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

As the cumulus of experience on experience grew greater, chance violations of tradition, or custom, or ritual, or formula achieving for the violator a mastery or stability which performance and obedience failed to achieve, the new heresy became the later orthodoxy, for in religion, as in all other matters human, nothing succeeds like success. An impotent god has no divinity; a disused potency means a dying life among the immortals as on the earth. And as the gods themselves seemed often to give their worshipers the lie, the futility of the personal and dramatic definitions of the immediate environment became slowly recognized, the recognition varying in extent, and clearer in practice than in discourse.

Accordingly the most primitive of the animisms underwent a necessary modification. The plasticity of objects under destructive treatment, the impotence of taboo before elementary needs, the adequate satisfactions which violations of the divine law brought,—these killed many gods and drove others from their homes in the hearts of things. The objects so purged became matters of accurate knowledge. Where animation is denied the whole environment, wisdom begins to distinguish between spirit-haunted matter and the purely material; knowledge of person and knowledge of things differentiate, and science, the impersonal and more potent knowledge of the environment, properly begins. Familiarity leads to control, control to contempt, and for the unreflective mind, personality is not, as for the sophisticated, an attribute of the contemptible. The incalculable appearance of thunder, the magic greed of fire, the malice, the spontaneity, the thresh and pulse as of life which seems to characterize whatever is capricious or impenetrable or uncontrollable are too much like the felt throbs of consciousness to become dehumanized. To the variable alone, therefore, is transcendent animation attributed. Not the seasonal variation of the sun's heat, but the joy and the sorrow of which his heat is the occasion made him divine. When the gods appear, to take the place of the immanent spirits immediately present in things, they appear, therefore, as already transcendent, with habitations just beyond the well-known: on high mountains, in the skies, in dark forests, in caves, in all regions feared or unexplored. But chiefly the gods inhabit those spaces whence issue the power of darkness and destruction, particularly the heaven, a word whose meaning is now, as it was primitively, identical with divinity. The savage becomes a pagan by giving concrete personality to the dreadful unknown. Thence it is that the ancient poet assigns the gods a lineage of fear; and fear may truly be said to have made the gods, in so far as the gods personify the fear which made them.

The moral level of these figments alters with the level of their habitation; their power varies with their remoteness; Zeus lives in the highest heaven and is arbiter of the destiny of both gods and man. To him and to his like there cannot be the relation of equality which is sustained between men and spirits of the lower order. His very love is blasting; interchange of commodities, good for good and evil for evil is not possible where he is concerned. Gods of the higher order he exemplifies, even all the gods of Olympus, of the Himalayas, of Valhalla, are literally beings invoked and implored, as well as dwellers in heaven. To them man pays a toll on all excellence he gains or finds; libations and burnt-offerings, the fat and the first fruits: he exists by their sufferance and serves their caprice. He is their toy, born for their pleasure, and living by their need.

But just because men conceive themselves to be play-things of the gods, they define in the gods the ideals of mankind. For the divine power is power to live forever, and the sum of human desire is just the desire to maintain its humanity in freedom and happiness endlessly. And exactly those capacities and instruments of self-maintenance,—all that is beauty, or truth, or goodness, the very essence of value in any of its forms,—the gods are conceived to possess and to control: these they may grant, withhold, destroy. They are as eternal as their habitations, the mountains; as ruthless as their element, the sea; as omnipresent as the heavens, their home. To become like the gods, therefore, the masters and fathers of men, is to remain eternally and absolutely human: so that who is most like them on earth takes his place beside them in heaven. Hercules and Elias and Krishna, Çaka-Muni and Ishvara, Jesus and Baha Ullah. Nay, they are the very gods themselves, manifest as men! The history of the gods thus presents a double aspect: it is first a characterization of the important objects and processes of nature and their survival-values,—the sun, thunder, rain, and earthquakes; dissolution, rebirth, and love; and again it is the narration of activities native and delightful to mankind. Zeus is a promiscuous lover as well as a wielder of thunderbolts; Apollo not only drives the chariot of the sun; he plays and dances, discourses melody and herds sheep.

But while the portrait of the heart's desire in fictitious adventures of divinity endears the gods to the spirit, the exploration of the elements in the environment whose natures they dramatically express, destroys their force, reduces their number, and drives them still further into the unknown. Olympus is surrendered for the planets and the fixed stars. With remoteness of location comes transmutation of character. The forces of the environment which were the divinity are now conceived as instrumental to its uses. Its power is more subtly described; its nature becomes a more purely ideal expression of human aspiration. Physical remoteness and metaphysical ultimacy are akin. God among the stars is better than God on Olympus. If, as with the Parsees, the unfavorable character of the environment is expressed in another and equal being,—the devil, then the god of good must, in the symbolic struggle, become the ultimate victor and remain the more potent director of man's destiny. In religion, therefore, when the mind grows at all by experience, monism develops spontaneously. For the character of the god becomes increasingly more relevant to hope than to the conditions of hope's satisfaction. And what man first of all and beyond all aspires to, is that single, undivided good,—the free flow of his unitary life, stable, complete, eternal. There is hence always to be found a chief and father among the gods who, as mankind gain in wisdom and in material power, consumes his mates and his children like Kronos or Jahweh, inherits their attributes and performs their functions. The chief divinity becomes the only divinity; a god becomes God. But divinity, in becoming one and unique, becomes also transcendent. Monotheism pushes God altogether beyond the sensible environment. Personality, instead of being the nature of the world, has become its ground and cause, and all that mankind loves is conserved, in order that man, whom God loves, may have his desire and live forever. Life is eternal and happiness necessary, beyond nature,—in heaven. Finally, in transcendental idealism, the poles meet; what has been put eternally apart is eternally united; the immaterial, impalpable, transcendent heaven is made one and continuous with the gross and unhappy natural world. One is the other; the other the one. God is the world and transcends it; is the evil and the good which conquers and consumes that evil. The environment becomes thus described as a single, eternal, conscious unity, in which all the actual but transitory values of the actual but transitory life are conserved and eternalized. In a description of God such as Royce's or Aristotle's the environment is the eternity of all its constituents that are dearest to man. Religion, which began as a definition of the environment as it moved and controlled mankind, ends by describing it as mankind desires it to be. The environment is now the aforementioned ideal socius or self which satisfies perfectly all human requirements. Pluralistic and quarrelsome animism has become monistic and harmonious spiritism. Forces have turned to excellences and needs to satisfactions. Necessity has been transmuted to Providence, sin has been identified with salvation, value with existence, and existence with impotence and illusion before Providence, salvation, and value.

VII

With this is completed the reply to the question: Why do men contradict their own experience? Experience is, as Spinoza says, passion and action, both inextricably mingled and coincident, with the good and evil of them as interwoven as they. That piecemeal conquest of the evil which we call civilization has not even the promise of finality. It is a Penelope's web, always needing to be woven anew. Now, in experience desire anticipates and outleaps action and fact rebuffs desire. Desire realizes itself, consequently, in ideas objectified by the power of speech into independent and autonomous subjects of discourse, whereby experience is One, Eternal, a Spirit or Spiritually Controlled, wherein man has Freedom and Immortality. These, the constantly desiderated traits of a perfect universe, are in fact the limits of what adequacy environmental satisfactions can attain, ideas hypostatized, normative of existence, but not constituting it. With them, in philosophy and religion, the mind confronts the experiences of death and obstruction, of manifoldness, change and materiality, and denies them, as Peter denied Jesus. The visible world, being not as we want it, we imagine an unseen one that satisfies our want, declaring the visible one an illusion by its side. So we work a radical substitution of desiderates for actualities, of ideals for facts, of values for existences. Art alone acknowledges the actual relations between these contrasting pairs. Art alone so operates as in fact to convert their oppugnance into identity. Intrinsically, its whole purpose and technique consists of transmutation of values into existences, in the incarnation the realization of values. The philosophy and religion of tradition, on the contrary, consists intrinsically in the flat denial of reality, or at least, co-reality, to existence, and the transfer of that eulogium to value-forms as such.

Metaphysics, theology, ethics, logic, æsthetics, dialectic developments as they are of "norms" or "realities" which themselves can have no meaning without the "apparent," changing world they measure and belie, assume consequently a detachment and self-sufficiency they do not actually possess. Their historians have treated them as if they had no context, as if the elaboration of the ideal tendencies of the successive systems explained their origin, character, and significance. But in fact they are unendowed with this pure intrinsicality, and their development is not to be accounted for as exteriorization of innate motive or an unfoldment of inward implications. They have a context; they are crossed and interpenetrated by outer interests and extraneous considerations. Their meaning, in so far as it is not merely æsthetic, is nil apart from these interests and considerations of which they are sometimes expressions, sometimes reconstructions, and from which they are persistently refuges.

Philosophy and religion are, in a word, no less than art, social facts. They are responses to group situations without which they cannot be understood. Although analysis has shown them to be rooted in certain persistent motives and conditions of human nature by whose virtue they issue in definite contours and significances, they acquire individuality and specific importance only through interaction with the constantly varying social situations in which they arise, on which they operate, and by which they are in turn operated on. Philosophy has perhaps suffered most of all from nescience of those and from devoting itself, at a minimum, to the satisfaction of that passion for oneness, for "logical consistency" without which philosophic "systems" would never arise, nor the metaphysical distinction between "appearance" and "reality"; and with which the same systems have made up a historic aggregate of strikingly repugnant and quarrelsome units. It is this pursuit of consistency as against correctness which has resulted in the irrelevance of philosophy that the philosopher, unconscious of his motives and roots, or naïvely identifying, through the instrumentality of an elaborate dialectic, his instinctive and responsive valuations of existence with its categoric essences, confuses with inward autonomy and the vision of the "real." Consequently, the systems of tradition begin as attempts to transvalue social situations whose existence is troublesome and end as utterances of which the specific bearing, save to the system of an opponent, is undiscoverable. The attempt to correct the environment in fact concludes as an abolition of it in words. The philosophic system becomes a solipsism, a pure lyric expression of the appetites of human nature.

For this perversity of the philosophic tradition Plato is perhaps, more than any one else, answerable. He is the first explicitly to have reduplicated the world, to have set existences over against values, to have made them dependent upon values, to have assigned absolute reality to the compensatory ideals, and to have identified philosophy with preoccupation with these ideals. Behind his theory of life lay far from agreeable personal experience of the attitude of political power toward philosophic ideas. Its ripening was coincident with the most distressing period of the history of his country. The Peloponnesian War was the confrontation of two social systems, radically opposed in form, method, and outlook. Democracy, in Athens, had become synonymous with demagoguery, corruption, inefficiency, injustice and unscrupulousness in every aspect of public affairs. The government had no consistent policy and no centralized responsibility; divided counsel led to continual disaster without, and party politics rotted the strength within. Beside Athens, Sparta, a communistic oligarchy, was a tower of strength and effectiveness. The Spartans made mistakes; they were slow, inept, rude, and tyrannical, but they were a unit on the war, their policy was consistent, responsibilities were adequately centered, good order and loyalty designated the aims and habits of life.[98] The Republic is the response to the confrontation of Spartan and Athenian; the attempt to find an adequate solution of the great social problem this confrontation expressed. The successful state becomes in it the model for the metaphysical one, and the difference between fact and ideal is amended by dialectically forcing the implications of existence in the direction of desire. Neither Athens nor Sparta presented a completely satisfactory social organization. There must therefore exist a type of social organization which is so satisfying. It must have existed from eternity, and must be in essence identical with eternal good, identical with that oneness and spirituality, lacking which, nothing is important. This archetypal social organization whose essence is excellence, it is the congenital vocation of the philosopher to contemplate and to realize. Philosophers are hence the paragons among animals, lovers of truth, haters of falsehood and of multiplicity, spectators of all time and all existence. In them the power to govern should be vested. Their nature is of the same stuff as the Highest Good with which it concerns itself, but being such, it appears, merely "appears" alas! irrelevant to the actual situations of the daily life. The philosopher is hence opposed and expelled by that arch-sophist, Public Opinion: the man on the street, failing to understand him, dubs him prater, star-gazer, good-for-nothing.[99] He becomes an ineffectual stranger, an outlaw, in a world in which he should be master.