131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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be possible. It would be something peripheral and incidental, not the essential negation of the
essential, but the removal of an inconsequential bit of rubbish. In contrast to Fichte's
rationalist philosophy, here a despotism is rejected. Against Fichte, Hegel argued that it
would be a violent abstraction to assume that the world had been abandoned by God and was
only waiting until mankind could bring a purpose to it and build it according to an abstract
notion of "how things should be." 6 An "ought" is impotent. What is right will make itself
effective, and what merely should be, without actually existing, is not true but only a
subjective mastery of life.
The most important advance that the nineteenth century made over the rationalism of the
eighteenth rests on this contrast between Hegel and Fichte. A dictatorship had become
impossible because the absolute character of moral disjunction had been dissolved.
Nevertheless Hegel's philosophy remained only a logical development and intensification of
the old rationalism. The conscious human act first makes people what they are and propels
them out of the natural finitude of an "in-itself" onto the higher level of a "for-itself." What
man is according to his aptitude and ability he must first become aware of, so that he does
not remain trapped in a merely accidental and capricious empirical existence and so that the
irresistible motion of world-historical events do not pass him by. So long as this philosophy
remained contemplative, it had no place for dictatorship in any case. But that changes as soon
as it is taken seriously by active people. In material political and sociological praxis, those
who have a higher consciousness and who believe themselves to be representatives of this
great force will shake off the constraints of a narrow outlook, and will enforce the
"objectively necessary.'' Here too their will forces the unfree to be free. In practice that is an
educational dictatorship. But if world history is to go forward, if the unreal must be
continually defeated, then by necessity the dictatorship will become permanent. Here it is
also clear that the universal duality, which, according to Hegel's philosophy, can be found in
everything that happens, rests above all in itself: Its concept of
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