The thesis of moral abstracticism against the concept of the useful.
If in the course of philosophical history, the theory of utility has sought to cause the disappearance of the other practical term, which is morality, by swallowing it up, we are not to believe that morality has been for its part more modest and discreet and has not in its turn attempted to devour its companion. One exaggeration has been met with another; to utilitarianism has been opposed that error which may be calledmoral abstracticism,by means of which is refused to the concept of utility the place that belongs to it in the organism of the spirit.
Such a refusal (analogous to our analysis of the utilitarian theory) cannot take place, save in three ways: that is, in so far as value is denied to the useful, either aspracticalconcept, or aspositiveconcept, or asphilosophicalconcept.Here too we naturally do not take count of the theses of the materialists or of the intellectualists, which (especially those of the former) have raged in the field of Economy not less than in that of Ethic, giving rise to insane attempts to explain the useful on mechanical principles, or with the contingencies of historical evolution.
The useful as the means or as theoretical fact.
The useful (it has been said) is nothing but themeansto obtain a certain end. For example, if I take a walk every day with a view to keeping myself in good health, the daily walk is the suitable means and is therefore useful; if, on the contrary, I find that it makes me ill, this means that it is not the suitable means and it would be, and I should declare it to be, useless or harmful. Now by the demonstration given above, it is known that means and end are indistinguishable in thepractical,for what is called means is nothing but the actual situation (and the knowledge of it), from which arises the practical act, and to which that act corresponds. Thus it is most possible to separate the means from the end; but in so doing, the consideration of the practical act is abandoned, and we pass to that of its theoretical antecedent; and if the mere theoretical antecedent be called "useful" or "practical" in ordinary speech (rememberingthe practical act, to which it has been or it is presumed that it may be united) then a metaphor is employed, against which there is nothing to be said. Those, then, who define the useful as the means should once for all realize that with such a definition they remove that concept from the circle of the Philosophy of the practical and transport it into Logic, where the relation of means and end is the very same as that of cause and effect, and it again becomes part of the theory of empirical concepts, in which cause and effect are wont to be posited as terms separately conceivable. This has been more or less consciously recognized, when the useful has been defined as thetechnical,for we know that the technical is nothing but knowledge thus made into a metaphor, owing to the relation that it has or is presumed to be capable of having, with an action that has been done or is about to be done.
Technical and hypothetical imperatives.
The theoretical character of the technical has, on the contrary, been obscured, when technical knowledge has received the name ofhypothetical imperatives,distinct and ranged beside thecategorical.The imperative is will, and is therefore always both categoric and imperative:ais willed (categorically), butawould not bewilled if the condition of fact and situationbdid not exist (hypothetically). The merely hypothetical imperative is the knowledge, that remains when abstraction is made of the practical act or of the will; and is no longer an imperative, but a theoretic affirmation. Where effective will is not, imperatives cannot be talked of.
Critique: the useful is a practical fact.
Having made clear that the definition of the useful asmeansimplies the negation of the useful as a practical fact and its reduction to a theoretical category already known, we must exclude the possibility of such a reduction, for in the useful, the practical character, the effectivity of the will, is ineliminable. "It is useful for me to take a walk" means, "It pleases me to take a walk," "I will to do it." It is a question, not of contemplation or of reasoning, but of volitional movement. The knowledge that precedes the utilitarian act is one thing, the act itself is another. The old man has the same knowledge as the young man, he has indeed much more (si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait!), but he does not will what the young man wills: he knows that by traversing so many kilometers he will arrive at a certain definite point; but it is not useful for him to go there, because it is notuseful for him to traverse those kilometers, or to submit to that exertion at the risk of an illness. The utilitarian will is expressed, not in merely hypothetical imperatives, but in those categoric imperatives that are at the same time hypothetical. The general formula is "will!" or "will that you will!" or "be coherent in your willing!" as the individuated forms are those that we are continually repeating to ourselves, "now, to bed!" "now, up you get!" and the like; which, when developed, mean: "go to bed" (if you wish to rest yourself), "get up" (if you wish to work), and so on. The distinction between the cognoscitive and the volitional theses is here evident.
The useful as the egoistic or immoral.
Since then, owing to the unalterably practical character of the utilitarian fact, it was not possible to insist upon its reduction to the technical, and since, on the other hand, it was not desired to recognize it as a practical category side by side with the practical category of morality, they have tried to think of it as something certainly practical, but at the same time of little value, to beware of it, to combat it, to free ourselves from it. "Useful" has in this way become synonymous with wilfulness, with individual caprice, with will more or less perverted, and (looking uponimmorality as the individual I, shut up in itself and rebelling against the universal) withegoism.This theory is supported by certain common modes of speech, in which the moral man is opposed to the man intent upon what is useful to him as an individual, the ethical to the economic life. But it is a question of phrases, true,' perhaps, in a certain sense, but inexact when understood or interpreted as affirmations of a contest between morality and utility.
Critique: the useful is amoral.
We discover at once that the contest is inexistent, by merely thinking of the case already mentioned, of the man in whom the moral conscience is not developed or has been suppressed, or of the case—limit calledinnocence.What is done in innocence responds, no doubt, to individual pleasure, and so to what is useful for the individual, as he feels it in the given circumstances: were this not so, what is done would not be done. But innocence is not immoral on this account. It will beamoral,because it is merely individual volition deprived of the light of the eternal; it will never beimmoral.Thus (to make use of the comparison and analogy of the theoretic activity) the images that the poet creates will be without philosophy, but will not for this reason be anti-philosophical. Because, were thatso, they would have to be partially philosophical, that is to say, to enter into strife with philosophy; but there is no such strife, and, therefore, those images, although philosophically not true, are none the less not philosophically false. Yet they are theoretical acts, in the same way that philosophy is a theoretical act. The philosophical innocence of the poet does not change his intuitive knowledge into bad philosophical knowledge, into a negative of philosophy.—Further, the useful not only is not the negative of morality, but, as we know, is also a fact that unites itself very well with morality, as the word is joined to the thought, making it concrete and palpable, so much so that thought without words is impossible. What honourable man would tolerate being judged disuseful? What moral action would be truly moral, were it not at the same time useful? The good action is good, because it is not bad, that is, it absolutely excludes the bad at the point in which it becomes effective; but certainly it is not so, because disuseful; indeed, in being good, it is also useful, because it absolutely comprehends the useful in itself at the point in which it becomes effective. The union of morality with utility suffices to eliminate the concept of the useful as a negative. Certainly negative and positivedo unite to give rise to becoming and to development; but their union is that of strife, not of concord.
The useful as ethical minimum.
The third way of eliminating the concept of the useful from Philosophy, or from the Philosophy of the practical, is that which makes of it a concept of ethical description, or an empirical and psychological concept designating certain groups of very minute ethical facts, the rudimentary ethical consciousness. Hence the illusion of the existence of volitional acts indifferent in respect to morality. These acts are really indifferentiated for the mind that is examining them, which sometimes does not take the trouble to do so minutely, save when such an examination is seriously undertaken, and then they are always differentiated into good or bad. Thus it generally said that eating and sleeping, playing at cards or at billiards, are things that appertain, not to morality, but to individual utility, and that each one may conduct himself as he wills in respect to them, whereas individual choice is excluded when it is necessary to fulfil one's own obligations of social work or of respecting the life of one's neighbour. But if we observe attentively, we see that also in eating or in sleeping, in playing cards or billiards, one acts morally or immorally, since, for example, it isimmoral to ruin one's health with eating too much, or with sleeping too little, or to corrupt soul and intellect with card-playing and dawdling in billiard-rooms, when one can do something better.
Critique: the useful is premoral.
But the useful is none of all these things; it is not the complex of ethical micro-organisms, in which we discover with the microscope the same facts of life and of death that we observe with the naked eye in macro-organisms. No microscope will ever discern in it the oppositions of moral good and evil, because these oppositions are not really there; there are only those of utilitarian or economic good and evil. For the useful is not the moral minimum, but thepremoral.In this case it is a question, not of approximative, but of rigorous difference; not psychological, but philosophical.
A desperate attempt: the useful as inferior practical conscience. Confirmation of the autonomy of the useful.
Finally, it is necessary to consider the attempt to present the utilitarian conscience as a moral conscience,different and inferiorto another moral conscience placed over it, not as a new mode of eliminating the concept of the useful, by absorbing it in that of morality, but as a confession of the autonomy of that moment of the spirit. It would be moral, because there is no contradiction to be found in it that can cause it to be judged immoral, and if it be so judged, this happensbecause it is looked at from the point of view of the superior conscience, or because the superior conscience is erroneously transported into the inferior. But this has importance precisely because it is not moral, and because the value that it is admitted to possess, far from being morality, is spirituality; that is to say, it constitutes a peculiar spiritual value, different from morality. "Better a will of some sort than no will at all" is a common saying which means that prior to morality, there is another and more elementary spiritual demand. The distinction of the two consciences, then, is philosophical, not one of more or less, a distinction of degrees, but not of empirical degrees, which coincides with our conclusion. Thus, to return to the usual comparison, the poetical figuration is true, and can only be judged false by him who looks upon it from a philosophical point of view, or himself falsifies it by turning it into a bad philosopheme. But the truth of that figuration is not philosophical, and remains purely and simply poetical truth. It will be said that morality is implied in utilitarian volition, because, when the individually useful is posited, the universal, which will dominate and correct it, is promoted, in the same way as it has been said that philosophy is implied in theæsthetic intuition, since by positing the individual imagination is posited the claim of the universal, which surpasses and renders it untrue. But since the æsthetic conscience is distinguished from the philosophical, precisely because that which in the latter isexplicitis onlyimplicitin the former, so, in like manner, the utilitarian conscience is distinguished from the moral conscience, because that morality which becomes explicit and effective in the second, is only implicit or actually inexistent in the first. The difference betweenimplicitandexplicitis another way of enunciating the distinction between the two consciousnesses or practical forms, the autonomy of both being thus recognized.
Economic and ethic as the double degree of the practical.
The respective distinction and autonomy of the two forms, economic and ethic, as we have hitherto been expounding it, and as results from the words "inferior" and "superior" just now used, is that of two degrees, at once distinct and united, such that the first can stand without the second, but the second cannot stand without the first. The moment of distinction lies in that possibility of existence independent of the first; the moment of unity is in the impossibility of independent existence of the second. If the first were wanting, there would be identity; if the second, there would be abstract distinction or separation. For this reason we have insisted upon showing that there are actions without morality, yet which are perfectly economical, whereas moral actions that are not also perfectly useful or economical do not exist. Moralitylives in concrete, in utility, the universal in the individual, the eternal in the contingent. Hence our reason for reducing the theses that denied the distinction between the two practical forms to an exclusive affirmation of the economic form, this latter being as it were the general form, which of itself involves both itself and the other.
Errors arising from conceiving them as coordinated.
Even when both the practical forms, economic and ethic, utility and morality, are admitted, the gravest errors arise from failing to understand the connection of unity-distinction that exists between them, conceiving them as juxtaposed or parallel, and the respective concepts as coordinated.
Disinterested actions. Critique.
In truth, if utility and morality were coordinate concepts, each included as species beneath the general concept of practical activity, the first consequence that could be drawn from this (and it has been drawn) is that morality is conceivable without utility. This has given rise to the absurd concept ofdisinterestedactions, that is, of those moral actions that should hold themselves aloof from any sort of impure contact with utility. But disinterested actions would be foolish actions, that is to say, wilful acts, caprices, non-actions. Every action is and must be interested; indeed,the more profoundly it is interested, so much the better. What interest is stronger and more personal than that which impels the man of science to the search for truth, which is his life? Morality requires that the individual should, in every case, make his individual interest that of the universal; and it reproves those who engage themselves in an insoluble contradiction between the individual interest of the universal and that which is merely individual. But it cannot claim to suppress the interest, that is, itself, in the same way that the volitional act dominates the passions, but cannot eradicate them without eradicating itself. Hence, as the volitional act triumphs over the passions as thesupreme passion,so morality triumphs over interests as thesupreme interest.
Vain polemic conducted with such an assumption against utilitarianism.
The polemic of autonomous Ethic against the heteronomous Ethic of utilitarianism has had a false and fruitless beginning, owing to this fiction of disinterested actions. In the belief of conquering and more than conquering, it has been attempted to show that man accomplishes some actions without any personal interest, whereas on the contrary an easy victory has in this way been prepared for the adversary. Utilitarianism, in fact, has always been able triumphantly to makethe counter-demonstration that there is no action, be it as lofty as you will, that does not answer to a personal end. It is evident that the hero has his personal interest in thepro patria mori,just as the saint, who wishes to direct his soul toward humility, finds his own account in allowing himself to be abused, beaten and splashed with mud ("in this is perfect joy," said Francesco of Assisi to Frate Leone). Correct polemic should not enter upon the useless task of denying this evidence; it should on the contrary admit, as was admitted above, that there is no action which does not answer to an individual desire, since it is the individual that performs it, and the universal is always obliged to avail itself of individuals. But when this point has been conceded and admitted, it will prove, as was proved above, that the useful action can either remain merely personal or progress to the action that is universal-personal, ethical-useful. And the ethical-useful action itself is precisely the new spiritual category that the utilitarian does not see.
Actions morally indifferent, obligatory, supererogatory, etc. Critique.
A second erroneous but unavoidable consequence of the conception of useful and moral as coordinated concepts is that while, according to that theory, there can be ethical actionseconomically disinterested or indifferent, so there can be actions that are useful andmorally indifferent.The indifferent would not be those that are merely economic, and, therefore, neither moral nor immoral, which we have recognized as the necessary precedent of moral actions, reappearing always when a return is made to the state of innocence, or as soon as the moral conscience is abolished or suspended. They would on the contrary be economic actions that should persist as such, that is, as ingenuous and amoral, when the moral consciousness is already kindled, and consequently in the very circle of such a conscientiousness. They are altogether inadmissible when thus conceived, and to have admitted them is equivalent to annulling morality, as the recognition of the right of subjects to rebel at their pleasure would be to annul sovereignty, or a burlesque contract containing the clause that each party should be free not to observe the other clauses agreed upon, at his pleasure. Indifferent actions do not exist, either for economy or for morality, and those to which such a character is generally attributed are, as we know, indifferentiated, not indifferent, and always differentiable when more closely examined. Only he who places the useful and the moral, sideby side with one another, separate and impenetrable, is of necessity led to conceive of useful actions morally indifferent, and as suchlicit or permissible.Hence it also happens that moral actions also seem to beobligatorycompared with the first; and that, in order to obtain equilibrium at the other extremity, ultramoral or more than moral actions, calledmeritorious or supererogatory,are placed side by side with obligatory actions that hold the mean. But morality does not grant leavenot to do,nor prizes fordoing more than was required; it simply imposesdoing,doing always what is morally good, always realizing the universal, in ordinary as in extraordinary life, on the occasions that occur every day, every hour, every minute, as in those that occur every year, every ten years, every century. Nothing is indifferent to economy in its sphere and nothing to morality in its sphere: in it, economic actions with their premoral character do not persist, but only moral actions subsist. Economicity is certainly the concrete form of morality; but it is never an element that possesses a value of its own in the moral life.
Comparison with the relation of art and philosophy.
A comparison with the theoretic activity will serve to make clearer this criticism of thelicitor morally indifferent. Artistic intuitions orexpressions are neither true nor false philosophically, so much so that Philosophy, if it wish to exist, must also become concrete itself, as living speech, æsthetic form, intuition-expression, and place itself as an intuition among intuitions, though it be an intuitionportans mysteria,that is, enclosing in itself the universal. But the appearance of philosophy reacts upon the pure intuitions, or upon the poetic representation of the world, in which existent and inexistent were indistinct; and the world of intuition transforms itself into the world of perceptions, in which those that once were poetic intuitions, are now all of them critical or reflective images penetrated by the concepts, divided into images of existence and images of possibility. In the world of perception or of history, no poetical element can subsist as such; what was a bewitching truth in the field of art, were it introduced into history, would give rise to disharmony and become changed into a repugnant lie, as we see is actually the case in history mingled with inventions and fables. History too assumes artistic form; but it cannot tolerate in its bosom art as an element standing alone. Utilitarian or economic volitions and the moral-economic volitions (universal and historicalperceptions or representations of the practical) proceed in a manner perfectly analogous (intuitions of the practical). Moral indifference belongs to the first, when they are on this side of the moral conscience, but within this conscience they lose the right to innocence, as in history the pure intuitions, when they have become perceptions, lose the privilege that they possessed as pure intuitions. The ethical discrimination of the economic volitions, which takes place through the moral conscience, is then in full correspondence with the historical discrimination of the æsthetic intuitions, which takes place through the logical conscience.
Other erroneous conceptions of modes of action.
We owe to the false conception by coordination, not only the two monstrous little concepts ofdisinterested actionsand of those that are morallyindifferent, licit, or permissive,but others also, which have been deduced by means of a somewhat different casuistic from the same general hypothesis. Indeed, in the preceding case, useful and moral, posited as apart and parallel, were maintained one extraneous to the other and at peace between themselves. But nothing forbade that warlike plans should be attributed to those two entities, just as when two coordinate animal species are posited, we may suppose, either thatthe individuals of each one mind their own affairs and allow the individuals of the other species to live and to prosper in peace, or that the one takes to persecuting the other, sometimes injuring or destroying it and sometimes being by it injured or destroyed. Thus were and are obtained concepts ofmoral anti-economicactions and ofanti-economic moralactions, ofimmoral economicactions, and ofeconomic immoralactions, four concepts which are all four to be rejected. Moral action can never be accomplished at a loss: morality is for the moral man the supreme advantage in the situation in which he finds himself, and it would be erroneous to measure it by comparison with what an individual without morality would do in the same situation, for, as we know, individual and situation are all one, in such a way that a like comparison is impossible. In a similar manner, an anti-economic action can never be moral; at the most it will not even be amoral, or will not even posit the primary and generic condition of morality, that is, it will not be action, but inert contemplation. An immoral action can never be economic, because immorality implies internal disagreement and strife between one volition directed to the universal and another directed to the merelyindividual, hence the result will be practical inconclusion and infecundity, dissatisfaction and remorse; that is to say, just the opposite of utility and economicity. In like manner, an economic action can never be immoral: at the most (when it is merely an economic action), it will be amoral.
Pleasure and the economic activity, happiness and virtue.
The bond of unity and distinction that exists between the concepts of the useful and the moral and the consequent negation of the formula of coordination, help to solve in a definite way the intricate questions relating topleasure and morality, happiness and virtue.
Pleasure, pain and feeling.
First of all, we can here give yet another meaning to the indeterminate category offeelingwith its poles of pleasure and pain, for it is clear that when feeling was distinguished from moral activity and set at variance with it, we had in view nothing but the pure economic activity. And in truth, of all the tendencies included in that concept as sketched out, this of economicity seems on the whole to prevail over the others, so much so that we shall henceforth be disposed to give to the word "feeling" the name of economic activity. Thus it was reasonably maintained, with implied reference to this meaning, that pleasure and pain areproperto feeling andextraneousto theother spiritual forms, and that they only act in the others asconcomitants.For if the theoretical forms give rise to the dialectic of true and false, in so far as the practical spirit can be introduced into them, it is clear that pleasure and pain come to those forms from the practical spirit, with which the theoretic spirit is always in unity. In the practical spirit too, the moral activity divides into pleasure and pain, in so far as it has concrete or economic form; and therefore in so far as it is economic, not in so far as it is moral. Pleasure and pain belong to feeling alone, because they belong to the economic activity alone, which is the practical in its general form, involving of itself all the other forms, practical and theoretic.
Coincidence of duty with pleasure.
When this has been established, pleasure or economic feeling or economic activity as positive cannot be at strife with duty or with the moral activity in its positivity, for the two terms coincide. The divergence existed only when they were conceived, not in unity and distinction, but in coordination. When we speak of a good action accompanied with pain, we make an inexact statement, or better, we make use of a mode of expression that must be understood, not literally, but in its spirit. The good action, as such, always brings with it satisfaction and pleasure, and thepain said to accompany it, either shows that the action is not yet altogether good, because it has not been willed with complete internal accord, or that a new practical problem, still unsolved and therefore painful, lies beyond the pleasurable moral action.
Critique of rigorism or asceticism.
The other false idea, ofrigoristic or asceticEthic, which makes war upon pleasure as such, derives from the plan of coordination, through the already mentioned casuistic of the conflict between the coordinated terms. Indeed, if it be legitimate to combat this or that pleasure, which enters into a contest with the moral act, it is not possible to abolish the category of pleasure, for the reason already given, that in this way the category itself of morality, which has its reality and concreteness in pleasure (in economicity), would be abolished: the concrete and real moral act is also pleasurable. The attempt to abolish pleasure is as insane as would be the wish to speak without words or any other form of expression, preserving thought pure of such sensual contacts, that is to say, producing an inexpressed and inexpressible thought. This last attempt has been made bymysticism,which either does not give thoughts at all, or, contradicting itself, gives them expressed and logical,like those of all other doctrines. Asceticism provides a complete counterpart to this in the practical field, for it might be calledmysticism of the practicalin the same way as the name ofasceticism of the theoreticalwould not be unsuitable to mysticism.
Relation of happiness and virtue.
What has been said of the relation between pleasure and morality, is to be repeated of the other between happiness and virtue, a relation that is identical with the preceding, from which it diners only because expressed by means of empirical concepts of class. Happiness is not virtue, as pleasure is not morality, because there exist the pleasure of the innocent or of the mentally deficient, and the happiness of the child or the brute, who are without moral conscience. But virtue is always happiness, as morality is always pleasure. It will be said that a virtuous man may be unhappy, because he suffers atrocious physical pain or is in financial difficulties, and, therefore, that virtue and happiness do not coincide. But this is a vulgar sophism, because the virtuous man, who should be also happy, must be truly and altogether virtuous; that is to say, he must cure and conquer the ills of the body and of fortune with his energy, if he can, or, if it be impossible to conquer them, he must resign himselfand take them into account and develop his own activity within the limits that they lay down. Every individual, not only the unfortunate individual of the example, has his limits; and everyone can transform his limits into pains by being dissatisfied with them, just as every one can, with resignation, transform his pains into limits and conditions of activity. It will be said that sometimes the evils that assail the virtuous man are not only incurable, but so intolerable as to render all resignation impossible. But he who does not effectively and absolutely resign himself, that is, does not accommodate himself to life, dies; and the occurrence of the death of the individual is neither happiness nor unhappiness: it is a fact or event.
Critique of the subordination of pleasure to morality.
Finally, the theory thatsubordinatespleasure or happiness, utility or economy, to duty, to virtue, to moral activity, is to be rejected. The subordination of the one term to the other is not possible on this side of morality, because only one of the two terms is present; and in like manner it is impossible in the moral circle, because, though the terms are certainly two, they are two in one, not one above and the other below; that is to say, they are distinct terms that become unified. Morality has complete empireover life, and there is not an act of life, be it as small as you will, that morality does not or ought not to regulate. But morality has noabsolute empire over the forms or categories of the spirit,and as it cannot destroy or modify itself, so it cannot destroy or modify the other spiritual forms, which are its necessary support and presupposition.
No empire of morality over the forms of the spirit.
Hence is apparent the remarkable fatuity of those who pretend to regulate morally thefunctionof art, of science, or of economy and professmoralistictheories of art and philosophy and amoralizedeconomic science. The poet, the man of science, the business man, must be as honest as others, but it is not given to them to tear in pieces the nature of poetry, of science and of industry, in the madness of honesty. Indeed, were this done or attempted, and the poet were to introduce extraneous elements into his work of art, through his failure to understand morality, or the philosopher to veil or alter the purity of truth, or the man of business foolishly to bring his own business to ruin, then and only then, would they be dishonest. To substitute thesingle actsof life that appertain to morality, forthe universal forms of the spirit,and to predicate of these what should be predicated only of those,is so evident an absurdity that it could not be committed by anyone accustomed to philosophical distinctions. But what nonsense is so evident that idle babblers and elegant men of letters do not know how to cover with their ratiocinative and æsthetic flowers and to present to society or to the academic world as truth, or at least as a theory worthy of reflection and discussion?
Inexistence of other practical forms and impossibility of subdivision of the two established.
Such, then, are the two forms of the practical activity, and such their relation; and as it is not possible to reduce them to one alone, so it is not possible to multiply them beyond the two, which altogether exhaust the nexus of finite and infinite. Hence, too, we perceive that the economic and also the ethic-economic activity do not each of them give rise to new subdivisions, because other terms of subdivision are not conceivable beyond the duality of finite and infinite. As there are no philosophical and ethical classes, nor categories of expression (rhetoric), nor categories of concepts (formalistic logic), so there are no economic categories and ethical categories beyond those that constitute utility (volition of the individual) and morality (volition of the universal).
Problem of the relations between Philosophy and Science of Economy.
Internal observation, confirming at all points rational necessity, has rendered clear the existence of a special form of practical activity, the utilitarian or economic, and of a correlative Economic or Philosophy of economy. But however irrefutable may seem the demonstration that we have given, yet it will never be altogether satisfactory, while a very important point is left obscure: the relation between ourPhilosophy of economyand theScience of economy.
This is a system of doctrine that takes various names and forms, and is presented in turn as political, national, pure, or mathematical Economy; it is a system of doctrines which, although not without precedents in antiquity, has been gradually formed, especially in recent centuries, and is now in fullest flower. A saying of Hegel is often recorded, not without satisfaction, foreven in his time he praised Economy as "a science that does much honour to thought, because it extracts the laws from a mass of accidentally."[1]
Has it the same object as our Philosophy of economy? If the reply be in the affirmative, how does it ever arrive at concepts altogether different? Or is it an empirical science, and if so, from what source does it derive the rigour and absoluteness by which it is removed from all empiricism and formulates truths of universal character? Two strict sciences with the same object are inconceivable; and yet as it seems, there must here be precisely two: hence the perplexity and disorientation that the affirmation of a Philosophy of economy must and does produce.
Unreality of the laws and concepts of economic science.
If the economic actions of man be considered, in their uncontaminated and undiminished reality, with an eye free from all prejudice, it is never possible to establish even asingle oneof the concepts and laws of economic science. Every individual is different at every moment of his life: he wills always in a new and different way, not comparable with the other modes of his or of others' willing. If A spent seven soldi to buy a loaf of bread yesterday, and to-day he spend the same amountin making the same purchase, the seven soldi of to-day are not for this reason those of yesterday, nor is the bread the same as that of yesterday, nor the want that A satisfies to-day the same as that of yesterday, nor is the effort that his action costs him identical with that of yesterday. If the individual B also spend seven soldi for a loaf of bread, the action of B is different from that of A, as that of the A of to-day was different from that of yesterday. If we lead the economist on to this ground of reality (or rather to the side of this Heraclitean river, in which it is not possible to dip the same hands twice in the same water), he will feel himself impotent, for he will not find any point of support for the edification of any of his theories.—The value of a piece of goods (says a theorem of Economy) depends upon the quantity of it and of all the other goods that are upon the market.—But what does "goods" mean? Bread, for example, or wine? In reality, abstract bread and wine do not exist, but a given piece of bread, a given glass of wine, with a given individual who will give a treasure or nothing in order to eat the one or to drink the other, according to the conditions in which he finds himself.—Any sort of enjoyment, when protracted, decreases and finally becomes extinguished.—That is the lawof Gossen, one of the foundation—stones of economic theory. But what are these enjoyments that are protracted, decrease, and end by becoming extinguished? In reality there exist only actions, which assume different positions at every moment, owing to the continual changing of surrounding reality, in which the volitional individual operates. The difference is qualitative, not quantitative: if the individual A eat the bread that he has bought for seven soldi, when swallowing the second or the tenth or the last mouthful, he has a pleasure, not inferior to that which he had when swallowing the first, but different: the last was not less necessary for him, in its way, than the first; otherwise he would have remained unsatisfied in his normal want, in his habit, or in his caprice.—The economic man seeks the maximum of satisfaction with the least effort.—That is the very principle of Economy, but neither does this principle correspond with reality, most simple and general though it be. The individual A disputes for an-hour, in order to save two soldi in the purchase of an object, for which he has been asked ten lire, thus attaining the maximum satisfaction for himself with the least means that is naturally at his disposal on that occasion. The individual B, making boastof his magnificence, lights his cigarette with a banknote of a hundred lire, thus likewise attaining for himself the greatest satisfaction to which he aspired, with the least means that he possessed, namely, by burning that paper money. But if this be so, we have here a question, not of greatest and least, but of individual ends and of relative means adopted, or (owing to the unity of means and ends already noted), of actions individually different.
Economic Science founded upon empirical concepts, but not empirical or descriptive.
Certainly, it is quite possible to abstract in a greater or less measure from the infinite variety of actions and to construct a series of types or concepts of classes and of empirical laws, thus rendering uniform the formless, within certain limits. Thus is obtained the concept of bread and of the consumption of bread, and of the various portions of bread and of other objects, for which a portion of bread can be exchanged, and so on. In this way are full philosophico-historical reality and the method of logical necessity and of realistic observation of facts abandoned for a feigned reality and for a method of arbitrary choice, which, as we know, has its good reasons for existing in the human spirit, and does great service by the swift recall and easy control of the requisite knowledge. And if Economy consistedin the establishment of a series of laws and examples in the above sense (or when understood in this way), it would join the number of the descriptive disciplines; and in that case there would be no necessity for us to speak of it further, for it would suffice to refer back to what has already been said of the relations of the Philosophy of the practical with practical Description, classes, rules, and casuistic. But economic Science is not descriptive, and is not developed according to the following formula: goods are divided into the classesa, b, c, d, e,etc., and the classais exchanged with the classbin the proportion of I to 3, the classbwith the classcin the proportion of I to 5, etc. In such a formula is always understood theup and down,thefor the most part,andthe very nearly:the classeswith their ups and downsare as stated; the exchanges take placefor the most partin the proportions stated; if things are to-dayvery nearlythus, to-morrow they will be sovery nearly,in a different way.
On the contrary, the propositions of the Science of Economy are rigorous and necessary. "Granted that soils of different degrees of fertility are cultivated, their possessors will all obtain, besides the absolute rent, a differential rent, withthe exception of the possessor of the least fertile soil" (Ricardo's law). "Bad money drives out good" (Gresham's law). Now, it is not conceivable in any case that soils of different fertility, all of them cultivated, should not give a differential rent. It will be said that the State can confiscate the differential rent, or that the possessor, owing to his bad cultivation or to his bad administration, may lose it; but the proposition does not remain less sound on this account. Nor is it possible that, when an unchangeable paper money is in circulation, gold coins should also circulate indifferently and on a par with it, when the total of the money in circulation lowers the value of the monetary unit beneath the metallic value of the better money. A madman who might be in possession of a hoard of gold pieces at the time of the circulation of the declining paper money (which causes poverty) would perhaps give it in exchange for the inferior money; but the wise man will keep it in his safe. The economic proposition expresses the rational necessity, not the madness, which is irrational. Those propositions, like all the others of economic science, are therefore certainly not descriptions, buttheorems.
Their mathematical nature.
The denomination "theorems" makes us thinkat once of the mathematical disciplines, among which alone can economic Science find a place. The propositions of that science being excluded from philosophical, historical, or naturalistic science, there remains nothing that they can be, savemathematical.Yes, they are mathematical, but not pure mathematics, for in that case they would be nothing but arithmetic, algebra, or the calculus, that is, they would belong to the kind of mathematical disciplines calledapplied,because they introduce into the paradigms of the calculus certain data taken from reality, that is to say, taken from without the purely numerical conception. Economic Science, then, is a mathematic applied to the concept of human action and to its sub-species. It does not inquire what human action is; but having posited certain concepts of action, it creates formulæ for the prompt recognition of the necessary connections.