Chapter II: Freedom and Its Opposite. Good and Evil

[Sidenote: _Freedom of action as reality of action._]

Since, then, the volitional act is freedom, the question as to whether in a given case an individual has or has not been free, is equivalent to this other question: _Has there really been volition_ (action) in that case? This question can have and has (as any one who lends an ear to such discussions as are frequently heard can verify) but two meanings. The first is, whether the case under discussion be _action_ or _event,_ and, therefore, if it be or be not accurate to present it as an individual act. For example:--Was Jacobinism the crime or the glory of Voltaire and Rousseau? Was the defeat of Waterloo the fault of Marshal Grouchy? The second is, if it be really a question of _action,_ what, _precisely,_ has that action been? For example:--What were the respective parts of Voltaire and of Rousseau in the propaganda of the revolutionary spirit and of the Jacobin mode of thought? What did Marshal Grouchy really know and will when, instead of listening to Exelmans and to others of his generals and marching whither the cannon was thundering, he obeyed to the letter the order he had received and attacked the Prussian army corps of Thielman?

[Sidenote: _Inconceivability of the absolute absence of action._]

There is a third meaning that is to be excluded: namely, as to whether at a given moment of time there has been any sort of action or, on the contrary, a void and total absence of action. For the only case in which the individual does not act is that in which he is dead or partially dead, be the death physiological or spiritual, that of a corpse or of a madman. The glory of putting poor madmen on a level with the guilty and the delinquent is to be left to the thinkers of the "new school of penal law." In every other case, man always acts, always wills, and is always responsible and free, because life, so long as it lasts, is nothing but a web of volitions and therefore of free acts. He is also responsible for the acts that contribute to put man in such conditions as amount to madness more or less transitory, and so of irresponsibility: such is the case of drunkenness and of moral dangers imprudently sought, and so on. At no point of life does the _practically indifferent_ exist.

Those actions, too, that appear to be neither willed nor free, because they have become habitual, mechanicized, instinctive, are willed and free, not indeed because (though this be true enough in itself) habitual acts were once acts of will, but because (as we have already had occasion to remark), although they have become facts almost external to the individual willing, yet it is always the will that permits them to act and can always arrest their action: they are therefore to be looked upon as conditions of fact that every new volition modifies, even when it accepts them. A machine is not the work of the arm that moves it, but of hundreds and thousands of other arms that were previously moved in order to construct it. But once constructed, that which sets in motion the machinery is always the work of one arm, an act of will, just as an act of will can stop its movement and finally cause its disaggregation and destruction.

[Sidenote: _Non-freedom as antithesis and contrariety._]

But excluding the absolute absence of freedom of action (and of existence in so far as it is action), and on the other hand the presence of something different from it called causality having been previously excluded from the idea of freedom, it remains nevertheless indubitable that in the very bosom of freedom, there is _non-freedom. _ Every volition is at the same time nolition, as every affirmation is negation. Volition is love, nolition hate; and, as we know, every love is hate, and the more we love, the more we hate. Antigone was born to love intensely, and for that very reason, to hate profoundly. What can be that which we hate in love and abhor in volition? What can this internal enemy be, which does not consist either in the absence of volition or in the presence of an extraneous and indifferent element?--Since it is neither absent nor indifferent, it cannot be anything but the _opposite or contrary_ of freedom, anti-freedom, which constitutes the contradiction in its effective concretion.

[Sidenote: _Nullity and arbitrariness of non-freedom._]

Freedom is an indissoluble nexus of necessity and freedom: the force that tends to annul it is anti-freedom, the scission of that nexus, the analysis of that synthesis. On the one hand it aims at making liberty fall into nothingness, by compelling it to the inertia of the fact, and on the other, to make a leap into the void, by impelling it to will, a sterile endeavour--two movements that are one-sided and absurd, and become identified through the considerations already established in relation to determinism and arbitrarism. Therefore the opposite of freedom is qualified indifferently, either as the _passive,_ taken by itself, opposed to the active, the fact that resists the new creation, or as the _active,_ taken by itself and abstract, opposed to the passive: will opposed to liberty. Anti-freedom is either the material fact or arbitrary choice, but the first is resolved into will, the second into material fact. Only by an act of will can the fact that should continue to develop be fixed as a fact and so appear as a material fact, and only by a persistence in that fact, which should be surpassed, can will give itself the appearance of a content. The undertaking is contradictory, and the solution, the absence of freedom, is a contradiction.

[Sidenote: _Good as freedom and reality, and evil as its opposite._]

Freedom and its opposite, freedom and its internal contradiction, freedom and will, are what is designated by the terms _good and evil._ With us these terms are given an altogether generic meaning, as they are taken as the representatives of all the other couples of opposites that are wont to be enunciated in the field of practical activity, as helpful and harmful, useful and useless, honest and dishonest, meritorious and blameworthy, pious and impious, lawful and sinful, and so on. All these formulæ either answer to the sub-distinctions of the practical activity (which we shall study further on), or are the same distinction, variously formulated, with reference to psychological classes. But all are to be reduced to those of good and evil for the purposes of the philosophical study of the practical activity in general, without ulterior determinations of them as moral or utilitarian good, moral or utilitarian evil, or any other form there may be, and without regard to the various empirical material, with which they may be filled.

[Sidenote: _Critique of abstract monism and of the dualism of values._]

That practical good and evil are to be conceived as will and anti-will, and the good, therefore, as the reality and the bad as the irreality of the will, the good as something positive and the bad as something negative,--is the solution imposed by the impossibility of thinking the two others that differ from it: namely, that which considers the distinction between good and bad as inexistent (abstract monism of values), and that which considers the good as transcendent in respect of reality, which is always evil, unless the good deign to descend and modify it (abstract dualism of values). For the criticism of the abstract monistic view, it is necessary to distinguish between those doctrines that deny, not only the distinction between good and evil, but also all the analogous distinctions in every field of activity, including that of thought, and the doctrines that allow the distinction to subsist in other fields, but deny it in that of the practical. The first, which deny the distinction between true and false, are the suicide of Philosophy, the second, which deny it only between good and evil, are the suicide of the Philosophy of the practical: that is to say, both are founded upon errors that we have already criticized and surpassed, and upon which it would therefore be otiose to insist. As to the dualistic view (still common among right-thinking professors of philosophy, that is, among the lazy and the most lazy) it will be requisite to discuss this point seriously, when it has been demonstrated in what way Reality can place itself beneath the yoke of Value and of Goodness, which would be inferior to it by hypothesis, through the very fact that they were _unreal._ Reality living, these others dead; Reality like "the four bedevilled" of Giusti bent upon _doing so,_ they, like the "two hundred simpletons" of the same poet, bent upon _saying_ no. For if Value and Goodness be real, they will be the true Reality; and that which was first called by the name will be feigned reality, altogether identical with what we have indicated as the moment of contradiction and of will, arising in the very bosom of the practical activity.

[Sidenote: _Objections to the reality of evil._]

An instance that is always formidable has certainly been cited against the thesis of evil as something negative and unreal, and of good as itself the only positive and real: it has actually been affirmed that this thesis offends against good sense. What? Is evil unreal? Is it nothing? Unreality and nothingness are then the knavish trick of some wicked person who starts a calumny, which, being received and believed, injures an honest man? Unreality and nothing, the passion that drags the gambler into economic ruin and moral abjection? So the world is all good, all rose-coloured, all sweet; and crimes, cowardice, foolishness, and baseness are illusions, and there is no reason to lament; so the feeling of life should be expressed with a perpetual smile, like that upon the lips of the wounded warriors in the marbles of Aegina? -But let good sense and its advocates remain tranquil. If evil be a nothing, that does not mean that it is nothing; if the vanity that seems to be a person, be vanity and not a person, that does not mean that it has not really the appearance of a person and should not be really combated and dissipated. The wise, who having defined evil, deny toothache, or like the stoical Posidonio forget the gout that transfixes them, need Giambattista Vico to remind them how no philosophy is able to save them from anxiety on behalf of "their wives in childbirth" and of "their sons who languish in disease"! The world is precisely that mixture of good and evil, which good sense says it is, and the sweet is always tempered with the _amari aliquid._ It cannot be adequately expressed either with lamentations only, or only with laughter. The thesis that we have enunciated wishes to abolish, not the consciousness of evil, but the false belief that this is something substantial, and thus prevent one evil from being increased by another, evil by error, _moral_ trouble by _mental_ confusion.

[Sidenote: _Evil within and without synthesis._]

Evil is either felt as evil, and in this case it means that it is not realized, but that in its place is realized the good. The gambler of the example, at the moment he knows he is doing himself economic harm, does not play; his hand is held; and it is held, because to _know,_ in the practical sense, equals to _will_; and to know the harm of gambling means to know it as harm, and so to dislike gambling. If he take to dice or cards again, this arises because that knowledge is obliterated in him, that is, because he changes his mind; and in this case play is not looked upon any longer as harmful; it is willed, and so at that instant again becomes the good for him, because it satisfies one of his wants. The calumniator, if he understand the idea that is passing through his mind, or rather the impulse that has seized him, as calumny, is for that very reason repugnant to it and does not pronounce those evil words: in that case indeed he is not a calumniator, but an honest man who resists a temptation (and no other definition of an honest man can be given). But if he pronounce them, this means that the opposing repugnance was not present or is no longer present: and therefore those words are no longer for him a wicked act of calumny, but a simple satisfaction of a desire to amuse himself, or to reject the evil that has been done to him, and therefore a good. In the same way, he who asserts what is false, he who renders himself guilty of error, if he be aware of himself as frivolous or a charlatan or disloyal, would be silent: if he talk and write and print false insinuations, this happens either because the will for truth does not exist in him, or is for the time being suppressed, and with it the desire to seek it out and to diffuse it; that is to say, for that will has been substituted the other of withdrawing from a painful labour, or of obtaining easy praise and gain; so, for one good has been substituted another. As a rule, it is admitted that we will the good and do evil. "I do not do the good that I will, and I do the evil that I do not will" (οὐ γὰρ ὂ θέλω ποιῶ ἀγαθόν, ἀλλὰ ὂ οὐ θέλω κακὸν τοῦτο πράσσω), said St. Paul.[1] But it is a question of psychological confusion, owing to which a series of moments and alternatives is simplified into one single act, inexistent because contradictory.

[Sidenote: _Affirmative judgments of evil as negative judgments._]

Thus evil, when real, does not exist save in the good, which opposes and conquers it, and therefore does not exist as a positive fact. When on the contrary it exists as a positive fact, it is not evil, but good (and in its turn has for shadow an evil, with which it strives and conquers). The judgments that we give when we judge an action to be foolish or wicked, a statement false, a work of art ugly, are all metaphorical. In delivering them we do not mean to say that there is an _existence_ called error, ugliness, foolishness, but only that there is a given existence and that another is wanting. He who has launched a calumny, dissipated his property, soiled a canvas, printed a worthless book, does not, strictly speaking, deserve negative denominations, because to judge means to place oneself in the conditions of the person judged, and in those conditions there was neither evil nor ugliness nor error nor folly; otherwise the acts that are the objects of the judgment would not have been accomplished, and in so far as they are accomplished they deserve positive judgment. But what is meant by the negative form of those judgments is that such an act is this and not another, that it is utilitarian and not moral, a commercial and not a literary or scientific fact, and so on.

[Sidenote: _Confirmations of the doctrine._]

There is a very ancient saying to the effect that every one seeks his own good and that no one deliberately wills his own evil, and, therefore, that if the practically good man be the wise, then the bad man can but be the ignorant. Now if we remove from the thesis its intellectualist veneer, and translate wisdom and ignorance into practical terms, we see that wickedness is here looked upon as a limit, as a tendency toward the good, that has failed, not as the will for an evil. The dispute as to who sins the more, he who is conscious of the evil, or he who has no consciousness of it, is also illumined by the theory that we have here exposed, which declares that both parties to the dispute are right and wrong. For instance, he who is completely without moral consciousness, is morally innocent, whereas he who is more or less possessed of one, is also more or less of a sinner, for the law itself makes him so (τὴν ἀμαρτίαν οὐκ ἔγνων εἰ μὴ διὰ νόμου, also said St. Paul[2]). But with this saying it is not desired to put the innocent above the sinner, but the contrary. That declaration of ignorance is the gravest condemnation, for it is thus recognized that the individual in question is unable to sin, and therefore unable to do right, since the possibility of sinning is all one with that of doing right. The poet inspires admiration, but he who does not know how to be anything but a poet, and is therefore unable to reason and to act, is deficient. The shrewd man is praised, but he who is _only_ shrewd cannot be praised. The animal is a being, worthy of all esteem, but to call a man an animal, that is, to tell him that he is nothing but an animal, is to do him a great injury. In other words, while we recognize as good all that a man effectively does, we do not intend to cancel the distinction between one form and another of human activity, and between one act and another, between the utilitarian and the moral man, between fanciful and logical production, between animal and man. Nor do we mean that those emphatic expressions of negative character that we continually utter to one another and to ourselves, and by means of which we urge ourselves and others to more lofty modes of existence, are to be abandoned.

[Sidenote: _The poles of feeling (pleasure and pain) and their identity with their practical opposites._]

Here occurs an opportunity of tying a thread that we had left loose when discussing the theory of feeling, or rather the distinction of feeling into the two poles of _pleasure and pain,_ understood, not as a psychological distinction of greater or less, or of _mixed states,_ but as a philosophical distinction of _pure states,_ or of terms that are truly opposed. When the vague and indeterminate term of "feeling" is directed toward theoretical facts and is determined by theoretical philosophy as æsthetic activity or speculative thought, or in some other way, the terms of pleasure and pain are, strictly speaking, not applicable to it. The pure theoretic activity considered in itself, cannot be polarized, as has been seen; it will always attain to the beautiful, always to the true. Only in so far as the theoretic activity is also practical activity, by the law of the unity of the spirit, will the polarization of good and evil, which in that case are called beautiful and ugly, true and false, take place through it if not in it. If the term "feeling" be on the contrary directed to practical facts, and its synonymity with the practical activity (of which feeling would be a distinguishing characteristic) made clear by the Philosophy of the practical, it is clear that to it belongs immediately and no longer mediately that polarity of good and evil. Good and evil then become what theoreticians of feeling _call pleasure and pain._ These terms are identical with the preceding, as feeling is a fact identical with the practical activity, generically considered.

[Sidenote: _Doctrines concerning pleasure and happiness: critique._]

This theory of pain and pleasure, as the synonyms of the practical positive and negative, helps to put an end to a long series of questions arising in connection with such concepts. Above all, the dispute as to whether pleasure be positive or negative will appear to be unfounded, and, therefore, whether pain have a positive or a negative value, or, finally, whether both be negative: unfounded, since "pleasure" means "positive" and "pain" "negative." At the most, it may be admitted that pain has also a positivity, which is however nothing but the positivity of the negative, that is the real existence of the negative pole.--The theory that man always proposes to himself pleasure as an end is, on the contrary, not only not unfounded, but of such evident truth as not to require enunciation, much less efforts to prove it. If pleasure be nothing but activity, it is natural that man should have no other end save pleasure, that is, activity, life itself. The correction that has been suggested by others, to the effect that man wills, not indeed pleasure, but activity, of which the outcome is pleasure, has but slight exactitude, for the two terms are not distinguishable, and the result is not separable from the activity; the pleasure of travelling is not separable from travelling. That polemic has value at the most against empiricism, which limits pleasure to an arbitrarily determined group of pleasurable facts, that is to say, circumscribes activity to certain particular manifestations of activity, collected in groups or classes, and substituted for the universal concept. Finally, by means of the identification of pleasure and pain with good and evil in general which we have given, all disputes as to the concept of _happiness_ disappear, as to whether it be or be not distinct from that of the good action, practically coherent, and if man propose to himself _happiness_ as an end. "Happiness" is equal to "pleasure," and "pleasure" is equal to "activity." To will the good (that is, to will well and energetically), and to be happy, are the same. The objection raised by some, that man does not will happiness, but a certain happiness, that he does not will pleasure, but a certain pleasure, not the good, but a certain good, is valid; but this only amounts to distinguishing volitional man in the act, from the theory of the will, constructed by the philosopher. If Tizio wishes at this moment to go to bed and Caio to take a moonlight walk, bed and walk are the affairs of Tizio and of Caio; for the philosopher there is no Tizio, no Caio, but man in universal; there is neither bed nor moon, but pleasure and the good.

[Sidenote: _Empirical concepts relating to good and evil._]

The practical activity, the will, which is also strife between good and evil, can be illuminated now from this side and now from that by that indivisible unity, according to the accidents of discourse and the varying situations of life. In this way arises a series of concepts which, in so far as they are unilateral, are empirical, and only become again philosophical in the thought of the unity of which they form part. Thus, to make use of a comparison, space in geometry can be analyzed and split up into a first, second, and third dimension; but as spatiality, it is a _unicum,_ which does not possess either one or two or three dimensions; and when in measuring or constructing plans of measurement, we proceed to think one of these dimensions, we become aware that we cannot think them, save all three together, or not as three, but as one. The empirical, practical concepts that arise upon the antithetical and dialectical nature of the will, have had much importance, and it is fitting, therefore, that we should mention and explain at least the principal among them.

[Sidenote: _Duty of being, ideal, inhibitive, and imperative power._]

If the situations of life lead to the directing of the attention chiefly to the aspect of the will striving against inaction and arbitrary choice, it is posited in this strife, in this becoming, as something that _is not_ but _must be,_ not as _real,_ but as _ideal._ If the greatness of the ideal that is to be and to fill the soul with joy, be set in relief in this struggle, then the ideal appears sweet and smiling, as a _joy-bringing and beatific vision._ If, on the other hand, the effort of its becoming be set in relief, the ideal can be made into a metaphor, as will opposed to will, as legitimate against rebellious will; and then it assumes a sour, rough, and hard appearance, and the names of _inhibitive or imperative power,_ in so far as it impedes the will, or promotes liberty.

There is no less opportunity and interest in making clear that relation, from the point of view of the negative term, or of evil. A series of descriptive concepts then appears, which present the consciousness of evil, now as obstinate _blindness (cor induratum),_ now as _disquiet_ and _scruple,_ which induce vigilance and circumspection, now as _humility,_ which does not permit forgetting how easy it is to slip into evil. But it is worthy of note that the series of words and empirical concepts that serve to illuminate the _satisfaction_ of the good, the _victory_ won over oneself, _tranquillity_ of conscience, is far less rich. Perhaps this arises precisely because there is less practical interest in celebrating the pleasure of victory than in the inculcation of the necessity for strife and the abhorrence of evil. Why draw attention to joy and to repose when man is already too much inclined to allow himself joy and repose; does not Life allow them to itself and cause other problems to follow on each solution, new perils to follow perils overpast, and the necessity for new struggles? It is therefore of importance to direct the greater sum of attention to those aspects from which the eye is most frequently turned aside. Finally, these various aspects can be placed in relation with the greater or less frequency with which each appears in individuals, thus arriving at the construction of the concepts of _virtue and vice,_ and of the models of _the virtuous man, the honest man, the deliberate man, the clever man,_ and their opposites, _the vicious, the dishonest, the unreflective, the incapable man,_ and so on.

[Sidenote: _Their incapacity for setting as practical principles._]

The same thing happens with these empirical practical concepts as with all the other empirical concepts, of which we have spoken in general. They have been stiffened into philosophical concepts, for the hasty satisfaction of the philosophical need of man. Hence, among others, many of the disputes as to the principle of the Philosophy of the practical. Some indeed maintain that such a principle is to be found in _duty or the imperative; others in the idea or the ideal, others in the joy of good, others in the abhorrence of pain, others in virtue, others in enthusiasm,_ and so on. Each of the above-mentioned theoreticians has the sharpest eyes for the discovery of the defects in the theories of others, but is short-sighted as regards his own. Those who maintain the ideal satirize the form of the categoric imperative as suggestive of police or _gendarmerie;_ those of the imperative and of duty deride the quietist form and the insipid ecstasy proper to the contemplation of ideals; those of the avoidance of pain do not spare their sarcasms for the hunters of joy; those of joy call these plunged in sorrow hypocrites, who also obtain enjoyments for themselves, if in no other way, then secretly: _si non caste, caute._ The truth is that all are wrong as philosophers, because they all find the principle of the will, not in itself but in an empirical concept, which gives to it an abstract and mutilated appearance. And, on the other hand, all are right, because those aspects are all real, and in each one of them the others can be implicitly shown. The categoric imperative, for instance, contains in itself both the will, which, in so far as it commands itself, is the true will, the joy of being and the sorrow of not being what we wish to be, the ideal, and the necessity of self-realization, and so of entering into strife against irreality, thus becoming imperative, and so on.

[Sidenote: _Its characteristics._]

If none of the formulæ given above, owing to their empirical character, be able to indicate with precision the principle of the Philosophy of the practical, and all are more or less convenient _synecdoches,_ for this reason none of those concepts are to be treated as rigorous concepts. If they be so treated, there is not one of them, however justified it may seem to be, that is not able to cause rebellions and has not done so. The type of the dutiful man has been reproached with being so much preoccupied with duty that he does not really perform it, because he forgets the impulse of the heart; of the type of the virtuous man it is said that he, as it were, ceases from being so by the very fact that virtue becomes in him a profession; of the type of the honest man, that there is nothing more base than the race of honest men; of the type of the _pious Aeneas,_ that his piety is egoism; and in general of all these cases it has been recalled that a little vice is necessary for virtue, as alloy for metals. Repentance and remorse, too, although they be highly recommended as means of purification, have had their detractors; does it not suffice (they say) that an evil deed has been committed? Must the offence be aggravated by losing time over it, as though anything could be remedied with sorrowing and lamentation? But others have replied that, given human iniquity, it is better to exceed in the matter of remorse than to pass rapidly over it. Humility has been opposed with the _sume superbiam_ as being more virile, and with the _laudum immensa cupido_ as being more noble; the habit of self-tormenting with the _servite domino in laetitia,_ as, on the other hand, the over-confident has been admonished with that other not less biblical dictum: _beatus homo qui semper est pavidus._ These are objections and replies that may all of them have value for the empirical situations to which they refer; but they have neither truth nor value in philosophy, for which they are all of them false, because the distinctions from which they derive are not philosophical. Remorse, for instance, has a value, not in itself, but as a passage to activity, without which such passage would not take place; the virtuous habit has a value, not in itself, but in so far as it is practised and constantly preserved; duty cannot differ from the aspiration of the soul, and both cannot differ from the volitional act; confidence is at the same time trepidation, and humility must be one with the pride of merit. To sum up, for, the philosopher, the dialectic of the will is all in the concept of will, with its polarization of good and evil, which is the actuality and concreteness of that concept.

[1] Rom. vii 19.

[2] Rom. vii.