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
is no genuine doubt or suspense as to the meaning of any impulse or
habit. Their meaning is ready-made, fixed: pleasure. The only "problem"
or doubt is as to the _amount_ of pleasure (or pain) that is involved.
This assumption does violence to fact. The poignancy of situations that
evoke reflection lies in the fact that we really do not know the meaning
of the tendencies that are pressing for action. We have to search, to
experiment. Deliberation is a work of discovery. Conflict is acute; one
impulse carries us one way into one situation, and another impulse takes
us another way to a radically different objective result. Deliberation
is not an attempt to do away with this opposition of quality by reducing
it to one of amount. It is an attempt to _uncover_ the conflict in its
full scope and bearing. What we want to find out is what difference each
impulse and habit imports, to reveal qualitative incompatibilities by
detecting the different courses to which they commit us, the different
dispositions they form and foster, the different situations into which
they plunge us.
In short, the thing actually at stake in any serious deliberation is not
a difference of quantity, but what kind of person one is to become, what
sort of self is in the making, what kind of a world is making. This is
plain enough in those crucial decisions where the course of life is
thrown into widely different channels, where the pattern of life is
rendered different and diversely dyed according as this alternative or
that is chosen. Deliberation as to whether to be a merchant or a school
teacher, a physician or a politician is not a choice of quantities. It
is just what it appears to be, a choice of careers which are
incompatible with one another, within each of which definitive
inclusions and rejections are involved. With the difference in career
belongs a difference in the constitution of the self, of habits of
thought and feeling as well as of outward action. With it comes profound
differences in all future objective relationships. Our minor decisions
differ in acuteness and range, but not in principle. Our world does not
so obviously hang upon any one of them; but put together they make the
world what it is in meaning for each one of us. Crucial decisions can
hardly be more than a disclosure of the cumulative force of trivial
choices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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