Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

166 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

order. In this moral order, it is not human beings who are
important but the being-in-itself, the extra-human entity.
Human beingshave to dowhat this beingwills.
Eduard von Hartmann imagines the being-in-itself as a
divinity whose own existence is suffering. He believes
that this divine being created the world so that, through
the world, it might be released from its infinite suffering.
Von Hartmann therefore regards human moral evolution
as a process whose purpose it is to redeem the Divinity:
The world process can be brought toward its
goal only through the construction of an ethical
world order by reasoning, self-aware individuals.
Real existence is the incarnation of divinity; the
world process is at the same time both the Passion
of the God who has become flesh and the path of
redemption of Him who was crucified in the flesh;
morality, however, is cooperation in the shortening
of this path of suffering and redemption.^2
In this view, human beings do not act because they will
it, buthave to act because it is God’s will to be redeemed.
Just as materialist dualists make human beings into au-
tomata whose actions are merely results of purely me-
chanical laws, so spiritualist dualists make human beings
into slaves to the will of the absolute (because they see
the absolute, the being-in-itself, as something spiritual in
which human beings do not participate with their con-
scious experience). Freedom has no place either in ma-
terialism or in one-sided spiritualism, nor has it a place

2. Hartmann,Die Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins.