THE sheer joy we sometimes take in evil is a thing so striking to the imagination that it supplies one of the strongest arguments for belief in a positive inclination of human nature toward the wrong, in the reality of evil as a force to be set up in opposition to the good, in an “original sin” beyond the help of man, and in the consequent insuperable dualism in morals which lies at the base of all Manicheisms. Says Edgar Allan Poe in “The Black Cat”: “I am not more sure that my soul lives than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties or sentiments which give direction to the character of man.” An elementary and mitigated form of the “joy of evil” is commonly noted in our appetite for “forbidden fruit.” “Oh, would virtue had been forbidden,” says the “Yorkshire Tragedy.” “We should then have proved all virtuous; for ‘tis our blood to love what we are forbidden.” Experience, in fact, has taught us that to prohibit a thing is to make that thing an object of desire; and sometimes in despair of finally vanquishing such a desire, or else to evade the hard struggle the victory would cost, we remove the prohibition, we license the wrong we would destroy, hoping thus to cool the boiling of certain lusts, to dim the charms of certain allurements, to obviate the untoward effects of this or that excess; though we know that the compromise not only fails to weaken the impulses in question, but actually strengthens them.

This expedient is a common one in dealing with children and adolescents (and even women), and it may at times be justified by circumstances at a given moment when no sounder measures of correction are available. Perhaps the very abundance of the restrictions laid upon natural love, whether by family discipline or by civil and penal law, have so sharpened the acrid pleasures of furtive or defiant waywardness as to lead certain moralists to the conclusion that sexual passion has its true basis in a “joy of evil.” The thought was expressed by Baudelaire not only in prose but in verses of deep inspiration and sturdy fibre: Qui donc devant l’amour ose parler d’enfer?

Maudit soit à jamais le rêveur inutile

Qui voulut le premier, dans sa stupidité, S’éprenant d’un problème insoluble et stérile, Aux choses de l’amour mêler l’honnêteté!

Celui qui veut unir dans un accord mystique L’ombre avec la chaleur, la nuit avec le jour, Ne chauffera jamais son corps paralytique A ce rouge soleil que l’on nomme l’amour!

But the pleasure we take in “forbidden fruit” might well be examined closely to see whether it is really referable to a primal impulse toward evil, as a first hasty conclusion might suggest. And so examining it we find that the “pleasure of doing wrong” is simply a verbal formula of approximate description which, instead of defining the situation positively, defines it negatively, depicting its naked reality from a moral point of view and colouring the picture with immoral suggestions and therefore with moral judgments. So far as the pleasure of tasting forbidden fruit comes from the prohibition itself, it is the pleasure of overcoming an obstacle, a pleasure intensified in proportion as the obstacle is great. And what is there wrong in that? Is it not the same pleasure we take in laboriously mastering some hidden truth of science, or in attaining any noble objective? We commonly suppose that men of robust intellect dislike easy problems and welcome hard ones; just as men of strong character are lifted above themselves and rejoice when they are called upon to face great and bitter trials; whereas in the commonplaces of everyday life their heroism languishes for lack of a prize sufficiently glorious to stimulate it.

Certainly, some one may say, such a pleasure would be innocent enough if the obstacle in this particular case did not happen to be the moral law; indeed, because the pleasure here springs from the violation of the moral law it may properly be called a pleasure in wrongdoing. But this is the point, rather: morality here appears precisely as a “law,” emanating therefore from a law-giver—another person, society, God. It is not morality, accordingly, but a brute, external, wholly non-rational obstacle, which gets in the individual’s way and which he is happy therefore to overcome. If the law were not something cold and foreign to the individual, if it sprang from his own conscience as a limitation he sets upon himself and to which he submits voluntarily, he could never rebel against it with any satisfaction; or at least, if there were rebellion and satisfaction, these would be due to some momentary obfuscation of conscience, some temporary slip down to a lower plane, to be immediately followed by remorse. Or, going at the matter the other way round: once the individual’s conscience is awakened, once the law becomes a matter of conviction, once what was a duty becomes will, passion, “love”—then the check that was formerly inoperative begins to work, the lower or repressed impulse yields to a higher and freer one, and a perverse and stupid indulgence gives place to spiritual harmony and beauty. The removal of a prohibition often has just this effect (not with children or weaklings, but with men), by giving the individual a chance to do of his own free will what he might refuse to do under constraint—not out of any contempt for morality but in rebellion against the oppressiveness of an arbitrary law.

However, the sweetness of the fruit forbidden is not altogether what we mean by the “joy of evil” proper; and this is something more, also, than the gratification we may feel at the sorrow or misfortune of another person, a sentiment accurately definable as the “pleasure of vengeance.” In this connection it may be just as well to clear up a frequent psychological misapprehension by pointing out that, strictly speaking, it is quite impossible to feel pleasure at another person’s pleasure, or pain at another’s pain. The pain and pleasure of an individual are incommunicable as such; for no individual can be blended with another individual—which is another way of saying that one link in the chain of reality cannot be another link in the same chain of reality. Our joy at another’s joy or our pain at another’s pain is our joy and our pain, based on considerations of our own. The delight parents may take in the conjugal happiness of their children is not, surely, identical with the joys the honeymoon is bringing to the bride and groom. So the pleasure we experience at another’s distress has its own spring within ourselves and is different from the suffering of the other person.

In the case of vengeance, we are moved perhaps by satisfaction at seeing a sort of justice done; in joyfully inflicting pain upon some one who has done harm to us, we may think we are freeing ourselves from danger of further harm from him or others. In rejoicing at the misfortune of an enemy we are warmed by a certain confidence that God, or Fortune, or the rhythm of life is with us as ally or co-worker. In vengeance, that is, what we enjoy is not the pain we have inflicted but the advantage we ourselves have won; and not till we have risen above this low plane of selfishness to the sphere of ethical penalties do we feel the different sort of satisfaction which comes from a sense that the moral order, and not our own individual security or profit, has been affirmed. In comparison with this latter pleasure, vengeance seems a mean and blameworthy thing as a unilateral guarantee of our individual welfare only; and when we have attained this high-mindedness, we reprove not only those who vent their private grudges, but also those who out of laziness or vanity or a pose of tolerance allow evil to go unpunished.

But to show the “joy of evil” in its pure, its classic, manifestation, people ordinarily point, not to the pleasures of the forbidden fruit and of vengeance, but to the disinterested enjoyment of another’s pain because it is pain—pain for pain’s sake, as it were. Schopenhauer, for example, in his review of anti-moral motives, distinguishes between selfishness and malevolence by saying that in selfishness the pain of another person is regarded as an instrument while in malevolence it is an end in itself; so that, as he continues, “selfishness, and even envy, are human failings, but the ‘joy of evil’ is of fiends and devils.” However, in the life of the Spirit, there can be no such thing as disinterestedness, which would be equivalent to irrationality and imply the existence of effects without cause. There is an element of self-interest in the Good itself, just as there is in utterly fiendish joy; and the distinction between the latter and selfishness, like all the distinctions which Schopenhauer sets up in his Ethics, is superficial and unsound. In the pleasure we feel at a misfortune which does not touch ourselves there is a certain sense of satisfaction at finding ourselves stronger in comparison with others from the simple fact that others have suddenly become weaker than ourselves. So a farmer is the gainer by the failure of another’s crop, and a merchant by the collapse of a competitor; for even if neither becomes the richer, at least he has improved or maintained his relative position in his own group. As La Rochefoucauld shrewdly (if cynically) observed: “y a toujours dans le malheur d’un ami quelque chose qui nous fait plaisir.” And in fact we always do feel at least a faint flash of joy at the misfortune of a friend. For one thing, among many, we now have an opportunity to help and comfort him. Then again, we can bring our friendship forward, and this gives added importance to our whole selves. Even when the pleasure we take in evil seems to be purely objective—artistic, so to speak—with no apparent profit to ourselves or even with some loss to ourselves, analysis which goes deep enough will always find the individual interest. It may be a question of sensuous hankerings, of morbid impulses of the imagination (people run to see accidents!), of wild and weird passions for the unusual and the extraordinary. But whatever it is, it will always have a motive which, taken by itself, is neither moral nor immoral, but merely useful for the life of the individual or for a given phase or aspect of the life of the individual. It will be pleasure at some good (some individual good) and not pleasure or joy in evil.

Considerations, these, which bring to light the element of absurdity that lurks in the notion of a “joy of evil,” an absurdity placarded in the very words of the phrase itself. Because evil, when it is truly evil, when, that is, it is felt as evil, is pain and not joy; and if it is not felt as evil, then it is not evil. Indeed, if a faculty of evil existed in the Spirit, we should be called upon to delimit its field of action, for no spiritual force can be suppressed or left without expression.

As a matter of fact, the “average” or “commonplace” type of respectable citizen, starting from a false concept of the nature of good and evil, does try to delimit such a field—a very little field, with a fence around it, where he impounds his vices, in a corner or alongside of the more spacious field where he pastures his virtues. But unusual men, men who are not content with mediocrity, despise paltry or small-minded compromises and strike out along lines courageously drawn: either they go to extremes of unbridled license, or they toil incessantly to bring all their impulses into the domain of moral productiveness. At times, indeed, the two extremes seem to meet or to alternate in the same individual, and we get philanthropic bandits, honest thieves, self-sacrificing profligates, and the like. Then again the one will replace the other: the upright man goes wrong and goes very wrong indeed (corruptio optimi pessima); or the great sinner repents and becomes a great saint.