Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/765/en

Thinking in Brotherhood or Fellow-Humanity

On economic ground, thinking no longer merely stands over against the world — it plunges into it and becomes itself a creative process. It plunges feelingly into the will and is wholly there for the fellow human being and for the world. In thinking, the human being finds the ground of his activity in the time-necessary demands of the farm and in the satisfaction of his fellow human beings' needs. These are held sacred by thinking in the economic realm. Drinking spirits, for example, can be a need. The distiller will spare no mental effort to devise the best possible process for meeting that need — naturally he is free, out of spiritual insight, to enlighten his spirits-consumer about the harmful consequences of alcohol consumption — and the trader keeps the product on the shelf because people want it. Economic life is autonomous, just as rights-life and spiritual-cultural life are autonomous. Strictly speaking, it is not the business of the one engaged in the economy to withhold a product from the consumer because he thinks it harmful. To decide on that belongs, at the level of spiritual-cultural life, to insight into the grounds of the harmfulness, and at the level of rights-life, to the law that restrains availability. Every human being stands, answerable for himself, within these three members, and must learn to align his social conduct to the validity of the autonomy of the three members of social life.