be thought as rights only in so far as they appear in the sensuous world, and as they can be checked or disturbed by other free beings. It is proper, therefore, to speak, for instance, of a right of sensuous self-preservation, that is, of preserving my body as such; but it is improper to speak of a right to freely think or will. ”

“ This mutual ignorance cancels even the possibility to approve each other as beings who have rights. And since this ignorance extends even to the fact whether each intends to respect the freedom and inviolability of the other's body, the result is, that no law-relation at all is possible between them; every thing is and remains problematical.
In our deduction of the right of compulsion, we discovered already that, as soon as that right is to be applied, men can not live together without an agreement. ”

“ Hence, if those laws work any change in the world which we have proposed to form to our conception, it is our own fault; for either those laws are too powerful for us, and then we should have considered that beforehand, or they are not too powerful, and then we should have controlled them through art and inventive ability. It is only through other free beings that unforeseen and unpreventable changes can be produced in our world—that is, in the system of that which we have received into our knowledge and related to our purpose—and that our free causality can, therefore, be disturbed. ”

“ Now, we have already shown that, by reason of this very conditionedness of the law, each free being can adopt it only as a conditioned law, that is, can adopt it only to attain the end which conditions it. The end of the law is to make a common intercourse of free beings possible. But this is possible only if the person with whom I thus enter into a community has subjected himself to this law, if he has resolved to respect my freedom or my original rights. ”

“ The question is, therefore, How does the law become a power? The power we seek is not a force of nature, is not a mechanical force, as we have already shown; and hence men have the physical power of inflicting wrongs upon each other. The required power must, therefore, be a power dependent upon a will. This will, however, must not be free, but unalterably and necessarily determined through the law. Such a will can not exist, therefore, as the will of an individual. ”

“ It is clear that the individual who enters such an agreement receives his freedom, although he renounces it, and receives it because he renounces it; it is clear, that through it all contradictions are solved, and through its realization the supreme rule of law can be secured; it is clear, that every one who desires the supremacy of the law must necessarily desire such a commonwealth; and that through the conception thereof, our investigation has therefore been brought to a close. ”

“ The argument is here that, from the willing of a determined mode of existence in the future, the willing of a future in general and the wish of our continued existence is the result. The assertion is, here, that we have the will to continue to exist, not for the continuance in itself, but for the sake of a determined state in the future; the continued existence is not absolute end itself at all, but merely the means for some specific end. This experience, indeed, fully confirms. All men desire to live, the nobler men to do something more, the less noble, at least to enjoy something more. ”

“ Rights can be spoken of only on the condition that a person is thought as a person, that is, as an individual, or, in other words, as occupying a relation to other individuals, between whom and him a community, though not actually posited, perhaps, is at least fictitiously assumed. For those things which, through speculative philosophy, we discovered to be conditions of personality, become rights only if other persons are added in thought, who dare not violate those conditions. ”

“ Not knowing, therefore, any other person, he may extend his freedom as far as he chooses, and take possession of the whole world. His right is really—if original rights ever could be real rights—infinite, for the condition which would limit it does not exist. ”

“ If in a certain case he has acted without a clear conception of his acting, if he has acted mechanically, obedient to chance impulses, it is impossible to live together with him in security as a rational being. He ceases to be a rational being, and becomes a product of nature, which ought to be compelled to inactivity. But this can not be done, both because he has, after all, a free-will, and because his general freedom must be respected. ”

“ I am excluded from the possession of a determined object, not through the will of the other, but only through my own free-will. If I had not excluded myself, I should not be excluded. But I must exclude myself from something in virtue of the Conception of Rights. ”

“ He can not posit that body as a thing to be influenced by him arbitrarily and subjected to his purposes, but solely as something whereby the sphere of his causality is limited. That causality may extend everywhere except to the space occupied by this body. As soon as I have seen the body and recognized it as that which it is, I have also recognized something which limits my causality in the sensuous world. ”

“ The Original Rights return in themselves, justify themselves, and constitute themselves as Right; that is to say, they become an absolute Right; and this proves that the circle of our investigation, as far as these rights are concerned, is completely closed, since a complete synthesis has now been established. I have the right to will the exercise of my rights throughout all the future, so far as I posit myself, simply because I have these rights; and I have these rights because I have the right to will them. ”

“ If injustice should become universal, society would necessarily dissolve itself, and thus perish. Often, it is true, law steps beyond its limits, and often, again, remains inactive; but these isolated cases do not necessarily dissolve the connection in actuality. For the individual there is, of course, little guarantee in the reflection that the whole commonwealth can not well perish unless each member thereof suffers injustice, and that he or other persons may well suffer violence at times without the protection of the law. ”

“ The possibility of the abstraction offers no difficulty.
But it must be well remembered at all times, THAT the abstraction has been made, and that the conception produced by it, though it have ideal possibility, (for thinking,) has no real significance. If this is forgotten, a purely formal Science of Rights will be the result.
There is no status of original rights for Man. Man attains rights only in a community with others as indeed he only becomes man—whereof we have shown the grounds heretofore—through intercourse with others. ”

“ The circle was this: The possibility of mutually liberating each other on the part of the offended and the offender is conditioned by the knowledge of their whole future; but this knowledge, again, is impossible, unless they mutually liberate each other. The method, which has been prescribed by the Science of Knowledge, tells us synthetically to unite both opposites, and thus to get rid of the contradiction.
A synthesis of this kind would be, in our case: the mutual liberation of both parties and the knowledge of the whole future must be one and the same; ”

“ Hence, Natural Law, or a legal relation between men, is not possible at all except in a commonwealth and under positive laws.
Either general morality, and universal faith in this morality, prevails—and even in that case it would be the most marvellous of all chances if men could agree upon their claims; and if morality so rules, law does not exist at all; for that which law should enforce occurs without its application, and that which it prohibits is never done. For a race of perfect moral beings there is no law. ”

“ Now, the body of a rational being is necessarily free and inviolable in virtue of its original rights. Hence, the other person who takes a cognition of that body must, by virtue of this his cognition, be forced to restrict his freedom to causality in the sensuous world, by that body and by the space which it occupies. ”

“ Free beings can not, however, be thought as coexisting at all, unless their rights reciprocally limit each other, that is, unless the sphere of their original rights changes into the sphere of rights in a commonwealth. It would seem, therefore, impossible to reflect upon rights as original rights, that is, without regard to their necessary limitations through the rights of others. Nevertheless, such a reflection must occur and furnish the ground for an investigation of rights in a commonwealth. ”

“ This determined willing is, therefore, the condition of all willing, and its realization, namely, the preservation of our body, which, in Natural Law, is as much as self-preservation, is a condition of all other acting and of all manifestation of freedom.
If we unite all our results into one, the person, in demanding his original rights, demands a continued reciprocal causality between his body and the sensuous world, determined and determinable solely through his freely formed conception of that world. ”

“ If he is not free to do either of these, he is no longer dependent solely upon his will.
It is, therefore, required that every thing should remain precisely as it has once been gathered into the conception of the rational being, whether it be already modified through it or not. Indeed, that which is not so modified in nature, becomes—by the very thinking of it, as not modified, and by joining it in thought to the modified—modified itself. The person has not modified it because it suited better to the modified things in its natural shape ”

“ The freedom of the lawful will remains unviolated by this contrivance, and retains all its dignity. So long as a person desires that which is lawful only for the sake of lawfulness, he experiences no longing for the unlawful; and since the law of compulsion operates only where this longing exists, it never effects the just person at all. His own good will places him above all external law, and he is utterly freed from it.
But a person may trespass upon another person's right without being thereunto impelled by a bad will. ”