is put to us, as the question which we cannot answer incidentally from the safe harbor of our self-consciousness as spectators of our own life, but which we can, which, indeed, whether we like it or not, we must answer only with our life itself, to which our whole active life and each of our individual acts, whatever it may be, must be viewed as the answer, in relation to which our whole existence takes on the character of answerability. The very thing, then, which general and theoretical thinking as such would rather hurry past, my very existence as an individual, as this or that person, the very subjectivity of my conduct, becomes important, becomes the important thing, the only important thing, when it is a matter of the unique knowledge of the unique truth of origin. It becomes important because this truth applies to me and at every moment I have to understand my existence in relation to it as responsibility and decision, whether the decision be for it or against it or be left open. It is decision and as such the revelation of this truth to us for good or ill. Knowledge of the good occurs as we do it or not. Ethics is understanding of the good, not as it is known to us as a general and theoretical truth, but insofar as it reveals itself to us in our doing of it or not, insofar as the concrete reality of our life-situation is decision for or against it. All ethics which tries to look beyond this revelation of the good in our own decision, this active revelation, to a being of the good or a goodness of being, and which tries to define good actions and duties and virtues on this basis, might in some circumstances kindle our interest in the same way as higher physics or metaphysics; but beyond what it can itself achieve it would at once make necessary an authentic ethics which has to ask about the origin of this being of the good or this good being, and to do so in relation to our own decision, to our existence in decision. |
The ethical problem is not a problem, i.e., not a general theoretical question to which a general theoretical answer can be given. The reality of ethical science—science presupposes the possibility of common knowledge—makes sense only when there is fellowship in this supremely special knowledge, a knowledge of the good which reveals itself for good or ill in our decision. Thus theological as well as philosophical ethics—the former directly, the latter, as we have seen, indirectly—presupposes the church, the church as the place where the common presupposition is the givenness of the question of unconditional truth that is put to man, and therefore the fact that man is questioned, and therefore the revelation of this truth in his existential decision. The truth is the fellowship of individuals precisely in and not in spite of their individuality, the particularity in which the good is known here. |
On the presupposition of the church, on whose basis alone ethical knowledge is possible, what is thought and said in common about the ethical problem cannot consist of its recognition as a problem, of making it general and theoretical, of treating it as one of the many human questions, of treating the answer to it as an evident truth. It can only aim at showing us how far the meaning of our life-situation, of the wholly unproblematical reality of our existence, can be the revelation, the becoming evident, of the good. This becoming evident of the good in the reality of our own existence is the divine act of sanctification. It is the thing from which we must not abstract in any way if we are to pursue theological ethics and not theological physics. The latter would happen if the extension of our general and theoretical knowledge were secretly or openly to control our ethical inquiry, if we were to ask about the unconditioned without wanting to ask unconditionally, i.e., with the strictest attention to our being asked, if we were to try to deduce what being ought to be from being itself, if we were thus to try to understand God as the supreme being instead of in the way that he reveals himself, i.e., in the act of his divine being. The place where God is revealed as the quintessence of the good, where the knowledge of God thus becomes the knowledge of the good or theological ethics, is the divine act of sanctification. It is thus the reality of our existence or our decision to the extent that in it, no matter how the decision may go, God has decided on our salvation.
As God sanctifies us, the truth becomes unconditioned special truth applying to you and me today and tomorrow, not the truth which I maintain but the truth which maintains itself over against me, which fulfills itself in me. We must not leave this place, or stop considering the answerability of our life-situation, if we are to know how far God’s command is real, how far, as we have been asking in this first section, it is revealed to us. It is revealed to us in the event of our own conduct understood as responsibility. We must now ask how far this is so.
2
The common formula for the ethical problem, and one which does justice to the depth of the matter, runs as follows: “What shall we do?” The question, then, is that of human conduct. The questioning “what” seems to indicate that the sought content of this conduct is not to be found self-evidently in our own range of vision. The concept “shall” implies that the good is this content that is sought. Since it is “we” who ask, we confess that this question applies to all of us and we must work together to find an answer. We thus find that we have to take very seriously both the terms which constitute the formula and with them the formula itself. We are thus directed at once by the problem to the reality of our existence as the source of knowledge of the divine command.
a. Is the “what?” in this question meant seriously? Are we as ready as it suggests to will what we should, not seeking the apparent glory of the “should” for what we ourselves will? It is not wholly self-evident that as we ask what we should do we are not long since bound by what we want to do, so that our ethical question will lead to self-demonstration which is not, of course, necessarily meant to be base or bad. Especially in times of a single, strong, and definite cultural will, as in the period from the beginning of the century to the first world war and well into the war itself, ethical reflection can easily not be meant very seriously in the sense that in it—one has only to think of the products of war theology in all countries—the content of the imperative that is apparently sought is fixed from the very outset in the form of specific practices whose goodness is no longer open to discussion, being known only too well, so that the factual result of ethical reflection is obviously the ethical justifying of a more or less compact: “This is what we will do.” A similar self-assurance on the part of the actual ethos might well have been the secret of the ethics of Thomas Aquinas. Times and people who know all too well what they want must accept it if we accompany their ethical work relatively rather than absolutely from this standpoint, and with a certain mistrust whether they have properly investigated what we should do. The less this mistrust is in place, the more open the relation is between ethics and the actual ethos, and the more seriously the what? is meant, the more it means that a vacuum is created in the whole state of actual willing and doing, that there has to be questioning though not necessarily rejection. It was this vacuum that cost Socrates his life as an enemy of religion and morality—what was meant, of course, was the self-assurance of Athens after the age of Pericles. Between our self-evident desires and our self-evident action in their naive or ideologically enlightened givenness there comes the doubt whether this really is after all the good. |
If the ethical question is serious in this sense, it means at once and automatically that ethics becomes critical in another sense. We no longer have the time to wander in distant metaphysical regions in search of the good. We no longer have the time to try to contemplate it as being. This being somewhere above the “ought” is the infallible mark of an ethics that does not quite take the “what?” of the ethical question seriously, that gets its knowledge elsewhere from the actual ethos of the ethicist and his time and background, and that is really making no more than an appearance of asking. In a seriously questioning “what?” we confess that we ourselves are scrutinized in our own being or existence, that an eternal eye is focused on our acts, that what we will and do are measured. If we put the question: “What shall we do?” as those who really do not know and really need instruction, then we confess that we are attacked and questioned and laid in the balances in the reality of our own existence, in our own most proper this. The attacker who has come into the midst of our life and under whose criticism our this is set is the good itself, the command which is issued to us. A seriously meant “what shall we do?”—and it is for us to be clear whether and how far we know a seriously
