Dewey's "mind"

"The vague mysterious properties assigned to mind and matter, the very conceptions of mind and matter in traditional thought, are ghosts walking underground" (p. 65).

"The idea that matter and mind are two sides or 'aspects' of the same things, like the convex and concave in a curve, is literally unthinkable" (p. 66).

"We do not start with convexity and concavity as two independant things and then set up an unknown tertium quid to unite two disparate things... to which both mind and matter belong is the complex of events that constitute nature.  This becomes a mysterious tertium quid, incapable of designation, only when mind and matter are taken to be static structures instead of functional characters."

The Eaglet viewed from the top of Cannon Cliff

Recently, after listening to Elizabeth Gilbert discuss her creative process, I wrote in a notebook "mind is like Dewey's 'epidermis'" thinking of Art as Experience where Dewey wrote "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where the organism ends and the environment begins."  I was thinking that the things which make up "mind" are largely the things of our environment, that our mind finds order and meaning through the perceived relationships, and that the creative, dreamy, and non-sense things of the mind are rooted in some way in the natural environment.  I'm not sure that the above quotes validate my notebook thought; I can't confidently say that I understand exactly what Dewey is getting at, but I think I may have been on a similar path?

Existence as Precarious and as Stable

Dewey's first study of life by means of philosophy considers the necessity of both stable, constant existences as well as the precarious, dubious, and the ever changing.  They work together in relation to one another, the constant is so in relation to what changes, the complete in relation to the incomplete, order in relation to chaos.  This reminds me of Dewey's discussion of rhythm in Art as Experience. Dewey argues that the philosophic fallacy is where "thinkers have relegated the uncertain and unfinished to invidious state of unreal being, while they have systematically exalted the assured and complete to the rank of true Being" (p. 51.)  I think of the logical positivists, and Dewey specifically names Bertrand Russell (p. 54) but includes the Platonic Idea of a "finished, complete, stable, wholly unprecarious reality," Democritus, Aristotle, Spinoza, and a host of others.  Expanding on this theme Dewey writes, "A world of 'ifs' is alone a world of 'musts'- the 'ifs' express the real differences; the 'musts' real connections.  The stable and recurrent is needed for the fulfillment of the possible; the doubtful can be settled only through its adaptation to stable objects" (p. 59). 

The nature of our world, the combination of the stable and the doubtful, is what gives rise to thinking.  "reflective thinking transforms confusion, ambiguity and discrepancy into illumination, definiteness and consistency.  But it also points to the contextual situation in which thinking occurs" (p. 61) and hence Dewey's insistence in chapter one that theory must return to experience.  Contingent for rational thought however, is imagination, "The conversion of the logic of reflection into an ontology of rational being is thus due to arbitrary conversion of an eventual natural function of unification into a causal antecedent reality; this in turn is due to the tendency of the imagination working under the influence of emotion to carry unification from an actual, objective and experimental enterprise, limited to particular situations where it is needed, into unrestricted, wholesale movement which ends in all-absorbing dream" (p. 62).  Thus, the fact that we do think, Dewey argues, is the ultimate proof that uncertainty and contingency exists.

The last point I want to remember goes back to the idea of rhythm.  Dewey writes, "Every existence is an event" (p. 63).  In time, everything changes, the perception of the certainty is found in "measure, relation, ratio, knowledge of the comparative tempos of change" (p. 64).  When we look at our individual existence we understand this fact, but when we consider the rules we believe govern nature it becomes more difficult to grasp.  It leads me to ask the question, if in time everything ends, what about time, does it too end, and was there a period of before time?  I'm asking the question knowing that Stephen Hawking, using string theory, suggested that time and our universe sprang into existence from nowhere.  I obviously don't know enough to discuss how he was able to support that theory, but I think Dewey would have avoided the question in the first place, because the theory in question is beyond the scope of what we can test in experience. 

Experience and Philosophic Method - 1929

Upon reading the later version of the opening chapter of this work, and following your comment to my discussion of the 1925 version, I noticed how little Dewey uses the term "denotation."  He referres to it only once, "this empirical method I shall call the denotative method" (p. 16).  Yesterday I had placed the idea of dictation, transcribing events, living deliberately, or simply attending to one's own experience as it happens (sometimes I think you say a form of writing one's experience into memory?) onto the term denotation.  Today, I think of it more like the scientific method of theorizing, which begins in raw experience and must return to it.  "Theory may intervene in a long course of reasoning, many portions of which are remote from what is directly experienced.  But the vine of pendant theory is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject matter" (p. 11).  Dewey illustrates this method in science, through Einstein's theory of deflection.  "what role do the objects attained in reflection play? Where do they come in?  They explain the primary objects, they enable us to grasp them with understanding, instead of just having sense-contact with them" (p. 16).  He illustrates that Einstein first noticed something about light and nature which prompted his reflective inquiry, his theorizing.  Einstein then was able to create a hypothesis and test it, using an upcoming eclipse as the natural experience opportunity to measure the bending of light around mass.  Dewey also points out, that were this final observation discovered first, as though by chance, its significance could be overlooked, "just as we daily drop from attention hundreds of perceived details for which we have no intellectual use."  Dewey also gives us "a first-rate test of the value of any philosophy which is offered us: does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful?" (p. 18).  And this I think is an aim of ED 5010, which may be as humble as letting the fly out of the bottle, or as grandiose as to lead to the theory or relativity. 

Through following the denotative method of philosophy we see that "the things of primary experience are so arresting and engrossing that we tend to accept them just as they are" (p. 22)  The flat earth.  The sun marching across the sky.  Morals, religion, and politics.  "Only analysis shows that the ways in which we believe and expect have a tremendous effect upon what we believe and expect.  We have discovered at last that these ways are set, almost abjectly so, by social factors, by tradition, and the influence of education...we believe many things not because things are so, but because we have become habituated..." (p. 23).  I believe Wittgenstein might say that the foundation of our mode of life is held up by the house itself.

Dewey writes, "Philosophical simplifications are due to choice, and choice marks an interest moral in the broad sense of concern for what is good" (p. 33) and then, "Selective emphasis, choice, is inevitable whenever reflection occurs.  This is not an evil.  Deception comes only when the presence and operation of choice is concealed, disguised, and denied" (p. 34).  Dewey suggests that philosophies of previous generations went astray when they made unacknowledged choices, and states that the aim of this work is to work with the "great philosophic systems, endeavoring to point out their elements of strength and weakness when their conclusions are employed" (p. 37).  To test theory in experience.  "It will not be a study of philosophy but a study, by means of philosophy, of life experience" (p. 40).  At the end of the chapter I wrote in the book, "Philosophy: empirical method to find choice in social/cultural norms & practices, to critique outcomes in experience, and to offer alternatives."

Experience and Philosophic Method - 1925

In Dewey's original opening chapter to Experience and Nature he discusses the problems and misuses of the term "experience" when used in philosophy.  Experience is as broad as "the whole wide universe of fact and dream, of event, act, desire, fancy and meanings, valid or invalid, can be set in contrast to nothing" (p. 371[appendix I]).  The issue arises, I believe, when using individual case studies to prove some or other point.  Experience "is presented to us as a catholic and innocent neutral, free from guile and partisanship.  But then unwittingly there is substituted for this free, full, unbiased and pliable companion of us all, a simplified and selected character, which is already pointed in a special direction and loaded with preferred conclusions."  The problem with experience as the source for philosophy is that somewhere at some time there is some experience which taken on its own and out of context could serve as an example for just about any point.

However, "the value of experience as method in philosophy is that it compels us to note that denotation comes first and last, so that to settle any discussion, to still any doubt, to answer any question, we must go to some thing pointed to, denoted, and find our answer in that thing" (p. 372).  This to me sounds like where ED 5010 picks up, the thought of waking up to our experience to the point of being able to denote, or to dictate it, is the starting point of doing philosophy.  Dewey feels that "we need the notion of experience to remind us that "reality" includes whatever is denotatively found" (events, acts, desires, fancies, and meanings.)  He suggests that one of the things denoted is deduction and logic, and I think that he implies that when objects in experience can be backed up with logic, then we have a starting point for discussion.

Earlier in the chapter, when arguing against the notion of experience as merely sensuous, Dewey writes "instead of experiencing something less than a chair he experiences a good deal more than a chair" (p. 368) and then, regarding Othello, "the actual experience was charged with history and prophecy, full of love jealousy and villainy, fulfilling past human relationships and moving fatally to tragic destiny."  

So at this point I think Dewey intends for us to use the denotation of experience to get at the meanings within our experiences, by getting to the "good deal more than" the objects and fancies, to the things that "force us to labor, that satisfy needs, that surprise us with beauty, that compel obedience under penalty." (p. 376). 

One of the things we find when denoting experience, is the categorization of experiences seeming to predate philosophy, "experience is political, religious, esthetic, industrial, mine, yours" (p. 375).

Dewey makes other interesting arguments, many of which I think are working with ideas from James, ideas which Wittgenstein also works with.  On the essence: " a common divisor is a convenience, and a greatest common divisor has the greatest degree of convenience.  But there is no reason for supposing that its intrinsic 'reality' or truth is greater than that of the number it divides" (p 376).  On being, having, and knowing: "being angry, stupid, wise, inquiring; having sugar, the light of day, money, houses and lands, friends, laws, masters, subjects, pain and joy, occur in dimensions incommensurable to knowing these things which we are and have and use, and which have and use us" (p. 378).  On meaning and culture: " the things which a man experiences come to him clothed in meanings which originate in custom and tradition" (p. 383).  And the aim of philosophy: "the purport of thinking, scientific and philosophic, is not to eliminate choice but to render it less arbitrary, and more significant" (p. 390). 

Lastly, I want to remember "Man in nature is man subjected; nature in man, recognized and used, is intelligence and art" (p. 384).

Experience and Nature

I thought I'd start with Dewey's 9th chapter, Experience, Nature, and Art, as it's so closely related to Art as Experience.  I get the sense that Dewey thinks of art as a way of life, as a verb, much more than he thinks of art as a category of objects.   Though of course he discusses art as objects also.

He discusses useful arts compared to fine arts, and culminates the discussion at the end of the chapter with, "Fine art consciously undertaken as such is peculiarly instrumental in quality.  It is a device in experimentation carried on for the sake of education" (p. 293).  This comes after some discussion about the idea of "usefulness" pertaining to serving a definitive purpose, as shoes, mugs, or buildings might be put to a particular use.  "Here inquiry and imagination stop.  What they also make by way of narrow, embittered, and crippled life, of congested, hurried, confused and extravgent life, is left in oblivion" (p. 2 72).  Dewey gets into means and ends, I think making the point as he does in AAE that when they are separate they fall towards the anaesthetic, and that for many workers the labor which seems to lead to wages are rather disconnected, "instead of an operation of means, there is an enforced necessity of doing one thing as a coerced antecedent of the occurrence of another thing which is wanted" (p. 275). 

Later Dewey discusses meaning and ideas, some meanings are formed hastily from perceived actions and results, while others are incorporated with ideas, bearing consequence on long term, consistent experiences.  "The idea is, in short, art and a work of art" (p. 278).  He discusses process in relation to means and ends, and that in aesthetic process the ends are present in the means, such that the house is present in the wood we use to make it.  "The end-in-view is a plan which is contemporaneously operative in the selecting and arranging materials" (p. 280).  Dewey discusses essences and seems to reject the classic philosophical notion of them as making things "what they are, even though not causing them to occur" (p. 289).  The classic view of the essence seems to me out of place with the aesthetic process.

In considering the place of science in relation to art and nature Dewey writes, "In short, the history of human experience is a history of the development of the arts.  The history of science in its distinct emergence from religious, ceremonial and poetic arts is the record of a differentiation of the arts, not a record of separation from art."  Dewey feels that science is an art, it is the art of observing, recording, and explaining the details of the natural world.

When we come  back to the end of the chapter and consider fine art to be an experimentation for the sake of education, I'm thinking about that notion of art synthesized through art as verbage, or as an active way of life.  I think of taking a stand to make a point, such as Thoreau's act of civil disobedience, as an expression of the artistic life.  Or, I think taking a stand in another way, such as living deliberately, is to live the artistic.  Its extremely fulfilling.

Art and Civilization

Quite often we hear statements about the value of the arts in society similar to Dewey's "the ultimate judgment upon the quality of civilization" (p. 339).  But Dewey tells us why, "For while it is produced and is enjoyed by individuals, those individuals are what they are in the content of their experience because of the cultures in which they participate."  So really, instead of elevating the arts to the highest and noblest achievements of the human race, they are more of a litmus test of a civilization.  I find this interesting when considering the work from the modern, post World War I era.  At times the judgment of our civilizations are not very kind, although quite accurate. 

I think this last chapter suggests to us as teachers some attitudes for improving the lives of our students.  Dewey comments on the need to change the structure of labor so that the proletariat workers can find aesthetic satisfaction in doing their jobs.  He suggest this can be accomplished when they have freedom of design and interest in the operations of production.  While I don't know that we can change the economic system to realize Dewey's vision, we can give our students these experiences, teach from them, and help our students to value forms of work with some degree of play, which allow for aesthetic fulfillment. 

Criticism and Perception

"One may even reverse the statement and say the value of ideals lies in the experiences to which they lead" (p. 335). 

In our society teachers must be able to understand and ultimately evaluate the learning of their students.  In this respect the teacher acts as a critic of the student, and although Dewey's discussion of the role of the critic is with regard to the arts, I think it parallels this aspect of the teacher's responsibilities.  Its interesting then to read through Dewey's discussion of standards in cirticism, given the current "standards based" approach to education. "...standards, prescriptions, and rules are general while objects of art are individual" (p. 313).  And so it is with students and their work.  "In order to get concreteness, they have to be referred for exemplification to the work of  'the masters.' Thus in fact they encourage imitation."  I think, that in teaching music, or really in teaching anything which involves creativity (and really every subject should involve some creativity) that a bit of imitation is ok, although imitation should act as a stepping stone towards more original creativity.  So in this regard, standards could serve as something of an elementary starting point (but not an intellectual or artistic ending point.) 

Later in the chapter Dewey writes that standards are unambiguous, quantitative measures, and while they may be used to measure things -"the yard is a yardstick, and the meter is a bar deposited in Paris" (p. 319  reminds me of Wittgenstein)- they are not values.  "Standards define things with respect to quantity. To be able to measure quantities is a great aid to further judgments, but it is not itself a mode of judgment" (p. 320).   This encourages the position that in education standards are not to be used as goals for achievement, as ultimate judgements of students, but that they help to measure specific things which in turn can help to make academic judgments.  We as teachers can use standards to measure the guidelines in which the content of experience could be framed, and that would allow the music teacher up the street to teach a reasonably equitable curriculum as me, understanding full well that "equitable" is not "the same."  Some form of measurement must take place to allow for that to happen.  But too heavy a focus on the standards, in an environment which values standards as achievement goals, places its ideals on measurement and not on quality, and will lead to experiences not fit for our students.  Again, "the value of ideals lies in the experiences to which they lead."

The Challenge to Philosophy

In an earlier post I wrote something about the essence of things not existing, following Wittgenstein's attention to particular details of this thing, and Dewey's discussion of categories, that seeing clouds is not the same as seeing this cloud.  But now Dewey discusses the essence directly, stating that "we eliminate irrelevancies and retain what is indispensable" (p. 305).  This notion of the essence is heightened in art, which captures what an artist feels is the essence of a particular situation.  Dewey suggests that instead of art working towards some preconceived (and secret) essence of aesthetics, particular artworks reverse the process so that they show the essence of aesthetics by showing what is indispensable from an artist's perspective.  He says that what is essential is the experience as an experience, which as I read it implies that the essence is not a super quality nor something hidden beneath the surface.

The Human Contribution - Imagination

I just wanted to get these reminders down.  Dewey suggests that imagination is not so much a thing as "it is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole" (p. 278).  "an imaginative experience is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world."  "Time is the test that discriminates the imaginative from the imaginary.  The latter passes because it is arbitrary.  The imaginative endures because, while at first strange with respect to us, it is enduringly familiar with respect to the nature of things" (p. 280).  Engaging with the arts have the ability to send us from a place of security into imagination and wonder. 

To see imaginatively is some aspect of seeing artistically, and seems to me to be necessary in the evolution of thought.  Dewey avoids discussing imagination much like he avoids beauty, because in aesthetic thought the two seem to be of the essence of the arts, things which are ethereal and undefinable.

Of course, Dewey opens the next chapter with "Esthetic experience is imaginative.  This fact, in connection with a false idea of the nature of imagination, has obscured the fact that all conscious experience has of necessity some degree of imaginative quality" (p. 283).  A point Allan has mentioned with respect to education and marriage, and one I would assume extends to parenting.

Lastly on imagination, when left alone and unrealized it stays dreamlike, and in education this type of imagination could be argued as a distraction or off the point.  But through the creation of art, imagination must be ordered and worked with, realized and continually criticized by the young artist struggling to achieve the creation of the imaginative impulse.  In this way I think art education could serve as practice for goal setting and achievement, an argument perhaps necessary in town politics. 

The Human Contribution - Mind

"...so called scientific psychology have been pretty thoroughly infected by the idea of the separateness of the mind and body.  This notion of their separation inevitably results in creating a dualism between 'mind' and 'practice,' since the latter must operate through the body" (p. 274).  This thought comes to Dewey after discussing various categorizing of experiences, including art, and a discussion of the common attitude of separation of the self from the environment.  This is a strong paradigm which I feel is seriously flawed in the society we live in.  I once heard of a woman who after suffering a stroke lost all sense of the boundaries of her body so that the entire room she was in seemed to be connected to her.  And as Dewey wrote much earlier, it is, for "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins.  There are things inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it that belong to it de jure, if not de facto" (p.61).  As we live in an environment, we really are a part of that environment, much like as a musical note is in a piece just as much as it is a part of that piece.  Our particular relation to the whole of our environment is much like Dewey writes of art, which "has the faculty of enhancing and concentrating this union of quality and meaning in a way which vivifies both" (p. 270).  The quality and meaning of our existence is tied to our environment.  And, as art reminds us, we think through our environment as much as through any partucular part of our body.

From the opening citation Dewey treats the word "Mind" as Wittgenstein would suggests "The meaning of a word is its use in language."  He settles on the notion of mind as primarily a verb, connected to the objects and environment which its activities are inherently connected with. 

"Mind as background is formed out of the modifications of the self that have occurred in the process of prior interactions with the environment" (p.275).  Here I relate Dewey's "background" to Wittgenstein's "bedrock;" the mind forms our form of life into which past experiences have contributed and future experiences are framed within.  And that sounds quite a bit like James' "stream of thought."