CHAPTER VIII THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE § 27. The forward-looking attitude. retrospection. § 28. Anticipation vs. § 29. Imagination and the specious present. § 30. Reflective intelligence and the flux of life. A S a significant and interesting expression of the utilitarian motive (or at least as a means of further defining that motive) I shall consider now the pragmatic attitude as represented by Professor John Dewey, an attitude also defined as "experimental" or "empirical". The attitude is significant as expressing the spirit of the age embodied in the conception of "modern progress". And it is interesting as a basis of criticism because Professor Dewey is a thorough-going critic of orthodox morality, who conceives morality to be co-extensive with the meaning of "life", and conceives life as a process of reflective intelligence. What remains, then, to give a utilitarian cast to the pragmatic attitude? I will put it as follows. For Professor Dewey it seems that the essence of immorality lies in the adoption of "fixed ends"; in taking any part of life to be of absolute and supreme importance, to which the rest of life is subordinate, or, as I should put it, in conceiving life as a matter of means and ends. He who adopts the orthodox programme of fixed principles and unchanging moral laws has forsworn moral choice and made of himself a mechanism for the illustration of "moral law". But he will be no less of a mechanism, no less of a non-moral being, if he has committed himself absolutely to the attainment of any specific end. The moral attitude will be at every moment an attitude of open-mindedness. "We are in a non-moral condition whenever we want anything intensely", i.e., absolutely, so as to limit the possibilities of choice. So far I follow him; and I should take this to mean that a man's life is imperfectly moral so far as he sacrifices any part of himself past or present. But now it seems, as I understand Professor Dewey (and I will not claim to understand him finally), that for him morality does consist precisely in the constant sacrifice of the past-to the future or to the present. This is the essence of the pragmatic attitude. And what it means is that the morality of open-mindedness is committed to a progressive as against a conservative attitude. For Professor Dewey it seems that progressive and conservative are the equivalents of moral and immoral. In this progressive attitude I seem to see life defined and limited by the utilitarian-more concretely, by the modern business man's point of view. § 27 According to Professor Dewey, "anticipation is more primary than recollection; projection than summoning of the past; the prospective than the retrospective." This passage from the essay in "Creative Intelligence"1 states the essence, the quintessence, of the pragmatic attitude. The pragmatic attitude is the forward-looking as against the backward-looking attitude. What it means is, Waste no time over unfulfilled hopes. Let the dead bury the dead, and don't cry over spilled milk. What you wanted in the past is of no consequence now. The past is dead and gone, hence non-existent and unreal; the real lies all ahead-in the future, Professor Dewey seemed to me formerly to say, in the present as he seems more definitely to say now; in any case in a present which for its aims looks forward only. 1 Creative Intelligence. Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. (By Dewey and others, 1917.) I am repeating here some of the things said in my review of this book in The Nation (New York) for July 26, 1917. This forward-looking attitude is also for Professor Dewey the reflective attitude. One who looks forward intelligently must of course also look back; and thus it happens that in point of fact "reflection" constitutes the central topic of most of Professor Dewey's writings. By him, however, the function of reflection appears to be strictly limited. "Imaginative recovery of the bygone is indispensable to successful invasion of the future, but its status is that of an instrument." This states the "instrumental" theory of reflection, of intelligence or of thought. According to this view, thought is a means for action as an end. The instrumental view is thus the opposite of any view (such as what I call the critical view) which looks for the realization of life in reflection itself and finds in unthinking action rather the vehicle, or means. The instrumental theory of intelligence is likewise a biological theory. It means, if I may state it crudely, that God has endowed us with reflective intelligence for the purpose of preserving our lives and of getting on in the world. For this practical purpose it is obviously necessary that we look back and recall which of the methods used in the past have been successful in attaining their ends. To do this is the function of thought just as reproduction is the function of sex; and therefore any preoccupation of thought in other directions-indulgence in retrospective enjoyment, sympathetic contemplation of dead hopes, revival of forgotten ambitions, any care whatever for what one formerly wanted, above all any present dissatisfaction because of past disappointments— all of this is an abnormality of the same order as the sexual abnormalities. From the instrumental point of view the past is only a means for the present, hence only something to be "used", so far as it may be useful, on behalf of the present. Such is pragmatic "reflection"; a strange etymological fate, it may seem, for a word made out of re and flectere! To the ordinary man it will appear that reflection is better typified by those moments in which he, a "tired business man" returning from his office, or a tired professor 1 Creative Intelligence, p. 14. returning from a lecture, sinks into an easy chair, with his feet upon another, and having lighted a pipe, forgets about getting on in life and takes up again the threads of past desires, interrupted by business, and speculates longingly upon the possibility of satisfying them; or decides perhaps to write to an old friend of years back, not because they have business to transact, or any plans to make, but because the memories are too precious to be lost out of life. Professor Dewey has his names for this species of reflective attitude. Formerly it stood for the "genteel tradition" of a leisure class1; later it was "senile" ; but now, in his reference to "impotent wishes, compensatory dreams in consciousness", I see him prepared with the Freudians to call it "infantile"-which means that a respect for the past is a form of sexual aberration. § 28 Anticipation, then, is prior to recollection-if this be more than the dogmatic assertion of a private prejudice, what is its ground? For the life of me I can see but one ground, namely, the ground of practical efficiency, motived by the desire of getting things done, however done, and the necessity of getting them done now if they are to be done at all, since time and tide wait for no man. That this motive has its compelling logic will be clear enough. Upon it the business man has constructed a science. Knowing full well that the sole value of his present stock is what it will bring in the future he makes it a point when the season begins to decline to cut his prices ruthlessly with no retrospective regard to cost. Such a policy stands doubtless for reflective intelligence, yet for a process in which reflection is reduced to a minimum by the prior adoption of cash value as a fixed end, the only end that matters. And it is the exclusiveness of this end that makes the prospective attitude so exclusively logical. 1 Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 72. Applied to matters more personal, the simply prospective attitude seems even less consistent with an attitude of reflection. When David shook off the sackcloth and ashes and became so quickly normal after hearing that the child of Bath-Sheba was dead, his friends naturally wondered. It was a trifle too practical and business-like. His explanation, that sackcloth and ashes are useless after the child is dead, is a really beautiful anticipation of the pragmatic attitude, but not suggestive of much depth of reflection. For the matter of that, however, the only practical attitude towards death is simply not to reflect upon it. You can make nothing of it. The thought of death paralyses action. And thus, as Freud has pointed out, death as a subject of conversation is universally taboo. Here at any rate the reflective attitude is not satisfied, but cut rudely short, by the practical attitude. To urge that grief is a luxury is to say, not Reflect! but rather Forget! For time is moving and hunger is pressing. Hence, on returning from the funeral the band plays "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again"; not, however, on behalf of a reflective attitude towards life. Just after I had read "Creative Intelligence"-in 1917, when it seemed that college teachers would be without an occupation for the coming year—a colleague spoke to me of his intention of spending the next year writing a book for which he had long been gathering material, for the writing of which, however, under the then disturbed conditions, he had little appetite. "Then", I asked rather flippantly, yet interested to get his reply, "why bother about it?" "If I fail to write that book," he said, "I shall have wasted twenty years of work." Suppose now that he writes the book? Shall we say with Dewey that the writing of the book is an end for which the twenty years of work will be (now) merely instrumental? May we not as well say that the writing of the book will be merely instrumental in making good twenty years of work? For my own part I cannot see that either point of view is more real or essentially more intelligent than the other. Any rejection of |