Wannamaker Summary - Chapter 9

Chapter Summary Of The Philosophy Of Freedom
Olin D. Wannamaker

Chapter 9 The Idea Of Inner Freedom
Only through the twofold activity of observation and thinking are concept and percept revealed as belonging together --with one sole exception, as we have seen: such is not the case in the one exceptional instance of observing the act of thinking. If we have learned to observe thinking, we have experienced in cognition the single instance in which perception and concept are one: in the very act of perceiving thinking, we also know its nature. Without this cognitional experience, we might always feel that the concept is only a shadowy refection of the perception. After this experience in direct cognition, however, we know that the perception alone is meaningless, an unrelated fragment, but that concept and perception united give knowledge of reality.

But this beholding of thinking in its reality teaches us much more about the human being. It leads us toward a true knowledge of the reality and the nature of human inner freedom.

We learn that thinking, in its own activity, thrusts aside the activity of the organism to make room for its own manifestation. But we learn also that this suppression of the organic activity gives self-consciousness, and that volition arises in connection with this creation of self-consciousness through the effect of thinkng on the organism. Thus are related thinking, the self-conscious ego, and acts of volition. Let us follow this reflection further toward our objective of undertanding human inner freedom.

Concepts become motives, attracting the will into activity toward their attainment, provided they are of such a character as to evoke a response in the individual characterological disposition. As this individual disposition rises to higher levels in the scale of moral quality, concepts on correspondingly higher levels act as motives. At the highest level, only the individual's own moral intuitions can become motives and attract the will into activity. Here the individual is above the sphere of the characterological disposition. Here the motive of action, consisting of a moral intuition, becomes identical with the impulse to action, the responsive spring of action in the individual's own nature. At this level, the human being has become a truly free spirit. But how does he actualize his free moral intuitions? In bringing his moral intuitions to realization, he uses the capacity of moral imagination.

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