THE RATIONALIST
By listing the thinking and acting characteristics of the Rationalism worldview found in The Philosophy Of Freedom, a personality type unfolds.
Rationalism: Grants validity only to those ideas that he discovers outside himself—not to any ideas that he might grasp from his inner self by some sort of intuition or inspiration, but only to those he reads from external things that are real to the senses.
1.6 Rationalist action: Practical Decision
“It is said that man is free when his reason rather than his animal cravings control his action. Or freedom means to determine one’s life and action according to purpose and deliberate decision.”
2.6 Rationalist pursuit of knowledge: Indivisible Unity
“The third form of Monism is the one that finds, even at the simplest level of existence (the atom) Matter and Mind already united.”
3.6 Rationalist thinking: Pure Thinking
“What I observe in studying a thought process is not what process in my brain connects the concept lightning with the concept thunder. I observe my reason for bringing these two concepts into a certain relationship.”
4.6 Rationalist perception: Subjective Percept
“To the claim that we can know only our percepts, no objection is made as long as it is only meant as a general fact that the percept is partly determined by the organization of the perceiving subject.”
5.6 Rationalist knowing: Isolate Concept
“For us, however, it is necessary to isolate certain sections of the world, and to consider them on their own. Our eye can grasp only single colors one by one out of a multicolored whole. Our mind can grasp only single concepts out of an interconnected conceptual system. This separating-off is a subjective act.”
6.6 Rationalist individual representation of reality: Individual Ego
“However, we are not satisfied with simply relating a percept to a concept by means of thinking. We also relate it to our particular subjectivity, to our individual Ego. The expression of this individual relationship is feeling, which we experience as pleasure or pain.”
7.6 Rationalist cognition: Real Evidence Of Senses in addition to Ideal Evidence
“An object grasped in “mere idea” remains nothing more than a figment of the imagination until sense-perception can provide proof of its reality. To put it briefly, the naive person demands, in addition to the ideal evidence of his thinking, the real evidence of his senses.”
8.6 Rationalist personality: Feeling Insight
“He must feel the connection of things in the world before he believes he has grasped it. He seeks insight through feeling rather than through knowledge; he attempts to make feeling the instrument of knowledge rather than thought.”
9.6 Rationalist idea to act: Situational Idea
“How can an action be individually adapted to fit a particular case and situation, and yet at the same time be determined in a purely conceptual way by intuition? Of course, my Self takes notice of the perceptual content, but it does not allow itself to be determined by it. This content is used only to construct a cognitive concept of the situation for oneself; but the corresponding ethical concept is not derived from the perceptible event.”
10.6 Rationalist moral authority: Accusation
“If someone claims that the action of another person is done unfreely, then he must identify the thing or the person or the institution within the perceptible world, that made this person act.”
11.6 Rationalist purpose: Purposeful Idea
“For something to be purposeful, a human being must first give it purpose. Something done on purpose can only come about through an idea being realized.”
12.6 Rationalist moral idea: Evolution Of Morality
“From this it follows for the philosopher of Ethics that, while he can certainly see the connection between earlier and later moral concepts, not one single new moral idea can be drawn from earlier ones. The individual, as a moral being, produces his own content.”
13.6 Rationalist value of life: Quality Of Pleasure
"If feelings are deleted from the pleasure side of our account because they are attached to things that turn out to be illusion, we make the value of life dependent, not on the quantity, but on the quality of pleasure, and this quality, in turn, is made dependent on the value of the things that cause the pleasure.”
14.6 Rationalist individuality: Free Thinking
“How an individual should think cannot be derived from any concept of the type. It depends solely on the individual.”
