Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ From these reasons we, in our theory, have asserted, that in civil law the legislative and the executive powers are inseparable, and not to be divided. Indeed, civil legislation is itself a branch of the executive, if the law is really to be executed. The administrator of the executive power is the natural interpreter of the common will, announcing the relations of the individuals to each other in the state; not exactly of the will which they actually have, but of the will which they must have, to make their coexistence in a community possible. ”

“ Common sense looks at your doings admiringly, and cheerfully confesses it its own fault that it does not understand you; but when some one who is not so modest takes it upon himself merely to utter his opinion on the subject, you can not explain his inability to understand a matter which to you seems so very clear, except on the presumption that the poor man has not gone through the rudiments of the Sciences."↑ I have read somewhere that the fundamental principle of the Science of Morality is, that "The manifold acts of the free will should be in harmony." ”

“ Nothing is easier than to produce with freedom, and under no necessity of thinking, every possible determination in our minds, and to cause our mind arbitrarily to act in every possible manner; but nothing is more difficult than to observe that mind as acting in real, that is, in necessary acting. The former mode of proceeding gives us conceptions without objects, or an empty thinking; and only in the second manner does the philosopher become the observer of an actual thinking of his mind. ”

“ But the true philosopher has to observe Reason in its original and necessary procedure, by which his Ego, with every thing which exists for it, has first derived Being. But since he can no longer find this originally acting Ego in empirical consciousness, he, by the only act of arbitrariness which is permitted to him, namely, by the free resolve to philosophize, places that Ego back at its first starting-point, and then causes it to describe all its acting from that point after its own laws, which to the philosopher are well-known. ”

“ Now, if the causalities of rational beings should work upon the same world, and should thus be able to influence, check, and oppose each other, as is indeed the case, then freedom—in the latter signification of the word—would be possible for persons who stand under this reciprocal influence, only on condition that all of them restrict their causality within certain limits, and divide the world, as it were, amongst them. But since they are posited as free, such a limit to their freedom could not lie beyond freedom—since then the limit would cancel, but not restrict it as freedom ”

“ In all this our representation of the conception of Rights we have refrained from expressly refuting those who attempt to deduce the conception of Rights from the Moral Law, because, as soon as the true deduction of that conception has been established, every impartial mind will accept it as the true one without demanding that the incorrectness of other deductions be shown up. ”

“ But who is to proclaim the common will, thus determined in all respects, regarding the rights of the individual citizen as well as regarding the punishment to be inflicted upon their transgression? Who is to interpret this necessary arrangement and agreement? The masses themselves would be the most improper body for it, and by counting together the expressed wills of the individuals, the true common will could scarcely be obtained in its purity. ”

“ The conception of freedom involves originally only the power, through absolute spontaneity, to form conceptions of our possible causality; and it is only this power which rational beings necessarily ascribe to each other. But that a rational individual, or a person, should find himself to be free requires something more, namely, that a result in the external world should follow the thinking of his activity, or that he should perceive the effect of his free causality. ”

“ Now, it is this moral aspect of the question which belongs to the Science of Morality, and not to the Science of Rights; in the latter science men are bound only by their arbitrary resolution to live in community with others; and if any one is not willing to restrict his arbitrariness at all, the Science of Rights has nothing to say to him other than this: that he must, in that case, remove from all human society. ”

“ The rational being in acting does not become conscious of its acting, since itself is its acting, and nothing more; but that whereof we are conscious is assumed to be external to consciousness, and hence external to the acting—it is the object of the acting. The Ego becomes conscious only of that which arises for it in and through this acting; and that which thus arises is the object of consciousness, or the thing. No other sort of thing exists for a rational being; and since we can speak of a thing and of being only in their relation to a rational being, no other sort of thing exists at all. ”

“ If the object has its ground solely in the acting of the Ego, and is completely determined through the Ego alone, it follows that, if there be distinctions amongst the objects, these their distinctions can arise only through different modes of acting on the part of the Ego. Every object became for the Ego determined in this particular manner, in which it is determined, simply because the Ego acted in the manner in which it did act; but that the Ego did so act was necessary, for just such an act was one of the conditions of self-consciousness. ”

“ Of quite a different nature is the law concerning the manner in which the laws are to be executed, or the constitution. The constitution must be adopted by the vote of every citizen, and can be adopted only by unanimity; since it is the guarantee which each one has given him by all others for the security of all his rights in the community. ”

“ The essential component of every constitution is the ephorate, explained in our work. Whether this is sufficient to secure the rights of all—without the separation of the legislative and executive powers, which to me seems inadmissible, I must leave to the judgment of more competent men. ”

“ The former is an arbitrary repetition of the original modes of Reason's acting, after the necessity, which gave them significance and reality, has passed away; the latter alone is the true observation of reason in its modes of proceeding. From the former arises an empty, formular-philosophy, which considers itself as having done enough when it has proved that one may think any thing without being anxious concerning the object, that is, concerning the conditions of the necessity of this thinking. A real philosophy posits conception and object together, and never treats one without the other. ”

“ It might be said that many learned men, who have written systems of natural law, have treated in them without knowing it that very part of the Science of Morality, had they not forgotten to state why obedience to the Moral Law always conditions absolute inner harmony of the rational Being. ”

“ Mere formal thinking has been indescribably injurious in philosophy, in mathematics, [5] in the natural Sciences, and indeed in all pure Sciences.
II. WHAT THE PROBLEM OF THE SCIENCE OF RIGHTS, AS A REAL PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCE, WILL BE.
To say, therefore, a certain determined conception is originally contained through and in Reason, can only signify: a rational being, as sure as it is such, acts in a determined manner. The philosopher has to show of this determined act, first, that it is a condition of self-consciousness, and this furnishes the deduction thereof ”

“ This inner acting of the rational being occurs either necessarily or through freedom.
The rational being is simply in so far as it posits itself as being; that is, in so far as it is self-conscious. All Being, that of the Ego as well as that of the Non-Ego, is a determined modification of consciousness; and without consciousness there is no Being. ”

“ Now, if you keep on dividing ad infinitum, as the problem requires you, you will never get to measuring it But if you proceed to measure it, you must first stop dividing, and then your polygon is finite, and not, as you have posited it, infinite.—But because you can take hold of your manner of acting in describing an Infinite, that is, because you can seize the empty comprehension of the Infinite, and designate it, for instance, as A, you now pay no further attention, to whether you have really accomplished the act—no, not even to whether you can accomplish it ”

“ None of these parts can be separated from the others, without wrongly treating even these separates, and without falling into formal philosophy. The conception of Rights is assumed to be an original conception of Reason ”

“ To mistake the products of free acting for the products of necessary acting, and vice versa, is insanity.↑ A reader—who in his joy at having finally found a well-known word, should hurry to transfer to it all that he may heretofore have thought as characterized by this word, conception—would soon be utterly confused, and unable to understand any thing further ”

“ Hence, only those are necessary acts which result from the conception of the rational being, or through which the possibility of self-consciousness is conditioned; but these acts are most certainly all necessary, and result as certainly as there is a rational being. The rational being necessarily posits itself ”

“ For if it were correct, a man might merely resolve to be a very thorough and consequent rascal in which case all the acts of his free will would perfectly agree, being, all of them, opposed to the condition of what shall be ”

“ This insight is the exclusive condition of all philosophizing; and unless a person has attained this insight, he is not yet ripe for philosophy. And, indeed, all true philosophers have philosophized from this stand-point ”