The Ring of Gyges

Other civilizations. Their defects are given as proof of the insufficiency of the religions to which they are attached. Yet in Europe, in the course of the last twenty centuries of history, one could easily find defects at least as great. The destruction of America by massacre and of Africa by slavery, the massacres in the south of France -- these are surely as bad as homosexuality in Greece or orgiastic rites in the East. But it is said that in Europe these defects existed in spite of the perfection of Christianity, and in other civilizations because of the imperfection of their religion. A privileged example, to be contemplated at length, of the mechanism of error. Setting apart. In evaluating India or Greece, one relates the evil to the good. In evaluating Christianity, one sets the evil apart. One sets apart without knowing it -- therein lies the danger. Or, what is worse still, one sets apart by an act of will, but an act of will that is furtive with regard to oneself. And then one no longer knows that one has set apart. One does not want to know it, and by dint of not wanting to know it, one reaches the point of being unable to know it. This faculty of setting apart permits all crimes. For everything outside the domain where education and training have forged solid connections, it constitutes the key to absolute license. This is what allows such incoherent behavior in people, especially whenever the social intervenes -- collective feelings (war, hatred of nations and classes, the patriotism of a party, of a Church, etc.). Everything covered by the prestige of the social is placed in another location from the rest and withdrawn from certain relationships.

One also uses this key when one yields to the attraction of pleasure.

I use it when I put off from day to day the accomplishment of an obligation. I separate the obligation from the passage of time.

There is nothing more desirable than to throw this key away. One would have to throw it to the bottom of a well from which it could never be retrieved.

The ring of Gyges, which makes one invisible, is precisely the act of setting apart. Setting apart oneself and the crime one commits. Not establishing the relation between the two.

The act of throwing away the key, of throwing away the ring of Gyges, is the proper effort of the will; it is the painful and blind march out of the cave.

Gyges. I have become king, and the other king has been assassinated. No connection between these two things. That is the ring.

A factory owner. I have such and such costly pleasures, and my workers suffer from poverty. He may have very sincere pity for his workers and not form the connection.

For no connection forms if thought does not produce it. Two and two remain indefinitely two and two if thought does not add them to make four.

We hate those who would bring us to form the connections we do not wish to form. Justice consists in establishing, among analogous things, identical relations between homothetic terms, even when some of these things concern us personally and are for us the object of an attachment. This virtue is situated at the point of contact between the natural and the supernatural. It belongs to the domain of the will and the clear intelligence, and thus to the cave (for our clarity is darkness), but one cannot maintain oneself in it if one does not pass into the light.