Studies in Logical Theory

by John Dewey

In the "energetic" self, we shall now seek to show, we have the common and essential principle of both ethical and economic valuation which marks these off from other and subordinate types of judgment. Let us determine as definitely as possible the nature and function of this principle.

The recognition of the chosen purpose as one favorable or otherwise to the self, and so the recognition of the self as capable of furtherance or retardation by its chosen purposes, is not always a feature of the state of mind which may ensue upon completed judgment. In the commoner situations of the everyday life of normal persons, as practically always in the lives of persons of relatively undeveloped reflective powers, it is quite wanting as a separate distinguished phase of the experience. In such cases it is present, if present at all, merely as the vaguely felt implicit meaning of the recognition that the known conditions sanction and confirm the purpose. Such situations yield easily to attack and threaten none of those dangers, none of those possible occasions for regret or remorse, of which complex situations make the person of developed reflective capacity and long experience so keenly apprehensive. They are disposed of with comparatively little of conscious reconstruction on either the subject or the predicate side, and when a conclusion has been reached the agent's recognition of the conditions carries with it the comfortable though too often delusive assurance of the complete and perfect eligibility of the purpose. If the question of eligibility is raised at all, the answer is given on the tacit principle that "whatever purpose is, is right." To the "plain man," and to all of us on certain sides of our lives, every purpose for which the requisite means and factual conditions are found to be at hand is, just as our purpose, therefore right.

The same experience of failure and disappointment which proves our purpose to have been, from the standpoint of enlargement and enrichment of the self, a mistaken one brings a clearer consciousness of the logic implicit in our first confident belief in the purpose, and at the same time emphasizes the need of making this logic explicit. The purpose, as warranted to us by the conditions and assembled means that lay before us, was our own, and as our own was implicitly a purpose of furtherance of the self. The disappointment that has come brings this implication more clearly into view, and likewise the need of methodical procedure, not as before in the determination of conditions, but in the determination of purposes as such; for the essence of the situation is that the execution of the purpose has brought to light some unforeseen consequence now recognized as having been all the while in the nature of things involved in the purpose. This consequence or group of consequences consists (in general terms) in the abatement or arrest of desirable modes of activity which find their motivation elsewhere in the agent's system of accepted ends, and it is registered in consciousness in that sense of restriction or repression from without which is a notable phase of all emotional experience, particularly in its early stages. The consequences are as undesirable as they are unexpected, and the reaction against them, at first emotional, presently passes over into the form of a reflective interpretation of the situation to the effect that the self has suffered a loss by reason of its thoughtless haste in identifying itself with so unsafe a purpose.[131]

It is the essential logical function of the consciousness of self to stimulate the valuation processes which take their rise in the stage of reflective thought thus attained. The consciousness of self is a peculiarly baffling theme for discussion from whatever point of view, because one finds its meaning shifting constantly between the two extremes of a subjectivity to which "all objects of all thought" are external and an objective thing or system of energies which is known just as other things are—known in a sense by itself, to be sure, but known nevertheless, and thought of as an object standing in possible relations to other objects. Now, it is of the subjective self that we are speaking when we say that its essential function is the stimulation or incitement of the valuation processes, but manifestly in order to serve thus it must nevertheless be presented in some sort of sensuous imagery. The subjective self may, in fact, be thought of in many ways—presented in many different sorts of imagery—but in all its forms it must be distinguished carefully from that objective self which, as described in psychology, is the assemblage of conditions under which the subjective or "energetic" self works out its purposes. It may be the pale, attenuated double of the body, or a personal being standing in need of deliverance from sin, or an atom of soul-substance, or, in our present terminology, a center of developing and unfolding energy. The significant fact is that, however different in content and in motive these various presentations of the subjective self may be, they are, one and all, as presentations and as in so far objective, stimuli to some definite response. The savage warrior deposits his double in a tree or stone for safety while he goes into battle; the self that is to be saved from sin is a self that prompts certain acceptable acts in satisfaction of the quasi-legal obligations that the fact of sin has laid upon the agent. The presented self, whatever the form it may assume as presentation, has its function, and this function is in general that of stimulus to the conservation and increase, in some sense, of the self that is not presented, but for whom the presentation is. Now our own present description of the self as "energetic," as a center or source of developing and unfolding energy is in its way a presentation. It consists of sensuous imagery and suggests a mechanical process, or the growth of a plant perhaps, which if properly safeguarded will go on satisfactorily—a process which one must not allow to be perturbed or hindered by external resistance or internal friction or to run down. To many persons doubtless such an account would seem arbitrary and fantastic in the extreme, but no great importance need be attached to its details. The kind and number and sensuous vividness of the details in which this essential content of presentation may be clothed must of course depend, for each person, upon his psychical idiosyncrasy.

Indeed, as the habit of reflection upon purposes comes to be more firmly fixed, and the procedure of valuation to be consciously methodical and orderly, the sensuous content of the presented self must grow constantly more and more attenuated until it has declined into a mere unexpressed principle or maxim or tacit presumption, prescribing the free and impartial application of the method of valuation to particular practical emergencies as these arise. For a self, consisting of presented content of whatever sort, which one seeks to further through attentive deliberation upon concrete purposes, must, just in so far as it has content, determine the outcome of ethical judgment in definite ways. Thus the soul that must be saved from sin (if this be the content of the presented self) is one that has transgressed the law in certain ways and the right relations that should subsist between creature and Creator, and has thereby incurred a more or less technically definable guilt. This guilt can only be removed and the self rehabilitated in its normal relations to the law by an appropriate response to the situation—by a choice on the agent's part, first, of a certain technical procedure of repentance, and then of a settled purpose of living as the law prescribes.[132] So also our own image of the self as "energetic" after the manner of a growing organism may well seem, if taken too seriously as to its presentational details, to foster a bias in favor of over-conservative adherence to the established and the accredited as such.[133]

The argument of the last few paragraphs may be restated in the following way in terms of the evolution of the individual's moral attitude or technique of self-control:

1. In the stage of moral evolution in which custom and authority are the controlling principles of conduct, moral judgment in the proper sense of self-conscious, critical, and reconstructive valuation of purposes is wanting. Such judgment as finds here a place is at best of the merely casuistical type, looking to a determination of particular cases as falling within the scope of fixed and definite concepts. There is no self-consciousness except such as may be mediated by the sentiment of willing obedience. It is, at this stage, not the particular sort of conduct which the law prescribes that in the agent's apprehension enlarges and develops the self; so far as any thought of enlargement and development of the self plays a part in influencing conduct, these effects are such as, in the agent's trusting faith, will come from an entire and willing acceptance of the law as such. "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine." Moreover, the stage of custom and authority goes along with, in social evolution, either very simple social conditions or else conditions which, though very complex, are stable, so that in either case the conditions of conduct are in general in harmony with the conduct which custom and authority prescribe. The law, therefore, can be absolute and takes no account of possible inability to obey. The divine justice punishes infraction of the law simply as objective infraction; not as sin, in proportion to the sinner's responsibility.

2. But inevitably custom and authority come to be inadequate. As social conditions change, custom becomes antiquated and authority blunders, wavers, contradicts itself in the endeavor to prescribe suitable modes of individual conduct. Obedience no longer is the way to light. The self becomes self-conscious through feeling more and more the repression and the misdirection of its energies that obedience now involves. This is the stage of subjective morality or conscience; and the rise of conscience, the attitude of appeal to conscience, means the beginning of endeavor at methodical solution of those new problematic situations in the attempt to deal with which authority as such has palpably collapsed. We say, however, that conscience is the beginning of this endeavor; for conscience is, in fact, an ambiguous and essentially transitional phenomenon. On the one hand conscience is the inner nature of a man speaking within him, and so the self furthers its own growth in listening to this expression of itself. In this aspect conscience is methodological. But on the other hand conscience speaks, and, speaking, must say something determinate, however general this something may be. In this aspect conscience is a résumé of the generic values realized under the system of custom and authority, but to the present continued attainment of which the particular prescriptions of custom and authority are no longer adequate guides. Conscience is thus at once an inward prompting to the application of logical method to the case in hand and a body of general or specific rules under some one of which the case can be subsumed. In ethical theory we accordingly find no unanimity as to the nature of conscience. At the one extreme it is the voice of God speaking in us or through us, in detailed and specific terms—and so, virtually, custom and authority in disguise. At the other it is an empty abstract intuition that the right is binding upon us—and, so, simply the hypostasis of demand for a logical procedure. The history of ethics presents us with all possible intermediate conceptions in which these extreme motives are more or less skilfully interwoven or combined in varying proportions. The truth is that conscience is essentially a transitional conception, and so necessarily looks before and after. In one of its aspects it is a self which has come to miss (and therefore to image for itself) the values and, it may be, a certain dawning sense of vitality and growth which obedience to authority once afforded.[134] In its other aspect it is a self that is looking forward in a self-reliant way to the determination on its own account of its purposes and values. And finally, as for the environing world of means and conditions, clearly this is not necessarily harmonious with and amenable to conscience; indeed, in the nature of things it can be only partially so. The morality of conscience is, therefore, either mystical, a morality that seeks to escape the world in the very moment of its affirmation that the world is unreal (because worthless), or else it takes refuge in a virtual distinction between "absolute" and "relative" morality (to borrow a terminology from a system in which properly it should have no place), perhaps setting up as an intermediary between heaven and earth a machinery of special dispensation.[135]

3. Conscience professes in general, that is, to be autonomous, and the profession is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. Moreover, apart from considerations of the logic of the situation, theories of conscience have, as a matter of fact, always lent themselves kindly to theological purposes just as the theory of self-realization in its classic modern statement rests upon a metaphysical doctrine of the Absolute.[136] Inevitably the movement concealed within this essentially unstable conception must have its legitimate outcome (1) in a clearing of the presented self of its fixed elements of content, thus setting it free in its character of a non-presentational principle of valuation, and (2) a setting apart of these elements of content from the principle of valuation as standards for reference and consultation rather than as law to be obeyed.

We have thus correlated our account of the logic whereby the "energetic" self comes to explicit recognition as stimulus to the valuation-process with the three main stages in the moral evolution of the individual and the race. We were brought to this first-mentioned part of our discussion by our endeavor to find out the factors involved in the first acceptance of a conscious purpose (or, indifferently, the subsequent recognition of it as a standard)—an endeavor prompted by the need of distinguishing, with a view to their special analysis, the two types of valuation-process. We now return to this problem.