Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 14
Errors of the sensists in rejecting the different degrees of capacity and contentment
641. Melchiorre Gioia, in his Prospetto delle scienze economiche,(289) defends the benefit of luxury goods in making human beings happy. As proof he lays down the principle that `the need to feel can be regarded as a constant quantity.' From this he deduces that the need to feel is calmed and satisfied in proportion to the pleasure indulged in. This proposition clearly contradicts daily experience, which continually offers examples of people in whom the desire for pleasure is stimulated by pleasure; the more we abandon ourselves to the desire, the more it increases.
642. Even if our discussion were restricted solely to physical feeling, we could easily show how such feeling is subject to disorders caused by the abuse of pleasure, which often renders physical feeling voracious and insatiably greedy. Each of the senses of an animal, beginning with taste, may go wrong even to the point of causing the animal's death, because of the deception caused by the vivacity and precipitation with which the instinct, produced by the sense, acts. The American Indians, who as a people drank themselves to death, are only one of the innumerable daily cases that demonstrate how contentment is impossible for any branch whatever of uncontrolled physical feeling.(290)
643. What the sensists cannot understand or accept is the distinction between physical feeling and human capacity. They systematically reduce all human powers to corporeal feeling and so cannot possibly form a correct concept of human desire, which does not stem from feeling but from understanding. Because they consider desire as part of the sensuous instinct alone, they are incapable of grasping the tremendous extension attainable by human capacity. The sensuous instinct can indeed be excited and become ravenous to the point of rage but it does not extend even to the tiniest part of the extension of human capacity.
644. Human capacity, we said, extends to all the real or imaginary objects that the understanding can conceive as good. But this good is infinite. Human capacity therefore can increase ad infinitum, and its various extensions can be infinite in number. Sensists forget entirely to observe and evaluate these wonderful phenomena of the human spirit. Their immense poverty of thought leads them to a facile belief that `the need to feel is a constant quantity.'
645. Philosophers as short-sighted as this, and equipped with such inexact observations, cannot form an accurate concept of contentment. For them, only the need of physical sensations, not the capacity of human desire, exists; they accept only actual physical pleasure which necessarily brings with it satisfaction of the need to feel. Consequently they are incapable of conceiving the state of contentment that arises when some capacity is satisfied. But even if the need of physical feeling were completely satisfied, we could still be very unhappy. Many people, endowed superabundantly with all the means necessary for satisfying every physical yearning, acknowledge their misery by taking their own lives.
646. We must conclude therefore:
1. The extensions of human capacity are infinite, because capacity can vary in extension according to the number of willed objects we crave and want, and according to the quality and nature of the objects which can at times have a finite or infinite value.
2. A different contentment corresponds to each extension of capacity. When all our capacity, small or great, is content, our contentment is complete. But the greater our capacity, the richer our contentment in internal delight. The number of our possible ways of contentment are therefore infinite and, although differing in the abundance of good they generate in the human spirit, are all states in which human desire has found peace.
3. When our capacity lacks complete satisfaction, it constitutes a state of human unhappiness; states of unhappiness are as many as the capacities themselves, that is, they too are infinite.
4. Finally, there are other states between the state of unhappiness and that of contentment. In these the spirit has a capacity which is neither entirely satisfied nor entirely devoid of satisfaction. This state varies according to the proportion between the satisfied and unsatisfied parts of our capacity. It is a mixture of pleasure and pain because the human being rejoices at the point where his human capacity is full, but suffers where it is absent.
Notes
(289) Cf. bk. 2, c. 1, Sui Consumi.
(290) I have discussed the deviation of the physical instinct in AMS, 401-415, 669-682, 687-688. - The law for an animal in a healthy state is: `An animal is never driven by instinct to obtain an actual pleasure harmful to its nature.' In a healthy animal this harm is felt beforehand and avoided by abstinence from what are otherwise pleasant actions and objects.