VIII. The Social Aspect of Legal and Economic Institutions and the Freedom of the Human Spirit

One must first understand that man is born neither free nor unfree, but that he can be educated and developed towards freedom, towards an understanding of freedom, towards experiencing freedom, if one brings him into contact with that spiritual life that imbues him with forces that first set him free in his development as a human being; that one can develop up to the point where our thoughts are no longer abstract, unreal, ideological, but thoughts that are grasped by the will. This is what I tried to present to the world as a realization in my Philosophy of Freedom: the marriage of the will with thoughts that have become inwardly free. And from this marriage of the will with the inwardly freed thoughts, it is to be hoped that the human being emerges who also develops the abilities, in living together with others, that is, in a social community, each for himself and each socially with each other, to produce such legal and economic orders that one accepts as necessary, just as one accepts the necessity of having to carry one's physical body, of obeying its laws, and not being free to grow one's right hand on the left side and vice versa, or one's head in the middle of one's chest. We do not fight against what is naturally reasonable out of our freedom. We fight against what is inhuman and unnatural about human legal and economic institutions with our freedom when we have come to the appropriate awareness, because we know that it can be done differently. And we know and want to know, as modern people, that every human being should work democratically on this transformation of the external economic and legal order to such a rationality that it does not impair our freedom any more than it impairs the natural lawfulness of our physical body. To understand this, however, one must have a heart and mind for the reality of spiritual life, because the kind of spiritual life that is an appendage of state and economic life, the kind of spiritual life that one acquires only if one is the son of rich people or has received state scholarships, or for the sake of acquiring a state position, this kind of spiritual life does not make one free. A spiritual life that stands on its own, that works out of its own strength, that is free, and that produces, in contrast to those moods, those three moods: inhibition of the will, oppression of the sense of right, obscuration of thoughts, which are present when the will is unfree, the other mood: the free development of the will in spiritual life.