Tribute 2

« Man lives in a world of Meaning. What he sees and hears means what he will or might handle. The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separates us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our con- tacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends. They are mediate in both senses. They constitute a meaning of all that lies between us and our most distant horizons, and they are the means and instruments of our consummations. They lie in this mediate fashion between the distant stimuli that initiate our acts and the enjoyments or disappointments that terminate them. They are the proximate goal of our sights and sounds, and they are the instrumental stuff in which we embody our ends and purposes. Thus on the one hand they constitute the hard physical realities of science, and on the other the material out of which to build the world of our heart’s desire, the stuff that dreams are made of. […]

This break between the definition of the things that constitute the means and the ends and values which they embody is not confined to the description of physical instruments and their uses, for it bisects the field of the social sciences as well. It has made economics the dismal science. It has mechanized and anatomized’ psychology. It has made ethics utilitarian, and aesthetics an affair of esoteric formulae. It is not a break that can be healed by a new philosophic formula, though insight that is profound enough can exorcise metaphysical oppositions that have hardened into accepted realities, and exhibit the break as that which lies between the generalized technique of life and the ends and purposes which we have been able to formulate. We are all of us engaged in complicated social activities whose accomplishments lie hopelessly beyond our appreciation.

History later will lift out the ramifications of the unnumbered co-operative acts which have led up to what will be significant and desirable in human experience, but the individual experiences that have gone to make the achievement will never share in this significance. Closer at hand we see the routine and drudgery of countless uninterested hands and minds fashion in factories and mines the goods for which men give their wealth and themselves, and in the enjoyment of which men may be bound together in common interests which were quite divorced from their manufacture. Indeed, this is the definition of drudgery, the blind production of goods, cut off from all the interpretation and inspiration of their common enjoyment. It is the tragedy of industrial society that division of labor can interrelate and exploit the social nature of men’s technical production so far in advance of their common fruitions, that all the earned significance of the work of our hands is foreign to its elaborate technique.

It has been the inspiration of universal religions, of political democracy, and later of industrial democracy to bring something of the universal achievement, of the solemn festival, of common delight into the isolated and dreary activities which all together make possible the blessed community, the state, the cooperative society, and all those meanings which we vaguely call social and spiritual. In this intersection of what Professor Dewey has called the technical and the final, this attempted grasping of the consummation of the complex efforts of men in society to infuse meaning into the detail of existence, aesthetic experience may be isolated as a separate phase. What is peculiar to it is its power to catch the enjoyment that belongs to the consummation, the outcome, of an undertaking, and to give to the implements, the objects that are instrumental in the undertaking, and to the acts that compose it something of the joy and satisfaction that suffuse its successful accomplishment.

The beatitude that permeates the common striving of men after an infinite God of their salvation, belongs to the cathedral. The delight which follows upon successful adjustment of one’s body to the varied reactions to the elements of a landscape flows over into the landscape itself. The pleasure that imbues our bodily and social balance of reaction to a human form inspires the statue. The felicity that animates harmoni- ous movements of men runs through the dance. To so construct the object that it shall catch this joy of consummation is the achievement of the artist. To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation. […]

The artisan who stops to sense the nice perfection of a tool or a machine has interrupted its use to appreciate it, and is in an aesthetic mood. He is not interested in its employment, he is enjoying it. The statesman who turns from the construction of his speeches, the ordering of his statistics, the meeting of political opposition, the whole tech- nique of putting across his projects for bettering conditions and life of children, to the picture of their healthful and joyous life, is for the time being no longer in action. He is savoring the end that he is fashioning into practicable politics. When one stops in his common labor and effort to feel the surety of his colleagues, the loyalty of his supporters, the response of his public, to enjoy the community of life in family, or profession, or party, or church, or country, to taste in Whitmanesque manner the commonalty of existence, his attitude is aesthetic. […]

But those that can import the aesthetic experience into activity must be fortunately engaged and engaged in rewarding undertakings. And this means more than the mere adaptation of means to end, the mere successful cooperative fashioning of the goods which are enjoyed in common. The enjoyment of its ultimate use must be suggested by the intermediate steps in its production, and flow naturally into the skill which constructs it. It is this which gives joy to creation, and belongs to the work of the artist, the research scientist and the skilled artisan who can follow his article through to its completion. It belongs to co-ordinated efforts of many, when the role of the other in the production is aroused in each worker at the common task, when the sense of team play, esprit de corps, inspires interrelated activities. In these situations something of the delight of consummation can crown all intermediate processes. […]

In closing I wish to refer again to this inchoate phenomenon of the human reverie, which the press and the movie have projected before us. We are apt to consider it as a purely private affair with each individual, his desultory meanderings of idea and purpose and imagery, perhaps more gruesomely presented in James Joyce’s Ulysses, than elsewhere in literature. It is, indeed, infected with privacy and therefore subject to disintegration. But it passes into the universal meanings of common discourse and co-operative effort, and out of it arise the forms of universal beauty, the intuitions of the inventor, the hypotheses of the scientist, and the creations of the artist. It is that part of the inner life of man which cannot be given its implicated meaning because of the incompleteness of social organization. It marks man’s isolation within society. We have decried its vulgarity when the daily press and the movie films have stripped off its privacy. It is better, however, to live with our problems than to ignore them. »

From The International Journal of Ethics. Volume 36, Issue 4, Jul., 1926. Pages 337-444. Chicago Journals, – on line – , University of Chicago Press.