Society And its Purpose
Book 2 - The End of Society
CHAPTER 4
Continuation — Two elements of contentment, one necessary, the other willed
197. One of the most profound and important questions posed by ancient moralists concerned the power of the will over human happiness. The two opposing schools of Epicureans and Stoics gave extreme solutions. The Epicureans denied the will any power to produce happiness or, rather, entirely neglected the influence exercised by the will in making human beings happy. The Stoics, on the other hand, gave the will total power to make human beings happy.
The reason for this difference of opinion was that the Epicureans made all good consist in pleasure. Pleasure, at least physical pleasure, from which the general notion of pleasure wass taken, is produced necessarily in human beings according to the laws of animality and not by the action of the will. The Stoics, however, saw that happiness could never lie in individual pleasures, no matter how many, but in general satisfaction, that is, in contentment, the production of which clearly entails a willed judgment.
We cannot deny the Stoics therefore the merit of having seen and determined two great and valuable truths: 1. that human happiness consists in contentment, not in pleasure (it is obvious that, if any human being, immersed in pleasure, declares himself unhappy, no one can ever consider him in possession of happiness); 2. that contentment always requires as its condition an act of the will by which human beings deem and judge themselves content and happy.
198. So far, we could not dissent from stoic teaching. Pleasure-seekers deride it because they can conceive only pleasures as our source of happiness. If they, who are given so much to pleasure, were to note what takes place within them, they would see that the stoic theory is the theory of human nature, acknowledged and praised in fact by people of all systems and of every kind of behaviour. When pleasure-lovers maintain that happiness consists in pleasure, they make a judgment; they are declaring, rightly or wrongly, that they are blessed in their use of material enjoyments. If their judgment were sincere, the Stoics would agree with them. If on the other hand their judgment were totally opposite, as often happens, they would be agreeing with the Stoics. It is always true therefore that, in order to be happy, human beings need a judgment declaring they deem and assert themselves happy. This is precisely the Stoic teaching about contentment. The strange thing is, however, that pleasure-lovers, while arguing theoretically, resolutely maintain that all happiness consists in pleasure, although their private lives, which are an almost uninterrupted succession of pleasures, find them plunged moaning and unremittingly complaining into a deep sea of sadness where they see themselves as the most unfortunate of people. Experience shows that people of this kind manifest and feel an unfortunate tendency to hatred of life, to suicide. I could quote examples known to me personally of these sad victims of sensual pleasures, but I do not think it necessary — we have all encountered such cases or read of them in the papers and in statistics.
199. Clearly, then, the intensity of pleasure deceives sensual people. As long as they are expressing only philosophical theory, they consider pleasure alone and find it very good. When they are forced to descend from theory to practice, experience tells them that material pleasure, which depends on the state of one’s physical fibre, is neither unlimited nor continuous nor perpetual; by its nature it occupies and exercises only the most humble and least important of our human powers, leaving all the others starved and unsatisfied. Consequently, the human being as a whole is forced to declare himself empty and wretched. This explains the continual discontent, oppressive anxieties and ceaseless complaints of pleasure-seekers.
200. This is the true part of stoic teaching, drawn faithfully from observation of nature.(62) But the teaching goes too far when it claims that contentment depends solely on the will, and that the will can always pronounce the judgment by which we are made content and happy. The Stoics claim that human beings, in whatever state they are, can by an act of will deem themselves content and happy. This energy of the free will rises above all the accidents to which human beings, together with their external things and bodies, are subject, and preserves immutable the judgment by which they consider themselves blessed. The Stoics make both human virtue and human happiness consist in this will.
This gives rise to an intrinsic contradiction. If human beings must judge that all goes well with them, they must have some matter on which to form their judgment. This matter can only be a truly satisfying state which gives foundation to the judgment they make of themselves, when they say all is well. If this were not the case, the judgment would be a nebulous, false proposition.
201. This critique of stoic happiness brings with it a critique of stoic virtue: if stoicism is seen to be in contradiction with itself because it sometimes makes human happiness consist in a false judgment pronounced by the free will, it contradicts itself all the more openly in making virtue a freely pronounced false judgment.
202. Furthermore, we must note, as I have shown elsewhere,(63) that these are the extreme efforts of human reason in the investigation of happiness and virtue. Reason lacked an essential element and therefore succeeded only in obtaining an erroneous result at the end of its argument.
203. We must conclude that contentment of human nature results from two elements: 1. a true good independent of human free will, 2. an act of free will by which we deem ourselves content with the good we possess.
Notes
(62) Language also favours the stoic system. When we ask: `Does happiness consist in pleasure?', we presuppose a difference between pleasure and happiness, and mean: `Does pleasure produce human happiness?' Pleasure is considered as cause, happiness as effect. The opposite is true, however; as we can see, happiness becomes virtually a synonym for contentment or complete satisfaction, the only sense we can rightly make of these words.
(63) Cf. Storia comparativa e critica de' sistemi morali, c. 8, art. 3, §7.