If by "conscience" – as is usually the case – we mean our inner subordination to this court and this authority, then Schopenhauer will not be far from the truth, saying somewhere that what is called the voice of conscience is 9/10 simply a fear of public censure, a slavish cowardice before the opinion of others.

And indeed, where we are dominated by these abstract, universally obligatory, coldly rational moral "ideals" and "principles," we feel ourselves tributaries, captives, enslaved slaves. Since we have not yet fully become accustomed to this state of servitude, since we have still preserved, at least in private, the free truthfulness of the spirit, we involuntarily revolt against these fetters. An inadmissible, heretical and stupid question arises for the majority of people, but an intractable childishly naïve question: why am I obliged to do anything at all, for which I have no inclination? Why should I, who live in the world only once, full of an insatiable thirst for life and self-discovery, sacrifice myself to something or someone, limit and constrain myself? Why should I: be kind, should love people if I hate them" why and in the name of what should I break and remake myself, be not what I really am? And, finally, even if I tried to break myself for the sake of so-called moral ideals, I would not really be able to do it: I cannot be a virtuous and strictly principled person if I am really born a sinful, passionate, torn apart by contradictory desires, restless being; I can only appear to be virtuous. Is this, then, the task of morality? Or perhaps this is the case, and all people only want to appear virtuous and hide their true living nature, their inner unbridled free being, more deeply from the judgment of morality?

And involuntarily one recalls daring protests, new and old, against the yoke of morality. One recalls Stirner with his anarchic cult of the autocratic self, Nietzsche's mockery of the "morality of slaves" and his aristocratic ideal of an inwardly noble, spiritually free person who knows his highest value and has the right to everything, not recognizing anyone's judgment and law over him. One recalls the ancient argument of a free-thinking Greek quoted by Plato (Callicles in the dialogue "Gorgias"), that man is born with a lion's nature, but falls into the hands of educators who, out of a selfish and cowardly need for their self-preservation, instill in him the ideas and feelings of a sheep, meekness, obedience, and peacefulness; but when such a trained lion cub grows up, sooner or later he will break the fetters that bind him and will appear in all his formidable natural greatness, in all the power of his primitive freedom; or a similar argument, also preserved by Plato (by the rhetorician Thrasimachus in the first book of the Republic), that morality, the idea of serving one's neighbor, is a fairy tale of old nurses, with the help of which clever rulers lull and fool childish people in order to rule over them more freely in their own interests. Let such amoralism not be right in everything, let it lead us into dangerous and disastrous paths, let it artificially simplify the complexity of human nature and too crudely identify the precious spiritual gift of human freedom with simple bestial licentiousness, with only the immeasurable expanse of passions and desires; yet, in the face of the cold, tyrannical and inwardly incomprehensible morality of duty, it contains for us some inexplicable, seductive truth, some seductive call to spiritual freedom.

Let us take, for example, one aspect of life, which, precisely because of the complete discrepancy between its indomitable and mysteriously self-willed nature and the official morality of duty, is usually shamefully hushed up. I mean sexual life in all its depth, power, and in all the bizarre variety of its manifestations. Sexual life gives all of us, and especially at a young age, not only joy, but also great torment and excitement. But we all carefully hide these torments even from the closest people, all of us, in the face of official morality, feign our complete decency, balance and calm, completely subordinate to the norms of morality attitude to this issue. Only physicians and psychopathologists, among the most sensitive, know what storms are playing out in the human soul in this field, and how much torment, physical and mental illnesses, broken and crippled Lives, are caused by these deep-seated natural storms. And in this tragic area, which requires the greatest attentiveness, sensitivity, caution and individualization, where we so passionately crave advice, consolation, genuine help, where we need experienced leaders, sensitive friends, delicate teachers who understand our torment and our shame, and reasonable doctors, we come up against the impenetrable walls of official, mercilessly strict, identical morality, we are faced with harsh, stupid and hypocritical judges at that, for the judges themselves are no better than those who are judged, and only avenge their own hidden torments by their own judgment. Beginning with diseases and strange perversions, which not only destroy our health, but corrode our souls with the pangs of secret shame and self-contempt, and ending with the whirlwind of passion that takes possession of us like madness, forcing us to forget everything else and throw ourselves headlong into the abyss, risking the destruction of ourselves and others,

As if there were not enough inner tragedy here, the immanent, fatally inherent sufferings and torments inherent in this area, inflicting deep wounds on our hearts, everyone seems to have tacitly conspired by their cold indifference or harsh condemnation to tear these wounds apart. And yet, in our minds, secretly, we are well aware that not everything in this sphere deserves rejection, overcoming, and contempt. Not only are we, through weakness, often unable to overcome this indomitable and powerful animal nature of ourselves, despite all our reasonable desire, and we thirst for this impotence to be understood and forgiven; but often also – and this is the main tragedy – we feel the primordial fusion of this blind passion with the highest and deepest principle of our personality, we ourselves do not know – as the deepest of psychologists, Dostoevsky, has already noted – where the sacred cult of the Madonna ends in our soul and where Sodom begins; and Sodom itself draws us not with external sensual pleasures, but with the irresistible temptation of mystical beauty, power and all-absorbing rapture. No matter how wild it may sound to stern moralists, who have already been accustomed by prolonged hypocrisy to complete spiritual blindness, in the frenzied, self-forgetful revelry of passions, to which we are attracted by the mournful and dashing gypsy song, we often imagine the resolution of our last, deepest longing, a kind of ultimate self-realization and satisfaction, for which it is no longer only the body, but our spirit itself that yearns. And already with the complete subjective evidence of the inner rightness and therefore the inner right to freedom, we are often aware of the great and pure, in spite of all its passion and connection with physical attraction, love for a woman, outside of which our life loses all its meaning at these moments, and which we then feel as the deepest basis of our own self — no matter how much this passion contradicts all the universally recognized and universally binding norms of morality.

Is it possible at all in this area to be a "reasonable", "principled" person, to "ideologically" regulate someone's life? However vague and dangerous this one may be; sphere, no matter how much evil is hidden in it, no matter how many insidious mirages lead to death in it, no one, hand on heart, can recognize in it the unshakable inner authority for himself of moral reason, of the unbending, universally binding principles of morality, which from the outside, without attention to the uniqueness of the individual, regulate this life in the same way for all. Let us all be sinners; but at least in this sphere we cannot but be sinners; And if anywhere, it is here that we await not judgment, but salvation, or such judgment as would really purify us and thereby give us salvation. Instead, we encounter cruel, cold idols of the morality of duty, to whom countless human sacrifices are offered. Truly, the wise poet is right:

Opfer fallen hier, Weder Lamm noch Tier, Aber Menschenopfer imerhort [6] Lines from Goethe's ballad "The Corinthian Bride".

Let us now take quite another area of this morality of duty, the morality of public service. It was most clearly expressed in our Russian past, in the moral cult of revolutionary heroism. We remembered him in contemplation of the "idol of the revolution"; We recalled there that this idol, now exposed as the life-devouring Moloch, had its inspired servants, its ascetics and voluntary heroes. But now we would like to draw attention to another, reverse side of the matter: for every voluntary hero and ascetic, this idol of revolutionary service, like every other idol, had dozens, if not hundreds, of involuntary victims, driven to service and death by the scourge of moral and public opinion. Instead of general considerations, I would like to cite here one concrete, individual example from personal recollections.

As has already been pointed out, about twenty-five years ago, in certain circles of Russian youth, a universal, all-consuming cult of revolutionary service reigned supreme. It was assumed that the student youth was completely divided into two groups: either unprincipled careerists and "white-lining" revelers, or "ideological" people who devoted themselves to progress and the salvation of the people, i.e., revolutionary heroes. It is true that most of these heroes were engaged in nothing but endless verbiage, discussions about Marx's "theory of surplus value" and the fate of the peasant commune, and, except for reading illegal political literature, only a few of the chosen ones were privy to real political secrecy. But even the former always risked being expelled from the university, exiled, if not to Siberia, then to a remote province, or to be imprisoned, and therefore they considered themselves activists and heroic fighters. In one such innocently "revolutionary" student circle in Moscow participated a quiet, well-mannered, shy young man from a family of Russified German nobles.

Before his death, he confessed that he was tormented by his inability to become a real revolutionary, his inner disgust for this occupation, his irresistible desire for an ordinary peaceful life; He recognized himself as a creature good for nothing and came to the decision to commit suicide. Of course, we, his comrades, did not at all understand the tragedy of this confession at the time. His death shocked us, but we blamed it on the "despotism" of the hated regime; From his funeral, we duly staged an anti-government demonstration and calmed down in the consciousness of our own revolutionary virtue. But when now, after all that I have experienced and happened, I remember this incident, I feel the blood of this innocent victim on me; I feel myself to be a moral accomplice in all the murders and atrocities that are being committed in the Emergency Rooms in the name of the revolution. For it was we, the ideological servants of duty, who, by our moral compulsion to a revolutionary way of thinking and revolutionary heroism, condemned to death this innocent young human soul; we, though not noticing it, tyrannically raped her with our merciless demand of her for revolutionary service, to which she was not inclined.

And how many sacrifices were made on the altar of revolutionary or "progressive" public opinion! How many talents have perished or, at least, have been subjected to the most severe persecutions, a real merciless moral boycott for violating the "categorical imperative" of "progressive" public opinion. It is hardly possible to find at least one genuinely gifted, original, inspired Russian writer or thinker who would not have been subjected to this moral boycott, who would not have endured persecution, contempt and mockery from it. Apollon Grigoriev and Dostoevsky, Leskov and Konstantin Leontiev — these are the first names that come to mind, the greatest names of geniuses, or at least of real inspired national writers, persecuted, if not persecuted, by the moral judgment of progressive society. Others, little-known victims of this trial, are innumerable.

We are inclined to recall with contempt, or at best with a smile of condescending irony, this recent despotism of public opinion. In vain. For nothing has changed in it, except the content and name of the idols to whom these human sacrifices are made. With the same pharisaical complacency, with the same cruel and cold inattention to the living human personality, people are being persecuted at the present time, whose living soul cannot lie down in the stencils of "counter-revolutionary" social duty. And again there is a preaching of social heroism as a sacred and therefore morally coercive duty of every individual, outside of which he cannot be recognized. And again, in a fatal way, for one genuinely inspired and free hero, drawn to the feat by inner love and calling, there are dozens of victims persecuted by the scourge of moral public opinion.

How many people are there in the world who, whether in the field of public service or in some other sphere of moral life, live and even die with the glory of a "hero," not because they are real heroes, but only because they are too cowardly to throw off the yoke of forced heroism—because it is often morally easier even to die under compulsion than to endure public contempt and resist moral public opinion. So often soldiers go on a deadly attack and die in it not because they are full of selfless self-denial, but only because there are machine guns in the rear, cutting off the way back and threatening the retreating with certain death.

Perhaps we will be reproached for allowing an impermissible substitution of concepts: our theme was the power of "ideas" and "moral ideals", and we are talking about the pressure of public censure, about the oppression of human opinion. The moral ideal, we will be told, is that which the individual himself acknowledges, in which he truly believes inwardly; the moral ideal, according to Kant's explanation already cited, is always "autonomous," while the power of public opinion is "heteronomous." But the fact of the matter is that this distinction, which is so clearly established theoretically, is constantly erased in the practice of psychic life and is almost always completely absent. And since we are dealing precisely with moral norms, expressed in rational concepts, equally obligatory for all people and occasions of life, and not substantiated by anything other than their own authority, we assert precisely that the living person, in his own, internal, genuinely free relation to them, does not recognize them, but only submits to them out of necessity, as if they were a yoke imposed from without. The genuine, concrete moral life, both the personal needs of man, not only the lower ones, but also the higher, spiritual ones, which he cannot renounce, and the living environment, the living relations with people – all this is so complex, individual, that the moral truth here can always be only concrete and does not fit into any general principles, norms and ideas. That is why, by the way, all philosophical attempts to logically deduce the content of moral ideals, understood as universally binding norms of behavior, are completely hopeless, have not yet led to anything, and cannot lead to anything. The ethics of the "morality of duty" theoretically hangs in the air; In this sense, ethics is not a science at all, it is simply a code of authoritarian precepts in which I am blindly obliged to believe. Kant's attempt to deduce its concrete content from the mere form of the "categorical imperative" as a universally binding moral law is clearly exposed as a hopeless and fruitless sophistic contrivance of thought, which logically rests on unconvincing (and rejected by Kant himself) considerations of a utilitarian nature. All the other possibilities of the scientific and logical foundation of ethics, in turn, were convincingly refuted by Kant himself. All of them boil down to an attempt to derive moral ideals from the actual, empirical needs of man; But that is precisely why they all allow for a hopeless logical abyss, containing, logically speaking, an inadmissible metabasiz eiz allo genoz (an unjustified leap from one area to another). For it does not follow from the fact that all men strive for one or the other that their strivings are morally valuable, that I am obliged to respect them and to subordinate my life to them, that is, to mutilate for their sake my own strivings, which for me have no less right to exist than the prevailing strivings. Moral principles, in all moments of complex, tragic conflicts, have neither internal self-evidence for the individual, nor the character of scientific and logical validity. They are simply imposed, like legal norms, as a restrictive and oppressive force, with the only difference that their force is aggravated by all the ruthlessness of public censure for their violation. We have already made a reservation above, and we repeat once again: of course, we do not mean by this to say that moral landmarks in life are not at all necessary, that all moral beliefs are empty prejudices that can be easily discarded in order to surrender to unlimited freedom. On the contrary, we seek a light that can illumine and comprehend for us the true moral ideals, which will make clear to us, with the last indisputable inner persuasiveness that the soul needs here, the path along which we must go: but we do not feel this light in the seemingly self-sufficient authority of moral legislation itself.