The Idea of Freedom 161laws either into extra-human commandments, into objec-
tive ethical concepts of duty independent of human par-
ticipation, or into the commanding voice of one’s own
falsely conceived, mystically compelling inner self. But
those who do not overlook the origin, but seek the human
being within it, will see it as belonging to the same world
of ideas from which they too draw their moral intuitions.
If they believe that they have better intuitions, then they
try to substitute their own for the existing ones; if they
find that the existing ones are justified, then they act in
accordance with them as if they were their own.
We must not establish the formula that human beings
exist to realize an ethical world order cut off from them-
selves. Anyone who claimed as much would still be stand-
ing, in relation to the science of humankind, at the same
point at which natural science stood when it believed that
a bull has horns in order to butt. Fortunately, natural sci-
entists have done away with such concepts of purpose. It
is harder for ethics similarly to free itself. But just as horns
do not existbecause of butting, but butting existsthrough
the horns, so human beings do not exist because of moral-
ity, but morality existsthrough human beings. Free human
beings act morally because they have moral ideas, but they
do not act in order for morality to arise. Human individu-
als, with the moral ideas belonging to their being, are the
precondition for the moral world order.
The human individual is the source of all morality and
the center of earthly life. States and societies exist be-
cause they turn out to be the necessary consequence of in-
dividual life. That states and societies then react upon