Words&Dirt

“‘To understand the present you must know the past, yet it is only part of the answer and I will never discover it all.  I have not the years.’”

––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 236

“Knowing, for the experimental sciences, means a certain kind of intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be contemplative and becomes in a true sense practical.  Now this implies that philosophy, unless it is to undergo a complete break with the authorized spirit of science, must also alter its nature.  It must assume a practical nature; it must become operative and experimental.  And we have pointed out what an enormous change this transformation of philosophy entails in the two conceptions which have played the greatest role in historic philosophizing––the conceptions of the ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ respectively.  The former ceases to be something ready-made and final; it becomes that which has to be accepted as the material of change, as the obstructions and the means of certain specific desired changes.  The ideal and rational also ceased to be a separate ready-made world incapable of being used as a lever to transform the actual empirical world, a mere asylum from empirical deficiencies.  They represent intelligently thought-out possibilities of the existent world which may be used as methods for making over and improving it.

Philosophically speaking, this is the great difference involved in the change from knowledge and philosophy as contemplative to operative.  The change does not mean the lowering of dignity of philosophy from a lofty plane to one of gross utilitarianism.  It signifies that the prime function of philosophy is that of rationalizing the possibilities of experience, especially collective human experience.  The scope of this change may be realized by considering how far we are from accomplishing it.”

––Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey, pg. 121-2