The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism

Summary

An ethics. Since in the future the whole of metaphysics will collapse into morals – of which Kant, with his two practical postulates, has given only an example and exhausted nothing – all ethics will be nothing more than a complete system of all ideas, or, what amounts to the same, of all practical postulates. Naturally, the first idea is the representation of myself as an absolute free being. With the free self-conscious being a whole world comes forth from nothing – the only true and thinkable creation from nothing. At this point I will descend to the realm of physics. The question is this: how must a world be constituted for a moral being? I would like to give wings again to our physics, which progresses laboriously with experiments.

So, if philosophy gives the ideas and experience the data, we can finally have the essentials of the physics that I expect of future epochs. It seems that the present physics cannot satisfy the creative spirit as ours is or should be.

From nature I come to the works of man. First of all the idea of humanity. I want to show that there is no more an idea of the state than there is an idea of the machine, because the state is something mechanical. Only that which is an object of freedom can be called an idea. We must therefore go beyond the state! For every state must treat free human beings as if they were cogs in a machine; but that it should not do; therefore it should cease to exist.