Читать книгу Ethics - Джон Дьюи - Страница 60

The Poets.—Out of the fierce competition of individual desires, the clashing of individual ambitions, the conflict between the individual and the state, and the deepening of the conception of the individual's "nature," emerged also another conception of fundamental importance for the more highly developed reflective moral life, viz., that of the moral personality, its character and its responsibility. We may trace the development of this conception through the poets, as well as in the philosophers. Æschylus set man over against the gods, subject to their divine laws, but gave little play to human character or conscious self-direction. With Sophocles, the tragic situation was brought more directly into the field of human character, although the conception of destiny and the limitations marked thereby were still the dominant note. With Euripides, human emotions and character are brought into the foreground. Stout-heartedness, the high spirit that can endure in suffering or triumph in death, which shows not merely in his heroes but in the women, Polyxena and Medea, Phædra and Iphigenia, evinces the growing consciousness of the self—a consciousness which will find further development in the proud and self-sufficient endurance of the Stoic. In more directly ethical lines, we find increasing recognition of the self in the motives which are set up for human action, and in the view which is formed of human character. Conscience in the earlier poets and moralists, was largely a compound of Nemesis, the external messenger and symbol of divine penalty, on the one hand, and Aidos, the sense of respect or reverence for public opinion and for the higher authority of the gods, on the other. But already in the tragedians we find suggestions of a more intimate and personal conception. Pains sent by Zeus in dreams may lead the individual to meditate, and thus to better life. Neoptolemus, in Sophocles, says,

"All things are noisome when a man deserts

His own true self and does what is not meet."

and Philoctetes replies,

"Have mercy on me, boy, by all the gods,

And do not shame thyself by tricking me."

The whole Antigone of Sophocles is the struggle between obedience to the political rulers and obedience to the higher laws which as "laws of reverence" become virtually inner laws of duty:

"I know I please the souls I ought to please."

Plato.—Here, as in the formulation of his conception of the ideal, religious imagery helped Plato to find a more objective statement for the conception of a moral judgment and a moral character. In the final judgment of the soul after death, Plato sees the real self stripped bare of all external adornments of beauty, rank, power, or wealth, and standing as naked soul before the naked judge, to receive his just reward. And the very nature of this reward or penalty shows the deepening conception of the self, and of the intrinsic nature of moral character. The true penalty of injustice is not to be found in anything external, but in the very fact that the evil doers become base and wicked:

"They do not know the penalty of injustice, which above all things they ought to know—not stripes and death, as they suppose, which evil doers often escape, but a penalty which cannot be escaped.

Theod. What is that?

Soc. There are two patterns set before them in nature; the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched; and they do not see, in their utter folly and infatuation, that they are growing like the one and unlike the other, by reason of their evil deeds; and the penalty is that they lead a life answering to the pattern which they resemble."[82]

The Stoics.—It is, however, in the Stoics that we find the conception of inner reflection reaching clearest expression. Seneca and Epictetus repeat again and again the thought that the conscience is of higher importance than any external judgment—that its judgment is inevitable. In these various conceptions, we see attained the third stage of Adam Smith's description of the formation of conscience.[83] Man who read his duty at first in the judgments of his fellows, in the customs and laws and codes of honor, and in the religious precepts of the gods, has again come to find in gods and laws, in custom and authority, the true rational law of life; but it is now a law of self. Not a particular or individual self, but a self which embraces within it at once the human and the divine. The individual has become social and has recognized himself as such. The religious, social, and political judgments have become the judgments of man upon himself. "Duty," what is binding or necessary, takes its place as a definite moral conception.