among the Platonic dialogues as to the relation ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 395 between pleasure and pain, a first trace of the discussions upon the same argument that have become most complicated in modern times, by all means let this be done, provided it be never forgotten that it is an affair of glimmers, rather than of vivid light, of antitheses hardly accentuated, not of those that are well defined and stand out clearly.
II. The precise and it may be said violent importance of Christianity affirmation of the antithesis, was the work tf for Ethic.' Christianity, which, conceiving pleasure and duty, nature and morality to be heterogeneous elements, did great service, both to the progress of civilization in general and in particular to Ethic. It is necessary to insist upon this, for the modern world was bound afterwards to react against this antithesis, and necessarily to assume an Antichristian, even a pagan attitude, and modern art and poetry are often inspired with an abhor rence of the tenebrous Middle Ages and of sad Christianity, and give a sigh of regret for Greece as for a lost Paradise, or a shout of jubila tion as for a Paradise regained. But reactions are reactions and poetry is poetry: humanity never retraces its footsteps, though it is often wont to adorn the future with memories of the past. The Greece of our hearts is a new Greece, 396 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL n.
profoundly modified by Christianity; the Greece of Goethe and of Hegel is no longer the Greece of Sophocles and of Aristotle, but a Greece far richer and more intense. Thought, like life, never turns back, and if it be necessary eventually to attain to a theoretic conciliation between pleasure and duty, between the useful and morality, such a conciliation will be very different from that of still ingenuous Greek Ethic. The three The spectacle afforded by modern Ethic, from resulting directions: the Renaissance to the beginning of the nineteenth utilitarianism, rigorism, and century, and also (with few exceptions) in the later psycnologism. ' periods is still altogether dominated by that anti thesis, and therefore two currents are to be dis cerned in it: one that attaches itself to the first term of the antithesis, the useful, and denies the second, or resolves it in the first, the other, which denies the useful and retains moral duty as the exclusive form of the practical activity. This latter is rigoristic Ethic, child of Christianity and of ascetic oriental sources, which flowed into it together by direct filiation; the other is utili tarianism^ child also, though illegitimate, of the distinction or rending asunder of the ancient unity of duty and pleasure, virtue and happi ness, effected by Christianity. The antithesis sometimes seems to be solved and a Philosophy ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 397 of the practical appears, which, without clinging exclusively to one term or the other, receives both into itself. But this philosophy, when it does not reveal itself at bottom (which generally happens), as masked utilitarianism, or (a less frequent case) rigorism attenuated in expres sion, has the defect of being, not philosophy, but an empirical description of the so - called principles of the practical, placed one beside the other, without a profound definition or deduction of either. This third direction may be called intuitionism or psychologism.
Utilitarianism is principally represented by English thought, to which belongs Hobbes, the greatest of all utilitarians, who proclaimed, in statu naturae (that is to say, in genuine reality) mensur am juris esse utilitatem? Similar doctrines are to be found in Spinoza, who has also been looked upon and criticized as a pure utilitarian. But the matter is rather more complicated as regards Spinoza. Of him it should rather be said that he would have been the most resolute of ethical rigorists, had he ever been able to construct an Ethic. His determinism was an insuperable obstacle to this, for it does not admit distinctions of values, but considers the good, 398 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL n.
like being, in its abstractness, and therefore, the being of each one as suum essere conservare; hence the appearance of utilitarianism, assumed by the Ethic of Spinoza.
English Ethic, From Hobbes descend Locke, Hartley, Hume, Adam Smith, Warburton, Paley, and others such; they are all less courageous and less coherent philosophers than he. Indeed, if Hobbes himself could not but be incoherent and could not avoid causing a desire for and there fore a state of peace to arise from a state of nature or of war, whence is discovered to the mind a source of the practical, altogether different from that of the useful alone, which was presupposed; with the mean and sophistical efforts of his successors, the incoherence becomes altogether irritating. The aid sought from associationism is among these efforts, and the excogitation of the example of the miser (found for the first time in 1731, in a discourse of the Rev. John Gay),1 and also the admission of the principle of sympathy beside that of egoism, a principle which with a cast of the dice is made to disappear again, and to become absorbed in egoism itself. The inanity of utilitarianism, which has already in Hobbes a 1 E. ^Jbee, A History of English Utilitarianism, London, 1902, pp.
IT ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 399 tendency to disavow itself, by recognizing as true laws not those of nature, but those revealed by God (in Scripturis sacris latae)? and in Locke re tained the divine side by side with the civil laws and those of public opinion,2 became evident in the theological utilitarianism of Warburton and of Paley. As for intuitionists and psycho logists, such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, these either left an unsolved dualism (as was above all the case with the last), or, although pos sessing the most lively consciousness of moral force, they yet strove to deduce it in some way from the egoistical and utilitarian principle. The French materialists of the eighteenth century, such as Helvetius and D'Holbach, though less subtle, are more consequent.
Rigoristic Ethic displayed its strength against idealistic Philosophy.
anti-ethical utilitarianism and anti-philosophical psychologism, not only in traditional scholastic, but also in the explicit polemic undertaken by Cudworth, Cumberland, Clarke and Price, against Hobbes, Locke, and the other utilitarians who followed them. The makers of great systems, too, attached themselves to ethical rigorism, Descartes (and in a certain sense Spinoza), 2 Essay on Human Understanding, Book II. c. 28, § 7 sqq.
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Malebranche, Leibnitz, and the philosophy of the school of Leibnitz, as the moral consciousness declared itself in its true nature in Jean Jacques Rousseau against the French materialists. But rigorism also ended by contradicting itself in the same way as utilitarianism, owing to its one-sided- ness, when it recognized a principle that was not merely utilitarian or that lost itself in mystery, either by reasoning with the utilitarian principle in the course of its development, or by receiving utilitarianism into itself, without any mediation, in the form of the morally indifferent. This is an old evil, which had already appeared in the aSidfopa of Stoicism, and in all those exceptions to the rigorous moral law, which ascetic Christianity had been obliged to allow, in order to exist side by side with the worldly life. Kant and his HI. The strength and the weakness of affirmation of 111 1 the ethical rigorism are to be clearly seen in the greatest principle...
ethical system to which it led: the moral doctrine of Emmanuel Kant. It was time that the principle of Christian Ethic should be re affirmed, duty as clearly distinguished from pleasure, giving to it that relief which it had been without in the systems of Descartes and of Leibnitz, after the materialistic and utilitarian orgy that had lasted for more than a century, ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 401 and after the equivocal attempts at an approach and fusion of the useful and the moral. Kant did not indeed in this respect oppose Wolffian Leibnitzianism; and although the ethical concept of perfectio seemed to him to be1 empty and in determinate, yet he was never able to prove that it was a eudaemonistic and utilitarian concept.1 But that concept certainly had not the energy of duty and of the Kantian categoric imperative, which are true declarations of war against every heteronomous morality. This is the merit of Kant, after whom no serious philosopher can be anything but a Kantian in Ethic, as, after Christianity, to no one, not a wind-bag or an extravagant, is it given to be anything but a Christian. Moral action has no other motive than morality itself: to promote one's own happiness (said Kant) can never be immediately duty, and even less the principle of all duties. But the mistake of Kant lies in not having dictions of well analyzed the concepts of pleasure, of happi- Kant concern ing the concept ness and of the useful, and in having thought °fthe useful< & of prudence, of that he could free himself from them, by placing haPPiness< etc- them among another set of principles, which he called hypothetical imperatives and opposed to the categoric. We know that the imperative 402 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
of those concepts is not less categoric than that of morality: it is a true imperative, not to be confounded with the knowledge of experience, metaphorically called imperative, because it assumes the appearance of a technique dealing with the practical. Kant was to some extent aware of this, for he subdistinguishes the hypothetical imperatives into problematical and assertorial. The first of these are technical and give rise to maxims of cleverness (Geschicklichkeit]\ the second are pragmatic and consist of maxims of prudence. Observe the difficulties in which he becomes involved, through not wishing to recognize the autonomous character of these imperatives compared with the moral imperatives, that is to say, the categoricity of both. The imperatives of prudence and of happiness are concerned (he says) " with an end which can be assumed as real among all rational beings (in so far as the imperatives can be applied to them in their quality of dependent beings); and, there fore, an intention, which not only they may possess, but which it is assumed with certainty that they do possess, according to a necessity of nature, which is the intention of happiness." We should therefore conclude that they are concerned with an end not less serious than ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 403 that of morality. But Kant perceives the poison in the argument and strives to turn them again into imperatives concerning means: " ability " (he continues) "in the choice of the means of one's own well-being, may be called prudence; therefore the imperative relating to the choice of the means for one's own happiness, namely the precept of prudence, is always hypothetical; the action is ordered, not absolutely, but only as means for another purpose." It is clear that to be able to call that knowledge or ability " prudence" is not sufficient to change the imperative of happiness into mere ability and knowledge. Kant perceives this also: " If it were easy to give a definite concept of happiness, the imperatives of prudence would altogether coincide with those of ability and would also be analytic. For it would be said in the one case as in the other, that he who wishes the end also wishes (necessarily, in conformity with reason) the only means for the purpose within his power. The concept of happiness is un fortunately so indeterminate, that although every one wishes to attain to it, he is nevertheless unable ever to say definitely and in accordance with himself exactly what he desires and wishes. The reason is that the elements which belong 4o4 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL n.
to the concept of happiness are all empirical and must therefore all be taken from experience; and that for the idea of happiness is also re quired an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being in my present state and in every future state." In what shall happiness be placed? In riches? In knowledge? In long life? In good health? None of these things is without dangers. In short, it is impossible to determine with full certainty, according to any principle whatever, what would make man truly happy; there fore it is not possible to act according to a definite principle, but only according to empirical concepts; and the imperatives of prudence, strictly speaking, command nothing. — As we see, the only effective argument of Kant against the admission of the categoric imperatives of well-being, of utility, of happiness, is that he does not know exactly what they are. This did not authorize him to exclude those imperatives and reduce them to pseudo - imperatives, to hypothetic imperatives, or to empirical rules. In other passages of his works, Kant tends to the other solution of excluding the maxims of prudence from the pure practical reason, because they are maxims of self-love (Selbstliebe\ or of the practical reason empirically or pathologically ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 405 conditioned, since for him every pleasure that precedes the moral law and is independent of it, is pathological, that is to say, it belongs to the senses, to the inferior appetitive faculty, not to that which is superior and to reason. Kant often returns to this point and always experiences the same embarrassments and con tradictions, as is proved by the variety of the arguments to which he has recourse.1 But the unrecognized autonomy of the useful, Errors derived of happiness, of well-being, generally revenges Ethic. itself; because, surreptitiously introduced, it causes itself to be unduly recognized afterwards. Thus it comes about that Kant creates, on the one hand, the monster of disinterested actions, and on the other, does not altogether exclude the con cept of actions morally indifferent or permissible.2 Thus, too, it happens that owing to the discord that he preserves between virtue and happiness, thinking vain the pretence of the Stoics and Epicureans to reconcile them in this life, he is led to postulate the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul, and to make of virtue a means of rendering oneself worthy of happiness in another life. "The cold duty of 406 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
Kant" (wrote Hegel) "is the last undigested morsel given by revelation to reason, and it weighs upon its stomach."1 Consequently, the Ethic of Kant, although so different in tendencies and inspiration, yet joined hands with theological utilitarianism, ending at length by also declaring that moral obligation is inconceivable, without the idea of a God, who rewards and punishes in another life, and by declaring that God and the immortality of the soul cannot be otherwise affirmed than by means of moral exigencies. Moral rigorism, like utilitarianism, makes ship wreck in mystery. occasions for IV. Occasions and opportunities for a philoa philosophy a philosophy of economy, sophical concept of the useful were not, to tell the truth, wanting to the thought anterior to Kant; but Kant let them all slip. Without attributing too much suggestive power to certain classes of virtues, such as fortitude or prudence (virtues that are generically economic, not ex clusively moral), which had passed from the Greek into the Christian Ethic, nor to certain acute aphorisms of psychologists and moralists (for instance: // y a des hdros en mal comme en bien; — Ce nest pas assez d 'avoir des grandes qualit^s, il en faut avoir Zdconomie; — La souveii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 407 raine habilitt consiste a bien connaitre le prix des choses, etc.1}, a first opportunity was certainly afforded by that inferior faculty of appetition, which the Wolffian philosophy had inherited from the Platonic, Aristotelian, and scholastic tradition.2 That faculty was parallel with the inferior faculty of knowledge, which that same philosophy had with Baumgarten attempted to develop into an independent science, Aesthetic^ a development that should have led to the thought of an analogous transformation of the corresponding practical faculty, which might have become an Oeconomica or Ethica inferior, as from /Esthetic had been made a Gnoseologia inferior. But Kant also rejected Esthetic, as science of a special theoretic form, science of intuition or fancy, conceiving instead, on the one hand a transcendental ^Esthetic or doctrine of space and time, and on the other, a Critique of judgment, or doctrine of finality and morality, symbolized in nature; 3 thus he fell into other difficulties, when he wished to establish an analogy between the other forms of the practical reason and that of the theoretical.4 Although he preserved the division of the faculty 3 Croce, Estetica, pp. 324-328.
4 Kr. d. prakt. Vcrn. pp. 79, 108.
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of appetition into inferior and superior (untere und obere Begehrungsvermogen), he failed to realize, as we have seen, the true philosophical concept of the inferior. The problem A second opportunity was presented by the of politics and series of treatises, which, from Machiavelli onward, had come to conceive of politics as a fact in dependent of morality, elaborating in particular those precepts and maxims of the " reason of state," of which we have already had occasion to expose the empirical character. But however empirical they were, those mental products gave rise to the problem of the relations between morals and politics, that is to say, as to whether the two terms could be considered as immedi ately identifiable. The thought of Machiavelli, in particular, constituted an enigma that all attempted to interpret in the most different ways, most by vituperating, some by defending it with strange reasons (Spinoza was among the de fenders *), though they never succeeded in freeing themselves from its difficulties, for to that end would have been necessary the understanding of the spiritual value of the utilitarian will, even if amoral. It was only when this difficult concept was to some extent caught sight of (by De ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 409 Sanctis) that Machiavelli appeared at once justified and criticized; but while that concept remained obscure, the point of view of Machiavelli was never attained and the work was condemned • for reasons of a moralistic character (Villari).1 Kant, too, in his work on Perpetual Peace, treated the problem of the relations between morality and politics, affirming that no disagree ment is possible between them, unless by politics is meant a doctrine of prudence, that is, " a theory of maxims for the selection of the means best adapted for the objects of individual advantage; that is, when the existence of morality is not altogether denied." Here too, he was right, when he claimed that concrete political actions should be submitted to morality; but, on the other hand, he did not perceive that submission and identity presuppose a previous independence and distinction.
Finally, a third opportunity was offered, in the The doctrine of the passions.
rehabilitation of the passions, begun by the philosophers of the seventeenth century and expressed, as has been said, in a notable manner by Vico. Now if the passions in general be 1 Cf. Croce, in De Sanctis, Scritti vart (Napoli, 1898), i. pp. xiv- xvi, pref.
2 Zumeivigen Friede, in Werke (ed. Rosenkranz-Schubert ), vol. vii. pt.
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the volitional activity itself, considered in its dialectic, they are also the soul turned to the particular, the useful in respect to the universal, which is sought by morality. This is to be seen especially in Vico and better still in Hegel, very similar to Vico in this respect; he admirably developed this moment of particularity, which is passion, necessary for the concreteness of the universal. As the passions for Vico are human nature itself, which morality directs but does not destroy, and are neither good nor bad in themselves, and utilitates ex se neque turpes neque honestae, sed earum inaequalitas est titrpitudo, aequalitas autem honestas? — so, for Hegel, " pas sion is neither good nor bad in its formal character and only expresses the fact that a subject has placed all the living interest of his spirit, of his talent, of his character, of his en joyment, in a single content. Nothing great can or has been accomplished without passion. Only a morality that is dead and too often hypocritical can inveigh against the form of passion as such...Ethicity concerns the content, which, as such, is universal, something inactive, and has its active element in the subject: the fact that the content is immanent in it constitutes interest, 1 De uno univ. juris principle > § 46.
ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 411 and in so far as it dominates all the efficient sub jectivity, passion."
The same Hegel once observed: " As for concept of the what concerns utility, morality must not play the useful. disdainful towards it, for every good action is actually useful, that is to say, possesses reality and produces something good. A good action that were not useful would not be an action, would not possess reality. The inutility of the good in itself, as its unreality, is its abstractness. Not only is it possible to be conscious of utility, but we ought to be conscious of it, since it is true that it is useful to know the good: utility does not mean anything but that we are conscious of our own action. If this be blameworthy, it will also be blameworthy to know the goodness of one's own action."
Hegel thus discovered the function of the use ful when rehabilitating the passions, though in a fugitive manner. But Karit had not attributed importance to the problem of the passions in Ethic, and had not therefore been in a position to avail himself of the suggestion contained in the doctrine of the passions.
Fichte, in re-elaborating the Kantian philo- 1 Encykl. § 474, and cf. other passages: Phtin. d. Geisies, pp. 484-486; Encykl. § 474; Phil. d. Rechtes, § 124; Phil. d. Gesch. pp. 39-41- the elaboration o) the Ethic.
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sophy, showed the relation between pleasure and Kantian duty in a manner that came very near to the J J truth. He gave precedence to what he called the empirical over the moral man, the former corresponding entirely to the merely utilitarian or economic. What, asks Fichte, will be his maxim of action at this stage? " As there is no other impulse in his consciousness save the natural, and as this is directed only toward enjoyment and has pleasure for its motive, that maxim cannot but be to choose what pro mises the maximum of pleasure in intensity and extension; that is, the maxim of his own happiness. This may likewise be sought in the pleasure of others by means of the sympathetic impulses; but the ultimate scope of his action always remains the satisfaction of those impulses and pleasures which arise from it, and therefore, his own happiness. Man at this stage is an intelligent animal." "But," he continues, "it is a fault to remain here, and man must raise himself to a stage at which he enjoys an alto gether different liberty; he must be free, not only formaliter, but also materialiter, that is, he must attain to the moral stage."1 That first stage, then, is formal freedom, and is no longer con- 1 System der Sittenlehre, p. 180 sq.; cf. p. 15.
n ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 413 sidered a pathological condition of the spirit, or as that merely technical knowledge of which Kant speaks. This would constitute no small progress, if Fichte had been conscious of all the richness of the concept of which he had caught a glimpse, and had made it fructify. But it seems that he was not aware of this, and certainly he took no advantage of it whatever.
V. The inventive genius of modern Ethic is exhausted with these thinkers. 1 heir successors and of morality in the have reproduced the old situations, one after thinkers of the nineteenth