VII. It is all the more necessary to understand the diversity between economic Science and the Philosophy of economy, between the quantitative and the qualitative processes, owing to the fact that since economic studies first flourished, in the eighteenth century, absurd ideas were introduced into the books of philosophers, as to the calculus of pleasures and the balance of life. Maupertuis' book, Essai de philosophie morale (1749), had a great influence in this direction. Here, a balance is presented, showing a deficit on the side of pleasures; and, following this lead, many Italian philosopher-economists of the same period occupied themselves with such calculations and balances (Ortes, Verri, Briganti, etc.), arriving at results, now optimistic, now pessimistic.[27] Galluppi, too, accepted the method as a good one,[28] and it is no marvel that the poet Leopardi made it his, steeped as he was in the sensualistic philosophy of the preceding century. But not only are the trivial optimistic sophisms of the utilitarians founded upon it, but likewise many of the pessimistic arguments of Schopenhauer and especially of Hartmann, the latter quite unconscious (being in other respects closely connected with the German idealist tradition) that he was accepting an element of an altogether anti-idealistic, that is, of a mechanistic origin.
For all these reasons, it is important to oppose the concept of the useful (which is not indeed a concept, but an abstraction), given by economic Science, with its philosophic concept. This we have attempted to do in the preceding theory of Economy, as at once distinct from and united with Ethic. In that theory, we have especially striven to collect stray threads of aphorisms and observations of good sense as to the value of the will, even when amoral; as to the doctrines of happiness and of pleasure, of the inferior appetitive faculty, of others dealing with politics and the arts of prudence, of the new conception of the passions, considered as the spirit in its individuality;—we have striven to attach to these that which is as it were the philosophical result drawn from economic Science, that is to say, the idea of a form of value that would be neither the intellectual, the æsthetic, nor the ethical, and cannot by any means be resolved into an ethical anti-value or egoism;—and finally, we have attempted to unite all these threads into one, in order to form the bond that ethical rigorism has hitherto been unable to place between itself and reality, between the universal and the practical individual, at the same time justifying utilitarian, activity in its autonomy. We believe that this historical sketch will have contributed to make clear the necessity of our attempt.
[1] De cive, c. i. § 10.
[2] E. Albee, A History of English Utilitarianism, London, 1902, pp. 26-27.
[3] De cive, c. iii. § 33.
[4] Essay on Human Understanding, Book II. c. 28, § 7 sqq.
[5] Gründl. d. Metaphys. d. Sitten, p. 70.
[6] Gründl, p. 36 sq.; Kr. d. prakt. Vernft. pp. 15, 21-28, 43, 145; cf. Metaph. d. Sitt. pp. 208-209.
[7] Metaph. d. Sitt. pp. 22, 23, 246.