volo ergo sum (vs. cogito ergo sum)
Grounding subjectivity in desire and will rather than cognition: "I will, therefore I am" replacing Descartes's "I think, therefore I am."
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Fichte: "to be free is nothing, to become free is heaven." Freedom is not a state you have but a becoming you live, driven by desire.
For Fichte, sincerity and motive outweigh consequences. Whatever it costs, you must not betray your own ideals.
The Underground Man grants reason is fine but says it feeds only our reasoning faculty; desire is "a manifestation of the whole of life," and people sometimes love suffering passionately.
Put simply Dostoevsky's Underground Man: reason is fine, but it satisfies only our thinking side. Desire expresses the whole of life, and people sometimes love suffering, passionately.
Shore sees in the address's insistence on will one of Nazism's roots in Romanticism: the governing verb is not thinking but willing.
Put simply Shore sees in the speech's stress on will one of Nazism's roots in Romanticism: the key verb is not "think" but "will."
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
RousseauTwo things distinguish humans from other creatures, on Rousseau's account: free agency, and an openness to becoming. We are underdetermined, self-creating beings rather than finished ones. L3 · 17:39
FichteFichte: "to be free is nothing, to become free is heaven." Freedom is not a state you have but a becoming you live, driven by desire. L3 · 37:08
Radicalizes Rousseau's becoming-over-being into an explicit axiom: freedom itself is a process, not a possession.Our inference
KantFree will cannot be proven, yet without it there is no ethics at all. Kant therefore simply posits it, and, almost in passing, posits God too. L3 · 31:04
FichteFichte: "to be free is nothing, to become free is heaven." Freedom is not a state you have but a becoming you live, driven by desire. L3 · 37:08
Takes Kant's merely-posited free will and turns it into an active, never-finished existential project of becoming free.
KantFor Kant, acting morally means acting from duty, not from whatever one feels like doing; acts are judged by their intentions, never by consequences nobody can control. L3 · 31:51
FichteFor Fichte, sincerity and motive outweigh consequences. Whatever it costs, you must not betray your own ideals. L3 · 37:32
Radicalizes Kant's focus on motive over consequence into an absolute imperative never to betray one's ideals.
FichteFichte: "to be free is nothing, to become free is heaven." Freedom is not a state you have but a becoming you live, driven by desire. L3 · 37:08
HegelLike the Romantics, Hegel cares less about what is than about what is becoming: nothing holds still, and everything is always on its way to being something else. L4 · 14:38
Shore says Hegel takes the being-versus-becoming distinction central to Romanticism, which she recalls through Fichte's line on becoming free, and makes it central.
DostoevskyThe Underground Man grants reason is fine but says it feeds only our reasoning faculty; desire is "a manifestation of the whole of life," and people sometimes love suffering passionately. L3 · 46:17
ShestovKant's Critique of Pure Reason, on Shestov's reading, really defends reason rather than critiquing it. The genuine critique of pure reason, he holds, is by Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground. L3 · 30:18
Shestov reads Notes from Underground as the genuine critique of pure reason.
Terms that appear in the same claims.