Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude

by John Dewey; Boyd Henry Bode; Harold Chapman Brown; Horace Meyer Kallen; George H. Mead; Addison Webster Moore; Henry Waldgrave Stuart; James Hayden Tu

(c) The process may be described also as one of "universalizing" the judging consciousness. For it is a counterpart of the objective implication of a judgment that it is not an affirmation as to any individual's opinion. This negative characterization of the judgment is commonly converted into the positive doctrine that any one who is unprejudiced and equally well informed would make the same judgment. Strictly speaking the judgment itself represents in its completed form the elimination of the private attitude rather than the express inclusion of other judges. But in the making of the judgment it is probable that this elimination of the private is reached by a mental reference to other persons and their attitudes, if not by an actual conversation with another. It is dubious whether an individual that had never communicated with another would get the distinction between a private subjective attitude and the "general" or objective.

Moreover, one form of the moral judgment: "This is right," speaks the language of law—of the collective judgment, or of the judge who hears both sides but is neither. This generalizing or universalizing is frequently supposed to be the characteristic activity of "reason." I believe that a comparison with the kindred value judgments in economics supports the doctrine that in judgments as to the good as well as in those as to right, there is no product of any simple faculty, but rather a synthetic process in which the social factor is prominent. A compelling motive toward an objective and universal judgment is found in the practical conditions of moral judgments. Unless men agree on such fundamental things as killing, stealing, and sex relations they cannot get on together. Not that when I say, "Killing is wrong," I mean to affirm "I agree with you in objecting to it"; but that the necessity (a) of acting as if I either do or do not approve it, and (b) of either making my attitude agree with yours, or yours agree with mine, or of fighting it out with you or with the whole force of organized society, compels me to put my attitude into objective terms, to meet you and society on a common platform. This is a synthesis, an achievement. To attribute the synthesis to any faculty of "practical reason," adds nothing to our information, but tends rather to obscure the facts.

(d) The process is thus a reciprocal process of valuing objects and of constructing and reconstructing a self. The object as first imaged or anticipated undergoes enlargement and change as it is put into relations to other objects and as the consequences of adoption or rejection are tried in anticipation. The self by reflecting and by enlarging its scope is similarly enlarged. It is the resulting self which is the final valuer. The values of most objects are at first fixed for us by instinct or they are suggested by the ethos and mores of our groups—family, society, national religions, and "reign under the appearance of habitual self-suggested tendencies." The self is constituted accordingly. Collisions with other selves, conflicts between group valuations and standards and individual impulses or desires, failure of old standards as applied to new situations, bring about a more conscious definition of purposes. The agent identifies himself with these purposes, and values objects with reference to them. In this process of revaluing and defining, of comparing and anticipation, freedom is found if anywhere. For if the process is a real one the elements do not remain unaffected by their relation to each other and to the whole. The act is not determined by any single antecedent or by the sum of antecedents. It is determined by the process. The self is not made wholly by heredity, or environment. It is itself creating for each of its elements a new environment, viz., the process of reflection and choice. And if man can change the heredity of pigeons and race horses by suitable selection, if every scientific experiment is a varying of conditions, it is at least plausible that man can guide his own acts by intelligence, and revise his values by criticism.

The self is itself creating for each of its elements a new environment—this is a fact which if kept in mind will enable us to see the abstractness and fallacies not merely of libertarianism and determinism, but of subjectivism and objectivism. Subjective or "inward" theories have sought standards in the self; but in regarding the self as an entity independent of such a process as we have described they have exposed themselves to the criticism of providing only private, variable, accidental, unauthoritative sources of standards—instincts, or emotions, or intuitions. The self of the full moral consciousness, however,—the only one which can claim acceptance or authority—is born only in the process of considering real conditions, of weighing and choosing between alternatives of action in a real world of nature and persons. Its judgments are more than subjective. Objectivism in its absolutist and abstract forms assumes a standard—nature, essence, law—independent of process. Such a standard is easily shown to be free from anything individual, private, or changing. It is universal, consistent, and eternal, in fact it has many good mathematical characteristics, but unfortunately it is not moral. As mathematical, logical, biological, or what not, it offers no standard that appeals to the moral nature as authoritative or that can help us to find our way home.

II

If we are dissatisfied with custom and habit and seek to take philosophy for the guide of life we have two possibilities: (1) we may look for the good, and treat right and duty as subordinate concepts which indicate the way to the good, that is, consider them as good as a means, or (2) we may seek first to do right irrespective of consequences, in the belief that in willing to do right we are already in possession of the highest good. In either case we may consider our standards and values either as in some sense fixed or as in the making.[68] We may suppose that good is objective and absolute, that right is discovered by a rational faculty, or we may consider that in regarding good as objective we have not made it independent of the valuing process and that in treating right as a standard we have not thereby made it a fixed concept to be discovered by the pure intellect. The position of this paper will be (1) that good while objective is yet objective as a value and not as an essence or physical fact; (2) that a social factor in value throws light upon the relation between moral and other values; (3) that right is not merely a means to the good but has an independent place in the moral consciousness; (4) that right while signifying order does not necessarily involve a timeless, eternal order since it refers to an order of personal relations; (5) that the conception of right instead of being a matter for pure reason or even the "cognitive faculty" shows an intimate blending of the emotional and intellectual and that this appears particularly in the conception of the reasonable.

(1) We begin with the question of the synthetic and objective character of the good. With G. E. Moore as with the utilitarians the good is the ultimate concept. Right and duty are means to the good. Moore and Rashdall also follow Sidgwick in regarding good as unique, that is, as "synthetic." Sidgwick emphasized in this especially the point that moral value cannot be decided by physical existence or the course of evolution, nor can the good be regarded as meaning the pleasant. Moore and Russell reinforce this. However true it may be that pleasure is one among other good things or that life is one among other good things, good does not mean either pleasure or survival. Good means just "good."

A similar thought underlies Croce's division of the Practical into the two spheres of the Economic and the Ethical. "The economic activity is that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the conditions of fact in which a man finds himself; the ethical activity is that which, although it correspond to these conditions, also refers to something that transcends them. To the first correspond what are called individual ends, to the second universal ends; the one gives rise to the judgment concerning the greater or less coherence of the action taken in itself, the other to that concerning its greater or less coherence in respect to the universal end, which transcends the individual.[69] Utilitarianism is according to Croce an attempt to reduce the Ethical to the Economic form, although the utilitarians as men attempt in various ways to make a place for that distinction which as philosophers they would suppress. "Man is not a consumer of pleasures. He is a creator of life." With this claim of the distinctive, synthetic, character of the moral consciousness and of the impossibility of testing the worth of ideals by cosmic laws, or by gratification of particular wants as measured by pleasure, I have no issue. The analysis of the moral judgment made above points out just how it is that good is synthetic. It is synthetic in that it represents a measuring and valuing of ends—instinctive and imagined, individual and social—against each other and as part of a whole to which a growing self corresponds. It is synthetic in that it represents not merely a process of evaluating ends which match actually defined desires, but also a process in which the growing self, dissatisfied with any ends already in view, gropes for some new definition of ends that shall better respond to its living, creative capacity, its active synthetic character. Good is the concept for just this valuing process as carried on by a conscious being that is not content to take its desire as ready made by its present construction, but is reaching out for ends that shall respond to a growing, expanding, inclusive, social, self. It expresses value as value.

Value as value! not as being; nor as independent essence; nor as anything static and fixed. For a synthetic self, a living personality, could find no supreme value in the complete absence of valuing, in the cessation of life, in the negation of that very activity of projection, adventure, construction, and synthesis in which it has struck out the concept good. A theory of ethics which upholds the synthetic character of the good may be criticized as being not synthetic enough if it fails to see that on the basis of the mutual determination of percepts and concepts, of self and objects, the synthetic character of the process must be reflected in the ultimate meaning of the category which symbolizes and incorporates the process.

(2) We may find some light upon the question how moral value gets its distinctive and unique character, and how it comes to be more "objective" than economic value if we consider some of the social factors in the moral judgment. For although the concept good is rooted in the life process with its selective activity and attending emotions it involves a subtle social element, as well as the more commonly recognized factors of intelligence.