JOHN DEWEY:
Man who lives in a world of hazards is
compelled to seek for security. He has sought to attain it in two ways. One of
them began with an attempt to propitiate the powers which environ him and
determine his destiny. It expressed itself in supplication, sacrifice,
ceremonial rite and magical cult. In time these crude methods were largely
displaced. The sacrifice of a contrite hearts was esteemed more pleasing than
that of bulls and oxen; the inner attitude of revence and devotion more
desirable than external ceremonies. If man could not conquer destiny he could
willingly ally himself with it; putting his will, even in sore affliction, on
the side of the powers which dispence fortune, he could escape defeat and might
triumph in the midst of destruction.
The other course is to invent arts and by their
means turn the powers of nature to account; man constructs a fortress out of
the very conditions and forces which threaten him. He builds shelters, weaves
garments, makes flame his friend instead of his enemy, and grows into the
complicated arts of associated living. This is the method of changing the world
through action, as the other is the method of changing the self in emotion and
idea. It is a commentary on the slight control man has obtained over himself by
means of control over nature, that the method of action has been felt to
manifest dangerous pride, even defiance of the powers which be. People of old
wavered between thinking arts to be the gift of the gods and to be an invasion
of their prerogatives. Both versions testify to the sense of something
extraordinary in the arts, something either superhuman or unnatural. The souls
who have predicted that by means of the arts man might establish a kingdom of
order, justice and beauty through mastery of nature’s energies and laws have
been few and little heeded.
Men have been glad enough to enjoy the fruits
of such arts as they possess, and in recent centuries have increasingly devoted
themselves to their multiplication. But this effort has been conjoined with a
profound distrust of the arts as a method of dealing with the serious perils of
life. Doubt as to the truth of this statement will be dispelled if one
considers the disesteem in which the idea of practice has been held. Philosophers
have celebrated the method of change in personal ideas, and religious teachers
that of change in the affections of their heart. These conversions have been
priced on their own account, and only incidentally because of a change in
action which would ensue. The places in which the use of the arts has affected
actual objective transformation have been regarded as indisparagement attending
the idea of the material has seized upon them. The honorable quality associated
with the idea of the “spiritual” has been reserved for change in inner
attitudes.
The depreciation of action, of doing and
making, has been cultivated by philosophers. But while philosophers have
perpetuated the derogation by formulating and justifying it, they did not
originate it, they glorified their own office without doubt in placing theory
so much above practice. But independently of their attitude, many things
conspired to the same effect. Work has been onerous, toilsome, associated with
a primeval curse. It has been done under compulsion and the pressure of
necessity, while intellectual activity is associated with leisure. On account
of the unpleasantness of practical activity, as much of it as possible has been
put upon slaves and serfs. Thus the social dishonor in which this class was
held was extended to the work they do. There is also the age-long association
of knowing and thinking with immaterial and spiritual principles, and of the
arts, of all practical activity in doing and making, with matter. For work is
done with the body, by means of mechanical applicances and is directed upon
material things. The disrepute which has attended the thought of material
things in comparison with immaterial thought has been transferred to everything
associated with practice.
One might continue in this strain. The natural
history of conceptions about work and the arts if it were traced through a
succession of peoples and cultures would be instructive. But all that is needed
for our purpose is to raise the question: why this invidious discrimination? A
very little reflection shows that the suggestions which have been offered by
the way of explanation themselfes need to be explained. Ideas derived from
social castes and emotional revulsions are hardly reasons to be offered in
justification of a belief, although they may have a bearing on its causation.
Contempt for matter and bodies and glorification of the immaterial are affairs
which are not self-explanatory. And, as we shall be at some pains to show later
in the discussion, the idea which connects thinking and knowing with some
principle or force that is wholly separate from connection with physical things
will not stand examination, especially since the whole-hearted adoption of
experimental method in the natural sciences.
The questions suggested have far-reaching
issues. What is the cource and the import of the sharp devision between theory
and practice? Why should the latter be disesteemed along with matter and the
body? What has been the effect upon the various modes in which action is manifested:
industry, politics, the fine arts, and upon morals conceived of as overt
activity have consequences, instead of as mere inner personal attitude? How has
the separation of intellect from action affected the theory of knowledge? What has been in particular the
effect upon the conception and course of philosophy? What forces are at work to
break down the devision? What would the effect be if the divorce were annulled,
and knowing and doing were brought into intrinsic connection with one another?
What revisions of the traditional theory of mind, thought and knowing would be
required, and what change in the idea of the office of philosophy would be
demanded? What modifications would ensue in the disciplines which are concerned
with the various phases of human activity?
These questions form the theme and indicate the
nature of the problems
to be discussed. We shall consider especially
some historic grounds for the elevation of knowledge above making and doing.
This phase of the discussion will disclose that exaltation of pure intellect
and its activity above practical affairs is fundamentally connected with the
quest for a certainty which shall be absolute and unshakeable. The distinctive
characteristic of practical activity, one which is so inherent that it cannot
be eliminated, is the uncertainty which attend it. Of it we are compelled to
say: act, but act at your peril. Judgment and belief regarding actions to be
performed can never attain more then a precarious probability. Through thought,
however, it has seemed that men might escape from the perils of uncertainty.
Practical activity deals with individualized
and unique situations which are never exactly duplicable and about which,
accordingly, no complete assurance is possible. All activity, moreover, involves
change. The intellect, however, according to the traditional doctrine, may
grasp universal Being, and Being which is universal is fixed and immutable.
Wherever there is practical activuty we human beings are involved as parttakers
in the issue. All the fear, disesteem and lack of confidence which gather about
the thought of ourselves, cluster also about the thought of the actions in
which we are partners. Man’s distrust of himself has caused him to desire to
get beyond and above himself; in pure knowledge he has thought he could attain
this self-transcendence.
There is no need to expatiate upon the risk
which attends overt action. The burden of proverbs and wise saws is that the
best laid plans of men as of mice gang agley. Fortune rather than our own intent
and act determines eventual success and failure. The pathos of unfulfilled
expectation, the tragedy of defeated purpose and ideals, the catastrophes of
accident, are the commonplaces of all comment on the human scene. We survey
conditions, make the wisest choise we can, we act, and we must trust the rest
to fate, fortune or providence. Moralists tell us to look to the end when we
act and then inform us that the end is always uncertain. Judging, planning,
choice, no matter how thoroughly conducted, and action no matter how prudently
executed, never are the sole determinants of any outcome. Alien and indifferent
natural forces, unforseeable conditions enter in and have a decisive voice. The
more important the issue, the greater is their say as to the ulterior event.
Hence men have longed to fing a realm in which
there is an activity which is not overt and which has no external consequences.
“Safety first” has played a large role in effecting a preference for knowing
over doing and making. With those to whom the process of pure thinking is
congenial and who have the leisure and the aptitude to pursue their preference,
the happiness attending knowing is unalloyed; it is not entangled in the risk
which overt action cannot escape. Thought has been alleged to be a purely inner
activity, intrinsic to mind alone; and according to traditional classic
doctrine, “mind” is complete and selfsufficient in itself. Overt action may
follow upon its operations but in an external way, a way not intrinsic to its
completion. Since rational activity is complete within itself it needs no
external manifestation. Failure and frustration are attributed to the accidents
of an alien, intractable and inferior realm of existence. The outer lot of
thought is cast in a world external to it, but one which in no way injures the
supremacy and completeness of thought and knowledge in their intrinsic natures.
Thus the arts by which man attains such
practical security as is possible of achievement are looked down upon. The
security they provide is relative, ever incomplete, at the risk of untoward
circumstance. The multiplication of arts may even be bemoaned as a source of
new dangers. Each of them demands its own measures of protection. Each one in
its operation brings with it new and unexpected consequences having perils for
which we are not prepared. The quest for certainty is a quest for a peace which
is assured, an object which is unqualified by risk and the shadow of fear which
act in casts. For it is not uncertainty per se which men dislike, but the fact
that uncertainty involves us in peril of evils. Uncertainty that affected only
the detail of consequences to be experienced provided they had a warrant of
being enjoyable would have no sting. It would bring the zest of adventure and
the spice of varity. Quest for complete certainty can be fulfilled in pure
knowing alone. Such is the verdict of our most enduring philosophic tradition.
While the tradition has, as we shall see later,
found its way into all themes and subjects, and determines the form of current problems and conclusions regarding
mind and knowledge, it may be doubted whether if we were suddenly released from
the burden of tradition, we should, on the basis of present experience take the
disparaging view of practice and the exalted view of knowledge apart from
action which tradition dictates. For man, in the spite of the new perils in
which the machinery of his new arts of
production and transportation have involved him, has learned to play with
sources of danger. He even seeks them out,weary of the routine of too sheltered
life. The enormous change taking place in the position of women is itself, for
example, a commentary on a change of attitude towards the value of
protection as an end in itself. We have attained, at least subconsciously, a
certain feeling of confidence; a feeling that control of the main conditions of
fortune is to an appreciable degree passing into our own hands. We live
surrounded with the protection of thousands of arts and we have devised schemes
of insurance which mitigate and distibute the evils which accrue. Barring the
fears which war leaves in its train, it is perhaps a safe speculation that if
contemporary western man were completely deprived of all the old beliefs about
knowledge and actions he would assume with a fair degree og confidence, that it
lies within his power to achieve a reasonable degree of security in life.
This suggestion is speculative. Acceptance of
it is not needed by the argument. It has its value as an indication af the
earlier conditions in which a felt need for assurance was the dominant emotion.
For primitive men had none of the elaborate arts of protection and use which we
now enjoy and no confidence in his own powers when they were reinforced by
appliances of art. He lived under conditions in which he was extraordinarily
exposed to peril, and at the same time he was without the means of defence
which are to-day matters of cource. Most of our simplest tools and utensils did
not exist; there was no accurate foresight; men faced the forces of nature in a
state of nakedness which was more than physical; save under unusually benign
conditions he was beset with dangers that knew no remission. In consequence,
mystery attended experiences of good and evil; they could not be traced to their
natural causes and they seemed to be the dispensations, the gifts and the
inflictions, of powers beyond possibility of control. The precarious crises of
birth, puberty, illness, death, war, famine, plague, the uncertanties of the
hunt, the vicissitudes of climate and the great seasonal changes, kept
imagination occupied with the uncertain. Any scene or object that was
implicated in any conspicuous tragedy or triumph, in no matter how accidental a
way, got a peculiar significance. It was seized upon as a harbinger of good or
as an omen of evil. Accordingly, some things were cherished as means of
encompassing safety just as a good artisan to-day looks after his tools; others
were feared and shunned because of their potencies for harm.
As a drowning man is said to grasp at a straw,
so men who lacked the instruments and skills developed in later days, snatched
at whatever, by any stretch of imagination, could be regarded as a source of
help in time of trouble. The attention, interest and care which now go to acquiring
skills in the use of appliances and to the invention of means for better
service of ends, were devoted to noting omens, making irrelevant
prognostications, performing ritualistic ceremonies and manipulating objects
possessed of magical power over natural events. In such an atmosphere primitive
religion was born and fostered. Rather this atmosphere was the religious
disposition.
Search for alliance with means which might
promote prosperity and which would afford defense against hostile powers was constant.
While this attitude was most marked in connection with the recurrent crises of
life, yet the boundary line between these crucial affairswith their
extraordinary risks and everyday acts was shadowy. The acts that related to
commonplace things and everyday occupations were usually accompanied, for good
measure of security, by ritual acts. The making of a weapon, the molding of a
bowl, the weaving of a mat, the sowing of seed, the reaping of a harvest,
required acts different in kind to the technical skills employed. These other
acts had a special solemnity and were thought necessary in order to ensure the
success of the practical operations used.
While it is difficult to avoid the use of the
word supernatural, we must avoid the meaning the word has for us. As long as
there was no defined area of the natural, that which is over and beyond the
natural can have no significance. The destinction, as anthropological students
have pointed out, was between ordinary and extraordinary, between the prosaic,
usual run of events and crucial incidents or interruption which determined the
direction which the average and expected cource of events took. But the two
realms were in no way sharply dematcated from each other. There was a no-mans
land, a vague territory, in which they overlapped. At any moment the
extrordinary might invade the
commonplace and either wreck it or clothe it with some surprising glory.
The use of ordinary things under critical conditions was fraught with inexplicable
potentialities of good and evil.
The two dominant conceptions, cultural
categories one might call them, which grew and flourished under such
circumstances were those of the holy and the fortunate, with their opposites,
the profane and the unlucky. As with the idea of the supernatural, meanings are
not to be assigned on the basis of present usage. Everything which was charged
with some extraordinary potency for benefit or injury was holy; holiness meant
necessity for being approached with ceremonial scruples. The holy thing,
whether place, object, person or ritual appliance, has its sinister face; “to
be handled with care” is written upon it. From it there issues the command:
Noli me tangere. Tabus, a whole set of prohibitions an injunctions, gather
about it. It is capable of transmitting its mysterious potency to other things.
To secure the favor of the holy is to be on the road to success, while any
conspicuous success is proof of the favor of some overshadowing power – a fact
which politicians of all ages have known how to utilize. Because of its
surcharge of power, ambivalent in quality, the holy has to be approached not
only with scruples but in an attitude of subjection. There are rites of
purification, humiliation, fasting and prayer which are preconditions of
securing its favor.
The holy is the bearer of blessing and fortune.
But a difference early developed between the ideas of the holy and the lucky,
because of the different dispositions in which each was to be approached. A
lucky object is something to be used. It is to be manipulated rather than
approached with awe. It calls for incantations, spells, divinations rather than
for supplications and humiliation. Moreover, the lucky thing tends to be a
concrete and tangible object, while the holy one is not usually definitely
localized; it is more potent in the degree in which its habitation and form are
vague. The lucky object is subject to pressure, at a pinch to coercion, to
scolding and punishment. It might be discarded if it failed to bring luck.
There developed a certain element of
mastery in its use, in distinction from the dependence and subjection
which remained the proper attitude towards the holy. Thus there was a kind of
rhythm of domination and submission, of imprecation and suplication, of
utilization and communion.
Such statements give, of course, a one-sided
picture. Men at all times have gone about many things in a matter-of-fact way
and have had their daily enjoyment. Even in the ceremonies of which we have
spoken there entered the ordinary love of the dramatic as well as the desire
for repetition, once routine is established. Primitive man early developed some
tools and some modes of skill. With them went prosaic knowledge og the
properties of the ordinary things but these beliefs were surrounded by others
of an imaginative and emotional type, and were more or less submerged in the
latter. Moreover, prestige attached to the latter. Just because some beliefs
were matter-of-fact they did not have the weight and authority that belong to
those about the extraordinary and unaccountable. We find the same phenomenon
repeated to-day wherever religious beliefs have marked vitality.
Prosaic beliefs about verifiable facts, beliefs
backed up by evidence of the senses and by the useful fruits, had little
glamour and prestige compared with the vogue of objects of rite and ceremony.
Hence the things forming their subject-matter were felt to be lower in rank.
Familiarity breeds a sense of equality if not of contempt. We deem ourselves on
a par with things we daily administer. It is a truism to say that objects
regarded with awe have perforce a superior status. Herein is the source of the
fundamental dualism of human attention and regard. The destinction between the
two attitudes of everyday control and dependence on something superior was
finally generalized intellectually. It took effect in the conception of two
distinct realms. The inferior was that in which man could foresee and in which
he had instruments and arts by which he might expect a reasonable degree of
control. The superior was that of occurrance so uncontrollable that they
testified to the presence and operation of powers beyond the scope of everyday
and mundane things.
The philosophical tradition regarding knowledge
and practice, the immaterial or spiritual and the material, was not original
and primitive. It had for its background the state of culture which has been
sketched. It developed in a social atmosphere in which the division of the
ordinary and extraordinary was domesticated. Philosophy reflected upon it and
gave it a rational formulation and justification. The odies of information that
corresponded to the everyday arts, the store of matter-of-fact knowledge, were
things men knew because of what they did. They were products and promises of
utilities. They shared in the relatively low esteem belonging to such things in
comparison with the extraordinary and devine. Philosophy inherited the realm
with which religion had been concerned. Its mode of knowing was different from
that accompanying the empirical arts, just because it dealt with a realm of
higher being. It breathed an air purer than that in which exist the making and
doing that relate to livelihood, just as the activities which took the form of
rites and ceremonies were nobler and nearer the divine than those spent in
toil.
The change from religion to philosophy was so
great in form that their identity as to content is easily lost from view. The
form ceases to be that of the story told in imaginative and emotional style,
and becomes that of rational discource observing the canons of logic. It is
well known that that portion of Aristotle´s system which later generations have
called metaphysics he called First Philosophy. It is possible to quote from him
sentences descriptive of “First Philosophy” which make it seem that the
philosophic enterprice is a coldly rational one, objective and analytic. Thus
he says it is the most comprehensive of all branches of knowledge because it
has for its subject-matter definition of the traits which belong to all form of
being whatsoever, however much the may differ from one another in detail.
But when the passages are placed in the context
they had in Aristotle´s own mind, it is clear that the comprehensiveness and
universality of the first philosophy are not of a strictly analytic sort.They
mark a destinction with respect to grade of value and title to reverence. For
he explicitly identifies his first philosophy-or metaphysic-with theology; he
says it is higher than other sciences. For these deal with generation and
production, while its subject-matter permits of demonstrative, that is
necessary, truth; and its objects are devine and such as are meet for God to
occupy himself with. Again, he says that the objects of philosophy are such as
are the causes of as much of the devine as is manifest to us, and that if the
devine is anywhere present, it is present in things of the sort with which
philosophy deals. The supremacy of worth and dignity of these objects are also
made clear in the statement that the Being with which philososphy is occupied
is primary, eternal and selfsufficient, because its nature is the Good, so that
the good is among the first principles which are philosophy´s subject-matter:-
yet not, it must be understood, the good in the sense in which it has meaning
and standing in human life but the inherently and eternally perfect, that which
is complete and self-sufficient.
Aristotle tells us that from the remote
antiquity tradition has handed down the idea, in story form, that the heavenly
bodies are gods, and that the devine encompasses the entire natural world. This
core of truth, he goes on to say in effect, was embroided with myths for the
benefit of the masses, for reasons of expediency, namely, the preservation of
social institutions. The negative work of philosophy was then to strip away
these imaginative accretions. From the standpoint of popular belief this was
its chief work, and it was a destructive one. The masses only felt that their
religion was attacked. But the enduring contribution was positive. The belief
that the devine encompasses the world was detached from its mythical context
and made the basis of philosophy, and it became also the foundation of physical
science-as is suggested by the remark that the heavenly bodies are gods.
Telling the story of the universe in the form of rational discource instead of
emotionalized imagination signified the discovery of logic as a rational
science. Conformity on the part of supreme reality to the requirements of logic
conferred upon its constitutive objects necessary and immutable
characteristics. Pure contemplation of these forms was man´s highest and most
divine bliss, a communion with unchangeable truth.
The geometry of Euclid doubtless gave the clew
to logic as the instrument of translation of what was sound in opinion into the
forms of rational discource. Geometry seemed to reveal the possibility of a
science which owed nothing to observation and sense beyond mere exemplification
in figures or diagrams. It seemed to disclose a world of ideal (or
non-sensible) forms which were connected with one another by eternal and
necessary relations which reason alone could trace. This fixed being which,
when grasped by thought, formed a complete system of immutable and necessary
truth.
If one looks at the foundations of the philosophies
of Plato and Aristotle as an anthropologist looks at his material, that is, as
cultural subject-matter, it is clear that these philosophies were
systematizations in rational form of the content of Greek religious and
artistic beliefs. The systematization involved a purification. Logic provided
the patterns to which ultimately real objects had to conform, while physical
science was possible in the degree in which the natural world, even in its
mutabilities, exhibited exemplification of ultimate immutable rational objects.
Thus, along with the elimination of myths and grosser superstitions, there were
set up the ideals of science and of a life of reason.ends which could justify
themselfes to reason were to take the place of custom as the guide of conduct.
These two ideals form a permanent contribution to western civilization.
But with all our gratitude for these enduring
gifts, we cannot forget the conditions which attended them. For they brought
with them the idea of a higher realm of fixed reality of which alone true
science is possible and of an inferior world of changing things with which
experience and pratical matters are concerned. They glorified the invariant at
the expense of change, it being evident that all practical activity falls
within the realm of change. It bequeathed the notion, which has ruled
philosophy ever since the time of the Greeks, that the office of knowledge is
to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as is the case with our
practical judgments, to gain the kind of understanding which is necessary to
deal with problems as they arise.
In fixing this conception of knowledge it
established also, as far as philosophies of the classic type are concerned, the
special task of philosophic inquiry. As a form of knowledge it is concerned
with the disclosure of the real itself, of Being in and of itself. It is
differentiated from other modes of knowing by its preoccupation with a higher
and more ultimate form of Being than that with which the sciences of nature are
concerned. As far as it occupied itself at all with human conduct, it was to
superimpose upon acts ends said to flow from the nature of reason. It thus
diverted thought from inquiring into the purpose which experience of actual
conditions suggest and from concrete means of their actualization. It
translated into a rational form the doctrine of escape from the vicessitudes of
existence by means of measures which do not demand an active coping with
conditions. For deliverance by means of rites and cults, it substituted
deliverance through reason. This deliverance was an intellectual, a theoretical
affair, constituted by a knowledge to be attained apart from practical
activity.
The realms of knowledge and action were each
divided into two regions. It is not to be inferred that greek philosophy
separated activity from knowing. It connected them. But it distinguished
activity from action-that is, from making and doing. Rational and necessary
knowledge was treated, as in the celebrations of it by Aristotle, as an
ultimate, self-sufficient and self-enclosed form of self-originated and
self-conducted activity. It was ideal and eternal, independent of change and
hence of the world in which men act and live, the world we experience
perceptibly and practically. “Pure activity” was sharply marked off from
practical action. The latter, whether in the industrial or the fine arts, in
morals or in politics, was concerned with an inferior region of Being in which
change rules, and which accordingly has Being only by courtesy, for it
manifests deficiency of sure footing in Being by the very fact of change. It is
infected with non-being.
On the side of
knowledge, the division carried with a difference between knowledge, in
its full sense, and belief. The former is demonstrative, necessary – that is,
sure. Belief on the contrary is only opinion; in its uncertainty and mere
probability, it relates to the world of change as knowledge corresponds to the
realm of true reality. This fact brings the discussion around once more to our
special theme as far as it affects the conception og the office and nature of
philosophy. That man has two modes, two dimensions, of belief, cannot be
doubted. He has beliefs about actual existences and the course of events, and
he has beliefs about ends to be striven for, policies to be adopted, goods to
be attained and evils to be averted. The most urgent of all practical problems
concerns the connection the subject-matter of these two kinds of beliefs
sustain to each other. How shall our most authentic and dependable cognitive beliefs
be used to regulate our practical beliefs? How shall the latter serve to
organize and integrate our intellectual beliefs?
There is a genuine possibility that the true
problem of philosophy is connected with precisely this type of question. Man
has beliefs which scientific inquiry vouchsafes, beliefs about the actual
structure and processes of things; and he also has beliefs about the values
which should regulate his conduct. The question of how these two ways of
believing may most effectively and fruitfully interact with one another is the
most general and significant of all the problems which life presents to us.
Some reasoned discipline, one obviously other than any science, should deal
with this issue. Thus there is supplied one way of conceiving of the function
of philosophy. But from this mode of defining philosophy we are stopped by the
chief philosophical tradition. For according to it the realms of knowledge and
of practical action have no inherent connection with each other. Here then is
the focus to which the various elements in our discussion converge. We may then
profitably recapitulate. The realm of the practical is the region of change,
and change is always contingent; it has in it an element of chance that cannot
be eliminated. If a thing changes, its alteration is convincing evidence of its
lack of true or complete Being. What is, in the full and pregnant sense of the
world, is always, eternally. It is self-contradictory for that which is to
alter. If it had no defect or imperfection in it how could it change? That
which becomes merely comes to be, never truly is. It is infected with
non-being; with privation of Being in the perfect sense. The world of
generation is the world of decay and destruction. Wherever one thing comes into
being something else passes out of being.
Thus the depreciation of practice was given a
philosophic, an ontologica, justification. Practical action, as distinct from
self-revolving rational self-activity, belongs in the realm of generation and
decay, a realm inferior in value as in Being. In form, the quest for absolute certainty has reached its goal.
Because ultimate Being or reality is fixed, permanent, admitting of no change
or variation, it may be grasped by rational intuition and set forth in
rational, that is, universal and necessary, demonstration. I do not doubt that
there was a feeling before the rise of philosophy that the unalterably fixed
and the absolutely certain are one, or that change is the source from which
comes all our uncertainties and woes. But in philosophy this inchoate feeling
was definitely formulated. It was asserted on grounds held to be as
demonstrably necessary as are the conclusions of geometry and logic. Thus the
predisposition of philosophy towards the universal, invariant and eternal was
fixed. It remains the common possession of the entire classic philosophic
tradition.
All parts of the scheme hang together. True
Being or Reality is complete; in being complete, it is perfect, divine,
immutable, the “unmoved mover”. Then there are things that change, that come
and go, that are generated and perish, because of lack of stability which
participation is ultimate Being alone
confers. These changes, however, have form and character and are
knowable in the degree in which they tend towards an end which is the
fulfillment and completion of the changes in question. Their instability is not
absolute but is marked by aspiration towards a goal.
The perfect and complete is rational thought,
the ultimate “end” or terminus of all natural movement. That which changes,
which becomes and passes away, is material; change defines the physical. At
most and best, it is a potentiality of reaching a stable and fixed end. To
these two realms belongs two sorts of knowledge. One of them is alone knowledge
in the full sense, science. This has a rational, necessary and unchanging form.
It is certain. The other, dealing with change, is belief or opinion; emperical
and particular; it is contingent, a matter of probability, not of certainty.
The most it can assert is that things are so and so “upon the whole” usually.
Corresponding to the division in Being and in knowledge is that in activities.
Pure activity is rational; it is theoretical, in the sense in which theory is
apart from practical action. Then there is action in doing and making, occupied
with the needs and defects of the lower realm of change in which, in his
physical nature, man is implicated.
Although this Greek formulation was made long
ago and much of it is now strange in its specific terms, certain features of it
are as relevant to present thought as they were significant in their original
formulation. For in spite of the great, the enormous changes in the
subject-matter and method of the sciences and the tremendous expansion of
practical activities by means of arts and technologies, the main tradition of
western culture has retained intact this framework of ideas. Perfect certainty
is what man wants. It cannot be found by practical doing or making; these take
effect in an uncertain future, and involve peril, the risk of misadventure,
frustration and failure. Knowledge, on the other hand, is thought to be
concerned with a region of being which is fixed in itself. Being eternal
unalterable, human knowing is not to make any difference in it. It can be approached
through the medium of the apprehensions and demonstrations of thought, or by
some other organ of mind, which does nothing to the real, except just to know
it.
There is involved in these doctrines a whole
systm of philosophical conclusions. The first and foremost is that there is
complete correspondence between knowledge in its true meaning and what is real.
What is known, what is true for cognition, is what is real in being. The
objects of knowledge form the standards of measures of the reality of all other
objects of experience. Are the object of the affections, of desire, effort,
choice, that is to say everything to which we attach value, real? Yes, if they
can be warrented by knowledge; if we can know objects having these value
properties, we are justified in thinking them real. But as objects of desire
and purpose they have no sure place in Being until they are approached and
validated through knowledge. The idea is so familiar that we overlook the
unexpressed premise upon which it rests, namely that only the completely fixed
and unchanging can be real. The quest for certitude has determined our basic
metaphysics.
Secondly, the theory of knowledge has its basic
premises fixed by the same doctrine. For knowledge to be certain must relate to
that which has antecedent existence or essential being. There are certain
things which are alone inherently the proper objects of knowledge and science.
Things in the production of which we participate we cannot know in the true
sense of the word, for such things succeed instead of preceding our action.
What concerns action forms the realm of mere guesswork and probability, as
distinct from the warrant of rational assurance which is the ideal of true
knowledge. We are so accustomed to the separation of knowledge from doing and
making that we fail to recognize how it controls our conceptions of mind, of
consciousness and of reflective inquiry. For as relates to genuine knowledge,
these must all be defined, on the basis of the premise, so as not to admit of
the presence of any overt action that modifies conditions having prior and
independent existence.
Special theories of knowledge differ enormously from one another. Their quarrels with
one another fill the air. The din thus created makes us deaf to the way in
which they say one thing in common. The controversies are familiar. Some
theories ascribe the ultimate test of knowledge to impressions passively
received, forced upon us whether we will or not. Others ascribe the quarantee
of knowledge to synthetic activity of the intellect. Idealistic theories hold
that mind and the object known are
ultimately one; realistic doctrines reduce knowledge to awareness of what
exists independently, and so on. But they
all make one common assumption. They all hold that the operation of
inquiry excludes any element of practical activity that enters into the
construction of the object known. Strangely enough this is as true of idealism
as of realism, of theories of synthetic activity as of those of passive
receptivity. For according to them “mind” constructs the known object not in
any observable way, or by means of practical overt acts having a temporal
quality, but by some occult internal operation.
The common essence of all these theories, in
short, is that what is known is antecedent to the mental act of observation and
inquiry, and is totally unaffected by these acts; otherwise it would not be
fixed and unchangeable. These negative condition, that the processes of search,
investigation, reflection, involved in knowledge relate to something having
prior being, fixed once for all the main characters attributed to mind, and to
the organs of knowing. They must be outside what is known, so as not to
interact in any way with the object to be known. If the word “interaction” be
used, it cannot denote that overt production of change it signifies in its
ordinary and practical use.
The theory of knowing is modelled after what
was supposed to take place in the act of vision. The object refracts light to
the eye and is seen; it makes a difference to the eye and to the person having
an optical apparatus, but none to the thing seen. The real object is the object
so fixed in its regal aloofness that it is a king to any beholding mind that
may gaze upon it. A spectator theory of
knowledge is the inevitable outcome. There have been theories which hold that
mental activity intervenes, but they have retained the old premise. They have
therefore concluded that it is impossible to know reality. Since mind
intervines, we know, according to them, only some modified semblance of the
real object, some “appearance”. It would be hard to find a more thoroughgoing
confirmation than this conclusion provides of the complete hold possessed by
the belief that the object of knowledge is a reality fixed and complete in itself,
in isolation from an act of inquiry which has in it any element of production
of change.
All of these notions about certainty and fixed,
about the nature of the real world, about the nature of the mind and its organs
of knowing, are completely bound up with one another, and their consequences
ramify into practically all important ideas entertained upon any philosophic
question. They all flow – such is my basic thesis – from the separation (set up
in the interest of the quest for absolute certainty) between theory and
practice, knowledge and action. Consequently the latter problem cannot be
attacked in isolation, by itself. It is too thoroughly entangled with
fundamental beliefs and ideas in all sorts of fields.