'Existence and Value' & 'Faith and It's Object' "Dovetail" in the Work of John Dewey

The analysis of the process of "valuation" in the chapter 'Existence and Value' in John Dewey's 'Experience and Nature', dovetails with the chapter 'Faith and It's Object' in 'A Common Faith'.

What we achieve what comes to "realization" through the "valuation" work of judgment,(described in 'Existence and Value') is the determination of what our aim is- what is it that is "valuable" or "significant"(Dewey's word). This becomes the idea of our action, the hoped for result of which is the "ideal". It is practical and real.

From 'A Common Faith'- chapter 2, Faith and It's Object, pG. 43 (Yale University Press)
"An ideal is not an illusion because imagination is the organ through which it is apprehended. For all possibilities reach us through the imagination. In a definite sense the only meaning that can be assigned the term "imagination" is that things unrealized in fact come home to us and have power to stir us. The unification effected through imagination is not fanciful, for it is the reflex of the unification of practical and emotional attitudes. The unity signifies not a single Being, but the unity of loyalty and effort evoked by the fact that many ends are one in the power of their ideal, or imaginative, quality to stir and hold us."

pg. 49

"What I have been objecting to, I repeat, is not the idea that ideals are linked with existence and that they themselves exist, through human embodiment, as forces, but the idea that their authority and value depend upon some prior complete embodiment- as if the efforts of human beings in behalf of justice, or knowledge or beauty, depended for their effectiveness and validity upon assurance that there already existed in some supernal region a place where criminals are humanely treated, where there is no serfdom or slavery, where all facts and truths are already discovered and possessed, and all beauty is eternally displayed in actualized form".

"The aims and ideals that move us are generated through imagination. But they are not made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience.....the new vision does not arise out of nothing, but emerges through seeing, in terms of possibilies, that is, of imagination, old things in new relations serving a new end which the new end aids in creating".

pg. 56-57

(on the change in intellectual climate due to increased knowledge and means of understanding)

"The.. change enables man to select those elements in natural conditions that may be organized and support and extend the sway of ideals. All purpose is selective, and all intelligent action includes deliberate choice. In the degree in which we cease to depend upon belief in the supernatural, selection is enlightened and choice can be made in behalf of ideals whose inherent relations to conditions and consequences are understood...Religion would then be found to have its natural place in every aspect of human experience that is concerned with estimate of possibilities, with emotional stir by possibilities yet unrealized, and with all action in behalf of their realization. All that is significant(meaningful/valuable) in human experience falls within this frame".

In Kant this is termed; in the Critique of Practical Reason; "the concept of the object of practical reason", and is described by Kant as being between what we can achieve and what we can't- thus between the "possible" and "impossible". Thus the insistence by Hickman and Alexander against Dewey utilizing any sense of "value" or "ideal" in the corpus is overstated to emphasize the instrumental aspect of "valuation". It is located in the 2nd essay of 'A Common Faith'.