The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought

by John Dewey

I

Beliefs look both ways, towards persons and toward things. They are the original Mr. Facing-both-ways. They form or judge—justify or condemn—the agents who entertain them and who insist upon them. They are of things whose immediate meanings form their content. To believe is to ascribe value, impute meaning, assign import. The collection and interaction of these appraisals and assessments is the world of the common man,—that is, of man as an individual and not as a professional being or class specimen. Thus things are characters, not mere entities; they behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior that exemplifies and tests their character, they help and hinder; disturb and pacify; resist and comply; are dismal and mirthful, orderly and deformed, queer and commonplace; they agree and disagree; are better and worse.

Thus the human world, whether or no it have core and axis, has presence and transfiguration. It means here and now, not in some transcendent sphere. It moves, of itself, to varied incremental meaning, not to some far off event, whether divine or diabolic. Such movement constitutes conduct, for conduct is the working out of the commitments of belief. That believed better is held to, asserted, affirmed, acted upon. The moments of its crucial fulfilment are the natural “transcendentals”; the decisive, the critical, standards of further estimation, selection, and rejection. That believed worse is fled, resisted, transformed into an instrument for the better. Characters, in being condensations of belief, are thus at once the reminders and the prognostications of weal and woe; they concrete and they regulate the terms of effective apprehension and appropriation of things. This general regulative function is what we mean in calling them characters, forms.

For beliefs, made in the course of existence, reciprocate by making existence still farther, by developing it. Beliefs are not made by existence in a mechanical or logical or psychological sense. “Reality” naturally instigates belief. It appraises itself and through this self-appraisal manages its affairs. As things are surcharged valuations, so “consciousness” means ways of believing and disbelieving. It is interpretation; not merely existence aware of itself as fact, but existence discerning, judging itself, approving and disapproving.

This double outlook and connection of belief, its implication, on one side, with beings who suffer and endeavor, and, its complication on the other, with the meanings and worths of things, is its glory or its unpardonable sin. We cannot keep connection on one side and throw it away on the other. We cannot preserve significance and decline the personal attitude in which it is inscribed and operative, any more than we can succeed in making things “states” of a “consciousness” whose business is to be an interpretation of things. Beliefs are personal affairs, and personal affairs are adventures, and adventures are, if you please, shady. But equally discredited, then, is the universe of meanings. For the world has meaning as somebody’s, somebody’s at a juncture, taken for better or worse, and you shall not have completed your metaphysics till you have told whose world is meant and how and what for—in what bias and to what effect. Here is a cake that is had only by eating it, just as there is digestion only for life as well as by life.

So far the standpoint of the common man. But the professional man, the philosopher, has been largely occupied in a systematic effort to discredit the standpoint of the common man, that is, to disable belief as an ultimately valid principle. Philosophy is shocked at the frank, almost brutal, evocation of beliefs by and in natural existence, like witches out of a desert heath—at a mode of production which is neither logical, nor physical, nor psychological, but just natural, empirical. For modern philosophy is, as every college senior recites, epistemology; and epistemology, as perhaps our books and lectures sometimes forget to tell the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma. Passionless imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete subjection to a ready-made and finished reality—physical it may be, mental it may be, logical it may be—is its professed ideal. Forswearing the reality of affection, and the gallantry of adventure, the genuineness of the incomplete, the tentative, it has taken an oath of allegiance to Reality, objective, universal, complete; made perhaps of atoms, perhaps of sensations, perhaps of logical meanings. This ready-made reality, already including everything, must of course swallow and absorb belief, must produce it psychologically, mechanically, or logically, according to its own nature; must in any case, instead of acquiring aid and support from belief, resolve it into one of its own preordained creatures, making a desert and calling it harmony, unity, totality.[27]

Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowledge which is other than the propitious outgrowth of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their ulterior implications in order to recast them, to rectify their errors, cultivate their waste places, heal their diseases, fortify their feeblenesses:—the dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects having no nature save to be known.

Not that their philosophers have admitted the concrete realizability of their scheme. On the contrary, the assertion of the absolute “Reality” of what is empirically unrealizable is a part of the scheme; the ideal of a universe of pure, cognitional objects, fixed elements in fixed relations. Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and transcendentalist, materialist and spiritualist, defining this object in as many differing ways as they have different conceptions of the ideal and method of knowledge, are at one in their devotion to an identification of Reality with something that connects monopolistically with passionless knowledge, belief purged of all personal reference, origin, and outlook.[28]

What is to be said of this attempt to sever the cord which naturally binds together personal attitudes and the meaning of things? This much at least: the effort to extract meanings, values, from the beliefs that ascribe them, and to give the former absolute metaphysical validity while the latter are sent to wander as scapegoats in the wilderness of mere phenomena, is an attempt, which, as long as “our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,” will attract an admiring, even if suspicious, audience. Moreover, we may admit that the attempt to catch the universe of immediate experience, of action and passion, coming and going, to damn it in its present body in order expressly to glorify its spirit to all eternity, to validate the meaning of beliefs by discrediting their natural existence, to attribute absolute worth to the intent of human convictions just because of the absolute worthlessness of their content—that the performance of this feat of virtuosity has developed philosophy to its present wondrous, if formidable, technique.

But can we claim more than a succès d’estime? Consider again the nature of the effort. The world of immediate meanings, of the world empirically sustained in beliefs, is to be sorted out into two portions, metaphysically discontinuous, one of which shall alone be good and true “Reality,” the fit material of passionless, beliefless knowledge; while the other part, that which is excluded, shall be referred exclusively to belief and treated as mere appearance, purely subjective, impressions or effects in consciousness, or as that ludicrously abject modern discovery—an epiphenomenon. And this division into the real and the unreal is accomplished by the very individual whom his own “absolute” results reduce to phenomenality, in terms of the very immediate experience which is infected with worthlessness, and on the basis of preference, of selection that are declared to be unreal! Can the thing be done?

Anyway, the snubbed and excluded factor may always reassert itself. The very pushing it out of “Reality” may but add to its potential energy, and invoke a more violent recoil. When affections and aversions, with the beliefs in which they record themselves and the efforts they exact, are reduced to epiphenomena, dancing an idle attendance upon a reality complete without them, to which they vainly strive to accommodate themselves by mirroring, then may the emotions flagrantly burst forth with the claim that, as a friend of mine puts it, reason is only a fig leaf for their nakedness. When one man says that need, uncertainty, choice, novelty, and strife have no place in Reality, which is made up wholly of established things behaving by foregone rules, then may another man be provoked to reply that all such fixities, whether named atoms or God, whether they be fixtures of a sensational, a positivistic, or an idealistic system, have existence and import only in the problems, needs, struggles, and instrumentalities of conscious agents and patients. For home rule may be found in the unwritten efficacious constitution of experience.

That contemporaneously we are in the presence of such a reaction is apparent. Let us, in pursuit of our topic, inquire how it came about and why it takes the form that it takes. This consideration may not only occupy the hour, but may help diagram some future parallelogram of forces. The account calls for some sketching (1) of the historical tendencies which have shaped the situation in which a Stoic theory of knowledge claims metaphysical monopoly, and (2) of the tendencies that have furnished the despised principle of belief opportunity and means of reassertion.