 The ever-present conflicts of values are also a condition of personal freedom, because no decision would be needed if there were no conflict (ET3 16e). Hartmann’s analysis of freedom covers the various senses of autonomy exposed by Kant’s ethical theory, but adds another layer that responds directly to the problem of value conflict. Because the actual ethical existence of the person is “higher” than values, freedom is incompatible with complete determination of the person by a higher principle—whether god, duty, or even values (ET3 16f). Freedom cannot bear the form of an ought at all. Interestingly, Hartmann was clear about this long before Sartre. Freedom has to be regarded as a plus of determination in face both of natural law and of moral law, ontological and axiological determination (ET3 16g). By our actual initiative we decide actual conflicts, and “personal autonomy” is the person’s capacity to endorse values, to transform a value into one’s own determinant, to commit or not to commit oneself to a value, and values are impotent without our commitment to them. We are the mediators of the ought in reality, and only personal commitment to them can bring them to actualization (ET3 17c). This explicitly opposes any simple intuitionism about values.