Human Nature and Conduct John Dewey

Dewey said that, “Morality is largely concerned with controlling human nature”.

Nietzsche would refer to this control as the sublimated resentment and self-congratulations of the controlled. This compensation for inferiority is the obverse side of the coin of the attempt to control human nature. Common to both is the view of human nature as evil. Dewey addresses the question that Nietzsche answers perfunctorily with the concept of ressentiment. Dewey's first question concerns the ways and wherefores of the dichotomy between the nature of humans and the nature of moral control. If, he muses, morality arose out of human nature, how is it that morality is something to struggle at rather than by something as natural and "second nature” as breathing. Like Nietzsche, Dewey looks for the answer in social stratification. Whereas, for Nietzsche, morality is the compensatory denunciation of the superior by the inferior, for Dewey, morality is the level of compliance of the controlled to the controlling agency. As Dewey looks to the origin of morality, while Nietzsche examinees the evolution of a morality of consequences to that of a morality of intent and preconditions, remember Polybius' words on the restructuring of a post-apocalyptic society.

Camouflage is the most effective defense against shame in a system of negative morals. Being "just like folk” as Clive Staples Lewis put it is just what Friedrich Nietzsche objected to in his condemnation of slave morality.

Dewey makes use of the interaction between the individual and the environment. In issues of ethics and morality, The person and social environment; considering Vision, the eye, the optic nerve, and light. He specifically Mentions that walking presupposes a surface that is walked upon. The question remains, which is preeminent? The eye? The optic nerve? The light? The interplay in between? Or would neuroscience more recent than John Dewey's Time point as toward the visual cortex in the occipital lobe as a processing center? Is This processing center the controlling factor or merely the focus from which the emergent property are call vision arises out of the matrix of light, eyeball and neural network?

Civilization presupposes infrastructure.