Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

We can now extend our definition. Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency; in other words, the only reason which can be given for not satisfying a desire is that more important desires will thereby be thwarted. Thus morals become purely prudential, and ethical codes merely the expression of the mast general scheme of expediency[*] to which an individual or a race has attained. But we have still to say what ‘important’ stands for in this formulation. (Cf. p. 51).

There are certain evident priorities among impulses, some of which have been studied in various ways by economists under the headings of primary wants and secondary wants. Some needs or impulses must be satisfied in order that others may be possible. We must eat, drink, sleep, breathe, protect ourselves and carry on an immense physiological business as a condition for any further activities. Some of these impulses, breathing, for example, can be satisfied directly, but most of them involve us in complicated cycles of instrumental labour. Man for the most part must exert himself half his life to satisfy even the primitive needs, and these activities, failing other means of reaching the same ends, share their priority. In their turn they involve as conditions a group of impulses, whose satisfaction becomes only second in importance to physiological necessities, those, namely, upon which communication and the ability to co-operate depend. But these, since man is a social creature, also become more directly necessary to his well-being.

The very impulses which enable him to co-operate in gaining his dinner would themselves, if not satisfied, wreck by their mere frustration all his activities. This happens all through the hierarchy. Impulses, whose exercise may have been originally only important as means, and which might once have been replaced by quite different sets, become in time necessary conditions for innumerable quite different performances. Objects, again, originally valued because they satisfy one need, are found later to be also capable of satisfying others. Dress, for example, appears to have originated in magical, ‘life-giving,’ ornaments[†], but so many other interests derive satisfaction from it that controversy can still arise as to its primitive uses.

The instances of priorities given must only be taken as examples. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that for a civilised man, activities originally valuable as means only, often become so important through their connections with the rest of his activities, that life without them is regarded as intolerable. Thus acts which will debar him from his normal relations with his fellows are often avoided, even at the cost of death. Total cessation of all activities is preferred to the dreadful thwarting and privation which would ensue. The case of the soldier, or of the conscientious objector, is thus no exception to the principle. Life deprived of all but the barest physiological necessities, for example, prison life, is for many people worse than non-existence. Those who even so incur it in defence of some ‘moral ideal’ do so because they are so organised, either permanently or temporarily, that only in this way can their dominant impulses secure satisfaction. The self-regarding impulses form only a part of the total activities of social man, and the impulse of the martyr to bear witness at any cost to what he regards as truth, is only one extreme instance of the degree to which other impulses often assume supremacy.

For another reason any priorities mentioned must be taken only as illustrations. We do not know enough yet about the precedences, the hierarchies, the modes of systematisation, actual and possible, in that unimaginable organisation, the mind, to say what order in any case actually exists, or between what the order holds. We only know that a growing order is the principle of the mind, that its function is to co-ordinate, and we can detect that in some of its forms the precedence is different from that in others. This we could do by observation, by comparing the drunken man with the sober, but from our own experience of our own activity we can go much further. We can feel differences between clear coherent thinking and confusion or stupidity, between free, controlled emotional response and dull or clogged impassivity, between moments when we do with our bodies more delicate and dexterous things than seem possible, and moments of clumsiness, when we are ‘all thumbs’, have no ‘balance’ or ‘timing’, and nothing ‘comes off’. These differences are differences in momentary organisation, differences in precedence between rival possible systematisations. The more permanent and more specifically ‘moral’ differences between individuals grow out of differences such as these and correspond to similar precedences between larger systems.

The complications possible in the systematisation of impulses might be illustrated indefinitely. The plasticity of special appetencies and activities varies enormously. Some impulses can be diverted more easily than others. Sex has a wider range of satisfactions than hunger, for example; some are weaker than others; some (not the same necessarily) can be suppressed in the long run with less difficulty. Some can be modified; some obey the ‘all or none’ rule—they must either be satisfied specifically or completely inhibited—well-established habits may have this peculiarity. In judging the importance of any impulse all these considerations must be taken into account. The affiliations of impulses, at present often inexplicable, need especially to be considered. Within the whole partially systematised organisation, numerous sub-systems can be found, and what would be expected to be quite trivial impulses are often discovered to be important, because they belong to powerful groups. Thus there are reasonable persons who, without a high polish on their shoes, are almost incapacitated.

The importance of an impulse, it will be seen, can be defined for our purposes as the extent of the disturbance of other impulses in the individual’s activities which the thwarting of the impulse involves. A vague definition, it is true, but therefore suitable to our at present incomplete and hazy knowledge of how impulses are related. It will be observed that no special ethical idea is introduced. We can now take our next step forward and inquire into the relative merits of different systematisations.

No individual can live one minute without a very intricate and, so far as it goes, very perfect co-ordination of impulses. It is only when we pass from the activities which from second to second maintain life to those which from hour to hour determine what kind of life it shall be, that we find wide differences. Fortunately for psychology we can each find wide enough differences in ourselves from hour to hour. Most people in the same day are Bonaparte and Oblomov by turns. Before breakfast Diogenes, after dinner Petronius or Bishop Usher. But throughout these mutations certain dispositions usually remain much the same, those which govern public behaviour in a limited number of affairs varying very greatly from one society or civilisation to another. Every systematisation in the degree to which it is stable involves a degree of sacrifice, but for some the price to be paid in opportunities foregone is greater than for others. By the extent of the loss, the range of impulses thwarted or starved, and their degree of importance, the merit of a systematisation is judged. That organisation which is least wasteful of human possibilities is, in short, the best. Some individuals, hag-ridden by their vices, or their virtues, to a point at which the law of diminishing returns has deprived even these of their appropriate satisfactions, are still unable to reorganise; they go through life incapacitated for most of its possible enjoyments.[*] Others, paralysed with their conflicts, are unable to do anything freely; whatever they attempt some implicated but baffled impulse is still fitfully and fretfully stirring. The debauchee and the victim of conscience alike have achieved organisations whose price in sacrifice is excessive. Both their individual satisfactions, and those for which they are dependent upon sympathetic relations with their fellows, an almost equal group, are unduly restricted. Upon grounds of prudence alone they have been injudicious, and they may be condemned without any appeal to peculiarly ‘ethical’ standards. The muddle in which they are forced to live is itself sufficient ground for reprobation.

At the other extreme are those fortunate people who have achieved an ordered life, whose systems have developed clearing-houses by which the varying claims of different impulses are adjusted. Their free, untrammelled activity gains for them a maximum of varied satisfactions and involves a minimum of suppression and sacrifice. Particularly is this so with regard to those satisfactions which require humane, sympathetic, and friendly relations between individuals. The charge of egoism, or selfishness, can be brought against a naturalistic or utilitarian morality such as this only by overlooking the importance of these satisfactions in any well-balanced life. Unfair or aggressive behaviour, and preoccupation with self-regarding interests to the exclusion of due sensitiveness to the reciprocal claims of human intercourse, lead to a form of organisation which deprives the person so organised of whole ranges of important values. No mere loss of social pleasures is in question, but a twist or restriction of impulses, whose normal satisfaction is involved in almost all the greatest goods of life. The two senses in which a man may ‘take advantage’ of his fellows can be observed in practice to conflict. Swindling and bullying, whether in business matters or in personal relations, have their cost; which the best judges agree to be excessive. And the greater part of the cost lies of in the consequences of being found out, in the loss of social esteem and so forth, but in actual systematic disability to attain important values.

Although the person who habitually disregards the claims of his fellows to fair treatment and sympathetic understanding may be condemned, in most cases, upon the ground of his own actual loss of values in such behaviour, this of course is not the reason for the steps which may have to be taken against him. It may very well be the case that a person’s own interests are such that, if he understood them, were well organised in other words, he would be a useful and charming member of his community; but, so long as people are about who are not well organised, communities must protect themselves. They can defend their action on the ground that the general loss of value which would follow if they did not protect themselves far outweighs such losses as are incurred by the people whom they suppress or deport.