These determinations, however, are not contained in the determination of duty itself; rather, since both are conditioned and limited, they thereby bring about the very transition into the higher sphere of the unconditioned — duty. To duty itself, insofar as it is, in moral self-consciousness, the essential or universal element of that self-consciousness, as it relates within itself only to itself, there thus remains only abstract universality; it has contentless identity, or the abstract positive, the undetermined, as its determination.

However essential it is to bring out the pure, unconditioned self-determination of the will as the root of duty — just as the cognition of the will first gained its firm ground and starting point, through the thought of its infinite autonomy, in the Kantian philosophy (see § 133) — so much does the fixation on the merely moral standpoint, which does not pass over into the concept of ethical life, reduce this gain to an empty formalism, and moral science to a rhetoric of duty for duty’s sake. From this standpoint no immanent doctrine of duties is possible; one can indeed bring in material from outside and thereby arrive at particular duties, but from that determination of duty as the absence of contradiction, as formal correspondence with itself — which is nothing other than the positing of abstract indeterminacy — no transition can be made to the determination of particular duties, nor, even when such a particular content comes under consideration for acting, does that principle contain any criterion as to whether it is a duty or not. On the contrary, every unrightful and immoral course of action can be justified in this way. — The further Kantian form — the capacity of an action to be represented as a universal maxim — does indeed bring in the more concrete representation of a state of affairs, but contains, for itself, no further principle than that same absence of contradiction and formal identity. — That no property should exist contains, for itself, just as little a contradiction as that this or that particular people, family, and so on, should not exist, or that no human beings at all should live. If it is otherwise firmly established and presupposed that property and human life should exist and be respected, then it is a contradiction to commit theft or murder; a contradiction can arise only in connection with something that is, with a content that already lies at the basis as a fixed principle. Only in relation to such a content is an action either in agreement with it or in contradiction. But duty, which is to be willed only as such, not for the sake of a content — formal identity — is precisely this: to exclude all content and determination.

The further antinomies and configurations of the perennial ought, in which the merely moral standpoint of relation only wanders about without being able to resolve them and get beyond the ought, I have developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 550 ff.; compare Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, § 420 ff.¹

(1. Encyclopaedia, 3rd ed., § 507 ff.)