Preface

[6th Paragraph]

The simple attitude of the naive mind is to adhere with trusting conviction to the publicly known truth and to build its way of acting and firm position in life upon this solid foundation. Against this simple attitude, the supposed difficulty arises: how, from the infinitely various opinions, what is universally recognized and valid therein might be distinguished and found? One can easily take this embarrassment for a right and true earnestness about the matter. In fact, however, those who pride themselves on this embarrassment are in the position of not seeing the forest for the trees, and only the embarrassment and difficulty they themselves create are present; indeed, their embarrassment and difficulty are rather proof that they want something other than what is universally recognized and valid, than the substance of the right and the ethical. For if it were truly about that, and not about the vanity and particularity of opining and being, they would adhere to the substantial right, namely the commands of ethical life and the state, and arrange their lives accordingly. The further difficulty, however, comes from the fact that man thinks and seeks in thinking his freedom and the ground of ethical life. This right, as high and divine as it is, is perverted into wrong when only this counts as thinking, and when thinking knows itself as free only insofar as it deviates from the universally recognized and valid and has known how to invent something particular for itself.

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