Workshop: "Political Philosophy in German Idealism: Freedom, Drive and Will"

J. J. Rodríguez, “Freedom and Right Beyond Autonomy: Schelling’s Concept of Will in the New Deduction of Natural Law”

Schelling’s New Deduction of Natural Law (1797) is a pivotal but often neglected work in the development of post-Kantian practical philosophy. Situated between Kant’s transcendental foundation of right and Fichte’s theory of intersubjective recognition, Schelling offers an original deduction of the juridical order grounded in the dynamics of will. This presentation reconstructs Schelling’s argument, showing how he reconfigures the problem of natural right by moving beyond Kantian autonomy and Fichtean reciprocity toward a conception of will that is simultaneously absolute and relational.
For Schelling, the will’s task is to actualize the unconditioned in the practical sphere — a demand that transforms the concept of right into the expression of the will’s formal self-determination (Form der Willkür). The core of this argument lies in the dialectic between individual and general will: individual freedom must assert itself as absolute, yet it achieves this absoluteness only by conditioning itself through the universalizable structure of willing. Law thus emerges not as an external limitation but as the condition under which individual and general volitions become mutually constitutive.
In this presentation I argue that Schelling’s theory anticipates later critiques of legal positivism by grounding right in the internal structure of willing itself, rather than in external norms or contractual arrangements. I also show how Schelling’s view retains Kant’s emphasis on universality while exposing the insufficiency of Fichte’s purely intersubjective model. Ultimately, the New Deduction presents a vision of right as the dynamic reconciliation of freedom and necessity — a conception with profound implications for political philosophy and the metaphysics of normativity.

Manuel Tangorra: “Desiring Subjects of the Law: Drive, Normativity and Social Interaction in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”

In recent decades, commentators have identified in Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts a social theory according to which individuals form themselves by assimilating the normative expectations embedded in intersubjective practices. While these approaches have significantly contributed to clarifying the logic of Hegel’s civil society, I argue that they often overlook the structuring of desire that, for Hegel, underpins the very possibility of social interaction. My hypothesis is that attention to the notion of Trieb (drive) in the Grundlinien—and in the related Lectures Hegel delivered in Berlin—reveals a more fundamental layer of subjectivation, i.e. one that ensures the identification of the subject with the objective form of the law. To substantiate this interpretation, I begin by examining the first appearance of the notion of drive in the section on abstract right and its role in shaping the subject’s primary attachment to the rationality of the social norm. On this basis, I analyze the role of two key mediations of individual formation—habit and labor—in terms of the structure they give to human drives. Finally, I conclude by highlighting the relevance of the notion of drive for reassessing Hegel’s theory of social interaction and its reception in contemporary critical theory.

Manja Kisner: “Fichte’s Drive Theory of the I and the Philosophy of the Others” 

Fichte conceptualizes the activity of the I through his theory of drives. In the System of Ethics (1798), this theory assumes an organicist framework: Fichte grounds efficacy and efficacious action in the corporeal organization of the individual, drawing upon Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Blumenbach’s notion of the formative drive. Accordingly, Fichte’s ethical theory can be interpreted as a synthesis of Kant’s second and third Critiques, uniting the moral ideals of freedom and self-determination with the teleological conception of organized natural beings. Yet Fichte’s philosophy is also characterized by a pronounced account of intersubjectivity. This talk examines the extent to which Fichte’s organicist model of efficacy underlies his theory of intersubjectivity, as developed in the Foundations of Natural Right (1796) and his later political writings. In particular, it asks whether Fichte’s drive theory of the I is intrinsically linked to his philosophy of the others.