Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
A similar thought underlies Croce's division of the Practical into the
two spheres of the Economic and the Ethical. "The economic activity is
that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the conditions of
fact in which a man finds himself; the ethical activity is that which,
although it correspond to these conditions, also refers to something
that transcends them. To the first correspond what are called
individual ends, to the second universal ends; the one gives rise to the
judgment concerning the greater or less coherence of the action taken in
itself, the other to that concerning its greater or less coherence in
respect to the universal end, which transcends the individual.[69]
Utilitarianism is according to Croce an attempt to reduce the Ethical to
the Economic form, although the utilitarians as men attempt in various
ways to make a place for that distinction which as philosophers they
would suppress. "Man is not a consumer of pleasures. He is a creator of
life." With this claim of the distinctive, synthetic, character of the
moral consciousness and of the impossibility of testing the worth of
ideals by cosmic laws, or by gratification of particular wants as
measured by pleasure, I have no issue. The analysis of the moral
judgment made above points out just how it is that good is synthetic. It
is synthetic in that it represents a measuring and valuing of
ends--instinctive and imagined, individual and social--against each
other and as part of a whole to which a growing self corresponds. It is
synthetic in that it represents not merely a process of evaluating ends
which match actually defined desires, but also a process in which the
growing self, dissatisfied with any ends already in view, gropes for
some new definition of ends that shall better respond to its living,
creative capacity, its active synthetic character. Good is the concept
for just this valuing process as carried on by a conscious being that is
not content to take its desire as ready made by its present
construction, but is reaching out for ends that shall respond to a
growing, expanding, inclusive, social, self. It expresses value _as_
value.
Value _as value!_ not as being; nor as independent essence; nor as
anything static and fixed. For a synthetic self, a living personality,
could find no supreme value in the complete absence of valuing, in the
cessation of life, in the negation of that very activity of projection,
adventure, construction, and synthesis in which it has struck out the
concept good. A theory of ethics which upholds the synthetic character
of the good may be criticized as being not synthetic enough if it fails
to see that on the basis of the mutual determination of percepts and
concepts, of self and objects, the synthetic character of the process
must be reflected in the ultimate meaning of the category which
symbolizes and incorporates the process.
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