8. Final Practical Reflections

Knowledge of this lawfulness with reference to human action is only one particular case of knowing activity. The views at which we have arrived about the nature of knowledge must also be applicable here. To know oneself as an acting personality means therefore: knowingly to possess, for one's actions, the corresponding laws, i.e., the moral concepts and ideals. If we have once known this lawfulness, then our actions are also our creation. The lawfulness is then not given as something that lies outside the object in which the occurrence manifests, but rather as the content of the object itself that is engaged in living activity. The object in this case is our own “I.” If, in knowing, the “I” has really penetrated the essential being of its actions, it then feels itself at the same time to be the master of its actions. As long as this does not occur, the laws of the actions confront us as something foreign — they rule us; what we accomplish stands under the compulsion they exert on us. If, from being foreign entities of this sort, they are transformed into the innate activity of our “I,” then this compulsion ceases. That which compels has become our own being. The lawfulness no longer rules over us; it rules within us over the occurrence that issues from our “I.” To cause something to occur by virtue of a lawfulness lying outside the doer is an act of inner unfreedom; to do so out of the doer himself is an act of inner freedom (Freiheit). To know the laws of one's actions means to be conscious of one's inner freedom. The process of knowledge, according to our argument, is the process of developing toward inner freedom.