Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 25
Continuation The different states of unhappiness in the human spirit are reduced to a single formula
749. Some acts of the intelligence depend upon the free will of human beings. All human actions take their origin from this kind of intellective acts; we have called the power that presides over them practical reason.(333) Describing the mistakes of practical reason, or classifying its errors relative to good and evil, is the same as describing and classifying the waywardness of the human will. By doing this, we go to the very root of the matter and, as it were, surprise this waywardness in the very act by which it deviates from the right path.
750. Practical reason dominates the faculties of thought and abstraction, and makes both serve its own purposes. If practical reason uses the faculty of thought and the faculty of abstraction according to their natural functions, the two faculties act in agreement to enlighten the progress of human beings; individuals do what is right, and reach a state of contentment and happiness. However, if practical reason claims from the faculty of abstraction more than the latter can give (by requiring from it that which only the faculty of thought can give), it confuses the natural objects of these two powers, and produces error in the understanding, disorder in the affections and unhappiness in life.
751. All this needs clarification because it is only from the abuse of these two faculties by practical reason, which confuses their functions, that a general formula can be drawn up to express all the different states of unhappiness to which the human spirit is subject. These states of unhappiness, because they are produced by the individual on his own behalf, all begin, as we said, from a willed error in the intellect. In other words, they begin from an error which is the efficient cause of affections and external operations. This error can only be explained in human beings if we posit a faculty proper to error. This, in turn, is a function of the practical reason itself, a more general power.
752. Many who deal only superficially with the problem believe it is easy to explain how we make errors in our judgments. This is not the case; the actual fact is very difficult to explain. They also believe that the faculty which enables us to know what is true also enables us to take what is false as true. If we go to the heart of the problem, however, we shall see that this is not so. Truth is independent of us; it is easy, therefore, to conceive a faculty that receives what is true. But what is of itself false is nothing, and does not exist independently of our judgments. We shall not succeed in explaining error, therefore, if we are satisfied with the existence of a faculty that simply receives it in itself; we also require a faculty that produces and creates it.(334)
753. How does this faculty of error come to disturb the functions of the two faculties of thought and abstraction, as we have called them? The natural function of the faculty of thought is that of constructing ends for our actions; these ends can only consist in the acquisition of real good. The natural function of the faculty of abstraction is that of providing human beings with rules that serve as means suitable for attaining those ends; each of these rules is an abstraction.(335)
754. In the state of Christian humanity, in which this capacity touches its final term of development, people want to find the highest good; they are not content with less. The abstract idea corresponding to such a good is that of happiness; its characteristics are absoluteness and infinity.
If, in searching for this good, we pause before some object which does not possess the two characteristics we have indicated, we can persuade ourselves that the object does have those characteristics. The power which achieves this is practical reason, the function of error, that is, intellective creativity. In persuading ourselves internally that we must find the happiness we seek in this given good, we put in this real object something that it does not contain; we arbitrarily place in it the characteristics of good, characteristics which we know abstractly. Thus we create a chimera, a vain idol, for ourselves. In other words, we abuse the faculty of abstraction by attempting to make real for ourselves the characteristics of absolute good, characteristics which this faculty submits to our mind as ideal rules and nothing more. In making the characteristics real by means of this kind of intellective make-belief, we see them where we want to see them, although they are not in fact present. We place them in the objects of our passion, which then differ in our spirit from what they actually are.
755. This internal operation of ours has changed what is abstract into what is real, and confused the functions of our two faculties; it is the simplest, most universal formula of all errors made by our practical reason about good. These errors are the foundation of an equivalent number of states of unhappiness in the human being. I repeat, our capacity, which requires a real object, will always be discontent with a self-fabricated chimera for which we cannot provide true, real subsistence; and our discontented capacity will always remain unhappy.
Notes
(333) Cf. PE, 114–181. It is a misnomer, and the source of many errors in moral disciplines, to call moral reason, practical reason. We have shown the immense difference between practical and moral reason in PE, 182–190. — Signor Baroli, in his vast work Diritto naturale e pubblico, again follows German authors when he says: `Practical reason is the fount of law.' I believe, on the contrary, that we ought to say that moral reason is the fount of laws. Practical reason is the fount of the actions with which we either fulfil or fail to fulfil whatever laws prescribe. The intrinsic value of the expression, practical reason, is the same as that of operative reason.
(334) CE, 1245–1362.
(335) It will help us here if we clarify by means of examples the different functions which we attribute to the faculties of thought and abstraction. If I want some remedy for a high fever, and the doctor prescribes sulphate of quinine, I can find the medicine, although I have never seen the substance, by using the abstract ideas of its physical characteristics. If, on the other hand, the doctor, instead of describing these characteristics, simply tells me to ask the chemist for it, I have acquired from my conversation with the doctor an abstract cognition that can be reduced to the following proposition: `that substance normally called sulphate of quinine, which chemists sell under this name'. The ideas contained in this proposition are only relationships, or negative information about the sulphate itself, which help me to find it. It is easy to see how each abstract presents our spirit with a rule enabling us to find objects corresponding to it in the faculty of thought. The abstract idea of pleasure, for example, leads us to know pleasurable objects; the idea of uprightness what is upright; the idea of beauty what is beautiful, and so on for every other abstraction.