Being and Doing

Abstract

It is more and more clear to me that the final question in regard to values, which is to say the final question in one's interpretation of life and the universe, is this which I have tried to focus in the epigrammatic phrase “such that.” Is the inner nature of things – especially of people – “given” in such a sense that all their doings and manifestations are but the “expression” or “manifestation” of a given inner nature, that what they do in the broadest sense follows inevitably from [w]hat they are at the moment of the doing? Or on the other hand is there “more” to than that? Is there a margin of choosing to be one thing or another, or choosing to do in a sense which involves choosing to be, as well as expression or manifestation of what one already is? It is the essential message or point of Bergson's philosophy. Cf. also B. Russell, Analysis of Mind, and Seman's work to which he refers. Russell inclines to the view that what a person or animal does expresses what he is, exactly and completely, but admits it is an assumption, unprovable. He is no fool. He also admits that what one is at any moment depends within widest limits on his history, but assumes also that this unfolds according to law, that the changes which one's nature undergoes in any experience or act are also an expression of and theoretically predictable from what one's nature was the moment before and the conditions surrounding the experience or act. But he recognizes that this also is an unprovable assumption.

Citation

Emmett, R.B. (2011), "Being and Doing", Emmett, R.B. (Ed.) Frank H. Knight in Iowa City, 1919–1928 (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 29 Part 2), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 349-351. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0743-4154(2011)000029B036