Chapter Five — On Good and Evil, the Beneficial and the Harmful

So we say: Man — insofar as he is one species among the species, and at the outset of his formation is something in potentiality — has a certain perfection by which his essence is completed. The perfection by which he is truly complete we call good. And he has a certain privation (ʿadam): should it befall him, his essence is not perfected. This we call evil. And since his perfection accrues to him gradually and is not present to him all at once, there are of necessity intermediaries between him and the final good, and these we call the beneficial things. Likewise between him and evil there are intermediaries, and these we call the harmful things. So man has a good, an evil, a beneficial, and a harmful; and the like holds of every species among the species. Absolute perfection, then, is an absolute good, and its privation an absolute evil. There is likewise an absolute beneficial and an absolute harmful. And the specific good, in that respect in which it is specific, we call felicity, and its privation wretchedness (shaqāwa). It is established that people differ in the demands of their class natures and their individual natures, as some have claimed — and it may well be the truth. In that sense, each individual among men would then have a felicity and a misery other than another’s, even though all are equal in the absolute human good and the absolute human evil. This sense of good and evil and the rest is the one people intend in their ordinary usages; but setting that forth is not our concern in this place.

Next we say: man has a real perfection, and a supposed, illusory (wahmī) perfection. As for the real perfection, it is evident. As for the supposed, imagined perfection: since man has multiple, mutually divergent faculties — such as the vegetative, the animal, and the rational — he has multiple perfections, each one of which, at the outset of his growth, is in potentiality; so they have paths and intermediaries. Hence there are many beneficial things, differing in kind, since the quiddity (māhiyya) of the beneficial is determined by the good for which it is beneficial; and since the goods differ, the beneficial things of each are other than the beneficial things of another. And should one and the same thing happen to be a good for one faculty and beneficial in relation to another, it too has two aspects. The absolute good is that in which there is no aspect of benefit — it is sought from every aspect.

Through the arousal of some of man’s faculties, or through certain happenstances, his aspiration may grow more intent upon halting at certain of the beneficial things and the intermediaries, owing to causes that require such assent — in accordance with what we stated in the Book of Iʿtibārāt: that some of the posited considerations may be made fundamental, with other things branching out upon it. So it is with one who prefers wealth for its own sake: he does not profit from the dinar in that for which it is an intermediary for him — he neither eats nor drinks nor clothes himself nor spends; he only amasses and amasses, and supposes it a good — although, had he reflected with the least reflection, he would have found the dinar to be a pure intermediary by which the comforts and the pleasures of foods, drinks, clothing, and marriage are attained. And were it not for these ends in nature, the dinar would never be preferred at all — like one who finds a treasure in a remote, barren desert, where it benefits his condition nothing and does not deliver him from perishing by so much as the measure of a mote. Just so, the single grain is, for the bird, grander in worth than a matchless pearl over which the greatest kings and the wealthy possessed of fortune contend. And were it possible to reach these comforts, and were they obedient to man as imagination is obedient, the dinar would never be sought, nor would any preference for or pursuit of it arise. Moreover, the more numerous and the stronger the effects that branch out upon the intermediaries, the firmer is the halting at them and the harder the departing from them. All of these are supposed goods, according to what the estimation clothes them in; according to reality there is no goodness in them — their benefit is only according as they conduct to the good. And were any one of them, in some aspect, an impediment, then to that measure it would be an evil and a harmful thing. So of good there is that which is supposed, and of it there is that which is real. From this it has become evident that one and the same thing may well be beneficial in one aspect and harmful in another aspect.

Next: these goods, though many according to appearance — for the acts of every one of the real faculties are perfections and goods for it — yet, were they supposed to gather together in a single thing possessed of aspects, there would of necessity be mutual interference among their acts. For the non-bodily acts that issue from essences endowed with souls are acts issuing by way of the class of the bodily faculties, and so they run contrary to what bodily nature demands. Hence they are evils relative to it, and goods relative to the agent faculties. And the thing which is the principle, if it is supposed to be one, is in itself not possessed of aspects — rather [the aspects lie] in the faculties of its essence. So its good — I mean the perfection of its existence — is one thing, even though the goods of its existence are many. Were its faculties, then, on a single level, its good would be the equilibrium (iʿtidāl) in their acts — and this is evident. But since the thing has a single perfection, it is necessary that these many faculties be in it in order to block the paths of corruption that supervene upon it in respect of its perfection. It is plain, then, that these faculties are servants, all of them, in relation to the final perfection (al-kamāl al-akhīr). So they are beneficial with regard to it; and aiming at them and preferring them is to the measure that they are beneficial and preserving of it. The perfection that belongs to them, in the relation of one to another, is the equilibrium in their acts. In the relation of them all to the final perfection, it is the issuing of their acts to a measure that does not impair the furthest aim and the absolute good — such that it does not incline from the mean toward the two sides of excess and deficiency; and that is equilibrium. The perfection and felicity of the faculties — apart from what was created for the absolute good — consists in the equilibrium in their acts; the faculties are beneficial, and therein lies their benefit. And the absolute perfection of a thing such as this is the perfection of its own proper existence, and its felicity. It is completed only through the perfection in its beneficial things — which is the equilibrium in their acts. Thus it has been established that the perfection and the good in a thing, according to reality, is the perfection that attaches to it in reality, with no metaphor in it.