Handbook of Ethical Theory - George Stuart Fullerton (chrome ebook reader txt) 📗

that we apply the term feeling. Thoughts are agreeable or disagreeable, pleasurable or painful. So are emotions. The agreeableness or disagreeableness, pleasantness or painfulness, which are the accompaniments of thoughts and emotions, have been called by modern psychologists their feeling-tone. It is not out of harmony with common usage to give them the name of feelings. In so doing we contrast them with knowledge and assimilate them to emotion.

Whether every sensation and every thought gives rise to an emotion of some sort is matter for dispute, as is also the question whether every sensation, thought and emotion is tinged with some degree of pleasurable or painful feeling. In the absence of conclusive evidence, it is open to us to assume that some feeling is always present where there is mental activity of any kind. The feeling may be so faint and evanescent as to escape detection, but this does not prove that it is absent.

50. FEELING AND ACTION.—Emotions and feelings of pleasure and pain are the normal accompaniments of the exercise of the instincts and impulses of creatures that desire and will. Within limits, we appear to be able to take them as an index of the strength of the desire and the vigor of the effort at attainment.

An act of cruelty is perpetrated. I see it, and it leaves me, perhaps, cold and unmoved. In such case, it is hardly expected of me that I should take energetic measures to have the evil-doer punished. The man whose face flushes, whose brows descend, whose teeth come together, whose fists clench, whose heart beats thickly, at the recognition of an insult, is, as a rule, the man from whom we look for vigorous efforts at retaliation. The apathetic creature who feels no resentment is usually expected to swallow the indignity. The child who jumps for joy at the sight of a new doll is supposed to desire it eagerly, and to be ready to make efforts to obtain it.

But it is only within limits that this relation between feeling and action holds. Men of little emotion may be resolute and prompt to action. Their desires, as evinced by their actions, may be persistent and effective. Nor need the individual fix his choice upon the particular object that arouses in him the most feeling. A man may see his fellow-creature destitute, and may shed tears over his pitiable lot. But he will not bequeath his money to him. He will leave it to his son, for whom, perhaps, he has no respect and has come to have little affection. And he may leave it to him with regret, knowing that it will be dissipated in ways which he cannot approve. It has been pointed out with justice that the exercise of many instincts may be accompanied with little feeling; and we are all aware of the fact that, as action becomes habitual, emotion tends to evaporate and the pleasure of effort and attainment is apt to be reduced to a minimum.

51. FEELING AS OBJECT.—It is well to keep in mind the distinction between feeling as a psychic fact present in the mind of the creature desiring and willing, and feeling as the object of desire and will. A man in a rage is the victim of a storm of feeling. The thought of the injury he has received and the desire for retaliation by no means exhaust the contents of his mind. But the passion which shakes him is not his object; that object is revengeful action.

Nevertheless, feeling may be made the object of desire and will. One may attend a religious or political meeting with the deliberate view of arousing in one’s self certain complex emotions. Poe’s gruesome tales are read for the sake of the thrill which is produced by the perusal. Probably the desire for excitement, for the experiencing of certain vivid emotions, has no little to do with the attraction exercised by certain criminal professions. The burglar desires the booty, but he may desire something more.

Emotions have, as we have seen, their “tone” of pleasure or pain. They are agreeable or the reverse, and it is palpable that men do not, as a rule, deliberately make them the object of desire and will in indifference to the fact that they are pleasant or are painful. We do not normally wish to attain to states of mind in which remorse plays a prominent part; we do not aim to revel in shame; we do not seek to be haunted with fear. Pleasurable emotions are desired, where desire is set on emotions at all; and painful emotions are regarded by the mind as unwelcome guests. At any rate, this appears to be the rule, and to characterize the man whom we regard as normal.

This being the case, it seems natural to ask whether, when we embrace the intention of producing in ourselves a given emotion, our motive may not be narrower in scope, namely, the attainment of pleasure? and, when we wish to rid the mind of any emotion, our motive may not be the avoidance of pain?

The adoption of this view would give to the feelings of pleasure and pain a unique importance. They would be accepted as the only ultimate objects of desire and will. By many they have been thus accepted. It has been insisted that objects of every description are chosen only as they arouse some feeling; and that those which promise pleasant feeling are sought and those which entail pain are avoided. The general recognition of the primacy of pleasure and pain over our other feelings, over the specific emotions mentioned above, is indicated by the fact that ethical writers of eminence sometimes make pleasure and pain synonymous with feeling in general, passing over other feelings, as though it were not important for the moralist to take them into consideration. The dispute whether the proper course for human action to take is prescribed by reason or is dictated by feeling often resolves itself into the problem whether we should be guided by reason, or by a consideration of pleasure to be attained or pain to be avoided.

52. FREEDOM AS OBJECT.—The acceptance of pleasure and pain as the ultimate motives of human action seems, at first sight, to be of inestimable assistance to us in threading our way through the labyrinth of diverse choices made by creatures that desire and will.

But only at first sight. Even if it be true that every creature seeks only to attain pleasure and to avoid pain, and uses the means it finds to hand in the attainment of these ends, the endless diversity of the means remains as a thing to reckon with. The knowledge that all men desire pleasure does not help us a whit in dealing with men, unless we know what things will give pleasure to this man or to that. All men may desire pleasure; but it remains true that what gives pleasure to the spendthrift gives pain to the miser; what appeals to the glutton disgusts a man of refined tastes. If all men were alike and precisely alike, and if their natures were very simple and remained unchanged, the problem of the distribution of pleasures would be vastly simplified.

Whether the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain may be regarded as the only ultimate ends proper to man will be discussed later. [Footnote: See chapter xxv.] Here, it is important to insist that so general a formula gives us little useful information touching the set of the will either of classes of men or of individuals. This we can attain to only as a result of the study of the complex nature of man as revealed in the choices which he actually makes. The ends of man are many and various; some of these ends are accidental, palpably means for the attainment of other ends more fundamental, and for them other means of attaining the same ends may be substituted. But other ends, and they are by no means to be reduced to a single class, appear to belong to the very nature of man. In seeking them he is giving expression to the impulses which make him what he is.

In so far as these impulses find an unimpeded expression the man is free; otherwise he is under restraint. Without rendering here a final decision upon the importance of the role played in human life by pleasure and pain, one feels impelled to ask the question whether the goal of a man’s endeavors may not best be described as freedom? Not freedom in the abstract, freedom to do anything and everything, but freedom to live the life appropriate to him as man, and as a man of a given type. That this freedom is limited in a variety of ways, by his material environment, by the clashing of impulses within himself, by the conflict of his desires with the will of the social organism in which he finds his place, is sufficiently palpable.