love is love. They become contradictory only when you say, ‘hate your friends,’ or ‘love your enemies;’ or when, instead of affirming, you analyze them, and see that each is the affirmation of a negation, or the negation of an affirmation. Hate we can all see is so, and deeper thinkers tell us the same of love.
What duty for duty’s sake really does is first to posit a determination, such as property, love, courage, &c., and then to say that whatever contradicts these is wrong. And, since the principle is a formal empty universal, there is no connection between it and the content which is brought under it. That connection is made from the outside, and rests on arbitrary choice, or considerations of general well-being and perhaps pleasure. The morality of pure duty turns out then to be either something like a Hedonistic rule,[1] or no rule at all, save the hypocritical maxim that, before you do what you like, you should call it duty; and this outdoes Probabilism.
Thus to get from the form of duty to particular duties is impossible. The particular duties must be taken for granted, as in ordinary morality they are taken for granted. But supposing this done, is duty for duty’s sake a valid formula, in the sense that we are to act always on a law and nothing but a law, and that a law can have no exceptions, in the sense of particular cases where it is overruled? No, this takes for granted that life is so simple that we never have to consider more than one duty at a time: whereas we really have to do with conflicting duties, which as a rule escape conflict simply because it is understood which have to give way. It is a mistake to suppose that collision of duties is uncommon; it has been remarked truly that every act can be taken to involve such collision.
To put the question plainly—It is clear that in a given case I may have several duties, and that I may be able to do only one. I must then break some ‘categorical’ law, and the question the ordinary man puts to himself is, Which duty am I to do? He would say, ‘all duties have their limits and are subordinated one to another. You can not put them all in the form of your “categorical imperative” (in the shape of a law absolute and dependent on nothing beside itself) without such exceptions and modifica-
- ↑ Schopenhauer has some characteristic and piquant criticism on this head.
