226 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
about a person is this or that way, we must refer back from
the individual to the genus. This explains to us why some-
thing about the individual appears in the form we observe.
But human beings free themselves from what is gener-
ic. If we experience it properly, what is humanly generic
does not limit our freedom, nor should it be made to do so
artificially. As human beings, we develop qualities and
functions of our own, whose source can only be sought
within ourselves. What is generic about us serves only as
a medium through which we can express our own distinct
being. We use the characteristics nature gives us as a ba-
sis, and we give these the form that corresponds to our
own being. We look in vain to the laws of the genus for
an explanation of that being’s actions. We are dealing
with an individual, and individuals can be explained only
individually. If a human being has achieved such emanci-
pation from the generic, and we still want to explain ev-
erything about that person in generic terms, then we have
no sense for what is individual.
It is impossible to understand a human being fully if one
bases one’s judgment on a generic concept. We are most
obstinate in judging according to type when it is a ques-
tion of a person’s sex. Man almost always sees in woman,
and woman in man, too much of the general character of
the other sex and too little of what is individual. In practi-
cal life, this does less harm to men than it does to women.
The social position of women is unworthy, for the most
part, because it is at many points determined not, as it
should be, by the individual characteristics of an individ-
ual woman, but by the general mental picture that others
[4]
[5]
