I am thinking of producing a chapter by chapter video series summarizing The Philosophy Of Freedom so I worked up 15 rules of life. Looking up the number 15 I saw it was the Devil card in the Tarot. This card shows a man and woman enslaved by the Devil bound with large chains. But the chains are loose and you can lift them off to free yourself—if you want to.
#0. Seek Truth Within “The only knowing that satisfies us is the kind that submits to no external norm, but springs from the inner life of the personality.” #1 Know Why You Act “Obviously, an action cannot be free if the doer carries it out without knowing why. But what are we to say of the freedom of an action when the reasons are known?” #2: Seek Unity With The World “Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content, do we find again the unity from which we have separated ourselves.” #3 Think About Thinking “We must first examine thinking in a completely impartial way. There is no denying that thinking must be understood before anything else can be understood.” #4 Be Aware Of Perception Bias “My perception-pictures, then, are at first subjective. The recognition of the subjective character of our perceptions can easily lead us to doubt whether anything objective underlies them at all.” #5 Know The World “Once we know what to make of the world, it will be an easy task to orient ourselves within it.” #6 Lift Your Feelings Into The Ideal “A true individuality will be the one who reaches up with his feelings as high as possible into the region of ideals.” #7 Accept No Limits To Knowledge “It follows from the concept of knowledge, as defined by us, that there can be no talk of any limits of knowledge.” #8 Know Yourself “It is only in the course of our gradual development that we struggle through to the point where the concept of Self emerges from within the blind mass of feelings that fill our existence.” #9 Actualize The Free Spirit “The concept of man is not complete unless it includes the free spirit as the purest expression of human nature. After all, we are human in the fullest sense only to the extent that we are free.” #10 Obey Only Yourself “A human action is unfree when he obeys some perceptible external compulsion, it is free when he obeys none but himself.” #11 Live A Purposeful Life “Life has no purpose or function other than the one which the human being gives to it.” #12 Be The Crown Upon Human Evolution “Ethical Individualism is the crown of the edifice that Darwin and Haeckel have erected for Natural Science.” #13 Recognize Your Achievements As The True Value Of Life “He determines the value of his life by measuring his attainments against his aims.” #14 Be The Source Of The Moral Life Of Humanity “All moral activity of humanity has its source in the ethical intuitions of the individual.”
A working translation of section 5 from Chapter 2 of "The Philosophy of Freedom as a Basis For Artistic Creation" has just been posted on the blog with the same title. (Note that it is not the Paragraphs that are being translated, as I noted, but the sections.)
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