ultimate essence and defect of the doctrine: what is known as theological utilitarianism. Human actions are always inspired by what is merely useful to the individual, and if a number of these seems to diverge from this criterion, this happens because account is not taken of an actual fact, by means of which even the actions which seem to be divergent are reduced to the common measure. This given fact is the life beyond this world, in which God rewards or punishes him who has obeyed or disobeyed his will, in the life of this world. He who in this life seems to resist the impulse of his personal advantage and performs sacrifices of every sort, even to that of his own life, follows equally with the others his personal advantage; and believing in God, in the im mortality of the soul, and in the reward and the punishment that await him, he regulates his action according to these actual facts. Intuition- istic Ethic, which places a moral duty at the side of individual pleasure, but indeducible from it, is in reality deduced from individual pleasure, and is likewise turned into rational or utilitarian Ethic by means of the transcendental datum. In this way the solution makes shipwreck in mystery; since God, immortality, the other life, the divine command, punishments and rewards, 336 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL cannot be defined and justified by means of thought and concept. When utilitarianism be comes theological, it abandons the philosophical field, confessing by so doing its philosophical defeat. And to philosophical consideration the distinction between the individually useful and that which is also superindividual shines out ever more clearly after the many vain attacks of utilitarianism, the affirmation of the moral form, as united and distinct from the utilitarian; the autonomy of Ethic against every form of utilitarianism and every heteronomous Ethic.
Ill CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ECONOMIC FORM IF in the course of philosophical history, the The thesis of moral abstracttheory of utility has sought to cause the dis- *«•"» against the concept of appearance of the other practical term, which is the useful morality, by swallowing it up, we are not to believe that morality has been for its part more modest and discreet and has not in its turn attempted to devour its companion. One exaggeration has been met with another; to utilitarianism has been opposed that error which may be called moral abstracticism, by means of which is refused to the concept of utility the place that belongs to it in the organism of the spirit.
Such a refusal (analogous to our analysis of the utilitarian theory) cannot take place, save in three ways: that is, in so far as value is denied to the useful, either -as practical concept, or as positive concept, or as philosophical concept.
338 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
Here too we naturally do not take count of the theses of the materialists or of the intellectualists, which (especially those of the former) have raged in the field of Economy not less than in that of Ethic, giving rise to insane attempts to explain the useful on mechanical principles, or with the contingencies of historical evolution. The mefui as The useful (it has been said) is nothing but as theoretical the means to obtain a certain end. r or example, fact.
if I take a walk every day with a view to keeping myself in good health, the daily walk is the suitable means and is therefore useful; if, on the contrary, I find that it makes me ill, this means that it is not the suitable means and it would be, and I should declare it to be, useless or harmful. Now by the demonstration given above, it is known that means and end are indistinguishable in the practical, for what is called means is nothing but the actual situation (and the knowledge of it), from which arises the practical act, and to which that act corresponds. Thus it is most possible to separate the means from the end; but in so doing, the consideration of the practical act is abandoned, and we pass to that of its theoretical antecedent; and if the mere theoretical antecedent be called "useful" or " practical" in ordinary speech (remembering ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 339 the practical act, to which it has been or it is presumed that it may be united) then a metaphor is employed, against which there is nothing to be said. Those, then, who define the useful as the means should once for all realize that with such a definition they remove that concept from the circle of the Philosophy of the practical and transport it into Logic, where the relation of means and end is the very same as that of cause and effect, and it again becomes part of the theory of empirical concepts, in which cause and effect are wont to be posited as terms separately conceivable. This has been more or less con sciously recognized, when the useful has been defined as the technical, for we know that the technical is nothing but knowledge thus made into a metaphor, owing to the relation that it has or is presumed to be capable of having, with an action that has been done or is about to be done.
The theoretical character of the technical has, Technical and on the contrary, been obscured, when technical imperatives. knowledge has received the name of hypothetical imperatives, distinct and ranged beside the categorical. The imperative is will, and is therefore always both categoric and imperative: a is willed (categorically), but a would not be 340 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
willed if the condition of fact and situation b did not exist (hypothetically). The merely hypothetical imperative is the knowledge that remains when abstraction is made of the practi cal act or of the will; and is no longer an imperative, but a theoretic affirmation. Where effective will is not, imperatives cannot be talked of.
critique: the Having made clear that the definition of the practical fact, useful as means implies the negation of the useful as a practical fact and its reduction to a theoretical category already known, we must exclude the possibility of such a reduction, for in the useful, the practical character, the effectivity of the will, is ineliminable. " It is useful for me to take a walk" means, "It pleases me to take a walk," " I will to do it." It is a question, not of con templation or of reasoning, but of volitional movement. The knowledge that precedes the utilitarian act is one thing, the act itself is another. The old man has the same knowledge as the young man, he has indeed much more (si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse poiwait /), but he does not will what the young man wills: he knows that by traversing so many kilometers he will arrive at a certain definite point; but it is not useful for him to go there, because it is not ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 341 useful for him to traverse those kilometers, or to submit to that exertion at the risk of an illness. The utilitarian will is expressed, not in merely hypothetical imperatives, but in those categoric imperatives that are at the same time hypothetical. The general formula is " will! " or " will that you will! " or " be coherent in your willing! " as the individuated forms are those that we are continually repeating to ourselves, " now, to bed!" "now, up you get!" and the like; which, when developed, mean: "go to bed" (if you wish to rest yourself), " get up " (if you wish to work), and so on. The distinction between the cognoscitive and the volitional theses is here evident.
Since then, owing to the unalterably practical The useful as character of the utilitarian fact, it was not possible or immoral. to insist upon its reduction to the technical, and since, on the other hand, it was not desired to recognize it as a practical category side by side with the practical category of morality, they have tried to think of it as.something certainly practical, but at the same time of little value, to beware of it, to combat it, to free ourselves from it. "Useful" has in this way become synonymous with wilfulness, with individual caprice, with will more or less perverted, and (looking upon 342 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
immorality as the individual I, shut up in itself and rebelling against the universal) with egoism. This theory is supported by certain common modes of speech, in which the moral man is opposed to the man intent upon what is useful to him as an individual, the ethical to the economic life. But it is a question of phrases, true, perhaps, in a certain sense, but inexact when understood or interpreted as affirmations of a contest between morality and utility. critique: We discover at once that the contest is inthe useful the useful is amoral, existent, by merely thinking of the case already mentioned, of the man in whom the moral con science is not developed or has been suppressed, or of the case - limit called innocence. What is done in innocence responds, no doubt, to individual pleasure, and so to what is useful for the individual, as he feels it in the given circum stances: were this not so, what is done would not be done. But innocence is not immoral on this account. It will be amoral, because it is merely individual volition deprived of the light of the eternal; it will never be immoral. Thus (to make use of the comparison and analogy of the theoretic activity) the images that the poet creates will be without philosophy, but will not for this reason be antiphilosophical. Because, were that ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 343 so, they would have to be partially philosophical, that is to say, to enter into strife with philosophy; but there is no such strife, and, therefore, those images, although philosophically not true, are none the less not philosophically false. Yet they are theoretical acts, in the same way that philosophy is a theoretical act. The philo sophical innocence of the poet does not change his intuitive knowledge into bad philosophical knowledge, into a negativeof philosophy. — Further, the useful not only is not the negative of morality, but, as we know, is also a fact that unites itself very well with morality, as the word is joined to the thought, making it concrete and palpable, so much so that thought without words is impossible. What honourable man would tolerate being judged disuseful? What moral action would be truly moral, were it not at the same time useful? The good action is good, because it is not bad, that is, it absolutely excludes the bad at the point in which it becomes effective; but certainly it is not so, because disuseful; indeed, in being good, it is also useful, because it absolutely com prehends the useful in itself at the point in which it becomes effective. The union of morality with utility suffices to eliminate the concept of the useful as a negative. Certainly negative and positive 344 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
do unite to give rise to becoming and to development; but their union is that of strife, not of concord. The useful as The third way of eliminating the concept of the ethical ethical minimum. useful from Philosophy, or from the Philosophy of the practical, is that which makes of it a concept of ethical description, or an empirical and psycho logical concept designating certain groups of very minute ethical facts, the rudimentary ethical consciousness. Hence the illusion of the existence of volitional acts indifferent in respect to morality. These acts are really indifferentiated for the mind that is examining them, which sometimes does not take the trouble to do so minutely, save when such an examination is seriously undertaken, and then they are always differentiated into good or bad. Thus it is generally said that eating and sleeping, playing at cards or at billiards, are things that appertain, not to morality, but to individual utility, and that each one may conduct him self as he wills in respect to them, whereas individual choice is excluded when it is necessary to fulfil one's own obligations of social work or of respecting the life of one's neighbour. But if we observe attentively, we see that also in eating or in sleeping, in playing cards or billiards, one acts morally or immorally, since, for example, it is ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 345 immoral to ruin one's health with eating too much, or with sleeping too little, or to corrupt soul and intellect with card-playing and dawdling in billiard- rooms, when one can do something better.
But the useful is none of all these things; it critique: is not the complex 01 ethical micro-organisms, in ispnmorai. which we discover with the microscope the same facts of life and of death that we observe with the naked eye in macro-organisms. No microscope will ever discern in it the oppositions of moral good and evil, because these oppositions are not really there; there are only those of utilitarian or economic good and evil. For the useful is not the moral minimum, but the premoral. In this case it is a question, not of approximative, but of rigorous difference; not psychological, but philo sophical.
Finally, it is necessary to consider the attempt A desperate attempt: the to present the utilitarian conscience as a moral useful as in ferior practical conscience, different and inferior to another moral conscience.
Confirmation conscience placed over it, not as a new mode of the autonomy 1 of the useful.
of eliminating the concept of the useful, by absorbing it in that of morality, but as a confession of the autonomy of that moment of the spirit. It would be moral, because there is no contradiction to be found in it that can cause it to be judged immoral, and if it be so judged, this happens 346 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
because it is looked at from the point of view of the superior conscience, or because the superior conscience is erroneously transported into the inferior. But this has importance precisely because it is not moral, and because the value that it is admitted to possess, far from being morality, is spirituality; that is to say, it con stitutes a peculiar spiritual value, different from morality. " Better a will of some sort than no will at all " is a common saying which means that prior to morality, there is another and more elementary spiritual demand. The distinction of the two consciences, then, is philosophical, not one of more or less, a distinction of degrees, but not of empirical degrees, which coincides with our conclusion. Thus, to return to the usual com parison, the poetical figuration is true, and can only be judged false by him who looks upon it from a philosophical point of view, or himself falsifies it by turning it into a bad philosopheme. But the truth of that figuration is not philosophical, and remains purely and simply poetical truth. It will be said that morality is implied in utilitarian volition, because, when the individually useful is posited, the universal, which will dominate and correct it, is promoted, in the same way as it has been said that philosophy is implied in the ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 347 aesthetic intuition, since by positing the in dividual imagination is posited the claim of the universal, which surpasses and renders it untrue. But since the aesthetic conscience is distinguished from the philosophical, precisely because that which in the latter is explicit is only implicit in the former, so, in like manner, the utilitarian conscience is distinguished from the moral conscience, because that morality which be comes explicit and effective'in the second, is only implicit or actually inexistent in the first. The difference between implicit and explicit is another way of enunciating the distinction between the two consciousnesses or practical forms, the autonomy of both being thus recognized.
IV RELATION BETWEEN THE ECONOMIC AND ETHICAL FORMS Economic and THE respective distinction and autonomy of the double degree of two forms, economic and ethic, as we nave the practical...,.,.., 1 hitherto been expounding it, and as results from the words "inferior" and " superior" just now used, is that of two degrees, at once distinct and united, such that the first can stand without the second, but the second cannot stand without the first. The moment of distinction lies in that possibility of existence independent of the first; the moment of unity is in the impossibility of independent existence of the second. If the first were wanting, there would be identity; if the second, there would be abstract distinction or separation. For this reason we have insisted upon showing that there are actions without morality, yet which are perfectly economical, whereas moral actions that are not also perfectly useful or economical do not exist. Morality PT.II ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 349 lives in concrete, in utility, the universal in the individual, the eternal in the contingent.) Hence our reason for reducing the theses that denied the distinction between the two practical forms to an exclusive affirmation of the economic form, this latter being as it were the general form, which of itself involves both itself and the other.
Even when both the practical forms, economic Errors arising from conceiving and ethic, utility and morality, are admitted, the them as co ordinated. gravest errors arise from failing to understand the connection of unity-distinction that exists between them, conceiving them as juxtaposed or parallel, and the respective concepts as coordinated.
In truth, if utility and morality were coordinate Disinterested concepts, each included as species beneath the critique. general concept of practical activity, the first consequence that could be drawn from this (and it has been drawn) is that morality is conceivable without utility. This has given rise to the absurd concept of disinterested actions, that is, of those moral actions that should hold themselves aloof from any sort of impure contact with utility. But disinterested actions would be foolish actions, that is to say, wilful acts, caprices, non-actions. Every action is and must be interested; indeed, 350 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
the more profoundly it is interested, so much the better. What interest is stronger and more personal than that which impels the man of science to the search for truth, which is his life? Morality requires that the individual should, in every case, make his individual interest that of JLL the universal; and it reproves those who engage themselves in an insoluble contradiction between the individual interest of the universal and that which is merely individual/) But it cannot claim to suppress the interest, that is, itself, in the same way that the volitional act dominates the passions, but cannot eradicate them without eradicating itself. Hence, as the volitional act triumphs over the passions as the supreme passion, so morality triumphs over interests as the supreme interest. vain polemic The polemic of autonomous Ethic against the conducted f.
with such an heteronomous E thic of utilitarianism has had a false assumption against ancj fruitless beginning, owing to this fiction of utilita ria nism.
disinterested actions. In the belief of conquering and more than conquering, it has been attempted to show that man accomplishes some actions without any personal interest, whereas on the contrary an easy victory has in this way been prepared for the adversary. Utilitarianism, in fact, has always been able triumphantly to make ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 351 the counter -demonstration that there is no action, be it as lofty as you will, that does not answer to a personal end. It is evident that the hero has his personal interest in the pro patria mori, just as the saint, who wishes to direct his soul toward humility, finds his own account in allowing himself to be abused, beaten and splashed with mud ("in this is perfect joy," said Francesco of Assisi to Frate Leone). Correct polemic should not enter upon the useless task of denying this evidence; it should on the contrary admit, as was admitted above, that there is no action which does not answer to an individual desire, since it is the individual that performs it, and the universal is always obliged to avail itself of individuals. But when this point has been conceded and admitted, it will prove, as was proved above, that the useful action can either remain merely personal or progress to the action that is universal-personal, ethical -useful. And the ethical -useful action itself is precisely the new spiritual category that the utilitarian does not see.
A second erroneous but unavoidable con- Actions sequence of the conception of useful and moral indifferent, as coordinated concepts is that while, according supererogatory, etc. Critique.
to that theory, there can be ethical actions 352 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL „.
economically disinterested or indifferent, so there can be actions that are useful and morally indifferent. The indifferent would not be those that are merely economic, and, therefore, neither moral nor immoral, which we have recognized as the necessary precedent of moral actions, re appearing always when a return is made to the state of innocence, or as soon as the moral conscience is abolished or suspended. They would on the contrary be economic actions that should persist as such, that is, as ingenuous and amoral, when the moral consciousness is already kindled, and consequently in the very circle of such a conscientiousness. They are altogether inadmissible when thus conceived, and to have admitted them is equivalent to annulling morality, as the recognition of the right of subjects to rebel at their pleasure would be to annul sovereignty, or a burlesque contract containing the clause that each party should be free not to observe the other clauses agreed upon, at his pleasure. Indifferent actions do not exist, either for economy or for morality, and those to which such a character is generally attributed are, as we know, indifferentiated, not indifferent, and always differentiable when more closely examined. Only he who places the useful and the moral, side ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 353 by side with one another, separate and impene trable, is of necessity led to conceive of useful actions morally indifferent, and as such licit or permissible. Hence it also happens that moral actions also seem to be obligatory compared with the first; and that, in order to obtain equilibrium at the other extremity, ultramoral or more than moral actions, called meritorious or supererogatory ', are placed side by side with obligatory actions that hold the mean. But morality does not grant leave not to do, nor prizes for doing more than was required: it simply imposes doing, doing always what is morally good, always realizing the universal, in ordinary as in extraordinary life, on the occasions that occur every day, every hour, every minute, as in those that occur every year, every ten years, every century. Nothing is indifferent to economy in its sphere and nothing to morality in its sphere: in it, economic actions with their premoral character do not persist, but only moral actions subsist. Economicity is certainly the concrete form of morality; but it is never an element that possesses a value of its own in the moral life.
A comparison with the theoretic activity will comparison .. with the re serve to make clearer this criticism of the licit lotion of art and philosophy* or morally indifferent. Artistic intuitions or 354 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
expressions are neither true nor false philo sophically, so much so that Philosophy, if it wish to exist, must also become concrete itself, as living speech, aesthetic form, intuition- expres sion, and place itself as an intuition among intuitions, though it be an intuition portans mysteria, that is, enclosing in itself the universal. But the appearance of philosophy reacts upon the pure intuitions, or upon the poetic representa tion of the world, in which existent and inexistent were indistinct; and the world of intuition trans forms itself into the world of perceptions, in which those that once were poetic intuitions, are now all of them critical or reflective images penetrated by the concepts, divided into images of existence and images of possibility. In the world of perception or of history, no poetical element can subsist as such; what was a bewitching truth in the field of art, were it introduced into history, would give rise to dis harmony and become changed into a repugnant lie, as we see is actually the case in history mingled with inventions and fables. History too assumes artistic form; but it cannot tolerate in its bosom art as an element standing alone. Utilitarian or economic volitions and the moral- economic volitions (universal and historical per-