The Eroica knows itself as absolute in the same way that the revolutionary I of Fichte's philosophy comes to self-knowledge. ‘My system’, writes Fichte, ‘is the first system of freedom. As that nation [France] releases man from his external chains, so my system releases him from the shackles of the thing in itself … and presents him … as an independent being.’ The ego, for Fichte, is not fact; it can neither be theorised about nor can it conceptualise its own being. Only the spontaneous action of the I is absolute: ‘We know because our vocation is to act.’ And it is only the action of the Eroica that is absolute in its attempt to grasp itself as infinite. The music presents itself as a process that is entirely self-caused; the heroic theme moves beyond the compulsion that the hammerstrokes inflict upon it to demonstrate the freedom of its conscious activity in shaping itself, breaking the limits of necessity to know the absolute position from which it can categorically assert its imperatives. The Eroica as the male action hero is the musical image of the absolute subject. But as Schelling would point out to Fichte, the freedom of the self-positing ego can only exist by dominating nature as merely something to be used.