Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 26
A description of the various states of unhappiness in which the human spirit often finds itself
756. What are the causes drawing us to such extremes that we place ourselves in a state of unhappiness through bad use of our practical reason? How does it come about that practical reason is led to disturb the functions of the two faculties of thought and abstraction by requiring from the second faculty the real good which only the first can give? There are two causes of this fatal effect: human freedom is certainly one; the other is the passions which enslave us when we consent to them. These passions are stimulated by the general capacity of our human desire.
757. By means of this general capacity, we have unlimited desire. This desire lacks an object, but requires one and wants to be satisfied at all costs. As human desire cries out imperiously for satisfaction, all the passions emerge from the human heart and present themselves one by one. Each says: `I am here to content you; I possess the objects capable of satisfying your longings.’ We hope for what we desire, and we believe what we hope. The urgency and intensity of the general desire for happiness makes us totally confident in the promises of any passion which first presents itself. We immediately begin to experiment with it, seeking the good which we need by abandoning ourselves to a tyrant who then betrays us.
Thus the states of unhappiness, that is, the states of our infinite, discontented capacity, are as numerous as the passions moving the practical reason to commit the error of claiming that an infinite capacity can be filled with finite objects. We must make a short list of such fatal errors.
758. The first attempt to acquire happiness consists in seeing if it exists in bodily gratification. When we set out on this road, we do so to satisfy the spirit, not the body, with sensual enjoyment. Note carefully: we say that sensual enjoyment for the person who seeks happiness in it is not merely bodily enjoyment but a mixture of bodily and spiritual enjoyment. We do not wish to use what we find gratifying; our end is gratification itself; we do not seek the real thing in gratification, but the abstract which we imagine we can find there. It is the rational, personal will which, although it requires satisfaction, cannot be satisfied with anything limited (it can only be satisfied with the unlimited good that corresponds to the general idea of happiness which serve us as a rule) and seeks within bodily enjoyment something infinite which cannot be present, and which therefore we never find there.
759. This explains the unrestrained libido proper to human beings alone, and unknown in animals. Human desire for ever-increasing pleasure is never satisfied; people often prefer to die rather than renounce it. This also explains the infinite longings and perpetual deceits of physical love, as well as all the arts of seduction. Moreover, the very efforts people continually make to content their capacity by means of some inadequate object are themselves the source of arousal relative to the particular pleasure in view: the more individuals feel they enjoy such pleasure, the more they are strengthened in their vain hope of contentment through an increase of the pleasure itself.
No increase, however, can provide this contentment; particular pleasures cannot satisfy general desire, such as intellective desire. Consequently, after experiencing pleasure, people desire still greater pleasure. The capacity, never satisfied, increases indefinitely, and with it the torment and unhappiness that come as people see themselves subjected to long-awaited but perpetually frustrated satisfaction. The resultant self-pity and immense emptiness of heart is followed finally by a state of never-ending rage and inexplicable fury far worse than madness. Other consequences are the conjunction of effeminacy and ferocity, the black moods and lack of love between dissolute fathers, mothers and children, the voluptuous dwellings and luxurious clothes which shelter the hearts of tyrants as they develop their insatiable thirst for blood. People suffering great emptiness of spirit become restless, frenetic, ferocious; the slaughter of millions appears of little importance to the dark hunger of such beasts if they can but succeed in surpassing the achievements of their fellow human beings.
760. Another kind of experience impels individuals to find their happiness in exterior good by means of the idea they form of wealth. Pleasure cannot provide individuals with any opinion about the aggrandisement of their nature; it can only attract them deceitfully to feed on vivid gratification. The contrary is true of the material good which makes up wealth. Because this good has a lasting existence, it can easily produce in individuals some opinion of their own greatness; people who see themselves accumulating many possessions can easily persuade themselves that they have grown in stature.
761. The practical reason can therefore deceive itself in two ways relative to the possession of external things. First, it begins by trusting in its power to find status in the possession of wealth considered as a kind of extension of the person’s own existence. This is an abstract idea, posited in a material, finite object. Then it hopes by means of wealth to obtain any pleasure it wants. Wealth, it seems, can secure for individuals the enjoyment of all their desires, and make them enjoy all pleasure simultaneously through the hope and assurance it gives them.
762. This explains the origins of disgusting, twofold avarice — avarice whose end is money, as though money made human beings great, and avarice which sees in money the means for obtaining comfort and enjoyment. Strangely enough, however, avaricious persons can never be induced to throw away money on pleasure because they are continually afraid of losing it all. They are quite happy at finding themselves in an apparently secure state where they can enjoy pleasure when they want to; this appeals to them more than actually enjoying pleasure. In both cases, these persons spend nothing. In the first case, on principle; in the second, because of the unending deception that makes them defer the enjoyment they love for the sake of always having it within their power.
763. However, because it is really impossible for people to find in wealth either status or complete dominion over enjoyment, it is also impossible for them to find contentment and happiness in accumulating treasure. Human capacity, aggravated by this, grows; the heart attributes lack of fulfilment solely to the small quantity of wealth possessed and acquired. People press on to riches with greater cupidity which, as it increases, feeds like a starving wolf on all their desires. It is no surprise, therefore, to see in misers an increase in their longing and need for wealth as their riches grow. At the sight of what they have attained, their confidence grows that more of it will surely bring them nearer to the ideal status and security they long for. Moreover, this capacity does not increase by arithmetical progression; like every capacity, it increases by geometrical progression, because what people gain in this way, unceasingly intensifies their previous capacity. In other words, this capacity expands and sharpens extremely swiftly in individuals. Finally it produces blind men and women who sell their all — their tranquillity, health, chastity, blood, life itself — for the sake of money.
We should not marvel that the human heart behaves like this; there is greater reason to wonder at the attitude of certain economists crazy enough to maintain that the wealth of nations may be increased by the sale of virtue, and that vice should be encouraged if the State would otherwise lose some of its wealth. In this way, our infinite, undetermined capacity takes the external form of bottomless avarice as compelling and extensive as the capacity which it represents and expresses. The illusion driving people to seek in masses of material riches the abstract idea of status necessary to content their rational will gradually becomes more common and eventually a maxim of State. It is this which has furnished nations with their restless search for gain and self-interest, a clear symptom of their unhappiness.
764. I have already noted that cupidity for artificial wealth(336) is more noticeably intellectual than the result of sensual gratification. The spirit of sense, although more immediately dominant in sensual gratification, also dominates in cupidity. In fact, to say that intelligence has a part in a certain operation does not mean that the spirit of intelligence dominates in it. This spirit prevails in our operations only when we are moved to act by an object of the faculty of thought, that is, by a real, not a chimerical object. As long as we want pleasure or gold not for the objects they actually are but for the objects we imagine them to be, we are deceived by the spirit of sense which persuades us to posit enough affection in a material object to raise it fictitiously to the level of a spiritual object.
765. The third object according to which the infinite capacity of the human heart seeks to determine itself is power. In this case, the undetermined capacity manifests itself under the form of avidity for domination. Domination of course is always a particular, limited object. Practical reason, however, deceiving itself in the same deplorable way as before, seeks in domination two things which are impossible to find there: unlimited power, to which it is led by the abstract idea of power, or security in the possession of goods. This security, also unlimited and therefore general, is not real security, which is fallible and restricted to one good or another. In the first case, power is end, in the second means, but means valued and loved as much as the end.
766. Let us consider how the chimerical fabric created by people’s intellective imagination becomes ever more complicated and extensive. Power loved for its own sake is only a deceitful ploy by which individuals persuade themselves that their real greatness consists in the force they use to subject to themselves many of their fellows. Hence the ambition to apply as much force as possible, and subject to oneself the greatest possible number of human beings. This special capacity, once aroused in people, produces its own growing itch in a way similar to that of pleasure and wealth. The good instinct present in still undepraved nature teaches primitive peoples what the Scythians declared to Alexander: `Take heed that we can neither serve anyone nor want to command anyone.’(337) But the avidity for domination, awakened in the spirit of a people, together with its hopes and successes, whets the appetite of the nation far more effectively than the other two capacities we have described. The history of conquerors shows how soon such a capacity maddens human beings. They even deny humanity for the sake of attributing divine honours to themselves. And these are people in daily danger of suffocating in lust or wine, or dying ingloriously by poison or the sword to the sound of universal mockery.
If immoderate power is not sought for itself but as means to wealth or pleasure, the chimerical edifice rises still higher. What people want is power in general, not power to a particular degree. In other words, they want unlimited power to which they are drawn by the abstract notion of power. They want to realise this abstract notion of power in order to attain and realise yet another abstract, that of wealth. This interminable desire of wealth, abstractly considered, is itself desired as a means of attaining pleasure, yet another chimerical entity. And again, it is not a question of a determined kind of pleasure, as in the case of the other two objects, but of pleasure conceived by the mind and impossible to fully realise.
What a fine, three-storied building! What a triple chain of errors human beings use to entangle themselves! They take their abstract ideas for real beings and subordinate them one to another; they put themselves in a state of perpetual agitation as they try to reach one impossible mirage by means of another, equally impossible, which itself is sought through yet a third impossible mirage. Yet, once the undetermined capacity is self-determined to power considered as an object in itself, everything is sacrificed to this end.
767. If, however, power is considered as a means for attaining and defending wealth, everything is sacrificed to power except wealth itself — strangely enough, even wealth could be sacrificed in an infrequent contradiction by which the power of attaining wealth is more sought after than wealth itself; it is rather like sacrificing pleasure to money for the sake of having in one’s power the ability for enjoying pleasure rather than actual enjoyment. Again, the thirst for wealth which of its own accord sacrifices everything to itself could have pleasure as its aim. In this case, it sacrifices everything except pleasure, an undetermined pleasure because it springs from a general concept. As a result, it always happens that the human spirit’s endeavour to satisfy itself through power proves impossible. Its capacity simply extends itself precipitously and constantly through its very attempts to content itself, and through the increase in the good for which it is searching.
History shows how the most outstanding actions suffer aggravation from the capacity for power as a result of its useless efforts to content itself. Rome, as it became incapable of increasing its conquests in proportion to the growth and pressure of its capacity for dominion, fixed its attention more avidly than ever on arenas soaked in human blood. Rome’s Neros and Caligulas are easily explained if we keep in mind how the capacity of these men, first rendered lustful, blind and immense through the very quantity of their subjects, then had to seek satisfaction in the quality of their subjugation. It felt itself master of human blood, although this brought no contentment but rather incitement to greater fury and a burning, increasing longing for power.
768. The fourth good in which the vague desire for happiness seeks its determination is glory, through which human capacity expresses and clothes itself in a new form, that is, in the desire to make one’s name famous. Glory also can be considered either as end in which human beings place all their happiness, or as a means for attaining power, wealth or pleasure. In addition, love of glory is either totally undetermined or has an object to which it is referred.
769. When people seek happiness in glory without reference to any other object, or without making glory serve some other end, their aim is chimerical and base. Yet we still see virtue defined as `love of glory’.(338) Imaginative young men tend towards this illusion; they burn as they hear this cry. If, in these circumstances, fame is sought for itself, without its being fixed on any object, everything is sacrificed to it. This principle was followed by the arsonist who set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus. Every famous thief justifies himself with this principle; every great confidence trickster makes it his boast.
770. If the desire for fame stops at fame alone, it is not yet glory; fame is glory only when united to praise. The first of these two longings, more abstract and undetermined than the other, is also more dangerous. It equates great crime with great virtue; it is always in search of what is noticeable, not what is just and beneficent. The second has an object — praise — which, however, is neither solid nor real, but as variable as human caprice. Human beings, according to the level of their degradation, sometimes exalt things, sometimes despise them. First, they argue about whose military undertaking is most to be praised; the same people then want to decide who receives glory for first inventing paté de fois gras.
Individuals who seek only praise are indifferent to vice and virtue; it is all the same to them whether they are praised for the quantity of wine they can hold or for their temperance,(339) for their vast estates or for their poverty, for their power of vendetta or their meekness. If what they first seek is no longer praised by people, they magnanimously reject it; like some new Sesostres, if the story is to be believed, they turn back to their native Egypt, satiated beyond measure with the pure glory of conquest, after conquering nations beyond the Ganges and as far north as the Danube.(340)
771. If an individual is not eager for praise as such, but only for the kind that derives from some special source, it remains to be seen if his object is sufficiently determined and real, or whether it remains abstract and chimerical .The glory sought can be referred to four chimerical objects: pleasure, wealth, power and knowledge. Referring it to pleasure produces vanity; to wealth, luxury and sumptuousnessi; to power, ambition; to knowledge, presumption.
772. In contradistinction to animals, only human beings change bodily pleasure into a spiritual object, that is, into a means for contenting the general capacity of their spirit. Vanity, therefore, is proper to human beings alone. It would be impossible to vaunt physical pleasure without drawing from it a corresponding abstract idea and providing it with some kind of subsistence. This explains why women and attractive men find a stimulant to self-love in their power to arouse pleasure, love, desire and hope in others, or at least in their power to generate in others the realisation that such tenderness and emotional tumult can be aroused at will. This would be impossible unless others’ senses were continually flattered and provided with a foretaste of pleasure serving to incite them to investigate the possibility of more intimate enjoyment. Feeling, however, is of such a nature that it tires of its own object; the law governing animal-fibre forces it to slow down and renders it incapable of maintaining the same tension for a lengthy period. Hence the ever-present need to revise thought and effort, the continual, untiring volubility of fashion and of all those niceties which constitute smart society. The speed with which these changes take place offers an infallible rule for measuring the vanity of nations.
The frivolity or superficiality of this cupidity does not detract from its infinity. This explains its constant disquiet; the vain thrust of the person concerned is unable to absorb the abstract of pleasure he has proposed for himself. This capacity, like every other, extends itself ceaselessly, but only to madden its subjects and urge them on towards the unattainable, that is, towards full satisfaction. Totally frivolous society is finally so aggravated that it goes out of its mind and loses all common sense; it falsifies all its ideas by filling them with extremely vain, ridiculous prejudices which form and agitate the intellectual fantasising of smart society.
773. Luxury and sumptuousness, which appear to be loved more for the sake of ostentatious wealth or power (wealth comes to stand for power) than for pleasure, accompany fashion. The passion for sumptuousness is itself as unlimited as other capacities; an individual can eat at a banquet fit for a king but still not be content precisely because in sumptuousness he seeks something other than sumptuousness.
774. The same occurs in the case of ambition, through which people seek the glory proper to power; ambition neither has nor can have limits in the minds of those who desire it. The very lack of limits means that there is never a limit to the acquisition of power.
775. Literary fame is also without any fixed object if it is reduced to a general desire for a name as writer or scholar. Authors who seek fame flatter the vices of the world, and impress upon their work all the corruption that stains the world. They sacrifice to their vanity both religion and virtue, and all that is decent and useful for the world; they corrupt literary and artistic taste, which they drag down with themselves. Yet these base members of society remain discontent; they are more restless, envious and contentious than ever. Their need for fame becomes more urgent, as they come to believe they have attained it.(341)
776. Six kinds of glory can, therefore, be desired: the most extended kind, which consists simply in fame, the most restricted, which consists only in praise, and the four kinds we have listed, which have as their objects pleasure, wealth, power and knowledge. The quest for all these types of glory is marked by illusion and impossibility because they lack a determined object. Their aim is unlimited glory, not a fixed quantity of it.
777. Finally, the glory of virtue may be desired without love of virtue. This is hypocrisy, a seventh kind of glory which must be added to the other six.(342) Each of these kinds of glory can be sought either for itself or as a means of obtaining pleasure, wealth or power. We know that Helvetius sought literary glory for the sake of pleasing women; mercenaries usually seek fame as soldiers for the sake of money; other people desire to be known as courageous and valiant in order to acquire authority and power in society.(343)
778. The fifth and last vain attempt that individuals make in their search for the happiness they have mentally created for themselves is to look for it in knowledge. The undetermined capacity of the human heart, when seeking determination in this way, takes the form of desire for knowledge without any deliberate choice about what it wants to know. This is curiosity.
779. Knowledge can also be desired for itself, or as an instrument for obtaining some other good. Considered per se it presents two kinds of good to individuals: enjoyment, when they actually meditate the truths known, and enrichment of spirit when they reflect that they possess these truths as a kind of treasure kept in a safe place from which it can be taken out at will and admired and enjoyed. In both cases, love of learning can tend towards undetermined and inexhaustible, rather than real, determined information.
However, people may not want to draw on the pleasure that can be theirs from sight of the cognitions they have obtained, or from consciousness of possessing them; instead, they may want to turn to the unlimited pleasure that will fully satisfy the happiness they aim to find in knowledge. In this case, they open within themselves a new capacity that will never be fulfilled. Meditation on already acquired cognitions, and the effort to acquire new cognitions, will have neither term nor order. Literary personalities grow immeasurably cranky and irritable as a result; their unhealthy dens, where individuals grow lined and old, reverberate with contempt for their fellow-workers; together, they come to deny even common sense.
780. The longing for knowledge becomes insatiable and a source of increasing unhappiness, whether the aim is pleasure in general or the accumulation of spiritual riches. The same is true if, through knowledge, we seek physical pleasure, wealth, power or glory as a result of conceiving these things ideally, that is, without limit. If the end has no determined limit, the means used to achieve it has no limit either; whatever its increase, the means will never attain a fitting, sufficient measure.
Notes
(336) Aristotle's observation, that avarice properly speaking entered the world with the invention of money, seems to be both true and philosophical. He continues: `Wealth dependent on such a method of gain is infinite. Every art seeks its end without limit; only the means employed are limited as a result of the end. Thus, this art of making money has no term; wealth like this, and such a method of achieving it, is itself the end' (Politics, bk. 1, c. 6). — The moral effect of the invention and use of money had already been seen before Aristotle by Lycurgus, who had forbidden the use of gold and silver coinage.
(337) Quint. Curt., bk. 7.
(338) Alfieri, Del Principe e delle Lettere.
(339) As a young man, Cyrus wrote to the Spartans encouraging them to help him deprive his brother Artaxerxes of the throne. Amongst his other reasons, he affirmed that he could drink more wine and hold it better than his brother.
(340) Herodotus, bk. 1, and Diog. Sic., bk. 1.
(341) Rousseau, speaking about literary vanity, says: `Every artist wants applause; the praise of his contemporaries is the most precious part of his recompense. So what does he do to obtain it if he has the disadvantage of being born amongst people and at times when fashionable learning has made frivolous youth the standard for smart society? Or if people have sacrificed their taste to the tyrants who oppress their freedom? Or if one of the two sexes, able to approve only what is proportioned to the pusillanimity of the other, neglects noble pieces of dramatic poetry and rejects prodigious harmonies? He will lower his genius to the level of his age and prefer to compose common works admired during his own time rather than wonders to be admired only after his death. Arouet (Voltaire), you are famous! Tell us how you sacrificed virile, strong beauty to our false delicacy, and how your spirit of gallantry, so fertile in little things, has deprived you of what is great!' (Discours à l'Académie de Dijon). — The person who seeks glory longs for immediate, instantaneous glory to the extent that he is dominated by the spirit of sense. In such circumstances he has less strength of soul to appreciate delayed, but lasting glory. As we said, space and time vanish in face of the spirit of sense.
(342) The glory of false virtue is reduced to one of these six kinds. Virtue is false when made to consist in the art of acquiring one of the four types of good we have enumerated.
(343) Desiring greater glory than one merits is an injustice pertaining to the cupidity which wants glory for its own sake without reference to some other end.