"Anyone who agrees with the world as it is would be dead." Dorothee Sölle: the truth is concrete.
Ceres, the Roman goddess, suddenly appears among the blood-stained savages, takes the spear from the hand of a wild hunter and draws a furrow in the earth with it, into which she throws a grain from her crown of ears, immediately an immense cornfield grows out of it, and so the survival of mankind no longer depends on bloody battle.
"That man may become man,
He establishes an everlasting covenant
faithfully with the pious earth,
its motherly foundation ..." Friedrich Schiller
The goddess Ceres turned the blood-stained savages into human beings who now live in mutual respect for one another and in moral self-restraint. This is the only way for people to unite with their neighbors so that they can live together in harmony. Strength arises from this social unity, for each individual and for all together.
"And only through his morals can he be free and powerful" Schiller
We have been to the moon, climbed all the high mountains here on our earth, can receive gravitational waves from the depths of space and from eternity, have named and determined everything that surrounds us, we transform analog into digital, horizons dissolve and also the here and now.
All the goddesses and gods disappeared, leaving behind a pledge, or better still a gift, for us that lies heavy on us, a yoke for some:
The freedom
The freedom to be public-spirited, the freedom to share, the togetherness that makes us human ... We have not mastered it, we have not been able to do it.
No more Ceres in sight!
But no need to despair, Ceres is no more, but Kant is approaching.
Our malice, our hubris, our envy, our greed, our carelessness, our egos, Kant calls them our adversities, our crudities, they should be, because they are our helpers on the path to becoming human. Guided by moral will, as the highest good?, and moral conviction, we become civilized, decent people.
"Nature gave man reason and freedom of will based on it ... For he, man, should not be guided by conditions, provided for and instructed by creative knowledge ... ... man, if he had one day worked his way up from the greatest crudity to the greatest skill, inner perfection of thought and thereby to happiness, should have the merit of this alone ... " Immanuel Kant
Our resistances: laziness, greed, avarice, domination, selfishness, all these crudities can be developed into culture, into being civilized.
If we indulged in an Arcadian pastoral life, Kant says, in harmony, frugality and alternating love, talents would remain eternally hidden in their germs.
Humans, as benign as the sheep they graze, would hardly give their existence a greater value than that of their domestic cattle. They would not fill the emptiness of creation with respect to their purpose as rational nature.
And Kant continues: "All culture and art that adorn people, the most beautiful social orders, are the fruits of unsociability, which is compelled by itself to discipline itself and thus to develop the germs of nature completely by forcing art out of itself.
It is true that one cannot carpenter a whole degree out of crooked wood, i.e. what man is made of, but the approximation to this idea is imposed on us.
For Kant, the vessel in which this is to succeed is a perfect civic constitution of the state.
Human cultural achievement - human civilization - despite all personal adversities, leads us step by step up to humanity, to responsibility for ourselves and our neighbour, which includes ecological and economic responsibility.
"quod bonum commune potius est bono privato", as Thomas Aquinas put it(in short: the common good comes before the private good)
Richard Rorty believes that the only remaining principle of an enlightened morality is solidarity in the sense of compassion with subjects with whom one feels a sense of belonging to a "we".
If we extend this concept of solidarity to reliability, loyalty, friendship, charity and fraternity and integrate the possible existence, the emergence of fear and competition into our fraternity, we come to know: Common things bind, individual things divide! One for all, it was once said.
Our responsibility towards our neighbors, future generations, animals and our ecological responsibility follows from and is based on this.
The way to give weight to responsibility and make it tangible is to work together in solidarity and cooperation. The tasks we face can only be accomplished through qualitative cooperation.
"If I could wish for anything, I would wish for neither wealth nor power, but the passion of possibility; I would wish for an eye that, eternally young, burns eternally with the desire to see possibility." Søren Kierkegaard
If we look around us, we have little reason to hope that we will succeed. But we have good tools, a clear mind and compassion, will and responsibility and the knowledge that we are not alone, that is enough of a possibility.
If we also understand social structures as the taming of antisocial impulses, we are on the right path.
"I feel courage to venture into the world,
To bear the earth's woe, the earth's happiness,
To struggle with storms
And not to faint in the gnashing of the shipwreck."
Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
About the author
Werner Lampert (born 1946 in Vorarlberg/Austria) is one of the pioneers in the field of sustainable products and their development in Europe. The organic pioneer has been intensively involved in organic farming since the 1970s. With Back to the origin (Hofer) and Ja! Natürlich, he developed two of the most successful organic brands in the German-speaking world.
