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
Another reaction to the separation of morals from human nature is a
romantic glorification of natural impulse as something superior to all
moral claims. There are those who lack the persistent force of the
executive will to break through conventions and to use them for their
own purposes, but who unite sensitiveness with intensity of desire.
Fastening upon the conventional element in morality, they hold that all
morality is a conventionality hampering to the development of
individuality. Although appetites are the commonest things in human
nature, the least distinctive or individualized, they identify
unrestraint in satisfaction of appetite with free realization of
individuality. They treat subjection to passion as a manifestation of
freedom in the degree in which it shocks the bourgeois. The urgent need
for a transvaluation of morals is caricatured by the notion that an
avoidance of the avoidances of conventional morals constitutes positive
achievement. While the executive type keeps its eyes on actual
conditions so as to manipulate them, this school abrogates objective
intelligence in behalf of sentiment, and withdraws into little coteries
of emancipated souls.
There are others who take seriously the idea of morals separated from
the ordinary actualities of humanity and who attempt to live up to it.
Some become engrossed in spiritual egotism. They are preoccupied with
the state of their character, concerned for the purity of their motives
and the goodness of their souls. The exaltation of conceit which
sometimes accompanies this absorption can produce a corrosive inhumanity
which exceeds the possibilities of any other known form of selfishness.
In other cases, persistent preoccupation with the thought of an ideal
realm breeds morbid discontent with surroundings, or induces a futile
withdrawal into an inner world where all facts are fair to the eye. The
needs of actual conditions are neglected, or dealt with in a
half-hearted way, because in the light of the ideal they are so mean and
sordid. To speak of evils, to strive seriously for change, shows a low
mind. Or, again, the ideal becomes a refuge, an asylum, a way of escape
from tiresome responsibilities. In varied ways men come to live in two
worlds, one the actual, the other the ideal. Some are tortured by the
sense of their irreconcilability. Others alternate between the two,
compensating for the strains of renunciation involved in membership in
the ideal realm by pleasurable excursions into the delights of the
actual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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