43. Adolf Gerecke “The Futility of Moralism”

The author seeks to prove the insignificance, even harmfulness, of moral commandments or norms for human action. He sees the establishment of such norms as a consequence of the dualistic world view more or less consciously advocated by philosophers and religious founders. According to the latter, the laws of morality are supposed to be implanted in the soul, thereby overcoming sensuality and ennobling the merely physical existence into a moral one. Gerecke now attempts to show that there is no special spiritual being apart from the physical being of man. For him, human sensations are only the result of an external impulse to our organism; he lets knowledge arise through the mechanical play of new impulses with the continuing effects of older ones in the organism; affects and desires are for him the reaction of the organic correlation of forces to such impressions. If an effect on an organism is such that its metabolism is stimulated, pleasure arises; if it is inhibited, displeasure. We sympathize with a person if the effects of his presence on our organism are such that the latter finds itself stimulated in its activity; otherwise the presence of the person triggers antipathy. Since man has absolutely no power to arrange the external world in such a way that it acts upon him in a manner he desires, he is also unable to arrange his actions, which are dependent upon it, according to norms which are entirely alien to this external world and which originate solely from within himself. Our affects and desires, our passions and sympathies are, in Gerecke's sense, the result of the mechanical process of the world; but the influence of moral legislation on them is meaningless. They cannot change the necessary course of our physical life, they can only act in the same way as the material agents, i.e. in the roundabout way that they generate desires and affects. According to Gerecke's conviction, this usually happens in a harmful way. Every moral teacher or statesman "who, in the interest of his social system, strives to control the antipathetic and sympathetic affects, who, more correctly, makes the foolish and criminal attempt to force people - by the force of law and the arts of persuasion - to suppress the effects resulting from these affects, I call an educator of criminals" ($. 183). Gerecke believes that through the process of suppressing desires, other more unusual and refined ones arise. "The endeavor to control or even eradicate desires is tantamount to educating them to extremes" (p. 190).

I must confess that rarely has a book caused me such bitter feelings as this one. I am convinced that the author is well placed to serve science in the way it must be done today if we are to overcome the often unsatisfied views of the past. The path that leads to a prosperous future does indeed lie in overcoming dualism and in establishing monism, which rejects the assumption of two worlds. The future will see the ethical life of man emerging from the same source from which natural events spring. Moral laws will only be valid as special cases of natural laws. That is why they will no longer be sought in abstract norms, but in concrete individual life. The author of this book suspects this, or rather: a kind of unconscious conviction of it haunts him. But his imaginative life is contaminated by the banal views of materialism. This world view knows no difference between man and a machine. At least not a qualitative one. What makes man different from a watch, for example, is only the complexity of the substances and forces that compose him. There can be nothing more harmful in the spiritual field than this world view. It wreaks tremendous havoc in human minds because it is shallow and superficial and shallow and shallow views are always the best fodder for the great masses. The fact that in Gerecke we are dealing with a writer who would have had a lot of work to do on his education before he took up the pen is proven by his incredibly clumsy style. It is a pity that the man did not work on himself a little more; a better style would probably have produced more thorough thoughts. The book before us, however, is of no use to anyone.