Philosopher views

TRUTH IS PROGRESSIVE AND EVOLVING

1. ADAPTING TO SOCIAL CONDITIONS DETERMINES OUR ABILITY TO THINK WELL

John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, p. 296.

Thinking, however, is the most difficult occupation in which man engages. If the other arts have to be acquired through ordered apprenticeship, the power to think requires even more conscious and consecutive attention. No more than any other art is it developed internally. It requires favorable objective conditions, just as the art of painting requires paint, brushes, and canvas. The most important problem in freedom of thinking is whether social conditions obstruct the development of judgment and insight or effectively promote it. We take for granted the necessity of special opportunity and prolonged education to secure ability to think in a special calling, like mathematics. But we appear to assume that ability to think effectively in social, political and moral matters is a gift of God, and that the gift operates by a kind of spontaneous combustion. Few would perhaps defend this doctrine thus boldly stated, but upon the whole we act as if that were true.

John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, p. 298.

Constant and uniform relations in change and a knowledge of them in “laws,” are not a hindrance to freedom, but a necessary factor in coming to be effectively that which we have the capacity to grow into. Social conditions interact with the preferences of an individual (that are his individuality) in a way favorable to actualizing freedom only when they develop intelligence, not abstract knowledge and abstract thought, but power of vision and reflection. For these take effect in making preference, desire and purpose more flexible, alert, and resolute. Freedom has too long been thought of as an indeterminate power operating in a closed and ended world. In its reality, freedom is a resolute will operating in a world in some respects indeterminate, because open and moving toward a new future.
3. FREEDOM CONSISTS IN RECOGNIZING AND ADAPTING TO CHANGE

John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, LECTURES ON ETHICS, 1991, p. 89.

Judgment or responsibility depends upon the balance between the subject and the predicate, between the natural self and the ideal self. In obligation, the element of tension or resistance between the two is perhaps the more emphasized, the explicit thing. But the necessary unity between the two is involved. In the idea of responsibility that unity of the natural and the ideal self (that it is the business of the natural self to become the ideal self and of the ideal self to be realized in the natural self) is the prominent thing. The point of simple tension between the two has been passed, and the emphasis is on the other side of the identity between the two. In other words, the possible self does not represent a remote, abstract possibility but is the possibility of the actual self. The actual self is not complete as long as it is stated simply as given. It is complete only in its possibilities. That is the basis of responsibility. Carry that identity farther. Make it not merely an identity in conception but in action, and you have freedom. Freedom is the equivalent of the reality of growth.

THERE ARE NO TRANSCENDENT MORAL TRUTHS

1. VALUES ARE DEPENDENT UPON REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES AND CIRCUMSTANCES

John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, pp. 48-49.

For ordinary purposes, that is for practical purposes, the truth and the realness of things are synonymous. We are all children who saw “really and truly.” A reality which is taken in organic response so as to lead to subsequent reactions that are off the track and aside from the mark, while it is, existentially speaking, perfectly real, is not good reality. It lacks the hallmark of value. Since it is a certain kind of object which we want, one which will be as favorable as possible to a consistent and liberal or growing functioning, it is this kind, the true kind, which for us monopolizes the title of reality. Pragmatically, teleologically, this identification of truth and “reality” is sound and reasonable: rationalistically, it leads to the notion of the duplicate versions of reality, one absolute and static because exhausted; the other phenomenal and kept continually on the jump because otherwise its own inherent nothingness would lead to its total annihilation. Since it is only genuine and sincere things, things which are good for what they lay claim to in the way of consequences, which we want or are after, morally they alone are “real.”

John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, p. 139.

Failure to recognize that general legal rules and principles are working hypotheses, needing to be constantly tested by the way in which they work out in application to concrete situations, explains the otherwise paradoxical fact that the slogans of the liberalism of one period often become the bulwarks of reaction in a subsequent era. There was a time in the eighteenth century when the great social need was emancipation of industry and trade from a multitude of restrictions which held over from the feudal estate of Europe. Adapted well enough to the localized and fixed conditions of that earlier age, they became hindrances and annoyances as the effects of new methods, use of coal and steam, emerged. The movement of emancipation expressed itself in principles of liberty in use of property, and freedom of contract, which were embodied in a mass of legal decisions. But the absolutistic logic of rigid syllogistic forms infected these ideas.