Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 5
The actions carried out by the human spirit in establishing its own contentment
534. I will now summarise the wonderful process by which the human spirit works to establish its own contentment of spirit.
535. 1. Contentment is posited in its final act by a willed judgment with which interiorly we tell ourselves we are satisfied and content. This act is supreme, judges all other acts and makes the final decision about all the good and bad that happens in us.
536. 2. Directly under this intellective act lies the satisfaction of our desires, which is the object or immediate matter of the supreme judgment. Here we must carefully note how contentment would never be achieved without the higher act which judges that our desires have been satisfied. Indeed, without it, properly speaking, we would never know what the satisfaction of our desires really is. Such satisfaction would be a concept involving contradiction; it would be totally isolated and without consciousness of itself.
537. As we have said, desire is an act, pertaining to the intellectual order and formed by means of a judgment which affirms that possession of some particular thing would be good for us. It is clear that our understanding, if it judges that possession of some particular thing is good for us and consequently moves us to want and desire it, must then tell us whether we have obtained it or not. In fact if, unknown to our understanding, we obtained possession of something, our understanding would continue to irk us and maintain our intense desire for the thing. Hence, desire born of a judgment can satisfy us only on condition that another judgment intervenes to tell us that the desire is satisfied: understanding imposes desire on us, understanding must satisfy it. Thus, a full satisfaction of the desires of the soul can only be conceived when a eudaimonological consciousness is formed in us telling us we have obtained the things we desired. This shows that eudaimonological consciousness is a higher judgment than all other judgments producing our desires.
538. 3. The judgments which produce desires in our soul have their own objects or materials subject to them. These objects or materials form a third element inferior to human contentment.
539. What is the nature of the objects of our desires? Are they our own action, formed and elaborated by us by means of another action of our spirit? Do they belong to the order of feelable things or to that of understanding? First, are the objects of our desires themselves our own action? I reply that we cannot exclude from the activity of the human spirit a notable action on the objects of its desires, on the increase and reduction of the objects, and, on their destruction and creation.
Undoubtedly, our spirit, making special use of the help offered by the imagination, creates every day countless beings which do not exist in nature, and counterfeits those that do exist. It embellishes and increases its creatures as it pleases; no term can be placed on it. We cannot deny that these chimerical, false creations become not only the object of affections and desires but often do so to a greater extent than if they were real and true. Using our understanding and imagination, our spirit can clearly elaborate and compose some objects of its desires, and consequently stimulate in itself desires which properly speaking tend to emptiness and nothingness. In this case we see three successive kinds of intellectual actions in the human spirit: with the first we compose the objects; with the second we judge them good and possible, and desire them; with the third we form our eudaimonological consciousness, that is, we judge our own state, telling ourselves we are or are not satisfied with what our desires seek and have or have not yet procured.
540. There is an immense difference, we should note carefully, between the power to produce certain meaningless objects of desire (and consequently, certain desires) and the power to satisfy the desires we have aroused in ourselves. When we use our imagination and create some good together with the desire, we are undoubtedly fully persuaded we have the power to satisfy the desire. But we are mistaken about the power we think we have to satisfy the chimerical desire, just as we are mistaken when we accept the imaginary object as real and true.
The fact is that a desire stimulated in us by a false opinion of good can never procure true satisfaction, either because the object can never be found or, when found, proves deceptive. In the latter case, we discover that the object is not really what we thought; the blindfold falls from our eyes, our illusion is unmasked, and immediately a sad disenchantment enters our soul, accompanied, according to circumstances, by various feelings.
541. Profound meditation on these illusory objects, the products of our practical reason, would be sufficient to enable us to find and classify the different errors into which we fall as moral, social beings. I intend to return to this argument later; here we must continue to list the materials of human contentment.
542. If the only objects of our desires were those we fabricate for ourselves, we would inevitably be unhappy, because our happiness can never come from illusion and deception.
Fortunately, in addition to the objects produced by our willed activity, there are others which are really good, and harmonise with human nature. Their reality is independent of the action of the human will. Nature provides them and, just as we have no power to form them, we have no power to destroy them. Their relationship with human nature, that is, their aptitude for satisfying it, is immutable and independent of us. Our will can only refuse or embrace them. But whether it refuses or accepts them, their aptitude for contenting human nature is the same. If the will accepts them, they produce their effect for our good; if it does not accept, they remain unproductive and are totally lost to us.
543. These observations have a consequence which alone would be sufficient to humble our pride, namely: `Human beings have the power to make themselves unhappy, but not the power to make themselves happy.'
544. Contentment of spirit is not therefore the task of human beings alone. They certainly contribute to it with acts of their understanding and will, which make them conscious of their well-being. They first contribute by determining their practical reason to direct their desires to real rather than imaginary good, and finally by their efforts to actually possess the real good. Nevertheless, they have to seek this real good from the nature of things as from a generous benefactor, and are obliged to accept them as they are from the hands of this provident mother. We must submit to the ontological laws which bind real good to the constitution of the human being, and which must be faithfully obeyed on pain of tearing ourselves apart and becoming desperately unhappy.
In this chapter I have summarised the actions with which the human spirit contributes to its own contentment. In the next, we must discuss the part played by nature in this task of contentment. I will list the kinds of real good given us by the nature of things as objects of our legitimate desires.