Claim. James’s and Dewey’s pragmatic reduction of truth, goodness, and intelligence to instruments useful for everyday life inverts the proper ontological order: everyday life in pursuit of food, clothing, and shelter should be grounded in truth, goodness, and beauty, which in turn are grounded in the purpose of creation — to actualize God’s love.
Elaboration. Lee’s appraisal of pragmatism (Unification Thought Appraisal of the Pragmatic Perspective on Ethics) targets the instrumentalization of value. James held that whatever works is true, and that ethical propositions are ‘true and good so long as they provide satisfaction or peace to the mind.’ Dewey extended this: intelligence is an instrument for processing problems effectively, moral principles are tools for analyzing situations, and goodness is realized step by step through expanding knowledge meeting life’s requirements.
Lee’s counter-argument has two layers. The first is teleological inversion: everyday life exists for the sake of the values of truth, goodness, and beauty, which in turn exist for the sake of the purpose-of-creation — actualizing true love. To subordinate values to life is to put the instrument above the end. An act that is useful to life is not automatically good; only acts in accord with the purpose of creation are good. (If a useful act also accords with the purpose of creation, it is good — the categories can coincide but the grounding remains teleological.)
The second layer uses Unification Thought’s epistemology of logos. Logos is formed through inner sungsang and hyungsang give-and-take centered on heart (love) and purpose. Inner Sungsang contains intellect, emotion, will; inner Hyungsang contains ideas, concepts, laws, mathematical principles. Lee grants Dewey a partial point: inner Hyungsang is in object position to inner Sungsang and can be called an instrument; and intellect/emotion/will can themselves be called instruments for the realization of love. So Dewey’s instrumentalism is ‘not wrong if it is centered on God’s purpose of creation’ — it is wrong only when aimed merely at everyday affluence.
The summary verdict on Dewey’s hope that scientific progress would automatically yield social good: ‘the progress of science does not necessarily correspond with values. Only when science aligns itself with the realization of the purpose of creation… will fact and value come to be unified.’ This is Lee’s recurring move — every modern philosophy fails when severed from the purpose-of-creation but is partially salvageable when reintegrated with it.
See also. kant-categorical-imperative-fails-without-purpose-of-creation, perfection-as-spirit-mind-dominating-physical-mind, logos-unites-freedom-and-necessity