error that we have already several times criticized, and many
propositions of the kind that one hears in ordinary conversation,
against which simple good sense has often rebelled, are to be reduced
to it. Thus the empirical consideration of certain human actions as
constituting richness and happiness, causes those individuals and
peoples who possess property of that sort to be called rich and happy;
but to this is opposed, with evident truth, that every one is happy
in his own way and that external conditions are not proof of internal
satisfaction, which is alone real and effective. The great dispute on
free trade is also to be reduced to the same misunderstanding, for when
we undertake to demonstrate that wealth is destroyed by protection, the
demonstration is efficacious only if the wealth, said to be destroyed,
is precisely that of which it was desired to assure the increase by
protection; but nothing has been proved if it be a different quality
of wealth that it may be desirable to acquire, even with the loss
and the destruction of the other. For example, a people may find it
advantageous from a political and military point of view to maintain in
its territories the cultivation of grain or the construction of ships,
even if that were to cost more than to provide itself with grain and
ships from abroad; in this case, we should, strictly speaking, talk,
not of the destruction of wealth, but rather of the acquisition of
wealth (presumed national security), paid for with dear grain and dear
naval construction. When the empirical ideas of free trade were raised
to the dignity of _laws of nature_ (reason), there was a rebellion
against the economists, by which it was made clear that those laws
of nature were laws, not absolute, but empirical, that is to say,
historical and contingent facts, and that the economists who propounded
them as absolute, were not at all men of science, but politicians,
and represented (if not seriously, at least by unconscious suggestion,
or, if it be preferred, by mere chance) the interests of certain
definite classes or of certain definite peoples. And the rebellion was
right, although it afterwards degenerated into the inconclusiveness
of historicism, and absolutely denied to those false practical
applications the formulæ and laws of Economy, which are _natural_ in
quite another sense, as nominal and therefore irrefutable definitions.
Abstract principles, which are always inadequate to grasp the richness
of reality, supply with a simple instrument him who passes from them
to historical and sociological observation, which requires altogether
different methods. Hence, for instance, the meaning of the school of
Le Play, which in studying concrete economic conditions took note of
religion, of family and political feelings, and of all the other things
connected with the first; hence the admitted necessity of completing
the analytic method (as it is called) with the synthetic, or (as it
would be preferable to say) of neglecting abstractions when dealing
with the problems of life and of directly intuiting life itself.
[Sidenote: _3rd. Transformation of the functions of the calculus into
reality._]
But what is particular to a philosophy that enters into hybrid wedlock
with economic Science, is the transformation of those quantitative
principles, of which we have seen the artificial origin, into effective
reality. As a result, when this origin has not been observed, or has
been forgotten, we may chance to hear the theories of Gossen on the
decline of pleasures, as though they were "fundamental laws of human
sensibility"; or that some _homo economicus_ has appeared, constructor
of diagrams and calculator of degrees of utility and of curves of
satisfaction, as though these were real things. Some false conceptions
derive from economic principles transported into the philosophy of the
practical, which we have already had occasion to refute, such as that
of a _scale of values,_ which the volitional man is supposed to have
before him whenever he deliberates, and that other of the embarrassment
he experiences in choosing between _two equal goods;_ and finally the
belief that man _wills things,_ whereas what he wills in reality is not
things but actions.
The comparisons, metaphors and symbols, taken from Economy and used
in ordinary conversation, lead to the false belief that mathematical
constructions and those of the economic calculus are the real processes
of the psyche or of the Spirit.
[Sidenote: _The pretended calculus of pleasures and pains, and the
doctrines of optimism and pessimism._]
The quantification of volitional acts, taken as a real fact and
introduced into philosophy, has given origin to the idea of a _calculus
of pleasures and pains and of a balance of life,_ to be established
with the pleasures on the profit side of the account and the sorrows
on the side of loss. And there have even been ravings about a double
mensuration of pleasures, to be based upon their _intensity_ and
_duration._ But the real man, at the moment he enjoys, has before him
only his own enjoyment, and at the moment that he suffers, only his
own sorrow: the past is past and life is not to be described like the
profit and loss account of a business. The true economic man says to
himself what Fra Jacopone sang in one of his lauds:
So much is mine
As enjoyed and bestowed for the love divine!
The sophisms that assume consistency owing to this false conception,
are most strange. Let the little dialogue of Leopardi with the seller
of almanacs suffice for all. No one would wish to live his life again,
not because the sorrows always exceed the pleasures, as that dialogue
suggests, but rather because man is not, as he believes, a consumer
of pleasures. He is a creator of life, and for this reason the idea
of doing again what has already been done, of retreading the same
path, of reliving the already past, is repugnant to him, even were it
all made up of pleasures as suggested, because he aspires only and
always to the future. _Optimism and pessimism,_ being each of them
respectively unable altogether to deny pleasure and pain, are obliged
to have recourse to these calculations and balances, in order to defend
their preconceived conclusions: but in so doing they fall from Scylla
into Charybdis and each reveals its own sophistical nature.
Indeed, a philosophy that calculates is a philosophy that toys
or dotes, and if we have certainly advised the economists and
mathematicians to calculate and not to think, we must, on the contrary,
cry to the philosopher:--Think, and do not calculate! _Qui incipit
numerare, incipit errare!_
VII
HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS
The concepts of the useful and of the moral and the various attempts
either to absorb the one in the other or to distinguish them, while
recognizing their relations, are the problem on which has laboured the
Philosophy of the practical as Ethic and Economic. Has this problem
ever been fully solved? It will be permissible to doubt it, when we
observe that a philosophical concept of the useful has been wanting
until our own days; and that in consequence one of morality must also,
strictly speaking, have been wanting, for it could not have been
understood in its fulness and purity, owing to the obscure position of
the term with which it is united.
[Sidenote: _Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness._]
I. The utilitarian character of Greek Ethic has been affirmed on
several occasions; but one experiences a certain repugnance in applying
so precise a term to the documents of ancient thought that remain to
us. Socrates, it is true, posited the useful as the supreme concept
of morality, and identified the good life with eudæmonia; but for him
that useful was nevertheless distinct from the merely pleasing, since
it consisted in what is useful to man as man, and his eudæmonia bore
much resemblance to the tranquil conscience of him who fulfils his
proper duties. Plato (for example, in the _Protagoras_) expounds the
doctrine that good things are nothing but pleasant things, and bad
things painful; but this doctrine is enunciated in order to place in
relief the thesis that man does not do wrong, save through ignorance,
and because the bad seems to him to be the good; without saying that
in other dialogues the distinction between pleasure and the good is
recognized. Nor can the most systematic of the ancient philosophers,
Aristotle, be called without reserve a hedonist, a eudæmonist, or a
utilitarian, on the strength of his doctrine of happiness. Happiness
is the supreme good, it is an end for itself; but virtue is already
included for Aristotle in happiness, virtue which is found there, not
as an adjunct, but intrinsic, for which exterior goods are indeed
necessary, but only as instruments. The virtuous man must be a lover
of himself (φίλαυτος), that is to say, just, temperate, liberal of his
possessions, ready to yield honours and offices to his friends; lover
of himself, then, in the lofty signification of the word (lover, not of
the empirical, but of the metempirical ego), as opposed to the wicked
man, who is his own enemy. Even Epicurus could not be included among
the hedonists, since for him pleasure is not an end, but a means for
_calm,_ which is the true good, and calm is tranquillity of the spirit,
which only the virtuous man can enjoy.
It is therefore more exact to consider Greek Ethic in its general
character, not as eudæmonistic and utilitarian, but here also, in
relation to the new problem that we now have before us (in the same
way as was done above, in respect to practical intellectualism), as
_ingenuous_; for in truth that problem did not constitute the centre
of inquiries and discussions, as they present themselves in our times,
nor were the different schools divided upon it. They were distinguished
from one another (as has been already noted in respect to the doctrine
of the passions), rather by the different rules of life respectively
laid down by each as preferable. The antitheses of the Cynics and
Cyrenaïcs, of the Epicureans and the Stoics, have but a superficial
resemblance to those of the ethical rigorists or abstractionists,
hedonists or utilitarians, which have appeared as the result of the
antithesis between pleasure and pain explicitly stated in modern times.
It would be difficult to point out ethical rigorists and utilitarians
among thinkers truly and properly so called. In order to discover the
utilitaristic attitude at that period of history, it would be necessary
to have recourse to some rhetorician, such as Carneades, ready to
maintain indifferently the most opposed paradoxes, or to Callicles and
Thrasymachus, so magnificently portrayed in the Platonic dialogues.
These were rather men of the world than philosophers, giving the
immediate and violent impression of the struggle for life, and for this
reason they were at conflict with Socrates, the philosopher, whom they
sometimes treated as a clown and utterer of paradoxes, sometimes pitied
as a child, a "suckling" child, and objected to him that philosophers
do not understand one iota about politics (as often has been and often
will be objected by politicians, not altogether without reason). If it
be wished, all the same, to find a reference to later utilitarianism
among the sophists, the hedonists and the Epicureans, or among the
Stoics, with their conception of life as a war against the passions,
something of future rigorism and asceticism, or in certain discussions
among the Platonic dialogues as to the relation 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.
[Sidenote: _Importance of Christianity for Ethic._]
II. The precise and it may be said violent affirmation of the
antithesis, was the work of 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 abhorrence 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 jubilation
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, 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.
[Sidenote: _The three resulting directions: utilitarianism, rigorism,
and psychologism._]
The spectacle afforded by modern Ethic, from the Renaissance to the
beginning of the nineteenth century, and also (with few exceptions) in
the later periods is still altogether dominated by that antithesis, and
therefore two currents are to be discerned 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 _utilitarianism,_ child also, though illegitimate, of
the distinction or rending asunder of the ancient unity of duty
and pleasure, virtue and happiness, effected by Christianity. The
antithesis sometimes seems to be solved and a Philosophy 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
expression, 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._
[Sidenote: _Hobbes, Spinoza._]
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) _mensuram juris
esse utilitatem._[1] 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. 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.
[Sidenote: _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 therefore
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),[2] 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 tendency to
disavow itself, by recognizing as true laws not those of nature, but
those revealed by God (_in Scripturis sacris latae_),[3] and in Locke
retained the divine side by side with the civil laws and those of
public opinion,[4] became evident in the theological utilitarianism of
Warburton and of Paley. As for intuitionists and psychologists, such as
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, these either left an unsolved dualism
(as was above all the case with the last), or, although possessing 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 Helvétius and
D'Holbach, though less subtle, are more consequent.
[Sidenote: _Idealistic Philosophy._]
Rigoristic Ethic displayed its strength against 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), 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-sidedness, 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 _ἀδιάφορα_ 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.
[Sidenote: _Kant and his affirmation of the ethical principle._]
III. The strength and the weakness of rigorism are to be clearly seen
in the greatest ethical system to which it led: the moral doctrine of
Emmanuel Kant. It was time that the principle of Christian Ethic should
be reaffirmed, 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, 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 be empty and indeterminate, yet
he was never able to prove that it was a eudæmonistic and utilitarian
concept.[5] 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.
[Sidenote: _Self-contradictions of Kant concerning the concept of the
useful, of prudence, of happiness, etc._]
But the mistake of Kant lies in not having well analyzed the concepts
of pleasure, of happiness and of the useful, and in having thought that
he could free himself from them, by placing them among another set of
principles, which he called _hypothetical_ imperatives and opposed to
the _categoric. _ We know that the imperative 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 sub-distinguishes 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,
therefore, 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 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 unfortunately
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 to the concept of happiness are all empirical
and must therefore all be taken from experience; 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; therefore
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_
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 contradictions, as is proved by
the variety of the arguments to which he has recourse.[6]
[Sidenote: _Errors derived from it in his Ethic._]
But the unrecognized autonomy of the useful, of happiness, of
well-being, generally revenges 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 concept of actions morally indifferent or permissible.[7] 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 Kant" (wrote Hegel) "is the last
undigested morsel given by revelation to reason, and it weighs
upon its stomach."[8] 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 shipwreck
in mystery.
[Sidenote: _Occasions for a philosophy of economy._]