The Idea of Freedom 153can only be completely individual. In truth, only an act of
will emerging from intuition can be individual. Only if
blind drives are reckoned to belong to the human individu-
ality can we see a criminal deed, or evil, as an expression
of individuality equivalent to the incarnation of pure intu-
ition. But the blind drive that drives someone to commit a
crime does not come from intuition. It does not belong to
what is individual within a person. It belongs to what is
commonest, to what is equally present in all individuals
and out of which we must work our way with our individ-
uality. What is individual in me is not my organism, with
its drives and feelings, but my own world of ideas that
lights up within this organism. My drives, instincts, and
passions establish no more in me than that I belong to the
general specieshuman being. The fact that something con-
ceptual expresses itself in a special way in those drives,
passions, and feelings establishes my individuality.
Through my instincts, my drives, I am the kind of person of
whom there are twelve to the dozen; I am an individual by
means of the particular form of the idea by which, within
the dozen, I designate myself as I. Only a being other than
myself could distinguish me from others by differences in
my animal nature. I distinguish myself from others by my
thinking, that is, by actively grasping what expresses itself
in my organism as conceptuality. Thus, we cannot say that
the action of a criminal proceeds from an idea. In fact, what
is characteristic of criminal acts is precisely that they derive
from non-conceptual elements within a human being.
Insofar as an action proceeds from the conceptual part
of my individual being it is felt to be free. Every other