The will contains α) the element of pure indeterminacy or of the pure reflection of the ego into itself, in which every limitation, every content immediately present by nature, needs, desires, and drives, or given and determined by any means whatsoever, is dissolved; the boundless infinity of absolute abstraction or universality, the pure thinking of itself.
Those who regard thinking as a particular, distinct faculty, separate from the will as a likewise distinct faculty, and who even go so far as to consider thinking as detrimental to the will—especially the good will—immediately show from the outset that they know nothing at all of the nature of the will; a remark that will often have to be made regarding the same subject. — If one side of the will as determined here—this absolute possibility of being able to abstract from every determination in which I find myself or which I have posited in myself, the flight from every content as a limit—is that toward which the will determines itself, or is held fast by representation as freedom itself, then this is negative freedom or the freedom of the understanding. — It is the freedom of emptiness, which is elevated to actual shape and passion; remaining merely theoretical, it becomes in the religious sphere the fanaticism of pure Indian contemplation, but turning toward actuality, it becomes in the political as well as the religious sphere the fanaticism of the destruction of every existing social order and the removal of individuals suspected of favoring an order, as well as the annihilation of any organization that seeks to emerge once again. Only by destroying something does this negative will have the sense of its own existence; it may well imagine that it wills some positive state, e.g., the state of universal equality or of a universal religious life, but in fact it does not will the positive actuality thereof, for this immediately brings about some order, a particularization of institutions as well as of individuals; it is, however, from the annihilation of particularization and objective determination that the self-consciousness of this negative freedom arises. Thus, what it imagines it wills can in itself be only an abstract representation, and its actualization can only be the fury of destruction.
