149

As a limitation, binding duty can appear only against the undetermined subjectivity or abstract freedom, and against the drives of the natural will, or of the moral will determining its undetermined good out of its own arbitrariness. But the individual has, in duty, rather its liberation — in part from the dependence in which it stands within mere natural drive, as well as from the oppressiveness in which it finds itself, as subjective particularity, within the moral reflections of what it ought and might do; in part from the undetermined subjectivity that does not arrive at existence and the objective determinacy of acting, and remains within itself, an unactuality. In duty the individual liberates itself into substantial freedom.

DE

Comments

One response to “149”

  1. Eduard Gans (Additions) Avatar
    Eduard Gans (Additions)

    Duty limits only the arbitrariness of subjectivity, and comes into conflict only with the abstract good that subjectivity clings to. When people say, we want to be free, this at first means only that we want to be abstractly free, and every determination and articulation within the state counts as a limitation of this freedom. Duty is therefore not a limitation of freedom, but only of its abstraction, that is, of unfreedom: it is the arrival at essence, the attainment of affirmative freedom.

Leave a Reply