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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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by William Ernest Hocking
Using the word art in the widest sense, as including all conscious efforts to remake the world, we may say that all animal behavior includes some degree of outwardly directed art. While life permits its world to shape it, it promotes thereby the artisanship by which it shapes the world. There is but on exception, presumably, to the rule that the arts of animals are directed to the environment. The human being does deliberately undertake, while reshaping his outer world, to reshape himself also. In meeting unsatisfactory conditions, -- scarcity of good, danger, etc., -- the simpler animal does what it can to change those conditions. The human being does likewise; but there sometimes occurs to him the additional reflection, "perhaps there should be some change in myself also." Scarcity of good may become to him an argument for greater foresight or industry, danger for more caution. If a beast is threatened, it may either fight or retreat: if a man is threatened, he may (while dealing with the facts) become a critic also of his own fear or anger. Man thus becomes for himself an object of artful reconstruction, and this is an art peculiar to man. Whatever is done in the world by way of producing better human individuals, whether for the benefit of the species or for the ends of individuals themselves, man is an agent in it: it is done not merely to him but by him. He has become judge of his own nature and its possibilities. "Evolution" leaves its work in his hands -- so far as he is concerned. I do not say that man is the only creature that has a part in its own making. Every organism may be said (with due interpretation of terms) to build itself, to regenerate itself when injured, to recreate itself and, in striving for its numerous ends, to develop itself -- to grow. It may be, as we were saying, an agent in evolution. But in all likelihood, it is only the human being that does these things with conscious intention, that examines and revises his mental as well as his physical self, and that proceeds according to a preformed idea of what this self should be. To be human is to be self-conscious; and to be self-conscious is to bring one's self into the sphere of art, as an object to be judged, altered, improved. Human beings as we find them are accordingly artificial products; and for better or for worse they must always be such. Nature has made us: social action and our own efforts must continually remake us. Any attempt to reject art for "nature" can only result in an artificial naturalness which is far less genuine and less pleasing than the natural work of art.
Excerpted from Human Nature and Its Remaking, by William Ernest Hocking |
What man can make of man, by William Ernest Hocking Human nature and its remaking, by William Ernest Hocking
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