our will is brought in, and it stamps our effort with inconsistency. Thus even to pursue imperfectly one’s own advantage by itself is unreasonable, for by itself and purely it has no existence at all. It was a trait characteristic of critical Common Sense when it sought for the individual’s moral end by first supposing him isolated. For a dogmatic assumption that the individual remains what he is when you have cut off his relations, is very much what the vulgar understand by criticism. But, when such a question is discussed, it must be answered quite otherwise. The contents, asserted in the individual’s self-seeking, necessarily extend beyond his private limits. A maxim, therefore, merely to pursue one’s own advantage is, taken strictly, inconsistent. And a principle which contradicts itself is, once more, not reasonable.[1]
(iii.) In the third place, admitting self-assertion and self-denial as equally good, popular thought attempts to bring them together from outside. Goodness will now consist in the coincidence of these independent goods. The two are not to be absorbed by and resolved into a third. Each, on the other hand, is to retain unaltered the character which it has, and the two, remaining two, are somehow to be conjoined. And this, as we have seen throughout our work, is quite impossible. If two conflicting finite elements are anywhere to be harmonized, the first condition is that each should forego and should transcend its private character. Each, in other words, working out the discrepancy
- ↑ The same conclusion holds if for “advantage” one writes “pleasure.” For pleasure is necessarily connected with other content, and is not isolated, or again conjoined hap-hazard and accidentally. One may of course pursue “merely one’s own” pleasure, in the sense that one tries to aim at and to consider this partial end by itself. But, if you assert that this end has not another aspect which contradicts “merely one’s own,” the assertion is false. And it is, I presume, a moral platitude that selfish action always must concern more than the actor.
