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
This explains why we attribute a will to power to others but not to
ourselves, except in the complimentary sense that being strong we
naturally wish to exercise our strength. Otherwise for ourselves we only
want what we want when we want it, not being overscrupulous about the
means we take to get it. This psychology is naive but it is truer to
facts than the supposition that there exists by itself as a separate and
original thing a will to power. For it indicates that the real fact is
some existing power which demands outlet, and which becomes
self-conscious only when it is too weak to overcome obstacles.
Conventionally the will to power is imputed only to a comparatively
small number of ambitious and ruthless men. They are probably upon the
whole quite unconscious of any such will, being mastered by specific
intense impulses that find their realization most readily by bending
others to serve as tools of their aims. Self-conscious will to power is
found mainly in those who have a so-called inferiority complex, and who
would compensate for a sense of personal disadvantage (acquired early in
childhood) by making a striking impression upon others, in the reflex of
which they feel their strength appreciated. The literateur who has to
take his action out in imagination is much more likely to evince a will
to power than a Napoleon who sees definite objects with extraordinary
clearness and who makes directly for them. Explosive irritations,
naggings, the obstinacy of weak persons, dreams of grandeur, the
violence of those usually submissive are the ordinary marks of a will to
power.
Discussion of the false simplification involved in this doctrine
suggests another unduly fixed and limited classification. Critics of the
existing economic regime have divided instincts into the creative and
the acquisitive, and have condemned the present order because it
embodies the latter at the expense of the former. The division is
convenient, yet mistaken. Convenient because it sums up certain facts of
the present system, mistaken because it takes social products for
psychological originals. Speaking roughly we may say that native
activity is both creative and acquisitive, creative as a process,
acquisitive in that it terminates as a rule in some tangible product
which brings the process to consciousness of itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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