[Sidenote] _The two forms of practical activity._
The twofold grade of the theoretical activity, aesthetic and logical,
has an important parallel in the practical activity, which has not yet
been placed in due relief. The practical activity is also divided into a
first and second degree, the second implying the first. The first
practical degree is the simply _useful_ or _economical_ activity; the
second the _moral_ activity.
Economy is, as it were, the Aesthetic of practical life; Morality its
Logic.
[Sidenote] _The economically useful._
If this has not been clearly seen by philosophers; if its suitable place
in the system of the mind has not been given to the economic activity,
and it has been left to wander in the prolegomena to treatises on
political economy, often uncertain and but slightly elaborated, this is
due, among other reasons, to the fact that the useful or economic has
been confused, now with the concept of _technique_, now with that of the
_egoistic_.
[Sidenote] _Distinction between the useful and the technical._
_Technique_ is certainly not a special activity of the spirit.
Technique is knowledge; or better, it is knowledge itself, in general,
that takes this name, as we have seen, in so far as it serves as basis
for practical action. Knowledge which is not followed, or is presumed to
be not easily followed by practical action, is called pure: the same
knowledge, if effectively followed by action, is called applied; if it
is presumed that it can be easily followed by the same action, it is
called technical or applied. This word, then, indicates a _situation_ in
which knowledge already is, or easily can be found, not a special form
of knowledge. So true is this, that it would be altogether impossible to
establish whether a given order of knowledge were, intrinsically, pure
or applied. All knowledge, however abstract and philosophical one may
imagine it to be, can be a guide to practical acts; a theoretical error
in the ultimate principles of morals can be reflected and always is
reflected in some way, in practical life. One can only speak roughly and
unscientifically of truths that are pure and of others that are applied.
The same knowledge which is called technical, can also be called
_useful_. But the word "useful," in conformity with the criticism of
judgments of value made above, is to be understood as used here in a
linguistic or metaphorical sense. When we say that water is useful for
putting out fire, the word "useful" is used in a non-scientific sense.
Water thrown on the fire is the cause of its going out: this is the
knowledge that serves for basis to the action, let us say, of firemen.
There is a link, not of nature, but of simple succession, between the
useful action of the person who extinguishes the conflagration, and this
knowledge. The technique of the effects of the water is the theoretical
activity which precedes; the _action_ of him who extinguishes the fire
is alone useful.
[Sidenote] _Distinction between the useful and the egoistic._
Some economists identify utility with _egoïsm_, that is to say, with
merely economical action or desire, with that which is profitable to the
individual, in so far as individual, without regard to and indeed in
complete opposition to the moral law. The egoistic is the immoral. In
this case Economy would be a very strange science, standing, not beside,
but facing Ethic, like the devil facing God, or at least like the
_advocatus diaboli_ in the processes of canonization. Such a conception
of it is altogether inadmissible: the science of immorality is implied
in that of morality, as the science of the false is implied in _Logic_,
the science of the true, and a science of ineffectual expression in
Aesthetic, the science of successful expression. If, then, Economy were
the scientific treatment of egoism, it would be a chapter of Ethic, or
Ethic itself; because every moral determination implies, at the same
time, a negation of its contrary.
Further, conscience tells us that to conduct oneself economically is not
to conduct oneself egoistically; that even the most morally scrupulous
man must conduct himself usefully (economically), if he does not wish to
be inconclusive and, therefore, not truly moral. If utility were egoism,
how could it be the duty of the altruist to behave like an egoist?
[Sidenote] _Economic will and moral will._
If we are not mistaken, the difficulty is solved in a manner perfectly
analogous to that in which is solved the problem of the relations
between the expression and the concept, between Aesthetic and Logic.
To will economically is to _will an end_; to will morally is to _will
the rational end_. But whoever wills and acts morally, cannot but will
and act usefully (economically). How could he will the _rational_,
unless he willed it also _as his particular end_?
[Sidenote] _Pure economicity._
The reciprocal is not true; as it is not true in aesthetic science that
the expressive fact must of necessity be linked with the logical fact.
It is possible to will economically without willing morally; and it is
possible to conduct oneself with perfect economic coherence, while
pursuing an end which is objectively irrational (immoral), or, better,
an end which would be so judged in a superior grade of consciousness.
Examples of the economic, without the moral character, are the Prince of
Machiavelli, Caesar Borgia, or the Iago of Shakespeare. Who can help
admiring their strength of will, although their activity is only
economic, and is opposed to what we hold moral? Who can help admiring
the ser Ciappelletto of Boccaccio, who, even on his death-bed, pursues
and realizes his ideal of the perfect rascal, making the small and timid
little thieves who are present at his burlesque confession exclaim:
"What manner of man is this, whose perversity, neither age, nor
infirmity, nor the fear of death, which he sees at hand, nor the fear of
God, before whose judgment-seat he must stand in a little while, have
been able to remove, nor to cause that he should not wish to die as he
has lived?"
[Sidenote] _The economic side of morality._
The moral man unites with the pertinacity and fearlessness of a Caesar
Borgia, of an Iago, or of a ser Ciappelletto, the good will of the saint
or of the hero. Or, better, good will would not be will, and
consequently not good, if it did not possess, in addition to the side
which makes it _good_, also that which makes it _will_. Thus a logical
thought, which does not succeed in expressing itself, is not thought,
but at the most, a confused presentiment of a thought yet to come.
It is not correct, then, to conceive of the amoral man as also the
anti-economical man, or to make of morality an element of coherence in
the acts of life, and therefore of economicity. Nothing prevents us from
conceiving (an hypothesis which is verified at least during certain
periods and moments, if not during whole lifetimes) a man altogether
without moral conscience. In a man thus organized, what for us is
immorality is not so for him, because it is not so felt. The
consciousness of the contradiction between what is desired as a rational
end and what is pursued egoistically cannot be born in him. This
contradiction is anti-economicity. Immoral conduct becomes also
anti-economical only in the man who possesses moral conscience. The
moral remorse which is the proof of this, is also economical remorse;
that is to say, pain at not having known how to will completely and to
attain to that moral ideal which was willed at the first moment, but was
afterwards perverted by the passions. _Video meliora proboque, deteriora
sequor_. The _video_ and the _probo_ are here an initial will
immediately contradicted and passed over. In the man deprived of moral
sense, we must admit a remorse which is _merely economic_; like that of
a thief or of an assassin who should be attacked when on the point of
robbing or of assassinating, and should abstain from doing so, not owing
to a conversion of his being, but owing to his impressionability and
bewilderment, or even owing to a momentary awakening of the moral
consciousness. When he has come back to himself, that thief or assassin
will regret and be ashamed of his inconsequence; his remorse will not be
due to having done wrong, but to not having done it; his remorse is,
therefore, economic, not moral, since the latter is excluded by
hypothesis. However, a lively moral conscience is generally found among
the majority of men, and its total absence is a rare and perhaps
non-existent monstrosity. It may, therefore, be admitted, that morality
coincides with economicity in the conduct of life.
[Sidenote] _The merely economic and the error of the morally
indifferent._
There need be no fear lest the parallelism affirmed by us should
introduce afresh into the category of the _morally indifferent_, of that
which is in truth action and volition, but is neither moral nor immoral;
the category in sum of the _licit_ and of the _permissible_, which has
always been the cause or mirror of ethical corruption, as is the case
with Jesuitical morality in which it dominated. It remains quite certain
that indifferent moral actions do not exist, because moral activity
pervades and must pervade every least volitional movement of man. But
this, far from upsetting the parallelism, confirms it. Do there exist
intuitions which science and the intellect do not pervade and analyse,
resolving them into universal concepts, or changing them into historical
affirmations? We have already seen that true science, philosophy, knows
no external limits which bar its way, as happens with the so-called
natural sciences. Science and morality entirely dominate, the one the
aesthetic intuitions, the other the economic volitions of man, although
neither of them can appear in the concrete, save in the intuitive form
as regards the one, in the economic as regards the other.
[Sidenote] _Critique of utilitarianism and the reform of Ethic and
of Economic._
This combined identity and difference of the useful and of the moral, of
the economic and of the ethic, explains the fortune enjoyed now and
formerly by the utilitarian theory of Ethic. It is in fact easy to
discover and to show a utilitarian side in every moral action; as it is
easy to show an aesthetic side of every logical proposition. The
criticism of ethical utilitarianism cannot escape by denying this truth
and seeking out absurd and inexistent examples of _useless_ moral
actions. It must admit the utilitarian side and explain it as the
concrete form of morality, which consists of what is _within_ this form.
Utilitarians do not see this within. This is not the place for a more
ample development of such ideas. Ethic and Economic cannot but be
gainers, as we have said of Logic and Aesthetic, by a more exact
determination of the relations that exist between them. Economic science
is now rising to the animating concept of the useful, as it strives to
pass beyond the mathematical phase, in which it is still entangled; a
phase which, when it superseded historicism, was in its turn a progress,
destroying a series of arbitrary distinctions and false theories of
Economic, implied in the confusion of the theoretical with the
historical. With this conception, it will be easy on the one hand to
absorb and to verify the semi-philosophical theories of so-called pure
economy, and on the other, by the introduction of successive
complications and additions, and by passing from the philosophical to
the empirical or naturalistic method, to include the particular theories
of the political or national economy of the schools.
[Sidenote] _Phenomenon and noumenon in practical activity._
As aesthetic intuition knows the phenomenon or nature, and philosophic
intuition the noumenon or spirit; so economic activity wills the
phenomenon or nature, and moral activity the noumenon or spirit. _The
spirit which desires itself_, its true self, the universal which is in
the empirical and finite spirit: that is the formula which perhaps
defines the essence of morality with the least impropriety. This will
for the true self is _absolute liberty_.