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
Self-deception originates in looking at an outcome in one direction
only--as a satisfaction of what has gone before, ignoring the fact that
what is attained is a state of habits which will continue in action and
which will determine future results. Outcomes of desire are also
beginnings of new acts and hence are portentous. Satisfied revenge may
_feel_ like justice vindicated; the prestige of learning may _feel_ like
an enlargement and rectification of an objective outlook. But since
different instincts and habits have entered into them, they are
actually, that is dynamically, unlike. The function of moral judgment is
to detect this unlikeness. Here, again, the belief that we can know
ourselves immediately is as disastrous to moral science as the
corresponding idea regarding knowledge of nature was to physical
science. Obnoxious "subjectivity" of moral judgment is due to the fact
that the immediate or esthetic quality swells and swells and displaces
the thought of the active potency which gives activity its moral
quality.
We are all natural Jack Horners. If the plum comes when we put in and
pull out our thumb we attribute the satisfactory result to personal
virtue. The plum is obtained, and it is not easy to distinguish
obtaining from attaining, acquisition from achieving. Jack Horner, Esq.,
put forth _some_ effort; and results and efforts are always more or less
incommensurate. For the result is always dependent to some extent upon
the favor or disfavor of circumstance. Why then should not the
satisfactory plum shed its halo retrospectively upon what precedes and
be taken as a sign of virtue? In this way heroes and leaders are
constructed. Such is the worship of success. And the evil of
success-worship is precisely the evil with which we have been dealing.
"Success" is never merely final or terminal. Something else succeeds it,
and its successors are influenced by its nature, that is by the
persisting habits and impulses that enter into it. The world does not
stop when the successful person pulls out his plum; nor does he stop,
and the kind of success he obtains, and his attitude toward it, is a
factor in what comes afterwards. By a strange turn of the wheel, the
success of the ultra-practical man is psychologically like the refined
enjoyment of the ultra-esthetic person. Both ignore the eventualities
with which every state of experience is charged. There is no reason for
not enjoying the present, but there is every reason for examination of
the objective factors of _what_ is enjoyed before we translate enjoyment
into a belief in excellence. There is every reason in other words for
cultivating another enjoyment, that of the habit of examining the
productive potentialities of the objects enjoyed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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