Note 37 — A LECTURE

(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.