Fichte on personal freedom and the freedom of others

Fichte’s deduction of the concept of right (Recht) in the first main division of the Foundations of Natural Right(§§1-4)helped make recognition into a central concept of social and political philosophy, albeit indirectly through its influence on Hegel’s account of recognition.1This deduction consists of an attempt to explain the possibility of self-consciousness, which in this particular context means consciousness of oneself as a free, rational agent capable of realizing one’s ends by effecting changes in the world. In the first main division of the Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte sets out an argument which aims to show that self-consciousness requires an object that qua object is independent of the subject but qua object of self-consciousness is not purely external to the subject and non-identical with it. Rather, the object reflects what the subject itself essentially is, that is to say, self-determining. What we have is, in effect, a practical form of the identity of subject and object which is presupposed by any conscious experience, but which, as the condition of any experience whatsoever, can itself never become a direct object of experience