The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thoughtDewey, John
Philosophy
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
Dewey, John
Evolution; Philosophy; Pragmatism
Among the influences that have worked in contemporary philosophy
towards disintegration of intellectualism of the epistemological type,
and towards the substitution of a philosophy of experience, the work of
Mr. Bradley must be seriously counted. One has, for example, only to
compare his metaphysics with the two fundamental contentions of T. H.
Green, namely, that reality is a single, eternal, and all-inclusive
system of relations, and that this system of relations is one in kind
with that process of relating which constitutes our thinking, to be
instantly aware of a changed atmosphere. Much of Bradley’s writings
is a sustained and deliberate polemic against intellectualism of the
Neo-Kantian type. When, however, we find conjoined to this criticism
an equally sustained contention that the philosophic conception of
reality must be based on an exclusively intellectual criterion, a
criterion belonging to and confined to theory, we have a situation
that is thought-provoking. The situation grows in interest when it is
remembered that there is a general and growing tendency among those
who appeal in philosophy to a strictly intellectualistic _method_ of
defining “reality,” to insist that the reality reached by this method
has a super-intellectual _content_: that intellectual, affectional,
and volitional features are all joined and fused in “ultimate”
reality. The curious character of the situation is that Reality is
an “absolute experience” of which the intellectual is simply one
partial and transmuted moment. Yet this reality is attained unto,
in philosophic method, by exclusive emphasis upon the intellectual
aspect of present experience and by systematic exclusion of exactly
the emotional, volitional features which with respect to content are
insisted upon! Under such circumstances the cynically-minded are moved
to wonder whether this tremendous insistence upon one factor in present
experience at the expense of others, is not because this is the only
way to maintain the notion of “Absolute Experience,” and to prevent
it from collapsing into ordinary everyday experience. This paradox is
not peculiar to Mr. Bradley. Looking at the Neo-Kantian movement in
the broad in its modern form, one might almost say that its prominent
feature is its insistence upon reaching a “Reality” that includes
extra-intellectual factors and phases, traits that are ideal in a moral
and emotional sense, by an exclusive recognition of the function of
knowledge in its isolation.
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