ON THE ASSUMPTION OF DUTIES TOWARDS OURSELVES IN PARTICULAR.
This form of the doctrine of duties was very acceptable to Kant,
and in working out his position he left it untouched; for, like his
predecessors, along with the duties towards others he ranged also
duties towards ourselves. I, however, entirely reject this assumption,
and, as there will be no better opportunity, I shall here incidentally
explain my view.
Duties towards ourselves must, just as all others, be based either
on right or on love. Duties towards ourselves based on right are
impossible, because of the self-evident fundamental principle _volenti
non fit injuria_ (where the will assents, no injury is done). For what
I do is always what I will; consequently also what I do to myself is
never anything but what I will, therefore it cannot be unjust. Next, as
regards duties towards ourselves based on love. Ethics here finds her
work already done, and comes too late. The impossibility of violating
the duty of self-love is at once assumed by the first law of Christian
Morals: "Love thy neighbour as thyself." According to this, the love
which each man cherishes for himself is postulated as the _maximum_,
and as the condition of all other love; while the converse, "Love
thyself as thy neighbour" is never added; for every one would feel that
the latter does not claim enough. Moreover, self-love would be the sole
duty regularly involving an _opus supererogationis_. Kant himself says
in the _Metaphysische Anfangsgründe zur Tugendlehre_, p. 13 (R., p.
230): "That which each man inevitably wills of himself, does not belong
to the conception of Duty." This idea of duties towards ourselves is
nevertheless still held in repute, indeed it enjoys for the most part
special favour; nor need we feel surprise. But it has an amusing effect
in cases where people begin to show anxiety about their persons, and
talk quite earnestly of the duty of self-preservation; the while it is
sufficiently clear that fear will lend them legs soon enough, and that
they have no need of any law of duty to help them along.
First among the duties towards ourselves is generally placed that of
not committing suicide, the line of argument taken being extremely
prejudiced and resting on the shallowest basis. Unlike animals, man is
not only a prey to =bodily= pain limited to the passing moment,
but also to those incomparably greater =mental= sufferings, which,
reaching forwards and backwards, draw upon the future and the past; and
nature, by way of compensation, has granted to man alone the privilege
of being able to end his life at his own pleasure, before she herself
sets a term to it; thus, while animals necessarily live so long as they
can, man need only live so long as he =will=.
Whether he ought on ethical grounds to forego this privilege is a
difficult question, which in any case cannot be decided by the usual
superficial reasoning. The arguments against suicide which Kant does
not deem unworthy of adducing (p. 53, R., p. 48 and p. 67, R., p.
57), I cannot conscientiously describe as other than pitiable, and
quite undeserving of an answer. It is laughable indeed to suppose that
reflections of such a kind could have wrested the dagger from the hands
of Cato, of Cleopatra, of Cocceius Nerva (Tac. _Ann_., vi. 26) or of
Arria the wife of Paetus (Plin., _Ep_., iii. 16). If real moral motives
for not committing suicide actually exist, it is certain that they lie
very deep, and cannot be reached by the plummet of ordinary Ethics.
They belong to a higher view of things than is adaptable even to the
standpoint of the present treatise.[1]
That which generally comes next on the rubric of duties towards
ourselves may be divided partly into rules of worldly wisdom, partly
into hygienic prescriptions; but neither class belongs to Morals in the
proper sense. Last on the catalogue comes the prohibition of unnatural
lust--onanism, _paederastia,_ and bestiality. Of these onanism is
mainly a vice of childhood, and must be fought against much more with
the weapon of dietetics than with that of ethics; hence we find that
the authors of books directed against it are physicians (_e.g._,
Tissot and others) rather than moralists. After dietetics and hygiene
have done their work, and struck it down by irrefutable reasoning, if
Ethics desires to take up the matter, she finds little left for her to
do. Bestiality, again, is of very rare occurrence; it is thoroughly
abnormal and exceptional, and, moreover, so loathsome and foreign to
human nature, that itself, better than all arguments of reason, passes
judgment on itself, and deters by sheer disgust. For the rest, as being
a degradation of human nature, it is in reality an offence against the
species as such, and in the abstract; not against human units. Of the
three sexual perversions of which we are speaking it is consequently
only with _paederastia_ that Ethics has to do, and in treating of
Justice this vice finds its proper place. For Justice is infringed by
it, in face of which fact, the dictum _volenti non fit injuria_ is
unavailing. The injustice consists in the seduction of the younger and
inexperienced person, who is thereby ruined physically and morally.
[1] There are ascetic reasons, which may be found in the Fourth Book,
Vol. I., § 69, of my chief work (_Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_).