The Reality of
Freedom
CHAPTER TEN
Freedom —
Philosophy and Monism
THE
naïve man, who acknowledges as real only what he can
see with his eyes and grasp with his hands, requires for his
moral life, also, a basis for action that shall be perceptible to
the senses. He requires someone or something to impart the
basis for his action to him in a way that his senses can
understand. He is ready to allow this basis for action to be
dictated to him as commandments by any man whom he
considers wiser or more powerful than himself, or whom he
acknowledges for some other reason to be a power over him.
In this way there arise, as moral principles, the authority of
family, state, society, church and God, as previously
described. A man who is very narrow minded still puts his
faith in some one person; the more advanced man allows his
moral conduct to be dictated by a majority (state, society).
It is always on perceptible powers that he builds. The man
who awakens at last to the conviction that basically these
powers are human beings as weak as himself, seeks guidance
from a higher power, from a Divine Being, whom he endows,
however, with sense perceptible features. He conceives this
Being as communicating to him the conceptual content of his
moral life, again in a perceptible way — whether it be, for
example, that God appears in the burning bush, or that He
moves about among men in manifest human shape, and that
their ears can hear Him telling them what to do and what not
to do.
The highest stage of development of naïve realism in the
sphere of morality is that where the moral commandment
(moral idea) is separated from every being other than oneself
and is thought of, hypothetically, as being an absolute
power in one's own inner life. What man first took to be the
external voice of God, he now takes as an independent power
within him, and speaks of this inner voice in such a way as to
identify it with conscience.
But in doing this he has already gone beyond the stage of
naïve consciousness into the sphere where the moral laws
have become independently existing standards. There they
are no longer carried by real bearers, but have become
metaphysical entities existing in their own right. They are
analogous to the invisible “visible forces” of metaphysical
realism, which does not seek reality through the part of it
that man has in his thinking, but hypothetically adds it on
to actual experience. These extra-human moral standards
always occur as accompanying features of metaphysical
realism. For metaphysical realism is bound to seek the
origin of morality in the sphere of extra-human reality.
Here there are several possibilities. If the hypothetically
assumed entity is conceived as in itself unthinking, acting
according to purely mechanical laws, as materialism would
have it, then it must also produce out of itself, by purely
mechanical necessity, the human individual with all his
characteristic features. The consciousness of freedom can
then be nothing more than an illusion. For though I consider
myself the author of my action, it is the matter of
which I am composed and the movements going on in it
that are working in me. I believe myself free; but in fact all
my actions are nothing but the result of the material processes
which underlie my physical and mental organization.
It is said that we have the feeling of freedom only because
we do not know the motives compelling us.
We must emphasize that the feeling of freedom is due to the
absence of external compelling motives ... Our action is
necessitated as is our thinking.
(see fn 1)
Another possibility is that a man may picture the extra-human
Absolute that lies behind the world of appearances
as a spiritual being. In this case he will also seek the impulse
for his actions in a corresponding spiritual force. He will see
the moral principles to be found in his own reason as the
expression of this being itself, which has its own special
intentions with regard to man. To this kind of dualist the
moral laws appear to be dictated by the Absolute, and all
that man has to do is to use his intelligence to find out the
decisions of the absolute being and then carry them out.
The moral world order appears to the dualist as the perceptible
reflection of a higher order standing behind it.
Earthly morality is the manifestation of the extra-human
world order. It is not man that matters in this moral order,
but the being itself, that is, the extra-human entity. Man
shall do as this being wills.
Eduard von Hartmann,
who imagines this being itself as a Godhead whose very existence
is a life of suffering, believes that this Divine Being has
created the world in order thereby to gain release from His
infinite suffering. Hence this philosopher regards the moral
evolution of humanity as a process which is there for the
redemption of God.
Only through the building up of a moral world order by
intelligent self-conscious individuals can the world process
be led towards its goal. ... True existence is the incarnation
of the Godhead; the world process is the Passion of the
incarnated Godhead and at the same time the way of redemption
for Him who was crucified in the flesh; morality, however,
is the collaboration in the shortening of this path of suffering and
redemption.
(see fn 2)
Here man does not act because he wants to, but he shall
act, because it is God's will to be redeemed. Whereas the
materialistic dualist makes man an automaton whose actions
are only the result of a purely mechanical system, the
spiritualistic dualist (that is, one who sees the Absolute, the
Being-in-itself, as something spiritual in which man has no
share in his conscious experience) makes him a slave to the
will of the Absolute. As in materialism, so also in one-sided
spiritualism, in fact in any kind of metaphysical realism
inferring but not experiencing something extra-human as
the true reality, freedom is out of the question.
Metaphysical as well as naïve realism, consistently followed
out, must deny freedom for one and the same reason: they
both see man as doing no more than putting into effect, or
carrying out, principles forced upon him by necessity.
Naive realism destroys freedom by subjecting man to the
authority of a perceptible being or of one conceived on the
analogy of a perceptible being, or eventually to the authority of the
abstract inner voice which it interprets as “conscience”;
the metaphysician, who merely infers the extra-human
reality, cannot acknowledge freedom because he sees man
as being determined, mechanically or morally, by a
“Being-in-itself”.
Monism
will have to recognize that naïve realism is partially
justified because it recognizes the justification of the world
of percepts. Whoever is incapable of producing moral ideas
through intuition must accept them from others. In so far as
a man receives his moral principles from without, he is in
fact unfree. But monism attaches as much significance to the
idea as to the percept. The idea, however, can come to
manifestation in the human individual. In so far as man
follows the impulses coming from this side, he feels himself
to be free. But monism denies all justification to metaphysics,
which merely draws inferences, and consequently also to the
impulses of action which are derived from so-called
“Beings-in-themselves”. According to the monistic view, man may
act unfreely-when he obeys some perceptible external
compulsion; he can act freely, when he obeys none but
himself. Monism cannot recognize any unconscious compulsion
hidden behind percept and concept. If anyone
asserts that the action of a fellow man is done unfreely, then
he must identify the thing or the person or the institution
within the perceptible world, that has caused the person to
act; and if he bases his assertion upon causes of action lying
outside the world that is real to the senses and the spirit, then
monism can take no notice of it.
According to the monistic view, then, man's action is
partly unfree, partly free. He finds himself to be unfree in the
world of percepts, and he realizes within himself the free
spirit.
The moral laws which the metaphysician who works by
mere inference must regard as issuing from a higher power,
are, for the adherent of monism, thoughts of men; for him the
moral world order is neither the imprint of a purely mechanical
natural order, nor that of an extra-human world order,
but through and through the free creation of men. It is not
the will of some being outside him in the world that man
has to carry out, but his own; he puts into effect his own
resolves and intentions, not those of another being. Monism
does not see, behind man's actions, the purposes of a supreme
directorate, foreign to him and determining him according
to its will, but rather sees that men, in so far as they realize
their intuitive ideas, pursue only their own human ends.
Moreover, each individual pursues his own particular ends.
For the world of ideas comes to expression, not in a community
of men, but only in human individuals. What appears
as the common goal of a whole group of people is only the
result of the separate acts of will of its individual members,
and in fact, usually of a few outstanding ones who, as their
authorities, are followed by the others. Each one of us has it
in him to be a free spirit, just as every rose bud has in it a
rose.
Monism, then, in the sphere of true moral action, is a
freedom philosophy. Since it is a philosophy of reality, it
rejects the metaphysical, unreal restrictions of the free
spirit as completely as it accepts the physical and historical
(naïvely real) restrictions of the naïve man. Since it does not
consider man as a finished product, disclosing his full nature
in every moment of his life, it regards the dispute as to
whether man as such is free or not, to be of no consequence.
It sees in man a developing being, and asks whether, in the
course of this development, the stage of the free spirit can
be reached.
Monism knows that Nature does not send man forth from
her arms ready made as a free spirit, but that she leads him
up to a certain stage from which he continues to develop
still as an unfree being until he comes to the point where he
finds his own self.
Monism is quite clear that a being acting under physical
or moral compulsion cannot be a truly moral being. It regards
the phases of automatic behavior (following natural urges
and instincts) and of obedient behavior (following moral
standards) as necessary preparatory stages of morality, but it
also sees that both these transitory stages can be overcome
by the free spirit. Monism frees the truly moral world
conception both from the mundane fetters of naïve moral
maxims and from the transcendental moral maxims of the
speculative metaphysician. Monism can no more eliminate
the former from the world than it can eliminate percepts; it
rejects the latter because it seeks all the principles for the
elucidation of the world phenomena within that world, and
none outside it.
Just as monism refuses even to think of principles of
knowledge other than those that apply to men
(see Chapter 7),
so it emphatically rejects even the thought of moral maxims
other than those that apply to men. Human morality, like
human knowledge, is conditioned by human nature. And
just as beings of a different order will understand knowledge
to mean something very different from what it means to us,
so will other beings have a different morality from ours.
Morality is for the monist a specifically human quality, and
spiritual freedom the human way of being moral.
Author's additions, 1918
- In forming a judgment about the argument of the two
preceding chapters, a difficulty can arise in that one appears
to be faced with a contradiction. On the one hand we have
spoken of the experience of thinking, which is felt to have
universal significance, equally valid for every human
consciousness; on the other hand we have shown that the
ideas which come to realization in the moral life, and are of
the same kind as those elaborated in thinking, come to
expression in each human consciousness in a quite individual
way. If we cannot get beyond regarding this antithesis as a
“contradiction”, and if we do not see that in the living
recognition of this actually existing
antithesis a piece of man's
essential nature reveals itself, then we shall be unable to see
either the idea of knowledge or the idea of freedom in a true
light. For those who think of their concepts as merely
abstracted from the sense perceptible world and who do
not allow intuition its rightful place, this thought, here
claimed as a reality, must remain a “mere contradiction”.
If we really understand how ideas are intuitively experienced
in their self-sustaining essence, it becomes clear that in the
act of knowing, man, on the edge of the world of ideas, lives
his way into something which is the same for all men, but
that when, from this world of ideas, he derives the intuitions
for his acts of will, he individualizes a part of this world by
the same activity that he practices as a universal human one
in the spiritual ideal process of knowing. What appears as a
logical contradiction between the universal nature of
cognitive ideas and the individual nature of moral ideas is
the very thing that, when seen in its reality, becomes a living
concept. It is a characteristic feature of the essential nature
of man that what can be intuitively grasped swings to and
fro within man, like a living pendulum, between universally
valid knowledge and the individual experience of it.
For those who cannot see the one half of the swing in its
reality, thinking remains only a subjective human activity;
for those who cannot grasp the other half, man's activity in
thinking will seem to lose all individual life. For the first kind
of thinker, it is the act of knowing that is an unintelligible
fact; for the second kind, it is the moral life. Both will put
forward all sorts of imagined ways of explaining the one or
the other, all equally unfounded, either because they entirely
fail to grasp that thinking can be actually experienced, or
because they misunderstand it as a merely abstracting
activity.
* * * * *
- On page 147 I have spoken of
materialism.
I am well aware that there are thinkers — such as
Ziehen, mentioned
above — who do not call themselves materialists at all, but
who must nevertheless be described as such from the point
of view put forward in this book. The point is not whether
someone says that for him the world is not restricted to
merely material existence and that therefore he is no
materialist; but the point is whether he develops concepts
which are applicable only to material existence. Anyone who
says, “Our action is necessitated as is our thinking”, has
implied a concept which is applicable only to material
processes, but not to action or to being; and if he were to
think his concept through to the end, he could not help but
think materialistically. He avoids doing this only by the
same inconsistency that so often results from not thinking
one's thoughts through to the end.
It is often said nowadays that the materialism of the
nineteenth century is outmoded in knowledgeable circles.
But in fact this is not at all true. It is only that nowadays
people so often fail to notice that they have no other ideas
but those with which one can approach only material things.
Thus recent materialism is veiled, whereas in the second
half of the nineteenth century it showed itself openly. The
veiled materialism of the present is no less intolerant of an
outlook that grasps the world spiritually than was the
self-confessed materialism of the last century. But it deceives
many who think they have a right to reject a view of the
world which takes spirit into account on the ground that the
scientific view “has long ago abandoned materialism”.
Footnotes:
- Ziehen,
Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie, 1st edition,
pp. 207 ff. For the way I have here spoken about
“materialism”,
and the justification for doing so, see the
Addition to this chapter.
- Hartmann, Phaenomenologie des sittlichen
Bewusstseins, p. 871.
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