IV
RELATION BETWEEN THE ECONOMIC AND ETHICAL FORMS
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. Morality lives 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 of disinterested actions, 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 the supreme passion, so morality triumphs over interests as the supreme interest.