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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The poles of feeling (pleasure and pain) and their identity with their practical opposites.