[31] (p. 20) i.e., “Als richtig characterisiert.” This phrase, which occurs frequently, I have translated sometimes as above, sometimes by “qualified as right.” By this phrase and its equivalents is meant that the act (sc. of loving, hating, or preferring,) is at once perceived by us to be a right one, bears the mark or character of rightness.
[32] (p. 20). In order to exclude a misunderstanding and the doubts necessarily connected therewith, I add the following remark to what has been suggested shortly in the text. In order that an act of feeling may be called purely good in itself it is requisite: (1) that it be right; (2) that it be an act of pleasing and not an act of displeasing. If either condition be absent, it is already, in a certain respect, bad in itself; pleasure at the misfortunes of others (Schadenfreude) is bad on the first ground; pain at the sight of injustice, on the second ground. If both conditions are lacking, the act is still worse, in accordance with the principle of summation of which we shall speak later in the lecture. According to this same principle, where a feeling is good, its increase increases also the goodness of the act, while, similarly, where an act is purely bad, or at least participates in any respect in the bad, with the intensity of the feeling increases the badness of the act. When the act is a mixed one, good and bad manifestly increase, or diminish, in simple proportion to one another. The “plus” belonging to the one or the other side, must therefore, with the increase in intensity of the act become ever greater, with its decrease ever smaller. And so the surplus of good in the act may, under certain circumstances in spite of its impurity, be described as a very great good, while conversely, the surplus of the bad may, despite the admixture of the good, be described as something very bad (cf. note 36).
[33] (p. 20). It may happen that, at the same time, one and the same thing is both pleasing and displeasing. First, something in itself displeasing may yet be pleasing as a means to something else, and vice versa; then a case may arise where something instinctively repels us, while at the same time it is loved by us with a higher love. We may thus have an instinctive repugnance to a sensation, which is yet at the same time (and every idea, qua idea, is good), a welcome enrichment of our world of ideas. Aristotle has said: “It happens that desires enter into conflict with each other. This happens when the reason (λὁγος) and the lower desires (ἐπιθυμα) are in opposition (De Anima iii. 10). And again: “Now the lower desires (ἐπιθυμία) gain a victory over the higher, now the higher over the lower, and as” (according to the ancient astronomy) “one celestial sphere the other, so one desire draws off the other with it when the individual has lost the firm rule over himself” (De Anima ii.).
[34] (p. 21). Just as love and hate may be directed towards single individuals, so also they may be directed to whole classes. This Aristotle has already observed. We are, he thinks, “not only angry with the individual thief who has robbed us, and with the individual sycophant who deceives our confiding nature, but we hate thieves and sycophants in general” (Rhet. ii. 4). Acts of loving and hating, where in this way there is an underlying general conception, also possess frequently the character of rightness. And so quite naturally along with the experience of this given act of love or hate, the goodness or badness of the entire class becomes manifest at one stroke, and apart from every induction from special cases. In this way, for example, we attain to the general knowledge that insight as such is good. It is easy to understand how near the temptation lies, in the case of such knowledge of a general truth without any induction from single cases otherwise demanded in truths of experience, entirely to overlook the preparatory experience of a feeling having the character of rightness, and to regard the universal judgment as an immediate synthetic à priori form of knowledge. Herbart’s very remarkable doctrine of a sudden elevation to general ethical principles seems to me to point to the fact that he had observed something of this peculiar process without at the same time becoming quite clear about it.
[35] (p. 21). It is easy to see how important this proposition may become for a theodicy. As regards ethics it might be feared that its security becomes thereby seriously endangered, perhaps, indeed, completely destroyed. To see how unfounded such a fear is, cf. note 43, p. 99.
[36] (p. 22). It seems to me evident even from analysis of the notion of choice (1) that everything which is good is to be preferred, i.e. that in an act of choice it shall fall as a reasonable moment into the balance; (2) that everything bad forms a reasonable anti-moment, and therefore also that (3) in such cases—partly by direct means, partly by an addition in which the good and the bad are to be taken into account as quantities with opposite signs—the preponderance in which right choice is to be grounded may become evident, i.e. the preferability or superiority of the one as opposed to the other. According to this view, it does not, closely examined, require the special experience of an act of preference having the character of rightness, but only the experience of simple similarly qualified acts of pleasing and displeasing, in order to attain in the above-mentioned cases to the knowledge of the better. And therefore I have said that we derived our knowledge of preferability, not from the fact that our experience has the character of rightness, but that the said preferences possess the character of rightness because the knowledge of preferability has here been made the determining standard. I do not, however, mean to say that the same distinguishing character which was previously insisted upon in the case of certain simple acts of pleasing is not also here really present.
[37] (p. 24). In order that the procedure here might have been rendered quite exact and really exhaustive, two other very important cases would still need to have been mentioned in the lecture. The one case is that of pleasure in the bad, the other that of displeasure in the bad. If we enquire: Is pleasure in the bad good? the answer has already been given in a measure quite rightly by Aristotle: No. “No one,” he says in the Nicomachian Ethics (x. 2, p. 1174 a. 1), “would wish to feel joy in what is shameful even if it were made certain to him that no harm would result therefrom.” The hedonists, to which class belonged such noble men as Fechner (cf. his work on The Highest Good) contradicted this view. Their teaching is to be rejected; in practice as Hume has observed, they fortunately proved much better than in theory. There is still, however, a grain of truth in their view. The pleasure in the bad is, qua pleasure, good, and only at the same time bad as a wrong activity of feeling, and though, by reason of this perversion, it may be described as a preponderance of the bad, it cannot be regarded as something purely bad. While, therefore, abhorring it as bad, we are really making an act of choice in which freedom from what in the object is bad is preferred to the possession of what is good. And when we recognize the aversion as right, this is possible only because the preference has the character of rightness.
The case is similar when we inquire if a similarly qualified displeasure in the bad is good, as e.g. where a noble heart feels pain on seeing the innocent oppressed, or where some one, looking back upon his past life, feels remorse at the consciousness of a bad action. Here the case is in every respect the reverse of the one preceding. Such a feeling arouses a state in which pleasure preponderates, but this pleasure is not pure; it cannot be called a pure good like the joy which would have arisen were the opposite of that over which we now mourn a fact, hence Descartes’ advice (cf. 24, p. 75)—to turn the attention and feeling in an equal degree rather to the good—would really not lose its significance. We recognize all this clearly, and have therefore, once more a preference with the character of rightness as the source of our knowledge of what is worthy of preference.
In order not to introduce too many complications, I omitted in my lecture when discussing preferences to mention these cases. And this seemed to me the more admissible, because it would practically lead to the same result, if (like Aristotle in the case of disgraceful pleasure) one were to treat hate qualified as right on the one hand and love qualified as right on the other, as phenomena of simple disinclination and inclination.
It may be easily seen that from these special cases of a possible determination of a quantitative relation between good and bad pleasure and displeasure, on the one hand, and of rightness and unrightness on the other hand (cf. for these also Note 31, p. 91) there is no hope of filling in the great gaps referred to in the lecture in a way valid for all cases.