The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Let us recapitulate what we have won in the preceding chapters. The world approaches man as a multiplicity, as a sum of single things. One of these single things, a being among beings, is he himself. We designate this form of the world as simply given, and insofar as we do not develop this form through conscious activity, but rather find it before us, we call this perception. Within the world of perception, we perceive our own self. This self-perception would simply remain there as one perception among the many others, if there did not arise from the midst of this self-perception something which proves itself able to connect all perceptions, and therefore also the sum total of all other perceptions, with that of our self. This something which arises is no longer mere perception; it is also not, like perceptions, simply found before us. It is brought forth through our activity. It seems at first to be bound to what we perceive as our self. In its inner significance, however, it reaches out beyond the self. To the single perceptions it adds ideal characterizations which, however, relate to one another, which are founded in one whole. It characterizes ideally what is won through self-perception in the same way as all other perceptions, and places it as subject or “I” over against the objects. This something is thinking, and the ideal characterizations are concepts and ideas. Thinking manifests itself therefore at first in the perception of the self; it is, however, not merely subjective; for the self first designates itself as subject with the help of thinking. This relationship to itself in thinking is a life characteristic of our personality. Through it we lead a purely ideal existence. We feel ourselves through it to be thinking beings. This life characteristic would remain a purely conception (logical) one, if no other characteristics of our self supervened. We would then be beings whose life would be limited to the establishment of purely ideal relationships among our perceptions themselves, and between them and ourselves. If one calls this establishing of such a thought situation “cognizing,” and the condition of our self attained through it “knowing,” then, if the above supposition applies, we would have no regard ourselves as merely cognizing or knowing beings.

[ 2 ] This presupposition, however, does not apply. We do not merely relate our perceptions to ourselves ideally, through the concept, but also through feeling, as we have seen. We are therefore not beings with a merely conceptual content to our lives. The naive realist, in fact, sees in the life of feeling a life of the personality more real than in the purely ideal element of knowing. And from his standpoint he is entirely right when he explains the matter to himself in this way. Feeling, from the subjective side, is at first exactly the same as what perception is from the objective side. According to the basic principle of naive realism that everything is real that can be perceived: feeling is therefore the guarantee of the reality of one's own personality. The monism presented here must, however, confer upon feeling the same complement that it considers necessary for any perception, if perception is to represent full reality. For this monism, feeling is something real but incomplete which, in the first form in which it is given to us, does not yet contain its second factor: the concept or idea. Therefore feeling also arises everywhere in life, as perceiving does, before the activity of knowing. We feel ourselves at first as existing entities; and only in the course of gradual development do we struggle through to the point where, within our own dimly felt existence, the concept of our self arises for us. What for us only emerges later is, however, inseparably bound up with our feeling from the beginning. Because of this fact the naive person falls into the belief that in feeling, existence presents itself to him directly; in knowing, only indirectly. The cultivation of his feeling life will therefore seem to him more important than anything else. He will believe that he has grasped the connection of things only when he has taken it up into his feeling. He seeks to make not knowing, but rather feeling, into his means of knowledge. Since feeling is something altogether individual, something equivalent to perception, the philosopher of feeling makes a principle that has significance only within his personality into a world principle. He seeks to permeate the whole world with his own self. What the monism meant here strives to grasp with the concept, this the philosopher of feeling seeks to attain with his feeling, and sees his way of being with objects as the more direct one.

[ 3 ] The tendency characterized here as the philosophy of feeling is often termed mysticism. The error of a mystical way of viewing things based on feeling alone consists in the fact that it wants to experience what it should know, that it wants to transform something individual, feeling, into something universal.

[ 4 ] Feeling is a purely individual act, the relating of the outer world to our subject, insofar as this relationship finds its expression in a merely subjective experiencing.

[ 5 ] There is still another manifestation of the human personality. The “I” lives along, through its thinking, with the general life of the world; through thinking, in a purely ideal (conceptual) way, it relates its perceptions to itself, and itself to its perceptions. In feeling, the “I” experiences a relationship of the object to itself as subject; in willing, the opposite is the case. In willing we likewise have a perception before us, namely that of the individual relationship of our self to what is objective. Whatever in my willing is not a purely ideal factor is just as much a mere object of perception as is the case with any thing in the outer world.

[ 6 ] In spite of this, naive realism will believe that here again it has before itself a far more real existence than can be attained through thinking. It will see in willing an element within which it becomes directly conscious of a happening, of bringing something about, in contrast to thinking, which first grasps the happening in concepts. What the “I” accomplishes through this willing represents, for this way of viewing things, a process which is directly experienced. In willing, the adherent of this philosophy believes that he has really grasped world happening by one tip. While he can follow other happenings only through perception from outside, he believes that in his willing he experiences a real happening quite directly. The form of existence in which his will appears to him within the self becomes for him a real principle of reality. His own willing appears to him as a specific case of universal world happening; and this latter appears, therefore, as universal willing. Will becomes the world principle just as, in the mysticism of feeling, feeling becomes the knowledge principle. This way of viewing things is philosophy of will (thelism). Something which can only be experienced individually is made by this philosophy into the factor constitutive of the world.

[ 7 ] Just as little as mysticism of feeling can be called science, can philosophy of will be so called. For both assert that they cannot make do with a conceptual penetration of the world. Both demand, besides the ideal principle of existence, a real principle as well. And this with a certain justification. But since we have, for this so-called real principle, only our perception as a means of grasping it, so this assertion of the mysticism of feeling and of the philosophy of will is identical with the view that we have two sources of knowledge: that of thinking and that of perceiving; and this latter presents itself in feeling and will as individual experience. Since what flows from the one source, the experiences, cannot be taken up by these world views directly into what flows from the other source, that of thinking, these two ways of knowledge, perceiving and thinking, continue to exist side by side without any higher mediation. Besides the ideal principle attainable through knowing, there is supposedly still a real principle of the world in addition, which is experienceable but not to be grasped in thinking. In other words: mysticism of feeling and philosophy of will are naive realism, because they subscribe to the proposition that what is directly perceived is real. Only, with respect to original naive realism, they commit in addition the inconsistency of making one particular form of perception (feeling, or willing as the case may be) into the only means of knowing existence, which they can do, after all, only if they subscribe in general to the basic proposition that what is perceived is real. Therefore they would also have to ascribe to outer perception an equal cognitive value.

[ 8 ] Philosophy of will becomes metaphysical realism when it also transfers will into those spheres of existence in which—unlike in one's own subject—a direct experience of will is not possible. It assumes hypothetically a principle outside the subject, for which subjective experience is the sole criterion of reality. As metaphysical realism, the philosophy of will falls under the critique, presented in the following chapter, which overcomes and acknowledges the contradictory factor in any kind of metaphysical realm, which is that will is a universal world happening only insofar as it relates itself ideally to the rest of the world.

Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 9 ] The difficulty in grasping thinking in its essential being by observing it lies in the fact that this essential being has all too easily slipped away already from the observing soul when the soul wants to bring this being into its line of vision. There then remains for the soul only the dead abstractness, the corpse of living thinking. If one looks only upon this abstractness, one can easily find oneself impelled, in the face of it, to enter into the “life-filled” element of the mysticism of feeling or else of metaphysics of the will. One can find it strange that someone should want to grasp, in “mere thought,” the essential being of reality. But whoever brings himself to the point of truly having life in his thinking will attain the insight that neither weaving in mere feelings nor looking upon the will element can even be compared to the inner wealth and to the peaceful, self-sustaining, yet inwardly moving experience within this life of thinking, let alone that these two could be ranked above it. It is precisely due to this wealth, to this inner fullness of experience, that thinking's counterpart in our usual state of soul appears dead, abstract. No other human soul activity is so easy to misapprehend as thinking. Willing, feeling: they warm the human soul, even in one's reliving of the original experiences. Thinking all too easily leaves one cold in this reliving; it seems to dry out one's soul life. But this is only the strongly manifesting shadow of thinking's reality—a reality which is woven through with light, and which delves down warmly into the phenomena of the world. This delving down occurs through a power that flows within the thinking activity itself, which is the power of love in spiritual form. One may not raise the objection that whoever, in this way, sees love within active thinking is transferring a feeling, love, into it. For this objection is in truth a confirmation of what is being maintained here. Whoever turns, namely to thinking in its essential being, will find in it both feeling and will, and these also in the depths of their reality; whoever turns away from thinking and toward “mere” feeling and willing only, will lose their true reality. Whoever wants to experience intuitively within thinking is also doing justice to experience of a feeling and will nature; the mysticism of feeling and the metaphysics of will, however, cannot do justice to the intuitive thinking penetration of existence. These last can all too easily come to the opinion that they stand within what is real, but that the intuitively thinking person, unfeeling and estranged from reality, forms with his “abstract thoughts” a shadowy, cold world picture.

[ 1 ] The concept of a tree, for my activity of knowing, is conditional upon my perception of the tree. With respect to a particular perception I can lift only one particular concept out of my general system of concepts. The connection between concept and perception is indirectly ad objectively determined by thinking in accordance with the perception. The connection of the perception with its concept is known after the act of perception; their belonging together, however, is determined within the thing itself.

[ 2 ] The process presents itself differently when knowledge, when the relationship of man to the world which arises I knowledge, is regarded. In the preceding considerations the attempt was made to show that a clarifying of this relationship is possible when an unprejudiced observation is directed upon it. A right understanding of such observation comes to the insight that thinking, as a self-contained entity, can be looked upon directly. Whoever finds it necessary for the explanation of thinking as such to draw upon something else—physical brain processes, for example, or unconscious spiritual processes lying behind our perceived conscious thinking—fails to recognize what the unprejudiced observation of thinking gives him. Whoever observes thinking lives during his observation directly within a spiritual, self-sustaining weaving of being. Yes, one can say that whoever wants to grasp the being of the spiritual in the form in which it first presents itself to man, can do this within thinking which is founded upon itself.

[ 3 ] When thinking itself is regarded, there merge into one what otherwise must always appear separately: concept and perception. Whoever does not recognize this will be able to see, in the concepts he works out with respect to his perceptions, only shadowy copies of these perceptions, and his perceptions will represent for him true reality. He will also build up for himself a metaphysical world modeled upon the perceived world; he will call this world the world of atoms, the world of will, unconscious spirit world, and so on, according to his particular way of picturing things. And it will escape him that in all this he has only hypothetically built himself a metaphysical world modeled upon his world of perception. Whoever does recognize, however, what lies before him with respect to thinking, will know that in the perception only a part of reality is present before him, and that the other part belonging to the perception, which alone first allows it to appear as full reality, will be experienced in his thinking permeation of the perception. He will not see, in what arises as thinking in his consciousness, a shadowy copy of a reality, but rather self-sustaining, spiritual, essential being. And about this essential being he can say that it is present for him in his consciousness through intuition. Intuition is the conscious experience, occurring within the purely spiritual, of a purely spiritual content. Only through an intuition can the being of thinking be grasped.

[ 4 ] Only when one has struggled through to the recognition—won through unprejudiced observation—of this truth about the intuitive nature of thinking, will the way be successfully cleared for a view of the human physical and soul organization. One recognizes that this organization can bring about nothing with respect to the essential being of thinking. Completely obvious facts seem, at first, to contradict this. Human thinking appears for ordinary experience only in connection with and through this organization. This appearance makes itself felt so strongly that it can only be seen in its true significance by someone who has recognized how nothing plays into the essential being of thinking from this organization. But then such a person can also not fail to see how particular the nature of the relation of the human organization to thinking is. This organization brings about nothing with respect to the essential being of thinking, but rather draws back when the activity of thinking appears; it ceases its own activity; it frees up a place; and upon the place now freed, thinking appears. The essential being which works within thinking has a double task: first, it represses the human organization's own activity, and secondly, it sets itself in the place of this activity. For the repressing of the bodily organization is also the result of thinking activity. And indeed, of that part of thinking activity which prepares for the appearance of thinking. One sees from this in what sense thinking finds its counterpart in the bodily organization. And when one sees this, one will no longer be able to misapprehend the significance of this counterpart for thinking itself. If someone walks over soft ground, his feet leave prints in the ground. One would not be tempted to say that the forms of the footprints were pushed in by forces of the earth working up from beneath. One would ascribe to these forces no part in the coming about of the forms of the prints. Just as little would someone who observes the being of thinking without prejudice ascribe to the imprints in the bodily organization a part in the coming about of the being of thinking; these imprints arise through the fact that thinking prepares its appearance through the body.¹

[ 5 ] However, a significant question arises here. If the human organization has no part in the essential being of thinking, what significance does this organization have within the total being of man? Now, what occurs within this organization through thinking has, indeed, nothing to do with the being of thinking; but it has very much to do with the arising of “I”-consciousness out of this thinking. Within thinking's one being there lies, indeed, the real “I,” but not “I”-consciousness. The person who actually observes thinking without prejudice recognizes this. The “I” is to be found within thinking; “I-consciousness” arises through the fact that in ordinary consciousness the traces of thinking activity imprint themselves in the sense described above. (Through the bodily organization, therefore, “I”-consciousness arises. One should not confuse this, however, with any kind of assertion that “I”-consciousness, once it has arisen, remains dependent upon the bodily organization. Once arisen, it is taken up into thinking and shares from then on in thinking's spiritual nature.)

[ 6 ] “I-consciousness” is built upon the human organization. From this organization flow the actions of the will. According to the direction of what has been presented thus far, an insight into the relationship between thinking, conscious “I,” and acts of will goes forth from the human organization.²

[ 7 ] For the individual act of will there come into consideration: motive and mainspring of action. The motive is a conceptual or mentally-pictured factor; the mainspring of action is the directly conditioning factor of willing in the human organization. The conceptual factor or the motive is the momentary determining factor of willing; the mainspring of action is the lasting determining factor of the individual person. Motive for willing can be a pure concept or a concept with a definite relation to perception, that is, a mental picture. General and individual concepts (mental pictures) become motives for willing through the fact that they affect the human individual and determine his action in a certain direction. One and the same concept, or one and the same mental picture, as the case may be, affects different individuals differently, however. They move different people to different actions .Willing is therefore not merely a result of the concept or mental picture, but rather of the individual make-up of the person as well. Let us call this individual make-up—we can follow Eduard von Hartmann in this respect—the characterological disposition. The way in which concept and mental picture affect the characterological disposition of a person gives a definite moral or ethical stamp to his life.

[ 8 ] The characterological disposition is formed through the more or less lasting life-content of our subject, i.e., through our content of mental pictures and feelings .Whether a mental picture, arising in me at the moment, stimulates me to will something or not, depends upon how it relates to the content of the rest of my mental pictures and also to my peculiarities of feeling. My content of mental pictures, however, is again determined by the sum total of those concepts which is the course of my individual life have come into contact with perceptions, that means, have become mental pictures. This again depends upon my greater or lesser capacity for intuition and upon the scope of my observations, that is, upon the subjective and objective factors of my experiences, upon inner determinants and location in life. My characterological disposition is most especially determined by my lift of feeling. Whether I feel pleasure or pain with respect to a definite mental picture or concept, upon this will depend whether I want to make it a motive for my action or not.—These are the elements which come into consideration with respect to an act of will. The immediately present mental picture or concept which becomes my motive determines the goal, the purpose of my willing; my characterological disposition moves me to direct my activity toward this goal. The mental picture of taking a walk in the next half hour determines the goal of my action. But this mental picture will only then be raised into a motive for willing when it hits upon a appropriate characterological disposition, that is, when, through my life up till now, mental pictures have formed I me as to the purposes for taking a walk, as to the value of healthiness, and furthermore, when in me the feeling of pleasure unites with the mental picture of taking a walk.

[ 9 ] We have therefore to distinguish: 1. the possible subjective dispositions appropriate to making particular mental pictures and concepts into motives; and 2. the possible mental pictures and concepts capable of influencing my characterological disposition in such a way that willing results. The former represents the mainsprings, the latter the goals of morality.

[ 10 ] The mainsprings of morality we can find by examining what are the elements out of which our individual life is composed.

[ 11 ] The first level of our individual life is perceiving, more particularly, perceiving with the senses. We stand here in that region of our individual life where perceiving passes over directly into willing, without any feeling or concept coming in between. The human mainspring of action which comes into consideration here is simply called drive. The satisfaction of our lower, purely animal needs (hunger, sexual intercourse, etc.) comes about in this way. The characteristic feature of the life of drives consists in the immediacy with which the individual perception activates the will. This way of determining the will, which originally is peculiar only to the lower life of the senses, can also be extended to the perceptions of the higher senses. With the perception of some sort of happening in the outer world, without further reflection, and without any particular feeling in us connecting itself to the perception, we let there follow an action, as this happens especially in conventional social life. One calls the mainspring for this action tact or social propriety. The more often there occurs such an immediate causing of an action through a perception, the more will the person concerned show himself inclined to act purely under the influence of tact, that is tact becomes his characterological disposition.

[ 12 ] The second sphere of human life is feeling. Onto my perceptions of the outer world, specific feelings connect themselves. These feelings can become mainsprings of action. If I see a starving person, my pity for him can represent the mainspring of my action Such feelings are for example: the feeling of shame, pride, sense of honor, modesty, remorse, pity, the feelings of vengefulness and gratitude, reverence, faithfulness, the feelings of love and duty.³

[ 13 ] The third level of life, finally, is thinking and mental picturing. Through mere reflection a mental picture or a concept can become the motive for an action. Mental pictures become motives through the fact that in the course of life we continuously connect certain goals of our will with perceptions which recur again and again in more or less modified form. This accounts for the fact that with people who are not entirely without experience, there always arise in their consciousness, along with particular perceptions, also mental pictures of actions which they have carried out in a similar case or have seen carried out. These mental pictures hover before them as determining models in all future decisions; they become part of their characterological disposition. We may call the mainsprings of will just described practical experience. Practical experience passes over gradually into purely tactful action. When certain typical picture of actions have united themselves in our consciousness so firmly with mental pictures of certain situations in life that in a given case we skip all reflection based on experience and go directly from the perception into willing, then this is the case.

[ 14 ] The highest level of individual life is conceptual thinking without regard to a specific content of perception. We determine the content of a concept through pure intuition out of the ideal sphere. Such a concept then contains, to begin with, no relation to specific perceptions. When, under the influence of a concept which points to a perception—that is, under the influence of a mental picture—we enter into willing, then it is this perception that determines us in a roundabout way through conceptual thinking. When we act under the influence of intuitions, then the mainspring of our action is pure thinking. Since one is used, in philosophy, to calling the ability of pure thinking “reason,” so one is also fully justified in calling the mainsprings of morality on the level just characterized, practical reason. The clearest account of these mainsprings of will has been given by Kreyenbühl (“Philosophical Monthly” Vol. XVIII, No.3).⁴ I consider his article in this subject to be one of the most significant creations of modern philosophy, more particularly of ethics. Kreyenbühl describes the mainsprings of action we are discussing as practical a priori, that means an impulse to action flowing directly out of my intuition.

[ 15 ] It is clear that such an impulse can, in the strict sense of the word, no longer be considered as belonging to the sphere of my characterological disposition for, what works here as mainspring is no longer something individual in me, but rather the ideal and therefore universal content of my intuition. As soon as I recognize the validity of this content as a foundation and starting point for an action, I enter into willing, regardless of whether the concept was already there within me beforehand in time, or only entered my consciousness immediately before my action; that is, regardless of whether the concept was already present in me as predisposition or not.

[ 16 ] It then comes to a real act of will only when a momentary impulse of action, in the form of a concept or mental picture, works upon the characterological disposition. Such an impulse then becomes the motive of willing.

[ 17 ] The motives or morality are mental pictures and concepts. There are philosophers of ethics who also see in feeling a motive of morality; they maintain, for example, that the goal of moral action is the promotion of the greatest possible amount of pleasure within the individual acting The pleasure itself, however, cannot become a motive, but only a mentally pictured pleasure. The mental picture of a future feeling, but not the feeling itself, however, can work upon my characterological disposition. For in the moment of the action the feeling itself is not yet there: it is meant, in fact, first to be effected through the action.

[ 18 ] The mental picture of one's own or of someone else's good, however, is rightly regarded as a motive of willing. The principle of causing through one's action the greatest amount of pleasure to oneself, that is, of attaining individual happiness, is called egoism. One seeks to attain this individual happiness either through the fact that one thinks ruthlessly of one's own good only, and strives for this at the cost of the happiness of other individuals (pure egoism), or through the fact that one promotes the good of others because one anticipates indirectly a favorable influence upon one's own person from the happiness of these other individualities, or because one fears, through the harming of other individuals, also the endangering of one's own interests (morality of prudence). The particular content of the principles of egoistic morality will depend upon what mental picture a person makes for himself of his own or of another's happiness. According to what a person regards as a good thing in life (luxury, hope of happiness, deliverance from various misfortunes, etc.), he will determine the content of his egoistical striving.

[ 19 ] One can then regard the purely conceptual content of an action as a further motive. This content does not, like the mental picture of one's own pleasure, relate itself to the single action only, but rather to the founding of its action out of a system of moral principles. These moral principles, in the form of abstract concepts, can regulate one's moral life, without one bothering about the origin of the concepts. We then simply feel our submission to the moral concept, which hovers over our action like a commandment, as moral necessity. We leave the founding of this necessity to the one who demands the moral submission, that is, to the moral authority whom we acknowledge (head of the family, state, social custom, authority of the church, divine revelation). One instance of these principles of morality is that in which the commandment does not make itself known to us through an outer authority, but rather through our own inner life (moral autonomy). We then perceive within our own inner life the voice to which we must submit. The expression of this voice is conscience.

[ 20 ] It signifies moral progress when a person no longer simply takes the commandment of an outer or inner authority as the motive of his action, but rather when his striving is for insight into the reason why one or another maxim of action should work in him as motive. This progress is one from authoritative morality to action out of moral insight. At this level of morality the person will seek out the needs of moral life and will allow himself to be determined in his actions by his knowledge of them. Such needs are: 1. the greatest possible good of all mankind, purely for the sake of good; 2. cultural progress or the moral development of mankind to ever greater perfection; 3. the realization of individual goals of morality grasped purely intuitively. [ 21 ] The greatest possible good of all mankind will naturally be comprehended by different people in different ways. The above maxim does not refer to a particular mental picture of this good, but rather to the fact that each person who acknowledges this principle strives to do what, in his view, best promotes the good of all mankind.

[ 22 ] Cultural progress is seen, by the person in whom a feeling of pleasure is united with the good things of culture, to be a special case of the foregoing moral principle. He will only have to take into the bargain the downfall and destruction of many things which also contribute to the good of mankind. It is, however, also possible that a person sees in cultural progress, aside from any feeling of pleasure connected with it, a moral necessity. Then this progress is for him a moral principle of its own beside the foregoing one.

[ 23 ] Both the maxim of the good of all and that of cultural progress are based upon the mental picture, that is, upon the relation one gives the content of moral ideas to specific experiences (perceptions). The highest conceivable principle of morality is, however, the one which from the beginning contains no such relation but rather springs from the source of pure intuition and only afterwards seeks a relation to perception (to life). The determining of what is to be willed goes forth here from a different quarter than in the foregoing cases. The person who holds to the moral principle of the good of all, will, in hall his actions, first ask what his ideals contribute to this good of all. The person who subscribes to the moral principle of cultural progress will do the same thing here. There is, however, a higher principles which, in each individual case, does not start from one particular single goal of morality, but which rather attaches to all maxims of morality a certain value, and, in any given case always asks whether one or another moral principle is more important. It can happen that someone will, under certain circumstances, regard the promotion of cultural progress as the right principle and make it the motive of his action under others, the promotion of the good of all, in a third case, the promotion of his own good. But only when all other determining factors take second place does conceptual intuition itself then come first and foremost into consideration. Other motives thereby step back from their leading position, and only the ideal content of the action works as its motive.

[ 24 ] Of the levels of the characterological disposition, we have designated that one as the highest which works as pure thinking, as practical reason. Of motives, we have just now designated as the highest conceptual intuition. Upon closer reflection, it immediately turns out to be the case that at this level of morality, mainspring of actions and motive coincide, that is, neither a predetermined characterological disposition nor an outer moral principle accepted as norms affects our action The action is therefore not stereotyped, carried out according to some rule or other, and also not of the kind which a person performs automatically in response to an outer impetus, but rather one determined purely and simply by its ideal content.

[ 25 ] A prerequisite for such an action is the capacity for moral intuitions. Whoever lacks the capacity to experience the particular maxim of morality for each individual case, will also never achieve truly individual willing.

[ 26 ] The exact antithesis of this principle of morality is the Kantian one: Act in such a way that the basic tenets of your action can be valid for all men. This principle is the death of all individual impulse to action. Not how all men would act can be decisive for me, but rather what for me is to be done in the individual case.

[ 2 ] A superficial judgment could perhaps object to this: How can your actions at the same time be shaped individually toward a particular case and a particular situation, and still be determined in a purely ideal way out of intuition? This objection rests on a confusion of moral motive with the perceptible content of an action. The latter can be a motive, and is, for example in cultural progress, in action out of egotisms, etc.; in action based upon purely moral intuition, it is not a motive. My “I” of course directs its gaze upon this content of perception; the “I” does not allow itself to be determined by it. This content is used only in order to form for oneself a cognitive concept; the moral concept belonging to it, this the “I” does not take from the object. The cognitive concept of a particular situation which I am confronting is only then at the same time a moral concept if I am standing upon the standpoint of a particular moral principle. If I would like to stand upon the ground of the principle of cultural development alone, then I would go around in the world with fixed marching orders. From every happening that I perceive and that can concern me, there springs at the same time a moral duty; namely, to do my bit so that the particular happening is placed in the service of cultural development. In addition to the concept, which reveals to me the connections of natural law of a happening or thing there is also hung upon the happening or thing a moral etiquette, which contains for me, the moral being, an ethical directive as to how I am to conduct myself. This moral etiquette is justified in its sphere; it coincides, however, from a higher standpoint, with the idea which occurs to me when confronted by a concrete case.

[ 28 ] People are different in their capacity for intuition. In one the ideas bubble up; another acquires them for himself laboriously. The situations in which people live and which provide the stage for their actions are no less different. How a person acts will therefore depend on the way his capacity for intuition works in a given situation. What determines the sum total of the ideas active within us, the real content of our intuitions, is that which, in spite of the universality of the world of ideas, is individually constituted in every person. Insofar as this intuitive content passes over into action, it is the moral content of the individual. Allowing this content to live itself out is the highest moral mainspring of action, and at the same time the highest motive, of the person who sees that all other moral principles, in the last analysis, unite in this content. One can call this standpoint ethical individualism.

[ 29 ] The decisive factor for an intuitively determined action in a concrete case is the finding of the appropriate, completely individual intuition. On this level of morality it can be a question of general moral concepts (norms, laws) only insofar as these result from the generalizing of individual impulses. General norms always presuppose concrete facts from which they can be derived. Through human action, however, facts are first created.

[ 30 ] When we seek out the lawful (the conceptual in the actions of individuals, peoples and epochs), we do obtain an ethics, not as a science of moral norms, however, but rather as a natural history of morality. Only the laws won in this way relate to human action the way natural laws relate to a particular phenomenon. These laws, however, are not at all identical with the impulses upon which we base our actions. If someone wants to grasp how a person's action springs from his moral willing, then he must look first of all at the relationship of this willing to the action. He must first of all take a good look at actions for which this relationship is the determining factor. When I or someone else thinks back over such an action later, one can discover what moral maxims come into consideration for that action. While I am acting, the moral maxim is moving me, insofar as it can live in me intuitively; it is bound up with my love for the object which I want to realize through my action. I ask no person nor any rule: Ought I to carry out this action?—rather, I carry it out as soon as I have grasped the idea of it. Only through this is it my action. The action of someone who acts only because he acknowledges certain moral norms is the result of the principles which stand in his moral codex. He is merely the executor. He is a higher kind of automaton. Throw a stimulus to action into his consciousness, and immediately the cogwheels of his moral principles are set into motion and turn in a lawful manner to execute a Christian, humane, to him selfless action; or one of cultural-historical progress. Only when I follow my love for the object is it I myself who acts. I act on this level of morality, not because I acknowledge a master over me, nor outer authority, nor a so-called inner voice. I acknowledge no outer principle for my actions: love for the action. I do not test intellectually, whether my action is good or evil; I carry it out because I love it. It will be “good” when my intuition, imbued with love, stands in the right way within the intuitively experienceable world configuration; “evil” when that is not the case. I also do not ask myself how another person would act in my position—but rather I act as I, this specific individuality, see myself moved to will. It is not what is generally done, the general custom, a general human maxim, a social norm, which leads me directly, but rather my love for the deed. I feel no compulsion, neither the compulsion of nature which leads me in the case of my drives, nor the compulsion of moral commandments, but rather I simply want to carry out what lives within me.

[ 31 ] The defenders of general moral norms could respond to this: If every person strove to lie out fully what is in him, and to do whatever he pleases, then there is no difference between good conduct and criminal behavior; any knavery that lives in me has the same right to live itself out as the intention of serving what is universally best. The fact that I have scrutinized an action from the ideal point of view cannot be the decisive factor for me as a moral person, but rather my testing as to whether it is good or evil. Only when the former is the case will I carry out the action.

[ 32 ] My answer to this objection, which is obvious, but which nevertheless springs only from a faulty understanding of what is meant here, is this: Whoever wants to know the nature of human willing must distinguish between the path which brings this willing up to a certain level of development, and the particular nature which this willing acquires when it nears this goal. On the way to this goal, norms play their justified role. The goal consists in the realization of moral goals which are grasped purely by intuition. A person attains such goals to the extent that he possesses the ability to lift himself at all to the intuitive idea-content of the world. In individual cases of willing, other mainsprings of action or other motives will usually be mixed in with such goals. But what is intuitive can still be a determining or codetermining factor in human willing. What one ought to do, this one does; one provides the stage upon which “ought to” becomes doing; one's own action is what one allows to spring from oneself. There the impulse can only be a completely individual one. And, in truth, only an act of will which springs from an intuition can be an individual one. That the act of the criminal, that something evil, might be called the expressing of one's individuality, in the same sense as the embodiment of pure intuition, is possible only if blind drives are reckoned as part of the human individuality. But the blind drive which moves one to commit a crime does not stem from anything intuitive, and does not belong to what is individual in man, but rather to what is the most common in him, to that which prevails in all individuals to the same extent, and out of which a person extricates himself through what is individual in him. What is individual in me is not my organism with its drives and feelings, but rather the unified world of ideas which lights up within this organism. My drives, instincts, and passions establish nothing more about me than that I belong to the general species man; the fact that something ideal expresses itself in a particular way within these drives, passions, and feelings, establishes my individuality. Through my instincts, drives, I am a person of whom there are twelve to the dozen; through the particular form of the idea by which I designate myself as “I” within this dozen, I am an individual. Going by the difference of my animal nature, only a being other than myself could distinguish me from others; through my thinking, that means, through the active grasping of what expresses itself as something ideal within my organism, I myself distinguish myself from others. Therefore one cannot say at all of the action of the criminal that it goes forth from the idea. That is, in fact, exactly what is characteristic of criminal actions, that they issue from the non-ideal elements of the human being.

[ 33 ] An action is felt to be free to the extent that its reason stems from the ideal part of my individual being; every other part of an action, regardless of whether this part is performed under the compulsion of nature or the constraint of a moral norm, is felt to be unfree.

[ 34 ] A person is free only insofar as he is in a position at every moment of his life to follow himself. A moral act is my act only when it can be called free in this sense. Here, our considerations have first of all to do with the prerequisites under which a willed action is felt to be free; how this idea of inner freedom, grasped in a purely ethical way, realizes itself within the being of man, will appear in what follows.

[ 35 ] An action out of inner freedom does not by any means exclude the laws of morality, but rather includes them; it only proves to be on a higher level when compared to an action which is only dictated by these laws. Why then should my action serve the universal good any less when I have done it out of love, than when I have performed it only because I feel it is my duty to serve the universal good? The bare concept of duty excludes inner freedom, because it does not want to acknowledge what is individual, but rather demands submission of the latter to a general norm. Inner freedom of action is conceivable only from the standpoint of ethical individualism.

[ 36 ] But how is it possible for people to live together, if everyone is striving only to bring his own individuality into effect? This objection is indicative of a wrongly understood moralism. This moralism believes that a community of people is possible only when they are all united through a communally established moral order. This moralism does not, in fact, understand the unity of the world of ideas. It does not comprehend that the world of ideas active within me is no other than that within my fellowman. This oneness is, to be sure, only the result of experience of the world. But this oneness must be such a result. For were this oneness to be known through anything other than through observation, then, in the realm of this oneness, individual experience would not be in force, but rather the general norm. Individuality is possible only when each individual being knows of the other only through individual observation. The difference between me and my fellowman does not lie at all in our living in two completely different spiritual worlds, but rather in the fact that he receives other intuitions than I do out of the world of ideas common to us both. He wants to live out his intuitions, I mine. If we both really draw from the idea, and follow no outer (physical or spiritual) impulses, then we can only meet each other in the same striving, in the same intentions. A moral misunderstanding, a clash with each other, for morally free people is out of the question. Only the morally unfree person, who follows nature's drives or a commandment he takes as duty, thrusts aside his fellowmen if they do not follow the same instinct and the same commandment as he himself. To live in the love for one's actions, and to let live in understanding for the other's willing, is the basic maxim of free human beings. They know no other “ought” than that with which their willing brings itself into intuitive harmony; what they shall will in a certain case, this their capacity for ideas will tell them.

[ 37 ] If the primal basis for sociability did not lie within man's nature, one would not be able to instill it into human nature through any outer laws! Only because human individuals are of one spirit are they also able to live and act side by side. The free person lives in the confidence that any other free person belongs with him to one spiritual world and will concur with him in his intentions. The free person demands no agreement from his fellowmen, but he expects agreement, because it lies within man's nature. This does not refer to the necessities which exist for certain external regulations, but rather to the attitude, to the soul disposition, through which the human being, in his experience of himself among his fellowmen whom he values, most does justice to human worth and dignity.

[ 38 ] There are many who will say to this: the concept of the free person, which you are sketching here, is a chimera, is nowhere realized. We, however, have to do with real people; and with them one can hope for morality only when they obey a moral commandment, when they conceive of their moral mission as a duty and do not freely follow their inclinations and love.—I do not doubt this at all. Only a blind person could. But then away with all this hypocrisy about morality, if this is supposed to be the final word. Just say then that human nature must be compelled to its actions as long as it is not free. Whether one controls this non-freedom through physical means or through moral laws, whether a person is unfree because he follows his unlimited sexual drive, or because he is bound in the fetters of conventional morality, is, from a certain standpoint, a matter of complete indifference. But one should not claim that such a person can rightly call an action his own, since he is after all driven to it by a force other than himself. But out of the midst of such enforced order, those people lift themselves, the free spirits, who find themselves, within the welter of custom, law's coercion, religious practice, and so on. They are free insofar as they follow only themselves, unfree, insofar as they surrender themselves. Who of us can say that he is really free in all his actions? But in each one of us dwells a deeper being, in whom the free person expresses himself.

[ 39 ] Our life is constituted of actions of freedom and of non-freedom. We cannot, however, think the concept of man to its conclusions, without our coming upon the free spirit as the purest expression of man's nature. Indeed, we are truly human only insofar as we are free.

[ 40 ] Many will say that this is an ideal. Doubtless; but it is an ideal that, within our being, does work its way to the surface as a real element. It is no thought-up or dreamed-up ideal, but rather one that has life and that clearly makes itself known even in the most imperfect form of its existence. Were man merely a being of nature, then his seeking of ideals, that is, his seeking of ideas which at the moment are inoperative, but whose realization is called for, would be nonsensical. It is by the thing in the outer world that the idea is determined through perception; we have done our part when we have recognized the connection between the idea and the perception. With man this is not so. The sum total of his existence is not determined without man himself; his true concept as moral human being (free spirit) is not already objectively united beforehand with the perceptual picture “human being,” and merely needing afterward to be ascertained through knowledge. The human being must, through his own activity, unite his concept with his perception of the human being. Here concept and perception coincide only if the human being himself brings them into coincidence. He can do this, however, only if he has found the concept of the free spirit, that is, his own concept. Within the world of objects, because of our organization, a boundary line is drawn for us between perception and concept; our activity of knowing overcomes this boundary. Within our subjective nature this boundary is no less present; the human being overcomes it in the course of his development by giving shape to his concept in his outer manifestation. Thus, both the intellectual and the moral life of the human being lead us to his two fold nature; perceiving (direct experience) and thinking. His intellectual life overcomes his twofold nature through knowledge; his moral life does so by actually realizing the free spirit. Every being has its inborn concept (the law of its existence and working); but in outer things the concept is indivisibly united with the perception, and only within our spiritual organism is it separated from this perception. For the human being himself, concept and perception are at first actually separated, to be just as actually united by him. Someone could object that to our perception of the human being there corresponds at every moment of his life a particular concept, just as with everything else. I can form for myself the concept of an average person and can have such a person also given to me as perception; if I bring to this concept that of the free spirit as well, then I have two concepts for the same object.

[ 41 ] This is one-sided thinking. As object of perception, I am subject to continual change. As a child I was different; different again as a young person and as an adult. At every moment, in fact, my perceptible picture is different than in the preceding ones. These changes can occur in the sense that in them the same one (average person) is always expressing himself, or that they represent the manifestation of the free spirit. It is to these changes that my actions, as object of perception are subject.

[ 42 ] There is given to the human being as object of perception the possibility of transforming himself just as, within the seed, there lies the possibility of becoming a whole plant. The plant will transform itself because of the objective lawfulness lying within it; the human being remains in his unfinished state if he does not take up the stuff of transformation within himself and transform himself through his own power. Nature makes out of man merely a being of nature; society, a lawfully acting one; a free being, only he himself can make out of himself. Nature releases man from its fetters at a certain stage of his development; society leads this development to a certain point; the finishing touches only man can give to himself.

[ 43 ] The standpoint of free morality does not maintain therefore, that the free spirit is the only form in which a human being can exist. It sees in free spirituality only the human beings' last stage of development. This does not deny the fact that actions according to norms do have their justification as one level of development. But these actions cannot be regarded as the absolute standpoint of morality. The free spirit, however, overcomes norms in the sense that he does not only feel commandments as motives, but rather directs his actions according to his impulses (intuitions.)

[ 44 ] When Kant says of duty: “Duty! You great and sublime name! You who include within yourself nothing beloved which bears an ingratiating character, but demand submission,” you who “set up a law ..., before which all inclinations grow silent, even though they secretly work against it,”⁵ then, out of the consciousness of the free spirit, the human being replies, “Freedom! You friendly human name! You who include within yourself everything morally beloved, which my humanity values most, and who makes me the servant of no one; you who do not merely set up a law, but who rather awaits what my moral love itself will acknowledge as law, because this love feels itself to be unfree when faced with any law only forced upon it.”

[ 45 ] That is the contrast between a merely law-abiding and a free morality.

[ 46 ] The philistine, who sees in something outwardly established morality incarnate will perhaps even see in the free spirit a dangerous person. He does so, however, only because his gaze is constricted into one particular epoch of time. If he were able to see beyond it, then he could not but discover at once, that the free spirit has just as little need to transgress the laws of his state as the philistine himself does, and never to set himself in any real opposition to them. For the laws of a state have all sprung from intuitions of free spirits, just as have all the objective moral laws. There is no law enforced by family authority that was not at one time intuitively grasped as such by some ancestor and established by him; the conventional laws of morality are also set up first of all by particular people; and the laws of a state always arise in the head of a statesman. These spirits have set up laws over other people, and only that person becomes unfree, who forgets this origin, and either makes these laws into commandments outside man, into objective moral concepts of duty independent of men, or into the voice of his own inner life, thought of in a falsely mystical way as compelling, which gives him orders. But the person who does not overlook the origin of laws, but rather seeks it within the human being, will relate to a law as though to a part of the same world of ideas out of which he also draws his moral intuitions. If he believes that he has better ones, then his effort is to establish them in the place of existing ones; if he finds the latter to be valid, then he acts according to them as though they were his own.

[ 47 ] One may not formulate the principle that the human being is there for the purpose of realizing a moral world order which is separate from him .Whoever were to assert this would still be taking, with respect to the science of man, the same standpoint taken by that natural science which believed that a bull has horns so that it can butt. Scientists, fortunately, have sent this concept of purpose to its grave. Ethics is having more difficulty in freeing itself from this. However, just as horns are not there because of butting, but rather butting through the horns, so the human being is not there because of morality, but rather morality through the human being. The free person acts morally because he has a moral idea; but he does not act so that morality will arise. Human individuals, with their moral ideas belonging to their being, are the prerequisite of a moral world order.

[ 48 ] The human individual is the source of all morality and the center of life on earth. State and society are there only because they result necessarily from the life of individuals. That state and society should then work back upon the life of the individual is just as comprehensible as the fact that butting, which is there through the horns, works back upon the further development of the bull's horns, which would atrophy through prolonged disuse. In the same way the individual would have to atrophy if he lived a separate life outside of any human community. Indeed, that is exactly why a social order takes shape, in order to work back again upon the individual in a beneficial way.

• 1. In other writings that have followed this book the author has shown how the above view is confirmed in psychology, physiology, etc. This account intends only to characterize what is yielded by unprejudiced observation of thinking.
• 2. Page 130 to the above sentence is an addition, or, as the case may be, reworking for the revised edition of 1918.
• 3. One can find a complete compilation of the principles of morality (from the standpoint of metaphysical realism) in Eduard von Hartmann's Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness (Phaenomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins).
• 4. Philosophische Monatshefte.
• 5. Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft).

[ 1 ] The naive person, who considers real only what he can see with his eyes and grasp with his hands, also requires for his moral life incentives that are perceptible to the senses. He requires a being who communicates these incentives to him in a way understandable to his senses. He will let these incentives be dictated to him as commandments by a person whom he considers to be wiser and more powerful than himself, or whom, for some other reason, he acknowledges as a power standing over him. There result in this way as moral principles the authorities already enumerated earlier, of family, state, society, church and divinity. The most limited person still believes in some one other person; the somewhat more advanced person lets his moral behavior be dictated to him by a majority (state, society). Always it is perceivable powers upon which he builds. The person upon whom the conviction finally dawns that these are after all basically just such fallible men as he himself is will seek guidance from a higher power, from a divine being whom he endows with sense-perceptible characteristics. He lets this being again communicate to him the conceptual content of his moral life in a perceivable way, whether it be that God appears in the burning bush, or that He moves about among men in bodily human form and says to them in a way their ears can hear what they ought and ought not to do.

[ 2 ] The highest level of development of naive realism in the area of morality is that where the moral commandment (moral ideas) is separated from any entity other than oneself, and is hypothetically thought to be an absolute power in one's own inner being. What the human being first perceived as the voice of god from outside, this he now perceives as an independent power in his own inner being, and speaks of this inner voice in such a way that he equates it with his conscience.

[ 3 ] With this, however, the level of the naive consciousness is already left behind, and we have entered into the region where the laws of morality are made self-dependent as norms. They then no longer have any bearer, but rather become metaphysical entities that exist in and through themselves. They are analogues to the invisible-visible forces of metaphysical realism, which does not seek reality through the involvement that the human being has with this reality in thinking, but which rather thinks up these forces hypothetically and adds them to what is experienced. Moral norms outside man also always appear in company with this metaphysical realism. This metaphysical realism must also seek the origin of morality in the sphere of some reality outside man. There are different possibilities here. If the assumed being of things is thought of as something essentially without thoughts and as working by purely mechanical laws, which is the picture materialism has of it, then this being will also bring forth the human individual out of itself through purely mechanical necessity, along with everything about him. The consciousness freedom can then only be an illusion. For while I consider myself to be the creator of my action, the matter composing me and its processes of motion are at work within me. I believe myself free; all my actions are, however, actually only results of the material processes underlying my bodily and spiritual organism. Only because we do not know the motives compelling us, do we have the feeling of inner freedom, according to this view: “We must again emphasize here that this feeling of inner freedom ... rests upon the absence of external compelling motives.” “Our actions are necessitated like our thinking.” (Ziehen, Guidelines of Physiological Pathology)¹

[ 4 ] Another possibility is that a person sees some spiritual being as the absolute, outside man, which exists behind the appearances. Then he will also seek the impulse to action within such a spiritual power. He will regard the moral principles to be found in his reason as flowing from this being-in-itself which has its own particular intentions for man. Moral laws seem, to the dualist of this sort, as though dictated by the absolute, and the human being, through his reason, has simply to discover and carry out the decisions of the absolute being the moral world order appears to the dualist to be the perceptible reflection of a still higher order standing behind the moral world order. Earthly morality is the manifestation of a world order outside man. The human being is not the essential thing in this moral order, but rather the being-in-itself, the being outside man. Man ought to do what this being wills. Eduard von Hartmann, who pictures the being-in-itself as the divinity whose own existence is suffering, believes that this divine being created the world so that through it he might be delivered from his infinitely great suffering. This philosopher, therefore, sees the moral development of mankind as a process which is there in order to deliver the divinity. “Only through the building up of a moral world order by intelligent individual's conscious of themselves, can the world process be led to its goal.” “Real existence is the incarnation of the divinity; the world process is the history of the passion of God become flesh, and at the same time the path to the deliverance of the one crucified in the flesh; morality, however, is our collaboration in the shortening of this path of suffering and deliverance.” (Hartmann, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness)² Here man does not act because he wants to, but rather he ought to act, because God wants to be delivered. Just as the materialistic dualist turns man into an automaton, whose actions are only the result of purely mechanical lawfulness, so the spiritual dualist (that is, the person who sees the absolute, the being-in-itself, as a spirituality with which man has no involvement with his conscious experience), turns man into a slave to the will of that absolute. Inner freedom, in materialism as well as in one-sided spiritualism, or in any metaphysical realism which infers something outside man as true reality and which does not experience this reality, is out of the question.

[ 5 ] Both naive and metaphysical realism, to be consistent, must deny our inner freedom for one and the same reason, because they see in man only the one who executes or carries out principles forced upon him by necessity. Naive realism kills inner freedom through submission to the authority of a perceptible being, or to the one, conceived of by analogy as perceptible, or, finally, to the abstract inner voice which he interprets as “conscience”; the metaphysician who merely infers something outside man cannot acknowledge inner freedom, because he considers man to be mechanically or morally determined by a “being-in-itself.”

[ 6 ] Monism has to recognize the partial validity of naive realism, because it recognizes the validity of the world of perception. Whoever is incapable of bringing forth moral ideas through intuition must receive them from others. Insofar as man receives his moral principles from outside, he is actually unfree. But monism ascribes to the idea the same significance as to the perception. The idea, however, can come to manifestation within the human individual. Insofar as man follows his impulses from this side, he feels himself to be free. Monism ascribes no validity, however, to the metaphysics which merely draws inferences, now, consequently, to impulses to action originating from so-called “beings-in-themselves.” Man can, according to the monistic view, act unfreely if he follows a perceptible outer compulsion; he can act freely if he obeys only himself. Monism can acknowledge no unconscious compulsion, hidden behind perception and concept. If someone asserts about an action of a fellowman that it is done unfreely, then he must show, within the perceptible world, the thing, or the person, or the establishment, which has motivated someone to his action; if the person making this assertion appeals to causes for the action outside of the perceptibly and spiritually real world, then monism cannot enter into such an assertion.

[ 7 ] According to the monistic view man acts in part unfreely, in part freely. He finds himself to be unfree in the world of his perceptions, and makes real within himself the free spirit.

[ 8 ] The moral commandments, which the merely inference-drawing metaphysician has to regard as flowing from a higher power, are, for the believer in monism, thoughts of men; the moral world order is for him neither a copy of a purely mechanical natural order, not of a world order outside man, but rather through and through the free work of man. The human being does not have to accomplish in the world the will of some being lying outside him, but rather his own will; he does not realize the decisions and intentions of another being, but rather his own. Behind the human being who acts, monism does not see the purposes of a world guidance outside himself which determines people according to its will; but rather human beings pursue, insofar as they are realizing intuitive ideas, only their own human purposes. And, indeed, each individual pursues his particular purposes. And, indeed, each individual pursues his particular purposes. For the world of ideas does not express itself in a community of people, but only in human individuals. What presents itself as the common goal of a whole group of people is only the result of single acts of will by individuals, and usually, in fact, by some chosen few whom the others follow as their authorities. Each of us is called upon to become a free spirit, just as each rose seed is called upon to become a rose.

[ 9 ] Monism is therefore, in the sphere of truly moral action, a philosophy of inner freedom. Because monism is a philosophy of reality, it rejects the metaphysical, unreal restrictions upon the free spirit, just as much as it acknowledges the physical and historical (naive-real) restrictions of the naive person. Because monism does not regard man as a finished product which unfolds its full being at every moment of its life, for monism the dispute as to whether man as such is free or not amounts to nothing. Monism sees man as a self-developing being and asks whether, on this course of development, the stage of the free spirit can also be attained.

[ 10 ] Monism knows that nature does not release man from her arms already complete as free spirit, but rather that she leads him to a certain stage from which, still as an unfree being, he develops himself further until he comes to the point where he finds himself.

[ 11 ] Monism is clear about the fact that a being who acts out of physical or moral compulsion cannot be truly moral. It regards the transition through automatic behavior (according to natural drives and instincts) and through obedient behavior (according to moral norms) as necessary preliminary stages for morality, but sees the possibility of surmounting both transitional stages through the free spirit. Monism frees the truly moral world view in general from the fetters, within the world, of the naive maxims of morality, and from the maxims of morality, outside the world, of the speculative metaphysicians. Monism cannot eliminate the former from the world, just as it cannot eliminate perception from the world, and it rejects the latter because monism seeks within the world all the principles of explanation which it needs to illumine the phenomena of the world, and seeks none outside it. Just as monism refuses even to think about principles of knowledge other than those that exist for men (see pages 113–114), so it also rejects decisively the thought of moral principles other than those that exist for men. Human morality, like human knowledge, is determined by human nature. And just as different beings would understand as knowledge something totally different than we, so different beings would also have a different morality. Morality, for the adherent of monism, is a specifically human characteristic, and spiritual activity (Freiheit) the human way to be moral.

First Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 12 ] A difficulty in judging what has been presented in the two preceding chapters may arise through the fact that one believes oneself to be confronted by a contradiction. On the one hand the experience of thinking is spoken of, which is felt to be of a universal significance equally valid for every human consciousness; on the other hand, the fact has been pointed to here that the ideas which are realized in our moral life and which are of the same nature as the ideas achieved by thinking, express themselves in an individual way in every human consciousness. Whosoever feels himself compelled to stop before this confrontation as thought before a “contradiction,” and whoever does not recognize that precisely in the living contemplation of this actually existing antithesis a part of the being of man reveals itself, to such a person, neither the idea of knowledge nor that of inner freedom can appear in the right light. For the view which believes its concepts to be merely drawn (abstracted) from the sense world, and which does not allow intuition to come into its own, the thought which is claimed here as a reality will remain a “mere contradiction.” For an insight which sees how ideas are intuitively experienced as a self-sustaining, real being, the fact becomes clear that man, within the world of ideas surrounding him, lives, in the act of knowing, into something which is one for all men, but that, when he borrows from the world of ideas the intuitions for his acts of will, he individualizes a member of this world of ideas through the same activity which he unfolds as a universal human activity in the spiritual-ideal process of the act of knowing. What appears to be a logical contradiction—the universal nature of the ideas of knowledge and the individual nature of the ideas of morality—is the very thing which, inasmuch as it is beheld in its reality, becomes a living concept. Therein lies a characteristic of man's being, that what is to be intuitively grasped within man moves like the living swing of a pendulum, back and forth between universally valid knowledge and individual experience of this universal element. Whoever cannot behold the one end of the pendulum swing in its reality, for him thinking remains only a subjective human activity; whoever cannot grasp the other end, for him, with man's activity in thinking, all individual life seems lost. For a thinker of the first sort, knowledge, for the other thinker, moral life, is an impenetrable phenomenon. Both will put forward all kinds of things to explain the one or the other, all of which miss the point, because actually the experienceability of thinking is either not grasped by them at all, or is misunderstood to be a merely abstracting activity.

Second Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 13 ] On pages 162 and 163 materialism is discussed. I am well aware that there are thinkers—such as Th. Ziehen mentioned above—who would not call themselves materialists at all, but to whom, nevertheless, from the point of view presented in this book, this concept must be applied. The point is not whether someone says that for him the world is not restricted to merely material existence; that he is therefore no materialist. The point is rather whether he develops concepts which are applicable only to a material existence. Someone who states that “our actions are necessitated like our thinking,” has put forward a concept which is applicable merely to material processes, but not to action nor to being; and, if the thought his concept through to the end, he would, in fact, have to think materialistically. That he does not do this results only from that inconsistency which is so often the consequence of thinking which is not carried to its conclusion.—One often hears nowadays that the materialism of the nineteenth century has been done away with scientifically. In actual truth, however, it has not been so at all. It is just that one often does not notice today that one has no ideas other than those with which one can approach only what is material. Materialism cloaks itself now in this way, whereas in the second half of the nineteenth century, it displayed itself opening. The veiled materialism of the present day is no less intolerant toward a view that comprehends the world spiritually than the admitted materialism of the last century. Today's materialism only deceives many people who believe themselves able to reject a spiritually oriented world conception because, after all, the scientific one has “long since left materialism behind.”

• 1. Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie. For the way “materialism” is spoken of here, and the justification for doing so, see the Addition to this chapter.
• 2. Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins.

[ 1 ] Among the manifold streams in the spiritual life of mankind, there is one we can follow which may be described as the overcoming of the concept of purpose in realms where it does not belong. Purposefulness has its own particular nature within the sequence of phenomena. It is a truly real purposefulness only when, in contract to the relationship of cause and effect where a preceding event determines a later one, the reverse applies and a subsequent event affects and determines an earlier one. This happens, to begin with, only in the case of human actions. A person carries out an action, which he pictures to himself beforehand, and lets himself be moved to his action by this mental picture. What comes later, the action, works with the help of the mental picture upon what comes earlier, the person who acts. This detour through mental picturing is, however, altogether necessary in order for a connection to be purposeful.

[ 2 ] In the process which breaks down into cause and effect, the perception is to be distinguished from the concept. The perception of the cause precedes the perception of the effect; cause and effect would simply remain side by side within our consciousness if we were not able to connect them with each other through their corresponding concepts. The perception of the effect can only follow upon the perception of its cause. If the effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, then this can only be through the conceptual factor. For the perceptual factor of the effect is simply not present at all before that of the cause. Whoever maintains that the blossom is the purpose of the root, which means the former has an influence upon the latter, can maintain this only about that factor of the blossom which he can establish through his thinking. The perceptual factor of the blossom has as yet no existence at the time when the root comes into being. For there to be a purposeful connection, however, not merely the ideal lawful connection of the later with the earlier is necessary, but also the concept (the law) of the effect must really, through a perceptible process, influence the cause. A perceptible influence of a concept upon something else, however, we can observe only in human actions. Here alone, therefore, is the concept of purpose applicable. The naive consciousness, which accepts as real only what is perceptible, seeks—as we have repeatedly noted—to transfer something perceptible even into an area where only something ideal is to be known. Within perceptible happenings it seeks perceptible connections, or, if it cannot find such, it dreams them up. The concept of purpose valid for subjective actions is an element which lends itself to such dreamed-up connections. The naive person knows how this makes something happen and concludes from this that nature will do it in the same way. Within the purely ideal interconnections of nature he sees not only invisible forces, but also unperceivable real purposes. Man makes his tools to suit his purposes; the naive realist has the Creator build organisms by this same formula. Only quite gradually is this incorrect concept of purpose disappearing from the sciences. In philosophy, even today, it is still up to its mischief in a very harmful way. There people ask about the purpose, outside the world, of the world, about the determinants (and consequently, about the purpose), outside man, of man, and so on.

[ 3 ] Monism rejects the concept of purpose in all areas with the sole exception of human action. It seeks laws of nature, but not purposes of nature. Purposes of nature are arbitrary assumptions just as unperceivable forces are (see page 109f). But also purposes of life which man does not give himself, are unjustified assumptions from the standpoint of monism. Only that is purposeful which man has first made to be so, for only through the realization of an idea does purposefulness rise. The idea however, becomes operative in the realistic sense only within man. Therefore human life has only the purpose and determination which man gives to it. To the question: What kind of task does man have in life?, monism can only answer: the one which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no predetermined one, but rather it is, at any given moment, the one I choose for myself. I do not enter upon my life's path with fixed marching orders.

[ 4 ] Ideas are realized purposefully only through human beings. It is therefore inadmissible to speak of history as the embodiment of ideas. All such expressions as: “History is the development of man toward freedom,” or the realization of the moral world order, and so on, are untenable from the monistic point of view.

[ 5 ] The adherents of the concept of purpose believe that to give up purpose, they would have to give up all order and unity in the world at this time. Listen, for example, to Robert Hamerling (Atomistic Theory of the Will)¹ “As long as there are drives in nature, it is foolishness to deny purposes in nature.”

[ 6 ] “Just as the form of a limb of the human body is not determined and controlled by an idea of this limb that is hovering somewhere in the air, but rather by its connection with the greater whole, with the body to which the limb belongs, so the form of every being of nature, whether plant, animal, man, is not determined and controlled by an idea of the same hovering in the air, but rather by the formal principle of the greater whole of nature which purposefully expresses itself and gives shape to everything.” And on page 191 of the same volume: “The theory of purpose maintains only that, in spite of the thousand discomforts and sufferings of our creaturely existence, a lofty purposefulness and plan are unmistakably present within the forms and developments of nature—a plan and purposefulness, however, which realize themselves only within the laws of nature, and which cannot aim for some fool's paradise where no death confronts life, and no decay with all its more or less unpleasing but simply unavoidable intermediary stages, confronts growth.”

[ 7 ] “When the opponents of the concept of purpose bring a small, laboriously collected rubbish heap of partial or complete, imaginary or real examples showing lack of purpose, against a world full of wonders of purpose such as nature shows in all its realms, then I just find that ludicrous.”

[ 8 ] What is here called purposefulness? A harmonizing of perceptions into a whole. Since, however, underlying of perceptions, there are laws (ideas), which we find through our thinking, so the systematic harmonizing of the parts of a perceptual whole is, in fact, the ideal harmonizing of the parts of an ideal whole contained within this perceptual whole. The notion that the animal or the human being is not determined by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, is all askew, and when it is set right, the condemned view automatically loses its absurd character. The animal is, to be sure, not determined by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, but is very much determined by an idea which is inborn and which constitutes the lawful nature of its being. Precisely because the idea is not outside the thing, but rather works within it as its very being, one cannot speak of purposefulness. Precisely the person who denies that a being of nature is determined from outside (whether by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, or by an idea existing outside the creature in the mind of a world-creator, makes no difference at all in this connection_ must admit that this being is not determined purposefully and according to plan from outside, but rather causally and lawfully from within. I construct a machine purposefully when I bring its parts into a relationship which they do not have by nature. The purposefulness of the arrangement consists then in the fact that I have incorporated the machine's way of working into it as its idea. The machine has become thereby an object of perception with a corresponding idea. The beings of nature are such entities as well. Whoever calls a thing purposeful because it is lawfully formed should then apply this term also to the beings of nature. But this lawfulness should not be confused with that of subjective human actions. For purpose, it is in fact altogether necessary that the cause which is at work be a concept, and indeed the concept of the effect. In nature, however, concepts as causes are nowhere to be found; the concept always shows itself only as the ideal connection of cause and effect. Causes are present in nature only in the form of perceptions.

[ 9 ] Dualism can talk about purposes of the world and of nature. Where a lawful joining of cause and effect appears to our perception, there the dualist can assume that we are only seeing the copy of a relationship within which the absolute world being realizes his purposes. For monism, with the falling away of the absolute world being who cannot be experienced but is only hypothetically inferred, there also falls away any reason for ascribing purpose to the world and to nature.

Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 10 ] If one thinks through without prejudice what has been set forth here, one could not conclude that the author, in his rejection of the concept of purpose outside the human domain, stands on the same ground as those thinkers who, by throwing out this concept, create the possibility of grasping everything which lies outside human actions—and then these also—as only a happening of nature. The fact that in the book the thought process is represented as a purely spiritual one should guard against any such conclusion. When here the thought of purpose is also rejected for the spiritual world lying outside of human actions, then this is done because in that world something higher than the purpose which realizes itself within humanity comes to manifestation. And when a purposeful destiny of the human race, thought up along the lines of human purposefulness, is spoken of as an erroneous idea, then by this is meant that the individual person gives himself purposes and out of these the result of the total activity of mankind is composed. This result is then something higher than its parts, the purposes of men.

• 1. Atomistik des Willens

[ 1 ] The free spirit acts according to his impulses, that is, according to intuitions chosen from the whole of his world of ideas through thinking. For the unfree spirit, the reason he isolates one particular intuition from his world of ideas in order to base an action upon it lies within the world of perceptions given to him, that means within his previous experiences. He remembers, before he comes to a decision, what someone else has done or named as a good thing to do in a case analogous to his own, or what God has dictated in such a case, and so on, and then he acts accordingly. For the free spirit these preconditions are not the only stimulus to action. He makes an absolutely primal decision. In doing so, he bothers just as little about what others have done in this case, as about what they have dictated for it. He has purely ideal reasons which move him to lift just one particular concept out of the sum total of his concepts and to translate it into action. His action will, however, belong to perceptible reality. What he brings about will therefore be identical with a quite definite perceptible content. His concept will have to realize itself in a concrete individual happening. It will not, as concept, be able to contain this individual instance. It will be able to relate itself to this only in the way that any concept at all relates itself to a perception; for example, in the way the concept “lion” relates to an individual lion. The intermediary between concept and perception is the mental picture (see pages 95–97). For the unfree spirit this intermediary is given from the start. His motives are present from the start as mental pictures in his consciousness. When he wants to carry out an action, he does it in the way he has see it done or the way he's ordered to do it in this or that case. Authority works therefore best of all through examples, that means through providing quite definite single actions for the consciousness of the unfree spirit. The Christian acts less according to the teachings than to the example of the Redeemer. Rules have less value for positive action than for leaving certain actions undone. Laws take on the generalized form of concepts only when they forbid actions; not, however, when they order something done. Laws about what he ought to do must be given to the unfree spirit in a quite concrete form: clean the sidewalk in front of your house! Pay your taxes in this amount at that tax center! And so on. Laws for preventing actions have a conceptual form: You shall not steal. You shall not commit adultery! These laws also affect the unfree spirit; however, only through reference to some concrete mental picture, for example, to that of the corresponding temporal punishment, or of the pangs of conscience, or of eternal damnation, and so on.

[ 2 ] As soon as the stimulus to an action is present in the generalized form of concepts (for example: You shall do good to your neighbor! You shall live in such a way that you best promote your own welfare!), then in each individual case the concrete mental picture of the action (the relation of the concept to a perceptual content) must first be found. For the free spirit, who is not impelled by any example nor by any fear of punishment, etc., this translation of the concept into a mental picture is always necessary.

[ 3 ] The human being produces concrete mental pictures out of the sum total of his ideas first of all through imagination. What the free spirit needs in order to realize his ideas, in order to make his way, is therefore moral imagination.¹ It is the wellspring for the actions of the free spirit. Therefore, it is also true that only people with moral imagination are actually morally productive. Mere preachers of morality, that is, the people who spin forth moral rules without being able to condense them into concrete mental pictures, are morally unproductive. They are like the art critics who know how to expound judiciously upon the way a work of art ought to be, but who are unable themselves to create even the least little one.

[ 4 ] Moral imagination, in order to realize its mental picture, must reach into a particular region of perceptions. Man's action does not create any perceptions, but rather reshapes the perceptions which are already present, imparts to them a new form. In order to be able to reshape a particular object of perception or a number of such, in accordance with a moral mental picture, one must have grasped the lawful content (its way of working until now, which one wants to shape anew or give a new direction to) of this perceptual configuration. One must furthermore find the method by which this lawfulness allows itself to be transformed into a new one. This part of one's moral activity rests upon knowledge of the phenomenal work with which one is involved. It is therefore to be sought in one branch of scientific knowledge in general. Moral action therefore presupposes, along with the faculty² for moral ideas and along with moral imagination, the ability to transform the world of perceptions without violating their natural lawful connections. This ability is moral technique. It can be learned in the same sense that science in general can be learned. Generally, people are in fact better able to find the concepts for the already existing world, than productively, out of their imagination, to determine not yet existing future action. Hence, it is quite possible that people without moral imagination would receive moral mental pictures from others and would skillfully imprint them upon reality. The opposite case can occur also, that people with moral imagination are without technical skillfulness and must then make use of other people to realize their mental pictures.

[ 5 ] Insofar as knowing the objects in our sphere of action is necessary for moral action, our action rests upon the knowing. What comes into consideration here are the laws of nature. We have to do with natural science, not with ethics.

[ 6 ] Moral imagination and the capacity for moral ideas can become the object of knowing only after they have been produced by the individual. Then, however, they are no longer regulating life, but have already regulated it. They are to be grasped as operating causes like all others (they are purposes merely for the subject). We concern ourselves with them as with a natural history of moral mental pictures.

[ 7 ] Besides this there can be no ethics as a science of norms.

[ 8 ] People have wanted to hold to the normative character of moral laws, at least insofar as they have grasped ethics in the sense of dietetics, which extracts general laws out of the life conditions of the organism, in order then, on the basis of these laws, to influence the body in particular ways (Paulson, System of Ethics).³ This comparison is false, because our moral life cannot be compared with the life of our organism. The functioning of the organism is there without our doing; we find all its laws already there in the world, can therefore seek them, and then apply the ones we have found. Moral laws, however, are first created by us. We cannot apply them before they are created. The error arises through the fact that moral laws are not created, new in content, at every moment, but rather are handed down to others. The moral laws taken over from our ancestors then appear to be given, like the natural laws of the organism. It will definitely not, however, be as right for future generations to apply them as to apply laws of diet. For moral laws have to do with the individual and not, as is the case with a natural law, with a member of a species. As an organism I am just such a member of a species, and I will live in accordance with nature when I apply the natural laws of the species also in my particular case; as a moral being I am an individual and have laws entirely my own.⁴

[ 9 ] The view put forward here seems to stand in contradiction to that basic doctrine of modern natural science known as the theory of evolution. But it only seems to do so. By evolution is understood the real emerging of the later out of the earlier in ways corresponding to natural laws. By evolution in the organic world one means that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendants of earlier (less perfect) ones, and have emerged from them in a way corresponding to natural laws. The adherents of the theory or organic evolution would actually have to picture to themselves that there was once a period of time on earth when someone could have followed with his eyes the gradual emergence of the reptiles out of the proto-amniotes, if he could have been present as observer back then and had been endowed with sufficiently log life. In the same way the evolutionary theorists would have to picture to himself that a being could have observed the emergence of the solar system out of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, if he had been able to dwell freely in the realm of world ether in a suitable place during that infinitely long time. The fact that, with a picture such as this, both the nature of the proto-amniotes and also that of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula would have to be thought of differently than the materialistic thinkers do, does not come into consideration here. But it should not occur to any evolutionary theorists to maintain that, even without ever having seen a reptile, he could draw forth from his concept of the proto-amniotes that of the reptile with all its characteristics. Just as little could the solar system be deduced from the concept from the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula. This means, in other words, that the evolutionary theorists must, if he is consistent in his thinking, maintain that out of earlier phases of development later ones result in a real way, and that, once we have bestowed the concept of less perfect and that of perfect, we can then see the connection; by no means, however, should he grant that the concept gained through the earlier is far-reaching enough to evolve the later out of it. From this it follows for the philosopher of ethics that he can in fact gain insight into the connection of later moral concepts with earlier ones; but not that even one single new moral idea can be drawn from an earlier one. As a moral being the individual produces his content. This content he produces is, for the philosopher of ethics, something given, exactly in the same way as, for the scientific researcher, the reptiles are something given. The reptiles have come forth out of the proto-amniotes; but the scientific researcher cannot draw the concept of the reptiles from that of the proto-amniotes. Later moral ideas evolve out of earlier ones; the philosopher of ethics cannot, however, draw, out of the moral concepts of an earlier cultural epoch, those of later ones. The confusion is caused through the fact that, as scientific researchers, we already have the phenomena before us and only afterward observe and know them; whereas in our moral actions we ourselves first create ht phenomena which we the afterward know. In the evolutionary process of the moral world order we do what nature does on a lower level: we transform something perceptible. The ethical norm can therefore at first not be known the way a law of nature can, but rather it must be created. Only when it is there can it become the object of our knowing.

[ 10 ] But can we not then measure the new against the old? Is not each person compelled to measure what is produced through his moral imagination against the moral teachings already there from the past? For that which is to reveal itself as something morally productive, this is just as nonsensical as it would be for someone to want to measure a new natural form against an old one and then say: Because the reptiles do not match up with the proto-amniotes, they are an invalid (pathological) form.

[ 11 ] Ethical individualism does not therefore stand at odds with a rightly understood theory of evolution, but rather follows directly form it. Haeckel's genealogical tree from the protozoa up to man as an organic being would have to be able to be followed, without any break in the lawfulness of nature and without any break in the unity of evolution, right up to the individual as a being who is moral in a particular sense. At no point, however, could the nature of a later species be decided form the nature of an ancestral species. But as true as it is that the moral ideas of the individual have observably come forth out of those of his ancestors, it is also just as true that he is morally barren if he himself does not have any moral ideas.

[ 12 ] The same ethical individualism which I have developed on the basis of the preceding considerations could also be derived out of the theory of evolution. The final conviction would be the same; only the path upon which it is achieved would be a different one.

[ 13 ] The emergence of totally new moral ideas out of our moral imagination is, for the theory of evolution, as little to be wondered at as the emergence of a new species of animal out of another. But this theory, as a monistic world view in moral life just as in the life of nature, must reject any influence from the beyond, any (metaphysical) influence which is merely inferred and not experienced in idea. This theory follows thereby the same principle which motivates it when it seeks the causes of new organic forms and in so doing does not refer to the intervention of some being, outside the world, who calls forth each new species through supernatural influence, according to new creative thought. Just as monism can have no use for any supernatural creative thoughts to explain a living being, so for monism it is al impossible to derive the moral world order from causes which do not lie within the experienceable world. Monism cannot believe that the nature of an act of will, as a moral one, has been fully explored by tracing it back to a continuing supernatural influence upon one's moral life (divine world-rule from outside), or to a particular revelation in time (the giving of the ten commandments), or to the appearance of God (of Christ) on earth. What occurs in and with the human being through al this becomes something moral only when within his human experience, it becomes something individually his own. For monism the moral processes are produced by the world like everything else that exists, and their causes must be sought in the world, that means in man, because he is the bearer of morality.

[ 14 ] Ethical individualism is therefore the crowning feature of that edifice which Darwin and Haeckel have striven to build for natural science. Ethical individualism is spiritualized evolutionary teaching carried over into moral life.

[ 15 ] Someone who from the beginning, in a narrow-hearted way, restricts his concept of nature to an arbitrarily limited sphere, can easily come to the point of finding no place in nature for free individual action. The evolutionary theorist who proceeds consequently cannot fall into any such narrowness of heart. He cannot terminate natural evolution at the ape and attribute to man a supernatural origin; he must, even when seeking the natural ancestors of man already seek the spirit in nature; he can also not stop short at the organic functions of man and find only these to be of nature, but rather he must also regard his morally free life as a spiritual continuation of organic life.

[ 16 ] According to his basic principles, the evolutionary theorist can only maintain that the moral actions of the present emerge out of other kinds of world happening; his determining of the character of an action, that is whether it is free, he must leave up to his direct observation of the action. He maintains, after all, only that human beings have evolved out of ancestors that were not yet human. How human beings are constituted must be determined through observation of human beings themselves. The results of this observation cannot come into contradiction with a rightly viewed evolutionary history. Only the assertion that the results are such as to exclude a natural world order could not be brought into agreement with the present direction of natural science.⁵

[ 17 ] Ethical individualism has nothing to fear from a natural science that understands itself: observation shows inner freedom to be the characteristic of the perfect form of human action. This freedom must be attributed to human willing, insofar as this willing realizes purely ideal intuitions. For these are not the results of some necessity working upon them from outside, but rather are something based upon themselves. If a person finds that an action is the image of such an ideal intuition, he experiences it as a free one. In this characteristic of an action lies inner freedom.

[ 18 ] How do matters stand now, from this point of view, with the distinction already made above (page 9f. and 4–5) between the two statements: that to be free means to be able to do what one wants to, and the other as to whether being at liberty to be able to desire and not to desire is the real proposition involved in the dogma of free will.—Hamerling in fact bases his view about free will upon this distinction, in that he declares the first statement to be correct and the second to be an absurd tautology. He says that I can do what I want to. But to say that I can want what I want to is an empty tautology.—Whether I can do, that means, can translate into reality, what I want to, what I have therefore put before me as the idea of my doing, this depends upon outer circumstances and upon my technical skill (see page 180f.) To be free means to be able, out of oneself, through moral imagination, to determine which mental pictures (stimuli to action) are to underlie one's actions. Inner freedom is impossible if something outside of me (a mechanical process or a merely inferred God outside the world) determines my moral mental pictures. I am therefore free only when I myself produce these mental pictures, not when I am able to carry out the stimuli to action which another being has instilled in me. A free being is one that can want what he himself considers to be right. Whoever does something other than he wants to, has to be driven to this other thing by motives which do not lie within him. Such a person acts unfreely. To be at liberty to be able to want what one considers to be right or wrong, means therefore to be at liberty to be able to be free or unfree. That is of course just as absurd as to see freedom in the ability to be able to do what one must want. But this last, however, is just what Hamerling maintains when he says that it is perfectly true that the will is always determined by stimuli to action, but that it is absurd to say that the will is therefore unfree; for no greater freedom could either be wished or imagined for it than the freedom to realize itself in proportion to its own strength and determination.—Yes! A greater freedom can indeed by wished for, and only that is the true one; namely, the freedom to determine for oneself the grounds for one's willing.

[ 19 ] Under certain circumstances a person may let himself be motivated to refrain from carrying out what he wants to do. To let be prescribed what he ought to do, that is, to want what someone else and not he considers to be right, to this he can succumb only insofar as he does not feel himself to be free.

[ 20 ] External powers can hinder me from doing what I want. They then simply condemn me to doing nothing or to being unfree. Only when they enslave my mind and spirit and drive my own impulses to action from my head and want to replace them with theirs, do they then intend my inner unfreedom. This is why the church, therefore, works not merely against my doing, but especially against my impure thoughts, that is against the impulses of my actions. The church makes me unfree if all impulses to action which it does not decree appear impure to it. A church or another community creates inner unfreedom when its priests or teachers make themselves into the ones who dictate conscience, that is, when the faithful must draw the impulses for their actions from them (in the confessional).

Addendum to the Revised Edition, 1918

[ 21 ] In these considerations of human willing there is presented what the human being can experience with respect to his actions, in order through this experience to come to the consciousness: my willing if free. It is of particular significance that the justification for designating a willing as free is established through the experience that in the willing an ideal intuition realizes itself. This can only be the result of observation, but is so in the sense in which human willing observes itself in a stream of development whose goal lies in reaching just such a potential of willing that is carried by purely ideal intuitions. This potential can be reached because nothing is at work within ideal intuition other than its own being, which is founded upon itself. If such an intuition is present in human consciousness, then it has not developed out of the processes of the organism (p. 133ff.), but rather the organic activity has drawn back, in order to make room for the ideal activity. If I observe a willing that is the image of intuition, then the organically necessary activity has also drawn back out of this willing. The willing is free. A person will not be able to observe this freedom of willing who cannot see how free willing consists in the fact, that first, through the intuitive element, the necessary working of the human organism is paralyzed, forced back, and that the spiritual activity⁶ of will filled with ideas is set in its place. Only someone who cannot make this observation of the twofold nature of a free willing believes in the unfreedom of every willing. Whoever can make it struggles through to the insight that the human being, insofar as he cannot fully accomplish the process of damming up organic activity, is unfree; but that this unfreedom is striving toward freedom, and this freedom is in no way an abstract ideal, but rather is a power of direction lying within the human being. Man is free to the extent that he is able in his willing to realize the same mood of soul which lives in him when he is conscious of giving shape to purely ideal (spiritual) intuitions.

• 1. Moralische Phantasie
• 2. Only superficiality could see, in the use of the word “faculty” here and in other places in this book, a relapse into the teachings of an older psychology about faculties of the soul. The connection with what was said on page 85 gives exactly my meaning of the word.
• 3. System der Ethik
• 4. When Paulsen (on page 15 of the book mentioned above) says that “different natural dispositions and life conditions demand, as well as a different bodily diet, also a different spiritual-moral one,” he is very close to the correct view, but still misses the decisive point. Insofar as I am an individual, I need no diet. Dietetics means the art of bringing one particular member into harmony with the general laws of its species. As an individual, however, I am no member of any species.
• 5. That we speak of thoughts (ethical ideas) as objects of observation is justified. For even if the configurations of thinking do not also enter into my sphere of observation during my activity of thinking, still, they can become the object of observation afterwards. And in this way we have attained our characterization of the nature of human action.
• 6. geistige Tätigkeit

[ 1 ] A counterpart to the question of the purpose and determinants of life (see page 172ff.) is the question as to its value. We meet two opposing views regarding this, and, in between, every imaginable attempt to reconcile them. One view says the world is the best imaginable, and that our living and acting in it are a gift of inestimable value. Everything presents itself as a harmonious and purposeful working together and is worthy of wonder. Even what seems to be evil and bad can be recognized from a higher standpoint as good; we can value the latter all the more when it stands out in relief against the former. Furthermore, evil has no true reality; we only experience a lesser degree of the good as evil. Evil is the absence of good; it is nothing that has significance in its own right.

[ 2 ] The other view is the one which maintains that life is full of agony and misery, that pain everywhere outweighs pleasure, and suffering everywhere joy. Existence is a burden, and nonexistence would under all circumstances be preferable to existence.

[ 3 ] We have to consider Shaftesbury and Leibniz as the main proponents of the first view, of optimism, and Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann as those of the second view, of pessimism.

[ 4 ] Leibniz believes that the world is the best that could possibly be. A better one can not possibly be. A better one is impossible. For god is good and wise. A good God wants to create the best of worlds, a wise God knows the best; He can distinguish the best world from all other possible worse ones. Only an evil or unwise God could create a world worse than the best possible.

[ 5 ] Whoever takes this view as his starting point will easily be able to prescribe the direction our human actions must take in order that they contribute what they can to the best of worlds. The human being has only to discover what God's ways are for him and then act accordingly. When he knows what God's intentions are for the world and for the human race, then he will also do the right thing. And he will feel happy in adding also his good to the general good. From the optimistic standpoint life is therefore worth living. It must stimulate us to coactive involved participation.

[ 6 ] Schopenhauer pictures the matter differently. He does not think of the ground of existence as an all-wise and all-good being, but rather as blind urge or will. Eternal striving, ceaseless craving for a satisfaction which can never in fact be attained, is the basic thrust of all willing. For when we have attained one of the goals we have striven for, there arises a fresh need and so on. Any satisfaction can only last for an infinitely small time. All the rest of the content of our life is unsatisfied urge, that is, discontent, suffering. If our blind urges are finally dulled, then we lack any content; an endless boredom fills our existence. Therefore the relatively best thing to do is to stifle the wishes and needs within us, to extinguish our willing. Schopenhauer‘s pessimism leads to inaction; his moral goal is universal laziness.

[ 7 ] Hartmann seeks in a considerably different way to establish pessimism and to make use of it in ethics. Hartmann seeks, in keeping with a favorite tendency of our day, to found his world view upon experience. By observing life he wants to determine whether pleasure or pain¹ outweighs the other in the world. He lets pass in review before reason what seems good and satisfying to people, in order to show that all this supposed gratification proves, upon closer inspection, to be illusion. It is illusion when we believe ourselves to have sources of happiness and satisfaction in health, youth, freedom, adequate livelihood, love (sexual enjoyment), compassion, friendship and family life, self-respect, honor, fame, power, religious edification, scientific and artistic pursuits, expectation of life in the beyond, and participation in cultural progress. When looked at soberly, every enjoyment brings far more evil and misery than pleasure into the world. The unpleasantness of hangover is always greater than the pleasant feeling of intoxication. Pain predominates in the world by far. No man, even the relatively happiest one, if asked, would want to go through this miserable life a second time. But now, since Hartmann does not deny the presence of the ideal (of wisdom) in the world, grants it in fact equal standing with blind urge (will, he can credit his primal Being with the creation of the world only if he traces the pain of God Himself, for the life of the world as a whole is identical with the life of God. An all-wise Being can only see His goal, however, to be in the release from suffering, and since all existence is suffering, in the release which is far better, is the purpose of the creation of the world. The world process is a continuous battle against God's pain, finally leading to the eradication of all existence. The moral life of men becomes therefore participation in the eradication of existence. God has created the world so that through it He can free Himself from His infinite pain. This world is “to be regarded in a certain way as an itching eruption upon the absolute Being,” through which His unconscious healing power frees Him from an internal illness, “or even as a painful poultice which the All-One-Being applies to Himself in order first to divert an inner pain outward and then to cast it off.” Human beings are parts of the world. Within them God suffers. He has created them in order to split up this infinite pain. The pain which each one of us suffers is only a drop in the infinite ocean of God's pain (Hartmann, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness).

[ 8 ] Man has to permeate himself with the knowledge that the pursuit of individual gratification (egoism) is folly, and he has to let himself be guided solely by the task of dedicating himself with selfless devotion to the world process of God's deliverance. The pessimism of Hartmann, in contrast to that of Schopenhauer, leads us to devoted activity on behalf of a lofty task.

[ 9 ] But is all this based on experience?

[ 10 ] Striving for gratification is a reaching out of one's life activity beyond the present content of life. A being is hungry; i.e. it strives to fill itself, when its organic functions demand new life content in the form of nourishment in order to continue. The striving for honor consists in the fact that a person considers what he himself does or refrains from doing, worthwhile only when recognition from outside follows his actions. The striving for knowledge arises when something is lacking for a person in the world he sees, hears, etc., for as long as he has not comprehended it. The success of his striving creates pleasure in the striving individual; its failure creates pain. It is important to note in this that pleasure or pain depend only upon the success or failure of my striving. The striving itself can in no way be accounted as pain. If it turns out, therefore, that in the moment one's striving is realized, another one presents itself right away, I still cannot say that pleasure has given birth to pain for me just because enjoyment always creates desire that it be repeated or desire for new pleasure. Only when this desire hits up against the impossibility of its being satisfied, can I speak of pain. Even in the case where an enjoyment I have experienced creates in me the demand for a greater or more refined experience of pleasure, I can speak of pain being created by the first pleasure only at the moment when the means fail for experiencing the greater or more refined pleasure. Only in the case where pain occurs as a naturally lawful realm of pleasure, as for example when the woman's sexual enjoyment results in the sufferings of childbirth and in the cares of rearing children, can I find in enjoyment the creator of pain. If striving in itself called forth pain, then any removing of striving would have to be accompanied by pleasure. The opposite is, however, the case. A lack of striving in the content of our life creates boredom, and this brings pain with it. But since striving in the nature of things, can last for a long time before success is granted it and is content meanwhile with its hope for this success, so it must be recognized that pain has absolutely nothing to do with striving as such, but rather depends on its non-fulfillment alone. Schopenhauer is therefore in any case wrong when he considers desire and striving (will) in themselves to be the source of pain.

[ 11 ] In fact, just the opposite is correct. Striving (desire) in itself creates joy. Who does not know the enjoyment which the hope brings of reaching a distant but strongly desired goal? This joy is the companion of work whose fruits will only be forthcoming to us in the future. This pleasure is entirely independent of our reaching the goal. When the goal is reached, then to the pleasure of striving, the pleasure of its fulfillment is added as something new. But if someone wanted to say that to the pain of not reaching one's goal there is added also the pain of disappointed hope which in the end makes the pain of unfulfillment still greater, one would answer him that the opposite can also be the case; the looking back on the enjoyment of the time of unfulfilled desire will just as often work to ease the pain of unfulfillment. The person who in the face of his dashed hopes calls out, “I have done all I can!” is living proof of this assertion. The happiness of feeling that one has striven to do the best one could is overlooked by those who maintain about each unrealized desire that not only is the joy of fulfillment unforthcoming, but also that the enjoyment of desiring is itself destroyed.

[ 12 ] Fulfillment of desire calls forth pleasure and its unfulfillment, pain. One may not infer from this that pleasure is the satisfying of desire and pain the non-satisfying of desire. Both pleasure and pain can occur in a being, even without their being the result of desire. Illness is pain unpreceded by desire. Someone who wanted to maintain that illness is unsatisfied desire for health would be making the mistake of considering as appositive desire the wish, quite natural but not brought to consciousness, not to become ill. If someone receives an inheritance from a wealthy relative of whose existence he had not had the slightest inkling, this fact still fills him with pleasure without any desire preceding it.

[ 13 ] Whoever therefore wants to investigate whether there is a predominance on the side of pleasure or on the side of pain must take into account the pleasure in desiring, the pleasure in the fulfillment of desire and the pleasure that comes to us unsought. Onto the debit side of the ledger will have to be entered the pain of boredom, the pain of unfulfilled striving, and finally the pain that comes our way without any desire on our part. To the last category belongs also the pain caused by work forced upon us, not of our choosing.

[ 14 ] The question arises now as to the right means of determining from the debit and the credit side, what our balance is. Eduard von Hartmann is of the opinion that it is our reason which does this, in its ability to weigh things up. He says indeed (Philosophy of the Unconscious):² “Pain and pleasure exist only insofar as they are experienced.” It follows from this that there is no other yardstick for pleasure than the subjective one of feeling. I must experience whether the sum total of my feelings of pain, when put beside my feelings of pleasure, show a predominance in me of joy or pain. In spite of this Hartmann asserts, “Although ... the life-value of each being can only be assessed according to its own subjective yardstick ..., this in no way says that each being, out of all the feelings in his life, can find the correct algebraic balance, or, in other words, that his overall judgment of his own life with respect to his subjective experiences is a correct one.” But this still makes rational judgment of our feeling into the evaluator.³

[ 15 ] Whoever adheres more or less exactly to the way such thinkers as Eduard von Hartmann picture things, can believe that, in order to come to a correct evaluation of life, he must clear out of the way those factors which falsify our judgment as to the balance between pleasure and pain. He can seek to achieve this in two ways. Firstly, by showing that our desire (drive, will) acts disruptively upon our sober judging of a feeling's value. Whereas, for example, we would have to say that sexual pleasure is a source of evil, still the fact that the sex drive is powerful in us misleads us into conjuring up before us a pleasure which is absolutely there to that degree. We want to enjoy; therefore we do not admit to ourselves that we suffer under our pleasures. Secondly, by subjecting his feelings to critical judgment and by seeking to show that the objects to which his feelings attach themselves prove before rational knowledge to be illusions, and that they are destroyed the moment our ever-growing intelligence sees through the illusions.

[ 16 ] He can think the matter through for himself in the following way. If an ambitious person wants to make clear to himself whether, up to the moment of making this calculation, pleasure or pain had had the greater part in his life, then he must free himself in this evaluation from two sources of error. Since he is ambitious, this basic feature of his character will show him his joys from the recognition of his accomplishments through a magnifying glass but will show him his hurt at being slighted, through a glass which makes things look smaller. Back when he experienced the slights, he felt the hurt, precisely because he is ambitious; to memory it appears in a milder light, whereas the joys of recognition, for which he is so receptive, imprint themselves all the more deeply. Now for the ambitious person it is truly a blessing that this is so. Delusion lessens his feeling of pain in the moment of self-observation. Nevertheless his assessment is still an incorrect one. The sufferings, over which a veil is now drawn for him, had really to be gone through in all their intensity, and he therefore enters them, in fact, incorrectly into the account book of his life. In order to come to the correct estimate, the ambitious person would have to free himself, during the time of his self-assessment, from his ambition He would have to look, without any kind of glass in front of his spiritual eye, upon his life until now. Otherwise he is like a merchant who, in making up his books, enters onto the credit side his own business zeal as well.

[ 17 ] He can, however, go still further. He can say that the ambitious person will also have to make clear to himself that the recognition he pursues is a worthless thing. He will himself come to the insight, or be brought to it by other people, that to an intelligent person the recognition of men means nothing, since in fact, “in all such matters, other than questions of sheer existence, or that are not already definitively settled by science,” one can always swear by it “that the majority is wrong and the minority right.” It is into the hands of such judgment that a person puts his life's happiness when he makes ambition his guiding star.” (Philosophy of the Unconscious) If the ambitious person does say all this to himself, then he must label as illusion what his ambition has pictured to him as reality, and consequently also the feelings which are connected with the particular illusions of his ambition. For this reason it could then be said that in the ledger of what has value in life, there have still to be deleted the feelings of pleasure connected with illusions; what then is left represents the sum total, free of illusion, of the pleasure one has had in life, and this, compared with the amount of pain in life, is so small that life is joyless, and non-existence preferable to existence.

[ 18 ] But while it is immediately intelligible that the error, cause by the interference of ambition's drive, in figuring out one's pleasure-balance, brings about an incorrect result, what was said about one's knowledge of the illusory nature of the objects of one's pleasure must still be challenged. To exclude from one's pleasure-balance in life all feelings of pleasure connected with actual or supposed illusions would in fact render this balance incorrect. For, the ambitious person genuinely did enjoy his recognition by the masses, quite irrespective of whether he himself, or someone else, afterwards knows this recognition to be an illusion. The happy feeling he enjoyed is not thereby decreased at all. The exclusion of all such “illusory” feelings from our life-balance definitely does not correct our judgment about our feelings, but rather eliminates from our life feelings which were actually present.

[ 19 ] And why should these feelings be excluded? For the person who has them they are in fact pleasurable; for the person who has overcome them, there arises through the experience of overcoming (not through the self-complacent experience of what a great person I am, but rather through the objective source of pleasure that lies in overcoming) a pleasure, spiritualized, to be sure, but not thereby less significant. If feelings are deleted from our pleasure-balance because they adhere to objects which turn out to be illusions, then the value of life is made dependent not upon the amount of pleasure, but rather upon the quality of pleasure, and this in turn upon the value of the things which cause the pleasure. But if I want first of all to determine the value of life according to the amount of pleasure or pain which it brings me, then I must not presuppose something else through which I first determine the value or non-value of the pleasure. If I say that I want to compare the amount of pleasure to the amount of pain and to see which is greater, then I must also take into account all pleasure and pain in their actual magnitude, quite irrespective of whether they are based on illusion or not. Whoever attributes a lesser value for life to a pleasure based on illusion than to one which can justify itself to reason, makes the value of life in fact dependent upon still other factors than upon pleasure.

[ 20 ] Whoever attaches less value to a pleasure because it is connected with a frivolous object is like a merchant who enters the considerable income from his toy factory into his accounts at a quarter of its actual amount because his factory produced playthings for children.

[ 21 ] When it is merely a matter of weighing an amount of pleasure against an amount of pain, then the illusory nature of the objects of certain feelings of pleasure should therefore be left entirely out of the picture.

[ 22 ] The way Hartmann has suggested for looking intelligently at the amounts of pleasure and pain caused by life has therefore led us far enough now to know how we have to set up our calculations, what we have to enter on the one side of our ledger and what on the other. But how is the calculation now to be made? And is our reason qualified to determine the balance?

[ 23 ] A merchant has made an error in his calculations if his calculated profit does not agree with what the business actually has take in or still will take in. A philosopher also will definitely have made an error in his assessment, if he cannot show that the surplus of pleasure, or of pain, as the case may be, which he has somehow reasoned out, does actually exist in our feeling.

[ 24 ] I do not for the moment want to monitor the calculations of the pessimists who base themselves upon a rational consideration of the world; but a person who has to decide whether he should go on with the business of life or not will first demand to be shown where the calculated surplus of pain is to be found.

[ 25 ] Here we have touched the point where reason is not in a position to determine by itself alone any surplus of pleasure or pain, but rather where reason must show this surplus to be a perception in life. Not in the concept alone, but rather in the interweaving, by means of thinking, of concept and perception (and feeling is a perception) is reality accessible to man (see page 77ff.) The merchant also will in fact give up his business only when the losses which his bookkeeper has recorded are confirmed by the facts. If that is not the case, he asks his bookkeeper to make the calculations over again. And that is exactly the same way a person standing in life will do it. When the philosopher tries to show him that pain is far greater than pleasure, but he does not experience it that way, then he will say to the philosopher: You, in your delvings, have made a mistake; think the matter through once more. But if at a certain point in a business such losses are actually present to the extent that there is not enough on the credit side to satisfy the creditors, then bankruptcy occurs if the merchant has failed to maintain clarity about his affairs through keeping accounts. In just the same way it would have to lead to a bankruptcy in the business of life, if the amount of pain became so great for a person at a given moment, that no hope (credit) of future pleasure could get him over the pain.

[ 26 ] Now the number of suicides, however, is a relatively small one compared to the number of people who courageously go on living. Very few people close down the business of life because of existing pain. What can we conclude from this? Either that it is not correct to say that the amount of pain is greater than that of pleasure, or that we do not at all make our continued existence dependent upon the amount of pleasure or pain we experience.

[ 27 ] The pessimism of Eduard von Hartmann comes in a very peculiar manner to the point of declaring life worthless, because pain predominates in it, but of maintaining nevertheless the necessity of undergoing it. This necessity lies in the fact that the purpose of the world described above (p. 195ff.) can only be attained through the ceaseless devoted work of men. As long as men are still pursuing their own egoistic desires, however, they are unsuited for such selfless work. Only when they have convinced themselves through experience and reason that the pleasures in life striven for by egoism cannot be attained, will they devote themselves to their actual task. In this way the pessimistic persuasion is supposed to be the source of selflessness. An education based on pessimism is supposed to eradicate egoism through demonstrating its hopelessness.

[ 28 ] According to this view therefore the striving for pleasure is originally founded in human nature. Only out of insight into the impossibility of fulfillment does this striving withdraw and make way for higher human tasks.

[ 29 ] It cannot be said of the moral world view which hopes through the recognition of pessimism for a devotion to unegoistical goals in life, that it overcomes egoism in the true sense of the word. It supposes that moral ideals will only then be strong enough to master the will, when man has recognized that selfish striving for pleasure cannot lead to satisfaction. The person whose self-seeking craves the grapes of pleasure declares them to be sour because he cannot reach them: he leaves them and devotes himself to a selfless transformation of his life. Moral ideals, in the opinion of the pessimists, are not strong enough to overcome egoism; but rather they set up their rulership upon the ground cleared for them beforehand by knowledge of the hopelessness of self-seeking.

[ 30 ] If men, out of their natural predisposition, strive after pleasure, but cannot possibly attain it, then annihilation of existence and deliverance through non-existence would be the only rational goal. And if one is of the view that God is the actual bearer of pain of the world, then human beings would have to make it their task to bring about the deliverance of God. The attainment of this goal is not helped by the suicide of the individual person, but rather harmed by it. Rationally, God can only have created human beings so that through their actions they could bring about His deliverance. Otherwise the creation would be purposeless. And such a world view does think in terms of purposes outside man. Each person must carry out his particular part in the general work of deliverance. If he evades his task through suicide, then the work intended for him must be done by someone else. The latter must bear the torment of existence instead of him. And since God is in every being as the actual bearer of his pain, the suicide has not lessened at all the amount of God's pain, rather, he has imposed the new difficulty upon God of creating a replacement for him.

[ 31 ] All this presupposes that pleasure is the yardstick for the value of life. Life manifests itself in a sum of drives (needs). If the value of life depended upon whether it brings more pleasure or pain, then a drive must be designated as worthless which causes its bearer a surplus of the latter. Let us look now at drive and pleasure to see whether the first can be measured by the second. In order not to arouse the suspicion that we believe life to begin only in the sphere of the “aristocracy of the mind,” let us begin with a “purely animal” need, hunger.

[ 32 ] Hunger arises when our organs can no longer continue their proper function unless new substance is given them. What the hungry person seeks first of all is to eat enough. As soon as enough food has been taken in for hunger to cease, then everything has been achieved which the drive to be fed seeks. The enjoyment connected with eating enough consists first of all in removing the pain which hunger causes. To this drive merely to be fed, there comes another need. A person does not merely want, through taking in nourishment, to restore the normal functioning of his organs, or, as the case may be, to still the pain of hunger: he seeks to effect this to the accompaniment of pleasant taste sensations. When he is hungry and a meal promising rich enjoyment is a half hour away, he can even avoid spoiling his pleasure in the better food by not eating something inferior which could satisfy him sooner. He needs his hunger in order to have the full enjoyment of his meal. Through this, hunger becomes for him a cause of pleasure at the same time. If now all the hunger present in the world could be stilled, this would result in the total amount of enjoyment which we owe to the existence of our need for food. Still to be added to this is the particular enjoyment aimed at by gourmets through a cultivation of the palate beyond the ordinary.

[ 33 ] This amount of enjoyment would have the greatest conceivable value when no need, aiming at the kind of enjoyment now under consideration, remained unsatisfied, and when along with the enjoyment a certain amount of pain did not have to be taken into the bargain at the same time.

[ 34 ] Modern science holds the view that nature produces more life than it can sustain, which means that it also brings forth more hunger than it is in a position to satisfy. The excess life that is produced must perish painfully in the struggle for existence. Admittedly: the needs of living things at every moment of the world process are greater than the means existing to meet and satisfy them, and this does detract from life's enjoyment. The individual enjoyment actually present in life, however, is not made the least bit smaller. Wherever the satisfying of a desire occurs, the corresponding amount of enjoyment is then present, even though there are still a great number of unsatisfied drives as well within the desiring being itself or in others. But what is diminished thereby is the value of the enjoyment of life. If only a part of the needs of a living thing are satisfied, then this being has a corresponding enjoyment. This enjoyment has a lesser value the smaller it is in proportion to the total demands of life in the areas of desires in question. One can think of this value as represented by a fraction, whose numerator is the enjoyment actually present and whose denominator is the sum total of need. The fraction has the value 1 when numerator and denominator are the same, that means, when all needs are also satisfied. It will be greater than 1 when in a living creature more pleasure is present than its desires demand; and it is less than 1 when the amount of enjoyment lags behind the sum of its desires. The fraction can never reach zero, however, as long as the numerator has even the smallest value. If a person, before his death, were to close his accounts, and were to imagine the amount of enjoyment accruing to one particular drive (to hunger, for example) dispersed over his whole life with all the demands of this drive, the pleasure he experienced would perhaps have only little value; but it can never become totally valueless. If the amount of enjoyment of a living creature remains the same while its needs increase, then the value of its pleasure in life diminishes. The same is true for the sum total of all life in nature. The greater the number of living creatures is in relation to the number of those that can fully satisfy their drives, the smaller is the average pleasure-value of life. The bills of exchange that are drawn for us in our drives with respect to our enjoyment of life decrease in value if one cannot expect them to be honored at their full value. If for three days I have enough to eat but then must go hungry the next three days, the enjoyment of the days on which I ate does not become less thereby. But I must then picture it to myself as apportioned over six days, whereby its value for my drive to eat is reduced by half. The situation is the same for the amount of pleasure in relation to the degree of my need. If I have enough appetite for two pieces of bread and can only have one, then the enjoyment I derive from the one has only half the value that it would have if I were fully satisfied after eating. This is the way that the value of a pleasure is determined in life. Pleasure is measured against the needs of life. Our desires are the yardstick; pleasure is what is measured. Value is attached to the pleasure of eating enough only through the fact that hunger is present; and the value attached is of a particular degree through the relationship in which it stands to the degree of hunger present.

[ 35 ] The unfulfilled demands of our life cast their shadows even upon desires which have been satisfied, and detract from the value of hours filled with enjoyment. But one can also speak of the present value of a feeling of pleasure. This value is all the smaller, the less our pleasure is in relation to the duration and intensity of our desire.

[ 36 ] An amount of pleasure has full value for us which in duration and degree matches our desire exactly. A smaller amount of pleasure, compared to our desire, reduces the pleasure-value; a greater amount creates an unasked for excess, which is experienced as pleasure only as long as we are able, while enjoying it, to intensify our desire. If we are not in a position to keep step, in the intensifying of our demands, with the increasing pleasure, then the pleasure turns into pain. The object which otherwise would be satisfying to us storms in upon us without our wanting it, and we suffer under it. This is one proof of the fact that pleasure is of value to us only so long as we can measure it against our desire. An excess of pleasurable feeling veers over into pain. We can observe this particularly with people whose demands for one kind of pleasure or another are very small. For people whose drive to eat is dulled, eating can easily become repugnant. It follows from this also, that desire is what measures the value of pleasure.

[ 37 ] Now the pessimist could say that the unsatisfied drive to eat brings not only the pain of lost enjoyment, but also positive suffering, agony, and misery into the world. He can cite here the unspeakable misery of those suffering want, and the amount of pain which springs for such people indirectly through the lack of food. And if he wants to apply his assertion also to nature outside man, he can point to the agonies of the animals that starve from lack of food at certain times of the year. Of these evils the pessimist maintains that they far outweigh the amount of enjoyment which our drive to eat brings into the world.

[ 38 ] There is indeed no doubt that one can compare pleasure and pain with each other and can determine the excess of one over the other, as this is done in profit and loss. But if the pessimist believes that an excess occurs on the side of pain, and believes he can infer from this that life has no value, then he is already in error, insofar as he is making a calculation which is not carried out in real life.

[ 39 ] Our desire directs itself in a given case toward a particular object. The pleasure-value of its satisfaction, as we have seen, will be the greater, the greater the amount of pleasure is in relation to the intensity of our desire.⁴ But it also depends upon the intensity of our desire, how great the amount of pain is which we are willing to take into the bargain in order to attain the pleasure. We compare the amount of pain, not with that of pleasure, but rather with the intensity of our desire. Someone who takes great joy in eating will, because of his enjoyment during better times, more easily get himself through a period of hunger, than will someone else who lacks this joy in satisfying his drive to eat. The woman who want to have a child does not compare the pleasure which possessing the child affords her with the amount of pain resulting from pregnancy, childbirth, child care, and so on, but rather with her desire for having the child.

[ 40 ] We never strive after an abstract pleasure of a particular intensity, but rather after concrete satisfaction in a very definite way. When we are striving for a pleasure which must be afforded by one particular object or by one particular sensation, then we cannot be satisfied by being given a different object or a different sensation that affords us a pleasure of the same intensity. With someone whose aim is to satisfy his hunger, one cannot replace the pleasure of doing so with one equally as great but caused by a walk. Only if our desire strove quite generally for a particular quantity of pleasure would it then have to grow silent at once if this pleasure were not attainable without a quantity of pain surpassing it in intensity. But since satisfaction is striven for in a particular way, pleasure still accompanies fulfillment even when pain greater than it has to be taken into the bargain along with it. Through the fact that the drives of living creatures move in a definite direction and go straight toward a concrete goal, the possibility ceases of bringing into our calculations, as a factor of equal validity, the amount of pain that has set itself in the way to this goal. When the pain is overcome—however great it might be—and the desire is still strong enough to be present to any degree at all, then the pleasure of satisfaction can still be savored in its full intensity. Desire, therefore, does not bring pain directly into relation with the pleasure attained, but rather of whether the desire for the goal striven for or the resistance of the pain opposing it is greater. If this resistance is greater than the desire, then the latter gives way to the inevitable, slackens and strives no further. Through the fact that satisfaction is demanded in a definite way, the pleasure connected to it gains a significance which makes it possible, after the satisfaction has occurred, to take the necessary quantity of pain into account only insofar as it has decreased the measure of our desire. If I am passionately fond of views, then I never calculate how much pleasure the view from a mountain peak brings me compared directly with the pain of the laborious ascent and descent. I do, however, consider whether my desire for the view, after overcoming the difficulties, will still be lively enough. Only indirectly through the intensity of the desire can pleasure and pain, when compared, give a result. It is absolutely not a question, therefore, of whether pleasure or pain is present to a greater extent, but whether the wanting of the pleasure is strong enough to overcome the pain.

[ 41 ] A proof of the correctness of this view is the fact that the value of a pleasure is rated more highly when it has to be purchased at the price of great pain, than when it falls into our lap, as it were, like a gift from heaven. When pain and suffering have toned down our desire and then the goal is still reached after all, the pleasure in relation to the quantity of desire still remaining, is all the greater. But this relation represents as I have shown, the value of the pleasure (see page 208ff.). A further proof is given through the fact that living creatures (including man) unfold their drives as long as they are able to bear the pain and suffering which oppose them. And the struggle for existence is only the result of this fact. Existing life strives to unfold itself and only that part gives up the struggle whose desires are stifled through the force of the difficulties rising up against them. Every living thing keeps seeking food until lack of food destroys its life. And even man turns his hand against himself only when he believes (rightly or wrongly) that he cannot attain the goals in life which seem to him worth striving for. But as long as he still believes in the possibility of attaining what in his view is worth striving for, he will struggle on against all suffering and pain. Philosophy would first have to impose upon the human being the view that willing makes sense only when pleasure is greater than pain; by nature he wants to attain the objects of his desire if he can bear whatever pain becomes necessary in doing so, be it ever so great. Such a philosophy would be in error, however, because it makes human willing dependent upon a condition (excess of pleasure over pain) which is to begin with foreign to man. The primal yardstick of willing is desire, and desire presses forward as long as it can. One can compare the calculation which life, not an intellectual philosophy, makes, when it is a question of pleasure and pain in satisfying a desire, with the following. If, when buying a certain quantity of apples, I am forced to take twice as many bad ones as good ones—because the seller wants to clear out his stock—then I will not think twice about taking the bad apples as well if I can value the smaller amount of good ones highly enough that along with the selling price I also still want to take upon myself the expense of disposing of the bad wares. This example illustrates the relation between the amounts of pleasure and pain caused by a drive. I determine the value of the good apples, not by subtracting their number from that of the bad ones, but by whether the former still retain some value despite the presence of the latter.

[ 42 ] Just as, in my enjoyment of the good apples, I leave the bad ones out of account, so I give myself over to the satisfaction of a desire after I have shaken off the unavoidable pain.

[ 43 ] Even if pessimism were right in its assertion that more pain than pleasure is present in the world, this would have no influence upon our willing, for in spite of this, living creatures strive for whatever pleasure is left. Empirical proof that pain outweighs joy, if it could be provided, would indeed be able to show the futility of that philosophical direction which sees the value of life in an excess of pleasure (eudaemonism), but it could not show willing in general to be irrational, for willing does not pursue an excess of pleasure but rather the amount of pleasure still left over after the pain is discounted. This still appears as a goal worth striving for.

[ 44 ] One has tried to refute pessimism by maintaining that it is impossible to calculate an excess of pleasure or pain in the world. The possibility of any kind of calculation depends upon the fact that the things to be calculated can be compared with each other in magnitude. Now every pain and every pleasure has a definite magnitude (intensity and duration). Pleasurable sensations of different kinds can also be compared with each other, at least approximately, according to magnitude. We know whether a good cigar or a good joke gives us more pleasure. Against the comparability of different kinds of pleasure and pain, according to magnitude, there can thus be no objections raised. And the researcher who makes it his task to determine an excess of pleasure or pain in the world takes his start from the suppositions which are altogether justified. One can maintain that the results of pessimism are in error, but one cannot doubt either the possibility of a scientific estimation of the amounts of pleasure and pain, nor that a pleasure balance can thereby be determined. It is, however, incorrect if someone maintains that the results of this calculation have any consequences for human willing. The instances where we make the value of our actions really dependent upon whether pleasure or pain shows itself to exceed the other, are those in which the objects to which we direct our actions are indifferent to us. If it is a matter, after work, of my enjoying myself with a game or in light conversation, and I am completely indifferent as to what I do for this purpose, then I ask myself what will give me the greater pleasure. And I definitely refrain from an activity if the scale dips toward the side of pain. With a child for whom we want to buy a toy, we think, in making our choice, about what will give him the most pleasure. In all other instances we do not go exclusively by the balance of pleasure.

[ 45 ] When therefore the pessimistic philosophers of ethics are in of the view that by showing pain to be present in greater quantity than pleasure they prepare the ground for selfless devotion to the task of civilization, they do not bear in mind that human willing does not by its nature let itself be influenced by such knowledge. The striving of men directs itself toward the measure of satisfaction possible after all difficulties are overcome. The hope of this satisfaction is the basis of human activity. The work of every single person and all the work of civilization springs from this hope. Pessimistic ethics believes it must represent the pursuit of happiness to man as an impossible one, so that he will dedicate himself to his real moral tasks. But these moral tasks are nothing other than his concrete natural and spiritual drives; and the satisfaction of these is striven for in spite of the pain that falls to him thereby. The pursuit of happiness which pessimism wants to eradicate is therefore not present at all. But the tasks which the man has to fulfill, he fulfills, because, by virtue of his nature, when he has really known their nature, he wants to fulfill them. Pessimistic ethics maintains that man will be able to devote himself to what he recognizes to be his life's task only when he has given up his striving for pleasure. No ethics, however, can ever conceive life tasks other than the realization of those satisfactions demanded by human desires and the fulfillment of his moral ideals. No ethics can take away from him the pleasure he has in this fulfillment of what he desires. When the pessimist says: do not strive for pleasure, for you can never attain it; strive for what you recognize as your task; then the reply to this is: That is human nature, and it is the invention of a philosophy going off on false paths when it is asserted that man strives merely for happiness. He strives for the satisfaction of what his being desires, and he has his eye upon the concrete objects of this striving, not upon some abstract “happiness”; this fulfillment is a pleasure for him. When pessimistic ethics demands a striving not for pleasure, but rather for the attainment of what one recognizes as one's life's task, it hits upon the very thing that man by nature wants. The human being does not need to first be turned topsy-turvy by philosophy, he does not need first to cast off his nature in order to be moral. Morality lies in striving for a goal that one recognizes as justified; it lies in man's being to pursue this goal, as long as the pain connected with it does not lame the desire for it. And this is the nature of all real willing. Ethics is not based upon the eradication of all striving for pleasure so that anemic, abstract ideas can establish their rule there where no strong longing for enjoyment of life opposes them; but rather, it is based upon strong willing, carried by ideal intuition, that reaches its goal even though the path to it is a thorny one.

[ 46 ] Ethical ideals spring from the moral imagination of man. Their realization depends upon their being desired by a person strongly enough to overcome pain and suffering. They are his intuitions, the mainsprings that his spirit winds; he wills them, because their realization is his highest pleasure. It is not necessary for him first to let himself be forbidden by ethics to strive after pleasure in order then to let himself be told what ought to be the goal of his striving. He will strive after ethical ideals if his moral imagination is active enough to inspire him with intuitions that grant his willing the strength to make its way against the resistances lying in his organization, to which pain necessarily also belongs.

[ 47 ] Whoever strives after ideals of noble greatness does so because they are the content of his being, and realizing them will be an enjoyment for him compared to which the pleasure that pettiness draws from satisfying commonplace drives is trifling. Idealists revel, spiritually, in translating their ideals into reality.

[ 48 ] Whoever wants to eradicate the pleasure of satisfying human desires must first make the human being into a slave who does not act because he wants to, but only because he ought. For, the attainment of what he wants gives pleasure. What one calls the good is not that which the human being ought, but rather that which he wants, when he unfolds his full true human nature. Whoever does not acknowledge this must first drive out of man what he wants, and then let be prescribed for him from outside what he has to give as content to his willing.

[ 49 ] Man attaches value to the fulfillment of a desire, because the desire springs from his being. What is attained has value because it is wanted. If one denies any value to the goal of human willing as such, then one must take the goals that do have value from something that a person does not want.

[ 50 ] The ethics which builds upon pessimism springs from a disregard of moral imagination. Only one who does not consider the individual human spirit capable of giving to itself the content of its striving can seek the sum total of all willing in the longing for pleasure. The unimaginative person creates no moral ideas. They must be given to him. Physical nature provides for his striving after satisfaction of his lower desires. But to the unfolding of the whole human being there belong also the desires originating out of the spirit. Only when one is of the opinion that man simply does not have these, can one maintain that he must receive them from outside. Then one is also justified in saying that he is obligated to do something which he does not want. Every ethics which demands of the human being that he suppress his wanting in order to fulfill tasks which he does not want, does not reckon with the whole human being, but rather with one who lacks the ability to desire spiritually. For the harmoniously developed human being the so-called ideas of the good are not outside, but rather inside, the circle of his being. Moral action does not lie in the extermination of a one-sided self-will, but rather in the full development of human nature. Whoever regards moral ideas as attainable only if the human being extinguishes his self-will does not know that these ideals are just as much wanted by the human being as is the satisfaction of his so-called animalistic drives.

[ 51 ] There is no denying that the views thus characterized can easily be misunderstood. Immature people without moral imagination like to regard the instincts of their half-developed nature as the full content of humanity, and they reject all moral ideas not created by them so that they can “express themselves” undisturbed. It is obvious that what is right for a whole human being is not valid for a partially developed human nature. Someone who must still first be brought by education to the point that the moral nature breaks through the shell of his lower passions: of him one cannot expect what does, however, hold good for the mature human being. But the intention here is not to delineate what needs to be instilled into the undeveloped man, but rather what lies in the nature of a fully mature human being. For the intention is to show the possibility of being free; inner freedom, however, does not appear in actions performed out of sensory or soul constraints, but rather in such actions as are carried by spiritual intuitions.

[ 52 ] This fully mature human being gives himself his own worth. It is not pleasure he seeks, handed to him by nature or by his creator as a gift of grace; nor is it some abstract duty that he fulfills, recognized by him as such after he has stripped away all striving for pleasure. He acts as he wants, that is, in accordance with his moral intuitions; and he experiences the attainment of what he wants as his true enjoyment in life. He determines the value of life by the relation of what he has attained to what he has striven to achieve. An ethics that puts in the place of what one wants, what one merely ought, and is the place of inclination mere duty demands to what he fulfills. Such an ethics measures man by a yardstick applied from outside his being.—The view developed in this book refers man back to himself. It recognizes as the true value of life only that which the individual person regards as such in accordance with his own willing. It knows just as little about any value of life not recognized by the individual as it does about any purpose of life not springing from the individual himself. It sees in the real individual looked upon and through from all sides, his own master and his own evaluator.

Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 53 ] One can misconstrue what is presented in this chapter if one gets one's teeth too firmly into the seeming objection that man's willing as such is in fact, irrational, that one must show him this irrationality; then he will recognize that the goal of moral striving must lie in final liberation from willing. This kind of a seeming objection was offered me, in any case, by a competent person, who said to me that it is in fact the task of philosophy to make up for what the thoughtlessness of the animals and of most people has neglected to do; namely to draw up a real balance sheet of life. Still, whoever makes this objection does not in fact see the main point: If inner freedom is to realize itself, then within human nature willing must be carried by intuitive thinking; but at the same time, it is a fact that willing can also be determined by something other than intuition, yet only in the free realizing, flowing form man's being, of intuition do there arise what is moral and the value of what is moral. Ethical individualism is able to present morality in its full worthiness, for it does not view that as truly moral which brings about, in an outer way, a congruence of human willing with some norm, but rather that which arises out of man when he unfolds moral willing as one part of his total being, in such a way that to do what is immoral seems to him as mutilation and deformation of his being.

• 1. Die Lust oder die Unlust
• 2. Philosophie des Unbewussten
• 3. Whoever wants to calculate whether the sum total of pleasure or that of pain outweighs the other ignores the fact that he is undertaking a calculation of something that is nowhere experienced. Feeling does not calculate, and for the real evaluation of life, it is a matter of real experience, and not of the result of a calculation someone has dreamed up.
• 4. We disregard here the instance where, through excessive increase, pleasure veers over into pain.

[ 1 ] Against the view that the human being has it in him to be a complete, self-contained, free individuality, there seems to stand the fact that he appears as a part within a natural whole (race, ancestral line, folk, family, male or female gender), and that he is active within a whole (state, church, and so on). He bears the general characteristics of the community to which he belongs, and gives a content to his actions which is determined by the place he holds within the larger group.

[ 2 ] Given this, is individuality still possible at all? Can one still regard the human being himself as whole in himself, seeing that he grows out of one whole and integrates himself into another?

[ 3 ] A part of a whole, in its characteristics and functions, is determined by the whole. An ethnic group is a whole, and everyone belonging to it bears the characteristic traits that are determined by the nature of the group. How the single person is constituted and how he acts is determined by the character of the group. Through this the physiognomy and behavior of the individual person takes on something of a generic quality. If we ask for the reason why this or that about a person is this or that way, then we are directed away form the individual person and toward his genus. The genus explains to us why something about him appears in the form in which we observe it.

[ 4 ] The human being frees himself, however, from these generic qualities. For man's generic qualities, when rightly experienced by him, are not something which restrict his freedom, and should also not be made to do so by artificial means. The human being develops traits and functions for himself whose determining factors can only be sought within man himself. His generic qualities serve him thereby only as a medium through which to express his particular being. He uses the characteristic traits given by nature as a basis and gives to what is generic a form in accordance with his own being. Now we would seek in vain the reason for an action of this being within the laws of the genus. We have to do with an individual who can be explained only through himself. If a person has won his way through to this detachment from the generic, and if, even then, we still want to explain everything about him by the characteristics of the genus, then we have no organ for what is individual.

[ 5 ] It is impossible to understand a person entirely, if one bases one's judgment upon a generic concept. One persists the most in judging according to the genus where it is a matter of gender. A man sees in a woman, a woman in a man, almost always too much of the general characteristics of the opposite sex and too little of what is individual. In practical life this does less harm to men than to women. The social position of women is such an unworthy one mostly because in many respects what her position ought to be is not determined by the individual qualities of a particular woman but rather by the general picture one forms of the natural task and the needs of women. The activities of a man direct themselves in life according to his individual abilities and inclinations; those of a woman are supposed to be determined exclusively through the fact that she is after all a woman. A woman is supposed to be a slave to what is generic, to womanhood in general. As long as it is debated by men whether a woman is fitted “by natural disposition” for this or that profession, the so-called woman's question cannot get out of its most elementary stage. What a woman can want according to her nature must be left up to the woman to judge. If it is true that women are fitted only to the tasks which are presently theirs, then they will hardly be able out of themselves to attain to any others. But they must be allowed to determine for themselves what is in accordance with their nature. The response is someone who fears an upheaval of our social structure if women are to be regarded, not as generic entities, but rather as individuals, is that a social structure in which one half of mankind leads an existence unworthy of a human being is in fact very much in need of improvement.¹

[ 6 ] Whoever judges people according to generic characteristics gets only as far, in fact, as the boundary line beyond which people start to become beings whose activity is based upon free self-determination. What lies below this boundary can, of course, be the object of scientific study. The characteristic traits of races, ancestral lines, peoples, and sexes are the content of particular sciences. Only people who wanted to live solely as examples of genus could make themselves coincide with the general image which arises out of the observations of such sciences. All these sciences, however, cannot penetrate through to the particular content of the individual. Where the realm of freedom (of thinking and doing) begins, the determining of the individual by generic laws ends. The conceptual content which man, through his thinking, must bring into connection with perception in order to take hold of full reality (see page 77ff.), this no one can establish once and for all and leave behind for mankind in a finished form. Each individual must gain his concepts through his own intuition. How the individual person is to think cannot be deduced from any generic concepts. It it purely and simply the individual who decides this. And just as little should the concrete goals which the individual wants to set for his willing be determined out of general human characteristics. Whoever wants to understand the single individuality must enter into his particular being, and not stop short at typical characteristics. In this sense every single human being is a riddle. And every science that concerns itself with abstract thoughts and generic concepts is only a preparation for that knowledge which is afforded us when a human individuality communicates to us his way of viewing the world, and for that other knowledge which we gain from the content of his willing. Wherever we have the feeling that here we have to do with that in a person which is free of any typical way of thinking and free of any generic willing, there we must cease from taking recourse to any concept out of our spirit, if we want to understand his being. The activity of knowing consists in the joining of concept and perception through thinking. With all other objects the observer must gain his concepts through his intuition; with understanding a free individuality it is only a matter of purely (without mixing in our own conceptual content) taking over into our spirit his concepts, by which he, after all, determines himself. People who immediately mix their own concepts into every judgment about another person can never arrive at an understanding of an individuality. Just as the free individuality makes himself free of the characteristics of genus, so must our knowing activity free itself from the way generic qualities are understood.

[ 7 ] Only to the extent that a person has made himself free of generic qualities in the way indicated does he come into consideration as a free spirit within a human community. No man is entirely genus; none is all individuality. But every person gradually frees a greater or lesser sphere of his being, both from the generic qualities of animal life and from the commandments, ruling him, of human authorities.

[ 8 ] In that part of his being in which he cannot attain such inner freedom, however, man is incorporated into the organism of nature and of the spirit. He lives in this respect as he sees other live, or as they command. Only that part of his actions which springs from his intuitions has an ethical value in the true sense. And whatever he has about him in the way of moral instincts, inherited from social instincts, becomes something ethical through his taking it up into his intuitions. All moral activity of mankind springs from individual ethical intuitions and from their being taken up into human communities. One can also say that the moral life of mankind is the sum total of the creations of the moral imagination of free human individuals. These are the findings of monism.

• 1. Immediately upon publication of this book (1894) the objection was raised against the above arguments, that, within her generic sphere a woman can already now live out her life just as individualistically as she could want, much more freely than a man can, who, through schooling and then through war and profession is already stripped of his individuality. I know that one will raise this objective perhaps even more strongly today. In spite of this I must still let these sentences stand here and would like to hope that there will also be readers who understand how great a violence such an objection does to the concept of inner freedom which is developed in this book, and who will judge the above sentences of mine by something other than by how a man is stripped of his individuality by schooling and profession.

[ 1 ] The explanation of the world as a unity, or what is meant here by monism, takes from human experience the principles it needs to explain the world. It likewise seeks the sources of man's actions within the world of observation, namely within the human nature accessible to our self-knowledge, and more particularly within moral imagination. Monism refuses to seek outside of this world, through abstract inferences, the ultimate foundations of the world which is present to perception and thinking. For monism, the unity which experienceable thinking observation brings to the varied multiplicity of perceptions is at the same time the unity which our human need for knowledge demands; and this need seeks entry into the physical and spiritual realms of the world through this unity. Whoever seeks, behind the unity sought in this way, yet another one only shows that he does not recognize the harmony which exists between what is found through thinking and what is demanded by our drive for knowledge. The single human individual is not really separated off from the world. He is a part of the world, and there exists in reality a connection—between this part and the totality of the cosmos—which is broken only for our perception. We see this part at first as a self-existent being, because we do not see the belts by which the fundamental powers of the cosmos turn the wheel of our life. Whoever remains at this standpoint regards a part of the whole as a being that really exists independently, regards it as the monad which receives information about the rest of the world in some way or other from outside. What is meant here by monism shows that this independence can be believed in only as long as what is perceived is not woven by thinking into the web of the conceptual world. If this is done, then this partial existence turns out to be a mere illusion of perception. Man can find his self-contained total existence in the universe only through the intuitive experience of thinking. Thinking destroys the illusion of perception and members our individual existence into the life of the cosmos. The unity of the conceptual world, which contains our objective perceptions, also takes up the content of our subjective personality into itself. Thinking gives us reality in its true form, as a self-contained unity, whereas the multiplicity of our perceptions is only an illusion due to our organization (see page 76ff.) The knowledge of what is real in contrast to what is illusion about perception has constituted in all ages the goal of thinking. Science has made great efforts to know perceptions as reality by discovering the lawful relationships among them. Where one was of the view, however, that the relationship ascertained by human thinking has only a subjective significance, one sought the true ground of unity in some object lying beyond our world of experience (an inferred God, will, absolute spirit, etc.)—And based on this belief, one strove to gain, in addition to knowledge about the relationships recognizable within our experience, yet a second knowledge which goes beyond our experience, and which reveals the relationship of experience to entities that are no longer experienceable (a metaphysics attained not through experience, but rather through deduction). The reason we can grasp world relationships through orderly thinking was seen from this standpoint to lie in the fact that a primal being had built the world according to logical laws, and the reason we act was seen to lie in the willing of the primal being. But one did not recognize that thinking encompasses both what is subjective and what is objective, and that in the union of perception and concept total reality is conveyed. Only so long as we look at the lawfulness permeating and determining our perceptions, in the abstract form of the concept, do we in fact have to do with something purely subjective. But the content of the concept, which with the help of thinking is gained in addition to the perception, is not subjective. This content is not taken from the subject, but rather from reality. It is that part of reality which perceiving cannot attain. It is experience, but not experience conveyed through perception. Whoever cannot picture to himself that the concept is something real, thinks only of the abstract form in which he holds the concept in his mind. But in such a separated state the concept is present only through our organization, in the same way that the perception is. Even the tree that one perceives has, isolated off by itself, no existence. It is only a part within the great mechanism of nature, and only possible in real connection with it. An abstract concept is by itself no more real than a perception by itself. The perception is the part of reality that is given objectively; the concept is the part given subjectively (through intuition, see page 84ff.) Our spiritual organization tears reality apart into these two factors. The one factor appears to perception, the other to intuition. Only the union of both, the perception incorporating itself lawfully into the universe, is full reality. If we look at mere perception by itself, we then have no reality, but rather a disconnected chaos; if we look at the lawfulness of our perceptions by itself, we then have to do merely with abstract concepts. The abstract concept does not contain reality; but the thinking observation does indeed do so, which considers neither concept nor perception one-sidedly by itself, but rather the union of both.

[ 2 ] That we live within reality (that the roots of our real existence extend down into reality), this even the most orthodox subjective idealist will not deny. He will only dispute the claim that we also reach ideally, with our knowing activity, into that which we really live through. With respect to this, monism shows that thinking is neither subjective nor objective, but rather a principle encompassing both sides of reality. When we observe and think, we carry out a process which itself belongs in the course of real happening. Through thinking, within the very realm of experience itself, we overcome the one-sidedness of mere perceiving. We cannot figure out the nature of what is real through abstract conceptual hypotheses (through purely conceptual thinking), but inasmuch as we find in addition to perceptions their ideas, we live within what is real. Monism does not seek, in addition to experience, anything unexperienceable (in the beyond), but rather sees in concept and perception what is real. It spins out of mere abstract concepts no metaphysics, because it sees in the concept by itself only the one side of reality and does not have to seek outside his world some unexperienceable higher reality. He refrains from seeking the absolutely real anywhere other than in experience, because he recognizes the content of experience itself as real. And he is satisfied with this reality, because he knows that thinking has the power to guarantee it. What dualism first seeks behind the world of observation, monism finds within this world itself. Monism shows that in our knowing activity we grasp reality in its true form, not in a subjective picture that, as it were, inserts itself between man and reality. For monism the conceptual content of the world is the same for all human individuals (see page 78ff.). page 78ff.). According to monistic principles one human individual regards another as a being of his own kind because it is the same world content which expresses itself in him. In the oneness of the world of concepts there are not, so to speak, as many concepts “lion” as there are individual people who think “lion,” but rather only one concept. And the concept which A adds to his perception of the lion is the same as that of B, only grasped by a different perceiving subject (see pages 79–80). Thinking leads all perceiving subjects to the common ideal oneness of all manifoldness. The oneness of the world of ideas expresses itself in them as in a multiplicity of individuals. As long as a person grasps himself merely through self-perception, he regards himself as this particular person; as soon as he looks toward the world of ideas lighting up in him and encompassing all particulars, he sees the absolutely real light up livingly within him. Dualism designates the divine primal being as that which permeates all men and lives in them all. Monism finds this universal divine life within reality itself. The ideal content of another person is also my own, and I see it as a different one only so long as I perceive; but no longer, however, as soon as I think. Every person encompasses with his thinking only a part of the total world of ideas, and to this extent individuals do also differ in the actual content of their thinking. But these contents exist in one self-contained whole which comprises the contents of thinking of all men. In his thinking, therefore, man grasps the universal primal being that permeates all men. Filled with the content of thought, his life within reality is at the same time life in God. The merely inferred unexperienceable “beyond” rests on the misunderstanding of those who believe that the “here” does not have the basis of its existence within itself. They do not recognize that through thinking they do find what they require as explanation for perception. Therefore no speculation has ever yet brought to light any content that has not been borrowed from the reality given us. The god assumed by abstract deduction is only the human being transferred into the beyond; the Will of Schopenhauer is only the human power of will made into an absolute; Hartmann's unconscious, primordial being, composed of idea and will, is a composition of two abstractions taken from experience. Exactly the same is to be said of all other principles, not based on experienceable thinking, of some “beyond.”

[ 3 ] The human spirit, in truth, never passes out of or beyond the reality in which we live, and it is also not necessary for it to do so, since everything it needs to explain the world lies within this world. If philosophers finally declare themselves satisfied with their derivation of the world out of principles which they borrow from experience and transfer into some hypothetical “beyond,” the a similar satisfaction must also be possible when the same content is left in the “here” where, for experienceable thinking, it belongs. All going out of and beyond the world is only a seeming one, and principles transferred outside the world do not explain the world better than the principles lying within it. But thinking which understands itself also does not at all demand any such transcendence, since a thought content can only seek inside the world, not outside of it, for the perceptible content along with which it forms something real. Even the objects of imagination are only contents which first have validity when they become mental pictures which refer to some content of perception. Through this content of perception they incorporate themselves into reality. We can only think up the concepts of reality; in order to find reality itself, perceiving is also still necessary. A primal being of the world, for which a content is thought up, is, for a thinking which understands itself, an impossible assumption. Monism does not deny what is ideal; it in fact does not regard a content of perception which lacks its ideal counterpart as full reality; but it finds nothing in the whole domain of thinking which could make it necessary to step out of thinking's realm of experience by denying the objective spiritual reality of thinking. Monism sees, in a science which restricts itself to describing perceptions without pressing forward to their ideal complements, a half of something. But it regards in the same way, as half of something, all abstract concepts which do not find their complement in perception and do not fit in anywhere into the web of concepts that encompasses the observable world. Monism knows therefore no ideas which point toward something objective lying beyond our experience, and which supposedly form the content of a merely hypothetical metaphysics. Everything which mankind has brought forth in the form of such ideas is for monism an abstraction from experience whose creators overlook its source.

[ 4 ] Just as little, by monistic principles, can the goals of our actions be taken from some “beyond” outside man. Insofar as they are thought, they must stem from human intuition. Man does not make the purposes of some objective primal being (in the beyond) into his individual purposes, but rather pursues purposes of his own, given him by his moral imagination. The human being looses from the one world of ideas the idea which is to be realized through some action, and lays it as the basis for his willing. In his actions, therefore, it is not the commandments instilled from the “beyond” into the “here” which express themselves, but rather human intuitions belonging to the world of the “here.” Monism knows no world director who sets the goals and direction of our actions from outside of ourselves. Man finds no kind of primal ground of existence in the beyond whose decrees he could discover in order to experience from it the goals toward which he has to steer in his actions. He is thrown back upon himself. He himself must give a content to his actions. When he seeks outside of the world in which he lives for determining factors of his willing, he then searches in vain. He must seek them—when he goes beyond the satisfying of his natural drives, for which mother nature has provided—within his own moral imagination, unless his desire for comfort prefers to let itself be determined by the moral imagination of others; that means he must give up all action or else act according to determining factors which he gives himself out of the world of his ideas, or which others give him out of that same world. Whenever he goes beyond living in his sensual drives and beyond carrying out the orders of other people, he is determined by nothing other than himself. He must act out of an impulse which he has given himself and which is determined by nothing else. Ideally this impulse is, to be sure, determined within the one world of ideas; but factually it can only be drawn out of that world by man and transferred into reality. Only within man himself can monism find the basis for the actual transferring of an idea into reality by man. In order for an idea to become an action, man first must want and will before it can happen. This kind of willing has its basis therefore only within man himself. Man is then the one ultimately determining his action. He is free.

First Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 5 ] In the second part of this book the attempt was made to establish the fact that inner freedom is to be found in the reality of human action. For this it was necessary to isolate from the total domain of human actions those parts with respect to which, out of unprejudiced self-observation, one can speak of inner freedom. It is those actions which present themselves as realizations of ideal intuitions. No unprejudiced consideration will regard other actions as free. But, out of unprejudiced self-observation, man will indeed have to regard himself as able and inclined to advance upon the road to ethical intuitions and to their realization. This unprejudiced observation of the ethical being of man cannot by itself, however, establish any final judgment about inner freedom. For were intuitive thinking itself to spring from some other being, were its being not one resting upon itself, then the consciousness, flowing from what is ethical, of inner freedom would prove to be an illusory thing. But the second part of this book finds its natural support in the first. This presents intuitive thinking as experienced inner spiritual activity¹ of man. To understand, to experience, this being of thinking, however, is equivalent to knowledge of the freedom of intuitive thinking. And if one knows that this thinking is free, then one also sees the perimeter of the willing to which freedom must be ascribed. The acting human being will be regarded as free by anyone who, on the basis of inner experience, can ascribe to the intuitive thought experience its self-sustained being. Whoever is not able to do so will definitely not be able to find any indisputable way to the acceptance of inner freedom. The experience presented here finds within consciousness the intuitive thinking which does not have reality only within consciousness. And it finds therefore that freedom is the characteristic feature of actions flowing from the intuitions of consciousness.

Second Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 6 ] What is presented in this book is built upon purely spiritual, experienceable, intuitive thinking, through which every perception is placed knowingly into reality. The book intends to present nothing more than can be surveyed out of the experience of intuitive thinking. But the intention was also to show what thought configurations this experienced thinking requires. And it requires that thinking not be denied as a self-sustaining experience within the cognitive process. It requires that one not deny thinking its ability, together with perception, to experience reality, and that one therefore not seek reality only within a world which lies outside this experience, which is only inferable, and in the face of which human thought activity is only something subjective.

[ 7 ] Thus in thinking the element is characterized through which the human being enters spiritually into reality. (And no one really should confuse this world view, built upon experienced thinking, with any mere rationalism). But on the other hand it is fully evident from the whole spirit of what is presented here, that the perceptual element can be considered a reality for human knowledge only when it is grasped in thinking. The characterizing of something as reality cannot lie outside of thinking. It should therefore not be imagined, for example, that the senses' kind of perception establishes the only reality. The human being must simply await what will arise as perception along his life's path. The only question could be whether, from the point of view that results purely out of intuitively experienced thinking, it can justifiably be expected that man would be able to perceive, besides what is sense-perceptible, also what is spiritual. This can be expected. For although on the one hand intuitively experienced thinking is an active process taking place within the human spirit, on the other hand it is at the same time a spiritual perception grasped without any physical organ. It is a perception in which the perceiver himself is active, and it is an activity of the self which is also perceived. In intuitively experienced thinking man is transferred into a spiritual world also as perceiver. Within this world, whatever comes to meet him as perception in the same way that the spiritual world of his own thinking does, this the human being recognizes to be the world of spiritual perception.* This world of perception would have the same relation to thinking which the world of physical perception does on the side of the senses. The world of spiritual perception, as soon as man experiences it, cannot be anything foreign to him, because in intuitive thinking he already has an experience that bears a purely spiritual character. A number of books published by me after this one speak about such a world of spiritual perception. This Philosophy of Spiritual Activity lays the philosophical groundwork for these later books. For in this book the attempt is made to show that the experience of thinking, rightly understood, is already the experiencing of spirit. Therefore it seems to the author that a person will not stop short before entering the world of spiritual perception who can in full earnestness take the point of view of the author of this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. What is presented in the author's later books cannot, it is true, be logically drawn—by deductive reasoning—out of the content of this book. From a living grasp of what is meant in this book by intuitive thinking, however, there will quite naturally result the further living entry into the world of spiritual perception.

• 1. Geistbetätigung

[ 1 ] Everything to be discussed in this book is oriented toward two root questions of human soul life. One question is whether a possibility exists of viewing the being of man in such a way that this view proves to be a support for everything else which, through experience and science, approaches him but which he feels cannot support itself and can be driven by doubt and critical judgment into the realm of uncertainty. The other question is this: Is man, as a being who wants and wills, justified in considering himself to be free, or is this inner freedom a mere illusion that arises in him because he does not see the threads of necessity upon which his willing depends just as much as any happening in nature? No artificial spinning out of thoughts calls forth this question. It comes before the soul quite naturally in a particular disposition of the soul. And one can feel that the soul would lack something of what it should be if it never once saw itself placed, with a greatest possible earnestness in questioning, before the two possibilities: freedom or necessity of the will. It is to be shown in this book that the soul-experiences which the human being has to undergo through the second question depend upon which point of view he is able to take with regard to the first. The attempt is made to show that there is a view of the being of man which can support his other knowledge; and furthermore, to indicate with this view a full justification is won for the idea of the freedom of the will, if only the soul region is first found in which free willing can unfold itself.

[ 2 ] The view under discussion here with respect to both these questions presents itself as one which, once gained, can itself become a part of active soul life. A theoretical answer is not given which, once acquired, merely carries with it a conviction preserved by memory. For the way of picturing things which underlies this book, such an answer would be only a seeming one. No such fixed and final answer is given, but rather a region of experience of the soul is indicated, in which, through the inner activity of the soul itself, the question is answered anew in a living way at any moment that the human being needs it. For someone who has once found the region of the soul in which these questions evolve, the real view of this region gives just what he needs for both these riddles of life; then, with what he has achieved, he can travel on into the distances and depths of this enigmatical life as his need and destiny move him.—With this, a knowledge seems to be indicated which, through its own life and through the relatedness of its own life to the whole human soul life, proves its justification and worth.

[ 3 ] This is how I thought about the content of this book as I wrote it down twenty-five years ago. Today also I must write such sentences when I want to characterize the thoughts toward which this book aims. I limited myself as I wrote at that time, not to say more than what is connected in the closest sense to the two root questions characterized above. If someone should be surprised about the fact that he does not yet find in this book any allusion to the region of the world of spiritual experience that is described by me in later books, I would ask him to bear in mind that at the time I did not want, in fact, to give a description of the results of spiritual research, but wanted rather first to build the foundation upon which such results can rest. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity contains no such specialized results; but what it does contain is indispensable, in my opinion, to anyone who is striving for certainty in such knowledge. What is said in the book can also be acceptable to those who, for one or another reason, which is valid for them, want to have nothing to do with the results of my spiritual-scientific research. But what is attempted here can also be of importance for a person who can regard these spiritual-scientific results as something to which he is drawn. It is this: to show how an unbiased consideration, extending solely to these two questions which lay the foundation for all knowing activity, leads to the view that the human being lives in the midst of a true spiritual world. What is striven for in this book is to justify a knowledge of the spiritual realm before entry into spiritual experience. And this justification is undertaken in such a way that one needs nowhere at all in these expositions to cast a sidelong glance at the experiences put forward by me later, in order to find what is said here acceptable, if one can or wants to enter into the nature of these expositions themselves.

[ 4 ] So this book seems to me on the one hand then to occupy a position completely separate from my actual spiritual-scientific writings, and yet on the other hand to be most closely bound up with them also. All this has moved me now, after twenty-five years, to republish the content of the book in a virtually unchanged form. I have only made some additions to a number of chapters. The experiences I have had with people's misconceptions about what I had written made such detailed amplifications seem necessary to me. I have made only changes where what I wanted to say a quarter of a century ago seems to me today to be awkwardly expressed. (Only someone with ill will could possibly be moved by these changes to say that I have changed my basic conviction.)

[ 5 ] The book has been out of print for many years already. Although it seems to me, as is apparent from what has just been said, that what I expressed twenty-five years ago about the two questions should still be expressed in the same way today, I hesitated for a long to time to prepare this new edition. I asked myself again and again whether, in this or that passage, I did not have to come to terms with the numerous philosophical views that have come to light since the appearance of the first edition. The demands of my purely spiritual-scientific research lately have prevented me from doing this in the way I would want. But now, after the most thorough possible survey of current philosophical work, I have convinced myself that, as tempting as such a task would be in itself, it is not something to be taken up on the context of what is meant to be said through my book. What seemed to me necessary to be said about more recent philosophical directions from the point of view taken in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, may be found in the second volume of my Riddles of Philosophy.

I believe I am indicating correctly one of the fundamental characteristics of our age when I say that, at the present day, all human interests tend to centre in the cult of human individuality. An energetic effort is being made to shake off every kind of authority. Nothing is accepted as valid, unless it springs from the roots of individuality. Everything which hinders the individual in the full development of his powers is thrust aside. The saying “Each one of us must choose his hero in whose footsteps he toils up to Olympus” no longer holds for us. We allow no ideals to be forced upon us. We are convinced that in each of us, if only we probe deep enough into the very heart of our being, there dwells something noble, something worthy of development. We no longer believe that there is a norm of human life to which we must all strive to conform. We regard the perfection of the whole as depending on the unique perfection of each single individual. We do not want to do what anyone else can do equally well. No, our contribution to the development of the world, however trifling, must be something which, by reason of the uniqueness of our nature, we alone can offer. Never have artists been less concerned about rules and norms in art than today. Each of them asserts his right to express, in the creations of his art, what is unique in him. There are dramatists who write in dialect rather than conform to the standard diction which grammar demands.

No better expression for these phenomena can be found than this, that they result from the individual's striving towards freedom, developed to its highest pitch. We do not want to be dependent in any respect, and where dependence must be, we tolerate it only on condition that it coincides with a vital interest of our individuality.

[ 2 ] Truth, too, will be sought in an age such as ours only in the depths of human nature. Of the following two well-known paths described by Schiller, it is the second which will today be found most useful:

Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innen
In dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.
Ist das Auge gesund, so begegnet es aussen dem Schöpfer;
Ist es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.

A truth which comes to us from without bears ever the stamp of uncertainty. Conviction attaches only to what appears as truth to each of us in our own hearts.

[ 3 ] Truth alone can give us confidence in developing our powers. He who is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed. In a world of riddle of which baffles him, he can find no aim for his activity.

[ 4 ] We no longer want to believe; we want to know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths which we do not wholly comprehend. But the individuality which seeks to experience everything in the depths of its own being, is repelled by what it cannot understand. Only that knowledge will satisfy us which springs from the inner life of the personality, and submits itself to no external norm.

Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;
I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.
The healthy eye can through the world the great creator track;
The healthy heart is but the glass which gives creation back.

—Bulwer

[ 5 ] Again, we do not want any knowledge that has encased itself once and for all in hide bound formulas, and which is preserved in Encyclopædias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediate experiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.

[ 6 ] Our scientific doctrines, too, are no longer to be formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title like Fichte's A Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel the Readers to Understand. Nowadays there is no attempt to compel anyone to understand. We claim no agreement with anyone whom a distinct individual need does not drive to a certain view. We do not seek nowadays to cram facts of knowledge even into the immature human being, the child. We seek rather to develop his faculties in such a way that his understanding may depend no longer on our compulsion, but on his will.

[ 7 ] I am under no illusion concerning the characteristics of the present age. I know how many flaunt a manner of life which lacks all individuality and follows only the prevailing fashion. But I know also that many of my contemporaries strive to order their lives in the direction of the principles I have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It does not pretend to offer the “only possible” way to Truth, it only describes the path chosen by one whose heart is set upon Truth.

[ 8 ] The reader will be led at first into somewhat abstract regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines if it is to reach secure conclusions. But he will also be led out of these arid concepts into concrete life. I am fully convinced that one cannot do without soaring into the ethereal realm of abstraction, if one's experience is to penetrate life in all directions. He who is limited to the pleasures of the senses misses the sweetest enjoyments of life. The Oriental sages make their disciples live for years a life of resignation and asceticism before they impart to them their own wisdom. The Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.

[ 9 ] The spheres of life are many and for each there develop a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. There must be one supreme science which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading men back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific specialist seeks in his studies to gain a knowledge of the world and its workings. This book has a philosophical aim: science itself is to be infused with the life of an organic whole. The special sciences are stages on the way to this all-inclusive science. A similar relationship is found in the arts. The composer in his work employs the rules of the theory of composition. This latter is an accumulation of principles, knowledge of which is a necessary presupposition for composing. In the act of composing, the rules of theory become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same sense philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of their art, and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas turn into life forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active, has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.

[ 10 ] How philosophy, as an art, is related to freedom; what freedom is; and whether we do, or can, participate in it—these are the principle problems of my book. All other scientific discussions are put in only because they ultimately throw light on these questions which are, in my opinion, the most intimate that concern mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom”.

[ 11 ] All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle curiosity did it not strive to enhance the existential value of human personality. The true value of the sciences is seen only when we have shown the importance of their results for humanity. The final aim of the individuality can never be the cultivation of any single faculty, but only the development of all capacities which slumber within us. Knowledge has value only in so far as it contributes to the all-round unfolding of the whole nature of man.

[ 12 ] This book, therefore, does not conceive the relation between science and life in such a way that man must bow down before the world of ideas and devote his powers to its service. On the contrary, it shows that he takes possession of the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims, which transcend those of mere science.

[ 13 ] Man must confront ideas as master; lest he become their slave.