{"id":900133,"date":"2024-05-31T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/?p=900133"},"modified":"2026-08-24T10:30:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T08:30:04","slug":"135","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/135\/","title":{"rendered":"135"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/em> — 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<\/em>, or the abstract positive<\/em>, the undetermined, as its determination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u00a7 133<\/a>) — 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<\/em>, and moral science to a rhetoric of duty for duty’s sake<\/em>. From this standpoint no immanent doctrine of duties is possible; one can indeed bring in material from outside and thereby arrive at particular<\/em> duties, but from that determination of duty as the absence of contradiction<\/em>, as formal correspondence with itself<\/em> — which is nothing other than the positing of abstract indeterminacy<\/em> — 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<\/em> maxim — does indeed bring in the more concrete<\/em> 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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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<\/em>, 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<\/em> — is precisely this: to exclude all content and determination.<\/p>\n

The further antinomies and configurations of the perennial ought<\/em>, in which the merely moral standpoint of relation<\/em> only wanders about without being able to resolve them and get beyond the ought, I have developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>, p. 550 ff.; compare Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences<\/em>, \u00a7 420 ff.1<\/sup><\/p>\n

(1. Encyclopaedia, 3rd ed., \u00a7 507 ff.)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,13],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-900133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paragraph-en","category-uncategorized","tag-concept"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":900193,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900133\/revisions\/900193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}