The naïve man who acknowledges nothing as real except what he can see
with his eyes and grasp with his hands, demands for his moral life,
too, grounds of action which are perceptible to his senses. He wants
some one who will impart to him these grounds of action in a manner
that his senses can apprehend. He is ready to allow these grounds of
action to be dictated to him as commands by anyone whom he considers
wiser or more powerful than himself, or whom he acknowledges, for
whatever reason, to be a power superior to himself. This accounts
for the moral principles enumerated above, viz., the principles which
rest on the authority of family, state, society, church, and God. The
most narrow-minded man still submits to the authority of some single
fellow-man. He who is a little more progressive allows his moral
conduct to be dictated by a majority (state, society). In every
case he relies on some power which is present to his senses. When,
at last, the conviction dawns on someone that his authorities are,
at bottom, human beings just as weak as himself, then he seeks refuge
with a higher power, with a Divine Being, whom, in turn, he endows
with qualities perceptible to the senses. He conceives this Being as
communicating to him the ideal content of his moral life by way of
his senses--believing, for example, that God appears in the flaming
bush, or that He moves about among men in manifest human shape, and
that their ears can hear His voice telling them what they are to do
and what not to do.
The highest stage of development which Naïve Realism attains in the
sphere of morality is that at which the moral law (the moral idea)
is conceived as having no connection with any external being,
but, hypothetically, as being an absolute power in one's own
consciousness. What man first listened to as the voice of God, to
that he now listens as an independent power in his own mind which he
calls conscience. This conception, however, takes us already beyond
the level of the naïve consciousness into the sphere where moral
laws are treated as independent norms. They are there no longer
made dependent on a human mind, but are turned into self-existent
metaphysical entities. They are analogous to the visible-invisible
forces of Metaphysical Realism. Hence also they appear always as
a corollary of Metaphysical Realism, which seeks reality, not in
the part which human nature, through its thinking, plays in making
reality what it is, but which hypothetically posits reality over
and above the facts of experience. Hence these extra-human moral
norms always appear as corollaries of Metaphysical Realism. For this
theory is bound to look for the origin of morality likewise in the
sphere of extra-human reality. There are different possible views of
its origin. If the thing-in-itself is unthinking and acts according
to purely mechanical laws, as modern Materialism conceives that it
does, then it must also produce out of itself, by purely mechanical
necessity, the human individual and all that belongs to him. On
that view the consciousness of freedom can be nothing more than
an illusion. For whilst I consider myself the author of my action,
it is the matter of which I am composed and the movements which are
going on in it that determine me. I imagine myself free, but actually
all my actions are nothing but the effects of the metabolism which is
the basis of my physical and mental organisation. It is only because
we do not know the motives which compel us that we have the feeling
of freedom. "We must emphasise that the feeling of freedom depends
on the absence of external compelling motives." "Our actions are as
much subject to necessity as our thoughts" (Ziehen, Leitfaden der
Physiologischen Psychologie, pp. 207, ff.). [7]
Another possibility is that some one will find in a spiritual being
the Absolute lying behind all phenomena. If so, he will look for the
spring of action in some kind of spiritual power. He will regard the
moral principles which his reason contains as the manifestation of this
spiritual 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 visible symbol of the higher order
that lies behind it. Our human morality is a revelation of the divine
world-order. It is not man who matters in this moral order but reality
in itself, that is, God. Man ought to do what God wills. Eduard von
Hartmann, who identifies reality, as such, with God, and who treats
God's existence as a life of suffering, believes that the 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 approximate to its goal." "Real existence is the
incarnation of God. The world-process is the passion of God who has
become flesh, and at the same time the way of redemption for Him who
was crucified in the flesh; and morality is our co-operation in the
shortening of this process of suffering and redemption" (Hartmann,
Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, § 871). On this view,
man does not act because he wills, but he must 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. Neither
Materialism, nor Spiritualism, nor in general Metaphysical Realism
which infers, as true reality, an extra-human something which it does
not experience, have any room for freedom.
Naïve and Metaphysical Realism, if they are to be consistent, have to
deny freedom for one and the same reason, viz., because, for them,
man does nothing but carry out, or execute, principles necessarily
imposed upon him. Naïve Realism destroys freedom by subjecting man
to authority, whether it be that of a perceptible being, or that of
a being conceived on the analogy of perceptible beings, or, lastly,
that of the abstract voice of conscience. The Metaphysician, content
merely to infer an extra-human reality, is unable to acknowledge
freedom because, for him, man is determined, mechanically or morally,
by a "thing-in-itself."
Monism will have to admit the partial justification of Naïve Realism,
with which it agrees in admitting the part played by the world
of percepts. He who is incapable of producing moral ideas through
intuition must receive them from others. In so far as a man receives
his moral principles from without he is actually unfree. But Monism
ascribes to the idea the same importance as to the percept. The
idea can manifest itself only in human individuals. In so far
as man obeys the impulses coming from this side he is free. But
Monism denies all justification to Metaphysics, and consequently
also to the impulses of action which are derived from so-called
"things-in-themselves." According to the Monistic view, man's action
is unfree when he obeys some perceptible external compulsion; it
is free when he obeys none but himself. There is no room in Monism
for any kind of unconscious compulsion hidden behind percept and
concept. If anybody maintains of the action of a fellow-man that it
has not been freely done, he is bound to produce within the visible
world the thing or the person or the institution which has caused the
agent to act. And if he supports his contention by an appeal to causes
of action lying outside the real world of our percepts and thoughts,
then Monism must decline to take account of such an assertion.
According to the Monistic theory, then, man's action is partly free,
partly unfree. He is conscious of himself as unfree in the world of
percepts, and he realises in himself the spirit which is free.
The moral laws which his inferences compel the Metaphysician to regard
as issuing from a higher power have, according to the upholder of
Monism, been conceived by men themselves. To him the moral order is
neither a mere image of a purely mechanical order of nature nor of
the divine government of the world, but through and through the free
creation of men. It is not man's business to realise God's will in the
world, but his own. He carries out his own decisions and intentions,
not those of another being. Monism does not find behind human agents a
ruler of the world, determining them to act according to his will. Men
pursue only their own human ends. Moreover, each individual pursues
his own private ends. For the world of ideas realises itself, not in a
community, but only in individual men. What appears as the common goal
of a community is nothing but the result of the separate volitions
of its individual members, and most commonly of a few outstanding
men whom the rest follow as their leaders. Each one of us has it in
him to be a free spirit, just as every rosebud is potentially a rose.
Monism, then, is in the sphere of genuinely moral action the true
philosophy of freedom. Being also a philosophy of reality, it
rejects the metaphysical (unreal) restriction of the free spirit as
emphatically as it acknowledges the physical and historical (naïvely
real) restrictions of the naïve man. Inasmuch as it does not look
upon man as a finished product, exhibiting in every moment of his
life his full nature, it considers idle the dispute whether man,
as such, is free or not. It looks upon man as a developing being,
and asks whether, in the course of this development, he can reach
the stage of the free spirit.
Monism knows that Nature does not send forth man ready-made as a free
spirit, but that she leads him up to a certain stage, from which he
continues to develop still as an unfree being, until he reaches the
point where he finds his own self.
Monism perceives clearly that a being acting under physical or moral
compulsion cannot be truly moral. It regards the stages of automatic
action (in accordance with natural impulses and instincts), and of
obedient action (in accordance with moral norms), as a necessary
propædeutic for morality, but it understands that it is possible for
the free spirit to transcend both these transitory stages. Monism
emancipates man in general from all the self-imposed fetters of the
maxims of naïve morality, and from all the externally imposed maxims of
speculative Metaphysicians. The former Monism can as little eliminate
from the world as it can eliminate percepts. The latter it rejects,
because it looks for all principles of explanation of the phenomena
of the world within that world and not outside it. Just as Monism
refuses even to entertain the thought of cognitive principles other
than those applicable to men (p. 125), so it rejects also the concept
of moral maxims other than those originated by men. Human morality,
like human knowledge, is conditioned by human nature, and just as
beings of a higher order would probably mean by knowledge something
very different from what we mean by it, so we may assume that other
beings would have a very different morality. For Monists, morality
is a specifically human quality, and freedom the human way being moral.