JOHN DEWEY
From Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philosophy: Essential Selections, by James Fieser
© 2008, updated 1/1/2026, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
CONTENTS
Introduction
Hegelian Psychology: The Self as Ultimate Reality
Philosophy of Education
Evolution and Ethics
American Philosophy and Instrumentalism
We Select Different Moral Theories for their Usefulness
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy
Ethics and Democracy: Solving Concrete Social Problems
Ethics Based on Human Nature
Empirical Method avoids Problems with Traditional Metaphysics
Democracy as Community Life
The Misguided Quest for Certainty
Reconnecting Art with Experience
Religious Faith without the Supernatural
Study Questions
INTRODUCTION
Born in Burlington, Vermont, John Dewey (1859-1952) was the third of four sons born to a merchant. After attending university, he taught in public school for two years and later attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins University where he received his Ph.D. He worked briefly at several prominent universities and, in 1904, when his reputation was well-established, he accepted a position at Columbia University where he remained until his retirement at age 70. He died at the age of 92 from pneumonia in is New York City apartment. Throughout his career and into his retirement, he was an active writer and public speaker in the fields of psychology, philosophy, education, and politics. He is often considered the twentieth century's most influential writer on educational theory. In Philosophy, he is associated with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James as originators of philosophical pragmatism, or "instrumentalism" as Dewey himself called it. According to this view, a philosophical or scientific theory's worth rests solely on its usefulness, and if it has none it should be rejected in favor of a more useful alternative.
Dewey's writings fall into three periods spanning 70 years. His early works (1882-1898) emphasize idealism, where, following Hegel, he holds that the human mind is just an aspect of the larger universal intelligence of the cosmos. His middle works (1899-1924) emphasize experimentalism (pragmatism, instrumentalism) where, following Peirce and James, the value of any theory depends upon practical facts that confirm of refute it. His later works (1925-1953) emphasize naturalism (contextualism), where human mental states reduce to interactions with one's cultural context. If there is an overarching theme to the three periods, it is that scientific advancement is the engine that drives social change, and, accordingly, changing community life is the context for us to create values, whether it involves education, ethics, democracy, truth, logic, art, or faith.
Beginning with Dewey's early period, the first selection is from his textbook on Psychology (1887), which discusses the various mental faculties of knowledge, perception, memory, etc. While the work describes the experimental and scientific aspects of the field of psychology, he also explores the philosophical implications of the subject, and his early sympathy with Hegel's philosophy becomes apparent. He argues that all our individual mental faculties are just stages towards a more universal knowledge of a universal intelligence. Next is "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897), an article where Dewey summarizes his views on educational theory. Again, in Hegelian fashion, he argues that education involves acclimating the student into the larger organic social consciousness of humanity. This involves a hands-on approach where the student must interact with a school environment that represents actual life. Throughout the 1890s, Dewey gradually turned away from his Hegelian assumptions that everything was organically connected through a universal intelligence. He shifted instead to a biological Darwinian explanation of how organisms emerge and change within their environment. In "Evolution and Ethics" (1898) he argues that ethics evolves within ever-changing social conditions. Just as biological evolution results from an organism's capacity to adapt to its physical environment through survival of the fittest, so too do ethical values adapt to changing social environments, and when those values can't compete, they die out. The difference is that biological evolution is mechanical, while ethical evolution is conscious. Still, he argues, the process of survival of the fittest is the same in both, and the ethical is every bit as evolutionary as the biological.
In his middle period, Dewey emphasizes the pragmatic/instrumental method of inquiry. In "Philosophy and American National Life" (1905), a speech he presented at a University of Vermont graduation ceremony, he gives his most concise definition of what pragmatism is. He first argues that a uniquely American approach to philosophy should be based on the concept of democracy, and even the classic mind-matter problem can be viewed as an outgrowth of the historical conflict between aristocracy vs. democracy. When American philosophy is understood as a method for solving problems, it should be "instrumental in furnishing points of view and working ideas which may clarify and illuminate the actual and concrete course of life." In a discussion from his Ethics (1908), he argues that we select different moral theories for their usefulness, not because one theory is the right one in all circumstances. In fact, even though each moral theory, such as utilitarianism, has a different emphasis, each recognizes the relevance of the other theories in some way. In "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy" (1909) he argues that evolutionary theory made three important shifts in ways of viewing the world, which impacted philosophy. There was a shift from fixity of species to transitional changes between them, a shift from design to chance as the principal causal explanation of the world, and a shift from questions of absolute origins of the world to specific conditions which brought the world about.
While all of Dewey's writings critically evaluate traditional philosophical views, in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), he addresses the issue head on with a systematic critique of the major branches of philosophy. He first argues that philosophy as a discipline originated from social and emotional considerations, not intellectual and speculative considerations as it currently seems to be. If we return to its true origins, philosophy will become more about social purpose than speculations about the nature of reality. Next he argues that ethics is based on fixing problems in concrete situations, not on finding universal rules as we typically see in traditional ethics. Paralleling modern science, a modern reconstruction of ethics should challenge the traditional idea of a single unchanging source of moral law and shift focus to a multiplicity of changing individualized goods. Finally, he describes how democracy works as a mechanism for experimentally solving concrete social problems. Society, he argues, involves a wide variety of associations of members, including clubs, companies, towns, all of which involve communication and participation among members. In all these contexts, there is a democracy where each person can attempt to shape the policies of the group to address specific problems or concerns. It is an experimental process where new ideas are put forward and tested, and, even if they fail, the group learns from the experience. He continues this theme of reforming ethics in Human Nature and Conduct (1922) where he rejects the traditional approach to ethics which aims at controlling and suppressing human nature. Instead, morals should be based on a study of human nature, which will connect it more with physics and biology, and thereby offer more natural solutions to moral problems.
Dewey's later writings begin with his most famous philosophical work, Experience and Nature (1925), and it is here that he lays out his theory of contextualism. Contextualism, for Dewey, is the view that the ever-changing set of human experience is the context by which we (1) determine the meaning of ideas, and (2) inquire into problems surrounding those ideas. Experience is not just sensory perceptions, but the full range of conscious human experiences and what shapes them. In the selection here he refers to this contextualist approach as the "empirical method". The critic of this method, he argues, will claim that mere experience is an inadequate path to explain nature as it actually is. Experience is irregular, and too veiled off from reality. Dewey's response is that the method of science is confined to experience and functions very well at its task, and this is a model for how we should approach all inquiry. By doing so, we will avoid what he calls the "philosophic fallacy" of creating metaphysical entities to help explain natural phenomena, such as a metaphysical substance. We can use this empirical method to test past philosophical theories, and, by doing so, we will find that they erred by adopting concepts from the limited science of their day, such as Newtonian physical corpuscles which Locked adapted into the notion of "simple ideas".
In The Public and its Problems (1927), Dewey distinguishes between (1) democracy as a social idea that affects all community associations, and (2) "political" democracy which is just the governmental machinery to bring the idea of democracy about. Sometimes the machinery does this successfully, other times not so much. Democracy as an idea involves community life at all levels within society, such as families, schools, businesses and religions. In each case the community members are jointly engaged in activities that they recognize as good. Without this conception of democracy as "community life", terms such as "fraternity", "liberty" and "equality" become empty sentimentalism. True democratic community life requires that the members not only associate together, but actively participate through a language of shared concerns. In this way, communities create a social consciousness through their mutually-held linguistic symbols.
In The Quest for Certainty (1929), Dewey explores philosophy's misguided pursuit of absolute knowledge. The problem began historically with the early human desire to achieve security from the imposing natural forces around them. He argues that there are two ways to achieve such security: (1) an intellectual change in attitude where we learn to accept the unpredictable events that go on around us, or (2) a practical change in one's condition through craftsmanship such as building houses to protect us from the elements. The ancient Greek tradition went the first route viewing religion as an intellectual solution, and philosophers subsequently transformed the religious approach into a rational search for truth. Once abstract reason became the final authority on matters of truth, issues of human action and practice became less important. This separation between knowledge and action, he argues, is the faulty assumption behind all philosophical theories of knowledge. The solution is to revisit the initial issue of human security and replace the current quest for certainty with the practical quest for security.
Dewey's Quest for Certainty was mainly a critique of the philosophy of knowledge, and his aim was to remove questions of truth from speculative reason and place them within the domain of practical action. In Art as Experience (1934), he does the same thing with the philosophy of art. That is, he argues that we should remove artworks from their pedestals as remote objects of spiritual or idealized value. Instead, art needs to be examined from within the sphere of practical action and appreciated for the physical conditions that inspired the artists to create their works in the first place. He suggests that we should begin by examining the original non-aesthetic conditions of objects of everyday enjoyment, such as eating utensils and functional buildings, without spiritualizing them. This will then help us recover the connection between aesthetic experience and the normal processes of living.
Finally, in A Common Faith (1934) Dewey attempts to define a type of religious faith that excludes all supernatural elements, and instead ties faith with community values. Dewey rejects the idea of "religion" because of its association with the supernatural realm, which he believes science has completely discredited. However, he wishes to rescue the notion of "religiousness" from the supernaturalism of religion. In this since, religion for him is a bad thing, while non-supernatural religiousness is a good thing. He argues that if we examine a dictionary definition of the word "religion" we will find that it is so flexible that we can easily adapt the notion of religiousness in a non-supernatural way. This non-supernatural faith needs to be grounded in the secular community where secular institutions have become the new social center. These include associations formed for educational, political, economic, philanthropic and scientific purposes. This, he believes, will create a common faith of humanity that adapts to values of the ever-changing human community.
HEGELIAN PSYCHOLOGY: THE SELF AS ULTIMATE REALITY (Psychology, 1887, Chapter 5: Stages of Knowledge)
Mind is Universal, Knowledge is not Individual
§ 1. Knowledge as Self-development.
Knowledge is, therefore, a self-developing process, one side of which results in the existence for consciousness of a world of things, events, and relations, while the other side results in the organized or realized existence of mind. The world known is the externalized self; the self existing is the known, or internalized world. Knowledge, accordingly, is not a purely individual process, which each carries on for himself, independently of all other intelligence. It is universal, as manifested by the fact that it consists in the development of a known universe, and by the fact that even the individual self which knows gets reality only as this universe is constructed in knowledge.
Knowledge not Arbitrary or Unreal.—The statement that knowledge is the construction by the mind of a universe must not be thought to mean that knowledge is arbitrary, or the universe a product of imagination, or of the processes of individual minds. It means that mind or intelligence is necessarily universal in its nature, and that the construction of the universe of knowledge is the necessary manifestation of this universal character of intelligence. Since the mind is universal, the world exists in the same universal or real sense with it; it is a permanent objective reality, because intelligence is a permanent objectifying activity. The knowledge of the finite individual is the process by which the individual reproduces the universal mind, and hence makes real for himself the universe, which is eternally real for the complete, absolutely universal intelligence, since involved in its self-objectifying activity of knowledge. The student will thus see more clearly what is meant by defining psychology as the science of the reproduction of the universe in and by the individual than he could when the definition was made.
Mental Faculties as Stages towards Universal Knowledge
Knowledge a Progressive Process.—Knowledge is, therefore, in the individual, the gradual process by which he realizes his selfhood, or the universal objective character of intelligence. It is the process by which the individual is lifted into universality of intelligence, as he constructs the world which he knows. There will be, therefore, various stages in the process. The individual is not born a realized self, but his psychical existence is the process of realization. Various forms of knowledge will, therefore, be recognized according to the stage of universality or realization of intelligence reached. These arc the so-called faculties of knowledge, which, therefore, are not various powers of the mind, but mark various stadia of its development. These "faculties" are Perception, Memory, Imagination, Thinking, Intuition or self-consciousness.
Objects of Perception are not Realities, but only Mental Relations that Contribute to Consciousness of Ultimate Reality
Relation of Perception to Other Stages.—There has been a theory in psychology that individual objects are impressed upon the mind as wholes without any constructive activity of the mind, and that this process, perception, gives us knowledge of reality. The activity of mind from this point on was supposed to consist in combining and separating these wholes, so that the results are more or less artificial in nature, and constitute a departure from the simple realities made known to us in perception. But this theory falls into a double error. In the first place, perception or knowledge of particular things is not a passive operation of impression, but involves the constructive, interpreting, idealizing activity of intelligence. The particular objects of perception get their existence, as known, through their relations to self. It follows from this, secondly, that the other activities of mind do not bring about a departure from reality, as they go beyond the particular things to universal relations, but a nearer approach to it. The realities known in perception are not realities per se, but only through their relation to the constructive activity of intelligence; and the other activities of mind consist simply in developing these relations to intelligence, and thus coming more and more to consciousness of the ultimate reality, intelligence itself. They, in short, are necessary to the complete development of perception itself.
PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION ("My Pedagogic Creed", 1897)
What Education Is
I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the [human] race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it or differentiate it in some particular direction.
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language. . . .
In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted–we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents–into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service.
What the School Is
I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.
I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
I believe that the school must represent present life — life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.
I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, or that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden.
I believe that the school, as an institution, should simplify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by the multiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are prematurely called into play and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated. . . .
The Subject-Matter of Education
I believe that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts and of all his attainments.
I believe that the subject-matter of the school curriculum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the primitive unconscious unity of social life.
I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.
I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities. . . .
I believe that there is, therefore, no succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum. If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect, an aspect of art and culture, and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.
I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.
I believe that to set up any end outside of education, as furnishing its goal and standard, is to deprive the educational process of much of its meaning and tends to make us rely upon false and external stimuli in dealing with the child.
The Nature of Method
I believe that the question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child's powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child's own nature. Because this is so I believe the following statements are of supreme importance as determining the spirit in which education is carried on:
1. I believe that the active side precedes the passive in the development of the child nature; that expression comes before conscious impression; that the muscular development precedes the sensory; that movements come before conscious sensations; I believe that consciousness is essentially motor or impulsive; that conscious states tend to project themselves in action.
I believe that the neglect of this principle is the cause of a large part of the waste of time and strength in school work. The child is thrown into a passive, receptive, or absorbing attitude. The conditions are such that he is not permitted to follow the law of his nature; the result is friction and waste. . . .
The School and Social Progress
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile. . . .
I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.
I believe that this conception has due regard for both the individualistic and socialistic ideals. It is duly individual because it recognizes the formation of a certain character as the only genuine basis of right living. It is socialistic because it recognizes that this right character is not to be formed by merely individual precept, example, or exhortation, but rather by the influence of a certain form of institutional or community life upon the individual, and that the social organism through the school, as its organ, may determine ethical results.
I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals. . . .
ETHICS EVOLVES WITHIN EVER-CHANGING SOCIAL CONDITIONS ("Evolution and Ethics," 1898)
The Relation between Evolutionary and Ethical Concepts
I undertake the discussion of the question of the relation of evolution and ethics. A generation ago the entire interest was in the exact relation between man and the lower animals. We had one school concerned with reducing this difference to the lowest possible limits and urging that the consciousness of man, intellectual and moral, as well as his physical nature, might be considered a direct inheritance through easy gradations from some form of the anthropoid ape. We had another school equally concerned with magnifying the difference, making it, if possible, an unbridgeable chasm. It would be a bold man who would say that this controversy has been settled by the actual weight of concrete detailed evidence, or even that it has been very far advanced. The writings which really throw light on the question, in either direction (so far as the facts are concerned and not merely general considerations), can probably be easily numbered on the fingers of the two hands. Yet suddenly we find that discussion of this question has practically ceased, and that what engages controversy is the relation of what I may call the evolutionary concepts in general to the ethical concepts. Points of agreement and disagreement between the ideas involved in the notion of evolution and those involved in the notion of moral conduct are searched for. It is the state of the imagination and the direction of interest which have changed. . . .
Evolutionary Fitness for Humans involves Social Adaptation
I have discussed this particular case [of survival of the fittest] in the hope of enlarging somewhat our conception of what is meant by the term "fit"; to suggest that we are in the habit of interpreting it with reference to an environment which long ago ceased to be. That which was fit among the animals is not fit among human beings, not merely because the animals were non-moral and man is moral; but because the conditions of life have changed, and because there is no way to define the term "fit" excepting through these conditions. The environment is now distinctly a social one, and the content of the term "fit" has to be made with reference to social adaptation. Moreover, the environment in which we now live is a changing and progressive one. Everyone must have his fitness judged by the whole, including the anticipated change; not merely by reference to the conditions of today, because these may be gone tomorrow. If one is fitted simply to the present, he is not fitted to survive. He is sure to go under. A part of his fitness will consist in that very flexibility which enables him to adjust himself without too much loss to sudden and unexpected changes in his surroundings. We have then no reason here to oppose the ethical process to the natural process. The demand is for those who are fit for the conditions of existence in one case as well as in the other. It is the conditions which have changed. . . .
The very highest habits and ideals which are organizing today with reference to existing conditions will be just as much, and just as little, an obstacle to the moral conduct of man millions of years from now, as those of the ape and the tiger are to us. So far as they represent the survival of outworn conditions, they will demand re-constitution and re-adaptation, and that modification will be accompanied by pain. Growth always costs something. It costs the making over of the old in order to meet the demands of the new.
This struggle, then, is not more characteristic of the ethical process than it is of the biological. Long before man came upon the earth, long before any talk was heard of right and wrong, it happened that those who clung persistently to modes of action which were adapted to an environment that had passed away, were at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, and tended to die out. . . . With the animal it was simply the happy guess, the chance. In society there is anticipation; with man it is the intelligent and controlled foresight, the necessity of maintaining the institutions which have come down to us, while we make over these institutions so that they serve under changing conditions. To give up the institutions is chaos and anarchy; to maintain the institutions unchanged is death and fossilisation. . . .
Transition from Unconscious Biological Adaptation to Conscious Adaptation through Experimentation
Now, in man we have this power of variation and consequent discovery and constitution of new environments set free. All biological process has been effected through this, and so every tendency which forms this power is selected; in man it reaches its climax. So far as the individual is concerned, the environment (the specific conditions which relate to his life) is highly variable at present. The growth of science, its application in invention to industrial life, the multiplication and acceleration of means of transportation and intercommunication, have created a peculiarly unstable environment. It shifts constantly within itself, or qualitatively, and as to its range, or quantitatively. Simply as an affair of Nature, not of art (using these terms in Mr. Huxley's sense) it is a profitable, an advantageous thing that structural changes, if any occur, should not get too set. They would limit unduly the possibility of change in adaptation. In the present environment, flexibility of function, the enlargement of the range of uses to which one and the same organ, grossly considered, may be put, is a great, almost the supreme, condition of success. As such, any change in that direction is a favorable variation which must be selected. In a word, the difference between man and animal is not that selection has ceased, but that selection along the line of variations which enlarge and intensify the environment is active as never before.
We reach precisely the same conclusion with respect to "selection" that we have reached with reference to the cognate ideas—"fit" and "struggle for existence." It is found in the ethical process as it is in the cosmic, and it operates in the same way. So far as conditions have changed, so far as the environment is indefinitely more complex, wider, and more variable, so far of necessity and as a biological and cosmic matter, not merely an ethical one, the functions selected differ.
There are no doubt sufficiently profound distinctions between the ethical process and the cosmic process as it existed prior to man and to the formation of human society. So far as I know, however, all of these differences are summed up in the fact that the process and the forces bound up with the cosmic have come to consciousness in man. That which was instinct in the animal is conscious impulse in man. That which was "tendency to vary" in the animal is conscious foresight in man. That which was unconscious adaptation and survival in the animal, taking place by the "cut and try" method until it worked itself out, is with man conscious deliberation and experimentation. That this transfer from unconsciousness to consciousness has immense importance, need hardly be argued. It is enough to say that it means the whole distinction of the moral from the unmoral. We have, however, no reason to suppose that the cosmic process has become arrested or that some new force has supervened to struggle against the cosmic. Some theologians and moralists, to be sure, welcomed Huxley's apparent return to the idea of a dualism between the cosmic and the ethical as likely to inure favorably to the spiritual life. But I question whether the spiritual life does not get its surest and most ample guarantees when it is learned that the laws and conditions of righteousness are implicated in the working processes of the universe; when it is found that man in his conscious struggles, in his doubts, temptations, and defeats, in his aspirations and successes, is moved on and buoyed up by the forces which have developed nature; and that in this moral struggle he acts not as a mere individual but as an organ in maintaining and carrying forward the universal process.
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY GROUNDED UPON DEMOCRACY AND INSTRUMENTALISM ("Philosophy and American National Life", 1905)
American Philosophy should Interpret Philosophical Problems from the Vantage of Democracy
It is today generally recognized that systems of philosophy however abstract in conception and technical in exposition, lie, after all, much nearer the heart of social, and of national, life than superficially appears. If one were to say that philosophy is just a language, one would doubtless give occasion for rejoicing to those who already believe that philosophy is "words, words, words"; that it is only an uncouth terminology invented and used for the mystification of common sense. Yet mathematics, too, is only a language. Much, most, depends upon what the language is of and about. And, speaking roundly, philosophy is a language in which the deepest social problems and aspirations of a given time and a given people are expressed in intellectual and impersonal symbols. It has been well said that philosophy is a reflective self-consciousness of what first exists spontaneously, effectively, in the feelings, deeds, ideas of a people.
It is not a futile question to ask after the reciprocal influences of American national life and American philosophy. . . .
It is reasonably sure, however, that the answer is not to be sought in some special philosophic-ism. We may discount the belief current in Europe that American philosophy is bound to be a system if not of Materialism, at least of Mechanicalism; a highly "positive," non-spiritual type of thought. We may dismiss the idea of an American author that our philosophy is sure to be Realism, because the Americans are so essentially a hard-headed people. Not in such wholesale and exclusive labels are we to look for what we are after, but rather in certain features which color the atmosphere, and dye the spirit of all our thinking. American philosophy must be born out of and must respond to the demands of democracy, as democracy strives to voice and to achieve itself on a vaster scale, and in a more thorough and final way than history has previously witnessed. And democracy is something at once too subtle and too complex and too aspiring to be caught in the meshes of a single philosophical school or sect.
It is, then, to the needs of democracy in America that we turn to find the fundamental problems of philosophy; and to its tendencies, its working forces, that we look for the points of view and the terms in which philosophy will envisage and solve these problems. . . .
Mind-Body Problem as an Outgrowth of Aristocracy vs. Democracy
So we might go through, one by one, the historic problems of philosophy with a view to indicating that American philosophy does not cut loose from the past to begin a provincial career on its own account; nor yet settles the historic problems offhand in the terms of some one philosophical school; but that it has inevitably to reconceive and to re-beget them in the light of the demands and the ideals contained in our own national life-spirit. One might suggest, for example, that the question of the relation of mind and matter is revised when it is seen as the abstract form of the problem of the relation of the so-called material, that is, industrial and economic life, to the intellectual and ideal life of a democracy, and particularly to the ethical demands of democracy for a just distribution of economic opportunity and economic reward. One might even show how the entire dualism of mind and matter haunting the footsteps of historic philosophy is, at bottom, a reflex of a separation of want, of appetite, from reason, from the ideal, which in turn was the expression of non-democratic societies in which the "higher" and spiritual life of the few was built upon and conditioned by the "lower" and economic life of the many.
Instrumentalism the Method of American Philosophy
But since any detailed treatment of philosophic questions is not here in place, I conclude with a few words upon the subject of method. An absence of dogmatism, of rigidly fixed doctrines, a certain fluidity and socially experimental quality must characterize American thought. Philosophy may be regarded as primarily either system or method. As system, it develops, justifies and delivers a certain definite body of doctrine. It is taken to discover, or at least to guarantee, a more or less closed set of truths which are its peculiar and exclusively appropriate object. Its worth is measured by the finality and completeness of this independent and exclusive body of doctrines. Mediaeval philosophy is a typical example of what I mean, but the idea did not pass away with the waning of scholasticism. It animates as an ideal most philosophic thought of later times. Or, if questioned, it is questioned only in the interests of scepticism. But there is also struggling for articulation a conception of philosophy as primarily method: — system only in the sense of an arrangement of problems and ideas which will facilitate further inquiry, and the criticism and constructive interpretation of a variety of life-problems. This point of view is not sceptical. It is not undogmatic in the sense of mere looseness of definition and avoidance of classification, nor yet in the sense of a careless eclecticism. But it aims at a philosophy which shall be instrumental rather than final, and instrumental not to establishing and warranting any particular set of truths, but instrumental in furnishing points of view and working ideas which may clarify and illuminate the actual and concrete course of life.
Such a conception of the aim and worth of philosophy is alone, I take it, appropriate to the inherent logic of our America. Philosophers are not to be a separate and monopolistic priesthood set apart to guard, and, under certain conditions, to reveal, an isolated treasury of truths. It is theirs to organize — such organization involving, of course, criticism, rejection, transformation — the highest and wisest ideas of humanity, past and present, in such fashion that they may become most effective in the interpretation of certain recurrent and fundamental problems, which humanity, collectively and individually, has to face. For this reason philosophers must be teachers as well as inquirers.
WE SELECT DIFFERENT MORAL THEORIES FOR THEIR USEFULNESS (Ethics, 1908, Chapter 12: Types of Moral Theory,1-2)
Problems and Theories [i.e., Moral Problems presuppose Moral Theories which are Arbitrarily Selected for Usefulness in Inquiry]
We were concerned in the last chapter with the typical problems of moral theory. But it was evident that theories themselves developed and altered as now this, now that, problem was uppermost. To regard the question of how to know the good as the central problem of moral inquiry is already to have one type of theory; to consider the fundamental problem to be either the subordination or the satisfaction of desire is to have other types. A classification of types of theory is rendered difficult, a thoroughly satisfactory classification almost impossible, by the fact that the problems arrange themselves about separate principles leading to cross-divisions. All that we may expect to do is somewhat arbitrarily to select that principle which seems most likely to be useful in conducting inquiry.
(1) Teleological and Jural [i.e., Consequences vs. Deontological Imperatives of Moral Law]
One of the fundamental divisions arises from taking either Value or Duty, Good or Right, as the fundamental idea. Ethics of the first type is concerned above all with ends; hence it is frequently called teleological theory (Greek telos, end). To the other type of theory, obligations, imperatives, commands, law, and authority, are the controlling ideas. By this emphasis, arise the jural theories (Latin, jus, law). At some point, of course, each theory has to deal with the factor emphasized by its rival. If we start with Law as central, the good resides in these acts which conform to its obligations. The good is obedience to law, submission to its moral authority. If we start from the Good, laws, rules, are concerned with the means of defining or achieving it.
(2) Individual and Institutional
This fundamental division is at once cut across by another, arising from emphasizing the problem of the individual and the social. This problem may become so urgent as to force into the background the conflict between teleological and jural theories, while in any case it complicates and subdivides them. We have individualistic and institutional types of theory. Consider, for example, the following representative quotations: "No school can avoid taking for the ultimate moral aim a desirable state of feeling called by whatever name—gratification, enjoyment, happiness. Pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is an element of the conception"; and again, "the good is universally the pleasurable." And while the emphasis is here upon the good, the desirable, the same type of statement, as respects emphasis upon the individual, may be made from the side of duty. For example, "it is the very essence of moral duty to be imposed by a man on himself." Contrast both of these statements with the following: "What a man ought to do, or what duties he should fulfill in order to be virtuous, is in an ethical community not hard to say. He has to do nothing except what is presented, expressed, and recognized in his established relations." "The individual has his truth, real existence, and ethical status only in being a member of the State. His particular satisfactions, activities, and way of life have in this authenticated, substantive principle, their origin and result." And in another connection: "The striving for a morality of one's own is futile and by its very nature impossible of attainment. In respect to morality the saying of one of the wisest men of antiquity is the true one. To be moral is to live in accord with the moral tradition of one's country." Here both the good and the law of the individual are placed on a strictly institutional basis.
(3) Empirical and Intuitional
Another cross-division arises from consideration of the method of ascertaining and determining the nature of moral distinctions: the method of knowledge. From this standpoint, the distinction of ethical theories into the empirical (empeiros) and the intuitional (Latin, intueor, to look at or upon) represents their most fundamental cleavage. One view makes knowledge of the good and the right dependent upon recollection of prior experiences and their conditions and effects. The other view makes it an immediate apprehension of the quality of an act or motive, a trait so intrinsic and characteristic it cannot escape being seen. While in general the empirical school has laid stress upon the consequences, the consequences to be searched for were considered as either individual or social. Some, like Hobbes, have held that it was directed upon law; to knowledge of the commands of the state. And similarly the direct perception or intuition of moral quality was by some thought to apply to recognition of differences of value, and by others to acknowledgment of law and authority, which again might be divine, social, or personal. This division cleaves straight across our other bases of classification. To describe a theory definitely, it would then be necessary to state just where it stood with reference to each possible combination or permutation of elements of all three divisions. Moreover, there are theories which attempt to find a deeper principle which will bridge the gulf between the two opposites.
Complexity of Subject-matter and Voluntary Activity [Theories have Different Emphases, which all Other Theories Recognize in Some Way]
This brief survey should at least warn us of the complexity of the attempt to discriminate types of theory, and put us on our guard against undue simplification. It may also serve to remind us that various types of theory are not arbitrary personal devices and constructions, but arise because, in the complexity of the subject-matter, one element or another is especially emphasized, and the other elements arranged in different perspectives. As a rule, all the elements are recognized in some form or other by all theories; but they are differently placed and accounted for. In any case, it is voluntary activity with which we are concerned. The problem of analyzing voluntary activity into its proper elements, and rightly arranging them, must coincide finally with the problem of the relation of good and law of control to each other, with the problem of the nature of moral knowledge, and with that of the relation of the individual and social aspects of conduct.
THE INFLUENCE OF DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY ("The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy", 1909)
Darwinian Shift from Fixity to Transition
That the publication of the "Origin of Species" marked an epoch in the development of the natural sciences is well known to the layman. That the combination of the very words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the "Origin of Species" introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
No wonder, then, that the publication of Darwin's book, a half century ago, precipitated a crisis. The true nature of the controversy is easily concealed from us, however, by the theological clamor that attended it. The vivid and popular features of the anti-Darwinian row tended to leave the impression that the issue was between science on one side and theology on the other. Such was not the case-the issue lay primarily within science itself, as Darwin himself early recognized. . . .
The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life. When he said of species what Galileo had said of the earth, e pur se muove [and yet it moves], he emancipated, once for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon [i.e. instrument] of asking questions and looking for explanations.
Darwinian shift from Design to Chance as the Principal Causal Explanation
The exact bearings upon philosophy of the new logical outlook are, of course, as yet, uncertain and inchoate. We live in the twilight of intellectual transition. One must add the rashness of the prophet to the stubbornness of the partizan to venture a systematic exposition of the influence upon philosophy of the Darwinian method. At best, we can but inquire as to its general bearing-the effect upon mental temper and complexion, upon that body of half-conscious, half-instinctive intellectual aversions and preferences which determine, after all, our more deliberate intellectual enterprises. In this vague inquiry there happens to exist as a kind of touchstone a problem of long historic currency that has also been much discussed in Darwinian literature. I refer to the old problem of design versus chance, mind versus matter, as the causal explanation, first or final, of things.
As we have already seen, the classic notion of species carried with it the idea of purpose. In all living forms, a specific type is present directing the earlier stages of growth to the realization of its own perfection. Since this purposive regulative principle is not visible to the senses, it follows that it must be an ideal or rational force. . . . The design argument thus operated in two directions. Purposefulness accounted for the intelligibility of nature and the possibility of science, while the absolute or cosmic character of this purposefulness gave sanction and worth to the moral and religious endeavors of man. . . .
The Darwinian principle of natural selection cut straight under this philosophy. If all organic adaptations are due simply to constant variation and the elimination of those variations which are harmful in the struggle for existence that is brought about by excessive reproduction, there is no call for a prior intelligent causal force to plan and preordain them. Hostile critics charged Darwin with materialism and with making chance the cause of the universe.
. . .
Darwinian Shift from Questions of Absolute Origins to Specific Conditions
What does our touchstone [of design verses chance] indicate as to the bearing of Darwinian ideas upon philosophy? In the first place, the new logic outlaws, flanks, dismisses — what you will — one type of problems and substitutes for it another type. Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them. . . .
When Henry Sidgwick casually remarked in a letter that as he grew older his interest in what or who made the world was altered into interest in what kind of a world it is anyway, his voicing of a common experience of our own day illustrates also the nature of that intellectual transformation effected by the Darwinian logic. Interest shifts from the wholesale essence [in] back of special changes to the question of how special changes serve and defeat concrete purposes; shifts from an intelligence that shaped things once for all to the particular intelligences which things are even now shaping; shifts from an ultimate goal of good to the direct increments of justice and happiness that intelligent administration of existent conditions may beget and that present carelessness or stupidity will destroy or forego. . . .
The displacing of this [older] wholesale [essence] type of philosophy [with the newer Darwinian logic] will doubtless not arrive by sheer logical disproof, but rather by growing recognition of its futility. Were it a thousand times true that opium produces sleep because of its dormitive energy, yet the inducing of sleep in the tired, and the recovery to waking life of the poisoned, would not be thereby one least step forwarded. And were it a thousand times dialectically demonstrated that life as a whole is regulated by a transcendent principle to a final inclusive goal, none the less truth and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope and fear in the concrete, would remain just what and where they now are. To improve our education, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must have recourse to specific conditions of generation. . . .
Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction persists — though history shows it to be a hallucination that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the "Origin of Species."
ETHICS AND DEMOCRACY: SOLVING CONCRETE SOCIAL PROBLEMS (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920)
Origins of Philosophy in Desire and Imagination (Ch. 1)
Ordinary Consciousness involves Desire, not Speculation
. . . [E]arly man when left to himself, when not actually engaged in the struggle for existence, lived in a world of memories which was a world of suggestions. A suggestion differs from a recollection in that no attempt is made to test its correctness. Its correctness is a matter of relative indifference. The cloud suggests a camel or a man's face. It could not suggest these things unless some time there had been an actual, literal experience of camel and face. But the real likeness is of no account. The main thing is the emotional interest in tracing the camel or following the fortunes of the face as it forms and dissolves. . . .
I hope that I do not seem to you to have gone too far afield from my topic, the origin of philosophies. For it seems to me that the historic source of philosophies cannot be understood except as we dwell, at even greater length and in more detail, upon such considerations as these. We need to recognize that the ordinary consciousness of the ordinary man left to himself is a creature of desires rather than of intellectual study, inquiry or speculation. Man ceases to be primarily actuated by hopes and fears, loves and hates, only when he is subjected to a discipline which is foreign to human nature, which is, from the standpoint of natural man, artificial. Naturally our books, our scientific and philosophical books, are written by men who have subjected themselves in a superior degree to intellectual discipline and culture. Their thoughts are habitually reasonable. They have learned to check their fancies by facts, and to organize their ideas logically rather than emotionally and dramatically. When they do indulge in reverie and day-dreaming—which is probably more of the time than is conventionally acknowledged—they are aware of what they are doing. . . .
Philosophy as a Social Function, not a Search for Absolute Knowledge
If this lecture succeeds in leaving in your minds as a reasonable hypothesis the idea that philosophy originated not out of intellectual material, but out of social and emotional material, it will also succeed in leaving with you a changed attitude toward traditional philosophies. They will be viewed from a new angle and placed in a new light. New questions about them will be aroused and new standards for judging them will be suggested.
If anyone will commence without mental reservations to study the history of philosophy not as an isolated thing but as a chapter in the development of civilization and culture; if one will connect the story of philosophy with a study of anthropology, primitive life, the history of religion, literature and social institutions, it is confidently asserted that he will reach his own independent judgment as to the worth of the account which has been presented today. Considered in this way, the history of philosophy will take on a new significance. What is lost from the standpoint of would-be science is regained from the standpoint of humanity. Instead of the disputes of rivals about the nature of reality, we have the scene of human clash of social purpose and aspirations. Instead of impossible attempts to transcend experience, we have the significant record of the efforts of men to formulate the things of experience to which they are most deeply and passionately attached. Instead of impersonal and purely speculative endeavors to contemplate as remote beholders the nature of absolute things-in-themselves, we have a living picture of the choice of thoughtful men about what they would have life to be, and to what ends they would have men shape their intelligent activities.
Any one of you who arrives at such a view of past philosophy will of necessity be led to entertain a quite definite conception of the scope and aim of future philosophizing. He will inevitably be committed to the notion that what philosophy has been unconsciously, without knowing or intending it, and, so to speak, under cover, it must henceforth be openly and deliberately. When it is acknowledged that under disguise of dealing with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with the precious values embedded in social traditions, that it has sprung from a clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible contemporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of future philosophy is to clarify men's ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become so far as is humanly possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts. That which may be pretentiously unreal when it is formulated in metaphysical distinctions becomes intensely significant when connected with the drama of the struggle of social beliefs and ideals. Philosophy which surrenders its somewhat barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Absolute Reality will find a compensation in enlightening the moral forces which move mankind and in contributing to the aspirations of men to attain to a more ordered and intelligent happiness.
Ethics Based on Fixing Problems, Not Finding Rules (Chapter 7)
Moving Beyond Traditional Morality's Quest for Rules and a Single Source of Moral Law
Ethical theory began among the Greeks as an attempt to find a regulation for the conduct of life which should have a rational basis and purpose instead of being derived from custom. But reason as a substitute for custom was under the obligation of supplying objects and laws as fixed as those of custom had been. Ethical theory ever since has been singularly hypnotized by the notion that its business is to discover some final end or good or some ultimate and supreme law. This is the common element among the diversity of theories. Some have held that the end is loyalty or obedience to a higher power or authority; and they have variously found this higher principle in Divine Will, the will of the secular ruler, the maintenance of institutions in which the purpose of superiors is embodied, and the rational consciousness of duty. But they have differed from one another because there was one point in which they were agreed: a single and final source of law. Others have asserted that it is impossible to locate morality in conformity to law-giving power, and that it must be sought in ends that are goods. And some have sought the good in self-realization, some in holiness, some in happiness, some in the greatest possible aggregate of pleasures. And yet these schools have agreed in the assumption that there is a single, fixed and final good. They have been able to dispute with one another only because of their common premise.
The question arises whether the way out of the confusion and conflict is not to go to the root of the matter by questioning this common element. Is not the belief in the single, final and ultimate (whether conceived as good or as authoritative law) an intellectual product of that feudal organization which is disappearing historically and of that belief in a bounded, ordered cosmos, wherein rest is higher than motion, which has disappeared from natural science? It has been repeatedly suggested that the present limit of intellectual reconstruction lies in the fact that it has not as yet been seriously applied in the moral and social disciplines. Would not this further application demand precisely that we advance to a belief in a plurality of changing, moving, individualized goods and ends, and to a belief that principles, criteria, laws are intellectual instruments for analyzing individual or unique situations?
Morality involves Intelligent Inquiry into Unique Concrete Situations
The blunt assertion that every moral situation is a unique situation having its own irreplaceable good may seem not merely blunt but preposterous. For the established tradition teaches that it is precisely the irregularity of special cases which makes necessary the guidance of conduct by universals, and that the essence of the virtuous disposition is willingness to subordinate every particular case to adjudication by a fixed principle. It would then follow that submission of a generic end and law to determination by the concrete situation entails complete confusion and unrestrained licentiousness. Let us, however, follow the pragmatic rule, and in order to discover the meaning of the idea ask for its consequences. Then it surprisingly turns out that the primary significance of the unique and morally ultimate character of the concrete situation is to transfer the weight and burden of morality to intelligence. It does not destroy responsibility; it only locates it. A moral situation is one in which judgment and choice are required antecedently to overt action. The practical meaning of the situation —that is to say the action needed to satisfy it—is not self-evident. It has to be searched for. There are conflicting desires and alternative apparent goods. What is needed is to find the right course of action, the right good. Hence, inquiry is exacted: observation of the detailed makeup of the situation; analysis into its diverse factors; clarification of what is obscure; discounting of the more insistent and vivid traits; tracing the consequences of the various modes of action that suggest themselves; regarding the decision reached as hypothetical and tentative until the anticipated or supposed consequences which led to its adoption have been squared with actual consequences. This inquiry is intelligence. Our moral failures go back to some weakness of disposition, some absence of sympathy, some one-sided bias that makes us perform the judgment of the concrete case carelessly or perversely. Wide sympathy, keen sensitiveness, persistence in the face of the disagreeable, balance of interests enabling us to undertake the work of analysis and decision intelligently are the distinctively moral traits—the virtues or moral excellencies. . . .
Moral goods and ends exist only when something has to be done. The fact that something has to be done proves that there are deficiencies, evils in the existent situation. This ill is just the specific ill that it is. It never is an exact duplicate of anything else. Consequently the good of the situation has to be discovered, projected and attained on the basis of the exact defect and trouble to be rectified. It cannot intelligently be injected into the situation from without. Yet it is the part of wisdom to compare different cases, to gather together the ills from which humanity suffers, and to generalize the corresponding goods into classes. Health, wealth, industry, temperance, amiability, courtesy, learning, esthetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience, enterprise, thoroughness and a multitude of other generalized ends are acknowledged as goods. But the value of this systematization is intellectual or analytic. Classifications suggest possible traits to be on the lookout for in studying a particular case; they suggest methods of action to be tried in removing the inferred causes of ill. They are tools of insight; their value is in promoting an individualized response in the individual situation.
Morals is not a catalogue of acts nor a set of rules to be applied like drugstore prescriptions or cook-book recipes. The need in morals is for specific methods of inquiry and of contrivance: Methods of inquiry to locate difficulties and evils; methods of contrivance to form plans to be used as working hypotheses in dealing with them. And the pragmatic import of the logic of individualized situations, each having its own irreplaceable good and principle, is to transfer the attention of theory from preoccupation with general conceptions to the problem of developing effective methods of inquiry.
Democracy as Experimentally Solving Concrete Social Problems (Chapter 8)
Society consists of Many Associations of Members involved in Communication and Participation
Just as "individual" is not one thing, but is a blanket term for the immense variety of specific reactions, habits, dispositions and powers of human nature that are evoked, and confirmed under the influences of associated life, so with the term "social." Society is one word, but infinitely many things. It covers all the ways in which by associating together men share their experiences, and build up common interests and aims; street gangs, schools for burglary, clans, social cliques, trades unions, joint stock corporations, villages and international alliances. The new method takes effect in substituting inquiry into these specific, changing and relative facts (relative to problems and purposes, not metaphysically relative) for solemn manipulation of general notions. . . .
Society, as was said, is many associations not a single organization. Society means association; coming together in joint intercourse and action for the better realization of any form of experience which is augmented and confirmed by being shared. Hence there are as many associations as there are goods which are enhanced by being mutually communicated and participated in. And these are literally indefinite in number. Indeed, capacity to endure publicity and communication is the test by which it is decided whether a pretended good is genuine or spurious. Moralists have always insisted upon the fact that good is universal, objective, not just private, particular. But too often, like Plato, they have been content with a metaphysical universality or, like Kant, with a logical universality. Communication, sharing, joint participation are the only actual ways of universalizing the moral law and end. We insisted at the last hour upon the unique character of every intrinsic good. But the counterpart of this proposition is that the situation in which a good is consciously realized is not one of transient sensations or private appetites but one of sharing and communication—public, social. Even the hermit communes with gods or spirits; even misery loves company; and the most extreme selfishness includes a band of followers or some partner to share in the attained good. Universalization means socialization, the extension of the area and range of those who share in a good.
The increasing acknowledgment that goods exist and endure only through being communicated and that association is the means of conjoint sharing lies back of the modern sense of humanity and democracy. It is the saving salt in altruism and philanthropy, which without this factor degenerate into moral condescension and moral interference, taking the form of trying to regulate the affairs of others under the guise of doing them good or of conferring upon them some right as if it were a gift of charity. It follows that organization is never an end in itself. It is a means of promoting association, of multiplying effective points of contact between persons, directing their intercourse into the modes of greatest fruitfulness.
The tendency to treat organization as an end in itself is responsible for all the exaggerated theories in which individuals are subordinated to some institution to which is given the noble name of society. Society is the process of associating in such ways that experiences, ideas, emotions, values are transmitted and made common. To this active process, both the individual and the institutionally organized may truly be said to be subordinate. The individual is subordinate because except in and through communication of experience from and to others, he remains dumb, merely sentient, a brute animal. Only in association with fellows does he become a conscious centre of experience. Organization, which is what traditional theory has generally meant by the term Society or State, is also subordinate because it becomes static, rigid, institutionalized whenever it is not employed to facilitate and enrich the contacts of human beings with one another.
Democracy involves Each Person Experimentally Shaping the Policies of Social Groups
The long-time controversy between rights and duties, law and freedom is another version of the strife between the Individual and Society as fixed concepts. Freedom for an individual means growth, ready change when modification is required.
It [i.e., freedom] signifies an active process, that of release of capacity from whatever hems it in. But since society can develop only as new resources are put at its disposal, it is absurd to suppose that freedom has positive significance for individuality but negative meaning for social interests. Society is strong, forceful, stable against accident only when all its members can function to the limit of their capacity. Such functioning cannot be achieved without allowing a leeway of experimentation beyond the limits of established and sanctioned custom. A certain amount of overt confusion and irregularity is likely to accompany the granting of the margin of liberty without which capacity cannot find itself. But socially as well as scientifically the great thing is not to avoid mistakes but to have them take place under conditions such that they can be utilized to increase intelligence in the future.
If British liberal social philosophy tended, true to the spirit of its atomistic empiricism, to make freedom and the exercise of rights ends in themselves, the remedy is not to be found in recourse to a philosophy of fixed obligations and authoritative law such as characterized German political thinking. The latter, as events have demonstrated, is dangerous because of its implicit menace to the free self-determination of other social groups. But it is also weak internally when put to the final test. In its hostility to the free experimentation and power of choice of the individual in determining social affairs, it limits the capacity of many or most individuals to share effectively in social operations, and thereby deprives society of the full contribution of all its members. The best guarantee of collective efficiency and power is liberation and use of the diversity of individual capacities in initiative, planning, foresight, vigor and endurance. Personality must be educated, personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, or to the less important relationships of life. Full education comes only when there is a responsible share on the part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs. This fact fixes the significance of democracy. It cannot be conceived as a sectarian or racial thing nor as a consecration of some form of government which has already attained constitutional sanction. It is but a name for the fact that human nature is developed only when its elements take part in directing things which are common, things for the sake of which men and women form groups—families, industrial companies, governments, churches, scientific associations and so on. The principle [of democracy] holds as much of one form of association, say in industry and commerce, as it does in government. The identification of democracy with political democracy which is responsible for most of its failures is, however, based upon the traditional ideas which make the individual and the state ready-made entities in themselves.
ETHICS BASED ON HUMAN NATURE (Human Nature and Conduct, 1922, Introduction)
Traditional Morality aimed at Controlling Human Nature
Morality is largely concerned with controlling human nature. When we are attempting to control anything we are acutely aware of what resists us. So moralists were led, perhaps, to think of human nature as evil because of its reluctance to yield to control, its rebelliousness under the yoke. But this explanation only raises another question. Why did morality set up rules so foreign to human nature? The ends it insisted upon, the regulations it imposed, were after all outgrowths of human nature. Why then was human nature so averse to them? Moreover rules can be obeyed and ideals realized only as they appeal to something in human nature and awaken in it an active response. Moral principles that exalt themselves by degrading human nature are in effect committing suicide. Or else they involve human nature in unending civil war, and treat it as a hopeless mess of contradictory forces.
We are forced therefore to consider the nature and origin of that control of human nature with which morals has been occupied. And the fact which is forced upon us when we raise this question is the existence of classes. Control has been vested in an oligarchy. Indifference to regulation has grown in the gap which separates the ruled from the rulers. Parents, priests, chiefs, social censors have supplied aims, aims which were foreign to those upon whom they were imposed, to the young, laymen, ordinary folk; a few have given and administered rule, and the mass have in a passable fashion and with reluctance obeyed. Everybody knows that good children are those who make as little trouble as possible for their elders, and since most of them cause a good deal of annoyance they must be naughty by nature. Generally speaking, good people have been those who did what they were told to do, and lack of eager compliance is a sign of something wrong in their nature.
But no matter how much men in authority have turned moral rules into an agency of class supremacy, any theory which attributes the origin of rule to deliberate design is false. To take advantage of conditions after they have come into existence is one thing; to create them for the sake of an advantage to accrue is quite another thing. We must go back to the bare fact of social division into superior and inferior. To say that accident produced social conditions is to perceive they were not produced by intelligence. Lack of understanding of human nature is the primary cause of disregard for it. Lack of insight always ends in despising or else unreasoned admiration. When men had no scientific knowledge of physical nature they either passively submitted to it or sought to control it magically. What cannot be understood cannot be managed intelligently. It has to be forced into subjection from without. The opaqueness of human nature to reason is equivalent to a belief in its intrinsic irregularity. Hence a decline in the authority of social oligarchy was accompanied by a rise of scientific interest in human nature. This means that the make-up and working of human forces afford a basis for moral ideas and ideals. Our science of human nature in comparison with physical sciences is rudimentary, and morals which are concerned with the health, efficiency and happiness of a development of human nature are correspondingly elementary. . . .
Morals Based on a Study of Human Nature and Facts
It is not pretended that a moral theory based upon realities of human nature and a study of the specific connections of these realities with those of physical science would do away with moral struggle and defeat. It would not make the moral life as simple a matter as wending one's way along a well-lighted boulevard. All action is an invasion of the future, of the unknown. Conflict and uncertainty are ultimate traits. But morals based upon concern with facts and deriving guidance from knowledge of them would at least locate the points of effective endeavor and would focus available resources upon them. It would put an end to the impossible attempt to live in two unrelated worlds. It would destroy fixed distinction between the human and the physical, as well as that between the moral and the industrial and political. A morals based on study of human nature instead of upon disregard for it would find the facts of man continuous with those of the rest of nature and would thereby ally ethics with physics and biology. It would find the nature and activities of one person coterminous with those of other human beings, and therefore link ethics with the study of history, sociology, law and economics.
Such a morals would not automatically solve moral problems, nor resolve perplexities. But it would enable us to state problems in such forms that action could be courageously and intelligently directed to their solution. It would not assure us against failure, but it would render failure a source of instruction. It would not protect us against the future emergence of equally serious moral difficulties, but it would enable us to approach the always recurring troubles with a fund of growing knowledge which would add significant values to our conduct even when we overtly failed—as we should continue to do. Until the integrity of morals with human nature and of both with the environment is recognized, we shall be deprived of the aid of past experience to cope with the most acute and deep problems of life. Accurate and extensive knowledge will continue to operate only in dealing with purely technical problems. The intelligent acknowledgment of the continuity of nature, man and society will alone secure a growth of morals which will be serious without being fanatical, aspiring without sentimentality, adapted to reality without conventionality, sensible without taking the form of calculation of profits, idealistic without being romantic.
EMPIRICAL METHOD AVOIDS PROBLEMS WITH TRADITIONAL METAPHYSICS (Experience and Nature, 1925, Ch. 1: Experience and Philosophic Method)
Benefits of the Empirical Method
The Critic: Experience Is too Irregular and Blocked Off from True Nature to Explain it
The title of this volume, Experience and Nature, is intended to signify that the philosophy here presented may be termed either empirical naturalism or naturalistic empiricism, or, taking "experience" in its usual signification, naturalistic humanism.
To many the associating of the two words will seem like talking of a round square, so engrained is the notion of the separation of man and experience from nature. Experience, they say, is important for those beings who have it, but is too casual and sporadic in its occurrence to carry with it any important implications regarding the nature of Nature. Nature, on the other hand, is said to be complete apart from experience. Indeed, according to some thinkers the case is even in worse plight: Experience to them is not only something extraneous which is occasionally superimposed upon nature, but it forms a veil or screen which shuts us off from nature, unless in some way it can be "transcended." So something non-natural by way of reason or intuition is introduced, something supra-empirical. According to an opposite school experience fares as badly, nature being thought to signify something wholly material and mechanistic; to frame a theory of experience in naturalistic terms is, accordingly, to degrade and deny the noble and ideal values that characterize experience.
I know of no route by which dialectical argument can answer such objections. They arise from associations with words and cannot be dealt with argumentatively. One can only hope in the course of the whole discussion to disclose the meanings which are attached to "experience" and "nature," and thus insensibly produce, if one is fortunate, a change in the significations previously attached to them. This process of change may be hastened by calling attention to another context in which nature and experience get on harmoniously together wherein experience presents itself as the method, and the only method, for getting at nature, penetrating its secrets, and wherein nature empirically disclosed (by the use of empirical method in natural science) deepens, enriches and directs the further development of experience.
Response: Use of Experience in Natural Science is a Template for Use of Experience in Ordinary Life
In the natural sciences there is a union of experience and nature which is not greeted as a monstrosity; on the contrary, the inquirer must use empirical method if his findings are to be treated as genuinely scientific. The investigator assumes as a matter of course that experience, controlled in specifiable ways, is the avenue that leads to the facts and laws of nature. He uses reason and calculation freely; he could not get along without them. But he sees to it that ventures of this theoretical sort start from and terminate in directly experienced subject-matter. Theory may intervene in a long course of reasoning, many portions of which are remote from what is directly experienced. But the vine of pendant theory is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter. And this experienced material is the same for the scientific man and the man in the street. The latter cannot follow the intervening reasoning without special preparation. But stars, rocks, trees, and creeping things are the same material of experience for both.
These commonplaces take on significance when the relation of experience to the formation of a philosophic theory of nature is in question. They indicate that experience, if scientific inquiry is justified, is no infinitesimally thin layer or foreground of nature, but that it penetrates into it, reaching down into its depths, and in such a way that its grasp is capable of expansion; it tunnels in all directions and in so doing brings to the surface things at first hidden as miners pile high on the surface of the earth treasures brought from below. Unless we are prepared to deny all validity to scientific inquiry, these facts have a value that cannot be ignored for the general theory of the relation of nature and experience. . . .
Empirical Method Helps avoid the Philosophic Fallacy of Creating Metaphysical Entities
Selective emphasis, choice, is inevitable whenever reflection occurs. This is not an evil. Deception comes only when the presence and operation of choice is concealed, disguised, denied. Empirical method finds and points to the operation of choice as it does to any other event. Thus it protects us from conversion of eventual functions into antecedent existence: a conversion that may be said to be the philosophic fallacy, whether it be performed in behalf of mathematical subsistences, esthetic essences, the purely physical order of nature, or God. The present writer does not profess any greater candor of intent than animates fellow philosophers. But the pursuance of an empirical method, is, he submits, the only way to secure execution of candid intent. Whatever enters into choice, determining its need and giving it guidance, an empirical method frankly indicates what it is for; and the fact of choice, with its workings and consequences, an empirical method points out with equal openness. . . .
[Clarification of Philosophic Fallacy in Chapter 2: "philosophers have too readily assumed that metaphysics, and science of fact and truth, are themselves wisdom, thinking thus to avoid the necessity of either exercising or recognizing choice. The consequence is that conversion of unavowed morals or wisdom into cosmology, and into a metaphysics of nature, which was termed in the last chapter the philosophic fallacy. It supplies the formula of the technique by which thinkers have relegated the uncertain and unfinished to an invidious state of unreal being, while they have systematically exalted the assured and complete to the rank of true Being."]
Empirical Method evaluates the Good and Bad in Past Philosophies
Common Sense Philosophy a bad Method since it is Based on Past Prejudices
The chapters which follow make no pretence, accordingly, of starting to philosophize afresh as if there were no philosophies already in existence, or as if their conclusions were empirically worthless. Rather the subsequent discussions rely, perhaps excessively so, upon the main results of great philosophic systems, endeavoring to point out their elements of strength and of weakness when their conclusions are employed (as the refined objects of all reflection must be employed) as guides back to the subject-matter of crude, everyday experience.
Our primary experience as it comes is of little value for purposes of analysis and control, crammed as it is with things that need analysis and control. The very existence of reflection is proof of its deficiencies. Just as ancient astronomy and physics were of little scientific worth, because, owing to the lack of apparatus and techniques of experimental analysis, they had to take the things of primary observation at their face value, so "common-sense" philosophy usually repeats current conventionalities. What is averred to be implicit reliance upon what is given in common experience is likely to be merely an appeal to prejudice to gain support for some fanaticism or defence for some relic of conservative tradition which is beginning to be questioned.
Past Philosophers Erred by Importing Concepts from the Limited Science of their Day
The trouble, then, with the conclusions of philosophy is not in the least that they are results of reflection and theorizing. It is rather that philosophers have borrowed from various sources the conclusions of special analyses, particularly of some ruling science of the day, and imported them direct into philosophy, with no check by either the empirical objects from which they arose or those to which the conclusions in question point. Thus Plato trafficked with the Pythagoreans and imported mathematical concepts; Descartes and Spinoza took over the presuppositions of geometrical reasoning; Locke imported into the theory of mind the Newtonian physical corpuscles, converting them into given "simple ideas"; Hegel borrowed and generalized without limit the rising historical method of his day; contemporary English philosophy has imported from mathematics the notion of primitive indefinable propositions, and given them a content from Locke's simple ideas, which had in the meantime become part of the stock in trade of psychological science.
Well, why not, as long as what is borrowed has a sound scientific status? Because in scientific inquiry, refined methods justify themselves by opening up new fields of subject-matter for exploration; they create new techniques of observation and experimentation. Thus when the Michelson-Moley experiment disclosed, as a matter of gross experience, facts which did not agree with the results of accepted physical laws, physicists did not think for a moment of denying the validity of what was found in that experience, even though it rendered questionable an elaborate intellectual apparatus and system. The coincidence of the bands of the interferometer was accepted at its face value in spite of its incompatibility with Newtonian physics. Because scientific inquirers accepted it at its face value they at once set to work to reconstruct their theories; they questioned their reflective premisses, not the full "reality" of what they saw. This task of re-adjustment compelled not only new reasonings and calculations in the development of a more comprehensive theory, but opened up new ways of inquiry into experienced subject-matter. Not for a moment did they think of explaining away the features of an object in gross experience because it was not in logical harmony with theory as philosophers have so often done. Had they done so, they would have stultified science and shut themselves off from new problems and new findings in subject-matter. In short, the material of refined scientific method is continuous with that of the actual world as it is concretely experienced.
But when philosophers transfer into their theories bodily and as finalities the refined conclusions they borrow from the sciences, whether logic, mathematics or physics, these results are not employed to reveal new subject-matters and illuminate old ones of gross experience; they are employed to cast discredit on the latter and to generate new and artificial problems regarding the reality and validity of the things of gross experience. Thus the discoveries of psychologies taken out of their own empirical context are in philosophy employed to cast doubt upon the reality of things external to mind and to selves, things and properties that are perhaps the most salient characteristics of ordinary experience. Similarly, the discoveries and methods of physical science, the concepts of mass, space, motion, have been adopted wholesale in isolation by philosophers in such a way as to make dubious and even incredible the reality of the affections, purposes and enjoyments of concrete experience. The objects of mathematics, symbols of relations having no explicit reference to actual existence, efficacious in the territory to which mathematical technique applies, have been employed in philosophy to determine the priority of essences to existence, and to create the insoluble problem of why pure essence ever descends into the tangles and tortuosities of existence.
Empirical Method includes a Report of Historical Philosophical Systems
What empirical method exacts of philosophy is two things: First, that refined methods and products be traced back to their origin in primary experience, in all its heterogeneity and fullness; so that the needs and problems out of which they arise and which they have to satisfy be acknowledged. Secondly, that the secondary methods and conclusions be brought back to the things of ordinary experience, in all their coarseness and crudity, for verification. In this way, the methods of analytic reflection yield material which form the ingredients of a method of designation, denotation, in philosophy. A scientific work in physics or astronomy gives a record of calculations and deductions that were derived from past observations and experiments. But it is more than a record; it is also an indication, an assignment, of further observations and experiments to be performed. No scientific report would get a hearing if it did not describe the apparatus by means of which experiments were carried on and results obtained; not that apparatus is worshipped, but because this procedure tells other inquirers how they are to go to work to get results which will agree or disagree in their experience with those previously arrived at, and thus confirm, modify and rectify the latter. The recorded scientific result is in effect a designation of a method to be followed and a prediction of what will be found when specified observations are set on foot. That is all a philosophy can be or do. In the chapters that follow I have undertaken a revision and reconstruction of the conclusions, the reports, of a number of historic philosophic systems, in order that they may be usable methods by which one may go to his own experience, and, discerning what is found by use of the method, come to understand better what is already within the common experience of mankind.
DEMOCRACY AS COMMUNITY LIFE (The Public and its Problems, 1927, Chapter 5: Search for the Great Community)
Democracy as an Idea affects All Community Associations, Political Democracy is just the Governmental Machinery
We have had occasion to refer in passing to the distinction between democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a system of government. The two are, of course, connected. The idea remains barren and empty save as it is incarnated in human relationships. Yet in discussion they must be distinguished. The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion. And even as far as political arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions ere but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation. It will hardly do to say that criticisms of the political machinery leave the believer in the idea untouched. For, as far as they are justified — and no candid believer can deny that many of them are only too well grounded — they arouse him to bestir himself in order that the idea may find a more adequate machinery through which to work. What the faithful insist upon, however, is that the idea [of democracy] and its external [political] organs and structures are not to be identified. We object to the common supposition of the foes of existing democratic government that the accusations against it touch the social and moral aspirations and ideas which underlie the political forms. The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that machinery. But the phrase may also indicate the need of returning to the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it, and of employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and re-make its political manifestations. . . .
Democratic Community Life involves a Joint Activity that Members Recognize as Good
Regarded as an idea [rather than a system of government], democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself. It is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be. But neither in this sense is there or has there ever been anything which is a community in its full measure, a community unalloyed by alien elements. The idea or ideal of a community presents, however, actual phases of associated life as they are freed from restrictive and disturbing elements, and are contemplated as having attained their limit of development. Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.
True Meaning of Fraternity, Liberty and Equality through Democracy
Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not utopian. The conceptions and shibboleths which are traditionally associated with the idea of democracy take on a veridical and directive meaning only when they are construed as marks and traits of an association which realizes the defining characteristics of a community. Fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions. Their separate assertion leads to mushy sentimentalism or else to extravagant and fanatical violence which in the end defeats its own aims. Equality then becomes a creed of mechanical identity which is false to facts and impossible of realization. Effort to attain it is divisive of the vital bonds which hold men together; as far as it puts forth issue, the outcome is a mediocrity in which good is common only in the sense of being average and vulgar. Liberty is then thought of as independence of social ties, and ends in dissolution and anarchy. It is more difficult to sever the idea of brotherhood from that of a community, and hence it is either practically ignored in the movements which identify democracy with Individualism, or else it is a sentimentally appended tag.
In its just connection with communal experience, fraternity is another name for the consciously appreciated goods which accrue from an association in which all share, and which give direction to the conduct of each. Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association. Equality denotes the unhampered share which each individual member of the community has in the consequences of associated action. It is equitable because it is measured only by need and capacity to utilize, not by extraneous factors which deprive one in order that another may take and have. A baby in the family is equal with others, not because of some antecedent and structural quality which is the same as that of others, but in so far as his needs for care and development are attended to without being sacrificed to the superior strength, possessions and matured abilities of others. Equality does not signify that kind of mathematical or physical equivalence in virtue of which any one element may be substituted for another. It denotes effective regard for whatever is distinctive and unique in each, irrespective of physical and psychological inequalities. It is not a natural possession but is a fruit of the community when its action is directed by its character as a community.
Community Life is Association Plus Active Participation
Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a community. But association itself is physical and organic, while communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained. Human beings combine in behavior as directly and unconsciously as do atoms, stellar masses and cells; as directly and unknowingly as they divide and repel. They do so in virtue of their own structure, as man and woman unite, as the baby seeks the breast and the breast is there to supply its need. They do so from external circumstances, pressure from without, as atoms combine or separate in presence of an electric charge, or as sheep huddle together from the cold. Associated activity needs no explanation; things are made that way. But no amount of aggregated collective action of itself constitutes a community. For beings who observe and think, and whose ideas are absorbed by impulses and become sentiments and interests, ''we" is as inevitable as "I". But "we" and "our" exist only when the consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of desire and effort, just as and ''mine" appear on the scene only when a distinctive share in mutual action is consciously asserted or claimed. Human associations may be ever so organic in origin and firm in operation, but they develop into societies in a human sense only as their consequences, being known, are esteemed and sought for. Even if "society" were as much an organism as some writers have held, it would not on that account be society. Interactions, transactions, occur de facto and the results of interdependence follow. But participation in activities and sharing in results are additive concerns. They demand communication as a prerequisite. . . .
Communities create a Social Consciousness through Shared Linguistic Symbols
The results of conjoint experience are considered and transmitted. Events cannot be passed from one to another, but meanings may be shared by means of [linguistic] signs. Wants and impulses are then attached to common meanings. They are thereby transformed into desires and purposes, which, since they implicate a common or mutually understood meaning, present new ties, converting a conjoint activity into a community of interest and endeavor. Thus there is generated what, metaphorically, may be termed a general will and social consciousness: desire and choice on the part of individuals in behalf of activities that, by means of symbols, are communicable and shared by all concerned. A community thus presents an order of energies transmuted into one of meanings which are appreciated and mutually referred by each to every other on the part of those engaged in combined action. "Force" is not eliminated but is transformed in use and direction by ideas and sentiments made possible by means of symbols.
THE MISGUIDED QUEST FOR CERTAINTY (The Quest for Certainty, 1929, Ch. 1: Escape from Peril)
Two Ways of Achieving Security: Intellectual Change in Attitude vs. Practical Change in one's Condition
Man who lives in a world of hazards is compelled to seek for security. He has sought to attain it in two ways. One of them 'began with an attempt to propitiate the powers which environ him and determine his destiny. It expressed itself in supplication, sacrifice, ceremonial rite and magical cult. In time these crude methods were largely displaced. The sacrifice of a contrite heart was esteemed more pleasing than that of bulls and oxen; the inner attitude of reverence and devotion more desirable than external ceremonies. If man could not conquer destiny he could willingly ally himself with it; putting his will, even in sore affliction, on the side of the powers which dispense fortune, he could escape defeat and might triumph in the midst of destruction.
The other course is to invent arts and by their means turn the powers of nature to account; man constructs a fortress out of the very conditions and forces which threaten him. He builds shelters, weaves garments, makes flame his friend instead of his enemy, and grows into the complicated arts of associated living. This is the method of changing the world through action, as the other is the method of changing the self in emotion and idea. It is a commentary on the slight control man has obtained over himself by means of control over nature, that the method of action has been felt to manifest dangerous pride, even defiance of the powers which be. People of old wavered between thinking arts to be the gift of the gods and to be an invasion of their prerogatives. Both versions testify to the sense of something extraordinary in the arts, something either superhuman or unnatural. The souls who have predicted that by means of the arts man might establish a kingdom of order, justice and beauty through mastery of nature's energies and laws have been few and little heeded. . . .
The depreciation of action, of doing and making, has been cultivated by philosophers. But while philosophers have perpetuated the derogation by formulating and justifying it, they did not originate it. They glorified their own office without doubt in placing theory so much above practice. But independently of their attitude, many things conspired to the same effect. Work has been onerous, toilsome, associated with a primeval curse. It has been done under compulsion and the pressure of necessity, while intellectual activity is associated with leisure.
Quest for Certainty arises from Prioritizing Knowledge over Action
The questions suggested have far-reaching issues. What is the cause and the import of the sharp division between theory and practice? Why should the latter be disesteemed along with matter and the body? What has been the effect upon the various modes in which action is manifested: industry, politics, the fine arts, and upon morals conceived of as overt activity having consequences, instead of as mere inner personal attitude? How has the separation of intellect from action affected the theory of knowledge? What has been in particular the effect upon the conception and course of philosophy? What forces are at work to break down the division? What would the effect be if the divorce were annulled, and knowing and doing were brought into intrinsic connection with one another? What revisions of the traditional theory of mind, thought and knowing would be required, and what change in the idea of the office of philosophy would be demanded? What modifications would ensue in the disciplines which are concerned with the various phases of human activity?
These questions form the theme of this book, and indicate the nature of the problems to be discussed. In this opening chapter we shall consider especially some historic grounds for the elevation of knowledge above making and doing. This phase of the discussion will disclose that exaltation of pure intellect and its activity above practical affairs is fundamentally connected with the quest for a certainty which shall be absolute and unshakeable. The distinctive characteristic of practical activity, one which is so inherent that it cannot be eliminated, is the uncertainty which attends it. Of it we are compelled to say: Act, but act at your peril. Judgment and belief regarding actions to be performed can never attain more than a precarious probability. Through thought, however, it has seemed that men might escape from the perils of uncertainty.
Practical activity deals with individualized and unique situations which are never exactly duplicable and about which, accordingly, no complete assurance is possible. All activity, moreover, involves change. The intellect, however, according to the traditional doctrine, may grasp universal Being, and Being which is universal is fixed and immutable. Wherever there is practical activity we human beings are involved as partakers in the issue. All the fear, disesteem and lack of confidence which gather about the thought of ourselves, cluster also about the thought of the actions in which we are partners. Man's distrust of himself has caused him to desire to get beyond and above himself} in pure knowledge he has thought he could attain this self -transcendence. . . .
Greek Emphasis of Reason and Certainty
If one looks at the foundations of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle as an anthropologist looks at his material, that is, as cultural subject-matter, it is clear that these philosophies were systematizations in rational form of the content of Greek religious and artistic beliefs. The systematization involved a purification. Logic provided the patterns to which ultimately real objects had to conform, while physical science was possible in the degree in which the natural world, even in its mutabilities, exhibited exemplification of ultimate immutable rational objects. Thus, along with the elimination of myths and grosser superstitions, there were set up the ideals of science and of a life of reason. Ends which could justify themselves to reason were to take the place of custom as the guide of conduct. These two ideals form a permanent contribution to western civilization. . . .
Although this Greek formulation was made long ago and much of it is now strange in its specific terms, certain features of it are as relevant to present thought as they were significant in their original formulation. For in spite of the great, the enormous changes in the subject-matter and method of the sciences and the tremendous expansion of practical activities by means of arts and technologies, the main tradition of western culture has retained intact this framework of ideas. Perfect certainty is what man wants. It cannot be found by practical doing or making; these take effect in an uncertain future, and involve peril, the risk of misadventure, frustration and failure. Knowledge, on the other hand, is thought to be concerned with a region of being which is fixed in itself. Being eternal and unalterable, human knowing is not to make any difference in it. It can be approached through the medium of the apprehensions and demonstrations of thought, or by some other organ of mind, which does nothing to the real, except just to know it.
Two Implications of the Greek Assumption: Reality is Validated through Knowledge, and Some Things are Uniquely the Proper Object of Knowledge
There is involved in these doctrines a whole system of philosophical conclusions. The first and foremost is that there is complete correspondence between knowledge in its true meaning and what is real. What is known, what is true for cognition, is what is real in being. The objects of knowledge form the standards of measures of the reality of all other objects of experience. Are the objects of the affections, of desire, effort, choice, that is to say everything to which we attach value, real? Yes, if they can be warranted by knowledge; if we can know objects having these value properties, we are justified in thinking them real. But as objects of desire and purpose they have no sure place in Being until they are approached and validated through knowledge. The idea is so familiar that we overlook the unexpressed premise upon which it rests, namely that only the completely fixed and unchanging can be real. The quest for certitude has determined our basic metaphysics.
Secondly, the theory of knowledge has its basic premises fixed by the same doctrine. For knowledge to be certain must relate to that which has antecedent existence or essential being. There are certain things which are alone inherently the proper objects of knowledge and science. Things in the production of which we participate we cannot know in the true sense of the word, for such things succeed instead of preceding our action. What concerns action forms the realm of mere guesswork and probability, as distinct from the warrant of rational assurance which is the ideal of true knowledge. We are so accustomed to the separation of knowledge from doing and making that we fail to recognize how it controls our conceptions of mind, of consciousness and of reflective inquiry. For as relates to genuine knowledge, these must all be defined, on the basis of the premise, so as not to admit of the presence of any overt action that modifies conditions having prior and independent existence.
Separation of Knowledge and Action is the Faulty Assumption behind All Theories of Knowledge
Special theories of knowledge differ enormously from one another. Their quarrels with one another fill the air. The din thus created makes us deaf to the way in which they say one thing in common. The controversies are familiar. Some theories ascribe the ultimate test of knowledge to impressions passively received, forced upon us whether we will or no. Others ascribe the guarantee of knowledge to synthetic activity of the intellect. Idealistic theories hold that mind and the object known are ultimately one; realistic doctrines reduce knowledge to awareness of what exists independently, and so on. But they all make one common assumption. They all hold that the operation of inquiry excludes any element of practical activity that enters into the construction of the object known. Strangely enough this is as true of idealism as of realism, of theories of synthetic activity as of those of passive receptivity. For according to them "mind" constructs the known object not in any observable way, or by means of practical overt acts having a temporal quality, but by some occult internal operation.
The common essence of all these theories, in short, is that what is known is antecedent to the mental act of observation and inquiry, and is totally unaffected by these acts; otherwise it would not be fixed and unchangeable. This negative condition, that the processes of search, investigation, reflection, involved in knowledge relate to something having prior being, fixes once for all the main characters attributed to mind, and to the organs of knowing. They must be outside what is known, so as not to interact in any way with the object to be known. If the word "interaction" be used, it cannot denote that overt production of change it signifies in its ordinary and practical use.
Replacing the Quest for Certainty with the Practical Quest for Security
All of these notions about certainty and the fixed, about the nature of the real world, about the nature of the mind and its organs of knowing, are completely bound up with one another, and their consequences ramify into practically all important ideas entertained upon any philosophic question. They all flow such is my basic thesis from the separation (set up in the interest of the quest for absolute certainty) between theory and practice, knowledge and actions. Consequently the later problem cannot be attacked in isolation, by itself. It is too thoroughly entangled with fundamental beliefs and ideas in all sorts of fields.
In later chapters the theme will, therefore, be approached in relation to each of the above-mentioned points. We shall first take up the effect of the traditional separation upon the conception of the nature of philosophy, especially in connection with the question of the secure place of values in existence. We shall then pass on to an account of the way in which modern philosophies have been dominated by the problem of reconciling the conclusions of natural science with the objective validity of the values by which men live and regulate their conduct: a problem which would have no existence were it not for the prior uncritical acceptance of the traditional notion that knowledge has a monopolistic claim to access to reality. The discussion will then take up various phases of the development of actual knowing as exemplified in scientific procedure, so as to show, by an analysis of experimental inquiry in its various phases, how completely the traditional assumptions, mentioned above, have been abandoned in concrete scientific procedure. For science in becoming experimental has itself become a mode of directed practical doing. There will then follow a brief statement of the effect of the destruction of the barriers which have divided theory and practice upon reconstruction of the basic ideas about mind and thought, and upon the solution of a number of long-standing problems as to the theory of knowledge. The consequences of substituting search for security by practical means for quest of absolute certainty by cognitive means will then be considered in its bearing upon the problem of our judgments regarding the values which control conduct, especially its social phases.
RECONNECTING ART WITH EXPERIENCE (Art as Experience, 1934, Chapter 1: The Live Creature)
Art within the Creation and Use of Ordinary Objects
Art is Often Cut off from Human Experience, which Distorts Aesthetic Theories
By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding. In addition, the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience.
When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations. It is the business of those who are concerned with the theory of the earth, geographers and geologists, to make this fact evident in its various implications. The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine art has a like task to accomplish.
Begin by Examining Non-Aesthetic Conditions of a Work of Art
If one is willing to grant this position, even if only by way of temporary experiment, he will see that there follows a conclusion at first sight surprising. In order to understand the meaning of artistic products, we have to forget them for a time, to turn aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as esthetic. We must arrive at the theory of art by means of a detour. For theory is concerned with understanding, insight, not without exclamations of admiration, and stimulation of that emotional outburst often called appreciation. It is quite possible to enjoy flowers in their colored form and delicate fragrance without knowing anything about plants theoretically. But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants, he is committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air, water and sunlight that condition the growth of plants.
By common consent, the Parthenon is a great work of art. Yet it has esthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience for a human being. And, if one is to go beyond personal enjoyment into the formation of a theory about that large republic of art of which the building is one member, one has to be willing at some point in his reflections to turn from it to the bustling, arguing, acutely sensitive Athenian citizens, with civic sense identified with a civic religion, of whose experience the temple was an expression, and who built it not as a work of art but as a civic commemoration. The turning to them is as human beings who had needs that were a demand for the building and that were carried to fulfillment in it; it is not an examination such as might be carried on by a sociologist in search for material relevant to his purpose. The one who sets out to theorize about the esthetic experience embodied in the Parthenon must realize in thought what the people into whose lives it entered had in common, as creators and as those who were satisfied with it, with people in our own homes and on our own streets. . . .
In order to understand the esthetic in its ultimate and approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights that hold the crowd — the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals. These people, if questioned as to the reason for their actions, would doubtless return reasonable answers. The man who poked the sticks of burning wood would say he did it to make the fire burn better; but he is none the less fascinated by the colorful drama of change enacted before his eyes and imaginatively partakes in it. He does not remain a cold spectator. What Coleridge said of the reader of poetry is true in its way of all who are happily absorbed in their activities of mind and body: "The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, not by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the journey itself." . . .
Recovering the Connection between Aesthetic Experience and the Normal Processes of Living
Beginning with Art Objects of Everyday Enjoyment without Spiritualizing them
My purpose, however, is not to engage in an economic interpretation of the history of the arts, much less to argue that economic conditions are either invariably or directly relevant to perception and enjoyment, or even to interpretation of individual works of art. It is to indicate that theories which isolate art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing, are not inherent in the subject-matter but arise because of specifiable extraneous conditions. Embedded as they are in institutions and in habits of life, these conditions operate effectively because they work so unconsciously. Then the theorist assumes they are embedded in the nature of things. Nevertheless, the influence of these conditions is not confined to theory. As I have already indicated, it deeply affects the practice of living, driving away esthetic perceptions that are necessary ingredients of happiness, or reducing them to the level of compensating transient pleasurable excitations.
Even to readers who are adversely inclined to what has been said, the implications of the statements that have been made may be useful in defining the nature of the problem: that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living. The understanding of art and of its role in civilization is not furthered by setting out with eulogies of it nor by occupying ourselves exclusively at the outset with great works of art recognized as such. The comprehension which theory essays will be arrived at by a detour; by going back to experience of the common or mill run of things to discover the esthetic quality such experience possesses. Theory can start with and from acknowledged works of art only when the esthetic is already compartmentalized, or only when works of art are set in a niche apart instead of being celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience. Following this clue we can discover how the work of art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment. The art product will then be seen to issue from the latter, when the full meaning of ordinary experience is expressed, as dyes come out of coal tar products when they receive special treatment.
Many theories about art already exist. If there is justification for proposing yet another philosophy of the esthetic, it must be found in a new mode of approach. Combinations and permutations among existing theories can easily be brought forth by those so inclined. But, to my mind, the trouble with existing theories is that they start from a ready-made compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that "spiritualizes" it out of connection with the objects of concrete experience. The alternative, however, to such spiritualization is not a degrading and Philistinish materialization of works of fine art, but a conception that discloses the way in which these works idealize qualities found in common experience. Were works of art placed in a directly human context in popular esteem, they would have a much wider appeal than they can have when pigeon-hole theories of art win general acceptance.
Art is Heightened by Focusing on its Connection with Ordinary Experience in the World of Things
A conception of fine art that sets out from its connection with discovered qualities of ordinary experience will be able to indicate the factors and forces that favor the normal development of common human activities into matters of artistic value. It will also be able to point out those conditions that arrest its normal growth. Writers on esthetic theory often raise the question of whether esthetic philosophy can aid in cultivation of esthetic appreciation. The question is a branch of the general theory of criticism, which, it seems to me, fails to accomplish its full office if it does not indicate what to look for and what to find in concrete esthetic objects. But, in any case, it is safe to say that a philosophy of art is sterilized unless it makes us aware of the function of art in relation to other modes of experience, and unless it indicates why this function is so inadequately realized, and unless it suggests the conditions under which the office would be successfully performed. . . .
It is mere ignorance that leads then to the supposition that connection of art and esthetic perception with experience signifies a lowering of their significance and dignity. Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up within one's own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events. Instead of signifying surrender to caprice and disorder, it affords our sole demonstration of a stability that is not stagnation but is rhythmic and developing. Because experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ. Even in its rudimentary forms, it contains the promise of that delightful perception which is esthetic experience.
RELIGIOUS FAITH WITHOUT THE SUPERNATURAL (A Common Faith, 1934)
Religion Bad, the Religious Good (Chapter 1: Religion versus the Religious)
The Supernatural Essential to Religion
Never before in history has mankind been so much of two minds, so divided into two camps, as it is today. Religions have traditionally been allied with ideas of the supernatural, and often have been based upon explicit beliefs about it. Today there are many who hold that nothing worthy of being called religious is possible apart from the supernatural. Those who hold this belief differ in many respects. They range from those who accept the dogmas and sacraments of the Greek and Roman Catholic church as the only sure means of access to the supernatural to the theist or mild deist. Between them are the many Protestant denominations who think the Scriptures, aided by a pure conscience, are adequate avenues to supernatural truth and power. But they agree in one point: the necessity for a Supernatural Being and for an immortality that is beyond the power of nature.
The opposed group consists of those who think the advance of culture and science has completely discredited the supernatural and with it all religions that were allied with belief in it. But they go beyond this point. The extremists in this group believe that with elimination of the supernatural not only must historic religions be dismissed but with them everything of a religious nature. When historical knowledge has discredited the claims made for the supernatural character of the persons said to have founded historic religions; when the supernatural inspiration attributed to literatures held sacred has been riddled, and when anthropological and psychological knowledge has disclosed the all-too-human source from which religious beliefs and practices have sprung, everything religious must, they say, also go.
There is one idea held in common by these two opposite groups: identification of the religious with the supernatural. The question I shall raise in these chapters concerns the ground for and the consequences of this identification: its reasons and its value. In the discussion I shall develop another conception of the nature of the religious phase of experience, one that separates it from the supernatural and the things that have grown up about it. I shall try to show that these derivations are encumbrances and that what is genuinely religious will undergo an emancipation when it is relieved from them; that then, for the first time, the religious aspect of experience will be free to develop freely on its own account.
This view is exposed to attack from both the other camps. It goes contrary to traditional religions, including those that have the greatest hold upon the religiously minded today. The view announced will seem to them to cut the vital nerve of the religious element itself in taking away the basis upon which traditional religions and institutions have been founded. From the other side, the position I am taking seems like a timid halfway position, a concession and compromise unworthy of thought that is thoroughgoing. It is regarded as a view entertained from mere tendermindedness, as an emotional hangover from childhood indoctrination, or even as a manifestation of a desire to avoid disapproval and curry favor.
Dictionary Definition of Religion has Little Meaning
The heart of my point, as far as I shall develop it in this first section, is that there is a difference between religion, a religion, and the religious; between anything that may be denoted by a noun substantive and the quality of experience that is designated by an adjective. It is not easy to find a definition of religion in the substantive sense that wins general acceptance. However, in the Oxford Dictionary I find the following: "Recognition on the part of man of some unseen higher power as having control of his destiny and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship."
This particular definition is less explicit in assertion of the supernatural character of the higher unseen power than are others that might be cited. It is, however, surcharged with implications having their source in ideas connected with the belief in the supernatural, characteristic of historic religions. Let us suppose that one familiar with the history of religions, including those called primitive, compares the definition with the variety of known facts and by means of the comparison sets out to determine just what the definition means. I think he will be struck by three facts that reduce the terms of the definition to such a low common denominator that little meaning is left.
He will note that the "unseen powers" referred to have been conceived in a multitude of incompatible ways. Eliminating the differences, nothing is left beyond the bare reference to something unseen and powerful. This has been conceived as the vague and undefined Mana of the Melanesians; the Kami of primitive Shintoism; the fetish of the Africans; spirits, having some human properties, that pervade natural places and animate natural forces; the ultimate and impersonal principle of Buddhism; the unmoved mover of Greek thought; the gods and semidivine heroes of the Greek and Roman Pantheons; the personal and loving Providence of Christianity, omnipotent, and limited by a corresponding evil power; the arbitrary Will of Moslemism; the supreme legislator and judge of deism. And these are but a few of the outstanding varieties of ways in which the invisible power has been conceived. . . .
Freeing the Religious from its Historical Encumbrances
I gladly admit that historic religions have been relative to the conditions of social culture in which peoples lived. Indeed, what I am concerned with is to press home the logic of this method of disposal of outgrown traits of past religions. Beliefs and practices in a religion that now prevails are by this logic relative to the present state of culture. If so much flexibility has obtained in the past regarding an unseen power, the way it affects human destiny, and the attitudes we are to take toward it, why should it be assumed that change in conception and action has now come to an end? The logic involved in getting rid of inconvenient aspects of past religions compels us to inquire how much in religions now accepted are survivals from outgrown cultures. It compels us to ask what conception of unseen powers and our relations to them would be consonant with the best achievements and aspirations of the present. It demands that in imagination we wipe the slate clean and start afresh by asking what would be the idea of the unseen, of the manner of its control over us and the ways in which reverence and obedience would be manifested, if whatever is basically religious in experience had the opportunity to express itself free from all historic encumbrances. . . .
Religion Irrelevant to the Religious
For the historic increase of the ethical and ideal content of religions suggests that the process of purification may be carried further. It indicates that further choice is imminent in which certain values and functions in experience may be selected. This possibility is what I had in mind in speaking of the difference between the religious and a religion. I am not proposing a religion, but rather the emancipation of elements and outlooks that may be called religious. For the moment we have a religion, whether that of the Sioux Indian or of Judaism or of Christianity, that moment the ideal factors in experience that may be called religious take on a load that is not inherent in them, a load of current beliefs and of institutional practices that are irrelevant to them.
I can illustrate what I mean by a common phenomenon in contemporary life. It is widely supposed that a person who does not accept any religion is thereby shown to be a non-religious person. Yet it is conceivable that the present depression in religion is closely connected with the fact that religions now prevent, because of their weight of historic encumbrances, the religious quality of experience from coming to consciousness and finding the expression that is appropriate to present conditions, intellectual and moral. I believe that such is the case. I believe that many persons are so repelled from what exists as a religion by its intellectual and moral implications, that they are not even aware of attitudes in themselves that if they came to fruition would be genuinely religious. I hope that this remark may help make clear what I mean by the distinction between "religion" as a noun substantive and "religious" as adjectival.
To be somewhat more explicit, a religion (and as I have just said there is no such thing as religion in general) always signifies a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of institutional organization, loose or tight. In contrast, the adjective "religious" denotes nothing in the way of a specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs. It does not denote anything to which one can specifically point as one can point to this and that historic religion or existing church. For it does not denote anything that can exist by itself or that can be organized into a particular and distinctive form of existence. It denotes attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal. . . .
Nonsupernatural Religiousness Held Back by Supernatural Religion
Lives that are consciously inspired by loyalty to such ideals as have been mentioned are still comparatively infrequent to the extent of that comprehensiveness and intensity which arouse an ardor religious in function. But before we infer the incompetency of such ideals and of the actions they inspire, we should at least ask ourselves how much of the existing situation is due to the fact that the religious factors of experience have been drafted into supernatural channels and thereby loaded with irrelevant encumbrances. A body of [supernatural] beliefs and practices that are apart from the common and natural relations of mankind must, in the degree in which it is influential, weaken and sap the force of the possibilities inherent in such [non-supernatural religious] relations. Here lies one aspect of the emancipation of the religious from religion.
Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality. Many a person, inquirer, artist, philanthropist, citizen, men and women in the humblest walks of life, have achieved, without presumption and without display, such unification of themselves and of their relations to the conditions of existence. It remains to extend their spirit and inspiration to ever wider numbers. If I have said anything about religions and religion that seems harsh, I have said those things because of a firm belief that the claim on the part of religions to possess a monopoly of ideals and of the supernatural means by which alone, it is alleged, they can be furthered, stands in the way of the realization of distinctively religious values inherent in natural experience. For that reason, if for no other, I should be sorry if any were misled by the frequency with which I have employed the adjective "religious" to conceive of what I have said as a disguised apology for what have passed as religions. The opposition between religious values as I conceive them and religions is not to be bridged. Just because the release of these values is so important, their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved.
Non-Supernatural Faith grounded in the Secular Human Community (Chapter 3: The Human Abode of the Religious Function)
Secular Institutions are the New Social Center of Gravity
The change that has taken place in conditions once universal and now infrequent is in my opinion the greatest change that has occurred in religion in all history. The intellectual conflict of scientific and theological beliefs has attracted much more attention. It is still near the focus of attention. But the change in the social center of gravity of religion has gone on so steadily and is now so generally accomplished that it has faded from the thought of most persons, save perhaps the historians, and even they are especially aware of it only in its political aspect. For the conflict between state and church still continues in some countries.
There are even now persons who are born into a particular church, that of their parents, and who take membership in it almost as a matter of course; indeed, the fact of such membership may be an important, even a determining, factor in an individual's whole career. But the thing new in history, the thing once unheard of, is that the organization in question is a special institution within a secular community. Even where there are established churches, they are constituted by the state and may be unmade by the state. Not only the national state but other forms of organization among groups have grown in power and influence at the expense of organizations built upon and about a religion. The correlate of this fact is that membership in associations of the latter type is more and more a matter of the choice of individuals, who may tend to accept responsibilities imposed by the church but who accept them of their own volition. If they do accept them, the organization they join is, in many nations, chartered under a general corporation law of the political and secular entity.
The shift in what I have called the social center of gravity accompanies the enormous expansion of associations formed for educational, political, economic, philanthropic and scientific purposes, which has occurred independently of any religion. These social modes have grown so much that they exercise the greater hold upon the thought and interest of most persons, even of those holding membership in churches. This positive extension of interests which, from the standpoint of a religion, are non-religious, is so great that in comparison with it the direct effect of science upon the creeds of religion seems to me of secondary importance. . . .
The Common Faith of Humanity Expands upon the Values of the Continuous Human Community
The considerations put forward in the present chapter may be summed up in what they imply. The ideal ends to which we attach our faith are not shadowy and wavering. They assume concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.
STUDY QUESTIONS
Please answer all of the following questions.
1. According to Dewey in "Psychology", what are some features of human knowledge and how do they relate to universal intelligence?
2. According to Dewey in "My Pedagogic Creed", what are some of the main features of his philosophy of education?
3. According to Dewey in "Evolution and Ethics", what are the parallels between biological evolution and the evolution of ethical concepts?
4. According to Dewey in "Philosophy and American National Life", what are the unique features of American philosophy?
5. According to Dewey in "Ethics", what are the three fundamental cross-divisions of moral theories?
6. According to Dewey in "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy", what are the three Darwinian shifts that influenced philosophy?
7. According to Dewey's account of the origins of philosophy in "Reconstruction in Philosophy", what are the emotional and social factors that should form the basis of philosophy?
8. According to Dewey's account of ethics in "Reconstruction in Philosophy", what is wrong with the idea of a single ultimate goal, and what instead should morality focus on?
9. According to Dewey's account of democracy in "Reconstruction in Philosophy", what are the various types of associations that people have and what is the experimental process of shaping the policies of those groups?
10. According to Dewey in "Human Nature and Conduct", why did traditional morality set up rules against human nature, and how instead should morality approach human nature?
11. According to Dewey in "Experience and Nature", what are the benefits of the empirical method of philosophical inquiry and how does this method avoid the philosophic fallacy?
12. According to Dewey in "Experience and Nature", what are some of the bad approaches to past philosophies?
13. According to Dewy in "The Public and its Problems", what are the main points of distinction between political democracy and democracy as an idea?
14. According to Dewy in "The Public and its Problems", when disconnected with community life, what do the words "fraternity", "liberty" and "equality" reduce to?
15. According to Dewey in "The Quest for Certainty", what are the two ways of achieving security, and what are the main features of them?
16. According to Dewey in "The Quest for Certainty", what are the main aspects of Greek philosophy that prioritize reason and knowledge over action?
17. According to Dewey in "Art as Experience", what is the spiritualized/idealized view of art and what is so bad about it?
18. According to Dewey in "Art as Experience", what are the main features of art through ordinary experience?
19. According to Dewey in "A Common Faith", what is the supernatural view of religion and what is so bad about it?
20. According to Dewey in "A Common Faith", what are the main features of non-supernatural religiousness?
21. Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.
a. Henry Horace Williams makes the following criticism of Dewey's pragmatic theory of truth: "I think the purpose of the lecture is to show that truth has its source in action. The ultimate is not truth, but action. If this dictum of Professor Dewey stands, his purpose to clear the field of logic of variety will fail. . . . The process of measuring cloth can not serve as a test of the yardstick [i.e., the standard of truth]. Perhaps an illustration will clear the matter. A man wishes to grow corn. He proceeds to indulge in the process of growing corn. He plows and harrows, harrows and plows, and in due time a grain of corn is produced. My contention is that the grain of corn is a priori to the process of growing corn. The grain must precede, not follow the process of growing corn. The cultivation will affect the quantity of corn, but does not generate the corn. The sphere of pragmatism is the sphere of quantity. Action as a simple, ultimate concept is a contradiction" (review of "Reconstruction in Philosophy" 1921). Explain Williams's point and how Dewey might respond.
b. George Santayana criticizes that Dewey's naturalism and pragmatism in "Experience and Nature" reduces to psychological behaviorism: "the implicit American philosophy, which it is Dewey's privilege to make explicit, involves behaviorism. This doctrine is new and amazing if taken to deny the existence of thought; but on its positive side, in so far as it puts all efficient processes on one level, it has been an implication of naturalism from time immemorial. For a naturalist nothing can be substantial or efficacious in thought except its organs and instruments, such as brains, training, words, and books. Actual thought, being invisible and imponderable, eludes this sort of chase. . . . Is Dewey a behaviorist? On the positive side of the theory, he certainly is; and it is only when we interpret what he says about ideas, meanings, knowledge, or truth behavioristically, that the sense and the force of it begin to appear. Often, indeed, he seems to jump the barrier, and to become a behaviorist in the negative sense also, denying the existence of thought: because it would be to deny its existence if we reduced it to its material manifestations" ("Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics" 1925). Discuss Santayana's point and how Dewey might respond.
c. An anonymous critic wrote the following about Dewey's notion of democracy: "Man is a natural backslider, and certainly does love to take out "monopolies" against his fellow-kind, whenever possible. Even Dr. Dewey puts the word "copyright" as a fence around free quotation of his books. . . . In other words, Americans like to be favored, and favoritism is not Democracy" (The Gateway, 1921, Volume 35). Discuss the critic's point and how Dewey might respond.
d. Arthur Murphy argues that Dewey's pragmaticism and contextualism in "Experience and Nature" reduce to what Murphy calls "objective relativism": "[objective relativism] attempts to unite two propositions which have uniformly been taken to be incompatible. (a) The objective facts of the world of nature and of reality are the very 'apparent' and relative happenings directly disclosed to us in perception. (b) In spite (or because) of such objectivity such happenings remain ultimately and inescapably relative. Such relativity is hence an ultimate fact about the objective world. Now objectivity we know -and relativity we know, but their union seems irregular and positively illegitimate as judged by conventional standards. We should suppose that the way to show that a thing was objective was to prove that it was not ultimately relative, while the way to demote it to mere 'appearance' would be to convict it of just such relativity" ("Objective Relativism in Dewey and Whitehead" 1927). Discuss Murphy's point and how Dewey might respond.
e. Roy Wood Sellars criticizes Dewey's broad use of the term "experience" which evades the issue of whether an experience is that of the individual or human experience more generally: "Obviously his is a theory of evolutionary naturalism. And this brings me to the statement of one of the weaknesses -- as I see it -- of Dewey's philosophy, viz., his neglect of the problem of localization. Just where are feelings, sense-qualities, and ideas? He admits the central importance of the organism for all these affairs and yet, because the events with which these are connected are more inclusive than the organism, he refuses to locate feelings and ideas in the organism. In this way he escapes from the problems of epistemology and remains in the fog of 'experience'"(review of "Experience and Nature", 1926). Discuss Sellars' point and how Dewey might respond.
f. Clarence Ayers voices the following objection to Dewey's instrumentalism and its evolutionary assumptions: "To focus a whole philosophy upon one idea is, of course, a rather hazardous proceeding, and in no case is it more so than in that of the "instrumental logic," which differs so widely from the elder philosophic traditions of European thought that some responsible thinkers have expressed a doubt whether it is philosophy at all. . . . As the phrase, "instrumental logic," itself suggests, this philosophy has been from the first explicitly evolutionary. . . and represents the first serious attempt to commence the analysis of human thought with the assumption that man is an animal species struggling for survival on the surface of a minor plane" (review "Quest for Certainty" 1930). Discuss Ayers's point and how Dewey might respond.
g. Mark Mattern makes the following criticism of Dewey's philosophy of art: "The crux of Dewey's argument was that art, if closely tied to people's every-day lives, is a form of communication through which people learn about each other's similarities and differences, break through some of the barriers to understanding and awareness, and develop some of the commonalities that define community. I believe that Dewey was right about art and its potential role in a democracy. However, Dewey's work on art suffers some of the same shortcomings as his work in political philosophy. Most notably, he erased conflict, negotiation, and contestation-in short, politics-from the world of art. Nor does he address the crucial role of power in the world of art, which can as easily create and sustain social barriers as break through them" ("John Dewey, Art and Public Life" 1999). Discuss Mattern's point and how Dewey might respond.
h. Mark Mattern makes the following criticism of Dewey's philosophy of art: "art as we normally understand the term is hardly connected to people's everyday lives. His analysis of "art as experience" and its communicative capacity hinges precisely on whether or not art is closely tied to people's everyday lives. Unfortunately, in his time as in ours, most art gathers dust in museums and occurs in performance halls far removed from the average person's daily life" ("John Dewey, Art and Public Life" 1999). Discuss Mattern's point and how Dewey might respond.
i. Eustace Haydon makes the following criticism of Dewey's retention of the word "God" in "A Common Faith": "After refusing to use the word "religion" for what is really a continuation into the new world of the historic function of religion, it is difficult to understand why Mr. Dewey should use the word "God" for what has so little relationship in function or content with the gods of old. He admits that it is not necessary to use it, but feels that it has practical utility. After so definitive a dismissal of the supernatural there must be reasons more urgent than those given for retaining a term which inevitably involves supernatural implications, and will certainly carry with it the attitudes he is so anxious to discard" ("Mr. Dewey on Religion and God" 1935). Discuss Haydon's point and how Dewey might respond.
j. Dewey's "progressive" philosophy of education is often held responsible for all that is wrong with the American educational system today. Some common targets of criticism are Dewey's views that education should promote the practical over the abstract and that it should be a tool of economic and progressive social change. Develop these criticisms and discuss how Dewey might respond.