Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
The foremost outstanding is perhaps "the unity of the world."
Confronted by the perplexing menace of the variation of experience, the
dichotomies and oppositions of thoughts and things, the fusion and
diversifications of many things into one and one into many, mankind has,
from the moment it became reflective, felt in the relation of the One
and the Many the presence of a riddle that engendered and sustained
uneasiness, a mystery that concealed a threat. The mind's own
preference, given the physiological processes that condition its
existence, constitution, and operation, could hardly come to rest in a
more fundamental normation than Unity. A world which is _one_ is easier
to live in and with; initial adjustment therein is final adjustment; in
its substance there exists nothing sudden and in its character nothing
uncontrollable. It guarantees whatever vital equilibrium the organism
has achieved in it, ill or good. It secures life in attainment and
possession, insuring it repose, simplicity, and spaciousness. A world
which is many complicates existence: it demands watchful consideration
of irreducible discrete individualities: it necessitates the integration
and humanization in a common system of adjustment of entities which in
the last analysis refuse all ordering and reject all subordination,
consequently keeping the mind on an everlasting jump, compelling it to
pay with eternal vigilance the price of being. The preference for unity,
then, is almost inevitable, and the history of philosophy, from the
Vedas to the Brahma Somaj and from Thales to Bergson, is significantly
unanimous in its attempts to prove that the world is, somehow, through
and through one. That the oneness requires _proof_ is _prima facie_
evidence that it is a value, a desiderate, not an existence. And how
valuable it is may be seen merely in the fact that it derealizes the
inner conflict of interests, the incompatibilities between nature and
man, the uncertainties of knowledge, and the certainties of evil, and
substitutes therefore the ultimate happy unison which "the identity of
the different" compels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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