12. Knowledge, Truth and Freedom

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How does a truth approach a person who is based on the assumption that it does not contain the reasons for being, but merely reflects them? It must be assumed that the reason why it makes this or that assumption lies not within the conscious thinking, permeated by our self, but outside of it. Just as what a single thought represents lies outside of consciousness, so too the reason why we connect two or more thoughts in a certain way lies not within, but outside of our world of thought. The reason why we connect two concepts is not at the same time the reason why they belong together in reality. In this contemplation, thinking must therefore always bear in mind that it cannot produce truth from its own activity, but that it can only appropriate it as it is determined by something beyond it. Here, man does not produce truth by himself, but allows himself to be determined by circumstances beyond the scope of his ideas. In the truest sense, he receives truths determined by entities other than thoughts. For it is not the fact that thoughts are determined by entities outside our consciousness that is actually important, but rather that it is extra-mental entities, i.e., entities that cannot be reached by conscious thought, that determine the truth. This truth, which comes to man in a finished form, is in the proper sense that which can be called a dogma. This dogma can appear in two forms: either the ideal world itself comes to us as a finished product, with the claim that the reasons for its formation lie in an alien element; then we are dealing with the dogmatics of theology. Theological truths are dogmatic because they do not allow the reasons for being and the reasons for believing to coincide. Our insight into them is not one that we actively generate ourselves, but one that is imposed on us.

The second type of dogmatics is the dogmatics of [experience]. It is based on the principle that we can only gain our truths by observing the world as it is presented to our senses and by conceptualizing the things and phenomena it contains. This, then, is the obvious reason why we establish a truth. Not in the content of the thoughts that constitute it, but in the factors that determine the course of the phenomena that the thoughts merely depict. Here, too, the reason for believing is the fact that we [observe] a fact, not that which determines the actual relationship of the fact itself. The truth, as in the previous case, is determined, according to its content, not by the course of thought that we have penetrated, but by circumstances lying outside it; it is one that has been forced upon us. In every respect, observation is [analogous to] revelation as a source of knowledge in theology. In both cases, the truth is to be received as a finished product. In both cases, knowledge is actually a form of belief. Real knowledge can never arise from a truth taken from outside. Thus, two points of view of science that appear to be so opposed are in principle based on exactly the same premise. Both can also lead to the same consequences. Since they both see the ultimate foundation of existence as lying in the beyond, they lack the lucid clarity in the theoretical world view that characterized self-conscious thinking that relies only on itself. It loses itself in mysterious foreboding of an unknown; this is not without consequence for practical action, as we shall see in the last part of this essay. That self-conscious, self-reliant, intense thinking wants nothing to do with a moral behavior whose driving forces it would not find within itself. It recognizes only in itself the motives of its actions. The other thinking is characterized in a practical sense by a relationship of servility to the power of the great, sensed unknown. It finds its moral support not in itself but outside itself. The first thinking is characterized by a self-awareness appropriate to man; he has a noble pride in achieving his destiny through his own strength. The other is in its very essence determined by its humility and awareness of powerlessness in the face of the divine being. We will then see what consequences these determinations have for our view of human freedom.

Our view of the sources of our knowledge cannot fail to influence our practical actions. It is, after all, an equally incontrovertible and common truth that true wisdom always brings about a better attitude and that the knowledgeable and educated person is also morally superior to the ignorant and uncultured. It is true that one often hears the opposite view, that an ugly disposition can very well be combined with high insight and that the source of moral goodness can be present in the simplest, most uneducated nature as well as in the highly educated. But against the first it may be objected that not everything that is called by that name is real knowledge, and that there is an after-wisdom that is very little connected with man. This kind of knowledge is merely something that has been learned and acquired externally, not something that has been gained through one's own vigorous thinking. But what is acquired through the power of independent thinking becomes so deeply intertwined with our entire being, with the core of our inner self, we identify with it so completely that we cannot emancipate ourselves from it in any way. We do not merely possess such knowledge, but we ourselves are truly that which constitutes the content of this knowledge. When we act, we must put our very essence into the action to be accomplished. How else should we take the motives of the activity, from the source from which all our thinking and all our being flows. We must here fully agree with Riehl when he says of knowledge: “The deeper it sinks and the further it spreads, the more it is transformed into moral power; as such, knowledge becomes practical insight, understanding becomes wisdom. From the increase of insight follows the improvement of attitude, and so the system of knowledge is the prerequisite and support of ethics.” But the other objection, that a person with relatively little education can be morally superior, is also easily countered. After all, the actions of a particular person only extend to a particular sphere, to one area. Now, it is not a question of an unrestricted range of knowledge, but only of whether a person's knowledge extends as far as the range of his actions. He who has a narrow circle of activity also needs a narrow circle of knowledge. And so it may come about that a person with relatively limited knowledge behaves morally higher if he does not break his circle.

The doctrine of moral action will first have to start from the motives for moral behavior. These can be determined in two ways. And this determination is completely parallel to the determinations of the two theoretical worldviews determined at the beginning of our theory of knowledge.

These motives can be sought outside of our thinking or they can be seen as emerging from the content of thinking itself, which we have developed. Those who seek the sources of truth in the thinking of otherworldly entities and conditions will also seek the motives of morality in a beyond; they will perceive the precepts of their behavior as externally imposed commandments that they must obey. There is a moral imperative for such a view, to which one simply has to submit and which sets a certain standard for our actions. In this case, acting according to this standard is felt to be a duty. Kant's moral teaching is based on this point of view insofar as it is based on the categorical imperative. The moral dogma of theology also takes this view. This is simply imposed on us as God-given; we act according to it not because of our insight into its truth, but because of its divinity, which is guaranteed by revelation. It is not the moral force that prompts us to act and flows from the moral thoughts, but it is the compulsion, the feeling of necessity that they entail. But there is still another view that seems to be completely opposed to this point of view. It is the one that sees the impulses for action in the instincts of nature. Here man acts just as little as he would under divine commandments from implanted fundamental moral forces, but under the compulsion of mere natural law. He may not act out of necessity, but he does act out of physical necessity. It is the dogma of the efficacy of nature, which, in relation to moral value and in principle, is on the same level as the dogma of the first kind. The second world view presents a fundamentally different picture of moral action. It does not allow the precepts of morality to be determined by a power in the hereafter, but rather to arise from human thought itself. Just as in the first part, objective truth has essentially been incorporated into thought, so now everything that determines action is strictly contained within the human world of ideas. It is not the other, which we only imagine in the conceptual world, that determines our actions, but the content of our thoughts itself. Just as, in the theoretical, the content of the thoughts was the world ground itself, so here, in the moral, this content is at the same time what directly connects us morally. Just as in our actions we must see an execution of what an external power has prescribed to us, so too in our moral behavior we must see only an execution of what we prescribe to ourselves on the basis of our insight. This is different; here we are our own moral lawgiver. There, our practical behavior is essentially the fulfillment of duty; here, it is moral will. Now it is obvious that he who does not recognize any external norm of truth in theory must also reject such a norm in action. For there can only be one fundamental principle of the world, and if this enters into our thinking truly and substantially, it can only determine our actions from there. And that is the practical conclusion of our world view: it instructs man to have no other purpose than that which he gives himself. Only in this way, however, is a real will possible. A will is present only when the prescriber is at the same time the executor in action. If one being prescribes and another being executes this prescription, then the second is merely a machine in the hands of the former, and only in the latter, but not in the agent, can one speak of a true volition. Will consists essentially in the fact that it is linked to consciousness, that the agent follows his own insight, his own command. Such action must be protected from only two degenerations. Firstly, to see only the action of subjective arbitrariness in the execution of one's own commandments. But our world view could only take this point of view if it also assumed that the circumstances of thoughts are determined not by the content of thought, but by subjective arbitrariness, by pure chance. But for us, it is not the arbitrary subject that is the determining factor, but the content of thought itself. And the awareness that we ourselves are our own legislators does not arise from the fact that we decide according to our arbitrary mood, but from the fact that we are directly present in the legislative thought, that nothing is imposed on us, but everything is imbued by us. It is not a lowering of moral motives to us, but rather an uplifting of the human being to such a height that he makes thinking, which in itself determines its content, his own activity. We do not defend Schlegel's irony of subjectivity, which feels so exalted about its entire activity, which considers itself justified in destroying everything it does in the moment, but the view that thinking has a real [practical] content, and that man is able to elevate his spiritual self so high that this content no longer appears to him as something otherworldly and overpowering, but as his own content. We defend the point of view that it is the spiritual personality of man that provides the arena in which the source of the world develops and appears in its true form. While irony destroys any sacredness of the moral by reducing it to a whim, our view sanctifies the human personality by elevating it to the source of morality. Our view does not deny the existence of an absolute world substance in morality any more than it has denied it in theoretical knowledge. But it gives man a very peculiar relationship to this primal ground. Instead of assuming a principle that only directs the world from the outside, we take the view that this principle has poured itself out into the world of things with complete self-dissolution, with absolute self-renunciation. If the most widespread view is that things exist alongside their reason as its creatures, we assume that such a reason is nowhere to be found outside of things. We say outside of things. For in itself we see this reason as a real one. We do not take the standpoint of that atheism which simply rejects the reason of the world and simply considers the things - as they appear to our senses in observation - to be the universe; we base the world on an absolute cause, but we are convinced that this view has been completely absorbed into the world and that no independent existence has been retained in and for itself. And our practical-moral world view is the consequence of this assumption. There is no volition of the world principle except for human volition, because this principle has not reserved any resolutions for itself. It wills only insofar as man wills. It has renounced its own volition and has merged into humanity, and so its action is not one according to an external norm, but according to the determining factors of its own inner being. Through this complete absorption of the original source of things in the world, all the contradictions that occupied human thought for so long are suddenly eliminated. We will come back to this later. Here we must still note that history appears not as the result of the divine plan of the world, but as that of human ideals. History becomes the development of people's own ideals of will: What Herm. Ulrici, Im. H. Fichte, and others strove for, a union of a rational theism, as it is the need of the Western population, with a pantheistic world view, seems to be achieved in our scientific conviction.