Third Lecture

The question of a philosophy of freedom became a burning one on such grounds, for what the concept of freedom encompasses is an immediate human experience, and basically all that is needed is enough impartiality to say to oneself: Human freedom is experienced. - There is the experience of the free human being in consciousness. In this case, the view of nature that arises from agnosticism, because it actually rejects everything that points to the spirit, cannot arrive at an unbiased judgment about this immediate experience of freedom; for it sees its ideal in explaining everything according to the so-called causal method, that is, in such a way that every event is conditioned by a cause and proves to be an effect. And this agnostic-scientific attitude believes that it violates the laws of a true explanation of the world if it allows anything to be valid that cannot be explained according to the principle of causal necessity. But no matter how hard one tries to explain the world in terms of causal necessity, precisely when one consistently develops this causal explanation, one cannot use it to approach the experience of human freedom. This immediate experience simply falls outside the scope of the causal explanation.