8. Goethe Studies Morals and Christianity

The realization of this lawfulness for human action is only a special case of cognition. The views we have derived about the nature of cognition must therefore also be applicable here. To recognize oneself as an acting personality thus means: to possess the corresponding laws for one's actions, that is, the moral concepts and ideals as knowledge. If we have recognized this lawfulness, then our actions are also our work. The lawfulness is then not given as something that lies outside the object on which the action appears, but as the content of the object itself that is conceived in living action. In this case, the object is our own ego. If the latter has really penetrated its action in a recognizing way, then it also feels itself to be the master of it. As long as this does not take place, the laws of action confront us as something alien; they dominate us; what we accomplish is under the compulsion they exert on us. Once they have been transformed from such a foreign entity into the very own action of our ego, this compulsion ceases. The categorical imperative is to human action what the expediency ideas of teleology are to the science of living beings. The ideas of expediency hinder research into the purely natural laws of organic beings; the categorical imperative hinders the living out of purely natural moral impulses. The imperative has become our own nature. Lawfulness no longer rules over us, but in us over the events emanating from our ego. The realization of an event by means of a lawfulness that is external to the realizer is an act of bondage; the realization of an event by the realizer himself is an act of freedom. To recognize the laws of one's actions means to be aware of one's freedom. The process of cognition is, according to our explanations, the process of development towards freedom.