a. Is the “what?” in this question meant seriously? Are we as ready as it suggests to will what we should, not seeking the apparent glory of the “should” for what we ourselves will? It is not wholly self-evident that as we ask what we should do we are not long since bound by what we want to do, so that our ethical question will lead to self-demonstration which is not, of course, necessarily meant to be base or bad. Especially in times of a single, strong, and definite cultural will, as in the period from the beginning of the century to the first world war and well into the war itself, ethical reflection can easily not be meant very seriously in the sense that in it—one has only to think of the products of war theology in all countries—the content of the imperative that is apparently sought is fixed from the very outset in the form of specific practices whose goodness is no longer open to discussion, being known only too well, so that the factual result of ethical reflection is obviously the ethical justifying of a more or less compact: “This is what we will do.” A similar self-assurance on the part of the actual ethos might well have been the secret of the ethics of Thomas Aquinas. Times and people who know all too well what they want must accept it if we accompany their ethical work relatively rather than absolutely from this standpoint, and with a certain mistrust whether they have properly investigated what we should do. The less this mistrust is in place, the more open the relation is between ethics and the actual ethos, and the more seriously the what? is meant, the more it means that a vacuum is created in the whole state of actual willing and doing, that there has to be questioning though not necessarily rejection. It was this vacuum that cost Socrates his life as an enemy of religion and morality—what was meant, of course, was the self-assurance of Athens after the age of Pericles. Between our self-evident desires and our self-evident action in their naive or ideologically enlightened givenness there comes the doubt whether this really is after all the good. |
If the ethical question is serious in this sense, it means at once and automatically that ethics becomes critical in another sense. We no longer have the time to wander in distant metaphysical regions in search of the good. We no longer have the time to try to contemplate it as being. This being somewhere above the “ought” is the infallible mark of an ethics that does not quite take the “what?” of the ethical question seriously, that gets its knowledge elsewhere from the actual ethos of the ethicist and his time and background, and that is really making no more than an appearance of asking. In a seriously questioning “what?” we confess that we ourselves are scrutinized in our own being or existence, that an eternal eye is focused on our acts, that what we will and do are measured. If we put the question: “What shall we do?” as those who really do not know and really need instruction, then we confess that we are attacked and questioned and laid in the balances in the reality of our own existence, in our own most proper this. The attacker who has come into the midst of our life and under whose criticism our this is set is the good itself, the command which is issued to us. A seriously meant “what shall we do?”—and it is for us to be clear whether and how far we know a seriously meant “what shall we do?”—is already a witness that we know the command. Only where the command reveals itself does there come about the shattering of the self-assurance of our ethos which is the presupposition of a critical ethics. Only there does the seriously meant question arise.
b. “What shall we do?” is the question. Are we seriously asking what we should do? It might be that here, too, a substitute has to be set aside before we can say that the question is seriously meant. It might be that we have not yet heard the metallic ring of the “shall,” that we have openly or secretly clothed this concept with the very different concepts of what is convenient or useful or valuable to us. From the hedonists of antiquity to Max Scheler, as is well known, the ethical question has often been put in this way and answered with an imperative that is formulated accordingly. There can be no doubt that the question of the orientation of our conduct, in virtue of which it is meant to be directed toward what is convenient, useful, or valuable, is not only a possible, and even in its own way serious question but also that its concern ought to be expressed in a comprehensive discussion of the concept of command and of what is commanded. (There will be an opportunity for such a discussion in the second chapter on the command of God the Creator.) It may be asked, however, whether we have really reached the concept of command at all, whether we may legitimately formulate imperatives at all, if, like Scheler, we simply ascribe to the concept of value a necessity that claims our conduct. For the highest value [is] seen being and the highest being has seen value.4 If we have this necessity in view, have we really asked what we ought to do? For in the concept of the “ought” do we not recognize again the concept of origin which fundamentally transcends being? Can we not talk of an “ought” only when it is a question of unconditional truth and not merely of truth that is or that is seen? No value, not even the highest, can claim to be unconditional truth, and least of all, one might think, when this highest value is to be found, as Scheler believes, in human personhood,5 since the concepts value, seeing, and being are all on the same level, the level where there is only conditional and not unconditional truth. How else can a value be validated but by being seen, experienced, asserted, and estimated by us as a value? Is it too much to demand that if an imperative or command is understood as a claiming of our existence, of our life, of the only life we have, it must qualify as such in some better way than this?
We are perhaps not challenging too sharply the seriousness that an ethics of material values, a kind of higher physics, might have as such, if we state that we cannot be content with this kind of seriousness when it is a matter of the concept of the “ought,” if we say that we can speak of an “ought” only when unconditional truth—truth of the first degree and not the second, like seen truth or the truth of being—is the necessity which impinges on human willing and doing, when by such an “ought” we understand a claim which does not need to be validated by my seeing and experiencing its validity but which is grounded in itself and comes to me in such fashion that without asking about what I see or experience I have to validate myself before it in respect of the question how far I can meet it. Assuming that I must take the concept of the “ought” more seriously than is possible in the framework of an ethics of values, and assuming further that I ask only on the presupposition of the serious content of the concept: “What shall we do?”, it is plain that my serious question is a radiant witness that I know the “ought.” But how? How indeed? Not from an experience of value, for in such a case I should not know it and my question would not be serious in the stricter sense. Obviously, then, from the fact that the “ought” has made itself known to me, that the self-grounded claim has come to me, and I have been placed under its standard. As I cannot ask about God, but only about an idol of my own heart, without confessing, not that I have seen, experienced, and grasped God, but that God has spoken to me, that I am known by him, so—and we are speaking here of one and the same reality—I cannot ask about the “ought,” but only about the substitute of a being of value or value of being, without confessing that I ought, that the command has been spoken to me and has been accepted by me. If I seriously ask: “What shall I do?”, I have already understood that my existence is claimed by the good and that this claim, the command of the good, is given to me. My question, then, does not mean that I am raising a theoretical problem, as the rich young ruler obviously did [cf. Mark 10:17–31 par.], but that I see that a practical problem has already been raised whose problem is my problem, so that I present and clarify it to myself and others, which is clearly the point of ethical reflection. Seriously asking: “What shall I do?”, I have directed myself away from general and theoretical problems to my own practical reality. It is here that the truth of the good is known or it is not known to all. It reveals itself to me in my own decision as I do it or not, as I am judged by it or saved.
c.