Creative Intelligence · John Dewey
HORACE M. KALLEN
He who assiduously compares the profound and the commonplace will find their difference to turn merely on the manner of their expression; a profundity is a commonplace formulated in strange or otherwise obscure and unintelligible terms. This must be my excuse for beginning with the trite remark that the world we live in is not one which was made for us, but one in which we happened and grew. I am much aware that there exists a large and influential class of persons who do not think so; and I offer this remark with all deference to devotees of idealism, and to other such pietists who persist in arguing that the trouble which we do encounter in this vale of tears springs from the inwardness of our own natures and not from that of the world. I wish, indeed, that I could agree with them, but unhappily their very arguments prevent me, since, if the world were actually as they think it, they could not think it as they do. In fact, they could not think. Thinking--worse luck!--came into being as response to discomfort, to pain, to uncertainty, to problems, such as could not exist in a world truly made for us; while from time immemorial _pure_ as distinct from human consciousness has been identified with absolute certainty, with self-absorption and self-sufficiency; as a god, a goal to attain, not a fact to rest in. It is notable that those who believe the world actually to have been made for us devote most of their thinking to explaining away the experiences which have made all men feel that the world was actually not made for us. Their chief business, after proving the world to be all good, is solving "the problem of evil." Yet, had there really been no evil, this evil consequence could not have ensued: existence would have emerged as beatitude and not as adjustment; thinking might in truth have been self-absorbed contemplation, blissful intuition, not painful learning by the method of trial and error.
Alas that what "might have been" cannot come into being by force of discursive demonstration! If it could, goodness alone would have existed and been real, and evil would have been non-existence, unreality, and appearance--all by the force of the Word. As it is, the appearance of evil is in so far forth no less an evil than its reality; in truth, it is reality and its best witnesses are the historic attempts to explain it away. For even as "appearance" it has a definite and inexpugnable character of its own which cannot be destroyed by subsumption under the "standpoint of the whole," "the absolute good," the "over-individual values." Nor, since only sticks and stones break bones and names never hurt, can it be abolished by the epithet "appearance." To deny reality to evil is to multiply the evil. It is to make two "problems" grow where only one grew before, to add to the "problem of evil" the "problem of appearance" without serving any end toward the solution of the real problem how evil can be effectively abolished. I may then, in view of these reflections, hold myself safe in assuming that the world we live in was not made for us; that, humanly speaking, it is open to improvement in a great many directions. It will be comparatively innocuous to assume also, as a corollary, that in so far as the world was made for mind, it has been made so by man, that civilization is the adaptation of nature to human nature. And as a second corollary it may be safely assumed that the world does not stay made; civilization has brought its own problems and peculiar evils.
I realize that, in the light of my title, much of what I have written above must seem irrelevant, since the "problem of evil" has not, within the philosophic tradition, been considered part of a "problem of values" as such. If I dwell on it, I do so to indicate that the "problem of evil" can perhaps be best understood in the light of another problem: the problem, namely, of why men have created the "problem of evil." For obviously, evil can be problematic only in an absolutely good world, and the idea that the world is absolutely good is not a generalization _upon_ experience, but a contradiction _of_ experience. If there exists a metaphysical "problem of evil," hence, it arises out of this generalization; it is secondary, not primary; and the primary problem requires solution before the secondary one can be understood. And what else, under the circumstances, can the primary one be than this: "Why do men contradict their own experience?"
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.