Usefulness of rules.
Of rules it can be said that they do not possess absolute value. This is to be found written at the beginning of one of the best books of rules:Peu de maximes sont vraies à tous égards(Vauvenargues), and he might have said, "no maxim"; for if it were ever possible to produce one that was absolutely true, by that alone would it be demonstrated not to be a true maxim. But criticism prevails against the distortion of empirical rules into philosophical principles, or against the confusion between, the psychological and the speculative methods, to which attention has already been drawn. If this distortion be not committed, then rules are altogether innocuous. Not only are they innocuous, they are indispensable. Each of us is constantly making them for use in his own life. To live without rules would be impossible. Certainly, the man of action makes no practical rule, nor does he indicate how we should will and act in definite circumstances, nor does thepoet make any rule of Poetic. Guicciardini himself, whom we have just quoted, and who formulated stupendous maxims, warns us: "These memories are rules that can be written down in books; but special cases, which, since they have a different cause, ask a different treatment, can ill be written downelsewhere than in the book of discretion." Action depends upon the quickness of the eye, upon the perception of the situation historically given, which has never occurred before, and never will occur again, precisely identical. But it is useful to possess these types of actions to encourage and of actions to avoid, in order to sharpen the attention and to find one's way in the world of action, to facilitate and to discipline the examination of the concrete fact. If, therefore, individual rules are more or less transitory, the formation of rules is immortal.
The literature of rules and its apparent decadence.
The condition of literature in recent times would seem to be in disagreement with this affirmation, since as a fact there is a great falling off in the appearance of books of rules, compared with the enormous mass that remains in our libraries as an inheritance of the past. At one time rules of conduct were compiled for everything, not only for the moral life, inthe multiplication of treatises relating to vice and virtue, to merits and to sins, to things good and evil, to duties and to rights, dividing these and entering into minutiae, and again, summaries, catechisms, and various "decalogues," relating to every part of life. The literature of the Cinquecento gives rules even for the procuress and the courtesan, in most elegant little books, which bear the names of Piccolomini and of Aretino. In this same century, too, Ignatius of Loyola formulated rules for "tying up" the will, and for the reduction of the docile individualperinde ac cadaver,for the ends of "sanctity." We must further remark that all rules, including those on poetry and the arts, have at bottom a practical—character. That is to say, they are directed to the will, if only as intermediary. Thus it is necessary to add to the great mass of practical rules the unnumbered and innumerable treatises of Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry of the figurative arts, of music, of dancing, and so on. But it is a fact that there are now hardly any treatises containing rules, either for morality, politics, or for the arts. Has the world by chance become learned on the subject, through inherited aptitude, or rather has the inutility of rules been discovered?
Neither the one nor the other. The rules still live in books and treatises; they have only changed their literary form. In literature they have reabsorbed that imperative which they used at first to display and to boast of, not only mentally but literally. That has been made possible by the already established convertibility of rules into psychological classes. Hence in modern times the literary form of the psychological observation is preferred to that of rules. This was indeed redundant, pedantic, and at the same time ingenuous, as for instance in the Italian Seicento. It is difficult to restrain a smile when reading the many books on what was called thereason of State,elaborated by the Italians of that day and imitated by foreigners, especially Spaniards and Germans. Thosearcana imperii,those "secret strokes," those impostures, mysteriously inculcated on the printed page, are a true and real æsthetic contradiction. The eighteenth century therefore began to give up this form of treatise, and as it happens that men are accustomed to attribute to moral virtue that which is necessity or virtue of another kind, the writers of that century boasted of the moral progress which had set them free from the pernicious and immodest maxims of the "reason of State."
It is very amusing to assist at the acts of repulsion and of exorcism, which a man like the Abbé Galiani believes himself obliged to make in his treatiseDei doveri dei principi neutrali(1782). When, having amply discussed this matter from the point of view of morality, he goes on to discuss it from the point of view of politics and of the reason of State, he despatches it in a few pages, abhorring, as he says, that "insidious and wicked science" which formed "the delight, first of Italian and then of almost all European minds of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries." He protests at every step that he is "tired of repeating and of developing teachings of cunning and wickedness." But what the Abbot Galiani really abhorred was the robed scholastic treatment of a matter that he who was termedMachiavellinoby his French friends, and declared that he did not admit in politics anything butle machiavélisme pur, sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute son âpreté,[3]handled with very different ability and elegance in his conversations in Parisiansalonsand in his witty letters to Madame d'Épinay. The rules of the eighteenth century are to be sought in the speeches, essays, political opuscules, tragedies,plays dealing with the life of citizens, fiction, history, and books of memoirs. If Aretino and Piccolomini provided for the necessities of the respectable courtesans and procuresses of the Cinquecento, in the Settecento, Giacomo Casanova constructed the type of the perfect adventurer. He began with the rules to be followed as a system of life, these laisser aller au gré du vent qui pousse,and passed to those that were more special and yet fundamental, such as that one should have no scruplesde tromper des étourdis, des fripons et des sots,because theydéfient l'espritandon venge l'esprit quand on trompe un sot.There should be still less scruple in deception in affairs of love, for,pour ce qui regarde les femmes, ce sont des tromperies réciproques, qu'on ne met pas en ligne de compte; car, quand l'amour s'en mêle, on est ordinairement dupe de part et d'autre.[4]Let us leave to the reader to investigate, if he please, the rules of life that are concealed beneath the most modern forms of literature; these are a continuous, if not always beneficent, guide for daily life.
Relation between the arts (collections of rules) and philosophical doctrines.
Another circumstance that has led to the belief in the disappearance of books of rules is the observation that from those books dealing withthe so-calledarts,there has come to be a treatment of the philosophy of their subject-matter, in which those treatises have been dissolved. Thus from Poetics and Rhetorics has come Æsthetic, from Grammatic the Philosophy of language, from the Art of teaching and of reasoning Logic and Gnoseology, from the historical Art, Historic, from the Arts of economic government, the Science of Economy, from the treatises on Natural Law, the Philosophy of Law.
When such philosophies, then, had appeared, treatises upon the Arts seemed to have become superfluous, and to this is attributed the cause of their diminution or disappearance. But although it be impossible not to recognize the historical process above described from books on the arts to books of systems, it is necessary to be careful to interpret it exactly and not to confuse it with a passing from empiria to philosophy. Thus it will be seen that the part absorbed and dissolved in philosophy has been precisely those philosophical attempts that were mingled with such collections of rules and precepts. For it was very natural that the writers who put them together and had ideas as to what should be done and what avoided, were often led to investigate the principles from which sprung the particularrules. Believing that they were strengthening, they really came to surpass them, that is, they passed unwittingly from one form of treatment to another, from Psychology to Philosophy. But not even here has empiricism been refined into philosophy (a refinement which, strictly speaking, is impossible), but a more perfect philosophy has been substituted for one less perfect. The dissolution, then, has not been of the rules, but of that imperfect philosophy, a chemical process which has left the rules in what they possess of original as residuum. Hence their persistence, and indeed the impossibility that they should not persist, side by side with the most pure and perfect of philosophies.
Casuistic: its nature and utility.
Casuistichas had the same fate as the rules, and was also at one time responsible for a very copious literary production. Now it is cultivated as literature only by a few Jesuits, who carry on the glories of Escobar and of Sanchez, read only by priests preparing themselves for the post of confessor, whose studies are based for the most part upon old books (such as theTheologia moralisof the Neapolitan Sant' Alfonso de' Liguori). At one time Casuistic was not confined only to profane or theological morality, to thecasus conscientiae.There were also books ofcasuistry composed for all aspects of life, for politics, for the life of the courtier ("the Wise Man at Court"), for the art of love. When the literary form of rules fell into discredit, that of Casuistic fell with it. But this does not mean that it is dead; it lives and will live as long as rules live. For Casuistic is nothing but the process of reasoning by which rules are made always more precise, passing from more general cases to those more particular, so that no one will ever be able to do without them.—If we take for rule of life this maxim: to avoid scientific polemics, because they constitute a waste of time, adding little to the progress of knowledge; in what way must we behave if a polemic be such that it enables us to gain on the one hand the time it makes us lose on the other? Shall we maintain the general rule, or shall we waive it on this occasion, if for no other reason than to give variety to our occupations? And how shall we behave if not only we retrieve the time lost but avoid losing more time in the future? Shall we wish to enter upon the polemic at once? But if our future be looked upon as uncertain, if we be far advanced in years or in bad health, will it not be better to renounce the uncertain gain of the future for the certain gain of the present?—This is a verysimple example of Casuistic, which a critic and writer (let us suppose that he is the writer of these pages) is obliged to propose to himself and to solve. Naturally, no Casuistic will ever furnish the concrete solution (which is the only one that counts), since, as has been said, no rule can ever furnish it. Rules and casuistry do not reach the individualityomnimodo determinata,which is the historical situation; yet if Casuistic aid my action, this will always differ from that, as concrete from abstract; or better, my action will always truly possess the form, the definiteness that abstract casuistry cannot possess. Woe to practical men who rely upon collections of maxims and casuistical reasonings, and woe to those who rely upon them. Those who argue at length upon practical matters and draw subtle distinctions, are to be avoided in the world of affairs and in the world of action. If they have not yet provoked some disaster, they are on the road to doing so now. This, at least, is a good rule; like the supreme rule (which is not a rule but philosophical truth), namely, that we must abandon rules, that is, face the individual case, which, as such, is always irregular.
Jurisprudence as casuistry.
But if a further proof be wanted of the necessity and perpetuity of maxims and of casuistry,observe how these also persist in literary form, as laws, where this form is not eliminable.Laws,as we have seen, are not simple rules, but are based uponformulæ of rules,and must of necessity make explicit in them decisions as to doing and not doing. Jurisprudence is the Casuistic of law, or all the labour of so-called interpretation, which is at bottom the excogitation of new rules. All know that not only is Jurisprudence not of itself legislative, but that it cannot even determine the volitional act of the Statesman, nor the sentence, or decision upon the particular case, a decision which the judge creates upon each occasion. But no one would seriously think of suppressing the work and the function of thosecasuists,or judicial experts, a function which, since it has always existed and continues to exist, cannot but answer to a social need. It is possible to predict a form of social life, less complicated and weighty, in which that function would have less scope, but whatever be the case as regards this prediction, the casuistry of judicial experts will continue so long as there are laws and rules, that is to say, always.
[1]Ricordi politici e civili,n. xliv. (inOpere inedite(2), Firenze, 1857; p. 97).
[1]Ricordi politici e civili,n. xliv. (inOpere inedite(2), Firenze, 1857; p. 97).
[2]Scritti inediti,ed. Del Giudice, Napoli, 1862, p. 12.
[2]Scritti inediti,ed. Del Giudice, Napoli, 1862, p. 12.
[3]Letter to the d'Épinay, 5th September 1772.
[3]Letter to the d'Épinay, 5th September 1772.
[4]Mémoires,ed. Paris, Gamier, s.a., i pp. 3-4.
[4]Mémoires,ed. Paris, Gamier, s.a., i pp. 3-4.
In demonstrating the legitimacy and necessity of practical description and of its derivatives, Regolistic and Casuistic, we have not fulfilled, as it were, our whole knightly duty, which binds us to that discipline, which we have been obliged to maltreat so exceedingly, and shall further maltreat, when it has been or shall be presented as a philosophical method. It is now necessary to defend its existence against the invasion of philosophy, or rather of philosophers. We must make it obvious that if the empiricists and psychologists, who swell themselves out to philosophers, are bunglers, those too are bunglers who claim to solve empirical questions philosophically. Perhaps they are bunglers less worthy of pardon, because it is part of philosophy to know itself clearly, and consequently its own limits.
First form: tendency to generalize.
The first bad effect that philosophy has upon practical description is the tendency to change it from description and collection of particular descriptions into something that has the air of generality and comprehensiveness. Because, if practical description be closely connected with the historical conditions of definite individuals and societies and with their wants, the more specific and near to the concrete it is, the better it will be, and the more useless by as much as it goes wandering toward the general. We owe to the evil influence of philosophy those verbose treatises upon psychological classes, such as virtue, duties, things good, affections, passions, and human types, to read which nourishes less than fresh water, which at least refreshes.
Let him who wishes to be convinced compare the books of rules and observations that we owe to men of experience and to men of the world, such as theRicordiof Guicciardini, theMaximesof Larochefoucauld, and theOraculo Manualof Balthazar Gracian, with theTraité des passionsof Descartes, with that section of theEthicaof Spinoza that relates to this matter, with theAnthropologiaand theDoctrine of Virtueof Kant (we prefer to record great names). He will then see on whose side is the advantage,an advantage of originality, of importance, and even of style, which is in this case a revelation. Those books by philosophers contain for the most part definitions of vocabulary and of words which there is no need to define, because everybody knows them to such an extent that the definitions, rather than make them more clear, make them obscure. Who, for example, can resist the philosophical triviality of theAphorisms for the Wisdom of Lifeof Arthur Schopenhauer? Take the trouble to open a book to learn that good things are to be divided into personal, wealth and imagination, or reputation, and that the first (such as good health and a gay temperament) are pre-eminent over the others. Do we not learn more and with greater rapidity and efficacy from such proverbs as "God helps the merry man"? It is superfluous to observe that those books, in so far as they generalize, can never attain to philosophy. They remain at bottom more or less historical.
Historical elements persisting in generalizations.
The good and generous wine of the born psychologists and precept-makers is diluted in a great deal of water, but that water, however much there be of it, never becomes pure and is always discoloured and of an unpleasant taste. Thus in classifications of ancient Ethic theidea of "virtue" or of "good" was announced as the most important, in Christian Ethic that of "duty," in the same way as in ancient Ethic the political character was dominant, in the modern the individualistic, according to the different character of the corresponding civilizations. Historical elements differentiate the Ethic of Aristotle, impregnated with sane Greek life, from that of the Stoics, in which is foretold the decadence of the antique world and the germs of the future discovered (for instance, cosmopolitanism, which precedes the Christian idea of the unity of the human race). The four Platonic virtues retain the name, but are filled with a new content, in the four cardinal virtues of the Christian Ethic; the seven deadly sins are not to be explained in all their settemplicity without the ascetic ideal of the Middle Ages.
Among the various writers of treatises, the foreground is filled, now with the idea of effort or of duty, now with that of enjoyment and satisfaction; ideas are now despotic masters, now smiling friends; the dominant idea is in turn that of justice, of benevolence, of enthusiasm, and so on. In the systems of Catholic Ethic are reflected political absolutism and semi-feudal economy; in those of Protestant Ethic,constitutionalism, liberalism, the industrial and capitalistic world; a strict probity, not indeed without utilitarianism, and a hardness of heart, not indeed without austerity. Modern Ethic is concerned with property, with the struggle of classes, with proletarianism and communism. These are all historical facts and as such most worthy of attention, but for that very reason they should be examined in all their force and value and not through the medium of the pale categories of a universal doctrine, which they disturb and falsify and by which they are very often disturbed and falsified. Whoever undertakes to write general treatises upon the passions, upon the virtues, and upon the other practical classes, will always show the signs of his time in the categories that he establishes, and the result will be at once banal and empirical, that is to say, badly empirical.
Second form: literary union of philosophy and empiria.
But hitherto the chief ill has been that useless and tiresome books are written. Matters begin to look graver when an approach is attempted between philosophical theories and empirical classifications and they are united in one treatise, as thegeneralpart and theparticularpart, theabstractand theconcretepart, thetheoreticaland thehistoricalpart. We do not wish to refuserecognition to an occasionally just sense of the intimate relations between philosophy and history as among the motives that lead to such unions, the first of which flows into the second, revives it and is by it in turn revived. But the history, to which philosophy applies the torch, is all history in its palpitating reality; it is history represented by all histories that historians have written and will write, and also by those that they have not written and will not write. The history offered by these empirical descriptions is only a very small part of history and (what is worse) abstract and mutilated. This would, however, be an injury of not too grave a nature, even at this point, provided the incongruity were limited to literary unfitness; in which case, it is true, would be added to inutility the ugliness of a union capricious and artificial, but fortunately extrinsic. But by means of that extrinsic approach, the way is opened to the attempt at an intrinsic approach, and thus to the third form of the undue invasion of practical description by philosophy, which constitutes themorbus philosophico-empiricusin all its harm fulness.
Third form: attempt to place them in intimate connexion.
The attempt at intrinsic approach takes place when empirical classes are placed in connection with the philosophical concepts or categories,with pure thought. Nearly all philosophers have fallen into this error, since it is very natural that they should not have wished to leave ahiatusbetween the first and second parts of their books of Philosophy of the practical, between the general and particular parts, and that they should have striven to connect the one with the other by passing logically from the concepts of the first to those of the second. The mistake was indubitably increased owing to their small degree of clearness as to the logical nature of the two orders of concepts (concepts and pseudo-concepts), which is fundamentally diverse, and we shall not further insist upon this matter.
Science of the practical and Metaphysic: various significations.
Rather let us note that sometimes there has been something rational in the minds of those who have required the Science of the practical or Ethic to be constructed independently of all Metaphysic. In truth, that programme of the independence of the Science of the practical or Ethic of Metaphysic has had various meanings that it will be well to enumerate briefly. The first meaning was that the Science of the practical, in so far as it was philosophy, should be independent of theaggregateof the philosophical system (Metaphysic). In this casethe claim was not acceptable, as we shall see, because it was at variance with the nature itself of philosophy, which is unity. The second meaning was that the Practical, as science, should be kept remote from every form of faith, or feeling or fancifulness (which has sometimes been called "Metaphysic"); and in this case the proposition was inexpugnable, however contestable may have seemed the opportuneity of the meaning given to that word. The third meaning was that the Science of the practical, in so far as it was descriptive, should stand by itself, in order to afford a base for philosophical induction. Use was here made of the erroneous idea, already rejected several times, of philosophy as an intensification of the psychological method, or as a carrying of it on. But in a fourth sense, it was desired finally to withdraw practical description from the perilous care of the philosophers, and it seems to us that with this fourth meaning was expressed a very just demand.
Damaging consequences of the invasions.
What are, in fact, the consequences of the care that philosophers have bestowed upon practical description? We would not wish to use an over-coloured simile, but what happens is very much what would happen if a man weregiven a baby to suckle. He would press it violently against his dry and arid breast, incapable of nourishing, but well capable of tormenting it. Philosophy, when it approaches the empirical classes, will either begin to criticize their distinctions and abolish them, reducing several classes to one, and then reducing the reduced classes in their turn to a less number, until none are left at all and it finds itself in company with the universal philosophical principle alone, or alone with itself;—or it will contrive to preserve them as classes, deducing them philosophically, and will thus make them rigid and absolute, removing from them that elasticity and fluidity which they derive from their historical character, and converting them from useful classes that they were, into bad philosophemes, concepts contradictory in themselves.
1a. Dissolution of the empirical concepts.
Both these consequences have occurred, for the books of philosophers are full of examples, now of destruction, now of corruption of the empirical classes of the Practical. The treatment of the doctrine of the virtues or of so-called natural rights affords examples of destruction. Striving to distinguish courage from prudence, or justice from benevolence, or on the other hand, egotism from wickedness, they ended byrecognizing that true courage is prudence, true prudence courage; that benevolence is justice, justice benevolence; that egotism is wickedness, wickedness egotism, and so on. In this way, all the virtues became one, the virtue of being virtuous, the will for the good, duty. In like manner, by giving philosophical form to the natural rights of life, of liberty, of culture, of property, and so on, they ended by recognizing that all rights merge in one single right, which is that of existence; which latter, indeed, is not a right, but a fact. The passions were reduced from seventy or eighty classes to six or seven fundamental, but these six or seven were in their turn reduced to two only, pleasure and pain, and of these two; it was finally discovered that they constituted one only—life, which is pleasure and pain together. But virtues, rights, passions, possess value in practical description only in so far as they are multiplicity—their value is always plural, never singular. To reduce them to a single class signifies to annul them, as to blow upon a candle signifies to extinguish it and to remain in darkness; darkness is to be understood as without empirical light. Now the philosopher should certainly destroy empirical ideas, but only in so far asthey present themselves as philosophical distinctions, that is, in so far as they are empirico philosophical: and in that case it suffices him to show that they are empirical, without pretending to annul them in their own domain also:debellare superbos,butparcere subjectis;that is, he should spare strangers who remain quietly in their own house.
Examples: war and peace, property and communism, and the like.
It might seem desirable to pass in review all these empirical distinctions and questions which the philosophers have thought that they had satisfactorily solved, when they had, on the contrary, passed beyond them. But the theme is inexhaustible, and we cannot here give even a rich selection, comprising the most frequent and important cases. We must limit ourselves to brief mention.—People discuss every day: whether war be an evil, and if it be possible to abolish it; if community of goods should take the place of private property; if rational government be that of liberty or of authority, of democracy or aristocracy, of anarchism or state organization; whether the State should be in the Church or the Church in the State, or side by side and independent; if freedom of thought should be admitted or restrained; if instruction should be free or undertaken by the State;and other similar problems. Now behold the philosopher applying himself to the study of these ideas. Having tested them, he is astonished that people can find in them opposing terms, and make them argument for dispute. In truth (he says), war is intrinsic to reality, and peace is peace in so far as by making an end of one war it prepares another; as Socrates demonstrated in thePhaedo,when, scratching his leg in the place where it had been pressed by the chain, he realized that he could not have experienced that pleasure had he not previously experienced the pain. Nor is property different from communism: the individual declares himself by an individual taking possession of things and becoming their owner; but by so doing he enters into relations and into communion with other individuals, and does business with them. And liberty excludes subjection the less, sincesub lege libertas;nor does aristocracy exclude democracy, since the true aristocrat is the bearer of those universal values that are the substance of democracy; hence the more we are aristocratic the more we are democratic, and inversely. Nor does anarchism exclude State organization, because a collection of men, however free we suppose it to be, must nevertheless governitself according to some laws, and these laws are the State. Then, the ideal State, being the best government of men for their perfectionment, both material and spiritual, accomplishes the work of the Church itself, which is neither above, nor below, nor beside the State, because it is the State. Thus in like manner, no one can grant or abolish freedom of thought, since thought is by definition freedom, and the restraint is thought itself, because liberty coincides with necessity. And finally State instruction cannot but correspond with rational demands, and the free instruction of citizens, if it be really so and not arbitrary and capricious, will be the same as that of the State, or will be changed into the instruction of the State.
Other examples.
Passing to other orders of fact that are less political, but are also argument for practical discussions, we shall refer to the so-called conflicts between duty or interest, as symbolized in the legendary Titus Manlius, when offered the alternativeaut reipublicae aut sui suorumque obliviscendi;—or to the so-called question of the two moralities, private and public, in support of which the not legendary Camillo Cavour said in 1860, that if he had done in his private interest what he had done for Italy, he wouldhave deserved the galleys;—or we can refer to questions of classification, and ask whether the kind of man who is socially harmless should be placed side by side with the criminal;—or to those others, famous in Casuistic, relating to capital punishment, homicide, suicide, lies, whether and when they should be permitted, and other similar questions. Here, too, the philosopher will smilingly observe that duties and interests can never be in conflict, because in every given case duty is always one only, and interest is always one only, that of the given case;—he will deny that there is one public and one private morality, because in man, the private person and the citizen, family relations, or those of friendship, and those of political life, are inseparable and indistinguishable;—that every man is bad and good, inoffensive and criminal, and that in the so-called criminal there must also be the non-criminal, if he be given the name of man;—that every punishment is a punishment of death, that is, it causes something to die, and that it is impossible to find a clear distinction between shutting a man up in prison and thus taking from him a more or less large slice of physical life, and taking it from him altogether by hanging or shootinghim;—that homicide, as such, is so little a crime that in war it is a duty to commit it;—that a lie, which is silence as to what one knows, is in itself so innocent that no one in the world, save a foolish prater, tells all he knows, and that if it be admitted that one can and should be silent, that is to say, let others be deceived by our silence (though this is eloquent), there is no reason for not admitting that we can also betray them with speech (often less eloquent), as is done with children in order to send them to bed, and with sick persons in order to comfort them;—that, finally, culpable suicide is not the material act of depriving oneself of physical life (a thing done without incurring blame, and indeed with praise and glory, by those who sacrifice themselves for others in war, in epidemics, in dangers of all sorts, and by every one who consumes his own vital strength in a worthy cause), but the killing of the moral life in oneself.
Misunderstanding on the part of philosophers.
In all these answers to questions, we have not made our imaginary philosopher commit any blunder; we have indeed put into his mouth things that we believe to be all of them most true and irrefutable, because we believe them ourselves. And we hold that it is necessaryto profess them against those who arbitrarily make questions philosophical whose terms are not philosophical. But when the philosopher offers those solutions to the empirical disputants, he behaves like him who, hearing a speech in a language of which he knows little, makes a reply that is in itself most reasonable, but without relation to the previous speech. The empiricist, if he have studied philosophy, will be able to reply, as did King Theodore, worn with misery, in the oldopéra bouffeof the Abbé Casti, to him who recalls to him the miseries suffered by Marius, Themistocles, and Darius:—
Good my son, I know them well,For I have heard these tales before;But just at present, truth to tell,'Tis money interests me more.
Historical significance of the aforesaid questions.
Money, that is, ready money to spend in definite situations historically given, in order to find one's way in them; for all those questions are without universal signification, but have arisen from political and individual problems, to which they do and must belong. Certainly they are insoluble in the abstract, and this is the defect, or rather the nature of empirical questions, which, if they admitted of rigoroussolution, would not be any longer empirical. Therefore it is a foolish thing to discuss them philosophically, as is seen in the conspicuous example of certain casuistical enquiries (the homicide of the unjust aggressor, the lie, incest, etc.) which have been treated by nearly all philosophers and have been dragged about for centuries in discussions on Ethic, although every century has left them at the same point as they were in the one preceding.
But if it be not possible to solve, we can at leaststatethem in abstract terms, in the same way as drill and the sham-fight are abstract, though certainly of use when the battle is really fought. We can and we should bear in mind these abstract solutions, in order that we may be the better able to solve a series of concrete cases, which are not identical, certainly, because identical cases do not exist, but more or less similar, and therefore require solutions that are more or less similar.—Can war be done away with? This question refers not to the elimination' of the category "war," but to the possibility or the reverse of avoiding in the twentieth century and in European countries that empirical war which is waged with cannons and cruisers, that costs milliardswhen it is not waged, and tens of milliards when it is waged, and out of which the conqueror comes conquered. It is well understood that some form of war will always continue, because war is inherent to life.—Can private property be done away with? This does not mean to ask if it be possible to prevent man from taking possession of things, of his food, or of the material that he requires for dress, or from inhabiting a house; but whether it be possible to alter, to the advantage of mankind, the proportion that now obtains between production with private capital and production with collective capital, giving the preference to the latter.
And so on, for it would be tiresome to continue to state the historical problems that are grouped beneath each of the recorded formulæ, which indeed are easily to be found. Thus when we absolutely forbid the telling of lies, as indecorous and degrading, as that which severs the ties of human community and of reciprocal faith, as the vice (said Herbart) that has the special faculty of stirring up against it all the five moral ideas—justice, benevolence, equity, perfection, and internal liberty—the intention is to forbid what is usually called lying; but itis certainly not intended to institute a speculative enquiry as to the relation between knowing and making known, between the theoretic act of thought and the practical act of its communication to other individuals. Thus again, the prohibition of suicide has in view suicide through egoism, which is the most frequent form, and it is therefore useless to identify this with the universal relation between death and life, and with the proposition that life is preserved by means of death. Thus too, finally, the conception of the delinquent has been a beneficent rectification of common prejudices relating to the efficacy of certain laws and penalties applied to certain classes of individuals who are led to crime as though through unrestrainable natural tendency. For the rest, the wisdom of life teaches us usually to take individuals as we find them, with their virtues and vices, and without claiming to set them violently right, and to remake them from top to bottom. We should rather adapt them in the best way possible for our own ends, or for those of society. This does not, however, imply that they are fixed beings, and that each of those classes is heterogeneous in respect of the others. If, with the help of a foolish positivist philosophy, we make of theidea of the delinquent something necessary, a natural being, as it is called, confounding naturalistic with natural and incorrectly hypostasizing gnoseological procedure, then, and then alone, are we right in reacting and in denying.
2a. False deduction of the empirical from the philosophical.
And yet those solutions of philosophers, who think that they are solving empirical questions by annulling or ignoring them, do not yet represent the worst that happens when philosophy usurps the function of empiria. Such misunderstanding, such hardness of hearing, may be proof of a spirit so energetically directed to universale that it is unable to see anything else, and may even for that reason possess some sympathetic quality. The worst of the worst is the entering upon empirical questions, not in order to annul, but to take sides in them and to solve them philosophically.
Affirmations relating to the contingent changed into philosophemes.
This cannot be done, save by supporting empirical concepts with rigorous and philosophical concepts, confounding the one with the other by a trick of thought, and sometimes of words, making use of synonyms and homonyms, and pronouncing in the name of philosophy arbitrary solutions suggested only by caprice or self-interest. This is the complete corruption, alike of philosophy and of empiria. Not satisfiedwith making practical classes follow philosophical concepts of the practical, it is then sought to deduce the former from the latter, and behold them now deriving virtues and duties from the universal concept of practical moral activity, by means of the divisions of internal and external, of part and whole, of individual and society. These are concepts of relations, not susceptible of division, and therefore incapable of serving as base for empirical divisions. Or they have recourse to the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which is the universal concrete itself, constituting unity, and therefore incapable of serving as basis for division. Or they will deduce the moral virtues according to the three faculties, as virtues of representation, feeling and thought, or according to the two of the will and the intellect, as dianoetic and ethical virtues; as though the base of the division of thepracticalcould be that oftheoreticalandpractical.Empirical concepts become in this way all false, whereas, in their real nature, they are neither false nor true.
There is no thesis, however absurd, which cannot be defended with such a method. All know that there are aristocratic and democratic philosophers, libertarian and authoritarian,anarchical and organicist, socialistic and anti-socialistic, bellicose and pacific, feminist and antifeminist; and there are others who maintain the right to lie, the right to suicide, the right to prostitution, the right to incest, to making of themselves caterers for the scaffold, the right to the penalty of death. These solutions can be morally and politically justified in certain definite and particular cases. There are other solutions rationally unjustifiable in the individual case and put forward only through passion, wickedness, or prejudice, but in both hypotheses, they are outside philosophy and within it so false as to be odious, as that is odious which is maintained, not by means of intrinsic reason, but by imposition altogether extrinsic and external.
Reason of the rebellion against rules.
Such hatefulness explains the rebellion against moral rules and concepts that has often taken place. This, together with that against literary classes and rules and others of the same sort, forms part of the vast movement of rebellion against empirical or empiricized philosophy. In truth, when those rules and ideas are taken by themselves, no rebellion is possible, because they do not exert any pressure and obey the orders of the man who has made them. But it happens otherwise, when they become rigid andphilosophical, and as is said, absolute, claiming to substitute themselves as such for philosophy and to provide a base for judgments. In addition to this, from the enforced union of philosophemes with rules, has arisen the false idea of philosophizing about the practical (about an Ethic, for example), which showed itself to bepractical,or, as is said,normative.
Limits between philosophy and empiria.
Philosophy, by taking part in empirical questions, ruins both itself and them, because it loses the serenity, the dignity, and the utility that are intrinsic to it. In like manner, the empirical disciplines ruin themselves and philosophy when they claim to philosophize with their classes, which are not categories, with their pseudo-concepts, which are not concepts, with theirgeneralia,which are notuniversalia.Here too, safety lies in distinction: the observation of distinction alone makes possible beneficent co-operation.
A history of the general theories relating to the practical activity is still to write, although we have several relating to particular theories of Ethic. The mode in which such a historical narration should be conducted results from the historical explanations themselves, which we have exposed and shall continue to expose. Here we cannot even offer a rapid summary. We shall limit ourselves to making a—few remarks on the subject, and we shall give some historical account of certain problems of the philosophy of the practical, that have had, to some extent, profound treatment, or have at least been sufficiently discussed (for not a few others are virgin, or almost so), with the sole object of serving as a guide.