Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 12
The capacity of human desire
634. The dispositions of the spirit permitting or repudiating contentment depend on the level of the capacity of human desire. I must explain what I mean by `capacity'. Human powers, at first indistinct and at rest in the soul, are later actuated by means of the acts in which they issue. This actuation is directly proportionate to the level of development of our potency, and constitutes the quantity of efficacious human activity. These principles can be fittingly applied to the faculty of desire.
635. Desire in the human being is infinite. Initially however it is in a state of pure potency, and provides us with no vexatious stimulus. I certainly think that the human spirit, from its very first moments, is under some sort of tension, but a tension compressed, as it were, on all sides into immobility; lacking cognition of objects, the spirit has no way of expressing itself. Desire, under tension but compressed, constitutes the tranquillity of the first moments of life. This tension is a natural state of human activity, and no natural state causes disturbance. But desire encounters determined objects in both external stimuli and intellective perception. These objects constitute its sphere; they determine the quantity of its efficacious activity, which I call the `capacity' of the human spirit.
636. The capacity of the human spirit therefore is the faculty of desire in so far as this faculty has passed from the state of pure potency to the state of efficacious activity. In this state, desire is not quiescent but continually provokes and prompts us to be satisfied; when we are not satisfied, it troubles us relentlessly. Only when the capacity of the human spirit produces these effects in the spirit does ordinary speech call it `desire'.
637. We must also distinguish the capacity of the spirit from pure sensuous instinct. The first stage of human development comprises animal actions; at this stage only sensuous instinct, not desire, is active. There is pleasure and pain of body but not of spirit; inclination, irritation and needs are also present. None of this however exceeds the sphere of animality. Sense-affections and modifications later become the objects and matter of human desire but themselves never constitute this desire. Desire is a willed activity, and will presupposes a certain development of intelligence; in a word, the human being must know in order to be able to desire and will.(287)
638. Not every act of the will is involved in the capacity we are discussing. Some acts are conditioned, others, absolute. If, in the case of the former, the condition is or is known to be impossible, the acts are suitably called `wishful thinking'. If, however, the will is directed to a real, obtainable good, they are called `volitions'. Hence not all the objects conceived by the intellect as good are willed in such a way that one of the habitual desires which constitute human capacity arises in us. The intellect can judge two objects as good but see them as incompatible, so that the acquisition of one excludes the acquisition of the other. The will naturally prefers the one it loves more and abandons the other. It forms an absolute act, a complete volition, relative to the object it loves more, but only a mere wish relative to the other. In this case, its act depends on an impossible condition, namely, the condition that it does not will what in practice the will judges to be the best thing. Capacity therefore is formed by absolute volitions which tend to the objects made prevalent among incompatibles by our practical judgment.
639. If corporeal feeling prevails in us, we desire its objects and they become part of our capacity. If the stronger principle of intelligence dominates, the pleasure of the senses ceases to be part of our capacity whenever such pleasure contradicts a spiritual good, although our physical instinct longs for it as before. The pleasure, despite its being valued as good by the intelligence, is not desired because it has ceased to be the aim of the prevailing act of the will, the personal act: the person of the human being no longer wills it.(288) Hence, we should not be surprised if the same object is seen to be worthy of human hatred and love, fear and hope. Death, so feared by the sybarite that the word itself provokes death, becomes an object of triumph keenly sought by the Roman who sacrifices himself for the fatherland; extravagance, Lucullus' one desire, would have been intolerable in the eyes of a Curius or Cato.
Notes
(287) Cf. c. 2.
(288) Cf. c. 3.