Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
Is value, then, absolute or relative? Is value or price the prior
notion? Was the classical English economics superficial in its
predilection for the relative conception of value? Or is the reigning
Austrian economics profound in its reliance upon marginal utility? By
way of answer let us ask--What in our world can be more absolute a fact
than a man's transition from one level of experience and action to
another? Can the flight of time be stayed or turned backward? And if not
can the acts by whose intrinsic uniqueness and successiveness time
becomes filled for me and by which I feel time's sensible passage as
swift or slow, lose their individuality? But it is not by a mere empiric
temporalism alone that the sufficient absoluteness of the present act is
attested. My transition from phase to phase of "finitude" is a thing so
absolute that Idealism itself has deemed an Absolute indispensable to
assure its safe and sane achievement. And with all Idealism's distrust
of immediate experience for every evidential use, the Idealist does not
scruple to cite the "higher obviousness" of personal effort, attainment,
and fruition as the best of evidence for his most momentous truth of
all.[59] And accordingly (in sharp descent) we need not hesitate to
regard value in exchange as a primary fact in its own right, standing in
no need of resolution into marginal pseudo-absolutes. A price agreed to
and paid marks a real transition to another level. There are both
marginal valuation and _Werthaltung_ on this level, but they are
subordinate incidents to this level's mapping and the conservation of
its resources. On this level every marginal utility is relative, as we
have seen, to every other through their common relation to the complex
plan of organization as a whole.[60]
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