susan santog

“The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act; to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting: that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.”

The counterpart of classic thought which took ends, enjoyments, uses not simply as genuine termini of natural events (which they are), but as the essence and form of things independent of human experience, is a modern philosophy which makes reality purely mechanical and which regards the consequences of things in human experience as accidental or phenomenal by-products. In truth, abstraction from human experience is but a liberation from familiar and specific enjoyments, it provides means for detecting hitherto untried consequences, for invention, for the creation of new wants, and new modes of good and eveil. In any sense in which the conception of essence is legitimate, these human consequences are the esences of natural events. water still has the meanings of water of everyday experience when it becomes the essence H20, or else H20 would be totally meaningless, a mere sound, not an intelligible name. [ Dewey, 1925,pp.193-94]
This capacity of essences to enter readily into any number of new combinations, and thereby generate further meanings more profound and far reaching than those from which they sprang, gives them a semblance of independent lie and career, a semblance which is responbisble for their elevation by some thinkers into a realm separate form that of existence and superior to it. Consider the interpretations that have been based upon such essences as four, plus, the square root of minus one. These are at once so manipulable and so fertile in consequences when conjoined with others that thinkers who are primarily interested in their performances threat them not as significant terms of discourse, but as an order of entities independent of human invention and use. the fact the we can watch them and register what happens when they come together, and that the things that happen are as independent of our volition and expectation as are the discoveries of a geographic exploration, is taken as evidence that they constitute entities having subsistent Being independently not only of us but of all natural events whatever.
Alternatives are too narrowly conceived. Because meanings and essences are nto states of mind, because they are as independent of immediate sensation and imagery as are physical things, and because nevertheless they are not physical things, it is assumed that they are a peculiar kind of thing, termed metaphysical, or "logical" in a style which separates logic from nature. But there are many other things which are neither physical no psychical existences, and which are demonstrably dependent upon human association and interaction. Such things function moreover in liberating and regulating subsequent human intercourse; their essence is their contribution to making that intercourse more significant and immediately rewarding. [Dewey, 1925.pp.195-96]

Dewey 1925,pp387-88

"essence", as it figures in Greek theory, represents the mysterious potency of earlier "symbols" emancipated from their superstitious context and envisaged in a dialectic and reflective context. The essence of Greek-medieval science were in short poetic objects, treated as objects of demonstrative science, used to explain and understand the inner and ultimate constitution of things. While Greek thought was sufficiently emancipated from magic to deny "efficient" causality to formal and final essences, yet the latter were conceived of as making particular things to be what they are, members of natural kinds. Moreover, by a reversal of causal residenc3e, intrinsic seeking for such forms was imputed to changing events. Thus the ground was prepared for the later frank return of patristic and scholastic thought to a frank animistic super naturalism. the philosophic theory erred, as did magic and myth, regarding the nature of the efficacy involved in ends, and the error was due to the same causes, namely, failure of analysis into elements. It could not have occurred, were there that sharp division between means and ends, fruition's and instrumentalitites, assumed by current thought.

Cosmetics and Costumes

Our cosmetics and our costumes are so familiar to us that it is difficult to see the singular strangeness in the ways we make ourselves up. We emerge, all of us, out of our little night chambers, wherein we have temporarily lost our bearings in uncharted sleep, into the light of day, pausing to arrange our faces and clothe our bodies in a way that will naturalize us for the human company we intend to keep. Every day we achieve this dramatic transformation from nakedness into a socially serviceable appearance. Some days require several or even many changes of costume and of face, depending on the roles we are called upon to play.
In all of this we choose and select- grooming our bodies with more or less attention to the art of managing appearances. But our choices are always constrained by the affordances of our closets and cosmetic cabinets. These, in turn, are supplied from the vast but particular cultural wardrobe that is part of the large theater of our secular existence.

Boredom

To reject the practical, to change the purposeful into the purposeless, the necessary into the arbitrary, and to do it in such a way as to cause no harm, by simply imagining it, out of sheer playfulness, affords joy and pleasure, because it frees us for the moment from the fetters of the necessary, the purposeful, and the practical.

The Drama of Everyday Life

No fixed view of our reality can do justice to its features, for those features change in their meaning and significance depending on the perspective that is taken. This entire argument about a dramaturgical approach to psychology is nothing but a perspective, a particular point of view brought to bear on our subject matter -- ourselves and the world we live in. The special advantage of this perspective is that it enables us to see the intimate connections between the drama of everyday lives and our psychological processes-- our perceiving, thinking, social relations-- and our pathologies. An unsatisfactory view of reality is one that cannot shift perspectives-- so that one stands all of the time in the same box. No transformations, no drama, and the result is predictable and boring.

I have visited boxes of slam poets, square dancers, skeet shooters, schizophrenics, alcoholics, drug addicts, deconstructionists, missionaries, fishermen and farmers, football players, sports car buffs, bagpipe players, and country clubbers -- boxes of Carnaval-jumping Brazilians, fraternity pledges, and church deacons as well as psychologists and professors of various sorts. If you are blessed with a reasonabley long life, you will compile your own interesting list of boxes-- little theaters wherein the play is earnest and the players all convinced of their grasp on reality.

Robert G. Ingersoll

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural - that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling , the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world- not even in infinite space. I was free- free to think, to express my thoughts- free to live to my own ideal- free to live for myself and those I loved-free to use all my faculties, all my senses- free to spread imagination's wings- free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope-free to judge and determine for myself- free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past- free from popes and priests- free from all the "called" and "set apart"- free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies- free from the fear of eternal pain- free from the winged monsters of the night- free from devils, ghosts, and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought- no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings- no chains for my limbs- no lashed for my back- no fires for my flesh- no master's frown or threat- no following another's steps- no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain- for the freedom of labor and thought- for those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains- to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs- to those hose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn- to those by fire consumed- to all the wise, thoe good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it hight, that light might conquer darkness still.