Reason, both of every individual and of humanity as a whole, is the sole guide of human life.
The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore when your eye is good, your whole body is also full of light; but when it is evil, your body also is full of darkness. Therefore see whether the light that is in you is not darkness.
— Luke 11:34–35
If we take a look at most people’s lives, it will seem to us that the human being is akin to a plant, created to consume various nutrients, to grow, to procreate and, finally, to grow old and die. If that were the case then the human being would not be very good at achieving his aims because he uses his superior abilities to do that which other creatures can do much better than him. And the human being would deserve to be despised the most of all the creatures, at least in the eyes of true wisdom, if he did not partially realize and hope to fully realize a life that is not wholly animal, but also rational, natural only to the human being, the possibility of which he can perceive.
— After Kant
Everything lives together and everything lives apart—a human being lives apart, and so does a worm. And every separate being considers itself to be the only living thing and demands of life everything for itself alone, and meanwhile every separate existence is unceasingly drawing closer to death, to the destruction of its separate existence.
This contradiction would be irresolvable if the world were devoid of reason. But a human being possesses reason, and reason eliminates this contradiction.
A rational life is akin to a person carrying a lantern far in front of himself, which is illuminating his way. Such a person never reaches the end of the illuminated area as the illuminated area moves ahead of him. Such is rational life, and only in such a life is there no death, because the lantern does not cease illuminating until the very last minute, and you walk away after it just as calmly as you have been following it throughout your entire life.
All people live and act partly according to their own thoughts and partly according to the thoughts of others. The degree to which people live according to their own thoughts or the thoughts of others constitutes one of the main differences between them. Some people use their own thoughts most of the time as an intellectual game, treating their mind as a flywheel from which the transmission belt has been removed, but in their actions they obey custom, tradition and law; others consider their own thoughts to be the main driving force behind all their actions, they listen to the demands of their reason and obey it, and only rarely, after a critical evaluation, do they follow what was decided by others.
Every human being can and must use everything that has been developed by humankind’s collective intellect, but at the same time he can and should use his own intellect to test the truths that have been developed by the people who lived before him.
