What I would like to know?
There is a popular philosophical joke intended to
typifythe endless and useless arguments of
philosophers; I meanthe joke about which came first,
the chicken or the egg?I am not sure that
properly understood, it is so futile an inquiryafter all.
I am not concerned here to enter on those
deepmetaphysical and theological differences of
which the chickenand egg debate is a frivolous,
but a very felicitous, type.The evolutionary materialists are
appropriately enoughrepresented in the vision of all
things coming from an egg,a dim and monstrous oval
germ that had laid itself by
accident.That other supernatural
school of thought (to which Ipersonally adhere) would
be not unworthily typified in the fancythat this round
world of ours is but an egg brooded uponby a sacred
unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets.But
it is to much humbler functions that I
here call the awfulpower of such a distinction.
Whether or no the living birdis at the beginning of
our mental chain, it is absolutelynecessary that it
should be at the end of our mental chain.The
bird is the thing to be aimed at--not with a gun, but alife-bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is this: that the egg and the bird
must not be thought of as equal cosmicoccurrences
recurring alternatively forever. They must not
becomea mere egg and bird pattern, like the egg and
dart pattern. One isa means and the other an end;
they are in different mental worlds.Leaving
the complications of the human breakfast-table out of
account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists
to producethe chicken. But the chicken does not
exist only in orderto produce another egg. He may
also exist to amuse himself,to praise God, and
even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist.
Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable
in himself.Now our modern politics are full of a
noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production
of this happy and consciouslife is after all the
aim of all complexities and compromises.We talk of nothing
but useful men and working institutions; that
is,we only think of the chickens as things that
will lay more eggs.Instead of seeking to breed our
ideal bird, the eagleof Zeus or the Swan of Avon,
or whatever we happen to want,we talk entirely in terms
of the process and the embryo.The
process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes doubtfuland even
morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything;and our
politics are rotten eggs. From
CCEL site
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