X. Monism and the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity

Another possibility is that someone will find in a spiritual being the Absolute hidden behind all phenomena. If so, he will look for the spring of action in such a kind of spiritual power. He will regard the moral principles which his reason contains as the manifestation of this absolute being, which pursues in men its own special purposes. Moral laws appear to the Dualist, who holds this view, as dictated by the Absolute, and man's only task is to discover, by means of his reason, the decisions of the Absolute and to carry them out. For the Dualist, the moral order of the world is the perceptible reflection of the higher order that lies behind it. Our earthly morality is the manifestation of the extra-human world-order. It is not man who matters in this moral order but the Absolute, that is, the extra-human Being. Man ought to do what this being wills. Eduard von Hartmann, who identifies this being as such with a Godhead whose existence is a life of suffering, believes that this Divine Being has created the world in order to gain, by means of the world, release from his infinite suffering. Hence this philosopher regards the moral evolution of humanity as a process, the function of which is the redemption of God. “Only through the building up of a moral world-order on the part of rational, self-conscious individuals is it possible for the world-process to be led to its goal.” “Real existence is the incarnation of the Godhead. The world-process is the passion of the incarnated God, and at the same time the way of redemption for him who was crucified in the flesh; morality, however, is co-operation in the shortening of this path of suffering and redemption” (Hartmann, Phaenomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, p. 871). On this view man does not act because he wills, but he ought to act because it is God's will to be redeemed. Whereas the Materialistic Dualist turns man into an automaton, the action of which is nothing but the effect of causality according to purely mechanical laws, the Spiritualistic Dualist ( i.e., he who treats the Absolute, the thing-in-itself, as a spiritual something in which man with his conscious experience has no share), makes man the slave of the will of the Absolute. Freedom (spiritual activity) is excluded in Materialism, as well as in one-sided Spiritualism, and in general Metaphysical Realism which infers, as true reality, an extra-human something which it does not experience.