The burden of freedom: The doctrine of subject in Thomas Carlyle’s works

Abstract

Although Thomas Carlyle’s contemporaries were Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, the pillars of the classical positivism, he was anxious to found the ontological status of the subject. Kant showed that the subject is an epistemological institution that plays its part as a way to the domain of pure metaphysics; Hegel, a radical Kantian, subdued the whole course of logics, nature and history to self-realization of the Absolute Spirit. In Carlyle’s work we find an interesting method: he tends to reveal a historical person (“a hero”) as a subject of history and interprets him as the one subdued to Providence, or Nature. On this basis he endows the hero with the status of a means of Nature. Although this view represents a sound approach to creating a qualitative or metaphysical foundation of the description of a human being rather than the quantitative approach of sciences and the positivism, it inevitably brings about the paradox of “the weak and the powerful”; in the paper it is discussed as the Carlyle’s paradox. It is also significant that Carlyle derives his philosophical inspiration in the tradition of German idealism. J. G. Fichte’s doctrine of the destination of Man is very indicative in this respect. As a result, Carlyle’s doctrine of hero-worship is considered by him as a doctrine of freedom: to be free means accepting the burden of Providence and realizing it as a certain life project.