Studies in Logical Theory

by John Dewey

1. The judgment of valuation, whether expressed in terms of the individual experience or in terms of social evolution, is essentially the process of the explicit and deliberate resolution of conflict between ends. As an incidental, though nearly always indispensable, step to the final resolution of such conflict, physical judgment, or, in general, the judgment of fact or existence, plays its part, this part being to define the situation in terms of the means necessary for the execution of the end that is gradually taking form. The two modes of judgment mutually incite and control each other, and neither could continue to any useful purpose without this incitement and control of the other. Both modes of judgment are objective in content and significance. At the end of the reflective process and immediately upon the verge of execution of the end or purpose which has taken form the result may be stated or apprehended in either of two ways: (1) directly, in terms of the end, and (2) indirectly, in terms of the ordered system of existent means which have been discovered, determined, and arranged. If such final survey of the result be taken by way of preparation for action, or for whatever reason, the end will be apprehended as possessing ethical value and the means, under conditions later to be specified, as possessing economic value.

2. What then is the nature and source of this apprehension of end or means as valuable? The consciousness of end or means as valuable is an emotional consciousness expressive of the agent's practical attitude as determined in the just completed judgment of ethical or economic valuation and arising in consequence of the inhibition placed upon the activities which constitute the attitude by the effort of apprehending or imaging the valued object. Ethical and economic value are thus strictly correlative; psychologically they are emotional incidents of apprehending in the two respective ways just indicated the same total result of the inclusive complex judgment-process. Finally, as the moment of action comes on, the consciousness of the ethically valued end lapses first; then the consciousness of economic value is lost in a purely "physical," i. e., technological, consciousness of the means and their properties and interrelations in the ordered system which has been arranged; and this finally merges into the immediate and undifferentiated consciousness of activity as use of the means becomes sure and unhesitating.

When we say that the ends which oppose each other in an ethical situation (that is, a situation for the time being seen in an ethical aspect) are related, and the ends in an economic situation are not, we by no means wish to imply that in the one case we have in this fact of relatedness a satisfactory solution at hand which is wanting in the other. To feel, for example, that there is a direct and inherent relationship between a cherished purpose of self-culture and an ideal of social service which seems now to require the abandonment of the purpose does not mean that one yet knows just how the two ends should be related in his life henceforth; and again, to say that one can see no inherent relation between a desire for books and pictures and the need of food, excepting in so far as both ends depend for their realization upon a limited supply of means, is not to say that the issue of the conflict is not of ethical significance. Such a view as we here reject would amount to a denial of the possibility of genuinely problematic ethical situations[126] and would accord with the opinion that economic judgment as such lies apart from the sphere of ethics and is at most subject only to occasional revision and control in the light of ethical considerations.

By the relatedness of the ends in a situation we mean the fact, more or less explicitly recognized by the agent, that the new, and as yet undefined, purpose which has arisen belongs in the same system with the end, or group of ends, which the standard inhibiting immediate action represents. The standard inhibits action in obedience to the impulse that has come to consciousness, and the image of the new end is, on its part, definite and impressive enough to inhibit action in obedience to the standard. The relatedness of the two factors is shown in a practical way by the fact that, in the first instance at least, they are tacitly expected to work out their own adjustment. By the process already described in outline, subject and predicate begin to develop and thereby to approach each other, and a provisional or partial solution of the problem may thus be reached without resort to any other method than that of direct comparison and adjustment of the ends involved on either side. The standard which has been called in question has enough of congruence with the new imaged purpose to admit of at least some progress toward a solution through this method.

We can best come to an understanding of this recognition of the relatedness of the ends in ethical valuation by pausing to examine somewhat carefully into the conditions involved in the acceptance or reflective acknowledgment of a defined end of conduct as being one's own. Any new end in coming to consciousness encounters some more or less firmly established habit represented in consciousness by a sign or symbolic image of some sort, the habit being itself the outcome of past judgment-process. Our present problem is the significance of the agent's recognition of a relatedness between his new impulsive end and the end which represents the habit, and we shall best approach its solution by considering the various factors and conditions involved in the agent's conscious recognition of the established end as being such.

In any determinate end there is inevitably implied a number of groups of factual judgments in which are presented the objective conditions under which execution of the end or purpose must take place. There is in the first place a general view of environing conditions, physical and social, presented in a group of judgments (1) descriptive of the means at hand, of the topography of the region in which the purpose is to be carried out, of climatic conditions, and the like, and (2) descriptive of the habits of thought and feeling of the people with whom one is to deal, their prejudices, their tastes, and their institutions. The project decided on may, let us say, be an individual or a national enterprise, whether philanthropic or commercial, which is to be launched in a distant country peopled by partly civilized races. In addition to these groups of judgments upon the physical and sociological conditions under which the work must proceed, there will also be a more or less adequate and impartial knowledge of one's own physical and mental fitness for the enterprise, since the work as projected may promise to tax one's physical powers severely and to require, for its successful conduct, large measure of industry, devotion, patience, and wisdom. Indeed any determinate purpose whatever inevitably implies a more or less varied and comprehensive inventory of conditions. Further illustration is not necessary for our present purpose. We may say that in a general way the conditions relevant to a practical purpose will group themselves naturally under four heads of classification, as physical, sociological, physiological, and psychological. All four classes are objective, though the last two embrace conditions peculiar to the agent as an individual over against the environment to which for purposes of his present activity he stands in a sense opposed.

Now our present interest is not so much in the enumeration and classification of possible relevant conditions in a typical situation as in the significance of these relevant conditions in the agent's apprehension of them. Perhaps this significance cannot better be described than by saying that essentially and impressively the conditions are apprehended as, taken together, warranting the purpose that has been determined. We appeal, in support of this account of the matter, to an impartial introspection of the way in which the means and conditions of action stand related to the formed purpose in the moment of survey of a situation. The various details presented in the survey of a situation are apprehended, not as bare facts such as one might find set down in a scientist's notebook, but as warranting—as closely, uniquely, and vitally relevant to—the action that is about to be taken. This, as we believe, is a fair account of the situation in even the commoner and simpler emergencies that confront the ordinary man. Quite conspicuously is it true of cases in which the purpose is a purely technological one that has been worked out with considerable difficulty and is therefore not executed until after a somewhat careful survey of conditions has been taken. It is often true likewise in cases of express ethical judgment; if the ethical phases of the reflective process have not been excessively long and difficult, our definite sense of the ethical value of the act we are about to do lapses quite easily, and the factual aspects and features of the situation as given in one or more of the four classes which we have distinguished take on an access of significance in their character of warranting, confirming, or even compelling the act determined upon. Of our ordinary sense-perception in the moments of its actual functioning no less than of conscience in its aspect of a moral perceptive faculty are the words of Bishop Butler sensibly true that "to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it."[127] I Even in cases of more serious moral difficulty this sanctioning aspect of the means and conditions of action is not overshadowed. If the situation is one in which by reason of their complexity these play a conspicuous rôle and must be surveyed, by way of preparation on the agents' part, for performance of the act, they inevitably assume, for the agent, their proper functional character. In general, the conditions presented in the system of factual judgments have a certain "rightful authority" which they seem to lend to the purpose or end with reference to which they were worked out to their present degree of factual detail. The conditions can thus seem to sanction the end because conditions and end have been worked out together. Gradual development on the one side prompts analytical inquiry upon the other and is in turn directed and advanced by the results of this inquiry. In the end the result may be read off either in terms of end or in terms of conditions and means.[128] The two readings must be in accord and the agent's apprehension of the conditions as warrant for the end is expression in consciousness of this "agreement."[129]

Now in this mode of apprehension of factual conditions there is a highly important logical implication—an implication which inevitably comes more and more clearly into view with the continued exercise of judgment, even though the agent's habit of interest in the scrutiny of perplexing situations may still remain, by reason of the want of trained capacity for a broader view, limited in its range quite strictly to the physical sphere. This implication is, we shall declare at once, that of an endeavoring, striving, active principle or self which can be helped or hindered in its unfolding by particular purposes and sets of corresponding conditions—can lose or gain, through devotion to particular purposes, in the breadth, fulness, and energy of its life. The agent's apprehension of and reference to this active principle of course varies in all degrees of explicitness, according to circumstances, from the vague awareness that is present in a simple case of physical judgment to the clear recognition and endeavor at definition that are characteristic of serious ethical crises.

That the situation should develop and bring to light this factor is what should be expected on general grounds of logic—for to say that a set of conditions warrants or sanctions or confirms a given purpose implies that our purposes can stand in need of warrant, and this would seem to be impossible apart from reference to a process whose maintenance and development in and through our purposes are assumed as being as a matter of course desirable. It is of the essence of our contention that the apprehension of the conditions of action as warranting the end is a primordial and necessary feature of the situation—indeed, its constitutive feature. If our concern were with the psychological development of self-consciousness as a phase of reflective experience, we should endeavor to show that this development is mediated in the first instance by the "subjective" phenomena of feeling, emotion, and desire which find their place in the course of the judgment-process. We should then hold that, with the conclusion of the judgment-process and the accompanying sense of the known conditions as reassuring and confirmatory of the end, comes the earliest possibility of a discriminative recognition of the self as having been all along a necessary factor in the process. We should hold that outside of the process of reflective attention there can be no psychical or "elementary" beginnings of self-consciousness, and then that, except as a development out of the experience to which we have referred as marking the conclusion of the attentive process, there can be no recognized specific and in any degree definable consciousness of self. All this, however, lies rather beside our present purpose. We wish simply to insist that it is out of the apprehension of conditions as reassuring and confirmatory, out of this "primordial germ," that the agent's definite recognition of himself as a center of development and expenditure of energy takes its rise. Here are the beginnings of the possibility of self-conscious ethical and economic valuation.

This apprehension of the means as warranting is, we have held, a fact even when the means surveyed are wholly of the physical sort, and we have thereby implied that consciousness of the self as "energetic" may take its rise in situations of this type or during the physical stage in the development of a more complex total situation. It would be an interesting speculation to consider to what extent and in what way the development of the sciences of sociology and physiology may have been essentially facilitated by the emergence of this form of self-consciousness. But however the case may stand with these sciences or with the rise of real interest in them in the mind of a given individual, interest in the objective psychological conditions of a contemplated act is certainly very closely dependent upon interest in that subjective self which one has learned to know through the past exercise of judgment in definition and contemplation of conditions of the three other kinds. The more diversified and complex the array of physical and social conditions with reference to which one is to act, the more important becomes not simply a clearly articulated knowledge of these, but also a knowledge of oneself. The self that is warranted in its purpose by the surveyed conditions must hold itself in a steady and consistent attitude during the performance on pain of "falling short of its opportunity" and thereby rendering nugatory the reflective process in which the purpose was worked out. Experience abundantly shows how easily the assurance that comes with the survey of conditions may come to grief, though there may have been on the side of the conditions, so far as defined, no visible change; and in so far as self-consciousness has already emerged as a distinguishable factor in such situations, failures of the sort we here refer to are the more easily identified and interpreted. Some sudden impulse may have broken in upon the execution of the chosen purpose; there may have been an unexpected shift of interest away from that general phase of life which the purpose represented; or in any one of a number of other ways may have come about a wavering and a slackening in the resolution which marked the commencement of action. The "energetic" self forthwith (if we may so express it) recognizes that the sanction which the conditions so far as then known gave to its purpose was a misleading because an incomplete one, and it proceeds to develop within itself a new range of objective fact in which may be worked out the explanation, and thereby a method of control, of these new disturbing phenomena. The qualities of patience under disappointment, courage in encountering resistance, steadiness and self-control in sustained and difficult effort—these qualities and others of like nature come to be discriminated from each other by introspective analysis and may be as accurately measured, and in general as objectively studied, as any of the conditions to a saving knowledge and respect of which one may already have attained, and these newly determined psychological conditions will henceforth play the same part in affording sanction to one's purposes as do the rest. An ordered system of psychological categories or points of view comes to be developed, and an accurate statement of conditions of personal disposition and capacity relevant to each emergency as it arises will hereafter be worked out—over against and in tension with one's gradually forming purposes in like manner as are statements of all the other relevant objective aspects of the situation.[130]