Adolf Wuttke · 53 of 107

Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION XCIX.

As moral action always seeks to effect a harmony between the acting person and the moral object, hence it stands in relation, on the one hand, to the former as its starting-point, and, on the other, to the latter as the goal aimed at by the life-movement. This harmony can consequently be effected in a twofold manner,—either in that the object becomes for the subject, or the subject for the object, that is, either by appropriation or by formation. As, however, every entity, in so far as it is good, has a right in and of itself, hence it has such a right also as bearing upon the morally active person, so that neither the appropriating nor the forming is without some degree of limitation, but both must respect this right of the object. The two forms of moral action have therefore, as a necessary limit, a third form of moral bearing, namely, a bearing by which the moral object is preserved in its rights,—moral sparing.

This third form of the moral bearing, which, as an activity of the will, has of course a moral character, has been very largely ignored in ethics, or at least left in the back-ground, and it is even severely criticised in its defenders, and yet it is a sphere of very essential duties, duties which can be classed into other spheres only by manifest violence, and which yet consist, in fact, neither in appropriation nor in formation. When I check my foot in order not wantonly to crush an ant that is crossing my path, this is in fact a moral self-limitation, but it cannot be properly classed as moral forming, seeing that the end of this action is very evidently the to-be-spared animal, and not the acting person. But every moral action without exception is also a moral self-forming, a self-cultivating, without, however, that this self-culture should always appear as the end proper. Without the proper respecting of the duty of sparing, appropriation and formation would become violence. But the moral motive of all right action, namely, love, implies in its very nature also the exercising of preservative sparing; man cannot love an object, and yet not seek to preserve it in the beloved peculiarity of its being. Sparing is not of a mere negative character, a mere limiting of another action, but it is essentially different from all other action; it is of a negative character only in form but not in contents. When I do not severely reproach a person who is inwardly and deeply ashamed and humiliated because of his sin, but tenderly spare him, this is not a mere non-doing of that which I might do, not a mere limiting of my punitive activity, but it is the very opposite of this. There results here from the moral motive, that is, love, not a positive acting upon the other, but a restraining of such action; and if I thereby heap coals of fire upon the head of an enemy, and thus profit him morally, still this is not a real influential forming on my part, but a giving place for the moral self-forming of the other; my sparing procedure here is indeed mediately a forming, as, on the other hand, it is also a self-mastering; per se however, it is an action different from both. When, in the sphere of the freedom of rational creatures, God restrains his immediate action in order to preserve them in their freedom,—when God spared Cain, and, after the flood, promised henceforth to spare living creatures as a whole [Gen. iv, 15; viii, 21; ix, 11 sqq.],—this is simply a divine example of moral sparing. To spare is often more difficult morally than to appropriate or to influence, for in the latter cases the person has a lively consciousness of self, and stands forth prominently with his own rights and his enjoyment of activity; but, in sparing, it is the right of the object that stands in the foreground, and the actor must recognize and respect this right, and must morally overcome his personal will and his pleasure in self-assertion. Sparing is the preservative, the “conservative,” phase of the moral life, and its carrying-out presupposes greater moral maturity than the exercise of the appropriating or forming activities; for the youthful zeal of the morally immature spirit, its practice is exceedingly difficult; not to crush the bruised reed, nor to quench the smoking wick [Matt. xii, 20], is more difficult, and involves a higher moral wisdom, than to destroy or to create anew.—As the sparing procedure is logically the most immediate course of conduct, and rather a withholding than an express acting, hence it is more appropriate to treat of it first.