19. Human Spiritual Activity (Freiheit)
Our view about the sources of our knowing activity cannot help but
affect the way we view our practical conduct. The human being does
indeed act in accordance with thought determinants that lie within
him. What he does is guided by the intentions and goals he sets
himself. But it is entirely obvious that these goals, intentions,
ideals, etc., will bear the same character as the rest of man's
thought-world. Dogmatic science will therefore offer a truth for human
conduct of an essentially different character than that resulting from
our epistemology. If the truths the human being attains in science are
determined by a factual necessity having its seat outside thinking,
then the ideals upon which he bases his actions will also be
determined in the same way. The human being then acts in accordance
with laws he cannot verify objectively: he imagines some norm that is
prescribed for his actions from outside. But this is the nature of any
commandment that the human being has to observe. Dogma, as principle
of conduct, is moral commandment.
With our epistemology as a foundation, the matter is quite different.
Our epistemology recognizes no other foundation for truths than the
thought content lying within them. When a moral ideal comes about,
therefore, it is the inner power lying within the content of this
ideal that guides our actions. It is not because an ideal is given us
as law that we act in accordance with it, but rather because the
ideal, by virtue of it s content, is active in us, leads us. The
stimulus to action does not lie outside of us; it lies within us. In
the case of a commandment of duty we would feel ourselves subject to
it; we would have to act in a particular way because it ordered us to
do so. There, “should” comes first and then “want
to,” which must submit itself to the “should.”
According to our view, this is not the case. Man's willing is
sovereign. It carries out only what lies as thought-content within the
human personality. The human being does not let himself be given laws
by any outer power; he is his own lawgiver.
And, according to our world view, who, in fact, should give them to
him? The ground of the world has poured itself completely out into the
world; it has not withdrawn from the world in order to guide it from
outside; it drives the world from inside; it has not withheld itself
from the world. The highest form in which it arises within the reality
of ordinary life is thinking and, along with thinking, the human
personality. If, therefore, the world ground has goals, they are
identical with the goals that the human being sets himself in living
and in what he does. It is not by searching out this or that
commandment of the guiding power of the world that he acts in
accordance with its intentions but rather through acting in accordance
with his own insights. For within these insights there lives that
guiding power of the world. It does not live as will somewhere outside
the human being; it has given up all will of its own in order to make
everything dependent upon man's will. In order for the human being to
be able to be his own lawgiver, he must give up all thoughts of such
things as extra-human determining powers of the world, etc.
Let us take this opportunity to call attention to the excellent
article by Kreyenbuehl in Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. 18,
no. 3, 1882.
[
Ethical-Spiritual Activity in Kant, Mercury Press, 1986. –Ed.
]
This explains correctly how the maxims for our actions
result altogether from the direct determinations of our individuality;
how everything that is ethically great is not imposed by the power of
moral law but rather is carried out under the direct impulse of an
individual idea.
Only with this view is true spiritual activity possible for the human
being. If man does not bear within himself the grounds for his
actions, but rather must conduct himself according to commandments,
then he acts under compulsion, he stands under necessity, almost like
a mere nature being.
Our philosophy is therefore pre-eminently a philosophy of spiritual
activity. (see Note 9) First it allows theoretically how all forces,
etc., that supposedly direct the world from outside must fall away; it
then makes the human being into his own master in the very best sense
of the word. When a person acts morally, this is not for us the
fulfillment of duty but rather the manifestation of his completely
free nature. The human being does not act because he ought, but rather
be cause he wants to. Goethe had this view in mind when he said:
“Lessing, who resentfully felt many a limitation, has one of his
characters say, ‘No one has to have to.’ A witty, jovial man said,
‘Whoever wants to, has to.’ A third, admittedly a cultivated person,
added, ‘Whoever has insight, also wants to.’” Thus there is no
impetus for our actions other than our insight. Without any kind of
compulsion entering in, the free human being acts in accordance with
his insight, in accordance with commandments that he gives himself.
The well-known Kant-Schiller controversy revolved around these truths.
Kant stood upon the standpoint of duty's commandments. He believed it
a degradation of moral law to make it dependent upon human
subjectivity.
In his view man acts morally only when he renounces all subjective
impulses in his actions and bends his neck solely to the majesty of
duty. Schiller regarded this view as a degradation of human nature. Is
human nature really so evil that it must completely push aside its own
impulses in this way when it wants to be moral? The world view of
Schiller and Goethe can only be in accord with the view we have put
forward. The origin of man's actions is to be sought within himself.
Therefore in history, whose subject, after all, is man, one should not
speak about outer influences upon his actions, about ideas that live
in a certain time, etc., and least of all about a plan underlying
history. History is nothing but the evolution of human actions, views,
etc. “In all ages it is only individuals who have worked for
science, not the age itself. It was the age that executed Socrates by
poison; the age that burned Hus; ages have always remained the
same,” says Goethe. All a priori constructing of plans that
supposedly underlie history is in conflict with the historical method
as it results from the nature of history. The goal of this method is
to become aware of what human beings have contributed to the progress
of their race, to experience the goals a certain personality has set
himself, the direction he has given to his age. History is to be based
entirely upon man's nature. Its willing, its tendencies are to be
understood. Our science of knowledge totally excludes the possibility
of inserting into history a purpose such as, for example, that human
beings are drawn up from a lower to a higher level of perfection, and
so on. In the same way, to our view it seems erroneous to present
historical events as a succession of causes and effects like facts of
nature the way Herder does in his
Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.
The laws of history are in fact of a much higher
nature. A fact of physics is determined by another fact in such a way
that the law stands over the phenomena. A historical fact, as
something ideal, is determined by something ideal. There cause and
effect, after all, can be spoken of only if one clings entirely to
externals. Who could think that he is giving an accurate picture by
calling Luther the cause of the Reformation? History is essentially a
science of ideals. Its reality is, after all, ideas. Therefore
devotion to the object is the only correct method. Any going beyond
the object is unhistorical.
Psychology, ethnology, and history (see Note 10) are the major forms
of the humanities. Their methods, as we have seen, are based upon the
direct apprehension of ideal reality. The object of their study is the
idea, the spiritual, just as the law of nature was the object of
inorganic science, and the typus of organic science.
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