Words&Dirt

“If this lecture succeeds in leaving in your minds as a reasonable hypothesis the idea that philosophy originated not out of intellectual material, but out of social and emotional material, it will also succeed in leaving with you a changed attitude toward traditional philosophies.  They will be viewed from a new angle and placed in a new light.  New questions about them will be aroused and new standards for judging them will be suggested.

If any one will commence without mental reservations to study the history of philosophy not as an isolated thing but as a chapter in the development of civilization and culture; if one will connect the story of philosophy with a study of anthropology, primitive life, the history of religion, literature and social institutions, it is confidently asserted that he will reach his own independent judgment as to the worth of the account which has been presented today.  Considered in this way, the history of philosophy will take on a new significance.  What is lost from the standpoint of would-be science is regained from the standpoint of humanity.  Instead of the disputes of rivals about the nature of reality, we have the scene of human clash of social purpose and aspirations.  Instead of impossible attempts to transcend experience, we have the significant record of the efforts of men to formulate the things of experience to which they are most deeply and passionately attached.  Instead of impersonal and purely speculative endeavors to contemplate as remote beholders the nature of absolute things-in-themselves, we have a living picture of the choice of thoughtful men about what they would have life to be, and to what ends they would have men shape their intelligent activities.

Any one of you who arrives at such a view of past philosophy will of necessity be led to entertain a quite definite conception of the scope and aim of future philosophizing.  He will inevitably be committed to the notion that what philosophy has been unconsciously, without knowing or intending it, it must henceforth be openly and deliberately.  When it is acknowledged that under disguise of dealing with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with the precious values embedded in social traditions, that it has sprung from a clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible contemporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of future philosophy is to clarify men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day.  Its aim is to become so far as is humanly possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts.  That which may be pretentiously unreal when it is formulated in metaphysical distinctions becomes intensely significant when connected with the drama of the struggle of social beliefs and ideals.  Philosophy which surrenders its somewhat barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Absolute Reality will find a compensation in enlightening the moral forces which move mankind and in contribution to the aspirations of men to attain to a more ordered and intelligent happiness.”

––Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey, pg. 25-7

“You turned a tap and lo, water came forth, sweet, soft water without odor, pumped from some sub-surface pool by a silent, faithful servant, a small electric motor.  Every family on River Road, except the Henrys, obtained its water in the same way, each with its own pump and well.  More important than anything he had listed was water, free of dangerous bacilli, unpolluted by poisons human, chemical, or radioactive.  Pure water was essential to his civilization, accepted like pure air.  In the big cities, where even a near miss would rupture reservoirs, demolish aqueducts, and smash mains, it would be hell without water.  Big cities would become traps deadly as deserts or jungles.  Randy began to consider how little he really knew of the fundamentals of survival.”

––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 50-1