Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
As was suggested a moment ago, the contrast between ordinary experience
and something else of which it is the appearance is the result of the
failure to give proper recognition to the facts of behavior. If we
connect the forward reference of experience with the operations of our
nascent activities, we have no need of a pure duration or of bridging
the gulf between reality and its appearances. In the same way, if we
construe sensations as just symbols of our responses, we rid ourselves
of problems that are insoluble because they are unintelligible. Such
problems constitute metaphysics in the bad sense of the word, whether
they show themselves in the domain of science or of philosophy. To
describe experience by reference to such a real is to explain what we
know in terms of what we do not know. The question what is real is
absolutely sterile. Our descriptions and explanations must remain on the
same plane as the experiences with which they deal, and not seek after a
real of a different order. If we are to have an explanation of
consciousness at all, the explanation must not take us back to
hypothetical sensations that are almost but not quite experienced, nor
to a duration in which all distinctions are swallowed up, but must be
rendered in terms of other facts that dwell in the light of common day.
By way of conclusion I venture to urge once more that a proper
consideration of the facts of behavior will furnish us with a key that
will unlock many a door. The conception of stimulus and response gives
us a differentia for experience and also enables us to distinguish
within experience between consciousness and object. If, however, we
disregard behavior, we are bound to lose our way. The distinction
between the experienced and the unexperienced is either wiped out or
else is permitted to convert itself into a distinction between
appearance and reality that leads nowhere and explains nothing. The
significance of truth as the successful guidance of behavior, in
accordance with the program laid down in the organization of stimulus
and response, is lost to sight and recourse is had to a
fourth-dimensional truth or reality for the miracle of breathing life
into the dead bones of our philosophic abstractions. The study of
behavior constitutes a mode of approach that holds out the hope of
deliverance from questions that should never have been asked. We are on
a different and, let us hope, a higher level when we cease to ask how
consciousness can lay hold of passive objects, or how knowledge
_ueberhaupt_ is possible, and concern ourselves rather with the wondrous
activity whereby this plastic dance of circumstance that we call the
universe transcends the domain of mechanism and embodies itself in the
values of conscious life.
THE PHASES OF THE ECONOMIC INTEREST
HENRY WALDGRAVE STUART
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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