Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
Here, perhaps, is the place for a word on truth and satisfaction. The
satisfaction which marks the truth of logical operations--"intellectual
satisfaction"--is the satisfaction which attends the accomplishment of
their task, viz., the removal of ambiguity in conduct, i.e., in our
interaction with other beings. It does not mean that this satisfaction
is bound to be followed by wholly blissful consequences. All our
troubles are not over when the distress of ambiguity is removed. It may
be indeed that the verdict of the logical operation is that we must face
certain death. Very well, we must have felt it to be "good to know the
worst," or no inquiry would have been started. We should have deemed
ignorance bliss and sat with closed eyes waiting for fate to overtake us
instead of going forward to meet it and in some measure determine it.
Death anticipated and accepted is _realiter_ very different from death
that falls upon us unawares, however we may estimate that difference. If
this distinction in the _foci_ of satisfaction is kept clear it must do
away with a large amount of the hedonistic interpretations of
satisfaction in which many critics have indulged.
But hereupon some one may exclaim, as did a colleague recently: "Welcome
to the ranks of the intellectualists!" If so, the experimentalist is
bound to reply that he is as willing, and as unwilling, to be welcomed
to the ranks of intellectualism as to those of anti-intellectualism. He
wonders, however, how long the welcome would last in either. Among the
intellectualists the welcome would begin to cool as soon as it should be
discovered that the ambiguity to which logical operations are the
response is not regarded by the experimentalist as a purely intellectual
affair. It is an ambiguity in conduct with all the attendant affectional
values that may be at stake.[19] It is, to be sure, the fact of
ambiguity, and the effort to resolve it, that adds the intellectual,
logical character to conduct and to affectional values. But if the
logical interest attempts entirely to detach itself it will soon be
without either subject-matter or criterion. And if it sets itself up as
supreme, we shall be forced to say that our quandaries of affection, our
problems of life and death are merely to furnish occasions and material
for logical operations.
On the other hand, the welcome of the anti-intellectualists is equally
sure to wane when the experimentalist asserts that the doctrine that
logical operations mutilate the wholeness of immediate experience
overlooks the palpable fact that it is precisely these immediate
experiences--the experiences of intuition and instinct--that get into
conflict and inhibit and mutilate one another, and as a consequence are
obliged to go into logical session to patch up the mutilation and
provide new and better methods of cooeperation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account