Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
Unhappily, difference of mind, diversity and conflict of interests is
quite as fundamental, if not more so, as sameness of mind, cooeperation
and unity of interests. This the philosophical tradition sufficiently
attests. To Plato man is at once a protean beast, a lion, and an
intellect; the last having for its proper task to rule the first and
to regulate the second, which is always rebellious and irruptive.[90]
According to the Christian tradition man is at once flesh and spirit,
eternally in conflict with one another, and the former is to be
mortified that the latter may have eternal life. Common sense divides us
into head and heart, never quite at peace with one another. There is no
need of piling up citations. Add to the inward disharmonies of mind its
incompatibilities with the environment, and you perceive at once how
completely it is, from moment to moment, a theater and its life a drama
of which the interests that compose it are at once protagonists and
directors. The catastrophe of this unceasing drama is always that one or
more of the players is driven from the stage of conscious existence. It
may be that the environment--social conditions, commercial necessity,
intellectual urgency, allies of other interests--will drive it off; it
may be that its own intrinsic unpleasantness will banish it, will put it
out of mind; whatever the cause, it is put out. Putting it out does not,
however, end the drama; putting it out serves to complicate the drama.
For the "new psychology"[91] shows that whenever an interest or a desire
or impulsion is put out of the mind, it is really, if not extirpated,
put into the mind; it is driven from the conscious level of existence to
the unconscious. It retains its force and direction, only its work now
lies underground. Its life henceforward consists partly in a direct
oppugnance to the inhibitions that keep it down, partly in burrowing
beneath and around them and seeking out unwonted channels of escape.
Since life is long, repressions accumulate, the mass of existence of
feeling and desire tends to become composed entirely of these
repressions, layer upon layer, with every interest in the aggregate
striving to attain place in the daylight of consciousness.
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