Quotes from Creative Experience

Moreover, Pound defines social interests as “the claims or demands involved in the existence of society,” and here we have nothing vague or abstract. “The social interest in the individual,” “the individual interest in the social,” must become coordinate expressions. Thus does the individual preserve his integrity through all our “social” theories. Thus also we do not discard the abstract man of the nineteenth century only to put in his place an abstract society; social interests are the interests of men in their multitudinous and ever-varying relations.

Because the word function is being increasingly used to express relation, there are certain warnings necessary. First, we should not use the word function to excuse us from studying each situation; this I have seen done several times recently. A phrase may be a legitimate short-cut in exposition, but it is inexcusable to let it be a short-cut in investigation.

Through our observation of human relations, through the teachings of psychology, we learn then that from our concrete activities spring both the power and the guide for those activities. Experience is the dynamo station; here are generated will and purpose. Further, and of the utmost importance, here too arise the standards with which to judge that same will and purpose.

It should be noted that when we say total environment we of course do not mean total “total environment,” but that which is in such immediate relation to the individual that its forces can be reckoned with both as cause of and effect of his activity, that is, that much of environment which comes within the appreciable range of circular behavior.

Here we should have not necessarily the opposing, but the confronting, of interests. This confronting would make apparent many incompatibilities of interests, but does not judge the case beforehand as to what shall be done about it. Confront does not mean combat. In other words, it leaves the possibility of integrating as the method of the meeting of difference.

The political problem, then, is not how to obtain "consent," but how to open the way for the creating relation between man and man. This can be done by an adult education which shall deliberately try to find and teach those methods which shall make possible, encourage and develop this relation between men, by a journalism of insight, by cooperative movements, by the development of local units for discussion; but however furthered, it is the process of a self-creating will of the people, through the release of energy.

We have the choice with each fresh experience, if we do not disregard it altogether, of either pigeon-holing it to take out at some future time when a similar circumstance arises (a similar circumstance never will arise), or of integrating it with all the rest of our experience. We integrate our experience, and then the richer human being that we are goes into the new experience; again we give ourself and always by the giving rise above the old self.

Classification as "conceptual short-hand" is of course necessary, but we must be ready to change our classification with every new contribution of experience. Is this too obvious to need stating? Judge Gray tells us that "the besetting sin of the analytical jurist is the conviction that his classifications and definitions are final." The way in which bacteriologists use classification, changing it readily with every new discovery, might be a lesson to us.

Take a disagreement with someone: if we find that it was caused by a mere misunderstanding, there is little development there, but if we find that there was real difference and that we can unite what was of value in each point of view, it is a step in our growth. To keep to our own "side" either in the hope of downing the other side or in order to delimit the boundaries of the compromise is against all growth. We must guard against Mill's "deep slumber of a decided opinion." Our "opponents" are our co-creators, for they have something to give which we have not. The basis of all coöperative activity is integrated diversity.

We need now careful studies of the method of integration. We must observe and analyze industrial controversy, international controversy, personal controversy, to see when and why and how we get compromise, when and why and how we get genuine integration. We need more than this; far more than observation, we need experiment. We want participant-observers who will try experiment after experiment and tell us which succeed and which fail.

When you and I decide on a course of action together and do that thing, you have no power over me nor I over you, but we have power over ourselves together. We have, however, no authority over John Smith. We could try to get "power" over him in a number of ways, and that is what Le Dantec would call power, but the only legitimate power we could have in connection with John Smith is what you and John Smith and I could develop together over our three selves.

To sum up this point: there is no power-over in the single situation, therefore the aim should always be to create the single situation, that is, to make a working-unit or functional whole: as between employer and employee, landlord and tenant, or whatever the case may be. But we shall never succeed if we conceive the single situation as produced by coincidence of interests; this only twists and distorts the facts and that way lies failure - in the long run. The single situation is produced by the union of interests. For the moment, then, awaiting further study, I am inclined to make this distinction: genuine power is power-with, pseudo power, power-over.

THINKERS about democracy then have passed the stage of merely perfecting mechanisms of voting and representation; their aim is to train minds to act together constructively. The democratic problem is now recognized as the problem of how to get collective action that is socially valid, that is satisfying by the criteria of enlightened living; the problem of how to maintain vigor and creativeness in the thinking of everybody, not merely of chosen spirits.

I am not hereby glorifying "the people." We no longer declare a mystic faith in a native rightness of public opinion; we want nothing from the people but their experience, but emphatically we want that. Reason, wisdom, emerge from our daily activities. It is not the will of the people we are interested in but the life of the people. Public opinion must be built up from concrete existence, from the perceptual level.

Moreover, in considering that which educates or "influences," we must remember that influence is not all from the newspapers or the platform or what gets displayed in the limelight; people are influencing one another all the time. Instead of that influence being casual, we should be able to make more of it; there is much divergence going to waste. What I hope is that we shall be able so to vitalize small meetings of people that something shall be created in them which will be fundamental for our political life.

There are two integrations a representative has to make: first, the integration of the point of view he brings from his constituents with that brought by the other representatives from their constituents; secondly, the representative should go back and persuade his constituents not that a better way than theirs has been found, but that they must try to unite their old point of view, or their present point of view as developed since his election or appointment, with that formed in the representative group.

We should send our representatives not to win a victory but to come to some agreement on the basis of an enlarged understanding on both sides. We should send men to a "conference" to confer, not to fight for something already decided on before meeting; if the latter, they will use the balance of power of the moment, will rely on diplomacy and the handling of groups.

Law is to find the way of uniting interests. It is to seek to limit the area of mutually exclusive interests, but it is to do this not by arbitrary declaration, but by suggesting and encouraging those activities which will produce interests that are capable of uniting. Law should seek far more than mere reconciliation; it should be one of the great creative forces of our social life.

The standards of the past and those of the present can be united not by law makers or judges but only in the meetings and differings, the confronting and integrating, of the daily activities of men. The fruitful uniting of fundamental principles and social facts takes place in no man's mind. We rise from the perceptual to the conceptual plane through our concrete activities. Thus is our conception of "right" evolved. Thus does law develop. To paraphrase a sentence of Holmes: To find law in experience is not a duty, it is only a necessity.

A man promises me something; circumstances change; is he to keep that promise? Many answer Yes unreservedly, but one should discriminate here. That might mean life lived purely mechanically. Loyalty is not adherence to one moment or one person or one set of circumstances alone; my loyalty is tested by whether I am keeping faith with all the circumstances, with all that the present conditions involve, with the complexity of all my obligations. The other is a formal good faith, perhaps a half-blind good faith, or even sometimes a cowardly good faith. To be sure the loyalty I am advocating allows opportunity for greater self-deception, for doing more harm to others, the older doctrine was safer, but if we are willing to embrace the greater risk for the greater gain - gain in our spiritual development, in our individual and social progress - we shall accept the latter. It requires not only more courage, but more intelligence on our part; it renders our own responsibility greater and law more difficult, yet it is, I believe, worth all the demands it makes upon us. Of course there are many circumstances which should never affect our promises. I do not mean that when conditions are difficult or less to our interest that that should make adherence to obligation undertaken less imperative; there is often simply unquestionable justice in keeping a promise when it is no longer to our interest to do so. But understanding all this, it still remains true that this is not always so, and good faith must in the end mean loyalty to what is, in all its fulness and actuality.

No reform will be successful which tries to circumvent life instead of facing it. I believe in no happy (or unhappy) land where expert or leader can overcome diversity. I believe in no shadow country where vicarious experience can take the place of our own experience. I see no golden age in the past or in the future, but I believe in the possibilities of human effort, of disciplined effort, in truth in its Anglo-Saxon meaning (tryw) of faithfulness, and in the essence of relation from the amoeba and its food to man and man, as the release of energy, the evocation or the calling forth of new powers one from the other.