Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 16

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 16

Esteem in a certain degree, and under certain circ.u.mstances, is respect,--respect, a holy and sacred word which the most subtile or the loosest a.n.a.lysis will never degrade to expressing a sentiment that is related to ourselves, and is applied to actions crowned by fortune.

Take again these two words, these two facts a.n.a.logous to the first two, admiration and indignation. Esteem and contempt are rather judgments; indignation and admiration are sentiments, but sentiments that pertain to intelligence and envelop a judgment.[189]

Admiration is an essentially disinterested sentiment. See whether there is any interest in the world that has the power to give you admiration for any thing or any person. If you were interested, you might feign admiration, but you would not feel it. A tyrant with death in his hand, may constrain you to appear to admire, but not to admire in reality.

Even affection does not determine admiration; whilst a heroic trait, even in an enemy, compels you to admire.

The phenomenon opposed to admiration is indignation. Indignation is no more anger than admiration is desire. Anger is wholly personal.

Indignation is never directly related to us; it may have birth in the midst of circ.u.mstances wherein we are engaged, but the foundation and the dominant character of the phenomenon in itself is to be disinterested. Indignation is in its nature generous. If I am a victim of an injustice, I may feel at once anger and indignation, anger against him that injures me, indignation towards him who is unjust to one of his fellow-men. We may be indignant towards ourselves; we are indignant towards every thing that wounds the sentiment of justice. Indignation covers a judgment, the judgment that he who commits such or such an action, whether against us, or even for us, does an action unworthy, contrary to our dignity, to his own dignity, to human dignity. The injury sustained is not the measure of indignation, as the advantage received is not that of admiration. We felicitate ourselves on possessing or having acquired a useful thing; but we never admire, on that account, either ourselves or the thing that we have just acquired.

So we repel the stone that wounds us, we do not feel indignant towards it.

Admiration elevates and enn.o.bles the soul. The generous parts of human nature are disengaged and exalted in presence of, and as it were in contact with, the image of the good. This is the reason why admiration is already by itself so beneficent, even should it be deceived in its object. Indignation is the result of these same generous parts of the soul, which, wounded by injustice, are highly roused and protest in the name of offended human dignity.

Look at men in action, and you will see them imposing upon themselves great sacrifices in order to conquer the suffrages of their fellows. The empire of opinion is immense,--vanity alone does not explain it; it doubtless also pertains to vanity, but it has deeper and better roots.

We judge that other men are, like us, sensible to good and evil, that they distinguish between virtue and vice, that they are capable of being indignant and admiring, of esteeming and respecting, as well as despising. This power is in us, we have consciousness of it, we know that other men possess it as well as we, and it is this power that frightens us. Opinion is our own consciousness transferred to the public, and there disengaged from all complaisance and armed with an inflexible severity. To the remorse in our own hearts, responds the shame in that second soul which we have made ourselves, and is called public opinion. We must not be astonished at the sweets of popularity.

We are more sure of having done well, when to the testimony of our consciousness we are able to join that of the consciousness of our fellow-men. There is only one thing that can sustain us against opinion, and even place us above it: it is the firm and sure testimony of our consciousness, because, in fine, the public and the whole human race are compelled to judge us according to appearance, whilst we judge ourselves infallibly and by the most certain of all knowledge.

Ridicule is the fear of opinion in small things. The force of ridicule is wholly in the supposition that there is a common taste, a common type of what is proper, that directs men in their judgments, and even in their pleasantries, which in their way are also judgments. Without this supposition, ridicule falls of itself, and pleasantry loses its sting.

But it is immortal, as well as the distinction between good and evil, between the beautiful and the ugly, between what is proper and what is improper.

When we have not succeeded in any measure undertaken for our interest and prosperity, we experience a sentiment of pain that is called regret.

But we do not confound regret with that other sentiment that rises in the soul when we are conscious of having done something morally bad.

This sentiment is also a pain, but of quite a different nature,--it is remorse, repentance. That we have lost in play, for example, is disagreeable to us; but if, in gaining, we have the consciousness of having deceived our adversary, we experience a very different sentiment.

We might prolong and vary these examples. We have said enough to be ent.i.tled to conclude that human language and the sentiments that it expresses are inexplicable, if we do not admit the essential distinction between good and evil, between virtue and crime, crime founded on interest, virtue founded on disinterestedness.

Disturb this distinction, and you disturb human life and entire society.

Permit me to take an extreme, tragic, and terrible example. Here is a man that has just been judged. He has been condemned to death, and is about to be executed--to be deprived of life. And why? Place yourself in the system that does not admit the essential distinction between good and evil, and ponder on what is stupidly atrocious in this act of human justice. What has the condemned done? Evidently a thing indifferent in itself. For if there is no other outward distinction than that of pleasure and pain, I defy any one to qualify any human action, whatever it may be, as criminal, without the most absurd inconsequence. But this thing, indifferent in itself, a certain number of men, called legislators, have declared to be a crime. This purely arbitrary declaration has found no echo in the heart of this man. He has not been able to feel the justice of it, since there is nothing in itself just.

He has therefore done, without remorse, what this declaration arbitrarily interdicted. The court proceeds to prove to him that he has not succeeded, but not that he has done contrary to justice, for there is no justice. I maintain that every condemnation, be it to death, or to any punishment whatever, imperatively supposes, in order to be any thing else than a repression of violence by violence, the four following points:--1st, That there is an essential distinction between good and evil, justice and injustice, and that to this distinction is attached, for every intelligent and free being, the obligation of conforming to good and justice; 2d, That man is an intelligent and free being, capable of comprehending this distinction, and the obligation that accompanies it, and of adhering to it naturally, independently of all convention, and every positive law; capable also of resisting the temptations that bear him towards evil and injustice, and of fulfilling the sacred law of natural justice; 3d, That every act contrary to justice deserves to be repressed by force, and even punished in reparation of the fault committed, and independently too of all law and all convention; 4th, That man naturally recognizes the distinction between the merit and demerit of actions, as he recognizes the distinction between the just and the unjust, and knows that every penalty applied to an unjust act is itself most strictly just.

Such are the foundations of that power of judging and punishing which is entire society. Society has not made those principles for its own use; they are much anterior to it, they are contemporaneous with thought and the soul, and upon these rests society, with its laws and its inst.i.tutions. Laws are legitimate by their relation to these eternal laws. The surest power of inst.i.tutions resides in the respect that these principles bear with them and extend to every thing that partic.i.p.ates in them. Education develops them, it does not create them.

They direct the legislator who makes the law, and the judge who applies it. They are present to the accused brought before the tribunal, they inspire every just sentence, they give it authority in the soul of the condemned, and in that of the spectator, and they consecrate the employment of force necessary for his execution. Take away a single one of these principles, and all human justice is overthrown, no longer is there any thing but a ma.s.s of arbitrary conventions which no one in conscience is bound to respect, which may be violated without remorse, which are sustained only by the display of extreme punishments. The decisions of such a justice are not true judgments, but acts of force, and civil society is only an arena where men contend with each other without duties and rights, without any other object than that of procuring for themselves the greatest possible amount of enjoyment, of procuring it by conquest and preserving it by force or cunning, save throwing over all that the cloak of hypocritical laws.

It is true, such is the aspect under which skepticism makes us consider society and human justice, driving us through despair to revolt and disorder, and bringing us back through despair again to quite another yoke than that of reason and virtue, to that regulated disorder which is called despotism. The spectacle of human things, viewed coolly, and without the spirit of system, is, thank G.o.d, less sombre. Without doubt, society and human justice have still many imperfections which time discovers and corrects; but it may be said, that in general they rest on truth and natural equity. The proof of it is, that society everywhere subsists, and is even developed. Moreover, facts, were they such as the melancholy pen of a Pascal or a Rousseau represent them to be, facts are not all,--before facts is right; and this idea of right alone, if it is real, suffices to overturn an abasing system, and save human dignity.

Now, is the idea of right a chimera? I again appeal to languages, to individual consciousness, to the human race,--is it not true that fact is everywhere distinguished from right, fact which too often, perhaps, but not always, as it is said, is opposed to right; and right that subdues and rules fact, or protests against it? What word is it that restrains most in human societies? Is it not that of right? Look for a language that does not contain it. On all sides, society is bristling with rights. There is even a distinction made between natural right and positive right, between what is legal and what is equitable. It is proclaimed that force should be in the service of right, and not right at the mercy of force. The triumphs of force, wherever we perceive them, either under our eyes, or by the aid of history in bygone centuries, or by favor of universal publicity beyond the ocean, and in foreign continents, rouse indignation in the disinterested spectator or reader.

On the contrary, he who inscribes on his banner the name of right, by that alone interests us; the cause of right, or what we suppose to be the cause of right, is for us the cause of humanity. It is also a fact, and an incontestable fact, that in the eyes of man fact is not every thing, and that the idea of right is a universal idea, graven in shining and ineffaceable characters, if not in the visible world, at least in that of thought and the soul; concerning that is the question; it is also that which in the long run reforms and governs the other.

Individual consciousness, conceived and transferred to the entire species, is called common sense. It is common sense that has made, that sustains, that develops languages, natural and permanent beliefs, society and its fundamental inst.i.tutions. Grammarians have not invented languages, nor legislators societies, nor philosophers general beliefs.

All these things have not been personally done, but by the whole world,--by the genius of humanity.

Common sense is deposited in its works. All languages, and all human inst.i.tutions contain the ideas and the sentiments that we have just called to mind and described, and especially the distinction between good and evil, between justice and injustice, between free will and desire, between duty and interest, between virtue and happiness, with the profoundly rooted belief that happiness is a recompense due to virtue, and that crime in itself deserves to be punished, and calls for the reparation of a just suffering.

These things are attested by the words and actions of men. Such are the sincere and impartial, but somewhat confused, somewhat gross notions of common sense.

Here begins the part of philosophy. It has before it two different routes; it can do one of two things: either accept the notions of common sense, elucidate them, thereby develop and increase them, and, by faithfully expressing them, fortify the natural beliefs of humanity; or, preoccupied with such or such a principle, impose it upon the natural data of common sense, admit those that agree with this principle, artificially bend the others to these, or openly deny them; this is what is called making a system.

Philosophic systems are not philosophy; they try to realize the idea of it, as civil inst.i.tutions try to realize that of justice, as the arts express in their way infinite beauty, as the sciences pursue universal science. Philosophic systems are necessarily very imperfect, otherwise there never would have been two systems in the world. Fortunate are those that go on doing good, that expand in the minds and souls of men, with some innocent errors, the sacred love of the true, the beautiful, and the good! But philosophic systems follow their times much more than they direct them; they receive their spirit from the hands of their age.

Transferred to France towards the close of the regency and under the reign of Louis XV., the philosophy of Locke gave birth there to a celebrated school, which for a long time governed and still subsists among us, protected by ancient habits, but in radical opposition to our new inst.i.tutions and our new wants. Sprung from the bosom of tempests, nourished in the cradle of a revolution, brought up under the bad discipline of the genius of war, the nineteenth century cannot recognize its image and find its instincts in a philosophy born under the influence of the voluptuous refinements of Versailles, admirably fitted for the decrepitude of an arbitrary monarchy, but not for the laborious life of a young liberty surrounded with perils. As for us, after having combated the philosophy of sensation in the metaphysics which it subst.i.tuted for Cartesianism, and in the deplorable aesthetics, now too accredited, under which succ.u.mbed our great national art of the seventeenth century, we do not hesitate to combat it again in the ethics that were its necessary product, the ethics of interest.

The exposition and refutation of these pretended ethics will be the subject of the next lecture.

FOOTNOTES:

[187] See 2d Series, vol. ii., lect. 11 and 12; 4th Series, vol. ii., last pages of _Jacqueline Pascal_, and the _Fragments of the Cartesian Philosophy_, p. 469.

[188] 1st Series, vol. iii., lectures 2 and 3, _Condillac_.

[189] See the Theory of Sentiment, part i., lecture 5.

LECTURE XII.

THE ETHICS OF INTEREST.[190]

Exposition of the doctrine of interest.--What there is of truth in this doctrine.--Its defects. 1st. It confounds liberty and desire, and thereby abolishes liberty. 2d. It cannot explain the fundamental distinction between good and evil. 3d. It cannot explain obligation and duty. 4th. Nor right. 5th. Nor the principle of merit and demerit.--Consequences of the ethics of interest: that they cannot admit a providence, and lead to despotism.

The philosophy of sensation, setting out from a single fact, agreeable or painful sensation, necessarily arrives in ethics at a single principle,--interest. The whole of the system may be explained as follows:

Man is sensible to pleasure and pain: he shuns the one and seeks the other. That is his first instinct, and this instinct will never abandon him. Pleasure may change so far as its object is concerned, and be diversified in a thousand ways: but whatever form it takes,--physical pleasure, intellectual pleasure, moral pleasure, it is always pleasure that man pursues.

The agreeable generalized is the useful; and the greatest possible sum of pleasure, whatever it may be, no longer concentrated within such or such an instant, but distributed over a certain extent of duration, is happiness.[191]

Happiness, like pleasure, is relative to him who experiences it; it is essentially personal. Ourselves, and ourselves alone we love, in loving pleasure and happiness.

Interest is that which prompts us to seek in every thing our pleasure and our happiness.

If happiness is the sole end of life, interest is the sole motive of all our actions.

Man is only sensible to his interest, but he understands it well or ill.

Much art is necessary in order to be happy. We are not ready to give ourselves up to all the pleasures that are offered on the highway of life, without examining whether these pleasures do not conceal many a pain. Present pleasure is not every thing,--it is necessary to take thought for the future; it is necessary to know how to renounce joys that may bring regret, and sacrifice pleasure to happiness, that is to say, to pleasure still, but pleasure more enduring and less intoxicating. The pleasures of the body are not the only ones,--there are other pleasures, those of mind, even those of opinion: the sage tempers them by each other.

The ethics of interest are nothing else than the ethics of perfected pleasure, subst.i.tuting happiness for pleasure, the useful for the agreeable, prudence for pa.s.sion. It admits, like the human race, the words good and evil, virtue and vice, merit and demerit, punishment and reward, but it explains them in its own way. The good is that which in the eyes of reason is conformed to our true interest; evil is that which is contrary to our true interest. Virtue is that wisdom which knows how to resist the enticement of pa.s.sions, discerns what is truly useful, and surely proceeds to happiness. Vice is that aberration of mind and character that sacrifices happiness to pleasures without duration or full of dangers. Merit and demerit, punishment and reward, are the consequences of virtue and vice:--for not knowing how to seek happiness by the road of wisdom, we are punished by not attaining it. The ethics of interest do not pretend to destroy any of the duties consecrated by public opinion; it establishes that all are conformed to our personal interest, and it is thereby that they are duties. To do good to men is the surest means of making them do good to us; and it is also the means of acquiring their esteem, their good will, and their sympathy,--always agreeable, and often useful. Disinterestedness itself has its explanation. Doubtless there is no disinterestedness in the vulgar sense of the word, that is to say, a real sacrifice of self, which is absurd, but there is the sacrifice of present interest to future interest, of gross and sensual pa.s.sion to a n.o.bler and more delicate pleasure.

Sometimes one renders to himself a bad account of the pleasure that he pursues, and in fault of seeing clearly into his own heart, invents that chimera of disinterestedness of which human nature is incapable, which it cannot even comprehend.

It will be conceded that this explanation of the ethics of interest is not overcharged, that it is faithful.

We go further,--we acknowledge that these ethics are an extreme, but, up to a certain point, a legitimate reaction against the excessive rigor of stoical ethics, especially ascetic ethics that smother sensibility instead of regulating it, and, in order to save the soul from pa.s.sions, demands of it a sacrifice of all the pa.s.sions of nature that resembles a suicide.

Man was not made to be a sublime slave, like Epictetus, employed in supporting bad fortune well without trying to surmount it, nor, like the author of the _Imitation_, the angelic inhabitant of a cloister, calling for death as a fortunate deliverance, and antic.i.p.ating it, as far as in him lies, by continual penitence and in mute adoration. The love of pleasure, even the pa.s.sions, have a place among the needs of humanity.

Suppress the pa.s.sions, and it is true there is no more excess; neither is there any mainspring of action,--without winds the vessel no longer proceeds, and soon sinks in the deep. Suppose a being that lacks love of self, the instinct of preservation, the horror of suffering, especially the horror of death, who has neither the love of pleasure nor the love of happiness, in a word, dest.i.tute of all personal interest,--such a being will not long resist the innumerable causes of destruction that surround and besiege him; he will not remain a day.

Never can a single family, nor the least society be formed or maintained. He who has made man has not confided the care of his work to virtue alone, to devotedness and sublime charity,--he has willed that the duration and development of the race and human society should be placed upon simpler and surer foundations; and this is the reason why he has given to man the love of self, the instinct of preservation, the taste of pleasure and happiness, the pa.s.sions that animate life, hope and fear, love, ambition, personal interest, in fine, a powerful, permanent, universal motive that urges us on to continually ameliorate our condition upon the earth.

So we do not contest with the ethics of interest the reality of their principle,--we are convinced that this principle exists, that it has a right to be. The only question that we raise is the following:--The principle of interest is true in itself, but are there not other principles quite as true, quite as real? Man seeks pleasure and happiness, but are there not in him other needs, other sentiments as powerful, as vital? The first and universal principle of human life is the need of the individual to preserve himself; but would this principle suffice to support human life and society entire and as we behold it?

Just as the existence of the body does not hinder that of the soul, and reciprocally, so in the ample bosom of humanity and the profound designs of divine Providence, the principles that differ most do not exclude each other.

The philosophy of sensation continually appeals to experience. We also invoke experience; and it is experience that has given us certain facts mentioned in the preceding lecture, which const.i.tute the primary notions of common sense. We admit the facts that serve as a foundation for the system of interest, and reject the system. The facts are true in their proper bearing,--the system is false in attributing to them an excessive, limitless bearing; and it is false again in denying other facts quite as incontestable. A sound philosophy holds for its primary law to collect all real facts and respect the real differences that also distinguish them. What it pursues before all, is not unity, but truth.[192] Now the ethics of interest mutilate truth,--they choose among facts those that agree with them, and reject all the others, which are precisely the very facts of morality. Exclusive and intolerant, they deny what they do not explain,--they form a whole well united, which, as an artificial work, may have its merit, but is broken to pieces as soon as it comes to encounter human nature with its grand parts.