160 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
law... before which all inclinations fall dumb, though in
secret they might work against it!”^5 To this, a human be-
ing, out of the consciousness of the free spirit, replies:
“Freedom! You friendly, human name, you who contain
everything morally beloved, everything that most digni-
fies my humanity, and who make me into no one’s ser-
vant, you who do not merely establish a law, but wait for
what my moral love itself will recognize as law, because
it feels unfree in the face of every merely imposed law!”
This is the contrast between morality that is merely
lawful and morality that is free.
Philistines, who see morality embodied in something
externally fixed, might even see a free spirit as a danger-
ous person. They will do so, however, only because their
view is limited to a particular epoch. If they could look
beyond it, they would immediately find that free spirits
need to move beyond the laws of the state as little as the
philistines themselves, and that they never have to place
themselves in real opposition to these laws. For the laws
of the state, like all other objectively ethical laws, all
sprang from the intuitions of free spirits. There is no law
enforced by family authority that was not once intuitive-
ly conceived and formulated as such by an ancestor.
Even the conventional laws of morality are first estab-
lished by specific persons. And the laws of the state al-
ways arise in the heads of state officials. These minds
have set up laws over other people, and no one becomes
unfree except by forgetting that origin and making the
5.Critique of Practical Reason,1.3.
[45]
[46]
