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44

The person has the right to place its will into any thing, which thereby becomes mine; the thing, since it has no such purpose in itself, receives its determination and soul from my will – the absolute right of appropriation which human beings have over all things.

That so-called philosophy which ascribes to immediate individual things, to the impersonal, reality in the sense of independence and true being-for-itself and being-in-itself, and likewise that philosophy which asserts that spirit cannot know the truth and cannot know what the thing in itself is, is directly refuted by the way the free will behaves toward these things. If, for consciousness, for intuition and representation, the so-called external things have the semblance of independence, then, by contrast, the free will is the idealism, the truth of such actuality.

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2 responses to “44”

  1. Hegel (Notes) Avatar
    Hegel (Notes)

    Nothing is an end in itself – not even the living
    Not blood, Jews – not animals, India, Egypt –
    It is another matter whether and what I can take into possession – namely only particular, not universal things – not elemental ones –
    I myself relate only to particulars – in actual, physical possession – I am limited therein, with regard to what is also [there] as a universal relation – The universal – as such – I take into possession with thought.

  2. Eduard Gans (Additions) Avatar
    Eduard Gans (Additions)

    All things can become the property of the human being, because he is free will and as such is in and for himself, while what stands opposed to him does not have this quality. Everyone therefore has the right to make his will into the thing, or the thing into his will, that is to say, in other words, to sublate the thing and transform it into his own; for the thing, as externality, has no end in itself, is not the infinite relation of itself to itself, but is itself something external. Such an external thing is also the living being (the animal), and to that extent it is itself a thing. Only the will is the infinite, the absolute as against everything else, while the other, for its part, is only relative. To appropriate something thus means, fundamentally, only to manifest the sovereignty of my will over the thing and to demonstrate that the thing is not in and for itself, not an end in itself. This manifestation occurs through my placing into the thing another purpose than the one it immediately had; I give the living being, as my property, another soul than the one it had; I give it my soul. Free will is thus the idealism that does not take things, as they are, to be in and for themselves, whereas realism declares them to be absolute even though they exist only in the form of finitude. Even the animal no longer holds to this realist philosophy, for it consumes things and thereby proves that they are not absolutely self-subsistent.

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