#eternal values

The Eternal Values (Hugo Münsterberg, 1909)

“We have first the causal psychology, which considers all inner experiences as material for description and explanation. That means that it treats the inner experience like objects.

They are then simply contents of consciousness, which must be analyzed into their elements in the same way in which the anatomist dissects the body into its tissues and the tissues into their cells. 

And, finally, those contents of consciousness are to be explained as the physicist explains the changes in the contents of space.”

(…)

“Now, in the midst of the contents which consciousness finds, there occurs the idea of our self, and there also occurs the pain or the pleasure, and we become aware that this self reinforces the pleasure and suppresses the pain; but all that goes on in the midst of the content.

The pleasure is therefore in harmony with another content of our consciousness, namely, with the idea of ourselves, and the pain is in disharmony with that idea which we find in our consciousness.

But pain and pleasure are neither in harmony nor in disharmony with us, the spectators.

For us as spectators, the idea of ourselves, and that other content which we call pleasure or pain, are equally nothing but objects of awareness.

Like spectators, we note how this idea of our “I,” which is crystallized about the sensations of our body, contains those efforts to reject the pain and to continue the pleasure.

For us as spectators, pain and pleasure stand only in line with the rank and file of the other contents of consciousness.

They have an effect on certain other contents, but they are neither pleasurable nor displeasurable, neither valuable nor worthless, for the spectator.

“The starting-point for a moral decision is therefore always that there are in view two possible actions, of which the one is desired only as means to an effect, while the other is desired as action itself and for itself, and therefore without reference to any pleasurable effect.

Such action is willed, then, only as an expression of the will, as a realization of the personality.

He alone thinks morally who performs the action which he wants to perform, not for any result, but only as an expression of his whole real will.

Moral merit belongs only to the one who brings to realization that particular action which he himself really wants as action.

Hence moral value comes in question only where a man chooses what he really wants himself, and what expresses his own deepest will; in short, when he is loyal to himself.

The moral value is therefore not attached to the resulting action, and not to the preceding will for an action, but is attached to the agreement between the two. (…)

I want to be consistent with myself in my actions, and thus want to be myself, not for the purpose of getting a personal pleasure from this consistency, but to satisfy a will in me which has no reference to my individual advantage.

It is a will which, however much it concerns my personality, is ultimately not referring to my self but serving an eternal cause.

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