Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

Moral Imagination 191

to desire or not desire as one pleases”? Hamerling based
his view of free will precisely on this distinction, de-
scribing the first of these as correct and the second as an
absurd tautology. He says, “I cando what I will. But to
say that I can will what I will is an empty tautology.”
Whether I do—transform into reality—what I will—that
is, what I have intended as the idea of my action—de-
pends on outer circumstances and on my technical skill
(cf. p.182). To be free means: to be able—on my own,
through moral imagination—to determine the mental
pictures (motives) underlying an action. Freedom is im-
possible if something outside myself (whether a me-
chanical process or a merely inferred, otherworldly
God) determines my moral mental pictures. Therefore, I
am free only whenIproduce these mental pictures my-
self, not merely when Ican carry out motives that anoth-
er has placed within me. Free beings are those who can
will what they themselves hold to be right. Those who do
something other than what they want must be driven to
it through motives that do not lie within them. They are
acting unfreely. To choose to will or want what I consid-
er right or not right therefore means to choose to be free
or unfree. But this, naturally, is just as absurd as to see
freedom in the capacity to do what onehas to will. Yet
this is exactly what Hamerling claims when he says that
it is perfectly clear that the will is always determined by
motives, but it is absurd to say that it is therefore unfree;
for we can neither wish for, nor think of, a greater free-
dom of the will than for it to realize itself according to
its own strength and determination.