The Bridge Between Morality and Nature

How do westerners think? Let's take an outstanding, honest social thinker of the West, for example Adam Smith. Just as natural science of the West does not include people—they include anything but humanity—so also social science doesn't consider people. Just study Adam Smith: he doesn't speak about people at all in his national economics but refers to a particular piece of earth, what grows and what stands on it, and then he talks about a machine which sows the seed, allows germination and so on. So you have a piece of earth, and you have a machine (a drawing is made) which only through its automation must freely be able to alter this piece of earth. Thus everything happening on this piece of earth must be properly directed by this machine. Adam Smith mainly spoke about these two elements and stressed that the principal qualities of the machine would be called economic freedom, and the piece of earth he called private property. Here we have the actual original cell of the social being: a piece of private property with an economic machine, which is independent from other machines and other private properties. The concepts of Adam Smith only dealt with cultivated land, with private property and with such economic machines with economic freedom. These are his actual concepts. If he comes across a person, he sees him not as a human being but says: this represents a piece of private property and an economic machine, and it is only formed by having a head, a trunk in the middle and some limbs, to which is added on top, a phantom.—However, one doesn't think like this, no one understands it. This only appears on the private property. By activating the economic machine it externally takes on the form of the phantom's endowments of head, trunk and limbs. Nowhere will you discover any kind of understanding for the human being amongst Adam Smith's ideas. Just try it out for once! You will find combinations of private property with an economic machine, but you will never find a concept of the human being. Gradually you will discover things around the human being, but never the human being itself. What is characterised regarding freedom is but a last shadow which is transferred on to the machine. Human freedom is not spoken about, what rises with spiritual content out of moral fantasy to make people fully human is not mentioned—because one must think like in my Philosophy of Freedom>” ( Philosophy of Spiritual Activity)—but instead the subject is the relationship between private property and economic machines. We have on the one side the wisdom which has remained behind from the East, the inability of the human soul-spiritual to come out of the physical world. We have from the lands of the West the ability to say: Yes, here is something real in the world because something is on earth and can be automated; his lordship has great bounty, his Lordship has outer power through the management and hunt of goods. Through this one sees the Lordship has something. Yet, what rises from this is actually only a human phantom.