52 Doing good for some public reward is not doing good: it is doing something for public reward. That it also does good may seem to be its justification; but it is a dangerous justification, as I shall show.
53 There is a third less obvious ‘mode’ of pleasure to which we do not usually attach the idea, though we have the sensation, of pleasure. We may call it functional, and it is the pleasure we get from all those activities essential to our being – eating, excreting, breathing, and ultimately, existing. In a sense these are the only pleasures we cannot deny having. If we do not distinguish them very clearly it is because they are overlaid by the other two much more conscious and complex modes. If I choose what I eat, I experience the intended pleasure; if I enjoy what I eat more than I expected, I experience the fortuitous; but buried beneath is the functional pleasure of eating because to eat is to continue to exist. To use Jungian terminology, this third mode is archetypal, and I believe that from it we ought to derive our motive for doing good. In terms of bodily functions, we should evacuate good – not ejaculate it.
54 We never have a surfeit of natural bodily functions. We expect no extrinsic reward for carrying them out, since we know that the reward lies in the performance. Non-performance means illness or death, just as the non-performance of good actions finally means the death of society. Charity, kindness to others, actions against injustice and inequality should be acts of hygiene, not of pleasure.
55 What then does the functional ‘health’ thus brought about consist of? Its most important element is this: that the good action (and from ‘good action’ I am here excluding all those actions whose real motive is public esteem) is the most convincing proof we shall ever have that we do possess a relative freedom of will. Even when it does not involve acting against our self-interest, the good action requires a lack of self-interest, or conversely, an output of unnecessary (in terms of our biological needs) energy. It is an act against inertia, against what would have been otherwise determined by inertia and natural process. In a sense it is a divine act, in the old sense of divine: that is, the intervention of a free will upon matter imprisoned in its mere matterness.
56 All our concepts of God are concepts of our own potentialities. The charity and compassion that have been universally attributed to the finest – under their different outward masks – of such God-concepts are the qualities we are striving to establish in ourselves. They have nothing to do with any external ‘absolute’ reality; they are reflections of our hopes.
57 We cannot in ordinary life easily separate self-interested motives from the ‘hygienic’ one I propose. But the hygienic motive can always be used to assess the others. It constitutes a check upon them, and especially in that sadly wide category where the action seems good in the enactor’s mind but is clearly evil in its effects. There were certainly members of the Inquisition, there were Protestant witch-burners, there were perhaps even Nazi race-exterminators who genuinely and disinterestedly believed in the goodness of what they were doing. But even if one gives them every benefit of every doubt, they were all impelled by spurious rewards for their ‘good’ actions. They hoped for a better world to come for themselves and their co-believers, not for the heretics, witches and Jews they destroyed. They acted not for greater freedom, but for greater pleasure.
58 Freedom of will in a world without freedom is like a fish in a world without water. It cannot exist because it cannot use itself. The greatest fallacy of political tyranny has always been that the tyrant is free while his subjects are enslaved; but he is enslaved by his own enslaving, tyrannized by his own tyranny. He is not free to act as he wishes because what he wishes is determined, and generally very narrowly, by the demands of maintaining tyranny. And this political truth is true on a personal level. If the intention of a good action is not finally to institute more freedom (therefore, more justice and equality) for all, it will be partly evil not only to the object of the action but to the enactor, since its evil aspects will limit his own freedom. In terms of functional pleasure, it will be similar to unexcreted food, whose nutritional goodness is progressively counteracted by the damage it will do if its harmful elements are not passed out of the organism.
59 Over the last two hundred years there has been a great improvement in personal and public hygiene and cleanliness; and this was largely brought about by persuading people that the results of being dirty and apathetic in the face of disease were not acts of God, but preventable acts of nature; not the sheer misery in things, but the controllable mechanisms of life.
60 We have had the first, the physical, phase of the hygienic revolution; it is time we went to the barricades for the second, the mental. Not doing good when you usefully could is not immoral; it is going about with excrement on the hands.
6
THE TENSIONAL NATURE OF HUMAN REALITY
1 Because of our powers of reasoning, imagining and supposing, we exist mentally in a world of opposites, converses, negatives. There may be some kind of absolute reality that is not like this. There may be other relative realities. But this tensional, or polar, reality is the one we humans inhabit.
2 Anything that exists or can be imagined to exist is a pole. All feelings, ideas, thoughts, are poles; and each pole has counterpoles.
3 There are two categories of counterpole. One is nothingness, the non-existence of the pole. The other is whatever denies, attacks, diminishes, stands contrary to or diverts from the pole.
4 The obvious counterpole of an idea is the contrary idea. The world is round; the world is not round. But whatever else stands between my mind and its continuous concentration on the idea (The world is round) is also a counterpole. Now the contrary idea (The world is not round) is at first sight the most dangerous enemy of the pole idea; but all those subsidiary counterpoles (other concerns, other events, other exigencies, other ideas) that distract the mind from the pole idea endanger it far more; in fact, to the extent that they do not signal it, but submerge it, they reduce it to nothingness. There is thus a paradoxical sense in which the contrary idea signals and supports the idea to which it is superficially most opposed.
5 Even when contrary propositions are meaningless or demonstrably false they contribute life and meaning to the propositions they oppose; just as the nonexistence, in human terms of existing, of ‘God’ gives life and meaning to all that exists.
6 Our first and most direct apprehension of this polarity is got from our experience of our own self – our body and then our mind.
THE COUNTERPOLES OF THE ‘I’
7 I am made constantly aware of the otherness of things. They are all in some sense my counterpoles. A Sartrean existentialist would say that they hedge me in, they tyrannize me, they encroach on my selfhood. But they define me, they tell me what I am, and if I am not told what I am, I do not know what I am. I am aware too that all other objects are in exactly the same situation as myself: minute pole in a vast ocean of counterpoles, I am infinitely isolated, but my situation is infinitely repeated.
8 All parts of my body are objects external to me: my hands, my tongue, my digestive mechanism. The words I speak are counterpoles. There is no mental activity I cannot stand back from and be towards as to a counterpole. So I am a tissue of counterpoles. My body and my thoughts and my words are like the garden and the rooms and the furniture of my house. Certainly they seem to me more mine than your garden or the room you read in at this moment; but a moment’s analysis tells me that they are not mine in any total or scientific sense. They are mine in the artificiality of the law, and in the illogicality (or biologicality) of emotion. My garden is this collection of grass, earth, plants, trees that I possess in law and can enjoy while I live; it is not mine. Nothing, not even what I call my self, is mine; individuality and counter-polarity separate me from all.