that tends to annul it is anti-freedom, the scission of that nexus, the
analysis of that synthesis. On the one hand it aims at making liberty
fall into nothingness, by compelling it to the inertia of the fact,
and on the other, to make a leap into the void, by impelling it to
will, a sterile endeavour--two movements that are one-sided and absurd,
and become identified through the considerations already established
in relation to determinism and arbitrarism. Therefore the opposite
of freedom is qualified indifferently, either as the _passive,_
taken by itself, opposed to the active, the fact that resists the new
creation, or as the _active,_ taken by itself and abstract, opposed
to the passive: will opposed to liberty. Anti-freedom is either the
material fact or arbitrary choice, but the first is resolved into will,
the second into material fact. Only by an act of will can the fact
that should continue to develop be fixed as a fact and so appear as a
material fact, and only by a persistence in that fact, which should
be surpassed, can will give itself the appearance of a content. The
undertaking is contradictory, and the solution, the absence of freedom,
is a contradiction.
[Sidenote: _Good as freedom and reality, and evil as its opposite._]
Freedom and its opposite, freedom and its internal contradiction,
freedom and will, are what is designated by the terms _good and evil._
With us these terms are given an altogether generic meaning, as they
are taken as the representatives of all the other couples of opposites
that are wont to be enunciated in the field of practical activity,
as helpful and harmful, useful and useless, honest and dishonest,
meritorious and blameworthy, pious and impious, lawful and sinful, and
so on. All these formulæ either answer to the sub-distinctions of the
practical activity (which we shall study further on), or are the same
distinction, variously formulated, with reference to psychological
classes. But all are to be reduced to those of good and evil for
the purposes of the philosophical study of the practical activity
in general, without ulterior determinations of them as moral or
utilitarian good, moral or utilitarian evil, or any other form there
may be, and without regard to the various empirical material, with
which they may be filled.
[Sidenote: _Critique of abstract monism and of the dualism of values._]
That practical good and evil are to be conceived as will and anti-will,
and the good, therefore, as the reality and the bad as the irreality
of the will, the good as something positive and the bad as something
negative,--is the solution imposed by the impossibility of thinking
the two others that differ from it: namely, that which considers the
distinction between good and bad as inexistent (abstract monism of
values), and that which considers the good as transcendent in respect
of reality, which is always evil, unless the good deign to descend
and modify it (abstract dualism of values). For the criticism of
the abstract monistic view, it is necessary to distinguish between
those doctrines that deny, not only the distinction between good
and evil, but also all the analogous distinctions in every field of
activity, including that of thought, and the doctrines that allow
the distinction to subsist in other fields, but deny it in that of
the practical. The first, which deny the distinction between true
and false, are the suicide of Philosophy, the second, which deny it
only between good and evil, are the suicide of the Philosophy of the
practical: that is to say, both are founded upon errors that we have
already criticized and surpassed, and upon which it would therefore
be otiose to insist. As to the dualistic view (still common among
right-thinking professors of philosophy, that is, among the lazy and
the most lazy) it will be requisite to discuss this point seriously,
when it has been demonstrated in what way Reality can place itself
beneath the yoke of Value and of Goodness, which would be inferior
to it by hypothesis, through the very fact that they were _unreal._
Reality living, these others dead; Reality like "the four bedevilled"
of Giusti bent upon _doing so,_ they, like the "two hundred simpletons"
of the same poet, bent upon _saying_ no. For if Value and Goodness be
real, they will be the true Reality; and that which was first called
by the name will be feigned reality, altogether identical with what we
have indicated as the moment of contradiction and of will, arising in
the very bosom of the practical activity.
[Sidenote: _Objections to the reality of evil._]
An instance that is always formidable has certainly been cited against
the thesis of evil as something negative and unreal, and of good as
itself the only positive and real: it has actually been affirmed that
this thesis offends against good sense. What? Is evil unreal? Is it
nothing? Unreality and nothingness are then the knavish trick of some
wicked person who starts a calumny, which, being received and believed,
injures an honest man? Unreality and nothing, the passion that drags
the gambler into economic ruin and moral abjection? So the world is all
good, all rose-coloured, all sweet; and crimes, cowardice, foolishness,
and baseness are illusions, and there is no reason to lament; so the
feeling of life should be expressed with a perpetual smile, like that
upon the lips of the wounded warriors in the marbles of Aegina? -But
let good sense and its advocates remain tranquil. If evil be a nothing,
that does not mean that it is nothing; if the vanity that seems to be
a person, be vanity and not a person, that does not mean that it has
not really the appearance of a person and should not be really combated
and dissipated. The wise, who having defined evil, deny toothache,
or like the stoical Posidonio forget the gout that transfixes them,
need Giambattista Vico to remind them how no philosophy is able to
save them from anxiety on behalf of "their wives in childbirth" and
of "their sons who languish in disease"! The world is precisely that
mixture of good and evil, which good sense says it is, and the sweet
is always tempered with the _amari aliquid._ It cannot be adequately
expressed either with lamentations only, or only with laughter. The
thesis that we have enunciated wishes to abolish, not the consciousness
of evil, but the false belief that this is something substantial, and
thus prevent one evil from being increased by another, evil by error,
_moral_ trouble by _mental_ confusion.
[Sidenote: _Evil within and without synthesis._]
Evil is either felt as evil, and in this case it means that it is not
realized, but that in its place is realized the good. The gambler of
the example, at the moment he knows he is doing himself economic harm,
does not play; his hand is held; and it is held, because to _know,_
in the practical sense, equals to _will_; and to know the harm of
gambling means to know it as harm, and so to dislike gambling. If he
take to dice or cards again, this arises because that knowledge is
obliterated in him, that is, because he changes his mind; and in this
case play is not looked upon any longer as harmful; it is willed,
and so at that instant again becomes the good for him, because it
satisfies one of his wants. The calumniator, if he understand the
idea that is passing through his mind, or rather the impulse that has
seized him, as calumny, is for that very reason repugnant to it and
does not pronounce those evil words: in that case indeed he is not
a calumniator, but an honest man who resists a temptation (and no
other definition of an honest man can be given). But if he pronounce
them, this means that the opposing repugnance was not present or is
no longer present: and therefore those words are no longer for him a
wicked act of calumny, but a simple satisfaction of a desire to amuse
himself, or to reject the evil that has been done to him, and therefore
a good. In the same way, he who asserts what is false, he who renders
himself guilty of error, if he be aware of himself as frivolous or a
charlatan or disloyal, would be silent: if he talk and write and print
false insinuations, this happens either because the will for truth
does not exist in him, or is for the time being suppressed, and with
it the desire to seek it out and to diffuse it; that is to say, for
that will has been substituted the other of withdrawing from a painful
labour, or of obtaining easy praise and gain; so, for one good has been
substituted another. As a rule, it is admitted that we will the good
and do evil. "I do not do the good that I will, and I do the evil
that I do not will" (οὐ γὰρ ὂ θέλω ποιῶ ἀγαθόν, ἀλλὰ ὂ οὐ θέλω κακὸν
τοῦτο πράσσω), said St. Paul.[1] But it is a question of psychological
confusion, owing to which a series of moments and alternatives is
simplified into one single act, inexistent because contradictory.
[Sidenote: _Affirmative judgments of evil as negative judgments._]
Thus evil, when real, does not exist save in the good, which opposes
and conquers it, and therefore does not exist as a positive fact. When
on the contrary it exists as a positive fact, it is not evil, but
good (and in its turn has for shadow an evil, with which it strives
and conquers). The judgments that we give when we judge an action to
be foolish or wicked, a statement false, a work of art ugly, are all
metaphorical. In delivering them we do not mean to say that there is an
_existence_ called error, ugliness, foolishness, but only that there is
a given existence and that another is wanting. He who has launched a
calumny, dissipated his property, soiled a canvas, printed a worthless
book, does not, strictly speaking, deserve negative denominations,
because to judge means to place oneself in the conditions of the person
judged, and in those conditions there was neither evil nor ugliness
nor error nor folly; otherwise the acts that are the objects of the
judgment would not have been accomplished, and in so far as they are
accomplished they deserve positive judgment. But what is meant by the
negative form of those judgments is that such an act is this and not
another, that it is utilitarian and not moral, a commercial and not a
literary or scientific fact, and so on.
[Sidenote: _Confirmations of the doctrine._]
There is a very ancient saying to the effect that every one seeks
his own good and that no one deliberately wills his own evil, and,
therefore, that if the practically good man be the wise, then the
bad man can but be the ignorant. Now if we remove from the thesis
its intellectualist veneer, and translate wisdom and ignorance into
practical terms, we see that wickedness is here looked upon as a limit,
as a tendency toward the good, that has failed, not as the will for an
evil. The dispute as to who sins the more, he who is conscious of the
evil, or he who has no consciousness of it, is also illumined by the
theory that we have here exposed, which declares that both parties to
the dispute are right and wrong. For instance, he who is completely
without moral consciousness, is morally innocent, whereas he who is
more or less possessed of one, is also more or less of a sinner, for
the law itself makes him so (τὴν ἀμαρτίαν οὐκ ἔγνων εἰ μὴ διὰ νόμου,
also said St. Paul[2]). But with this saying it is not desired to put
the innocent above the sinner, but the contrary. That declaration of
ignorance is the gravest condemnation, for it is thus recognized that
the individual in question is unable to sin, and therefore unable to do
right, since the possibility of sinning is all one with that of doing
right. The poet inspires admiration, but he who does not know how to
be anything but a poet, and is therefore unable to reason and to act,
is deficient. The shrewd man is praised, but he who is _only_ shrewd
cannot be praised. The animal is a being, worthy of all esteem, but to
call a man an animal, that is, to tell him that he is nothing but an
animal, is to do him a great injury. In other words, while we recognize
as good all that a man effectively does, we do not intend to cancel
the distinction between one form and another of human activity, and
between one act and another, between the utilitarian and the moral man,
between fanciful and logical production, between animal and man. Nor
do we mean that those emphatic expressions of negative character that
we continually utter to one another and to ourselves, and by means of
which we urge ourselves and others to more lofty modes of existence,
are to be abandoned.
[Sidenote: _The poles of feeling (pleasure and pain) and their identity
with their practical opposites._]
Here occurs an opportunity of tying a thread that we had left loose
when discussing the theory of feeling, or rather the distinction of
feeling into the two poles of _pleasure and pain,_ understood, not as
a psychological distinction of greater or less, or of _mixed states,_
but as a philosophical distinction of _pure states,_ or of terms that
are truly opposed. When the vague and indeterminate term of "feeling"
is directed toward theoretical facts and is determined by theoretical
philosophy as æsthetic activity or speculative thought, or in some
other way, the terms of pleasure and pain are, strictly speaking, not
applicable to it. The pure theoretic activity considered in itself,
cannot be polarized, as has been seen; it will always attain to the
beautiful, always to the true. Only in so far as the theoretic activity
is also practical activity, by the law of the unity of the spirit,
will the polarization of good and evil, which in that case are called
beautiful and ugly, true and false, take place through it if not in it.
If the term "feeling" be on the contrary directed to practical facts,
and its synonymity with the practical activity (of which feeling would
be a distinguishing characteristic) made clear by the Philosophy of
the practical, it is clear that to it belongs immediately and no longer
mediately that polarity of good and evil. Good and evil then become
what theoreticians of feeling _call pleasure and pain._ These terms are
identical with the preceding, as feeling is a fact identical with the
practical activity, generically considered.
[Sidenote: _Doctrines concerning pleasure and happiness: critique._]
This theory of pain and pleasure, as the synonyms of the practical
positive and negative, helps to put an end to a long series of
questions arising in connection with such concepts. Above all, the
dispute as to whether pleasure be positive or negative will appear
to be unfounded, and, therefore, whether pain have a positive or a
negative value, or, finally, whether both be negative: unfounded,
since "pleasure" means "positive" and "pain" "negative." At the most,
it may be admitted that pain has also a positivity, which is however
nothing but the positivity of the negative, that is the real existence
of the negative pole.--The theory that man always proposes to himself
pleasure as an end is, on the contrary, not only not unfounded, but of
such evident truth as not to require enunciation, much less efforts
to prove it. If pleasure be nothing but activity, it is natural that
man should have no other end save pleasure, that is, activity, life
itself. The correction that has been suggested by others, to the
effect that man wills, not indeed pleasure, but activity, of which
the outcome is pleasure, has but slight exactitude, for the two terms
are not distinguishable, and the result is not separable from the
activity; the pleasure of travelling is not separable from travelling.
That polemic has value at the most against empiricism, which limits
pleasure to an arbitrarily determined group of pleasurable facts, that
is to say, circumscribes activity to certain particular manifestations
of activity, collected in groups or classes, and substituted for
the universal concept. Finally, by means of the identification
of pleasure and pain with good and evil in general which we have
given, all disputes as to the concept of _happiness_ disappear, as
to whether it be or be not distinct from that of the good action,
practically coherent, and if man propose to himself _happiness_ as an
end. "Happiness" is equal to "pleasure," and "pleasure" is equal to
"activity." To will the good (that is, to will well and energetically),
and to be happy, are the same. The objection raised by some, that man
does not will happiness, but a certain happiness, that he does not
will pleasure, but a certain pleasure, not the good, but a certain
good, is valid; but this only amounts to distinguishing volitional
man in the act, from the theory of the will, constructed by the
philosopher. If Tizio wishes at this moment to go to bed and Caio
to take a moonlight walk, bed and walk are the affairs of Tizio and
of Caio; for the philosopher there is no Tizio, no Caio, but man in
universal; there is neither bed nor moon, but pleasure and the good.
[Sidenote: _Empirical concepts relating to good and evil._]
The practical activity, the will, which is also strife between good
and evil, can be illuminated now from this side and now from that by
that indivisible unity, according to the accidents of discourse and the
varying situations of life. In this way arises a series of concepts
which, in so far as they are unilateral, are empirical, and only
become again philosophical in the thought of the unity of which they
form part. Thus, to make use of a comparison, space in geometry can be
analyzed and split up into a first, second, and third dimension; but
as spatiality, it is a _unicum,_ which does not possess either one or
two or three dimensions; and when in measuring or constructing plans
of measurement, we proceed to think one of these dimensions, we become
aware that we cannot think them, save all three together, or not as
three, but as one. The empirical, practical concepts that arise upon
the antithetical and dialectical nature of the will, have had much
importance, and it is fitting, therefore, that we should mention and
explain at least the principal among them.
[Sidenote: _Duty of being, ideal, inhibitive, and imperative power._]
If the situations of life lead to the directing of the attention
chiefly to the aspect of the will striving against inaction and
arbitrary choice, it is posited in this strife, in this becoming, as
something that _is not_ but _must be,_ not as _real,_ but as _ideal._
If the greatness of the ideal that is to be and to fill the soul with
joy, be set in relief in this struggle, then the ideal appears sweet
and smiling, as a _joy-bringing and beatific vision._ If, on the
other hand, the effort of its becoming be set in relief, the ideal
can be made into a metaphor, as will opposed to will, as legitimate
against rebellious will; and then it assumes a sour, rough, and hard
appearance, and the names of _inhibitive or imperative power,_ in so
far as it impedes the will, or promotes liberty.
There is no less opportunity and interest in making clear that
relation, from the point of view of the negative term, or of evil.
A series of descriptive concepts then appears, which present the
consciousness of evil, now as obstinate _blindness (cor induratum),_
now as _disquiet_ and _scruple,_ which induce vigilance and
circumspection, now as _humility,_ which does not permit forgetting
how easy it is to slip into evil. But it is worthy of note that the
series of words and empirical concepts that serve to illuminate
the _satisfaction_ of the good, the _victory_ won over oneself,
_tranquillity_ of conscience, is far less rich. Perhaps this arises
precisely because there is less practical interest in celebrating
the pleasure of victory than in the inculcation of the necessity for
strife and the abhorrence of evil. Why draw attention to joy and to
repose when man is already too much inclined to allow himself joy and
repose; does not Life allow them to itself and cause other problems
to follow on each solution, new perils to follow perils overpast, and
the necessity for new struggles? It is therefore of importance to
direct the greater sum of attention to those aspects from which the eye
is most frequently turned aside. Finally, these various aspects can
be placed in relation with the greater or less frequency with which
each appears in individuals, thus arriving at the construction of the
concepts of _virtue and vice,_ and of the models of _the virtuous
man, the honest man, the deliberate man, the clever man,_ and their
opposites, _the vicious, the dishonest, the unreflective, the incapable
man,_ and so on.
[Sidenote: _Their incapacity for setting as practical principles._]
The same thing happens with these empirical practical concepts as
with all the other empirical concepts, of which we have spoken in
general. They have been stiffened into philosophical concepts, for
the hasty satisfaction of the philosophical need of man. Hence, among
others, many of the disputes as to the principle of the Philosophy of
the practical. Some indeed maintain that such a principle is to be
found in _duty or the imperative; others in the idea or the ideal,
others in the joy of good, others in the abhorrence of pain, others in
virtue, others in enthusiasm,_ and so on. Each of the above-mentioned
theoreticians has the sharpest eyes for the discovery of the defects in
the theories of others, but is short-sighted as regards his own. Those
who maintain the ideal satirize the form of the categoric imperative
as suggestive of police or _gendarmerie;_ those of the imperative and
of duty deride the quietist form and the insipid ecstasy proper to the
contemplation of ideals; those of the avoidance of pain do not spare
their sarcasms for the hunters of joy; those of joy call these plunged
in sorrow hypocrites, who also obtain enjoyments for themselves, if in
no other way, then secretly: _si non caste, caute._ The truth is that
all are wrong as philosophers, because they all find the principle of
the will, not in itself but in an empirical concept, which gives to it
an abstract and mutilated appearance. And, on the other hand, all are
right, because those aspects are all real, and in each one of them the
others can be implicitly shown. The categoric imperative, for instance,
contains in itself both the will, which, in so far as it commands
itself, is the true will, the joy of being and the sorrow of not being
what we wish to be, the ideal, and the necessity of self-realization,
and so of entering into strife against irreality, thus becoming
imperative, and so on.
[Sidenote: _Its characteristics._]