Creative Intelligence · John Dewey
I
The four factors which it is proposed to emphasize are these: (1) Life as a biological process involving relation to nature, with all that this signifies in the equipment of instincts, emotions, and selective activity by which life maintains itself. (2) Interrelation with other human beings, including on the one hand associating, grouping, mating, communicating, cooeperating, commanding, obeying, worshiping, adjudicating, and on the psychological side the various instincts, emotions, susceptibilities to personal stimulation and appropriate responses in language and behavior which underlie or are evoked by the life in common. (3) Intelligence and reason, through which experience is interrelated, viewed as a whole, enlarged in imagination. (4) The process of judgment and choice, in which different elements are brought together, considered in one conscious universe, evaluated or measured, thereby giving rise reciprocally to a self on the one hand and to approved or chosen objects on the other.
(1) Life. Life is at least the raw material of all values, even if it is not in itself entitled to be called good without qualification. For in the process of nourishing and protecting itself, the plant or animal selects and in the case of higher animals, manipulates; it adapts itself to nature and adapts nature to itself; it shows reciprocal relation of means to end, of whole to part. It foreshadows the conscious processes in so many ways that men have always been trying to read back some degree of consciousness. And life in the animal, at least, is regarded as having experiences of pleasure and pain, and emotions of fear, anger, shame, and sex, which are an inseparable aspect of values. If it is not the supreme or only good, if men freely sacrifice it for other ends, it is none the less an inevitable factor. Pessimistic theories indeed have contended that life is evil and have sought to place good in a will-less Nirvana. Yet such theories make limited appeal. Their protest is ultimately not against life as life but against life as painful. And their refutation is rather to be intrusted to the constructive possibilities of freer life than to an analysis of concepts.
Another class of theories which omit life from the good is that which holds to abstractly ontological concepts of good as an eternal essence or form. It must be remembered, however, that the idea of good was not merely a fixed essence. It was also for Plato the self-moving and the cause of all motion. And further, Plato evidently believed that life, the very nature of the soul, was itself in the class of supreme values along with God and the good. The prize of immortality was [Greek: kalon] and the hope great. And with Aristotle and his followers the good of contemplation no less truly than the good of action had elements of value derived from the vital process. Such a mystic as Spinoza, who finds good in the understanding values this because in it man is "active," and would unite himself with the All because in God is Power and Freedom. The Hebrew prophet found a word capable of evoking great ethical values when he urged his countrymen to "choose life," and Christian teaching found in the conception of "eternal life" an ideal of profound appeal. It is not surprising that with his biological interests Spencer should have set up life of greatest length and breadth as a goal.
The struggle of the present war emphasizes tremendously two aspects of this factor of life. National life is an ideal which gets its emotional backing largely from the imagery of our physical life. For any one of the small nations involved to give up its national life--whatever the possibilities of better organized industry or more comfortable material conditions--seems to it a desperate alternative. Self-defense is regarded by the various powers at war as a complete justification not merely for armed resistance or attack but for ruthless acts. And if we are tempted to say that the war involves a prodigal waste of individual life on a scale never known before, we are at the same time compelled to recognize that never before has the bare destruction of life aroused such horror. For never before has peace set its forces so determinedly to protect life. The span of human life has been lengthened: the wastefulness of accident and disease has been magnified. The dumb acquiescence with which former generations accepted the death of infants and children and those in the prime of life has given way to active and increasingly successful efforts to preserve. The enormous increase in scientific study of biology, including eugenics, reflects not only an advance of science but a trend in morality. It is scarcely conceivable that it should grow less in absolute importance, whatever crises may temporarily cause its depreciation relatively to other values.
One exception to the growing appreciation calls for notice--the interest in immortality appears to be less rather than greater. The strong belief in life beyond the grave which since the days of ancient Egypt has prevailed in the main stream of Western culture seems not only to be affected by the scientific temper of the day, but also to be subject to a shift in interest. This may be in part a reaction from other-worldliness. In part it may be due to loss of fervor for a theological picture of a future heaven of a rather monotonous sort and may signify not so much loss of interest in life as desire for a more vital kind of continuance. It is not true that all that a man hath will he give for his life, yet it is true that no valuing process is intelligible that leaves out life with its impulses, emotions, and desires as the first factor to be reckoned with. (2) The second factor is the life in common, with its system of relations, and its corresponding instincts, emotions, and desires. So much has been written in recent years on the social nature of man that it seems unnecessary to elaborate the obvious. Protest has even been raised against the exaggeration of the social. But I believe that in certain points at least we have not yet penetrated to the heart of the social factor, and its significance for morals.
So far as the moral aspect is concerned I know nothing more significant than the attitude of the Common Law as set forth by Professor Pound.[66] This has sought to base its system of duties on relations. The relation which was prominent in the Middle Ages was that of landlord and tenant; other relations are those of principal and agent, of trustee, etc. An older relation was that of kinship. The kin was held for the wergeld; the goel must avenge his next of kin; the father must provide for prospective parents-in-law; the child must serve the parents. Duty was the legal term for the relation. In all this there is no romanticism, no exaggeration of the social; there is a fair statement of the facts which men have recognized and acted upon the world over and in all times. Individualistic times or peoples have modified certain phases. The Roman law sought to ground many of its duties in the contract, the will of the parties. But covenants by no means exhaust duties. And according to Professor Pound the whole course of English and American law today is belying the generalization of Sir Henry Maine, that the evolution of law is a progress from status to contract. We are shaping law of insurance, of public service companies, not by contract but by the relation of insurer and insured, of public utility and patron.
Psychologically, the correlate of the system of relations is the set of instincts and emotions, of capacity for stimulation and response, which presuppose society for their exercise and in turn make society possible. There can be no question as to the reality and strength of these in both animals and men. The bear will fight for her young more savagely than for her life. The human mother's thoughts center far more intensely upon her offspring than upon her own person. The man who is cut dead by all his acquaintance suffers more than he would from hunger or physical fear. The passion of sex frequently overmasters every instinct of individual prudence. The majority of men face poverty and live in want; relatively few prefer physical comfort to family ties. Aristotle's [Greek: philia] is the oftenest quoted recognition of the emotional basis of common life, but a statement of Kant's earlier years is particularly happy. "The point to which the lines of direction of our impulses converge is thus not only in ourselves, but there are besides powers moving us in the will of others outside of ourselves. Hence arise the moral impulses which often carry us away to the discomfiture of selfishness, the strong law of duty, and the weaker of benevolence. Both of these wring from us many a sacrifice, and although selfish inclinations now and then preponderate over both, these still never fail to assert their reality in human nature. Thus we recognize that in our most secret motives, we are dependent upon the rule of the general will."[67]
The "law of duty," and I believe we may add, the conception of right, do arise objectively in the social relations as the common law assumes and subjectively in the social instincts, emotions, and the more intimate social consciousness which had not been worked out in the time of Kant as it has been by recent authors. This point will receive further treatment later, but I desire to point out in anticipation that if right and duty have their origin in this social factor there is at least a presumption against their being subordinate ethically to the conception of good as we find them in certain writers. If they have independent origin and are the outgrowth of a special aspect of life it is at least probable that they are not to be subordinated to the good unless the very notion of good is itself reciprocally modified by right in a way that is not usually recognized in teleological systems.
(3) Intelligence and reason imply (_a_) considering the proposed act or the actually performed act as a whole and in its relations. Especially they mean considering consequences. In order to foresee consequences there is required not only empirical observation of past experience, not only deduction from already formulated concepts--as when we say that injustice will cause hard feelings and revolt--but that rarer quality which in the presence of a situation discerns a meaning not obvious, suggests an idea, "injustice," to interpret the situation. Situations are neither already labeled "unjust," nor are they obviously unjust to the ordinary mind. Analysis into elements and rearrangement of the elements into a new synthesis are required. This is eminently a synthetic or "creative" activity. Further it is evident that the activity of intelligence in considering consequences implies not only what we call reasoning in the narrower sense but imagination and feeling. For the consequences of an act which are of importance ethically are consequences which are not merely to be described but are to be imagined so vividly as to be felt, whether they are consequences that affect ourselves or affect others.
The broad grounds on which it is better to use the word intelligence than the word reason in the analysis with which we are concerned are two. (1) It is not a question-begging term which tends to commit us at the outset to a specific doctrine as to the source of our judgments. (2) The activity of intelligence which is now most significant for ethical progress is not suggested by the term reason, for unless we arbitrarily smuggle in under the term practical reason the whole activity of the moral consciousness without inquiry as to the propriety of the name we shall be likely to omit the constructive and creative efforts to promote morality by positive supplying of enlarged education, new sources of interest, and more open fields for development, by replacing haunting fears of misery with positive hopes, and by suggesting new imagery, new ambitions in the place of sodden indifference or sensuality. The term reason as used by the Stoics and by Kant meant control of the passions by some "law"--some authority cosmic or logical. It prepared for the inevitable; it forbade the private point of view. But as thus presenting a negative aspect the law was long ago characterized by a profound moral genius as "weak." It has its value as a schoolmaster, but it is not in itself capable of supplying the new life which dissolves the old sentiment, breaks up the settled evil habit, and supplies both larger ends and effective motives.
If we state human progress in objective fashion we may say that although men today are still as in earlier times engaged in getting a living, in mating, in rearing of offspring, in fighting and adventure, in play, and in art, they are also engaged in science and invention, interested in the news of other human activities all over the world; they are adjusting differences by judicial processes, cooeperating to promote general welfare, enjoying refined and more permanent friendships and affections, and viewing life in its tragedy and comedy with enhanced emotion and broader sympathy. Leaving out of consideration the work of the religious or artistic genius as not in question here, the great objective agencies in bringing about these changes have been on the one hand the growth of invention, scientific method, and education, and on the other the increase in human intercourse and communication. Reason plays its part in both of these in freeing the mind from wasteful superstitious methods and in analyzing situations and testing hypotheses, but the term is inadequate to do justice to that creative element in the formation of hypotheses which finds the new, and it tends to leave out of account the social point of view involved in the widening of the area of human intercourse. More will be said upon this point in connection with the discussion of rationalism.
(4) The process of judgment and choice. The elements are not the sum. The moral consciousness is not just the urge of life, plus the social relations, plus intelligence. The _process_ of moral deliberation, evaluation, judgment, and choice is itself essential. In this process are born the concepts and standards good and right, and likewise the moral self which utters the judgment. It is in this twofold respect synthetic, creative. It is as an interpretation of this process that the concept of freedom arises. Four aspects of the process may be noted. (_a_) The process involves holding possibilities of action, or objects for valuation, or ends for choice, in consciousness and measuring them one against another in a simultaneous field--or in a field of alternating objects, any of which can be continually recalled. One possibility after another may be tried out in anticipation and its relations successively considered, but the comparison is essential to the complete moral consciousness.
Moreover, one form of the moral judgment: "This is right," speaks the language of law--of the collective judgment, or of the judge who hears both sides but is neither. This generalizing or universalizing is frequently supposed to be the characteristic activity of "reason." I believe that a comparison with the kindred value judgments in economics supports the doctrine that in judgments as to the good as well as in those as to right, there is no product of any simple faculty, but rather a synthetic process in which the social factor is prominent. A compelling motive toward an objective and universal judgment is found in the practical conditions of moral judgments. Unless men agree on such fundamental things as killing, stealing, and sex relations they cannot get on together. Not that when I say, "Killing is wrong," I mean to affirm "I agree with you in objecting to it"; but that the necessity (a) of acting as if I either do or do not approve it, and (b) of either making my attitude agree with yours, or yours agree with mine, or of fighting it out with you or with the whole force of organized society, compels me to put my attitude into objective terms, to meet you and society on a common platform. This is a _synthesis_, an achievement. To attribute the synthesis to any faculty of "practical reason," adds nothing to our information, but tends rather to obscure the facts.
The self is itself creating for each of its elements a new environment--this is a fact which if kept in mind will enable us to see the abstractness and fallacies not merely of libertarianism and determinism, but of subjectivism and objectivism. Subjective or "inward" theories have sought standards in the self; but in regarding the self as an entity independent of such a process as we have described they have exposed themselves to the criticism of providing only private, variable, accidental, unauthoritative sources of standards--instincts, or emotions, or intuitions. The self of the full moral consciousness, however,--the only one which can claim acceptance or authority--is born only in the process of considering real conditions, of weighing and choosing between alternatives of action in a real world of nature and persons. Its judgments are more than subjective. Objectivism in its absolutist and abstract forms assumes a standard--nature, essence, law--independent of process. Such a standard is easily shown to be free from anything individual, private, or changing. It is universal, consistent, and eternal, in fact it has many good mathematical characteristics, but unfortunately it is not moral. As mathematical, logical, biological, or what not, it offers no standard that appeals to the moral nature as authoritative or that can help us to find our way home.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.