Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  Closely connected with this is the interesting question whether in general pleasure can be a countervailing equivalent for pain, and what coefficient or exponent must be assigned to a degree of pleasure to counterbalance for consciousness an equal degree of pain. Schopenhauer, citing the verse of Petrarch, “Mille piacer’ non vagliono un tormento (a thousand pleasures are not worth one pain),” makes the eccentric assertion that altogether a pain can never be balanced by any degree of pleasure; that therefore a world in which pain can occur at all is, under all circumstances, with ever so much preponderating happiness, worse than none. This view could hardly be supported; whether, however, there do not lie in it a core of truth so far as the co-efficient necessary for equivalence does not at all need to be = 1, as is usually assumed, that were well worthy of consideration.

  If I have the choice either of not at all hearing, or of hearing first for five minutes discords and then for five minutes a fine piece of music; if I have the choice either not to smell at all, or to smell first a stench and then a perfume; if I have the choice either not to taste, or to taste first something disagreeable and then something agreeable, I shall in all the cases decide for the non-hearing, non-smelling, and non-tasting, even if the successive homogeneous painful and pleasurable sensations appear to me to be equal in degree, although it would certainly be very difficult to ascertain the equality of the degree.

  Hence I conclude that the pleasure must be perceptibly greater in degree than a pain of like kind, if they are to be equivalent in consciousness, so that one determines their combination as equal to the zero of sensation and prefers it to the latter on a small enhancement of the pleasure or lowering of the pain. For the rest, this coefficient probably fluctuates with different individuals within certain limits, and only its mean amount should be greater than 1.

  On the causes underlying this remarkable phenomenon I venture to make no supposition. This much is certain, that, if the fact is correct, this circumstance also tells against a preponderance of happiness in the world, for suppose the case that even the sum of pleasure and pain objectively taken were equal, yet their combination subjectively would stand below the zero-point, as the combination of a stench and a fragrance is below zero. The world accordingly resembles a money-lottery: the appointed pains one must pay in in full, but the gains one receives only with a deduction, which answers to the difference between the constant coefficient of the pleasure-and-pain equation and 1. Were this remarkable inequality in value of pleasure and pain, which seems to me highly probable, confirmed on other sides, it should be added to the above four points as a fifth. In this sense Schopenhauer says (Parerga, ii. 313): “It is in harmony with this that we commonly find joys far below, pains far above our expectation.” (P. 321): “Deserving of envy is no one, of commiseration numberless.” (W. a. W. u. V., ii. 658): “Before one declares with such confidence that life is a desirable or thankworthy good, let any one calmly compare the sum of possible delight which a human being may enjoy in his life with the sum of possible suffering which may afflict him in his life. I believe the balance will not be difficult to strike.”

  It is now our task to inquire whether in the life of the individual the sum of pleasure or pain preponderates, and whether in the individual as such the conditions are given for attaining, under the most favourable circumstances conceivable in one’s life, an excess of pleasure over pain. As the field to be viewed is too vast for a simultaneous survey, a solution will be facilitated by considering separately the sum of pleasure and pain according to the main directions of life. But during the future considerations the reader must always keep in mind these premised general observations, since the circumstances mentioned are continually acting as essentially limiting co-efficients of pleasure, whilst, on the contrary, they either leave the pain unaffected or even increase it.

  2. Health, Youth, Freedom, and a Competence as Conditions of the Zero-point of Feeling, and Contentment .—The states mentioned are mostly claimed as the highest goods of life, and not without reason; nevertheless they fail to afford positive pleasure, save when they have just arisen by transition from the opposite states of pain. During their undisturbed continuance, however, they represent only the zero-mark of sensation, and by no means a positive elevation above it; the building-ground on which the expected enjoyments of life are to be erected. It is in accordance with this that the persistence of the states awakes as little a feeling of pleasure as of pain, since at the zero-point in general there is nothing to be felt, but that every fall from this level into sickness, old age, bondage, and distress is painfully felt. These goods have thus, in fact, the purely privative character that Leibniz would ascribe to evil; they are the privation of age, sickness, servitude, and distress, and are intrinsically incapable of being raised above the zero-point of sensation on the side of pleasure, thus incapable of producing a pleasure, unless by remission of an antecedent pain, even if it consist only of an imaginary fear or care.

  In health all this is quite self-evident; nobody feels a limb except when he is ill; only the nervous feels that he has nerves; only he who has diseased eyes that he has those organs: the healthy, however, perceives only by sight and touch that he has a body. With freedom it is just the same. Nobody feels if he himself determines his actions, for this is the self-evident natural condition, but undoubtedly he feels painfully all external constraint, every invasion of his self-determination, as it were, as an injury of the first and most original law of Nature, that he shares with every animal, with every atomic force.

  Youth is, in the first place, the time of life in which alone perfect health and an unimpeded use of the body and mind is found, whilst with age its infirmities also make their appearance, which are felt painfully enough. But, in the second place, youth alone, a direct consequence of the unimpeded use of the body and mind, possesses the full capacity of enjoyment, whilst in age undoubtedly all the burdens, inconveniences, vexation, disagreeables, and torments make themselves doubly sensible, but the faculty for enjoyment diminishes more and more. This capacity for enjoyment has, however, still only the value of the level; it is only capacity, i.e., possibility (not reality) of enjoyment. What is the good, however, of the best teeth, if one has nothing to bite with them?

  Finally, also, the competency or assurance against want and privation cannot be regarded as a positive gain or enjoyment, but only as the conditio sine qua non of bare life, which has to wait for its enjoyable fulfilment. To endure hunger, thirst, frost, heat, or damp is painful; protection from these evils by needful dwelling, clothing, and food cannot be called positive good (enjoyment in eating does not belong to this category). Were, namely, the bare life assured in its conditions of existence already a positive good, mere existence in itself must fill and satisfy us. The contrary is the case: the assured existence is a torment, unless a filling up of the same is added. This torment, which is expressed in ennui, may be so insupportable that even pains and ills are welcome to escape it.

  The most usual filling of life is work. There can be no doubt that work for him who must work is an evil, be it in its consequences for himself, as for humanity and the advancing evolution, ever so rich in blessing; for nobody works who is not compelled, i.e., who does not take work upon himself as the less of two evils—whether the greater evil be want, the torment of ambition, or even mere ennui—or who had not the intention through undertaking this evil to purchase for himself greater positive good (e.g., the satisfaction in rendering life more pleasant for himself and those dear to him, or for the value of the performances produced by means of work). All that can be said on the value of work reduces itself either to economical advantages (with which we shall deal later on), or to the avoidance of greater evils (idleness is the beginning of all vices); and the utmost that man can attain to is, “that he should rejoice in his own works, for that is his portion,” i.e., that he should become habituated to bear the inevitable as well as possible, as the cart-horse at last draws the cart with tolerable good-humour. At wo
rk man consoles himself with the prospect of leisure, and in leisure we have to console ourselves with the thought of work. Thus the alternate play of leisure and work comes to this, that the sick turns himself in his bed to get out of his uncomfortable position, but soon finds the new position just as uncomfortable, and so turns back again.

  As a rule, work is the price for a secure existence. It is not enough, therefore, that the assured existence represent in itself no positive good, but only the zero-point of sensation; this purely privative good must still be purchased by pain, in contrast to health and youth, which one only obtains as gifts. And how great is often the pain which is inflicted on the poor by work! I am not thinking of the labour of slaves, but of the labour of the operatives of our large towns. “At the age of five to enter a cotton-mill or other factory, and from that time onward to be fixed there and perform the same mechanical work for ten, twelve, and finally fourteen hours, is to purchase dearly the pleasure of breathing” (W. a. W. u. V., ii. 661).

  No less considerable sacrifices than the earning of a maintenance does the conquest of a relative freedom demand, for complete freedom is never obtained. On the other side, the assurance of existence and the attainable degree of freedom have the advantage that one can in general conquer them by one’s own energy, whereas we are altogether passively receptive with regard to youth and health.

  If now one actually possesses these four privative goods, the external conditions of contentment are given; if then the requisite internal condition, resignation, acquiescence in the inevitable, be added, contentment will dwell in the mind so long as no considerable misfortunes and pains afflict it. Contentment craves no positive happiness; it is just the foregoing of such. It only desires freedom from considerable evils and pains, thus about the zero-point of feeling. Positive goods and positive happiness can add nothing to contentment, but undoubtedly they can endanger it; for the greater the positive goods and good fortune, the greater is the probability of suffering by their loss great pains, which temporarily destroy contentment. Contentment can thus be so little regarded as a sign of positive happiness, that rather the poorest and those with fewest wants can most easily obtain permanent possession of it. If, nevertheless, contentment is so frequently lauded as a happy state, nay, as the supreme attainable felicity (Aristot., Eth. Eud., vii. 2: , Happiness is the possession of the self-sufficient; Spinoza, Eth., part. 4, Prop. 52, Obs.: Self-contentment is truly the utmost that we can hope), this can only be true if the state of painlessness and voluntary resignation of all positive felicity deserves the preference before the essentially transient possession of positive happiness. Altogether, if, as I believe, it is justifiable to call health, youth, liberty, and an easy existence the highest goods, and contentment the supreme happiness, it follows at once from that how doubtful must the case stand with all positive goods and positive happiness that one can justly place before them the privative goods, those consisting in mere freedom from pain. But what, then, does freedom from pain offer? Truly nothing more than non-existence! If, then, a “but” is still connected with positive goods and happiness, which places them, on the whole, still below contentment, i.e., still below the zero-point of sensation, at which non-existence permanently stands, it is thereby declared that they also rank below non-existence. Equal in value to non-existence would only rank the absolutely contented life, if there were such: there is none, however, for even the most contented is not always perfectly and in all respects contented, consequently all life ranks in value below the absolutely contented, consequently below non-existence.

  3. Hunger and Love .

  “Until this paragon of spheres

  By philosophic thought coheres,

  The vast machine will be controlled

  By love and hunger, as of old,”

  says Schiller very rightly. They are both, not only for progress and development in the animal kingdom, but also for the commencing development of humanity and the ruder states which characterise the same, almost the sole springs of action. If the value of these two factors for the individual must be pronounced to be small, there is little prospect of showing the value of individual life for its own sake in other ways.

  Hunger is painful in the extreme, which certainly he alone knows who has felt it; its satisfaction, the gratification of satiety, is for the brain the mere removal of pain, whilst for the subordinate centres it undoubtedly may entail a positive elevation above the zero-point of sensation in the comfortable feeling of digestion. This will, however, for the common feeling or total well-being of the individual, have less weight the more the subordinate centres recede relatively to the brain, which receives only feeble traces of the comfortable feeling of digestion, but feels so much the more depressed in its mental tone and working power through the satiation. Whoever finds himself in the fortunate situation of being able, whenever the commencement of hunger is announced, instantly to satisfy the same, and whoever is not inconvenienced by the lowering of the power of the brain through satiety, may certainly receive through hunger a certain excess of pleasure by the pleasure of digestion; but how few are in this doubly enviable position! Most of the 1300 millions of the earth’s inhabitants have either a scanty nourishment, unsatisfying and prolonging life with difficulty, or they live for a time in superfluity, from which they derive no preponderating enjoyment, and must for another period actually starve and suffer want, when they must accordingly endure the pains of hunger for long periods, whilst the pleasure of satiety, with perfect stilling of hunger, only occupies a few hours of the day. But now let any one compare the dull delight of satiety and digestion with the distinct gnawing of hunger or the hell-torments of thirst to which animals in deserts, steppes, and such regions, that in the hot season are perfectly dry, are not seldom exposed. How much more, however, must among many species of animals the pain of hunger exceed the pleasure of satiety in the course of life, which at certain seasons die of hunger from want of food, often in considerable numbers, or for weeks and months just on the brink of starvation, prolong their existence in slightly more favourable conditions of life! This happens both with graminivorous birds and birds in the winter of the polar and temperate zones and in the arid tropics, as also with carnivora and beasts of prey, which often for weeks wander about vainly in search of booty until they perish of inanition. It is not so long since in Europe one calculated on a famine every seven years, and if this has been changed by our present means of communication into mere dearth, i.e., into famine merely for the poorest classes, this or a similar state of things certainly continues to exist in by far the largest part of the earth.

  But even in our large towns we read ever and anon of cases of literal dying of hunger. Can the gluttony of a thousand gourmands outweigh the torments of one starving human being?

  And yet extreme starvation is with us the rarer and lesser evil produced by hunger; far more fearful is the bodily and mental wasting away of the race, the dying off of children, and the peculiar diseases engendered by it. One has only to read the accounts of the weaving districts of Silesia or of the, dens of misery of London. The less, however, a check is given to the progressive increase of humanity by devastating wars, the more the hosts of epidemics disappear by increasing cleanliness and their spread is hindered by precautionary measures, the more must the ability to procure sustenance prove the sole natural limit to increase, since the proportion of births remains tolerably the same; and the hypothesis of Carey that hereafter the ability of the human race to procreate and increase will diminish is altogether arbitrary, and justified by no historical analogies.

  However great may be the progress of agriculture and chemistry, still at last a point must be reached beyond which the production of the means of subsistence cannot go. The increase of the number of human beings by generation has, however, no limit save that which is assigned by the impossibility of obtaining subsistence; this has always formed the main source of restriction, and will become so more exclusively. This limit, however, is not abrupt and wel
l defined, but it passes from a sufficiency to impossibility of existence through infinitely numerous life-stages, of which each succeeding one is more hungry and wretched. To deceive instinct the stomach is often filled with substances that are neither agreeable in taste nor nutritious; thus in China, e.g., the poorest class, that cannot purchase rice, eat a kind of sea-tangle, which contains scarcely any nutritive matter. If one thinks of the masses which live on tasteless or insipid aliment (rice, potatoes), one will no longer be able to assert that, for the great excess of pain which hunger produces in the world, the relish connected with eating could offer a certain makeweight.

  The result in respect of hunger is then this, that the individual, by the simple stilling of his hunger, never experiences a positive rise above the zero-point of sensation; that under specially favourable circumstances he can certainly gain a positive excess of pleasure by the relish and pleasure of digestion connected with hunger; but that in the animal kingdom and human kingdom, on the whole, the torment and pain produced by hunger and its consequences far outweigh, and always will outweigh, the pleasure connected with its satisfaction. Considered in itself, therefore, the need of food is an evil; only the progress of development, to which it acts as a spring through the struggle for food, not its own value, can teleologically justify this evil.