Robert S. Hartman

                        Levels of Value

I am a professional philosopher. I think I owe you an explanation how a sane person can go into this
profession. I was raised in Germany. I was born on January 27, 1910 in Berlin - on the Emperor’s
birthday. Not only was I born on that imperial holiday in the capital of the German Empire, I was
born in the very street which housed the War Ministry, Bendlerstrasse. As a matter of fact, my birth
house was right opposite the entrance to the War Ministry. I always say, a metaphysical umbilical
cord connects me with the latest German history.

I grew up in Germany, went to primary school and high school and very early saw the National
Socialist movement beginning. There was a national socialist club at our school. When I was invited
to this club from time to time, I saw what was going on there; between you and me - we are all men
here - it was a homosexual outfit, and didn’t appeal to me. To my great astonishment, in the course
of my youth, this movement grew into a large political movement, and the leader of this movement
was slated to become the Chancellor of the German Reich. So I wrote articles and papers already in
high school against this. One article I remember was entitled "Die Frau Hitler" - "The Woman
Hitler." I showed that the Nazi movement was a movement of perverts and homosexuals. I lit into
it. I said it was not so much a political as a psychiatric phenomenon. I still have this article. The
Nazis didn’t like it. I left Germany right after high school, in 1927, studying in France, Spain and
England, returning only in 1932 to finish up my studies in Berlin - and in 1933 Hitler did become
the Chancellor of the German Reich.

                         What Is Value?

Observing this whole development as a young fellow - starting out when I was about thirteen,
witnessing the Munich trial of Hitler which was a great event to us kids in Munich - and having to
make up my mind what I would do in life, I thought, here is the very core of evil being organized into
a political movement, and into a movement that is capturing the whole of Germany - their big song
was, as you know, "Today we own Germany, tomorrow the whole world" - "Heute gehoert uns
Deutschland, morgen die ganze Welt. "

I had no doubts that if this man with his tremendous power for hate could organize the million
Germans into a military organization, as he promised, then there would be another war, and the
Nazis might win it. They might really become the masters of the world. And I thought to myself,
what guarantee is there that this evil will not win? I saw it winning in Germany, and I thought to
myself, if evil can be organized so efficiently, why cannot good? I decided I would organize good.
But then I had to find out what was good - and what was evil? I had to find out what was value. So
I studied law. I thought, in the law, the judges always say what is right and what is wrong; they must
know what is good and what is evil. I got my law degree - and didn’t learn a single thing about good
and bad. For the law does not tell what is good and what is bad. The law tells what is legal and what
is illegal. I learned the one great lesson from my law experience - that the law is nothing but an
instrument that can be used for good or for evil in the hands of either good or evil people. That was
an important thing to learn. The law is just like any other instrument. A hammer can be used to drive
in a nail and to bash in a head. Law is like science. Science is neither good nor evil - but it can be
used for good or evil in the hands of good or evil people. With the atomic power we can make the
Sahara bloom and we can make the world into a desert. Science is morally neutral, it is, as we say,
amoral. It is neither moral nor immoral - it is amoral, morally neutral. And so is the law. This was
an important lesson to learn.

As an example of this moral neutrality of the law there was a few years ago a famous law case in
Germany, the so-called Remer case. It made crystal clear the purely instrumental nature of the law
for good or for evil There was in Germany a neo-Nazi party led by a man by the name of Remer.
Remer was the fellow who, by an accident, turned the day of the conspiracy against Hitler, the 20th
of July 1944, into a disaster for the conspirators. Maybe some of you saw the movie made about that
day - a fabulous movie. When the attempt was made, by Colonel Schenk von Stauffenberg at Hitler’s
headquarters in Rastenburg in East Prussia, the bomb was put by accident on the other side of the
table, blew up the table and some of the men opposite of Hitler, but to Hitler himself nothing
happened. Stauffenberg, who had seen the building blow up, went back to Berlin and told his fellow
conspirators Hitler was dead. Unfortunately, the conspiracy was badly organized. It seems the good
people have never had, so far in history, the efficiency of the bad people. Our task is really to make
the good people as efficient in the world as the bad people. The good people at that time, both the
military like Stauffenberg and the civilians, like Goerdeler, were extremely inefficient. Among other
things, they didn’t even have the foresight to cut off the telephone switchboard in Berlin or
efficiently to cut off Hitler’s headquarters from the rest of the country.

Thus, when Stauffenberg came back to Berlin and said Hitler was dead the conspirators started to
take power and to give the corresponding orders all over Germany. Remer was in charge of the guard
battalion of Berlin and got the order to arrest the Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels. But on the way
to Goebbels a fellow told him that Hitler was not dead. Remer got confused; as a soldier he had to
follow order; but whose orders? He marched his men into Goebbel’s office; Goebbels was sitting
at his desk, and Remer said, “I am here to arrest you.” Goebbels says, “Man you’re mad. Hitler’s
alive.” Remer says, “I have the order.” Goebbels says, “The Fuhrer lives.” Remer says, “Show me.
So, by golly, Goebbels takes the telephone, gets the connection with Hitler, puts Remer on the
telephone, and Remer listens, “Mein Fuhrer!” He recognized the voice immediately. “Yes, sir!” And
instead of arresting Goebbels he goes back to arrest the people who gave him the order to arrest
Goebbels.

That was Remer. He was very young at that time. After the war he built the neo-Nazi party in this
Germany of today, which is our so-called ally. And in the course of an election speech he called to
one of the people present, who was the son of one of the conspirators against Hitler’s life, “You son
of a traitor, shut up!” That young man brought a law suit against Remer, saying Remer had slandered
him, calling him the son of a traitor. The German law court then had to decide whether Remer had
slandered that young man, or whether he had said the truth; whether the young man was the son of
a traitor or whether he was, the son of a patriot. And that meant to decide whether the men who made
the attempt against Hitler’s life were traitors against Germany or were patriots; and this in turn meant
to decide whether the government of Hitler was an honest-to- goodness government or a murder
gang. If it was an hones t-to-goodness s government then the rebels were traitors and the plaintiff
was the son of a traitor, and Remer had not slandered him but said the truth. But if Hitler’s
government was a gang and a non-government, so to speak, then Remer would have slandered him
because then it was the patriotic duty of a German to get rid of Hitler, and the father of the young
man was a German patriot.

That case went all the way up to the Supreme Court in Karlsruhe. The German judges, very thorough
as they are, got opinions from priests and pastors and rabbis, from professors of philosophy, and
professors of political science, and theologians, and all the opinions were gathered in a book entitled
“The Remer Case” which is absolutelyfascinating. The judgment was as follows: Remer had
slandered the young man.The government of Hitler was no government. It was a gang which had
ursurpedpower like a gang of criminals. To get rid of Hitler was the duty of every German; the father
of that young man had done that duty, and therefore Remerhad to go to prison for three months.

Now, you understand very well that if Hitler had been in power again, which is impossible of course,
on the date of that Supreme Court decision, then those very same judges, with the very same legality
would have said exactly the opposite. That is the law. The law is morally neutral. It does not tell us
a thing about good and evil - and this I learned at the end of my law studies. But I didn’t learn what
I had set out to learn: what is good and what is bad. I wouldn’t say I had wasted four years because
I went into business later, and it helped me a great deal in making contracts and the like. It also
helped me to think with precision in philosophy, which I studied next. In philosophy, I was sure, I
would find what I was looking for. So I became a philosopher. By that time I was in America, went
to Northwestern, and got my doctorate.

In philosophy, the situation was even more interesting than in the law, and in a way even more
frustrating. However, I did find eventually what I was look ing for. Now we have to go a little into
philosophy.

Our problem is, what is good and what is bad. For how can we organize goodness if we don’t know
what it is?

Now what is goodness? Plato started out with the question and said the following. The interesting
thing about goodness, he said, is that it is very difficult to find a common denominator for all the
things that are called good. If I have a concept, let us say, of fruit, I have no difficulty in defining
what makes the different things that are fruit to be fruit. Oranges are fruit, apples are fruit, pears
are.fruit, plums are fruit and they all have something in common which makes them to be fruit. But
how about good things? Now I give you my own examples, not Plato’s. Here is a good microphone,
this is a good desk, this is a good lamp. I am a good person. You are a good person. God is good.
TWA is a good airline. Swiss cheese is good Swiss cheese - now what have all these good things in
common? It must be goodness, but what is that? The goodness of this microphone, the goodness of
this desk, the goodness of myself as a person, of yourself as a person, the goodness of God, the
goodness of TWA.- what have all these goodnesses in common? These good things must have
something in common in their goodness if they are all called good. At Plato’s time, the Sophists and
others bothered about good things like usefulness, pleasure, satisfaction, purpose; but these, said
Plato, were kinds of goodness; they were not Goodness itself; just as oranges and apples and pears
are kinds of fruit, but they are not fruit itself. You cannot say that oranges, plums, pears, and apples
are strawberries. You cannot say that the kinds of fruit have in common another kind of fruit. They
must have in common the genus fruit, the nature of fruitness. Thus, the good things cannot have a
particular kind of goodness in common like usefulness or pleasure. I cannot say that pleasure,
satisfaction, purpose are all usefulness. I must say they are all good; they are all valuable; but what
then is this goodness they have in common? Here we have different kinds of fruit

                                                       0            0               0                     0              000000
                                                  oranges   apples         pears          strawberries        etc.

thousands of them. We now put them all together and call them “fruit”.
 

                                   FRUIT

                  0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

                               Kinds of fruit

“Fruit” is the concept that “grasps together” - “con” means “together” and “cept” means “to grasp” -
all the kinds of fruit in the genus fruit. So, says Plato, we mus t grasp together the kinds of good
things in one concept, goodness. Thus, here we have the different kinds of good things

               0                        0                    0                         0                        0                      0
good microphones     good cheese     good persons     useful things     pleasurable things      etc.

--all the good things we can think of. We now grasp them together in the concept “goodness”:

                                Goodness

           0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

                         Kinds of good things
                             (or of goods)

Now, what is this goodness, this concept that all good things have in common? Or, for that matter,
what is badness, the concept all bad things have in common?
 

                                Badness

           0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

                          Kinds of bad things

And, how are the concepts of goodness and of badness related?

Well, there is a famous passage in Plato’s dialogue, The Republic. Glaucon says to Socrates: “Now,
old man, you have talked about the problem aplenty - now tell us the solution.” And Socrates says,
“My dear Glaucon, the solution does not belong into this dialogue. For this we have to have another
dialogue. I can’t tell you what goodness is, I can only tell you what it is like. It is like the sun that
radiates every thing, that warms every thing, that makes every thing fertile and brings forth every
thing.” And Glaucon says, “That’s a poor answer.” And so did we poor students of philosophy. So
we looked for that other dialogue where Plato gives the answer, but it was never written. It doesn’t
exist. Well then the poor student goes to Aristotle. And Aristotle, in the sixth chapter of the first
book on the Ethics, says, there are many good things and they may or may not have something in
common which is goodness; in any case, this is a problem that does not belong into this particular
treatise, but into another one. In this treatise, he says, I only speak of human goodness; and then he
goes into ethics - what is a good man? So you’re stuck again. You look for that other treatise, and
again, it was never written. Believe it or not, you go through the whole of philosophy, and nowhere
do you find the answer to the problem, what is goodness in general?

                       The Axiom of Value

In the year 1903, an Englishman by the name of George E. Moore wrote a book entitled Principia
Ethica. He followed, in his title, that of Newton’s book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathe-
matica,  The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687. You know that this book is the
basis of our whole technological civilization, including the atomic bomb. It was Newton who made
out of natural philosophy, natural science. Before Newton there was no natural science, there was
natural philosophy. What is the difference between natural philosophy and natural science? It is the
difference, for example, between alchemy and chemistry. Or between astrology and astronomy.
Alchemy and astrology were natural philosophies. In Newton’s time you had more astrology than
astronomy. Newton’s great predecessor, Kepler, wrote a book on astrology, but in that book you find
the three laws of the revolution of the planets, on which Kepler, so to speak, stumbled in the middle
of all kinds of abstruse reasonings. Kepler tried with life-long persistency to apply mathematical
reasoning to the motions of the stars. He finally found the famous three laws. But it was Newton who
generalized Kepler’s laws and made astronomy out of astrology by making mathematics available
to the observation of the stars. He found a general law, that of gravitation, that was applicable to all
natural phenomena. You remember the famous apple falling on his head. What pulls that apple on
my head, he said, is the earth; the earth pulls the apple and the apple pulls the earth; as the earth pulls
the apple so it pulls the moon, and so the sun pulls the earth and all the planets. Well, it wasn’t as
easy as that, although he did it when he was 24 years old.

Now then, G. E. Moore wrote Principia Ethica as the prolegomena, the introduction and basis, to a
science of ethics. He never said it but he may have thought - as I did later - that the world is in a mess
because we don’t know what goodness is. If we knew goodness as scientifically as we know nature
then we could be as efficient in goodness as we are in natural science. In any case, he did write the
basis of the future science of ethics. First, negatively, by showing that in the whole history of
philosophy, the philosophers had made a grave mistake: they had taken kinds of goodness for
goodness itself. They had mixed up two different logical levels, genus and species. These two levels,
said George E. Moore, must not be mixed up. There are the good things, and there is goodness itself.
He called the confusion of these two levels a fallacy. To show this fallacy was his great negative
achievement. It cleared away the philosophical garbage of ages. Positively, he had a more difficult
time. What is goodness itself? Well, he said, goodness itself is undefinable. I don’t know what it is,
nobody knows. I can only say that it is but not what it is. So his book is very short. Yet it is
fundamental, because he at least shows that fallacy of mixing up kinds of goodness or values with
the notion of value itself.

That was in 1903. Of course, George E. Moore was never happy with that book, and all his life he
tried to figure out what in the world goodness could be. About twenty years later, in 1922, he wrote
a little essay - he wrote very little but libraries have been written about him - entitled “The
Conception of Intrinsic Value” - where he said: While good is still undefinable, I can now give an
exact determination of it. Good - now listen carefully to this - Good is not a sensory property - it has
nothing to do with the senses. It is not a descriptive property, such as tall, green - any-property that
you can see, hear, smell or touch. Good is none of those things that you see, hear, smell or touch.
And yet, he said, though this is so, Good depends entirely on the sensory properties of the thing that
is said to be good.

Now let us see what this means.

Here is a thing that is good. Let’s say cheese - Swiss cheese. Swiss cheese has a certain smell, it has
holes, it has a certain kind of density, it has a certain taste, etc. These are the descriptive properties
of Swiss cheese - the way you recognize Swiss cheese as Swiss cheese. Of course, other things have
entirely different descriptive properties. TWA, for example, has an entirely different set of such
properties. It has pilots, mechanics, planes, terminals, etc. So everything has its own set of
descriptive properties - its definition. These sets of properties or descriptions can be found in the
Webster by looking up the thing in question. For example, this table - if we are too lazy to figure out
its definition we look it up in the dictionary. There, under “table” we find: “a piece of furniture
consisting of a flat top set horizontally on legs”. The Webster is full of sets of properties or
descriptions of things. Now, says George E. Moore, goodness is not any one of these properties - you
can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t sit on it or stand on it, you can’t handle it in any way, you
can’t describe it, nor can it describe anything. Yet, he says, it depends entirely on that set of
properties. In other words, take our Swiss cheese. The goodness of Swiss cheese, he says, depends
entirely on the descriptive properties of Swiss cheese. So, here we have the set of descriptive
properties and the property good.

                                                Set of Descriptive Properties           Property Good

          X

          X
                            .
          X

          X

Now, says G. E. Moore in 1922, the property good depends on the descriptive properties. But, says
he, I don’t know how it depends. Thus, in 1903 he says there is goodness. In 1922 he says goodness
is a non-descriptive property, but it depends on the descriptive properties of the thing. Another
twenty years later, in 1942, he said “If I knew in which way goodness depends on the descriptive
properties then I would know the nature of goodness. And I would have solved the old Platonic
problem..” Then he died. So there we were, poor fellows in philosophy, especially me who wanted
to find out what goodness is, left up in the air.

Now, first I.want to explain to you as clearly as I can what Moore means. You all have your cars
outside. Now suppose you have forgotten something inside. You hand me your key and you say:
“Bob, here’s the key to my car. In there is a book. You just open the door and get it out.” I say:
“Well, which is your, car?” “Oh,” you say, “it’s a good car.” Will I ever find your car? I will never
find it because you didn’t describe it to me. Goodness is a non-descriptive property. Now then, say
some philosophers, the positivists, since “good” doesn’t describe, it doesn’t mean a thing. It doesn’t
say anything. But that is false. For you did say a great deal to me by saying that your car was good.
You have said it has a motor, it has brakes, when you push the brakes it brakes, when you push the
gas pedal it accelerates. You told me that it isn’t the other way around - when you push the gas pedal
it brakes, when you push the brake it accelerates. That would not be a good car. I have learned a lot
about your car, even though you haven’t described it to me. So what have you done? Well, we
figured out how this goodness was connected with the properties of the thing that was good. Finally,
we did a very simple thing. We did this.

                             Descriptive Properties   Connection     Goodness

                              X

                              X

                              X

                              X

This means that a thing is good if it has all the properties it is supposed to have. And with this we
founded a new science called value theory or, in Greek, axiology, from axios, meaning value. A
thing is good if it has all the properties it is supposed to have.

Now let us go back to the various things we mentioned. This is a microphone -what’s a good
microphone? A thing that is called “microphone” and has all the properties that microphones are
supposed to have - obvious. What is a good table? A thing that is called “table” and has all the
properties that tables are supposed to have. What is a good airline? A thing called “airline” that has
all the properties airlines are supposed to have. So far so good. But now here I am. What is a good
I? I am good if I have the properties I am supposed to have. Now we are getting into trouble. We
know how to define a microphone. We look it up in the Webster. We know what a table is or an
airline - we look them up in the Webster. So let’s stop for a minute and take stock.

We now have the general principle of goodness. A thing is good if it fulfills its definition. We also
have the relation of goodness to badness. A thing is not good, that is, bad, if it does not fulfill its
definition, if it does not have all its descriptive properties. A fourlegged table with only three legs
is still a fourlegged table, but a bad one. With.this general principle we had axiom of a new science,
the science G. E. Moore foresaw and prepared but did notbring about.

We now have the following set of sciences today. We have the natural sciences - for example,
physics with its atomic bomb. We have chemistry - astronomy, etc. All these are sciences because
they are mathematically ordered. Today we know that mathematics is a kind of logic. This was
proved in.1903 - the same year that Moore published Principia Ethica - by Bertrand Russell, the old
man of 90 today [in 1962] who is against nuclear armament. Thus, science has three levels: logic,
mathematics, and the specific sciences in question.

What is true of natural science must be true of the social and moral sciences, politics, ethics,
management science, sociology, psychology, religion, and so on. These disciplines until recently had
no framework according to which they could be ordered. They were philosophies, not sciences.
Therefore, we had on the one hand Einsteinian physics, and on the other hand, Aristotelian ethics.
What is still taught in high schools and universities today as ethics is Aristotle’s kind of ethics.
Aristotle wrote a book about physics, but anybody who would teach Aristotelian physics in a physics
course today would be crazy, for Aristotle’s physics is all wrong. Today we learn Newton’s and
Einstein’s physics, and even they are already passé. But what do we learn in ethics? Aristotelian
ethics. And the Aristotelian ethics is just as wrong as the Aristotelian physics. So we are extremely
advanced in natural science and completely behind in moral science. We know very well how to
make nuclear bombs, but we don’t know how to make ourselves good men. And to find out what
good men are we read Aristotle, and what is written there is commonplace trifles. So my students
come to me - I don’t teach it anymore, just for that reason - they came to me after the classes in
ethics - and said,“Well, do I know now how to be a good man?” “Well, “ I said, “you’re supposed
to.” “But,” they said, “we don’t.” “Of course you don’t,” I used to say, “I wasn’t supposed to teach
you how to be a good man; I was supposed to teach you Ethics. That is, what philosophers of ethics
have said. And they haven’t said much.” College students are very intelligent; they want to know.
You give them that old stuff and they become depressed. So, of course, they try to get ethics by :

Mathematics   Axiology
     Logic
 

Natural                                                    Value
Sciences    000000                        000000   Sciences

                                                                                Natural                                                                                           Value
Situations    000000                          000000   Situations

reading Lord of the Flies and the like, which are truly moral treatises. Aristotelian ethics doesn’t fit
the world of Einstein’s formula, E = mc2, the energy of something is equal to the product of its mass
times the square of the velocity of light. Since the velocity of light is 186,000 miles a second -you
square that times 186,000, and you multiply it with this piece of chalk and you can drive a battle ship
for ten years. With this powerful physics, we put the silly ethics of all these silly philosophers.

The remedy, and the only remedy, is to lift the social and moral disciplines, the so-called humanities
- to the level of science. The so-called social sciences today are no science at all; they are non-
sciences - philosophies and ideologies. How can they become exact sciences? By being ordered
logically. So we need another kind of logic which orders these disciplines and makes them exact.
As a result, we would know with exactness what a good man is and how a good man can be good,
and how goodness can be organized. This ordering logic is the science of axiology, or value theory.
It orders the social disciplines as mathematics orders the natural discipline . The total schema of the
sciences of the future then looks as in the preceding diagram.

                      What is a Good Man?

Once I had the axiom of value I tried to apply it. A thing is good if it has all the properties it is
supposed to have. This was very simple for apples, oranges and pears, and chairs and tables and
airlines. All I had to do was to look up their definitions in the dictionary. When a thing had all the
properties that the dictionary said it should have, it was a good such thing. But then I asked myself,
“What in the world is a good man?” What is it that makes me good? I am good, according to the
definition, if I have all the properties I’m supposed to have. Well, then I had to ask myself, what are
the properties that I’m supposed to have?

Now the trouble started. To begin with, how do I get a definition of myself? Who gives me my
definition of myself? Of course, nobody can give me the definition of myself but myself. So, I
defined man as the being that has its own definition of itself within itself. This is the difference
between man and anything else. Man is the being that has its own definition of itself within itself.
The poor chair here doesn’t know that it is a chair. It is I who gives it the definition. That table
doesn’t know that it’s a table. I make it a table. But I am I only when I know I am I. lam a man by
being a self-conscious being, a being conscious of myself; and any being conscious of itself is a man.
It makes no difference how it looks. Suppose there are beings on Mars that look like chairs. If they
can say “I” and they can define themselves - then they are human beings. There was once a cartoon
in the New Yorker - very funny I thought. It was a restaurant, a space station. At one table were
sitting people like you and me. At another table there were sitting people with antennas, looking like
ants. But the funniest thing were two doors. One door said “Martians” and the other said
“Terrestrials” - which showed that the biological set-put was different. But it made no difference -
both were humans in the sense of being able to say “I am I.” To have consciousness of one’s self or
conscience - to have one’s own definition of oneself within himself - that is the definition of the
human.

Now we have advanced already a large step. What I am telling you is called existential philosophy,
but forget the name right away for it may remind you of beatniks and the like and that is not what
I am talking about. Let’s call it value theory.

Now, then, I know I am human if I have my own definition of myself within myself. What then is
the property I have to fulfill to be a good myself? Precisely this: to be conscious of myself, to define
myself - for to define myself to be conscious of myself - that is the definition of myself. The more,
therefore, I am conscious of myself, the more, and the more clearly, I define myself - the more I am
a good person.

Now this was a hard thing for me to learn. I was raised in Germany, and that meant a very peculiar
education. When I was in grade school, in German called Volksschule, they still beat us, frequently,
regularly, and systematically, in the German way, prophylactically and kind of scientifically. We
called this discipline. I was raised by disciplinarians as a disciplinarian. My father, bless his soul, was
a good Prussian. I don’t think he would mind me saying this - he was and he knew it. He had the
same system - disciplinarian. I was raised as a disciplinarian, a perfectionist - but you see, I never
knew it. I thought that’s the way things are and things have to be. You do your duty, you do what you
have to do, come hell or high water. There is no higher value but this. My poor wife - she never
thought that way. But I never knew what she suffered until I tried to define myself. What is the
definition of myself ? I asked myself, “What am I?” Well, I am a professor philosophy; I was at that
time and still am. But, is that me? That is a member of the class of professors of philosophy. That
is not myself. It’s only a part of myself. There are thousands of professors of philosophy. What then
is I - that which is uniquely Robert S. Hartman? Ah, I said to myself, as the Prussian disciplinarian,
the perfectionist - I do it all as best I can, it just can’t be done better. But then I thought to myself,
first, that’s not true. Secondly, if it were true, so what. Then I would be the best philosopher in the
world. But that’s not myself. That’s not what my wife married. When my wife married me she didn’t
even know I was a philosopher. I was a jurist and a businessman - and not much of either, maybe,
I was 25 years old. And anyway, there were millions of jurists and businessmen - but she married me!
What did I have that nobody else had?’ Who was I? I suddenly saw that the question, “What am I?,”
didn’t work. Philosopher? Well, sure, I am a philosopher, I’m a husband, too. I’m a commuter, I’m
an eater, I’m a smoker - at that time - no more - I want to live. I’m a speaker - I’m a Rotarian - I was -
good Lord, I was a million things. So, when I tried to put down what I was in order to define what
would be a good me, I had to draw a circle with a thousand fractions; and I am together in society
with other such fractions, all of which together form the web of society.

[Hartman’s figures are not reproduced here].

I’m a professor. As a professor I’m in the American Association of University Professors, and there
I am together with ten thousand other professors. I am a commuter. I commute from Lake Forest to
Chicago among the other commuters. I am a husband among husbands. I’m an eater among eaters.
I’m a sleeper among sleepers. I’m a teacher among teachers. I’m a walker, a driver. Well, I’m a
collection of a million fractions. Where’s me - Where’s I? What is that which all these things have
in common? Where’s the core of the whole works? So I said to myself, the whole question is wrong.
I must not ask what I am - I must ask who I am. Who am I? And then I had to answer myself, who
am I? I am I. I am the one I am. And this is precisely the property I have to fulfill, the property of
self-consciousness, which I define myself. Whatever I said - I’m a so and so - I always became
fractioned up. I had to say, “I am the one I am. I am I.” Now strangely enough, I found in the Bible,
when Moses asked God, “What is your name?” God answered, “I am I. I am the one I am, Jehova.
The definition showed me that I am made in the image of God.

But now who is the one I am? Well, go back and apply value theory. The definition of me is that I
am the one who defines himself. Thus, what I have to do to fulfill my definition is to define myself,
to answer the question:”Who am I?” And who am I? I am I. This is my definition of myself - pure
self awareness: I am I. The concept I have to fulfill is “I”. or, “I am I,” and when I fulfill this I am
a good I. How do I fulfill this concept? The first thing I found - and many found this is just common
philosophy - is that I must not confuse my own intrinsic or moral self with my extrinsic or social self
- my inner being with the roles I am playing in society, my fundamental I and the social fractions of
me. That’s at the bottom of it all. What are the properties that I must fulfill to be I? Well, very simple
- be myself. And you? Be yourself. And that’s what every ethics book actually says or should say:
“To thine own self be true,” as Shakespeare says, and he adds, “It must follow as the night the day
thou canst not then be false to any man.” All the words of ethics mean that you should be yourself
-and not fool around being anybody else. Sincerity. What does it mean? That you are yourself.
Honesty - that you are yourself. Integrity? That you are yourself. Authenticity - “He is an authentic
person” - that you are yourself.

Is it possible not to be yourself? Oh, my God, most of us are not ourselves. We play roles. The word
person in Latin meant having a mask in front of yourself. “Personal” means “mask.” You play a role -
we say we play our role in life. I play the role as professor. You play your role whatever it is. But
that’s not you. That’s playing a role. The you that is yourself is that core of sincerity within you. Now
you may, with that core of sincerity, play that role sincerely and then you and your role are one. But
there are plenty of persons who play a role that is not themselves. I know a woman of 55 who plays
the role of being a girl of 18. And she walks like that, she dresses like that and she’s ridiculous - but
she doesn’t know it - her self is stunted. There are persons with a fractional or with a stunted self.
There are sicknesses within the self, just as there are sicknesses within the body and within the mind.
So we are really three parts. There is the Self, there is the body and its social situation, and there is
the mind. Each of these three parts of ourselves has its own values - and the total value pattern is the
Personality.

                   The Three Levels of Value

We can symbolize this total pattern in terms of a cone, with a little flag on top.

        Thought
 

        Society
 

        Self

The. Self is the vertical dimension within us. That’s why we speak of “depth” psychology. We are
of infinite depth because we can clarify our self-awareness to infinite clarity - to complete
transparency. The more we do it the more we become ourselves and the more power we can summon
at our disposal in the world. The Self is our reservoir of power. We have infinite power within us,
infinitely deep down within us. It is not easy to tap this power. We can only tap it if we get rid so to
speak of the horizontal dimension, that of society and even the little flag on top, thinking. We are
like icebergs. Most of us is underneath and the horizontal part is on top, swimming on the water like
the top of an iceberg, or even better, like a water lily, very fragile. This horizontal part is our social
self, the Me rather than the I. It is connected socially with other such selves - and the web of
connections is called Society. Thus, we have the horizontal dimension of society where we have
social intercourse with people, and we have the vertical dimension of the self where we might say
we have intercourse within our own Self. These are two dimensions of our personality - the social
and the - well, we call it the existential - but let us call it the human or the spiritual dimension of the
inner Self.

There is a third dimension - the intellectual - which builds systems and imposes them on society and
often upon the Self. It is our systemic dimension. The Germans are particularly strong in this. They
push the systemic to the last consequence - discipline, remember. That’s their highest value - or
wascome hell or high water, and even if it meant the end of the world. You read about Eichmann.
Was Eichmann a bad man? Oh, not at all. He did his duty. He said, “I never killed anybody. I am a
transportation specialist. My work was to make schedules - railroad schedules. That’s all I did. I
followed my orders. It wasn’t my business to know who was being put into those railroad cars. I
never put any body in. It wasn’t my business where they went to. My orders were to make railroad
schedules and that’s what I did. I transported people.” Well, he transported them to the fire, but that
was incidental. He did it with great thoroughness and was proud of it. He was a very systematic man,
and the system was his life. In his cell in Jerusalem he made every morning at the appointed hour
so many steps in one direction and so many in another. He smoked exactly four cigarettes a day. He
mopped his floor with exactly the same number of strokes each day. Once, when he was interrupted
and lost count he was upset all day. Order, that was his value, in both senses of the word. His trains
went on schedule, and that is all that counted for him. Well, you might say, that is German. But how
about this one? “I’m the captain of a submarine. My submarine has 16 nuclear bombs. Every single
one of these bombs has more fire power than all the bombs ever fired in all wars together - every
single one of them. And when I get my orders I push the button and fire my bombs. That’s my duty.
That’s what I live for. I follow orders. I am a Polaris captain. I transport the fire to the people. I’m
a member of a system and I do what the system says I should do.” What’s the difference with
Eichmann? As long as you are the member of the system, you are the member of a system. You do
what the system tells you.

This is systemic value. It is amoral - as is the law and as is science. Both are systems. This amorality
maybe immoral, and it may also be moral. It all depends how the system is being used. We can’t live
without systemic values - but we mustn’t overdo them. This is what my own value theory taught me.
All the other value s are more important than systemic values, no matter how important are systemic
values. Once there was something wrong with my railroad travel card. I go to the office to complain
and the man calls: “Miss Jones, bring me No. B33725.” That was me. For him I was a number, and
rightly so. Railroading is a big system. Life is full of systemic values. In the army you are a number -
in prison you’re a number - in the hospital you’re a number. One nurse says to the other, “I’m giving
a wash to No. 382". No. 382 is not even you -that’s the room you’re in. The world is full of systemic
values. But at times, systemic values may collide with your own individuality. People have a fine
sense for this, but not fine enough. They rebel against new telephone numbers without letters, but
they don’t rebel against nuclear bombs. They seem to be rebelling against flying jets, for the airlines
are losing money due to low traffic. I myself don’t like to fly; those planes they are too systemic for
me. I know the thing is so exactly figured out that if the slightest thing goes wrong I’m down. And
I know that if a little screw of 1 inch is lost in the tail assembly of a 707, that’s my end. A plane is
a mental construction - it’s up there by the pure laws of physics. It has a million parts put together
by man and man simply isn’t up to the perfection of systems. From time to time something must go
wrong.. That’s what you in the insurance business live on. You live on the fact that man is very good
systemically but not quite good enough. Most planes stay up but enough fall down for you to get
business. You would be out of business (a) if no plane ever would come down and (b) if all would
comedown. So there’s a very subtle balance in the universe between the perfect and the imperfect
which can be figured out by statistical laws. Most people are alive but all of us will die one day.
Most of us are healthy today but 1/64 percent of us will be sick tomorrow. Catastrophes are not a part
of your insurance contract - always there is that fine print for the so-called acts of God, which
actually are acts of the Devil. Of course, if it’s not too huge a disaster you get together and call that
reinsurance. It’s all figured out. All roads, automobiles and many other hazards. You can figure out
exactly - not when some thing will happen but that something’s got to happen.

A friend of mine came to Mexico this summer with his family; they rented a beautiful house which
had nothing but glass doors and glass windows. Such perfect glass that you didn’t see there was
anything. They had six children and they came in the beginning of June. I said to myself, by
statistical necessity with six children, four grown-ups and all these glass walls and windows, there
is bound to happen something. I said to them, “Listen, with all these kids you better put some paper
or some warning signs on those doors and windows. Otherwise, one of those kids, or you yourself
will just walk through - it happened to me almost.” “Oh, no,” they said, “We are very intelligent” -
college presidents, you know, university presidents. “We are very careful.” Sure enough, on their last
day when they wanted to leave, one of the little girls walked through the door and had to go to the
hospital. This is absolutely statistically certain. If it hadn’t happened to them it would have happened
to others. All the cars are going beautifully on the highway, but you know that every big week-end
385 drivers will die. Then comes in the actual statistics and it was 386. Nobody wanted it. The world
is perfect but it has a little flaw of contingency, as we call it, which is not so perfect. The human
mind is simply not up to complete perfection. Therefore, this.terrific danger of an accidental war.
By 1965 there will be 65,000 buttons, any one of which can start a war. It’s statistically certain that
it must happen. “Fail safe” must sometime fail - read the novel by Burdick and Wheeler - and a
failure in that system is like a pilot’s failure - it can only be made once.

So this is the statistical and systemic dimension of value. It is very necessary. When your wife goes
to the hospital to get her child, she gets a number, and the child also gets a number, and you hope
they’ll both get the same number. The systemic is very important for very important things in our
life but it is not all-important.

Now the social dimension. Here we get together with our so-called fellow man in the so-called
society for so-called fellowship. The insurance people get together - I bet you have an Insurance
Association of America where you. are together with your insurance fellows as insurance men. But
I bet your wife very seldom goes with you, or if she does, she won’t understand what goes on. If I
would go with you I won’t know what is going on. And if you would go with me to my philosophy
association, you wouldn’t understand a word. So the world is split up socially into classes; and when
Karl Marx spoke of classes he meant social classes, but they are also logical classes. People get
classified; everyone is in his own section and valued as a so-and-so. This we call social value or
extrinsic value. We are extrinsically valued. You are valued as good insurance men. I am valued as
a good teacher. We are valued by the railroad or airline as good commuters. The more tickets we
buy, the more they value us. They make us “Ambassadors,” give us “The Red Carpet” treatments
etc. Usually money values are extrinsic values. They are limited values - you wouldn’t sell your baby
or buy a wife. The intrinsic value level which is you in your own depth is infinitely more important
than all systems and all money in the world.

Now to give you an example of how all three levels get together. Let’s say that a young fellow goes
into a store to buy a package of cigarettes. There is a vending girl and he says, “I want a package of
Marlboros.” She says, “Here you are.” “How much,” he says. She says, “27 cents.” She gives it to
you, you give her 27¢, you say, “Goodbye.” She says, “Goodbye, thank you.” What kind of a
relationship was that? That was a purely systemic relationship, a legal sales contract. You paid 27¢,
and she gave you a package of cigarettes. Now she could have been a vending machine. You didn’t
need a girl for that. I think they have machines now that say, “Thank you.” It could have been a
machine - you put in 27¢ and out popped the package - and it was exactly the same contract - mind
you, girl or no girl.

So that was a systemic relationship, there wasn’t much to it. Next day you go into that same store
and there is that same girl and you say, “A Marlboro,” and she says, “Oh, yes, you want a Marlboro -
27¢.” And you say, “Yeh, 27¢ ,”and then you look at her. My gosh, she’s a girl. And you look at her
again and you think, “My, she looks pretty nice.” And you say, “How long have you been in
Columbus?” “Oh,” she says, “Three months,” and you say, “Where do you come from?” “Oh, I come
from Detroit.”Before you know they talk to each other about the weather, of course, then about father
and mother and so on. They make conversation. That’s also a relationship. It’s also a give and take,
but it’s a social one, not a legal one. It’s a social relationship. You have moved from the systemic,
which has no properties except one, to a social relationship which can have an infinity of properties.
Because you can talk to her for a whole day. By gosh, you like her. So there’s a little sofa there, and
you sit in the corner and just see how she does her job, and when there are no customers she talks
to you. One day, you say to her, “Let’s go out to have dinner at the Inn in Worthington of
Nationwide.”

“Boy,” she says, “Are you that rich?” Well, they go there and they have a wonderful time. Now
imagine how they have added to their relationship. Their relationship has become richer. We can
define value as “enrichment of properties. The richer in properties something is, the more value it
has. The poorer in properties something is, the less value it has. They enriched their properties. It’s
like a cake. You can make a very lean cake and you can add and add and add and at the end it’s a
humdinger of a cake - tremendous, whipped cream and God knows what - as they make them in
Austria. Enrichment of properties. The two have that evening at the Inn and others like it - all the
time enriching their relationship - until it takes in their whole being. And one day, as they meet he
says to her or she says to him, “When do we marry?” And before you know it they stand in front of
the minister, and one says to the other, “I stay with you in sickness and health, richness and poorness,
till death do us part.”

Well, they’ve come a long way from the vending contract. Now they’re husband and wife, and a true
marriage, love, has nothing whatsoever to do with a social relationship. It is a relationship from inner
core to inner core. Love is this relationship here.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

And she doesn’t give a hang how much money he has and who his father is or his mother - not
perhaps even his race - she’s a very sensitive girl wide awake to herself and her world. And he
doesn’t give a hang about her background, her money, her career. He loves her, she loves him and.
they get together. How do they know they love each other? Because- they have gone within
themselves and they have inquired within and they have asked themselves.- I speak of a real love
marriage, where people are really clear about what they do - “Who is this person” - not “What is this
person?” And he sees that person, that young girl of 18, as the grandmother of his own grandchildren
- when his own children haven’t even been conceived yet. That inner Self leaps over space and time,
it sees the whole of life at one glance. It has happened that you saw a girl and in the first glance you
knew that it was your wife. I don’t know whether that happened to anyone of you, I had a girl in my
class at MIT - there are some girls there too -she told me this. “I was sitting in your class and in came
a boy. I looked at him and I said to myself, there is my husband. Well, he sat down with a friend of
his at the other end of the room.” After my class she followed him. He went with his friend to a
drugstore, sat down and had ice cream. And she said, “I sat down right beside him and after three
months we were married.” And they’re still very happily married.

An immediate intuition is the main characteristic of that inner self. It is born from transparent clarity
of oneself. I tell you how I met my own wife. When I was 25, I was invited to a friend’s house, some
older gentleman, and he had a glass cabinet with dishes in it. Very nice, Rosenthal and so on, which
had a glass door. I was admiring these sets of glass - I was standing in front of it, my back to the
room, looking at the glass cabinet. Suddenly I see in that glass door, among the dishes, the face of
a girl, who was standing behind me. And as truly as I am standing here in front of you, I was there
looking at that girl in the mirror, and I said to myself, “There’s my wife.” And then I remember like
today, I said to myself, “You’re crazy, man, you’re 25. Men don’t marry, onlv women do. That is
not your business - I mean, to give up your freedom at 25 years of. age. Let the women do that. But
not me.” And then I said to myself, “How do I know that this is, my wife?” And my answer was this,
and I remember it like today. I said to myself, “Just as this is your little finger, this is your wife, and
you can’t do a thing about it.”

Now I was standing with my back to the room. So she saw me only from the back. And at the same
moment she said to herself, “There’s my husband.” And when I left she said to her mother, “I’m
going to marry that guy.” Her mother said, “You’re crazy” - and she was. For I told you how I was
raised, a disciplinarian, a perfectionist, systemic value was my value. She had a rough row to hoe.
But when I found out that this disciplinarian, professional efficiency was not all there was to me, I
found that the love of my wife and my love to her was more important than anything. I found that
out through George E. Moore and through trying to define myself according to value theory. I
became a different person. Much better to live with says my wife, and that’s true. I found the real
value. Let us now go into the depth of this self dimension.

                    The Infinity of the Self

First, let us remember my original question: What is goodness and how can we make goodness as
efficient in the world as badness. The answer is that goodness is richness of qualities, that these
qualities must be those of the thing in question, that is, those which define the thing - if I have a boil
in the middle of my face, my face is not richer in (face-) qualities than without a boil - and that,
hence, a thing has value in the degree that it fulfills its definition. I have moral value in the degree
that I fulfill my own definition of myself. This definition is: “I am I.” Thus, in the degree that I am
I, I am a morally good person. Moral goodness is the depth of mans own being himself. This is the
greatest goodness in the world. If everyone of us and everyone in the world would just be himself
and follow his own inner self or, as we say, the voice of his conscience, then everything would
straighten itself out, all the problems would just fall by the wayside. We wouldn’t listen to false
prophets, to politicians, to those who want to use us for their own ambitions. We would just be
ourselves. We would know the true values. As Larissa, in Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago says to her dead
friend Zhivago at the end of the book, “The riddle of life, the riddle of death, the enchantment of
genius, the enchantment of unadorned beauty - yes, yes, these things were ours. But the small worries
of practical life -things like the reshaping of the planet - these things, no thank you, they are not for
us.” Little things like the reshaping of the planet! The whole world is nothing compared to the value
of the infinite Self, the riddle of its life and death, its awareness of beauty, its genius.

This does not mean that we must not be social and not be intelligent. On the contrary, the more we
are ourselves the more we have both social and intellectual power - in a free society. I am still a
philosopher and I am still a disciplinarian and I am still a systematic thinker. This is how I make my
living. I try to think with absolute exactness about these deep values, and I try too make them
intellectually articulate. The trouble has been that these deep values have been known vaguely,
intuitively, in a shallow sense of the word, that we haven’t been able to articulate them. My job in
the world is too make these previously vague and intuitive things intellectually clear. The method
of axiology or value theory looks very cold but is awfully hot inside. We always say that the
difference between us and the Russians is that we believe in the value of the individual. That we
believe that man is made in the image of God. That man is of infinite value. But the Communists
always say with great justification - and I don’t think anyone in this room has had so many
discussions with Communists as I have - they way with great justification, “What do you mean by
that? This is all words. At best it is sentimentality.” And when you look at our politics in the world -
where we give tit for tat to the Communists - it is awfully hard to see how we put these intrinsic
values into politics. The larger the situation the harder it is to deal with it intuitively. In order to
actualize moral values in the world we absolutely need an instrument of clear intellectual thought
that will make these values transparent to everybody; or, at first, at least to the minds of the
intelligent people everywhere, or even the intellectuals, which is not the same as the intelligent.
Some of the most intellectual people I know are the most unintelligent. An intelligent person is really
a person who can mobilize his inner resources, the infinite power within him, for the management
of his own life. An intellectual is a person who merely knows how to think. Communists outside of
Russia are usually intellectuals. They want to understand the laws of society; and Karl Marx was an
alchemist who gave them some pseudo-laws. They are content with them for there is really nothing
of comparable intellectual vigor in the Western world. Thus, we have to make at least intellectually
clear what we mean by the value of the individual. Communism in Latin America, as it was in China,
is not a matter of the people, of the workers or peasants; it is a matter of the intellectuals.

I meet Americans all the time who say, me, I am so and so. I have a newspaper in this and this city
and I do everything to propagate our values, the value of the individual. When I ask, “What do you
mean by the value of the individual?” usually these guys either don’t say anything, or it turns out that
what they mean is their own right to make a lot of money. They really mean money value. I get
disgusted with these people. They play into the hands of the Communists. So my job is to articulate
these things. What is the value of the individual and in which sense is it infinite?

The first who divined the infinite value of man was the psalmist who said that man was made just
a little lower than the angels. The first who articulated this infinite value of the human person - not
in the language that we use, in the language that I am talking to you now, but in a different kind of
language as we shall see tomorrow - was Jesus. He saw and demonstrated the infinite value of the
individual. The first man after Jesus who clearly described this same infinite value was a young man
in Italy by the name of Pico della Mirandola who, at the height of the Renaissance, discovered the
new world of man’s infinite spirit, at exactly the same time, around 1492, that Columbus discovered
the new world of America. Pico write a speech entitled “On the Dignity of the Human Being.” There
he describes man in a very wonderful parable: When God had created the earth and had made the
animals and the vegetables and the minerals and put all the parts of the world in their places, there
was missing one being which would not be bound to any position at all but could take any position
and could mirror the whole creation within himself, including God. This being was man. And so God
created Adam as the one who would be able to appreciate God’s own creation and be able to take
any place in creation that he wanted, who could live like a vegetable or like an angel, like a rapacious
animal or like a saint. Ours is the whole range of creation. We can just vegetate, or we can rise on
the wings of the spirit almost to God. There is no limit whatsoever to our capacity. We are infinite
and of infinite power.

I always say too the students when they ask me, “What’s a genius,” “You are a genius.” For a genius
is nothing but a person who can put all his power into one thought. And when a student says, “But
I have no power,” I said to his neighbor, “Try and strangle that guy. You’ll see what powers he
develops.” There is infinite power in us even physically. Have you heard the story of that little ole
woman, weighing 110 pounds, whose son was lying in the garage under a Buick of 2 ½ tons when
the jack broke; and the little woman of 110 pounds - and I think she was asthmatic too - went into
the garage, lifted that 2 ½ ton Buick from that boy, put her leg under the car, pulled him out, and
broke her own back in the process? Well, that’s what we c all a miracle. A miracle is nothing but
summoning the infinite resources within us. That we have these infinite resources can be proved as
a fact, empirically, actually, and it can be proved logically. I hope none of you will ever have to go
through a situation when you have to prove it actually. But if you have a crisis in a deep sickness it
depends on your own power whether want to be healthy or not. And this is true of pulling through
any crisis. After the war, I saw those skeletons of the concentration camps, men weighing 50 and 60
pounds. They were talking to me and they told me how they had walked a hundred and two hundred
miles before they were liberated, the Germans were chasing them out of the concentration camps
when the Americans were coming, everyone was shot who stumbled. They said, “We heard the
American planes over us and whenever we heard them we got more power and we could walk and
walk. There was a power that sustained us that came from somewhere - I don’t know where. And
we had it as long as we needed it.” These are crisis situations when you get your power. A genius
is a man in a continuous crisis. He gets his power all the time.

So it is empirically, by experience provable that we have infinite, truly infinite power. Whenever you
read the stories of science, like Newton, or of art like Bach or Michelangelo, whenever these men
are asked how they could produce such beautiful works day in and day out, they always gave the
same answer throughout the ages: “Anybody can do it who doesn’t do anything else day and night.”
As Newton said, “I keep the problem continuously before my eyes.” He lived it. Galileo said, when
asked how he could find the law of movement, “I became a falling body,” meaning that he converted
himself into a falling tone and thought as a falling stone. A genius is a person who puts his whole
self into a problem. That’s not necessarily a good person from a moral point of view - he’s just a
genius you see. Newton was a pretty mean customer. But he was a great man.

A great good man is a Saint. Now a saint is a person who puts his whole power, all the resources of
himself, into his own goodness, a man who has discovered his oneness with all creation, all men, all
animals, even all things. He lives within the depth of everybody else. He is a man of infinite
compassion. This is the deepest intrinsic goodness - infinite compassion. To live so deeply and
transparently within ourselves that we live deeply and compassionately within every human being,
indeed every living being - indeed, every being. As St. Francis said to Brother Leo when he tried to
extinguish the fire on St. Francis’ coat, “Brother Leo, be careful with Brother Fire.” As Albert
Schweitzer who feels pain at having to kill the bacteria when he does an operation. Compassion is
the touchstone of moral value.

I am not talking Bible here. I mean it as an actual experience in the very sense that whenever you see
someone happy or someone suffering, some of your fellow-man in trouble, that it eats your heart out.
Now I hope there are some people like this in this room. If you feel with the suffering fellowman and
you can’t tear yourself away from him and you suffer as he does, then you know what I mean. I mean
the sensitivity that is the intrinsic value of your being one with all humanity. For - and now comes
the main thing - this infinity within us means that with our intrinsic self we are not in space and time.
Space and time are finite. Infinity - the infinity of your inner self - means that you are not bound to
anything in space and time, you are outside of space and time. That’s why we can immediately intuit
that this girl is our wife. We see the whole of our future in just one glance - we are not in time. Love
is not in time - years with the beloved are just a second - and a moment with her can be eternity.

]Friendship is not in time. I once happened to come through Sao Paulo in Brazil. I had nothing to do
in the evening and just leafed through the telephone book. Suddenly I see a name that was exactly
like the name of a boy I had seen last about 35 years ago in my class in Munich. Well, I though, call
him up. I was then about 50, and when I left Munich I was about 15, so it was some 35 years ago.
I call him up. I said, “I am so and so.” He said, “what - are you the one I went to school with in
Munich? Yes! My god, my best friend!” He came with his car, and 35 years were erased like nothing.
Friendship is not in time. Nor is it in space. Love and friendship are outside of space. I came to
America with my family in 1938 at the day of Munich when I was the representative of Walt Disney
in Scandinavia. I went to Hollywood to Walt Disney and said, “ I’m through with Europe; there will
be a war.” He didn’t believe me but finally give me his representation in Mexico and Central
America. I go back to Sweden to liquidate the business, leaving my wife and the baby in Hollywood.
One day I am sitting in the house of my parents-in-law in Stockholm reading the paper when it
flashed through my mind, “My wife is sick.” I take the telephone call from Stockholm to Hollywood,
an nurse answers and says my wife is in a crisis, but she’ll be all right. Love is not in space and time.
I bet many of you have had similar experiences.

The infinity of the Self is a fact of experience, an empirical fact that is proved by experience. It is
also a mathematical certainty. It can be demonstrated intellectually. I will give you two of the many
proofs of the infinity of the human being. These intellectual proofs are completely undeniable. What
I have said so far, somebody can say, “Well, it isn’t so. People can say what you about I don’t
understand. I’ve never had such an experience. I am from Missouri. Show me. So far, what you have
said is nonsense.” Now I shall give you two proofs nobody can deny. The first is the proof from the
Identity of the Self, the second is the proof from the Infinite Regress of the I.

First the proof from Identity. What is the I? The I is that which makes one person out of the infinite
fractions of my life in time and space. I’m standing here before you, 1962, August 30 (which
happens to be my Wedding Day). I was born on January 27, on the Emperor’s birthday in
Bendlerstrasse near the War Ministry in Berlin. When I was born I looked very different from what
I look now. Every moment of our lives we are different. Now you are sitting out there and then you
go home, then you travel somewhere else. You were boys in high school, you were babies. You will
be old men. Now, all these moments must belong to you, the self-same person. You must be able to
say, “I was born 40 years ago there and then. And it is I who is now here. Thus I pull together our
moments in space and time. It is the concept which makes out of my space-time moments one whole.

                              “I”

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Me at Birth                                            Me now                                            Me at Death

There are primitive tribes who are like babies; they cannot say “I.” When Molubabeba speaks of his
childhood he does not speak of himself or of “I” but of “Molubabeba child.” That was another one.
The sun of today is another sun from the one yesterday. It takes abstract thinking to grasp together
our moments in time. All the me’s together are the I. “I” is the concept of the me’s. It is the concept
of my moments in time and space. It is my concept of identity in time and space. How many
moments do I have? 52 years. How many days do I have? 52 times 365 -18, 980 days. How many
hours do I have? 455,520. How many minutes? How many seconds? There is an infinity of sub-
divisions I can make. My boy once asked me, “Daddy, what’s a hemisphere?” “Well,” I said, “A
hemisphere is half an earth.” Well,” he said, “Which half? Where does the half run?” I said, “You
stand like this, spread your legs.” He did. And I said, “It runs right between your legs.” Sure, you can
make the cut of the hemisphere anywhere you like, an infinity of cuts. So you have an infinity of life
moments, and all of these have to be put together. As a matter of fact, you didn’t begin with your
birth. You started with your conception. But, of course, once you go back that far then you didn’t
start there either. You started really with your father and mother. But they had to be conceived too;
hence you didn’t start there either but with the grandparents, and so on back and back - actually you
began with the beginning of creation. That’s what Walt Whitman says in “The Song of Myself.”
          Immense have been the preparations for me,
 Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.
 Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
 For room for me stars kept aside in their own rings,
 They sent influences to look after what was to hole me.
 Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
 My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
 For it the nebula cohered into an orb,
 The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
 Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
 Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and
  deposited it with care.
 All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
 Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

I’m a result of evolution. Whitman didn’t know that word. I’m the result of creation. I began in
infinity, and where do I end? Do I end with my death? Well, there’s my son, there’s my
granddaughter. I am a link in the chain of generations on earth. But moreover, I am immortal. My
Self, my spirit, we said, is not in space and time. How then can it die in space and time? It cannot
die. Body and mind may fall away, but the spirit, my awareness of my own Self within the whole of
creation, must continue. I come from infinity, I go to infinity. The German poet Goethe has said,”
I am immortal in the degree that I have lived immortally” - that I have lived wide awake in the
fullness of my own awareness. I am a prodigy of creation - Whitman is right. And if I live like a
vegetable I have let down creation.

Thus, when I say “I”, I encompass all creation. I am, says Kierkegaard, anchored with my own Self
at the source of creation itself. I not only express the infinitely many moments of my terrestrial life,
I express the whole span of all life between the infinity that was and the infinity that is to be.

This was a philosophical proof of my infinity. Still, someone might deny it, though this is hard to
do. Even communists must acknowledge the infinite causal chain from which they came. Even they
must acknowledge that the Self is what puts me together, integrates me, and that there are sicknesses
in the self which arise from the sick self’s incapacity to put the me’s together. They have their
schizophrenics just as we do. Such people are split within themselves, schizoid - apart. They are two
in one, or three in one. Some of you have seen the movie or read the book Three Faces of Eve. Let
me give you an experience of myself. I have a seminar of psychoanalysts, depth psychologists, who
want to know about value. They tell me about their cases, and we analyze these from the point of
view of the value of selfhood and of axiology. One case was the following.

A lady married with a banker, having a very lovely family, beautiful house in one of the suburbs of
Mexico City, lovely husband, lovely children, a good housewife and a good mother - but every
Tuesday and every Thursday she goes, as she says, to play canasta with her girl friends. Actually she
goes behind the slums of the city as a prostitute. Gets $2.00 for each prostitution. Comes home at
4 in the morning, says she won at canasta, and wonders what has happened. She vaguely feels there
is something wrong with her, so she goes to the psychoanalyst. Now what’s the matter with that
woman? She’s a schizophrenic. She’s two, you see. She has a self-contradiction within herself. Her
self-definition is not “I am I” but “I am not I.” And fulfilling this definition she splits apart. She can’t
live, she doesn’t want to live. Her giving herself to these bums is her way of killing herself, and in
order not to kill herself physically she kills herself morally. And the money gives her a special
satisfaction, a token of appreciation, which she has never gotten before. Her husband has no idea of
that, nor have the children, nor has she in a way because she doesn’t know when she does one thing
what other thing she does. She has no identity. The same with Eve. Eve Lancaster was the wife, or
is the wife, of a farmer in Alabama. On certain days she went to the city, all made up beautifully and
prostitutes herself. Then, finished with the business, she went back to her farmer and became a firm
woman. She was so exactly split that the psychiatrist could call forth the different persons within her.
He called the one “black Eve” and the other “white Eve.” When she was the firm girl he said, “I want
to talk to black Eve,” and immediately she changed and became a prostitute, and she talked as black
Eve. When he said, “I want white Eve,” immediately she became a farm woman and was white Eve.
When we don’t put ourselves together then we are no one but many, split up in our space and time
sections without connection, and almost physically many although we are one body.

The Self is the integration of ourselves, that which gives us integrity, that which pulls us together.
This then is the first proof of the Self’s infinity - it can pull itself together into one, concentrate itself,
or it can fall apart into an infinite number of fragments, and “we go to pieces.” Our time and space
fragments stay apart. The self pulls these fragments together, in the awareness of itself, and the
knowledge of me within the space-time world. The self, in other words, has remembrance, and it has
anticipation. It remembers who I was yesterday and it anticipates who I will be tomorrow. In order
to do this it must be beyond space and time. For space is only now and here; so in order to have
memory I have to be outside of time. In order to have anticipation and project the course of my life,
I have to be outside of time, too. In order to have imagination I have to be outside of space and time.
All this the I does, not the me, not my body, not my mind. My inner self uses my body and my mind.
In the first proof I have shown you how the I uses my body, my corporeal presence, in order to
express itself as one in time, pulling all the separate moments of this presence together into one. In
the second proof I shall show you how it uses my mind.

                           Awareness

My self is, as I said, aware of itself and knows me. Now let us see what this means. We come now
to the infinite regress of the I.

When I say, “I know myself” - or “I know me,” to make it easier - what does the I know? The I
knows me. But who knows the I? The I who does the knowing only knows the me; it doesn’t know
itself. There are two roles in me: I am a knower and I am a known. I am a subject and I am an object.
But the knower is the I and the known is the Me. The I knows the Me by applying itself to the Me -
my situation in space and time, my emotions, my thoughts, etc. - and the I can do this by its own self-
awareness. But just as the optical eye seeing cannot see itself, so the self knowing cannot know itself.
If I want to know the I, I have to make a met out of it. I have to say, “I know me knowing me.”
knowing me,” Now I know the first I as a me; but there appears another I that does the knowing and
is not known. I can make a me out of it and say, “I know me knowing me knowing me,” and thus
know the second I as a me - an object of knowledge; but there appears a third I as subject of
knowledge, and it is not known. And so on ad infinitum. There is always another self that cannot be
known. Thus, there are infinite levels within the self. There is always a residue which is unknown
to me and has to be known by something else than self-knowledge. I can only be aware of this final
residue of myself. This awareness is a very different thing from knowing.

Some people know everything but are aware of nothing, others are aware of everything and know
nothing. The first are informed fools, the second uninformed sages. The first are intellectuals who
have no moral insight, the second are simple people with moral insight. Some of the most
“remarkable characters I have known” were of this second kind - and usually what the Readers’
Digest calls such characters are these kind of people - simple but of great insight and dignity.

In Mexico we once had a maid by the name of Maria. She was just a girl and a housemaid. She came
with us at the age of 16, bare feet, and it took me a long time to get her used to shoes. She was with
us for 15 years. She ran the house, she ran us, she was aware of everything - she was wide awake -
but she didn’t know a thing. She hardly knew that 2 plus 2 equals 4. Yet there was a radiance and
a spirit in her that made everything around her true and real. When she was not around the world
wasn’t as it should be, and my wife and I were depressed. She knew exactly what she wanted. There
was a continuous struggle between her and my wife. My wife put the lamp here, the next day it was
there. My wife put it back here, the next day it was back there. That went on for years. She knew
exactly what she wanted, that girl - she still does. We imported her to the United States, and finally
she decided she wanted to marry, unfortunately. But then she was 31 and had a right to marry, but
we were sad and tried to dissuade her. But again, she knew exactly what she wanted. She got herself
a fellow from Mexico, married him; we imported him, too; but he couldn’t find work in Columbus
and didn’t want to live in our house, so finally they moved to Chicago.

Now, our friends in Chicago are long-hairs, eggheads, professors, lawyers, and so on. We told them
Maria was coming and please let her work for you one day a week and so we wrote to six of them,
for Maria wanted to work with a different one each day in order to be independent and make more
money. Then my wife and I leaned back and wondered what was going to happen, for that girl had
something. It didn’t take more than three weeks when the wife of one of our friends, a great
corporation lawyer, wrote too my wife, “What kind of a girl have you sent us? Whenever she comes
into the house everything becomes radiant, and it becomes so peaceful that my husband only goes
to the office when she has left. Complete awareness - and she knows nothing. But she lives
completely, she lives in the vertical dimension - she LIVES. That is why we call this existentialism.
All you have to be is to be. To be fully. This is called awareness, and it is a different thing from
knowing. You are aware of yourself and if you are not aware of yourself you don’t live. You may
be a big shot, but you don’t live. You may be a whiz, you may be the best in your profession, and
you’re dead. Kierkegaard called this The Sickness unto Death: to be completely alive to the world
and completely dead to the spirit.

Maria was completely alive to the spirit and alive to the world only within her small circle of
cleaning houses. But if you are completely alive to the spirit you have all you need, and your
knowledge of the world will grow by itself in the degree you need it.

Maria’s circle gradually widened. Her husband got a good position, she had her own household, and
they prospered. One day, here in Columbus, when we had a lot of guests invited, suddenly, about 9
p.m., drives up a Buick as long as a telescope - convertible, automatic windows, a big flower bouquet
sticking out of it. We thought, who’s that, who did we miss - when out climbs Maria, with the flower
bouquet very elegant, with her husband. They had come over from Chicago to pay us a visit. Maria
comes in, gives us the flower bouquet, sees we are having a party, puts on an apron, and immediately
takes over everything. “I take charge of this.” So, my wife could be a hostess, which American
women usually can’t be because they have to be in the kitchen. Maria served, with complete grace
and elegance, washes the dishes, cleans the ash trays, and everything goes wonderfully. When the
party is over, about 12 or so, she says they go back to Chicago. They had just wanted to visit us. But
before she left, she pushes me into a corner and she says, “Senor, I really came to tell you the
following. We Are pretty well off, We’re making a lot of money and you are just a professor - I want
you to know that whenever you are in trouble you call on us,”. Well, thank God,. she’s back in
Mexico now, having her own house and running her own business with her husband.

Now that person is so fully herself that she doesn’t have to give herself another thought. Her self is
not in the way of her Self. She is, as we call it, transparent to herself. I Hence, she can pour all her
energies into serving others - she lives for others. She gives herself fully to others. A person who is
so transparently herself that she lives only for others we call a saint. Maria’is a small-gauge saint.
A great saint is a person who matches the depth of his own .being with the width of his intellectual
horizon. Such a person was Jesus. Such a person, perhaps is Albert Schweitzer. There is a slight
approximation to this kind of person-in every Most Remarkable Character I’ve Met in The Readers’
Digest. You will find that these most remarkable characters are never big bankers or politicians but
always small people who give themselves to others.

Thus, the best combination of being a real person is to be completely alive to the world outside of
us and completely aware of the spirit within us. Unfortunately, our intellect often blocks our self-
development. The more intelligent you are the more cocky you become, and you think you are the
boss of creation. This hinders you to be aware of yourself because to be aware of yourself you have
to be humble. You have to be and nothing else - and that’s the hardest thing to do for you have to
forget about your achievements in the world - you have to give up your worldly pride. So when the
students ask me, “Now what in the world is that being,”I say, “It’s awfully hard to explain. You just
be - don’t be cocky, don’t be smart this or don’t be that. Just Be. Your smartness is in the way of
your being.” “Well,” the student says, “if I’m not smart you give me bad grades.” “Ah,” I say, “I’m
your teacher in a course in philosophy, I’m not your teacher in Being. However, I can also be your
teacher in Being. But then you’ll get no grades at all, everything in Being is infinite.” Some do
understand, but most of them do not. So I finally say, “Well, look here, your inner self, your humble
being is that which makes dogs lick you. That’s all.” What I mean is that with our inner self we go
down, down, down, to the bottom of creation. We have oneness with dogs, we have oneness with
the whole of creation. So the dogs think they are people or you are a dog. So they come and lick you.
Another symptom of this is the reaction of children. My wife can’t go into a room with children
before they are all over her. With me, they are a little more reserved. You all have had the experience
in grade school and even in high school that a teacher came into the classroom and either the whole
class broke loose with noise or it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Children sense the self-

awareness of a person; and in the degree that the person respects himself he is respected by others.

Another symptom of the Self is conscience. You have done something bad, nobody saw you, not a
soul was there. Then you come back among people and, by golly, you feel everybody knows the bad
thing you have done. None of us has ever done a really bad thing, but even the little bad things we
do now and then give us a bad conscience. And a bad conscience means you are afraid everybody
knows with you - con-science. The classic on this feeling-that-everybody-knows is the novel by
Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. A student, Raskolnikov, slays an evil old woman for money.
It’s the perfect crime, yet he feels that everybody knows, for seven hundred pages. He finally gives
himself up, he cannot live with his terrible guilt. None of us has ever done a horrible crime like that,
something irreversible, irreparable. The little things we do, we can always say, tomorrow I’ll stop.
We might never stop, but at least it’s a possibility.

Now, why do we have the feeling that everybody knows? Because the inner self is not in space and
time. So where is it? Everywhere. In other words, in that inner core of our Self we are intrinsically
one with every other Self. The cones of our Selfhood all meet at the vertex. There is one community,
one core, of all mankind. This realm is what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God that is within us. We
are all one; and when we do a bad thing everybody has done it with us because I intrinsically we are
all one. So in my self everyone has done the bad things and that is why I am afraid that everyone
knows. Everyone has really done it with me. So I am responsible for everybody else and everybody
else is responsible for me. This is the meaning of love. You are connected much deeper than in space
and time with the ones you love. And you may hurt them intrinsically although they may never know
it. That is why Jesus says that it is not evil deeds that count but already evil thoughts and desires. “Ye
have heard that it was said by them of old time, ‘Thou shalt not kill...’ But I say unto you, That
whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. Ye have
heard that it was said by them of old time, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But I say unto you, That
whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his
heart.” (Mat. 5) In the depth of the Self is the true reality - and here you hurt and you help those you
love. And those you love ought to be all your fellowmen. Therefore, another symptom of your own
being fully yourself is compassion - compassion with every living being, compassion, the very
touchstone, as we said, of your being yourself - and thus being one with every other being.
Compassion, suffering within you the suffering of the other, is “the greatest of them all,” as says St.
Paul; greater than faith and hope is charity. Hence the abysmal evil of the great states -Christian and
otherwise - who prepare suffering for millions of human beings today - and our abysmal guilt in
condoning these preparations for monstrous suffering, ane even abetting them. “The State,” said
Nietzsche, “what is that? Well! open now your ears to me, for now will I say unto you my word
concerning the death of peoples.” We do not live in the intrinsic world of the Self. We life mostly
in the extrinsic world of things and he systemic world of dogmas and ideologies. And they threaten
to engulf us.

What we have to do is to combine all three levels of value, to live in all three worlds. It will not do
to just live in the intrinsic, as it will not do to just live in the extrinsic or the systemic. It will not do
just to be intrinsic or sensitive and then be a bum. That is possible. It is possible, as I say, to be aware
of everything and to know nothing. And, as we shall see, Jesus, who emphasized the intrinsic nature
of ourselves, did not entirely deny the other natures, although he denied them to a certain degree. But
he said we should be smart as snakes, and he did many actions, such as riding into Jerusalem, which,
though symbolic of the Eternal, were yet actions within the finite. I must be sensitive, I must be
compassionate, but I must be intelligent also, I must be a disciplinarian. I can’t be an accountant
without discipline. I can’t be an airline pilot without discipline. When I take a plane I’m not
interested in the pilot’s compassion and intrinsic nature. I want him to know that plane backward and
forward. I am interested in his systemicness. I’m not interested in the fidelity of my surgeon to his
wife. What I’m interested in is that he knows how to put that needle exactly where it belongs.

          The Integration of the Three Levels of Value

However, and this is the important thing, you cannot fully be systemic or extrinsic unless you are
fully intrinsic, fully yourself. In other words, the moral man will also be a better accountant, pilot,
or surgeon. The value dimensions are within each other. The systematic, the social, and the human
envelop each other. The human contains the social and the social the systematic. The lower value
is within the higher. The systemic is within the extrinsic and the extrinsic within the intrinsic. The
more fully you are yourself, the better you will be at your job and in your social role, and in your
thinking. Out of your intrinsic being you summon the resources to be anything you want to be. Thus,
the intrinsic, the development of your inner self, is not a luxury. It is a necessity for your own being
yourself in all three dimensions. Suppose you are an accountant. You will be a better accountant the
more you are intrinsically yourself. It is an amazing thing how mistakes are being made. Mistakes
are being made when you are not summoning all your resources to the job at hand. On the other
hand, if you do, you will accomplish things you never dreamed of. You will make creative errors -
“errors” which turn out to be just the thing you had to do - even though you did not know that at the
time. Such creative errors are errors extrinsically and systemically but not intrinsically. Almost all
great inventions and discoveries are results of such creative errors. This is called Serendipity - the
capacity of reaching one’s goal against one’s intellectual knowledge - from a tale by Walpole, The
Three Princes of Serendip, Serendip is the. old name of Ceylon. The three Princes always found
more than they were looking for - for they were on the right-road, and their unconscious worked for
them unbeknown to themselves. For this reason also it is so stupid to always be busy. Some people
think unless they do something nothing will be achieved. So they hustle and bustle, and actually with
their busy-ness spoil things which should be left ripening by themselves - through one’s letting. go
and relaxing.

Thus, we must live on all three levels, sometimes more on one, sometimes more on the other, but
always enforcing the one by the other. The most difficult is to live on the level of our own intrinsic
Self. We are born into a world that is technologically and socially organized. There is no difficulty
in our systemic intellectual schooling and behavior and there is no difficulty in our social schooling
and behavior; Our conscious effort must be made on that level. All the rest is easy, there are schools
and organizations for it. But there are none for our inner Self. We have to make the effort to become
our own self, ourselves. And since we are all in corporations and organizations we have to combine,
to integrate our inner Selves with our job, with our intellectualism, with our social and intellectual
being. As a guide for us to do this I have formulated the following four questions.

The first question is the intrinsic one. What am I here for in the world? In Mexico City I am a
consultant to a firm where executives are tested as to their capacities of leadership. When I ask them
this question, “What are you here for in the world?” I get the most amazing answers. Usually, they
are suddenly brought face to face with something they have never thought about before. What should
they answer? You see, now we are right back where I was when I had to ask myself, “Who am I? -
What am I here for in the world?” To be a good agent for Nationwide? Well, no dog would lick you
for that. To make a lot of money? That is very unsatisfactory once you know what the nature of the
world is. The universe is too big for money. Money is a very recent invention. There have been times
when there was no money, and there will be times when there will be none. What will you do with
money when you get to the Planet Mars? What is money worth in a cosmic society with space ships
cruising regularly between Earth and Venus, Earth and Mars? Money is a fetish. It’s nice to have but
not so important that you have to be born for that.

What are you here for in the world? You are here for in the world to enrich the universe. That is my
answer. I am here in order to give myself to the full, by using my body and mind for purpose: to
enrich the universe. My purpose was to find out what is goodness and to articulate as clearly as
possible the realm of value. This is my answer, not yours. You must find your own answer. And the
answer will be the more true, the more fully you are yourself. For then you will come to the
conclusion that you represent a divine capital and that you were born to make this capital grow and
bear fruit. You can only have this feeling if you feel your body and mind to be the servants, the
instruments, the organon, as the Greeks said, of your deepest inner Self. If, as we said, you are
transparent to your own Self. Transparent means like glass, you don’t see it. Your body is transparent
if it is an unseen, unfelt instrument for your purpose.

Last time I couldn’t talk to you because I had a laryngitis. My throat obstructed my purpose. My
body was not transparent. I couldn’t talk. If you had a stomach ache you couldn’t be sitting there.
The body must not be felt, must be transparent to our purpose. This is called health. Our mind must
be transparent, it must not obstruct us, as it does in rationalizations and illusions and plain stupidity.
It must serve our purpose. This is called mental health. .We either can adapt our purpose to the
strength of our body and mind or our body and mind to our purpose. The higher we set our purpose,
the greater we feel the enrichment to be we can offer the universe, the more we will have to develop
our body and mind. . This greatness of purpose will make us great, but not better morally than the
person who fully gives himself or herself to a limited purpose, as did Maria. It is the quality of
purpose that counts morally, not the quantity. Quality of purpose means complete dedication of my
total Self to my task. It means using my body and mind for a purpose beyond my Self. Transparency
leads to transcendence. I transcend myself. I become a symbol for a meaning beyond myself. A,
symbol is both transparent and transcendent. It is something that has a meaning outside of itself.
When I drew this symbol “City” you don’t think of the curves and angles of these lines, you think
of the meaning of it. You hardly see the letters. They don’t obstruct but carry their meaning. They
are transparent, and they are transcendent. If you don’t know the meaning you only see lines and
curves and they mean nothing to you, like “zopog.” This is pronounced “gorod,” and means the same
as “city.” Only it’s Russian - foreign to you. So your body-and-mind must be more to you than lines
and curves, they must be transparent and transcendent, a symbol for a meaning. Otherwise, your
name will be as foreign to you as Russian. You will be a foreigner to yourself, a stranger or, as we
say, alienated to yourself. You must make the body meaningful, a symbol of a purpose in the world.
You must have the feeling that you are put into this world for a purpose. You are not an accident,
your birth is important for the universe, you are put here by God. If you have that feeling you have
intrinsic depth, if you don’t have it, well, then,. you have to develop it.

Now, second is the extrinsic question: Why do I work with this organization? Here I am, employed
by Nationwide, by the First National Bank of Manhattan, by the University, by whatever. Why do
I work with this organization? It has to fit in with my purpose. If it doesn’t I am either a fake or
unhappy or both. I cheat myself. I waste the divine capital I am. I sell myself to the world, for the
world, and in the world. And I will pay for it by neurosis, by drinking, even by smoking, which is
slow and deliberate suicide - as if- I were saying: “I am not worth the gift of life.”

Once I have answered the second question satisfactorily I can proceed to the third: What can this
organization do to help me fulfill my meaning in the world? In other words, the organization I work
with is here for me, it has to be an instrument for my divine mission. It has to be just like my body
and my mind, a vehicle for myself within the universe. It is to me a small universe and a small world,
a microcosm, and it has to nourish my inner self, give me confidence, give my spirit strength and
sustenance. Of course, many problems can arise here.

I once was in the following situation. I was hired as a professor at a University by a head of a
department who was a wonderful man. I had a wonderful time and had. all the suppqrt by the
organization I needed. Then, after some seven years, the head of the department who had hired me
retired. And in came a stinker -a morally evil person - he drank, he was dissipated, he was a bad
human being. I was so sensitive to his evilness that I almost vomited whenever he came into the
room. I became as unhappy as can be. I couldn’t go into my office without feeling disgusted. I
couldn’t go to the campus without feeling depressed.. My teaching became bad. Not only that, I
became physically sick and I had an operation. They have made studies in hospitals, as you probably
know, why people go to hospitals at that particular time, and over 90 percent of the time it was a
problem of an intrinsic nature which had nothing to do with the physical sickness. So finally I said
to my wife, and she said to me, “You can’t go on.” Now he couldn’t get rid of me. I had tenure. But
neither could I get rid of him. So finally, we decided we quit. I had no job at the time, but I got one
soon after.

There are times when you have to be true to your own Self, and that’s all there is to it. And come hell
or high water you have to have faith that the world is really the structure that I have described to you,
so that the badness of the moment will turn out well in the long run. Otherwise, you will curse
yourself to the end of your days and go down. It is so easy to destroy yourself. You have to have a
feeling of your own integrity. Now, mine was an exceptionally bad situation. In the business field
conditions are much more dynamic than in the academic field, and you can always hope to outwit
or outlast such a situation. So, what can this organization do to help me fulfill my meaning in the
world? It must support and further me, and it must not obstruct me.

Usually, we think of the business organization we work with. But we are also members of larger
organizations, such as the state. How about when it turns evil? There are situations so powerfully
against you that you simply cannot overcome evil by good, but have to quit if you don’t want to be
a part of the evil - and thus you do overcome evil by good - by remaining true to your own Self. It
happened to me in Germany. I had just finished my law exam when Hitler became Chancellor of the
Reich. For one week I walked through the woods of Berlin and asked myself, “Who is crazy? Are
you crazy or 60,000, 00 Germans? Is everything that you have written wrong? Is my whole thinking
wrong? Or is it right? If I am right the whole of Germany is wrong, they are mentally sick. In that
case, there is no choice for me but to leave everything, my family and all I have and to get out of
Germany.” My family is a mixed family - Jewish, Catholic, Protestant - all of them except my
brother stayed in Germany. But I had to go because I saw I couldn’t bust this evil, this Hitler. Should
I make my peace? Should I become a traitor to myself? Now this is a situation that can happen to all
of us any time. People at this moment are emigrating from Argentina. People are leaving China. And
you all know of the Berlin Wall - people want to leave East Germany. All’these are evil
organizations which some people cannot tolerate any more. There are even some people who are
emigrating from the United States because they feel the country has turned toward evil and they want
no part of a nuclear war. Imagine what tortures of conscience, what clarity of vision, what
determination are necessary for such a course. And so with any case of quitting, or overcoming an
evil in an organization to which one belongs.

Once I have answered the third question to my satisfaction and have found that the organization is
the right environment for me which nourishes my inner Self and encourages me to my own self-
development, I can proceed to the fourth question: How can I help this organization to help me fulfill
my meaning in the world? This means that I with all my powers and good will reciprocate the good
will of the organization towards me. That I am not like one of those workers in a shop who “only
work there,” and do the minimum with which they can get away, and hold back 40 percent of their
powers, thus hurting themselves, their inner selves, much more than the organization they work for.
That I fulfill my own self by fulfilling my duty, and more than my duty, toward the organization.
That the organization becomes the creative instrument of my own self-fulfillment. There is no
happier relationship in all the world than such a relationship toward and with an organization in
which one works - and if the wives complain saying that you are married more to your work than to
them they really mean it as the highest accolade both to you and your organization. My wife often
says she wished she were a class - for there I really give myself and am truly myself.

If I can answer all four questions to my satisfaction, I have integrated my life, my job, my intellectual
interests all into one, and I am a harmonious human being in the right spot. My world is complete.
And, of course, no executive can do his job as an executive unless he answers, to his own
satisfaction, these four questions.

                          Moral Types

I think it is clear by now that we are living in three worlds. We live in the world of the mind, we live
in the world of the senses, and we live in the world of our inner selves.

We live in the world of the mind. It is in our mind we think, we build systems. Here are all the
sciences, all mathematics, astronomy, cosmogony, physics, biology - here is the arsenal of our
technological world. And there are people who live in the systemic world of the mind as their real
world - the scientists. They live in the world of systemic value. Sometimes, in their delight over the
systemic beauty of this world, they forget the world of everyday reality and of intrinsic values. They
appear then in a spectrum of types from quiet absent-minded professors to noisy proponents of
bigger and better bombs.

Secondly, we live in the world of the senses. This is the world of space and time, our social world.
Here we, are with our colleagues, in our professions, our business, in the world we know. Ninety-five
percent of the people in the developed countries, both in the West and in the East, both in capitalist
and in communist countries, live in this world, the world of extrinsic value. The vast majority f them
believe this is the only world there is, and they neglect their inner being, as does Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych
in the old Russia, or the heroes of Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not By Bread Alone in the new Russia -
where man does not live by bread alone either - or as do we in the technological society of the West.
But outside the capitalist-communist block of developed countries, there is the vast mass of
humanity living by no means in the world of extrinsic value, of social classes and functions. They
live either in a primitive world of strict ritual - systemic values - or in the world of their inner selves -
intrinsic value; and the encroaching Western world throws them into turmoil, as did the first
missionaries the innocent savages of the South Pacific (as in Somerset Maugham’s Miss Thompson)
and as does the Western way of life today many of the people in other continents. The so-called
“under-developed” peoples are underdeveloped only on the level of extrinsic value; on that of
intrinsic value we are at least as underdeveloped as they, and often more. We need a spiritual Point
4 Program in reverse.

Thirdly, each of us lives in his own depth, up to a certain point. None of us lives all the way down
to the bottom of the cone of our Self - in eternity. If we did we would be Saints. But we do not even
live as deeply as we could and ought to.

Now, the peculiar thing is that not even in the field of the mind do we live as fully as we could and
ought to. We are experts only at social living - and that is only one world among three. Thus we
really live a very limited life. The full human being would be the one who knew all of science, had
all the experiences of society, and lived in the fullness of his inner depth. This perfect -human being
doesn’t yet exist. We are still on a low stage of evolution. Compared to man in a billion years - if
there is man in a billion years - we are like monkeys. Man in a billion years will be that full human
being. Systemically, he will know everything that Einstein knew, and more. You and I and most
people know practically nothing of physics. We know nothing of relativity or quantum theory. We
are scientific morons - systemic morons. Yet we live in this world that is the way the scientists say
and prove it is - and yet we know nothing about it. Of a huge part of this great world of ours, we are
ignorant - we haven’t learned it. That man of the future - he will know - he will just have this
knowledge.

There is already one such type in existence, the French peasant boy Jean Fréne, who was drafted into
the army and on testing was shown to have such tremendous inborn capacity for physical science that
now he works with one of France’s great physicists. One of his teachers in nuclear physics at Lyons
said of him: “Fréne has the most remarkable mind I have encountered. It leaps from mountain peak
to mountain peak, while the rest of us have to think our way laboriously down the side of one
mountain, across the valley and up the slopes to the final conclusion. When we get there we find Jean
Fréne has been there waiting for us for some time.” The knowledge of this boy grows out of his deep
intrinsic self and complete self-sufficiency. He is still a peasant “so comfortable with himself and
with the world into which he was born that he may never be moved to employ fully his great gifts.
But if he does use them, we may see another Einstein,” as somebody else put it (in The Readers’
Digest, October 1962). This man lives so fully within himself that he did not even know he had this
intelligence of genius until he was tested. Most of us live so fully in the social world that we don’t
know the spiritual gifts we have - until we are tested, as in the crises of our lives. In the social world
of extrinsic value we are experts. We are pretty adept at it. We are social animals - we are smart, that
is, we have social intelligence. What we call a moron is really a guy who doesn’t know how to get
along in society - but he is a moron only in this extrinsic sense. He is a moron in certain respects, he
is dumb in certain respects which we know. But in other respects he might be better than you and
I - as was our Maria. He is a social moron, and we are just as much scientific and spiritual morons.

Thus, in the social field we are very adept. But we fall far short of living in the full depth of
ourselves. We live more or less fully horizontally, but not vertically. We live rather shallow lives.
We are not fulfilling ourselves. We are only living a small fragment of ourselves. We are not really.
We don’t live what we could be. And that is as moronic in the moral field as not knowing what could
be known about the universe is in the scientific field, or not knowing what society is about in the
social field. In other words, of the full spectrum of man which is this here
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

we don’t live more. than a fragment. We look, maybe, like this
 
 
 
 
 
 

like plates rather than like infinite cones, like tops rather than like universes. And as children whip
around their tops, so circumstances whip us round - till our heads spin. Only if we summon the
resources that are within us do we summon the whole spectrum of what man could be. We develop
ourselves intellectually more and more and we develop ourselves morally more and more. And that
is the task that the future has for man, and.each of us has for himself. Great men such as Leonardo
da Vinci, St. Thomas of Aquinas, or Goethe are prototypes which we could, if we wanted to,
emulate.

The most important development is in the depth dimension. I told you about that new chairman of
my department whom I couldn’t stomach. What was wrong with him, from my point of view? The
only thing that was wrong with him was that he had a different moral pattern from me; he was a
different moral type. Suppose you live all in depth - there are people who do this -and there’s another
guy who lives all on the surface. He’s a social being, a great backslapper, with lots of columns in
Who’s Who. He is a member of a hundred clubs, he is a great extrovert, and you are a great introvert.
You are here and he’s there:

[Hartman here gives two cones, like those above, with one colored to a greater depth than the other.]
 

You have very little in common. He speaks with great force about what you regard as trifles. Every
word he says hits you in the stomach. And you just sit there, a quiet reproach to him. You can’t stand
him and he can’t stand you. For him you are the bore of bores, and slightly dullwitted. Because
you’re just sitting there looking at your navel - say you are sitting beside each other on the plane. The
more attempts he makes to draw you out, the more you draw back into yourself. “Boy,” he will say,
“What a bore I have been flying with.” And you will say, “What a pompous fool, what a chatterbox.”
In the few hours of the flight a sound antipathy has grown up between you. Now imagine you have
to sit beside him day in and day out, in meetings and all kinds of occasions - you have to sit through
life with him. The situation just becomes intolerable. On the other r hand, imagine two like him meet
on the plane or in life. No matter how different in their interests they may be, they are both social
beings. One, suppose, is a banker, the other a professor. Well, they get a drink together, they talk all
the way about all kinds of things. But if two like you meet on the plane nothing happens at all. And
if you meet in life it will take a long time to warm up and to discover each other.

Thus, there are moral types, and the differences and similarities between them are more important
than any other kind of differences and similarities. Thus, it is absolutely, mathematically, certain that
there must be people in this world that you can’t stand and that can’t stand you - a discovery young
people make to their consternation. It is in the intrinsicness of our being, our spiritual Gestalt, the
different form or pattern of our character, the very inner psyche, where the deepest differences are
between us.

Now, in order to test yourself as to where you stand in this inner pattern, let us make a self-test. This
test can also serve for your moral judgment of others. It will contain the set of moral properties of
the Self.

                          A Self -Test

If you live in the depth of yourself you are a world for yourself and you need nothing else. Not only
that, you are anchored with the totality of your own being in the totality of the world. You feel at
home in the world. The world is your home - you feel at ease. And the strange thing is, everything
comes to you even without any specific effort - everything is added unto you, as it says in the Bible.
You have the great property of Faith. Faith is the complete repose in the world as a whole, You are
living in this world as if lying in a comfortable bed. You. are, as we say, well born. You feel
wonderful to be alive. Faith is exactly this - to feel good in the world and to feel that the world is
good. You are not only made in the image of God and you bear intrinsically His name - “I am I” -
you also see the world with the eyes of God: “And God saw everything that He had made and,
behold, it was very good.” (Gen. 1:31) You are not letting God down by feeling the world is rotten.
You have the deep trust, fides - the Latin word from which derives “Faith” - that God is good and
that the world is His creation; and you have the humility, as did Job, to trust in the goodness of God
and the world even though at times you are unable to understand either the one or the other.

Intrinsic Faith is the fundamental property of the morally good man. From this property derive all
the others; and Intrinsic Humility is the first derivative property,

On the other hand, there is the unfortunate fellow who is not well born, who has not found himself,
who has not anchored himself deeply within the world as a whole. That poor fellow is ill-at-ease in
the world. He feels that his birth was an accident, that he is an error of the universe. He really should
not have been born, he thinks. He does not like himself, he wishes he were not. He lives in spite of
himself - and in spite of everything. He is defiant - intrinsically at odds with himself, with the whole
world - and with God. God to him is not a beloved and trusted Father. He is a fearful and mistrusted
master - as believes the unfaithful servant in the Parable of the Talents. This man lacks faith. His
whole life is one great suspicion or fear. He is thrown into the world like dropped by accident from
a plane over a strange country. He does not know where he is and what he is up to. He is intrinsically
bewildered - and hence afraid. Intrinsic Fear is the fundamental property of the morally insecure
person. And Intrinsic Defiance, Spitefulness, is his first derivative property.

There are then two great fundamental properties that characterize two fundamentally different kinds
of people, the morally secure and the morally insecure, the strong Selves and the wobbly Selves, the
wide awake and the sleepy - as St. Paul called them - the aware ones and the wary ones. The man
of faith is aware, wide awake to ‘ everything the world offers him. The world is right, and God is in
His Heaven watching it. The man of fear is wary, he has not faith, either in God or the world. He has
heard of it but he cannot make himself believe it. He is world-wary, always on the lookout; he sees
all the b