Chapter 19 Volume 3 Faith-7

I'm going to hold myself up, I'm going to make myself comfortable with this view of my mission that seems new to me. —The present life cannot be conceived in a rational way as the whole purpose of my existence and of the existence of mankind as a whole; Applicable, and entirely purposeless and superfluous to the highest achievements that earth can produce.Therefore, man must have a purpose beyond earthly life.But if the present life--it is after all arranged for man, may only be destined to develop reason, for the awakened reason does bid me to maintain it, to use all my strength to achieve its highest purpose-is in the order of our existence. If it is not entirely futile, then it must be at least as related to future life as means are to ends.In this present life there is nothing whose final result remains in the world, nothing which connects the present life with the future life, except a good will; The fundamental laws of the world do not produce any results in themselves.It can only be, and must be, the good will by which we labor for another life and the immediate end it presents to us; It is the results of this good will that cannot be seen by us that can go on from here.

Our good will must have results in itself, for itself, and by itself, as we already know from this life, for reason never demands anything aimless; but what will these results be How can it be possible for a mere will to produce certain results, questions of which we cannot even conceive, so long as we remain confined to this material world, and do not engage in a practice which we already know will fail us. Discussion is where wisdom lies.From the nature of these consequences, therefore, the present life is a life in faith with respect to the future life.We shall have these results in our future life, because we shall use our activities as a point of departure and build upon them; and so this other life is produced by our good will in our present life. The resulting aspect will become a witnessing life.We shall also acquire in this other life a proximate (II, 287) aim given to it, just as we have acquired the aim of the present life in the present life, for we must always be active.But we are still finite creatures for whom every activity is a definite activity, and definite actions have definite ends.In present life, the discovered existing world, its purposeful arrangement of the labor we have to perform, the culture and goodness achieved among men, and our own sensuous powers all have something to do with the purpose of present life. Similarly, in the future life, the results of our good will in the present life will also have a relationship with the goals of the future life.The present life is the beginning of our existence, the facilities and firm foundations of which are freely given to us; the future life is the continuation of this existence, for which we must give ourselves a beginning, a specific foothold.

Then the present life no longer appears futile; we have the present life for and only in order to obtain this solid foundation in the future life, and only with the help of this foundation can the present life Only then is it connected with our entire eternal existence.It is probable that even the immediate aim of this second life, like the aim of the present life, cannot be attained with certainty and rule by reason of limited powers, and even a good will appears superfluous and purposeless in the second life. of.But the good will cannot fail as it does in present life, for it is an imperative of reason which must always exist and is indispensable.Its necessary operation, therefore, may in this case lead us to a third life, in which the effects of the good will from the second life may be indicated, and which in the first Perhaps only faith can be added to the two lives; of course, this is after we have experienced the truth of reason in action and realized the fruit of the pure heart faithfully preserved in a life perfected, with a stronger and stronger Unshakable faith did it.

Just as in present life it is only from the command of a definite action that our conception of a definite goal arises, and from this goal the whole intuition of the sensuous world given before us, so in future life On the basis of a similar, now utterly incomprehensible imperative to us, the conception of the immediate goal of this life, and on this goal the intuition of a world in which The results of our good will are given to us in advance in the present life.The present world generally exists for us only by the imperative of duty; and another world likewise comes into being for us only by the imperative of another duty, for no world exists otherwise for any rational being. .

So that's my whole noble mission, my true nature.I am a member of two orders, the purely spiritual, where I rule by pure will, and the sensuous, where I function by my actions.The whole ultimate goal of rationality is its pure activity that absolutely passes through itself and does not need tools outside itself, that is, its independence from all irrational things, its absolute unconditionality.Will is the living principle of reason, and will itself is reason when it grasps it purely and independently; reason acts through itself, which means that pure will functions and functions simply as such. to rule.Only infinite reason lives directly and completely in this purely spiritual order.The finite, not the rational world itself, but only one of many members of this world, must at the same time live in the sensible order, which means: in the sensible order, in addition to purely rational activities, this order also presents itself to the finite. Another purpose is presented, a material purpose attained by means and forces which, though directly governed by the will, are regulated in their action by the laws of nature inherent in them.

However, just as reason is indeed reason, the will must function entirely through itself, independently of the laws of nature which determine action; therefore any sensuous life of the finite presupposes a higher life through which the will, as if purely itself leads the finite into this higher life, and there obtains for the finite a possession—a possession which, of course, appears to us sensibly as a state, and never as a manifestation. for a simple will. These two orders—the purely spiritual one and the sensuous order, which may consist of an endless series of particular lives—have existed from the first moment of the development of active reason in me, And they go hand in hand with each other.The latter order is only a phenomenon to myself and to those in my same situation of life; the former alone gives meaning, purpose, and value to the latter.As soon as I make up my mind to obey the laws of reason, I am immortal, everlasting, and eternal; I need not become so.The supersensible world is by no means the world of the future, it is present; it is not more present at any point of finite existence than it is at another; is more present.The other determinations of my sensuous existence are future; but these, like the determinations of the present, are not real life.With that determination I grasped eternity, renounced earthly life, and all other sensuous lives that I might yet face, and elevated myself above them.I become to myself the sole source of all my being and phenomena; from now on I am not conditioned by something outside me, but have a life within myself.My will, which I and no one else has put into the order of the world, is the true source of life and eternity.

But only my will is the source of this; only when I regard this will as the true seat of the moral good, and indeed elevate it to this good, do I gain the certainty and possession of that supersensible world. Instead of looking forward to some intelligible and visible end, without asking whether my will will produce something other than will itself, I should desire according to the laws of morality.My will is independent, separate from everything that does not belong to it, and is its own world simply by itself and for itself; It determines its other moments, and it never produces any conceivable, intelligible secondary, thereby subjecting its operation to an alien law.If, in our conceivable world of sensibility, opposed to the world of spirit, a second being arises from it, and from this second a third, and so on, ad infinitum, then its Power would be destroyed by the resistance of the independent link in the world of the senses which needs to be activated; The unique regularity of the heterogeneous scope of action limits. —So, in the present world of senses, which I know only, I must also consider will.Of course I have to believe this, I have to act like this, as if I imagined that my will can move my tongue, my hands and feet, but how can a simple breath, a pressure of intellectual power on itself? Not only can I not conceive, like the will, the principle of the earthly motion of heavy matter, but even the mere assertion of it is absurd before the court of the contemplative understanding; in this sphere even the motion of matter within myself must Explained entirely by the inner power of mere matter.

But I have gained this view of my will only because I perceive within myself that this will is not only the highest active principle of the world - which of course, without any real freedom , becomes such a principle through the mere influence of the whole system of the world, as we must conceive of the forming powers of nature—and it completely renounces all earthly ends, all ends existing outside itself, and For its own sake it establishes itself as the ultimate end.This mere view of my will leads me to a supersensible order, where the will is purely by itself, without the aid of all instruments that exist outside of it, in a space comparable to it. It becomes a cause in a sphere that is purely spiritual and can be thoroughly penetrated by it.That the lawful will is required for its own sake—a knowledge that I can only discover in the depths of my mind as a fact, and not in any other way—is the first moment of my thinking.This claim is rational, the source and maxim of all other reasonable things, this claim depends on nothing, but everything else must depend on it, and must be determined by it-this belief can not be obtained from outside. To get, but only from within, through the unshakable patronage that I freely give to that request—this is the second link of my thinking.It was from these moments that I arrived at my faith in the supersensuous world of eternity.If I give up the first link, I can't talk about the second link.If it is true, as many say, that all human virtues always have only a definite external end, before they can act and be virtuous, they must be sure of attaining this end, so that reason in itself has no power at all. contains the principles and maxims of its activities, but derives this maxim from without by examining its external world, and these hypothetical situations, which can be assumed to be self-evident without further proof, can be praised as The Highest Pinnacle of Living Wisdom—If this were the case, then perhaps this world would have the ultimate purpose of our existence, and the essence of man might be fully exhausted and elucidated by our earthly There also seems to be no rational basis for going beyond the present life.

But whichever thinker can get that first link historically from somewhere—for example, from the search for something new and extraordinary—and can draw further inferences from it with perfect correctness, then He'll preach as I just said to myself.Thus he reports to us the way of thinking that other people live, not his own; everything floats before him empty and meaningless, because he lacks the means by which we grasp everything. the faculty of reality; he is a blind man who, though completely blind to color, has built a perfectly correct theory of color on certain historically correct propositions about color; What must be the case under these conditions is not the case for him, because he does not exist under these conditions.We have acquired the faculties of eternal life only by virtue of the fact that we have actually renounced sensuous things and their ends, and consecrated them to a law which governs only our will and not our actions; the attitude by which we renounce them , that is, we firmly believe that this approach is reasonable, and it is the only reasonable approach.It is only in this renunciation of earthly things that faith in eternal things arises in our souls, and establishes this faith alone as the only support on which we can rest, after renunciation of everything else, as the only support which can also enhance our spirituality. Emotions, the only living principles that animate our lives.Indeed, in order to be able to enter the kingdom of God, we must first die from this world and then be born again, according to a parable of a divine doctrine.

I see, oh, I now clearly see the reason why I was not paying attention or seeing spiritual things before.If we are full of earthly purposes, forgetting them with all our imaginations and zeal, only the idea of ​​an effect that will actually be produced outside us, moved and driven by the desire and love for this effect. Driven, but insensitive and obstinate to the real impetus of reason, which legislates itself and sets us a purely spiritual purpose, the immortal mind remains anchored to the earth and bound to its wings.Our philosophy is the history of our own hearts and lives, and as we search for ourselves, we also think about the whole person and his mission.We have no real freedom if we are only driven by the desire for what is actually possible in this world—a freedom which seems to have its own absolute and complete grounds in itself.Our liberty is at best that of a self-growing plant; our liberty is not higher in its essence, but more artistic only in its fruit, not producing only a substance out of roots, leaves, and flowers, Instead, use intention, thought, and action to generate a mood.We can hardly conceive of real liberty, because we do not possess it; and when we speak of it, we either reduce the word to our own meaning, or simply denounce it as absurd.Because of the awareness of freedom, we also lose the ability to understand another world at the same time.All these things float before us like words that mean nothing to us, like a colorless, meaningless shade of gray and white, which we cannot grasp or keep.We leave everything where it is, in its place, without interfering at all.Or, should some day be impelled by passionate zeal to seriously examine such things, we shall see clearly and be able to prove that all those notions are untenable and empty fantasies, abandoned by reasonable men. They; from those premises from which we start, drawn from our own deepest experience, we are quite right, and so long as we remain the same, we are irrefutable and inflexible.Those excellent teachings of Liberty, Duty, and Eternal Life, which enjoy a special authority among our people, become to us magical parables, akin to the Hell and Paradise teachings of ancient Greece, and we do not express what is really in our hearts, because We find it expedient to maintain an apparent respectable prestige among the mob by these similes; or, if we think little, and are ourselves bound by the fetters of this authority, we ourselves are reduced to true mobs. , because we believe that what is thus understood may be mere childish fable, and find in that purely spiritual suggestion a promise to perpetuate for ever the same wretched life that we lead here here.

In a word: only a radical improvement of my will will shed a new light on my life and my mission; without this improvement, no matter how hard I think, no matter how much spiritual excellence I possess Endowment, in me and around me, is nothing but darkness.Only the improvement of the mind leads to true wisdom.That being the case, let my whole life go on and on towards this one and only purpose!