Volontà libera e arbitrio nel Sistema di etica di Fichte e nell’Introduzione ai Lineamenti di filosofia del diritto di Hegel

Even if Fichte seems to start from Kant’s doctrine of freedom, the distinction between a sensible and an intelligible world is not conclusive for his theory of freedom, which becomes comprehensible only as from the principles of the doctrine of science and, in particular, from the distinction between being and thought. With his definition of freedom as substantialitas, Fichte lays stress more on independence and spontaneity than, as Kant had done instead, on the normative aspect of autonomy. Hegel builds his doctrine of freedom within the fichtian theoretical horizon: with respect to two potentially diverging tendencies which are present in the Sittenlehre – that towards considering the natural impulse and the pure impulse nothing but two different points of view on something essentially unitary and that towards defining freedom as independence from nature and as dominion of rationality on nature - Hegel’s doctrine of freedom starts from the first, preserving however also the demand to guarantee the supremacy of rationality, which is at the bottom of the second.