Studies in Logical Theory

by John Dewey

Now it will be apparent on grounds of logic, as on the evidence of simple introspection, that in this third type of attitude—in the attitude of true valuation, that is to say—the energetic self cannot be identified with the chosen purpose. The purpose is a determinate specified act to be performed subject to recognized conditions, and with the use of the co-ordinated means; the self, on the other hand, is a process to which this particular purpose is, indeed, from the standpoint of the self's conservation and increase, indispensable, but which is nevertheless apart from the purpose in the sense that without the purpose it would still be a self, though perhaps a narrower and less developed one. Our standpoint here as elsewhere, the reader must remember, is the logical. It is the standpoint of the agent's own interpretation of his experience of judgment during the judgment-process and at its close, and not the standpoint of the psychological mediation of this experience as a series of occurrences. Thus we are here far from wishing to deny the general proposition that a man's purposes are an expression of his nature, as the psychologist might describe it, or the proposition that a man's conduct and his character are one and the same thing viewed from different points of view. We wish merely to insist upon the fact that these psychological propositions are not a true account of the agent's own experience of himself and of his purposes while these latter are in the making or are on the verge of execution. There is indeed no conflict between this "inside view" of the judgment-process and of the final survey and the psychological propositions just mentioned. The identity of conduct and character means not simply that as the man is so does he act, but quite as much, and in a more important way, that as he acts so is he and so does he become. It is, then, the essence of the agent's own view of the situation that his character is in the making and that the purpose is the method to be taken. To the agent the self is not, indeed, independent of the purpose, for plainly it is recognized that upon just this purpose the self is, in the sense explained, in a vital way dependent. Nevertheless the self is in the agent's apprehension essentially beyond the purpose, and larger than the purpose, and even, we may say, metaphysically apart from it. Now the conclusion which we wish to draw from this examination of the agent's attitude in judgment is that no formulation of an ideal self can ever be adequate to his purposes, not simply because any such formulation must, as Green allows, inevitably be incomplete and inconsistent, but because the self as a process is in the agent's own apprehension of it inherently incapable of formulation. Any formulation that might be attempted must be in terms of particular purposes (since in a modern ethical theory the self must be a "concrete" and not an abstract universal), and it is easy to see that any such would be, to the agent in the attitude of true ethical judgment, worse than useless. It could as contentual and concrete only be a composite of existing standards, more or less coherently put together, offered to the agent as a substitute for the new standard which he is trying to work out. If there were not need of a new standard there would be no judgment-process; the agent must be, to say the least, embarrassed, even if the unwitting imposture does not deceive him, when such a composite, useful and indeed indispensable in its proper place as a standard of reference and a source of suggestion, is urged upon him as suitable for a purpose which in the very nature of the case it is logically incapable of serving.[148]

To the agent, then, the "energetic" self can never be represented as an ideal—can never be expressed in terms of purpose—since it is in its very nature logically incongruous with any possible particular purpose or generalization of such purposes. It is commonly imaged by the agent in some manner of sensuous terms, but it is imaged, in so far as the case is one of judgment in a proper sense, for use as a stimulus to the methodical process of valuation—not as a standard, which if really adequate would make valuation unnecessary. The agent's consciousness of himself as "energetic" cannot be an ideal; it comes to consciousness only through the endeavor, first to follow, and then, in a later stage of moral development, to use ideals, and has for its function, as a presentation, the incitement of the process of methodical use of standards in the control of the agent's impulsive ends. It is not an anticipatory vision of the final goal of life, but the agent's coming to consciousness of the general impulse and movement of the life that is.

It is an inevitable consequence of acceptance of a contentual view of the "energetic" self as one's ideal that reflective morality should tend to degenerate into an introspective conscientiousness constantly in unstable equilibrium between a pharisaical selfishness on the one hand and a morally scarcely more dangerous hypocrisy on the other. There is certainly much justice in the stinging characterization of "Neo-Hegelian Egoism" which Mr. Taylor somewhere in his unsearchable book applies to the currently prevailing conventionalized type of idealistic ethics. If the self of the valuation-process is an ultimate goal of effort, then there must certainly be an irreconcilable contrast to the disadvantage of the latter between the plain man's objective desire for right conduct, as such, and for the welfare of his fellow-beings, and the moralist's anxious questionings of the rectitude of the motives by which his conformity to the fixed moral standard are prompted.[149] Into the value and significance of the attitude of conscientious examination of one's moral motives we are not here concerned to inquire, but need only insist, in accordance with our present view, that its value must be distinctly subordinate and incidental to the general course and outcome of the valuation-process. In the valuation-process, consciousness of self is not an object of solicitude, but simply, we repeat, a pure presentation of stimulus, having for its office the incitement, and if need be the reincitement, of the attitude of deference to the suggestions of old standards and openness to the petitions of new impulse, and of methodically bringing these to bear upon each other.

The outcome of such a process, of course, cannot be predicted—and for the same reasons as make unpredictable the scientist's factual hypothesis. Just as the scientist's data are incomplete and ill-assorted and unorganized, for the reason that they have, of necessity, been collected, and must at the outset be interpreted, in the light of present concepts, whose inadequacy the very existence of the problem at issue demonstrates, so the final moral purpose that shall be developed is not to be deduced from any possible inventory of the situation as it stands. The process in both cases is one of reconstruction, and the test of the validity of the reconstruction must in both cases be of the same essentially practical character. In both cases the process is constructive of reality, in the functional signification of the term. In both, the judgment process is constructive also of the self, in the sense that upon the determination of the agent's future attitude the cumulative outcome of his past attitudes is methodically brought to bear.[150]

V

Judgments of value are, then, objective in their import in the same sense as are the factual judgments in which the conditions of action are presented. The ideal problematic situation is, in the last resort, ethical, in the sense of requiring for its solution determination of the new end that has arisen with reference to existing standards. In structure and in function the judgment in which the outcome of this process is presented is knowledge, and objective in the only valid acceptation of the term.

But, after all, it may be urged, is it not the essential mark of the objective that it should be accessible to all men, and not in the nature of the case valid for only a single individual? At best the objectivity of content which has been made out for the judgment of value is purely functional, and not such as can be verified by appeal to the consensus of other persons. The agent's assurance of the reality of the economic or ethical subject-matter which he is endeavoring to determine, and his sense of the objectivity of the results which he reaches, need not be denied. These may well enough be illusions of personal prejudice or passion, or even normal illusions of the reflective faculty, like that of interpreting the secondary qualities of bodies as objective in the same sense as are the "bulk, figure, extension, number, and motion of their solid parts."[151] Any man can see the physical object to which I point, and verify with his own eyes the qualities which I ascribe to it, but no man can either understand or verify my judgment that the purpose I have formed is in accord with rational ideals of industry and self-denial, or that this portion of my winter's fuel may be given to a neighbor who has none.

But this line of objection proves too much, for, made consistent with itself, it really amounts to a denial that the very judgment of sense-perception, to which it appeals so confidently as a criterion, has objective import. The first division of this study was intended to show that every object in the experience of each individual is for the individual a unique construction of his own, determined in form and in details by individual interests and purposes, and therefore different from that object in the experience of any other individual which in social intercourse passes current as the same. The real object is for me the object which functions in my experience, presenting problematic aspects for solution, and lending itself more or less serviceably to my purposes; and this object is, we hold, not the object as socially current, but the complete object which, as complete in its determination with reference to my unique purposes, cannot possibly have social currency. The objection as stated cuts away the very ground on which it rests, since the shortcoming which it finds in the judgment of ethical or economic value is present in the particular judgment of sense-perception also. The object about which I can assure myself by an immediate appeal to other persons is the object in its bare "conceptual" aspects—the object as a dictionary might define it, the commodity as it might be described in a trade catalogue, or the ethical act as defined by the criminal code or in the treatise of a moral philosopher. It is an object consisting of a central core or fixed deposit of meaning, which renders it significant in a certain general way to a number of persons, or even to all men, but which is not yet adequately known by me from the standpoint of my present forming purpose. In virtue of these conceptual characters it is adaptable to my purpose, which is as yet general and indeterminate; but in the nature of the case it cannot yet be known to me as applicable to my prospective concrete purpose, as this shall come to be through judgment.

Thus, if the test of objectivity of import is to be that the judgment shall present an object or a fact which, as presented, is socially current among men and not shut away in the individual intelligence apart from the possibility of social verification, then the apparent nominalism of the objection we are considering turns out to be the uttermost extreme of realism. Such a test amounts to a virtual affirmation that the sole objective reality is the conceptual, and that the "accidents" of one's particular object of sense-perception are the arbitrary play of private preference or fancy. At this point, however, the objection may shift its ground and take refuge in some such position as the following: The real object is indeed the object which the individual knows in relation to his particular purpose, and it is indeed impossible that the individual's judgment should be limited in its content to coincidence with the conceptual elements of meaning which are socially current. The building-stone which one has judged precisely fit for a special purpose, the specimen which the mineralogist or the botanist examines under his microscope, the tool whose peculiarity of working one has learned to make allowance for in use—these all are, of course, highly individual objects, possessing for the person in question an indefinite number of objective aspects of which no other person can possibly be conscious at the time. And, more than this, even though the individual may, in his scrutiny of the object, have discovered no conspicuous new qualities in it which were not present in the socially current meaning, the object will still possess an individuality making it genuinely unique merely through its co-ordination with other objects in the mechanical process of working out the purpose in hand. It is at least an object standing here at just this time, a tool cutting this particular piece of stone and striking at this instant with this particular ringing sound, and these perhaps wholly nonessential facts will nevertheless serve to individualize the object (if one chances to think of them) in the sense of making it such a one as no other person knows. All this may be granted, the objection may allow, and yet the vital point remains; for this is not what it was intended, even in the first place, to deny. The vital point at issue is not whether the object which I know is known as I know it by any other person, but whether, in the nature of things, it is one that can be so known.

Herein, then, lies the difference between judgments of fact and judgments of value. The mineralogist can train his pupil to see precisely what he himself sees; and so likewise in any case of sense-perception, the object, however recondite may be the qualities or features which one may see in it, can nevertheless be seen by any other person in precisely the same way on the single, more often not insuperably difficult, condition that the discoverer shall point these out or otherwise prepare the other for seeing them. But with the ton of coal which one may judge economically disposable for a charitable purpose the case stands differently, since it is not in its visible or other physical aspects that the ton of coal is here the subject of the judgment. It is as having been set apart by oneself exclusively for other uses that the ton of coal now functions as an object and now possesses the character which the economic judgment has given it; and the case stands similarly with a contemplated act, of telling the truth in a trying situation. The valuation placed upon the commodity or upon the moral act depends essentially upon psychological conditions of temperament, disposition, mood, or whim into which it would be impossible for another person to enter, and these depend upon conditions of past training and native endowment which can never occur or be combined in future in precisely the same way for any other individual. In short, the physical object is describable and can be made socially current, though doubtless with more or less of difficulty, if other persons will attend to it and learn to see it as I see it; but the value of an economic object or a moral act depends upon my desires and feelings, and therefore must remain a matter of my private appreciation.