A Preface to Morals > Chapter XI. The Cure of Souls > Superstition and Self-Consciousness
This change of attitude toward evil is not, as at first perhaps it may seem, merely a new way of talking about the same thing. It alters radically the nature of evil, itself. For evil is not a quality of things as such. It is a quality of our relation to them. A dissonance in music is unpleasant only to a musical ear. Pain is an evil only if someone suffers, and there are those to whom pain is pleasure and most men's evil their good. For things are neutral and evil is a certain way of experiencing them.
To realize this is to destroy the awfulness of evil. I use the word 'awful' in its exact sense, and I mean that in abandoning the notion that evil has to be reconciled with a theory of how the world is governed, we rob it of universal significance. We deflate it. The psychological consequences are enormous, for a very great part of all human suffering lies not in the pain itself, but in the anxiety contributed by the meaning which we attach to it. Lucretius understood this quite well, and in his superb argument against the fear of death he reasoned that death has no terror because nothing can be terrible to those who no longer exist. Before we were born, he says, 'we felt no distress when the Poeni from all sides came together to do battle .... For he whom evil is to befall, must in his own person exist at the very time it comes, if the misery and suffering are haply to have any place at all." St. Thomas defines superstition as the vice of excess in religion, and in this sense of the word it may be said that the effect of the modern approach is to take evils out of the context of superstition.
They cease to be signs and portents symbolizing the whole of human destiny and become specific and distinguishable situations which have to be dealt with. The effect of this is not only to limit drastically the meaning, and therefore the dreadfulness, of any evil, but to substitute for a general sense of evil an analytical estimate of particular evils. They are then seen to be of long duration and of short, preventable, curable, or inevitable. As long as all evils are believed somehow to fit into a divine, if mysterious, plan, the effort to eradicate them must seem on the whole futile, and even impious. The history of medical progress offers innumerable instances of how men have resisted the introduction of sanitary measures because they dreaded to interfere with the providence of God. It is still felt, I believe, in many quarters, even in medical circles, that to mitigate the labor pains in childbirth is to blaspheme against the commandment that in pain children shall be brought forth. An aura of dread surrounds evil as long as evil situations remain entangled with a theory of divine government.
The realization that evil exists only because we feel it to be painful helps us not only to dissociate it from this aura of dread but to dissociate ourselves from our own feelings about it. This is a momentous achievement in the inner life of man. To be able to observe our own feelings as if they were objective facts, to detach ourselves from our own fears, hates, and lusts, to examine them, name them, identify them, understand their origin, and finally to judge them, is somehow to rob them of their imperiousness. They are no longer the same feelings. They no longer dominate the whole field of consciousness. They seem no longer to command the whole energy of our being. By becoming conscious of them we in some fashion or other destroy their concentration and diffuse their energy into other channels. We cease to be possessed by one passion; contrary passions retain their vitality, and an equilibrium tends to establish itself.
Just what the psychological mechanism of all this is I do not pretend to say. It is something to which psychologists are giving increasing attention. But since Hellenic times the phenomenon which I have been describing has been well known. It was undoubtedly what the Sophists meant by the injunction: know thyself. It was in large measure to achieve control through detachment that Socrates elaborated his dialectic, for the Socratic dialectic is an instrument for making men self-conscious, and therefore the masters of their motives. Spinoza grasped this principle with great 'clarity. "An emotion," he says, "which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it." He goes on to say that "insofar as the mind understands all things as necessary, it has more power over the emotions, or is less passive to them."
The more recent discoveries in the field of psychoanalysis are an elaboration of this principle. They are based on the discovery of Freud and Breuer at the close of the last century that a catharsis of emotion is often obtained if the patient can be made to recall, and thus to relive by describing it, the emotional situation which troubles him. The release of the psychic poison is known technically as an abreaction. Where the new psychology supplements the insights of the Sophists, of Socrates, and Spinoza, is in the demonstration that there are powerful passions affecting our lives of which it is impossible by ordinary effort of memory "to form a clear and distinct idea." They are said to be unconscious, or more accurately, I suppose, they are out of the reach of the normal consciousness. Freud and his school have invented an elaborate technic by which the analyst is able frequently to help the patient thread his way back through a chain of associations to the buried passion and fetch it into consciousness.
The special technic of psychoanalysis can be tested only by scientific experience. The therapeutic claims made by psychoanalysts, and their theories of the functional disorders, lie outside the realm of this discussion. But the essential principle is not a technical matter. Anyone can confirm it out of his own experience. It has been discovered and rediscovered by shrewd observers of human nature for at least two thousand years. To become detached from one's passions and to understand them consciously is to render them disinterested. A disinterested mind is harmonious with itself and with reality.
This is the principle by which a humanistic culture becomes bearable. If the principle of a theocratic culture is dependence, obedience, conformity in the presence of a superhuman power which administers reality, the principle of humanism is detachment, understanding, and disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.