Ethics

by John Dewey; James Hayden Tufts

(1) The Emotional and Instinctive Basis.—As feeling or emotion love may have two roots. A mental sympathy, based on kindred tastes and interests, is sometimes present at the outset, but in any case it is likely to develop under the favoring conditions of a common life, particularly if there are either children or a common work. But it is well known that this is not all. A friend is one thing; a lover another. The intimacy involved requires not only the more easily described and superficial attraction of mind for mind; it demands also a deeper congeniality of the whole person, incapable of precise formulation, manifesting itself in the subtler emotional attitudes of instinctive reaction. This instinctive, as contrasted with the more reflective, attraction is frequently described as one of opposites or contrasting dispositions and physical characteristics. But this is nothing that enters into the feeling as a conscious factor. The only explanation which we can give in the present condition of science is the biological one. From the biological point of view it was a most successful venture when Nature, by some happy variation, developed two sexes with slightly different characters and made their union necessary to the continuance of life in certain species. By uniting in every new individual the qualities of two parents, the chances of variation are greatly increased, and variation is the method of progress. To keep the same variety of fruit the horticulturist buds or grafts; to get new varieties he plants seed. The extraordinary progress combined with continuity of type, which has been exhibited in the plant and animal world, has been effected, in part at least, through the agency of sex. This long process has developed certain principles of selection which are instinctive. Whether they are the best possible or not, they represent a certain adjustment which has secured such progress as has been attained, and such adaptation to environment as exists, and it would be unwise, if it were not impossible, to disregard them. Marriages of convenience are certainly questionable from the biological standpoint.

But the instinctive basis is not in and of itself sufficient to guarantee a happy family life. If man were living wholly a life of instinct, he might trust instinct as a guide in establishing his family. But since he is living an intellectual and social life as well, intellectual and social factors must enter. The instinctive basis of selection was fixed by conditions which contemplated only a more or less limited period of attachment, with care of the young for a few years. Modern society requires the husband and wife to contemplate life-long companionship, and a care for children which implies capacity in the father to provide for a great range of advantages, and in the mother to be intellectual and moral guide and friend until maturity. To trust the security of these increased demands to instinct is to invite failure. Instinct must be guided by reason if perfect friendship and mutual supplementation in the whole range of interests are to be added to the intenser, but less certain, attraction.

(2) The Common Will.—But whether based on instinct or intellectual sympathy, no feeling or emotion by itself is an adequate moral basis for the life together of a man and a woman. What was said on p. 249, as to the moral worthlessness of any mere feeling abstracted from will, applies here. Love or affection, in the only sense in which it makes a moral basis of the family, is not the "affection" of psychological language—the pleasant or unpleasant tone of consciousness; it is the resolute purpose in each to seek the other's good, or rather to seek a common good which can be attained only through a common life involving mutual self-sacrifice. It is the good will of Kant specifically directed toward creating a common good. It is the formation of a small "kingdom of ends" in which each treats the other "as end," never as means only; in which each is "both sovereign and subject"; in which the common will, thus created, enhances the person of each and gives it higher moral dignity and worth. And, as in the case of all purpose which has moral value, there is such a common good as the actual result. The disposition and character of both husband and wife are developed and supplemented. The male is biologically the more variable and motor. He has usually greater initiative and strength. Economic and industrial life accentuates these tendencies. But alone he is apt to become rough or hard, to lack the feeling in which the charm and value of life are experienced. On the other hand, the woman, partly by instinct, it may be, but certainly by vocation, is largely occupied with the variety of cares on which human health, comfort, and morality depend. She tends to become narrow, unless supplemented by man. The value of emotion and feeling in relation to this process of mutual aid and enlargement, as in general, is, as Aristotle pointed out, to perfect the will. It gives warmth and vitality to what would otherwise be in any case partial and might easily become insincere. There was a profound truth which underlay the old psychology in which "the heart" meant at once character and passion.

(3) The Influence of Parenthood.—Nature takes one step at a time. If all the possible consequences of family life had to be definitely forecasted, valued, and chosen at the outset, many would shrink. But this would be because there is as yet no capacity to appreciate new values before the actual experience of them. "Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want." Parental affection is not usually present until there are real children to evoke it. At the outset the mutual love of husband and wife is enough. But as the first, more instinctive and emotional factors lose relatively, the deeper union of will and sympathy needs community of interest if it is to become permanent and complete. Such community of interest is often found in sharing a business or a profession, but under present industrial organization this is not possible as a general rule. The most general and effective object of common interest is the children of the family. As pointed out by John Fiske, the mere keeping of the parents together by the prolongation of infancy in the human species has had great moral influence. Present civilization does not merely demand that the parents coöperate eight or ten years for the child's physical support. There has been a second epoch in the prolongation. The parents now must coöperate until the children are through school and college, and in business or homes of their own. And the superiority of children over the other common interests is that in a different form the parents repeat the process which first took them out of their individual lives to unite for mutual helpfulness. If the parents treat the children not merely as sources of gratification or pride, but as persons, with lives of their own to live, with capacities to develop, the personality of the parent is enlarged. The affection between husband and wife is enriched by the new relationship it has created.

(4) Social and Religious Factors.—The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, are the most intimate of personal relations, but they are none the less relations of social interest. In fact, just because they are so intimate, society is the more deeply concerned. Or, to put it from the individual's standpoint, just because the parties are undertaking a profoundly personal step, they must take it as members of a moral order. The act of establishing the family signifies, indeed, the entrance into fuller participation in the social life; it is the assuming of ties which make the parties in a new and deeper sense organic parts of humanity. This social and cosmic meaning is appropriately symbolized by the civil and religious ceremony. In its control over the marriage contract, and in its prescriptions as to the care and education of the children, society continues to show its interest. All this lends added value and strength to the emotional and intellectual bases.

2. Parent and Child.—The other relationships in the family, those of parents and children, brothers and sisters, need no elaborate analysis. The love of parents for children, like that of man and woman, has an instinctive basis. Those species which have cared for their offspring have had a great advantage in the struggle for existence. Nature has selected them, and is constantly dropping the strains of any race or set which cares more for power, or wealth, or learning than for children. Tenderness, courage, responsibility, activity, patience, forethought, personal virtue—these are constantly evoked not by the needs of children in general, but by the needs of our own children. The instinctive response, however, is soon broadened in outlook and deepened in meaning. Intellectual activity is stimulated by the needs of providing for the physical welfare, and, still more, by the necessity of planning for the unfolding mind. The interchange of question and answer which forces the parent to think his whole world anew, and which with the allied interchange of imitation and suggestion produces a give and take between all members of the family, is constantly making for fluidity and flexibility, for tolerance and catholicity. In the thoughtful parent these educative influences are still further enriched by the problem of moral training. For in each family, as in the race, the need of eliciting and directing right conduct in the young is one of the most important agencies in bringing home to the elders the significance of custom and authority, of right and wrong. It is natural enough, from one standpoint, to think of childhood as an imperfect state, looking forward for its completeness and getting its value because of its rich promise. But the biologist tells us that the child is nearer the line of progress than the more developed, but also more rigidly set, man. And the lover of children is confident that if any age of humanity exists by its own right, and "pays as it goes," it is childhood. It is not only meet, but a joy, that the fathers labor for the children. Many, if not most, of the objects for which men and women strive and drudge seem less satisfactory when obtained; because we have meanwhile outgrown the desire. Children afford an object of affection which is constantly unfolding new powers, and opening new reaches of personality.[254] Conversely, an authority which is also tender, patient, sympathetic, is the best medium to develop in the child self-control. The necessity of mutual forbearance where there are several children, of sharing fairly, of learning to give and take, is the best possible method of training for membership in the larger society. In fact, from the point of view of the social organism as a whole, the family has two functions; as a smaller group, it affords an opportunity for eliciting the qualities of affection and character which cannot be displayed at all in the larger group; and, in the second place, it is a training for future members of the larger group in those qualities of disposition and character which are essential to citizenship.[255]

§ 3. GENERAL ELEMENTS OF STRAIN IN FAMILY RELATIONS

Difference in Temperament.—While there are intrinsic qualities of men and women that bring them together for family life, and, while there is in most cases a strong reënforcement afforded by the presence of children, there are certain characteristics which tend just as inevitably to produce tension, and those forces of tension are strengthened at the present time by certain economic, educational, and cultural conditions. The differences between men and women may be at the basis of their instinctive attraction for each other; they certainly have possibilities of friction as well. A fundamental difference already noted is that the male is more variable, the female more true to the type. Biologically at least, the varium et mutabile is applied by the poet to the wrong sex. Applied to the mind and disposition, this means probably not only a greater variation of capacity and temper as a whole,—more geniuses and also more at the other extreme than among women,—but also a greater average mobility.

Differences Accentuated by Occupation.—From the early occupations of hunting and fishing, to the modern greater range of occupations, any native mobility in man has found stimulation and scope, as compared with the energies of women which have less distinct differentiation and a more limited contact with the work of others. And there is another industrial difference closely connected with this, which has been pointed out by Ellis,[256] and Thomas.[257] Primitive man hunted and fought. Much of primitive industry, the prototype, so far as it existed, of the industrial activity of the modern world, was carried on by woman. Industrial progress has been signalized by the splitting off of one phase of woman's work after another, and by the organization and expansion of this at the hands of man. Man's work has thus become more specialized and scientific; woman's has remained more detailed, complex, and diffused. Her work in the family of ordering the household, caring for the children, securing the health and comfort of all its members, necessarily involves personal adjustment; hence it resists system. As a result of the differentiation man has gained in greater and greater degree a scientific and objective standard for his work; woman neither has nor can have—at least in the sphere of personal relations—the advantage of a standard. Business has its ratings in the quantity of sales or the ratio of net profits. The professions and skilled trades have their own tests of achievement. A scientist makes his discovery, a lawyer wins his case, an architect builds his bridge, the mechanic his machine; he knows whether he has done a good piece of work, and respects himself accordingly. He can appeal from the man next to him to the judgment of his profession. Conversely, the standard of the trade or profession helps to lift the individual's work. It is a constant stimulus, as well as support. A woman's work in the family has no such professional stimulus, or professional vindication. If the family is lenient, the work is not held up to a high level. On the other hand, it must make its appeal to the persons immediately concerned, and if they do not respond, the woman feels that she has failed to do something really worth while. If her work is not valued, she feels that it is not valuable. For there is no demonstrative proof of a successful home any more than there is of a good work of art. It is easy enough to point out reasons why the picture or the home should please and satisfy, but if the work itself is not convincing, no demonstration that similar works have satisfied is of any avail.

The way in which men and women come into contact with others is another element in the case. Man comes into contact with others for the most part in an abstract way. He deals not with men, women, and children, but with employers or employed, with customers or clients, or patients. He doesn't have to stand them in all their varied phases, or enter into those intimate relations which involve strain of adjustment in its fullest extent. Moreover, business or professional manner and etiquette come in to relieve the necessity of personal effort. The "professional manner" serves the same function in dealing with others, which habit plays in the individual life; it takes the place of continual readjustment of attention. When a man is forced to lay this aside and deal in any serious situation as "a human being," he feels a far greater strain. The woman's task is less in extension, but great in intension. It obliges her to deal with the children, at any rate, as wholes, and a "whole" child is a good deal of a strain. If she does not see the whole of the husband, it is quite likely that the part not brought home—the professional or business part of him—is the most alert, intelligent, and interesting phase. The constant close-at-hand personal relations, unrelieved by the abstract impersonal attitude and the generalizing activity which it invites, constitute an element of strain which few men understand, and which probably few could endure and possess their souls. The present division of labor seems, therefore, to make the man excessively abstract, the woman excessively personal, instead of supplementing to some extent the weak side of each.