Discursive communication is considered unstable; it does not relieve, it burdens. Such functionalist objections to the attempt to establish discursivity and reflection as constitutive for action can already be found in the historical Enlightenment, particularly in the theories of French materialism. The absolutization of the law of inertia as the supreme law of natural motion corresponds to the absolutization of the principle of self-preservation for social action. Anacker shows that the rationality recommended by this Enlightenment allows neither legal statements about nature nor the establishment of practical norms. The validity of the general is disputed. The idealistic philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Hegel) and Marx's social theory are then examined to see what systematic proposals can be made to address an absolutization.