Ethical and Aesthetic Meaning and Experience

Abstract

We have thus far been speaking of our environment in terms of individual objects, such as trees and rocks, books and tigers. But in fact our practical consciousness, or consciousness as agents, does not normally focus upon objects in isolation but rather upon groups of objects complexly related to form what we can call situations. By a situation I mean that particular selection from our total environment to which at a given time we consciously relate ourselves as actual or potential agents. This is made up of entities each of which has its own distinctive character or meaning; but the situation itself also has a meaning which exceeds that of the sum of its constituent parts. And our consciousness normally functions on this situational level as an awareness of a continuum of objects within which we act or react.

Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well, developed as in man. (Charles Darwin 1875, 98)