Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
ideal socius or self which satisfies perfectly all human requirements.
Pluralistic and quarrelsome animism has become monistic and harmonious
spiritism. Forces have turned to excellences and needs to satisfactions.
Necessity has been transmuted to Providence, sin has been identified
with salvation, value with existence, and existence with impotence and
illusion before Providence, salvation, and value.
VII
With this is completed the reply to the question: Why do men contradict
their own experience? Experience is, as Spinoza says, passion and
action, both inextricably mingled and coincident, with the good and evil
of them as interwoven as they. That piecemeal conquest of the evil which
we call civilization has not even the promise of finality. It is a
Penelope's web, always needing to be woven anew. Now, in experience
desire anticipates and outleaps action and fact rebuffs desire. Desire
realizes itself, consequently, in ideas objectified by the power of
speech into independent and autonomous subjects of discourse, whereby
experience is One, Eternal, a Spirit or Spiritually Controlled, wherein
man has Freedom and Immortality. These, the constantly desiderated
traits of a perfect universe, are in fact the limits of what adequacy
environmental satisfactions can attain, ideas hypostatized, normative of
existence, but not constituting it. With them, in philosophy and
religion, the mind confronts the experiences of death and obstruction,
of manifoldness, change and materiality, and denies them, as Peter
denied Jesus. The visible world, being not as we want it, we imagine an
unseen one that satisfies our want, declaring the visible one an
illusion by its side. So we work a radical substitution of desiderates
for actualities, of ideals for facts, of values for existences. Art
alone acknowledges the actual relations between these contrasting pairs.
Art alone so operates as in fact to convert their oppugnance into
identity. Intrinsically, its whole purpose and technique consists of
transmutation of values into existences, in the incarnation the
realization of values. The philosophy and religion of tradition, on the
contrary, consists intrinsically in the flat denial of reality, or at
least, co-reality, to existence, and the transfer of that eulogium to
value-forms as such.
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