John Dewey - Ultimate Collection: 40+ Works on Psychology, Education, Philosophy & Politics
I have heard someone remark that he would not so much mind what the Germans did if it were not for the reasons assigned in its justification. But to rationalize such a tangled skein as human experience is a difficult task. If one is in possession of antecedent rational concepts which are legislative for experience, the task is much simplified. It only remains to subsume each empirical event under its proper category. If the outsider does not see the applicability of the concept to the event, it may be argued that his blindness shows his ineptness for truly universal thinking. He is probably a crass empiric who thinks in terms of material consequences instead of upon the basis of antecedent informing principles of reason.
Thus it has come about that no moral, social or political question is adequately discussed in Germany until the matter in hand has been properly deduced from an exhaustive determination of its fundamental Begriff or Wesen. Or if the material is too obviously empirical to allow of such deduction, it must at least be placed under its appropriate rational form. What a convenience, what a resource, nay, what a weapon is the Kantian distinction of a priori rational form and a posteriori empirical matter. Let the latter be as brutely diversified, as chaotic as you please. There always exists a form of unity under which it may be brought. If the empirical facts are recalcitrant, so much the worse for them. It only shows how empirical they are. To put them under a rational form is but to subdue their irrational opposition to reason, or to invade their lukewarm neutrality. Any violence done them is more than indemnified by the favor of bringing them under the sway of a priori reason, the incarnation of the Absolute on earth.
Yet there are certain disadvantages attached to a priori categories. They have a certain rigidity, appalling to those who have not learned to identify stiffness with force. Empirical matters are subject to revision. The strongest belief that claims the support of experience is subject to modification when experience testifies against it. But an a priori conception is not open to adverse evidence. There is no court having jurisdiction. If, then, an unfortunate mortal should happen to be imposed upon so that he was led to regard a prejudice or predilection as an a priori truth, contrary experience would have a tendency to make him the more obstinate in his belief. History proves what a dangerous thing it has been for men, when they try to impose their will upon other men, to think of themselves as special instruments and organs of Deity. The danger is equally great when an a priori Reason is substituted for a Divine Providence. Empirically grounded truths do not have a wide scope; they do not inspire such violent loyalty to themselves as ideas supposed to proceed directly from reason itself. But they are discussable; they have a humane and social quality, while truths of pure reason have a paradoxical way, in the end, of escaping from the arbitrament of reasoning. They evade the logic of experience, only to become, in the phrase of a recent writer, the spoil of a "logic of fanaticism." Weapons forged in the smithy of the Absolute become brutal and cruel when confronted by merely human resistance.
The stiffly constrained character of an a priori Reason manifests itself in another way. A category of pure reason is suspiciously like a pigeonhole. An American writer, speaking before the present war, remarked with witty exaggeration that "Germany is a monstrous set of pigeonholes, and every mother's son of a German is pigeoned in his respective hole—tagged, labeled and ticketed. Germany is a huge human check-room, and the government carries the checks in its pocket." John Locke's deepest objection to the older form of the a priori philosophy, the doctrine of innate ideas, was the readiness with which such ideas become strongholds behind which authority shelters itself from questioning. And John Morley pointed out long ago the undoubted historic fact that the whole modern liberal social and political movement has allied itself with philosophic empiricism. It is hard here, as everywhere, to disentangle cause and effect. But one can at least say with considerable assurance that a hierarchically ordered and subordered State will feel an affinity for a philosophy of fixed categories, while a flexible democratic society will, in its crude empiricism, exhibit loose ends.
There is a story to the effect that the good townspeople of Königsberg were accustomed to their watches by the time at which Kant passed upon his walks—so uniform was he. Yielding to the Teutonic temptation to find an inner meaning in the outer event, one may wonder whether German thought has not since Kant's time set its intellectual and spiritual clocks by the Kantian standard: the separation of the inner and the outer, with its lesson of freedom and idealism in one realm, and of mechanism, efficiency and organization in the other. A German professor of philosophy has said that while the Latins live in the present moment, the Germans live in the infinite and ineffable. His accusation (though I am not sure he meant it as such) is not completely justified. But it does seem to be true that the Germans, more readily than other peoples, can withdraw themselves from the exigencies and contingencies of life into a region of Innerlichkeit which at least seems boundless; and which can rarely be successfully uttered save through music, and a frail and tender poetry, sometimes domestic, sometimes lyric, but always full of mysterious charm. But technical ideas, ideas about means and instruments, can readily be externalized because the outer world is in truth their abiding home.
II
German Moral and Political Philosophy
It is difficult to select sentences from Kant which are intelligible to those not trained in his vocabulary, unless the selection is accompanied by an almost word-by-word commentary. His writings have proved an admirable terrain for the display of German Gründlichkeit. But I venture upon the quotation of one sentence which may serve the purpose of at once recalling the main lesson of the previous lecture and furnishing a transition to the theme of the present hour.
"Even if an immeasurable gulf is fixed between the sensible realm of the concept of nature and the supersensible realm of the concept of freedom, so that it is not possible to go from the first to the second (at least by means of the theoretical use of reason) any more than if they were two separate worlds of which the first could have no influence upon the second,—yet the second is meant to have an influence upon the first. The concept of freedom is meant to actualize in the world of sense the purpose proposed by its laws." . . .
That is, the relation between the world of space and time where physical causality reigns and the moral world of freedom and duty is not a symmetrical one. The former cannot intrude into the latter. But it is the very nature of moral legislation that it is meant to influence the world of sense; its object is to realize the purposes of free rational action within the sense world. This fact fixes the chief features of Kant's philosophy of Morals and of the State.
It is a claim of the admirers of Kant that he first brought to recognition the true and infinite nature of the principle of Personality. On one side, the individual is homo phenomenon—a part of the scheme of nature, governed by its laws as much as any stone or plant. But in virtue of his citizenship in the kingdom of supersensible Laws and Ends, he is elevated to true universality. He is no longer a mere occurrence. He is a Person—one in whom the purpose of Humanity is incarnate. In English and American writings the terms subjective and subjectivism usually carry with them a disparaging color. Quite otherwise is it in German literature. This sets the age of subjectivism, whose commencement, roughly speaking, coincides with the influence of Kantian thought, in sharp opposition to the age of individualism, as well as to a prior period of subordination to external authority. Individualism means isolation; it means external relations of human beings with one another and with the world; it looks at things quantitatively, in terms of wholes and parts. Subjectivism means recognition of the principle of free personality: the self as creative, occupied not with an external world which limits it from without, but, through its own self-consciousness, finding a world within itself; and having found the universal within itself, setting to work to recreate itself in what had been the external world, and by its own creative expansion in industry, art and politics to transform what had been mere limiting material into a work of its own. Free as was Kant from the sentimental, the mystic and the romantic phases of this Subjectivism, we shall do well to bear it in mind in thinking of his ethical theory. Personality means that man as a rational being does not receive the end which forms the law of his action from without, whether from Nature,