Monday, March 04, 2013  sympathy, power, art and science fused
What is required is a blending, a fusing of the sympathetic
tendencies with all the other impulses and habitual traits of
the self. When interest in power is permeated with an
affectionate impulse, it is protected from being a tendency to
dominate and tyrannize; it becomes an interest in effectiveness
of regard for common ends. When an interest in artistic or
scientific objects is similarly fused, it loses the indifferent
and coldly impersonal character which marks the specialist as
such, and becomes an interest in the adequate aesthetic and
intellectual development of the conditions of a common life.
Sympathy does not merely associate one of these tendencies with
another; still less does it make one a means to the other’s
ends. It so intimately permeates them as to transform both into
a new and moral interest. - John Dewey. Ethics. 1908 In quoting
Dewey, Hilary Putnam argues (in Ethics without Ontology), pp
8-9, that it is impossible to understa