Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
At this point the weakness in Bergson's view of logical operations
appears. Bergson, too, is impressed by the break in continuity between
logical operations and the rest of experience. But with Mr. Bradley he
believes this breach to be essentially incurable, because the
mutilations and disjunctions are due to and introduced by logical
operations. Just why the latter are introduced remains in the end a
mystery. Both, to be sure, believe that logical operations are valuable
for "practical" purposes,--for action. But, aside from the question of
_how_ operations essentially mutilative can be valuable for action,
immediate intuitional experience being already in unity with Reality,
why should there be any practical need for logical operations--least of
all such as introduce disjunction and mutilation?
The admission of a demand for logical operations, whether charged to
matter, the devil, or any other metaphysical adversary, is, of course, a
confession that conflict and ambiguity are as fundamental in experience
as unity and immediacy and that logical operations are therefore no less
indigenous. The failure to see this implication is responsible for the
paradox that in the logic of Creative Evolution the operations of
intelligence are neither creative nor evolutional. They not only have no
constructive part but are positively destructive and devolutional.
Since, moreover, these logical operations, like those of the objective
universal, and like Mill's association of particulars, can only
reproduce in fragmentary form what has already been done, it is
difficult to see how they can meet the demands of action. For here no
more than in Mill, or in the logic of idealism, is there any place for
constructive hypotheses or any technique by which they can become
effective. Whatever "Creative Evolution" may be, there is no place in
its logic for "Creative Intelligence."
IV
The prominence in current discussion of the logical reforms proposed by
the "analytic logic" of the neo-realistic movement and the enthusiastic
optimism of its representatives over the prospective results of these
reforms for logic, science, and practical life are the warrant for
devoting a special section to their discussion.
There are indeed some marked differences of opinion among the
expounders of the "new logic" concerning the results which it is
expected to achieve. Some find that it clears away incredible
accumulations of metaphysical lumber; others rejoice that it is to
restore metaphysics, "once the queen of the sciences, to her ancient
throne."
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