Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 2
The personal element in contentment
516. A pleasant state pertains to nature; contentment properly speaking concerns person. Person, when it has attained awareness of itself, could not be satisfied by any pleasant feelings it may enjoy without making an internal judgment on its own well-being and affirming its contentment.
517. This fact, which is difficult to note, has a profound cause. The human person, when judging internally that he is content, is different from the proximate principle of simple feeling. If the proximate principle of feeling is in a pleasant state, it does not follow that the other, higher principle, which understands, judges and, properly speaking, constitutes human personship and `myself' (this word usually expresses a person aware of himself) is content and happy. The feeling principle will be in a pleasant state thanks to a pleasant sensation; the state of the intelligent principle will be pleasant only as a result of the knowledge of good, that is, by means of the judgment with which it declares itself content. I, as an intelligent being, can be content only by judging myself content; it is my personal activity which creates, or at least informs the contentment.
518. If personal activity were not yet posited in action but entirely dormant, as in the first moments of human existence, feeling could be pleasant without our experiencing any need to pass judgment on the pleasure. In those first moments when feeling alone is active, contentment neither exists nor is required to exist. The pleasant state of our feeling-nature is not disturbed by any need of contentment in our intellective nature. This need has not yet appeared because our intelligence has not attained a level of action sufficient to produce it. On the other hand, if our intelligence has become active and produced consciousness in us, that is, if we are already reflecting on ourselves, then the need to make some judgment on our state originates in us: we judge ourselves, and with this judgment we either make ourselves more miserable (if we judged ourselves miserable) or are content (if we judged ourselves content).
The development of the understanding reaches a point when pleasant feelings are no longer sufficient; we need to judge them. The necessity of this judgment is a psychological fact whose cause, as I said, is mysterious, deep and ultimately found in the law of personal action. I expressed this law in the formula: `In any particular acts whatsoever, person always uses the noblest activity it can dispose of at the time.'(248) Granted this law, and granted that the human being has attained such intellective development, he cannot, as person and thanks to this law, be content with mere feeling. Because the faculty of judgment is more noble than that of sense, he is forced to judge himself and his own well-being. If he did not exercise the noblest, highest faculty at his disposition, his very person would remain inactive and thus enjoy nothing. Pleasure would not exceed the sphere of sense and, because sense in this case is not the human being, he would have no contentment. We must always bear in mind that the developed human being in pursuing any good whatsoever, even a purely sensual delight, always does so by means of a judgment.
519. In the human being, even dedication to sensuality is the same as judging that some good resides in material delights. Human beings, as intelligent beings, cannot not judge, once they have attained a level of development where their action is a matter of choice. A moment's thought will show that human beings, granted the intelligence and choice with which they are endowed, never pursue sensual pleasure as a good per se but as a means by which they believe they can content and satisfy themselves. They need to judge themselves content in order to be content. Whether they use material or spiritual means to make themselves content, they are fully satisfied only when they have made an interior judgment. We must conclude therefore, as we have said, that `contentment is always intellective whatever we use, even something crass and material, to acquire it'.
520. This extraordinary proposition is a solid psychological truth. At first sight paradoxical, it is in fact is very true. The apparent paradox disappears once we consider the subordination of the animal feeling-part of the human being to the spiritual, intellective part. This dependence is founded in what is proper to the intellective part, that is, to know as its proper objects the nature and all the affections of its feeling-part which itself, (because it does not possess cognition), can never perceive or know any of the objects proper to the intellect.
Sense or experience therefore cannot in any way operate in human beings unless the intellective part is a witness and spectator of what they do or experience. On the other hand, the understanding has a set of proper objects (ideas) which cannot be perceived at all by corporeal sense, necessarily enclosed as it is in its own proper particular and material affections. Consequently, feeling which neither perceives nor knows the operations of the understanding cannot make a judgment about them. The understanding however can naturally make a judgment on the actions of feeling, which it knows and perceives.
521. Moreover, the difference between the faculty of sense and the faculty of understanding is the same as that between the faculty of sense appetite, which comes from feeling, and the faculty of intellective appetite, which proceeds from understanding. Just as all that happens in feeling pertains to the intellective part, in addition to many other more noble entities proper only to the intellect (feeling can never make these objects its own), so human beings can tend with their intellective appetite to all those things which, whether feelable or not, can be related to them as good and evil. On the other hand, with their sensitive appetite human beings can incline only to particular, corporeal, feelable things.
522. There is therefore in the intellective part of the human being a higher, dominant principle relative to knowing and to desiring and wishing. Relative to knowing, a principle exists which judges everything that happens in the human being - judges it, that is, as good or bad. Relative to desiring and wishing, there is a principle which desires everything judged good and abhors everything judged evil.
523. The animal feeling-part of the human being is naturally judged by the intellective part. What is good to sense is, when submitted to this judgment, sometimes declared evil; what is bad for sense is sometimes judged good. Similarly, the higher appetite resulting from the judgment often contradicts the lower appetite arising in feeling. In this case it either turns to things which molest feeling or withdraws from things pleasing to feeling.
524. This natural dependence of the animal part on the intellectual part clearly shows that human contentment cannot be found in anything desired by the feeling-part but solely in what the intellective part judges good. Feeling is simply a first tribunal whose decision is always questioned because it can settle nothing relative to human happiness or contentment. The supreme, personal principle, that is, our very self, must finally resolve the case and decide what is good and what is bad if we, as a whole, not just in part, are to call ourselves content or happy.
Notes
(248) Cf. AMS, 859-863.