Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychologyDewey, John
Philosophy
Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
Dewey, John
Habit; Social psychology
The reason for dividing conduct into two distinct regions, one of
expediency and the other of morality, disappears when the psychology
that identifies ordinary deliberation with calculation is disposed of.
There is seen to be but one issue involved in all reflection upon
conduct: The rectifying of present troubles, the harmonizing of present
incompatibilities by projecting a course of action which gathers into
itself the meaning of them all. The recognition of the true psychology
also reveals to us the nature of good or satisfaction. Good consists in
the meaning that is experienced to belong to an activity when conflict
and entanglement of various incompatible impulses and habits terminate
in a unified orderly release in action. This human good, being a
fulfilment conditioned upon thought, differs from the pleasures which an
animal nature--of course we also remain animals so far as we do not
think--hits upon accidentally. Moreover there is a genuine difference
between a false good, a spurious satisfaction, and a "true" good, and
there is an empirical test for discovering the difference. The
unification which ends thought in act may be only a superficial
compromise, not a real decision but a postponement of the issue. Many of
our so-called decisions are of this nature. Or it may present, as we
have seen, a victory of a temporarily intense impulse over its rivals, a
unity by oppression and suppression, not by coordination. These seeming
unifications which are not unifications of fact are revealed by the
event, by subsequent occurrences. It is one of the penalties of evil
choice, perhaps the chief penalty, that the wrong-doer becomes more and
more incapable of detecting these objective revelations of himself.
In quality, the good is never twice alike. It never copies itself. It is
new every morning, fresh every evening. It is unique in its every
presentation. For it marks the resolution of a distinctive complication
of competing habits and impulses which can never repeat itself. Only
with a habit rigid to the point of immobility could exactly the same
good recur twice. And with such rigid routines the same good does not
after all recur, for it does not even occur. There is no consciousness
at all, either of good or bad. Rigid habits sink below the level of any
meaning at all. And since we live in a moving world, they plunge us
finally against conditions to which they are not adapted and so
terminate in disaster.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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