Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 7
Corresponding evils
574. After the classification of subjective and objective real good, which are the matter of contentment of spirit, I will say a few words about corresponding evils.
Human nature, its active principles and its powers do not all develop equally in every period of our existence - this is clear from what I have said. Just after receiving existence, we take only a few, uncertain steps. Only later, as a result of great experience do we acquire some ability to move; gradually our abilities grow until we are able to deal with the most sublime objects. I called these abilities habits of our powers. It is clear that relative to our contentment certain habits have a value infinitely greater than our mere existence or the merely active principles contained in our existence or the powers in their original potentiality.
575. On the other hand, nature, principles, powers, habits and even acts considered as elements of nature give us only a limited, pleasant feeling; they allow us to enjoy the limited being that we are, that is, as subject. Contrariwise, when we strive for objects different from ourselves, they can be immeasurably large as well as multiple and various.
576. Just as understanding can either direct itself towards infinite being and rest in it (because this being is infinite), or continue to seek vain, self-fabricated objects uninterruptedly (because possible, chimerical, imaginary objects are indefinite in number), so the will loves all that the understanding knows, whether real or imaginary, multiple or single, finite or infinite. Moreover, the power of the will can limitlessly increase our love or hatred for these objects, to the extent that it fixes our gaze on them and makes us see them as good or evil. Delight is now added to love, pain to hatred; both the spiritual delight and spiritual pain are as great as the nobility and greatness of the object they have as their aim. Thus, by virtue of the sublime powers of our understanding and will, we can either increase our pleasure unlimitedly or torture ourselves by increasing our pain.
577. I attributed the origin and amount of subjective good to the degree of our natural, appropriate activity. Similarly, I attribute the origin of our evils to the same source. If our natural, appropriate activity is low, our enjoyment is low; if it is great, our enjoyment or subjective good is also great.(274) Up to this point, there is no evil, only a limitation of good.
Evil therefore consists in an activity, but an activity contrary to that in which good consists. Just as the activity which accompanies a pleasant feeling is our natural, appropriate activity, so the activity in which subjective evil consists and which is accompanied by an unpleasant feeling is contrary to our nature and its laws.(275)
578. The greatest subjective good consists in the greatest, supreme human activity (free activity), used appropriately. Similarly, the greatest subjective evil consists in our greatest, supreme activity used inappropriately. The greatest subjective good is necessarily joined to the greatest objective good, of which it is an effect, and the greatest subjective evil is attached and joined to the greatest objective evil.
If our freedom is joined to unlimited being, the greatest subjective and objective good exist together. If however our freedom excludes from its affections a part of being and is thus in opposition to unlimited being, the greatest subjective evil is present in us because of the enmity and strife between us and infinite being.
When we consider how disadvantaged we are in this battle - we are limited and nothing, while the adversary we challenge is infinite and the All - we see very clearly that this evil contains something infinite.
579. These principles allow us to speak about the greatest evil of which human beings are capable in the same way that we spoke about good. The question, `Is annihilation the greatest evil for a human being?' can now be solved and must be answered as follows.
A being that lacks intellect and will and is therefore incapable of the greatest objective good and evil, can never tend to or desire its own annihilation. To procure this, the being must pass through all evils up to the last; it must destroy every activity except the final, basic activity of existence. This explains why animals cannot commit suicide, and why suicide is not found among savages, who can neither perceive an evil greater than death with their understanding nor be persuaded about it. On the other hand, when human beings who are developed, civilised, perverted and insane accept some evil as greater than death,
| we see around us persons who complain about their own existence. As far as possible, many deprive themselves of existence, and the union of divine and human laws hardly suffices to check this disorder. I ask, (Rousseau despises the false civilisation in which he lived) has a savage in the state of freedom ever been heard to dream of regretting life and committing suicide?(276) |
580. In the order of purely subjective evil, therefore, the greatest evil is the privation of existence. But this is not the case with objective evil.
The infinite has greater value than the finite. Hence the feeling of ourselves, of our own existence, must have less value than the feeling of infinite being, in which we can nevertheless share. An infinite distance must exist between the possession of ourselves and the possession of an infinite entity. Similarly, we have to acknowledge that there must be an intrinsic absolute evil, containing something infinite, in our contradiction of, struggle against and hatred for an infinite being. Such observations recall the force of Christ's words about Judas that `it would have been better for that man if he had never been born.'(277)
Notes
(274) The degree of activity is measured by 1. the extension of the entity occupying our rational activity; 2. the intension of will with which we adhere to the entity. - The first of these two measures is the principal.
(275) This does not contradict what I said elsewhere about the nature of evil, that is, that evil consists in a privation of good. (Cf. Saggio sulle leggi secondo le quali sono distribuiti i beni ed i mali temporali in Opuscoli filosofici, vol. 1, pp. 119 ss.) Privation, in which evil consists, is inherent in every activity contrary to nature, precisely because it consists in the lack of agreement between the activity and the laws of the nature in act.
(276) Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine etc., p. 1. - He admits however that cases of suicide are rare and that the sum of good prevails over that of evil. Rousseau wrote to Voltaire (18th August 1766): `No matter how clever we are at fostering our miseries through fine institutions, we have not been able to perfect ourselves to the point of generally making life burdensome and preferring nothingness to existence. If this were the case, discouragement and despair would have soon taken hold of the majority, and the human race could not have survived long. If however existence is better for us than non-existence, this would be sufficient to justify Providence, even if there were no compensation for any evil we have to suffer, and the evil were as great as you depict it. But in this matter it is difficult to find good faith in human beings, and sound reasoning in philosophers who, when comparing good with evil, always forget the sweet feeling of existence isolated from every other sensation. Others, vainly despising death, calumniate life, just as some women prefer a tattered to a dirty dress.'
The feeling of existence in isolation from every other sensation is certainly a great gift given us by nature, but Rousseau is a long way from forming an accurate concept of this bare feeling isolated from every other sensation. Properly speaking, what he calls the `feeling of existence' is simply consciousness of the feeling, and consciousness at the level found in someone like Rousseau himself. In justification of Providence, we must add that human depravation and the evils caused by it result from our own actions, not from Providence. As we have said, it is not physical evil, but moral evil, that depends on us, which makes existence burdensome. On the other hand, the person determined to take his own life is to a great extent deceived by his imagination, which makes him see death or non-existence as a state of peace rather than a non-state. Nevertheless, human beings can easily acknowledge with their understanding that total moral wickedness includes an evil far worse than their own destruction.
(277) It has been suggested that Jesus did not say that non-existence would have been better for Judas, but `not having been born'. The same figure of speech is used in Job: `Would that I had died before any eye had seen me, and were as though I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave' (Job 10: [18-19]). It seems to me, however, that the Saviour's words can be truthfully understood in the sense of both interpretations.