Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
With a difference, however, a fundamental difference. When you have an
emotion you cannot yourself examine it. Effectively as the mind may work
in sections, it cannot with sanity be divided against itself nor long
remain so. A feeling cannot be had and examined in the same time. And
though the investigator who studies the nature of red does not become
red, the investigator who studies the actual emotion of anger does tend
to become angry. Emotion is infectious; anger begets anger; fear, fear;
love, love; hate, hate; actions, relations, attitudes, when actual,
integrate and fuse; as feelings, they constitute the sense of behavior,
varying according to a changing and unstable equilibrium of factors
_within_ the organism; they are actually underneath the skin, and
consequently, to know them alive is to have them. On the other hand, to
know _things_ is simply to have a relation to them. The same thing may
be both loved and hated, desired or spurned, by different minds at the
same time or by the same mind at different times. One, for example,
values whiskey positively, approaches, absorbs it, aims to increase its
quantity and sale; another apprehends it negatively, turns from it,
strives to oust it from the world. Then, according to these direct and
immediate valuations of whiskey, its place in the common world of the
two minds will be determined. To save or destroy it, they may seek to
destroy each other. Even similar positive valuations of the object might
imply this mutual repugnance and destruction. Thus, rivals in love: they
enhance and glorify the same woman, but as she is not otherwise
sharable, they strive to eliminate each other. Throughout the world of
values the numerical distinctness of the seats or centers of value,
whatever their identity otherwise, keeps them ultimately inimical. They
may terminate in the common object, but they originate in different
souls and they are related to the object like two magnets of like
polarity to the same piece of iron that lies between them. Most of what
is orderly in society and in science is the outcome of the adjustment of
just such oppositions: our civilization is an unstable equilibrium of
objects, through the cooeperation, antipathy, and fusion of
value-relations.
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