John Dewey - Ultimate Collection: 40+ Works on Psychology, Education, Philosophy & Politics
deliberation and discussion. This is just what the authoritative voice of a superior will not tolerate; it is the one unforgiveable sin.
The morals of bargaining, exchange, the mutual satisfaction of wants may be outlived in some remote future, but up to the present they play an important part in life. To me there is something uncanny in the scorn which German ethics, in behalf of an unsullied moral idealism, pours upon a theory which takes cognizance of practical motives. In a highly esthetic people one might understand the display of contempt. But when an aggressive and commercial nation carries on commerce and war simply from the motive of obedience to duty, there is awakened an unpleasant suspicion of a suppressed "psychic complex." When Nietzsche says, "Man does not desire happiness; only the Englishman does that," we laugh at the fair hit. But persons who profess no regard for happiness as a test of action have an unfortunate way of living up to their principle by making others unhappy. I should entertain some suspicion of the complete sincerity of those who profess disregard for their own happiness, but I should be quite certain of their sincerity when it comes to a question of my happiness.
Within the Kantian philosophy of morals there is an idea which conducts necessarily to a philosophy of society and the State. Leibniz was the great German source of the philosophy of the enlightenment. Harmony was the dominant thought of this philosophy; the harmony of nature with itself and with intelligence; the harmony of nature with the moral ends of humanity. Although Kant was a true son of the enlightenment, his doctrine of the radically dual nature of the legislation of Reason put an end to its complacent optimism. According to Kant, morality is in no way a work of nature. It is the achievement of the self-conscious reason of man through conquest of nature. The ideal of a final harmony remains, but it is an ideal to be won through a battle with the natural forces of man. His breach with the enlightenment is nowhere as marked as in his denial that man is by nature good. On the contrary, man is by nature evil—that is, his philosophical rendering of the doctrine of original sin. Not that the passions, appetites and senses are of themselves evil, but they tend to usurp the sovereignty of duty as the motivating force of human action. Hence morality is a ceaseless battle to transform all the natural desires of man into willing servants of the law and purpose of reason.
Even the kindly and sociable instincts of man, in which so many have sought the basis of both morality and organized society, fall under Kant's condemnation. As natural desires, they aspire to an illegitimate control in man's motives. They are parts of human self-love: the unlawful tendency to make happiness the controlling purpose of action. The natural relations of man to man are those of an unsocial sociableness. On the one hand, men are forced together by natural ties. Only in social relations can individuals develop their capacities. But no sooner do they come together than disintegrating tendencies set in. Union with his fellows give a stimulus to vanity, avarice and gaining power over others—traits which cannot show in themselves in individuals when they are isolated. This mutual antagonism is, however, more of a force in evolving man from savagery to civilization than are the kindly and sociable instincts.
"Without these unlovely qualities which set man over against man in strife, individuals would have lived on in perfect harmony, contentment and mutual love, with all their distinctive abilities latent and undeveloped."
In short, they would have remained in Rousseau's paradise of a state of nature, and
"perhaps Rousseau was right when he preferred the savage state to the state of civilization provided we leave out of account the last stage to which our species is yet destined to rise."
But since the condition of civilization is but an intermediary between the natural state and the truly or rational moral condition to which man is to rise, Rousseau was wrong.
"Thanks then be to nature for the unsociableness, the spiteful competition of vanity, the insatiate desires for power and gain."
These quotations, selected from Kant's little essay on an "Idea for a Universal History," are precious for understanding two of the most characteristic traits of subsequent German thought, the distinctions made between Society and the State and between Civilization and Culture. Much of the trouble which has been experienced in respect to the recent use of Kultur might have been allayed by a knowledge that Kultur has little in common with the English word "culture" save a likeness in sound. Kultur is sharply antithetical to civilization in its meaning. Civilization is a natural and largely unconscious or involuntary growth. It is, so to speak, a by-product of the needs engendered when people live close together. It is external, in short. Culture, on the other, is deliberate and conscious. It is a fruit not of men's natural motives, but of natural motives which have been transformed by the inner spirit. Kant made the distinction when he said that Rousseau was not so far wrong in preferring savagery to civilization, since civilization meant simply social decencies and elegancies and outward proprieties, while morality, that is, the rule of the end of Reason, is necessary to culture. And the real significance of the term "culture" becomes more obvious when he adds that it involves the slow toil of education of the Inner Life, and that the attainment of culture on the part of an individual depends upon long effort by the community to which he belongs. It is not primarily an individual trait or possession, but a conquest of the community won through devotion to "duty."
In recent German literature, Culture has been given even a more sharply technical distinction from Civilization and one which emphasizes even more its collective and nationalistic character. Civilization as external and uncontrolled by self-conscious purpose includes such things as language in its more spontaneous colloquial expression, trade, conventional manners or etiquette, and the police activities of government. Kultur comprises language used for purposes of higher literature; commerce pursued not as means of enriching individuals but as a condition of the development of national life; art, philosophy (especially in that untranslatable thing, the "Welt-Anschauung"); science, religion, and the activities of the state in the nurture and expansion of the other forms of national genius, that is, its activities in education and the army. The legislation of Bismarck with reference to certain Roman Catholic orders is nicknamed Kultur-kampf, for it was conceived as embodying a struggle between two radically different philosophies of life, the Roman, or Italian, and the true Germanic, not simply as a measure of political expediency. Thus it is that a trading and military post like Kiao-Chou is officially spoken of as a "monument of Teutonic Kultur." The war now raging is conceived of as an outer manifestation of a great spiritual struggle, in which what is really at stake is the supreme value of the Germanic attitude in philosophy, science and social questions generally, the "specifically German habits of feeling and thinking."
Very similar motives are at work in the distinction between society and the State, which is almost a commonplace of German thought. In English and American writings the State is almost always used to denote society in its more organized aspects, or it may be identified with government as a special agency operating for the collective interests of men in association. But in German literature society is a technical term and means something empirical and, so to speak, external; while the State, if not avowedly something mystic and transcendental, is at least a moral entity, the creation of self-conscious reason operating in behalf of the spiritual and ideal interests of its members. Its function is cultural, educative. Even when it intervenes in material interests, as it does in regulating lawsuits, poor laws, protective tariffs, etc., etc., its action has ultimately an ethical significance: its purpose is the furthering of an ideal community. The same thing is to be said of wars when they are really national wars, and not merely dynastic or accidental.
Society is an expression of man's egoistic nature; his natural seeking for personal advantage and profit. Its typical manifestation is in competitive economic struggle and in the struggle for honor and recognized social status. These have their proper place; but with respect even to them it is the duty of the State to intervene so that the struggle may contribute to ideal ends which alone are universal. Hence the significance of the force or power of the State. Unlike other forms of force, it has a sort of sacred import, for it represents force consecrated to the assertion and expansion of final goods which are spiritual, moral, rational. These absolute ends can be maintained only in struggle against man's individualistic ends. Conquest through conflict is the law of morals everywhere.
In Kant we find only the beginnings of this political philosophy. He is still held