In the Critique of Judgment, Kant defines longing, in a footnote, affect which demonstrates inchoate agreement with his doctrine of desire on the part of anyone who makes incredible wish; fantastic indicate that we are aware that our representations have real efficacy, and longing shows that we are aware of the inadequacy of our power to fulfill our wish. Regularly indulged, longing will make the heart flaccid and exhaust our powers through years of unfulfilled desires.1 Within thirty years, however, in Schelling's later philosophy, longing is everything, the chaotic and irrational foundation of nature, God's dark and sublime essence.2 The topic of this essay is the account of longing that Johann Gottlieb Fichte provides in the System of Ethics, which contributes to the shift that transforms longing from a dreamy disposition to a primordial force. I intend first to describe what longing is within that text, especially in relation to the natural drive and the moral law. Then I want to advance a suggestion about the relation between longing and the moral law. To conclude, I will compare the affective experience of the moral law and longing. Fichte's definition of longing is an indeterminate sensation of a need ... not determined through the concept of object, the of a particular drive.3 Longing is defined both a sensation (Empfindung) and a feeling (Gefuhl). Is there any significance to using both diese terms? In Kant, there is a distinction between feeUngs, purely subjective, internal states of the subject (which Kant restricts solely to pleasure and pain), and sensations, which refer to sensible affections insofar they are bound up with object.4 But Fichte alters, and to some degree, eliminates mis distinction: All feelings are originally states of the subject, and only when they are subsequently attributed to object can they be designated sensations.5 Both and real content are feelings: all sensible determinations, such purple, bitter, or hard, are considered feeUngs. But why did Fichte use the term Empfindung? In all likelihood, designating longing a sensation simply indicates the range of longing that Fichte will later delimit. There is a terminological connotation that indicates that longing will be referred to given objects (though not immediately, since that would be contradictory); more specifically, while longing originally is indeterminate, reflection on longing reveals desires oriented toward objects that nature provides or could provide for us coincidentally or gratuitously, or Fichte says, as a favor.6 Apart from restriction to the sphere of nature, though, longing is a feeling without objective contextualization. Within the System of Ethics, Fichte defines feeling in the following ways. Feeling is the sheer, immediate relation of what is objective in the I to what is subjective therein, or the relation of being to consciousness.7 Insofar feeUng manifests relations in which the subjective is dependent on the objective, it is the inverse of the will. The relation obtains when the will is inhibited and barred in its encroachments on the Not-I. Without overture into the opposed, real world, no feeling would arise; feelings are only produced by the frustration of the will in its endeavor to completely conform the world to reason. The complete conversion of the real world to the tool of reason, however, is only idea, and can never be genuinely effected. Accordingly, the will operates, not by eradicating feeling, but by transitioning from given feeUngs to new feelings that are in accord with the end that the will gives itself; these new feeUngs are the product of its freedom, and accordingly, the new feeUngs express increase in the scope of freedom.8 Fichte distinguishes between feelings and representations, saying that in the latter the subject presents itself - though passive and is aware of itself; whereas in feeUng, there is no awareness of the subject, no conscious reflection, only the feeling. …