the practical activity, quite individual, hedonistic, utilitarian, and economic, and the importance that it possesses, joined to or separated from morality, as the case may be, and the special practical 316 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL n.
judgments that have their origin in it (the judgment of convenience, whether it be called utilitarian or economic), so it would be impossible not to recognize the moral form. Yes, the volitional act satisfies us as individuals occupy ing a definite point of time and space, but if it fail to satisfy us at the same time as beings transcending time and space, our satisfaction will be ephemeral and will rapidly be changed into dissatisfaction. To one desire succeeds another, and to this another, and so on to infinity; but the one is different from the other, and the new either condemns the old or is by it condemned. If we succeed in arranging our pleasures in series and classes, and in subordinating and connecting them, certainly there will be some gain; but the gain will not have been a true one on this occasion either. We shall at the most be able to guide our life according to some plan, and for a certain time that has not the exactitude of the moment; instead of the instantaneous will to which succeeds a different will, we shall have general ends for which we shall work. We shall propose, for instance, to do certain work and to abstain from doing certain other work, in order to marry a loved one, to win a seat in Parliament, or to obtain literary fame. But those ends are ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 317 also merely contingent (they are general, not universal), and consequently cannot assuage our thirst. When we all have attained to them, we shall experience le cttboire that la cueillaison dun reve au occur qui fa ciieilli always leaves behind. The company of the fair beloved will weary, the political ambition realized will leave the soul empty, literary fame will seem the shadow of vanity. Perhaps too, we shall change our side, like the sick man who cannot rest on his bed of feathers, and begin to follow other ends; the lover deluded with matrimony will turn to other loves; the ambitious man, weary of political life, will think of new ambitions, or of that of not having any, and of retiring to so-called domestic peace; the seeker for literary fame will long for ease, silence, and forgetting. But in vain: dis satisfaction persists. ( And it will always persist, and pallid Care will always sit behind us, on the croup of our horse, if we are not able to tear from the contingent its character of contingent, breaking its spell, and bringing ourselves to a full stop in that progressus ad infinitum from thing to thing, from pleasure to pleasure, to which it impels us, if we be not able to place the eternal in the contingent, the universal in the individual, duty in desire. \ Then only do we acquire that internal 318 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
peace, which is not in the future, but in the present, because eternity is in the moment, for him who knows how to place it there. Our actions will always be new, because reality always places new problems before us, but if we accomplish them with lofty souls, and with purity of heart, seeking in them that which surpasses them, we shall on every occasion possess the Whole. Such is the character of the moral action, which satisfies us, not as individuals, but as men, and as in dividuals only in so far as we are men; and in so far as we are men, only by means of individual satisfaction. impossibility Those men in whom the moral consciousness of eliminating a. is wanting, or is confused and intermittent, make us fearful — fearful for ourselves, obliged to be on our guard against them and to ward off their snares and injuries, and fearful for them, for if they have not already fallen the prey to the most terrible torments, they certainly will do so. They are like people dancing uncon sciously upon ground that has been mined; the conscious spectator trembles for them, they do not; but if by chance they escape the danger, they will be retrospectively horrified when they look back. The inebriation evaporates and the clear outlines of reality reappear, but that which ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 319 restores form to those outlines is the eternal, not the contingent, morality, not desire. We see this take place in an intense form in what are called conversions, followed by the intention of leaving the world and its false joys and retiring to a cloister; or, without metaphor, of becoming regenerated, of beginning a new life with new ideal presuppositions. But intensive conversions are catastrophes which occur, like popular revolu tions, when continuous evolution is impeded. The wise man is converted and renewed at every moment, without the solemnity of a conversion, and with the memorare novissima he retains in the contingent, his contact with the eternal. He knows that he must love things and creatures one by one, each in its individuality, for he who does not love thus is neither good nor bad, not even being a man. He will wish for literary fame, political power, matrimony, according to his apti tudes and to the conditions in which he finds himself; but he will wish for all these things without wishing for them; he will wish for them, not for themselves, but for that which they contain of universal and constant; he will love them in God, ready to abandon them immediately their ideal content shall have left them; he will seriously desire them with all ardour for them- 320 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
selves, but only when their self is also "his other self." No thing, no creature possesses unconditioned value, which belongs only to that which is neither thing nor creature. The value of our individual life is conditioned for each of us, and we must guarantee and defend it as vehicle of the universal, and we must be ready to throw it away, as a useless and pernicious thing, when it does not serve this end, or rebels. But the value of every being dear to us is not less con ditioned, and Jesus said with reason, when pre paring himself for his divine mission, that he had come to separate men from their wives, their sons, their friends, and from their native land. That separation in union, that union in separation, is the moral activity, individual and universal.
confirmed by Thus it happens that art, which has celebrated strong characters, able men and affairs well conducted, has also celebrated, and with greater liveliness, those strong men who have placed their strength at the service of that other strength which surpasses them and makes them eternal. For this reason, no embittered soul, no sceptic and pessimist remains long firm in his negation of all moral light; such negations are indeed as a rule true amantiiim irae. The ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 321 singer of the lesser Brutus who had thus fero ciously imprecated: Foolish Virtue, hollow mists and fields Of restless ghosts Are thy schools, and Repentance turns her back upon is the same who, on witnessing a slight act of generosity, exclaims with emotion: Fair Virtue, when my spirit becomes aware of thee, It exults, as at a joyous event...The coldest and most self-contained philosophers, when they speak of it, find themselves sometimes impelled to adopt a poetic tone, and Aristotle will say of Justice that it is "a more wonderful thing than Hesperus or the Morning Star,"1 and Emmanuel Kant will compose an apostrophe to Duty, and will write at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason: " Two things fill the soul with ever new and ever increasing veneration and admiration the more often and the longer reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me, and the moral law within me." And even the great mass of rhetoric that has for its object virtue or the moral law is a homage rendered to this supreme force of life, reality of reality.
322 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.H The impossibility of suppressing the economic or the moral form of the activity in our practical consciousness, the continual appeal that the one makes to the other, the revolving of our practical judgment about the two aspects, both of them necessary, of the useful and the honest, energy and goodness, pleasure and duty, explain why the Psychology and the Description of practical life have constituted the two kinds of types and classes, of economic and of moral men, of economic and of moral institutions. Such rough and approximate distinctions have however at bottom, in this as in other cases, an intimate and rigorous distinction, which every one will find evident in himself, if he look inward upon himself and fix his gaze persistently on the universal forms of the spirit that acts within him.
II CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ETHICAL FORM THE distinction of the two forms, well known Exclusion of materialistic to the inner consciousness, will appear more andofinteilectualistic clearly when we examine the reasons for which criticisms. the one or the other of them has been denied. We say the one or the other, because we have now freed ourselves from the obligation of refuting the theses that have their origin in presupposi tions, both materialistic and intellectualistic, and therefore deny the moral and economic activi ties, either because they do not admit the con cept of spiritual activity itself, or because they do not admit the more special conception of practical activity. The greater number of those who deny morality are nothing but mechanicists, empiricists, materialists, and positivists, to whose brains not only do economy and morality appear inconceivable, but also art and science and, in short, every spiritual value. They ask: Where is this moral principle of which you discourse?
324 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
Point it out to us with your finger. But they also ask: Where are the categories or the pure concept? Where is the aesthetic synthesis and the pure intuition? Where is the a priori of perception and of history? Where are all these fine things you talk of as though they existed, and that we neither see nor touch? — And for our part, we can henceforth let them say what they will, only praying in our hearts that God may illuminate them and make them discover (at least when they are near to death and the dense veil of their bodies has become more thin) that if the universals were things that it was possible to perceive as we do individual things, they would not be universals.
When the double assumption of a spiritual activity and of a practical form of it has been admitted, it is not possible to do otherwise than either to deny the economic for the moral form, or the moral for the economic. What might seem to be a third possibility, that of denying the two forms, is reducible to the first, because, when the distinction of the terms has been suppressed, there remains nothing but the practical activity considered in general, which co incides with the individual and economic activity. We shall begin then with the examination of the ,i ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 325 negation of morality for economy, which is the thesis of utilitarianism. Those same materialists have recourse to utilitarianism when they wish to present some sort of a Philosophy of the practical, but with what little right they avail themselves of such aid, is clear from what has already been said: the useful is always value and teleology, and materialism, in all its sub-forms and varieties, is incapable of positing the smallest concept of value and finality.
Utilitarianism affirms that no other volition The thesis of utilitarian ism exists save that which answers to the merely against the existence of individual determination, or, as it is also ex- moral acts, pressed, to the pleasure of the individual, under standing by pleasure, not the generic pleasure that also accompanies moral satisfaction in the individual, but that which is exclusively individual. Actions, therefore, as it says, are what concern it, not their motives, that is, the motive of the individuality of the act abstractly conceived, not that of the spirit become concrete in it; thus, not killing for fear of punishment and not killing because repugnant to one's own conscience, become the same thing. They are the conse quences of different conditions, but in both cases of the same motive, which is personal con venience. And as there does not exist a pleasure 326 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
that cannot be and is not substituted for a different pleasure, so there is not an action, however moral it be called, that cannot be inter rupted and changed, when different conditions present themselves. Every action, every man has his price: it is all a matter of discovering what that price is. He who seems to place the glory of his country above all other aspirations, although he cannot, for example, be corrupted by money, by vanity, or by pleasure, will yet always have in him some weak point that a more expert corrupter will discover or be able to dis cover; and when the discovery has been made and the suitable transaction proposed, the glory of his country will be abandoned, because it has been well compensated for by something else. This way of looking upon human actions has appeared to be concrete, exact, rational; and the utilitarian theory, if it have often been called hedonistic, and sometimes even (esthetic (under standing by aesthetic, individual pleasure), is also wont to be decorated with the name of ethical or practical rationalism, rational morality. Difficulties All would go very well, and the practical the presence activity would in this way be entirely explained of these.
and unified, if we did not at every moment of life run against the distinction between mere ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 327 pleasure and duty, between the useful and the honest action, and if there did not arise in our conscience an invincible distinction between the things that have a price and those that have none, and if an abyss did not differentiate among apparently similar actions that which has a merely utilitarian from that which has a moral motive. The utilitarians even (who, although bad philosophers, are men, and as such carry at the bottom of their souls a far better philosophy than they profess in books and in the schools) are not able to suppress that distinc tion in themselves and to deny all recognition to the power of morality, to which, as men, they submit at every moment. How then are they to behave? How are they to explain the genesis of that distinction which, by the premises that they have posited, cannot be other than illusion? What is there that gives effective existence to the fallacious category of morality, side by side with the veracious one of utility?
There have been several attempts to solve Attempt to .. explain them that hard resisting term of morality. The first, as quantitative distinctions.
which was logically bound to present itself, was that of considering facts called moral as nothing but empirical groups of utilitarian facts, and of explaining the false category as an hypostasis 328 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
of those empirical groups, arbitrarily reduced to a rigorous and philosophical concept. Banking, usury, commerce, industry, agriculture, and labour are empirically distinguished, yet are all eco nomic facts. Courage, prudence, temperance, chastity, justice, modesty are empirically dis tinguished, yet are all moral facts. Why not unite the two series, and recognize the unity and continuity of nature by the insertion among them of other types and terms? Morality is also utility, but the utility of the greater number\ interest is interest, but well understood-, pleasure is pleasure, but pleasure of greater duration and quantity, preferred to another less intense, or more fugitive; egoism, egoism of family, of race, of human race, egoism of species, altruism; eudemonism, but social eudemonism, enjoyment, but enjoyment of sympathy, utility, but utility of conforming, not to one's own individual judgment, but to that of public opinion. Thus are moral facts included in utilitarian, in the same way as the number a hundred thousand is not less a number than two or three and the others inferior to it, because it is composed of three and of two and of other numbers less than itself. Csesar Borgia murders his brother and thus gets rid of a rival both in love and in politics, that is, he seeks ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 329 his advantage; but Giordano Bruno also seeks his own advantage, and nothing else, when he allows himself to be burned in order to assert his philosophy, because, for one constituted as he, with that demoniacal fury of his for philo sophical truth, the pyre must have seemed a very miserable and negligible thing, just as his brother's blood seemed to Caesar Borgia. Call the one of these actions utility of a com plexity of ten and the other utility of a complexity of a hundred, or give to the complexity a hundred the name of morality, of well-understood self-interest, of sympathy, of altruism, and so on, and to the complexity of ten that of utility, of individual interest, of egoism: the two actions will not thus have been declared of a different nature.
But the fact is that they have already been critique. declared of a different nature by the utilitarians themselves. No one, indeed, will have been deceived with the ingenious phraseology ex cogitated: well-understood interest is no longer mere self-interest; the egoism of species is not egoism, durable pleasure is not mere pleasure. The difference between the one term and the other is not quantitative, and even where a greater quantity is talked of, a greater duration, a greater 330 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
number, arithmetical definitions are not posited, but symbols pointing to qualitative differences. There is a difference, not of complexity but of nature, between the action of Caesar Borgia and that of Giordano Bruno; there is no common measure between baseness and moral elevation as there is between undulating plains and moun tains. The two series, of empirical utilitarian concepts and of empirical moral concepts, are not only irreducible to a single series, but remain obstinately distinct and irreducible. All that can be done, and has been done, is to unify them verbally; and in this the utilitarians have shown themselves as bold as it was possible to be in so miserable an enterprise. But the identity or similarity of words does not suffice to cancel the profound distinctions of things. Attempt to There would have been an immediate passage explain them.
as facts either from the consciousness of the puerility 01 such extraneous to the practical or identifications to the recognition of a distinct irrational and stupid, ethical form, if purpose and prejudice had not made resistance, prompting, on the contrary, the search for new expedients for setting themselves free in theory from the tedious and recurring phantom of morality. On this occasion also these expedi ents must have been just two: that is, to declare morality i£r concept extraneo^ls to the practical, or ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 331 intrinsic to it indeed, but contrary. The first was attempted, but feebly, when morality was spoken of as the fantasticality of poets, as the dream or rosy illusion caressed in life. No attention was paid to the fact that what the poet imagines cannot be contradictory and absurd, but must indeed be founded in the reality of life and in the nature of things; and that morality is not the aesthetic form in which it is reproduced and represented, but practical form or action. But the unmaintainability of this attempt was too evident for its success. The other expedient, on the contrary, has always had and still has great success. This turns morality into a prac tical contradictory concept, that is, into some thing certainly practical, but without motive, incoherent, and in contradiction to the healthy development of the practical. It is true that it is usually enunciated in very different words from those used by us. They speak as follows: What is called a good and virtuous action is nothing but the product of the association between certain acts that are for us the means to a pleasure, and that pleasure itself; so that gradually, even where the primitive pleasure is absent, those acts are sought and repeated for themselves, as though in themselves pleasurable. The savage fought 332 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
against the enemies who assailed his tribe, that he might not be made a slave or sacrificed to the idol of another tribe, that is to say, in order to defend his personal liberty or his life; but later on, man, forgetting that the tribe or the city or the State were simple means for protecting life and goods, defends them for themselves and allows himself to be despoiled and slain for his country. In the same way (to employ the classical example), money is first sought as a means to enjoyment, and to form a supply for procuring a life more comfortable and secure; but by degrees he who amasses money turns in his soul the means into the end, and becomes avaricious, that is, he finds delight in the mere possession of money, and sacrifices for that all his other joys, even an easy life, food, house and sleep, which he originally intended that money should obtain for him. Morality arises entirely from a similar process of association between means and end, and the case of the miser explains by analogy every act of virtue that cannot be directly reduced to simple pleasure and individual utility. ionism Now the association here discussed is neither and evolution ism. Critique, that of logic nor of aesthetic, nor valid association, synthesis, but irrational and fallacious associaii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 333 tion. It is only possible to exchange means for end as the result of a bad association of ideas: therefore that association is folly and stupidity, as the miser adduced as an example is stupid and foolish, being called " miser " precisely for this reason, with the intention of blaming him (for this word does not mean " economic " or " provident "). And behold! morality should be defined as that which is practically irrational, foolish, stupid, the product of illusion and confusion, or the contrary of the practical activity, which is clear-sightedness, rationality, wisdom. Thus defined, it is at the same time annulled. Indeed, irrationality is that which is condemned to be perpetually subjected to the rational; and what is called the moral man, if he were nothing but a false associator of ideas, would be constantly confuted by the man of good sense, by the utilitarian, who would prevent him from committing the stupidity of sacrificing himself for his children, for his country, or for knowledge; or, were he to persist, would cover him with contempt and ridicule. The fear that to discover its origin would be tantamount to abolishing morality would therefore be perfectly justified in this new sense also; or better, it would not be a question of a fear, but of a fact: morality would be in a state of progressive 334 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
annulment, as the effect of increasing instruction, both in the individual and in society. It has been replied that neither this fear nor this fact arises, because that false association is indissoluble, being a product of heredity, or, to speak of it in proper terms, it is hereditary stupidity (evolution- istic utilitarianism). But whether inherited or acquired, it is so dissoluble as to be dissolved in the theory proposed: lux facia est, and no one succeeds in obscuring it any longer. If, not withstanding that pretended light, morality be not dissipated, if recourse be had to the miserable subterfuge of insuperable heredity (which is surpassed at the very moment in which its origin is made clear), this means to say that, for the moralist himself, morality is not the irrational, but something very rational. He does not suc ceed in identifying it with the merely individu ally useful, but neither can he reject it as the pure and simple negative of this. And since he does not wish to abandon the utilitaristic hypothesis, there is no other path open to him but that of recourse to mystery.
A desperate This is precisely what happens in the last theological form of utilitarianism, which has seemed to be utilitarianism and mystery, capricious and extravagant, but is on the contrary profoundly auto - critical, since it reveals the ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 335