152 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
the compulsion of ethical commandments. I simply want
to carry out what lies within me.
Defenders of universal ethical norms might object to
these arguments as follows: If all people strive merely to
express themselves, and to do as they please, then there is
no difference between a good action and a crime; every
bit of knavery within me has equal claim to expression
with the intention to serve the universal good. As an eth-
ical human being, what should be decisive for me is not
the mere fact that I have focused on the idea of an action,
but rather my determination of whether the action is good
or evil. Only if I have determined that it is good should I
carry it out.
My response to this objection, which seems plausible,
but arises only from a misunderstanding of what is meant
here, is this: Anyone who wants to know the essence of
human willing must distinguish between the path that
brings willing up to a certain stage of development and the
special form that it assumes when it nears its goal. On the
path to this goal, norms play their justifiable role. The goal
consists in the realization of ethical aims that are grasped
purely intuitively. Humans achieve such aims to the de-
gree that they possess any capacity to lift themselves to the
intuitive-conceptual content of the world. In any individu-
al act of willing, other things are generally mixed in with
such aims, as motive or motive power. But intuition can
still determine, or co-determine, human willing. What we
shoulddo, we do; we offer the stage upon which “should”
becomes “do.” An action is our own if we allow it to
emerge as such from within ourselves. Here, the impulse
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