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
Men have constructed a strange dream-world when they have supposed that
without a fixed ideal of a remote good to inspire them, they have no
inducement to get relief from present troubles, no desires for
liberation from what oppresses and for clearing-up what confuses present
action. The world in which we could get enlightenment and instruction
about the direction in which we are moving only from a vague conception
of an unattainable perfection would be totally unlike our present world.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient it is to
stimulate us to remedial action, to endeavor in order to convert strife
into harmony, monotony into a variegated scene, and limitation into
expansion. The converting is progress, the only progress conceivable or
attainable by man. Hence every situation has its own measure and quality
of progress, and the need for progress is recurrent, constant. If it is
better to travel than to arrive, it is because traveling is a constant
arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily
attained by going to sleep or dying. We find our clews to direction in
the projected recollections of definite experienced goods not in vague
anticipations, even when we label the vagueness perfection, the Ideal,
and proceed to manipulate its definition with dry dialectic logic.
Progress means increase of present meaning, which involves
multiplication of sensed distinctions as well as harmony, unification.
This statement may, perhaps, be made generally, in application to the
experience of humanity. If history shows progress it can hardly be found
elsewhere than in this complication and extension of the significance
found within experience. It is clear that such progress brings no
surcease, no immunity from perplexity and trouble. If we wished to
transmute this generalization into a categorical imperative we should
say: "So act as to increase the meaning of present experience." But even
then in order to get instruction about the concrete quality of such
increased meaning we should have to run away from the law and study the
needs and alternative possibilities lying within a unique and localized
situation. The imperative, like everything absolute, is sterile. Till
men give up the search for a general formula of progress they will not
know where to look to find it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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