"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?
A core issue here that Dewey came back to over and over again in different works is one that you can see in Wittgenstein. "Mind" (like W's view of language) is not a subjective, personal, interior notion.
ReplyDeleteRather (you'd better "mind" me here) "mind" is a verb. One that indicates a transaction between the live creature and the environment that the creature moves through in time and space.
it's interesting that Lopez enters into this space in a very powerful and beautiful way in the essay we've used for some time now in ED 5010. I think what Lopez attempts in "Landscape and Narrative" is an example of the denotative method at work. It's not just a simple noting of landscape, people, stories etc. It, in effect, gives new words to something Dewey wanted to get at in E&N and that people like Lopez and Geertz and others who've opened up new philosophical-anthropological vistas for us have made good on. You can catch this is good literature, and, you can catch it in the kind of anthropology that places humans in varying environmental contexts grasped in sequences of continuities of "nows".
And this is what I think Thoreau recorded in his Journal also.
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ReplyDeleteMy dissertation advisor, Jim Chambliss from the intro to one of his books:
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What proves to be most striking about the naturalism of Plato, Aristotle, Vico, Rousseau, and Keats is not their differences in emphasis, method, and style, although these differences plainly exist. It is, rather, the way in which their conceptions of imagination and reason were formed in the context of what John Dewey has called "the precarious nature of existence." Under the heading, "Existence as Precarious and as Stable," in Experience and Nature he once wrote:
If classic philosophy says so much about unity and so little about unreconciled diversity. so much about the eternal and permanent, and so little about change (save as something to be resolved into combinations of the permanent), so much about the comprehending universal and so little about the recalcitrant particular. it may well be because the ambiguousness and ambivalence of reality are actually so pervasive. Since these things form the problem, solution is more apparent (although not more actual) in the degree in which whatever of stability and assurance the world presents is fastened upon and asserted (p. 46).
What is common to the naturalism of the writers considered here is their sensitivity to the "unreconciled diversity" of experience, their awareness of the ways in which men of pride are humbled by "the ambiguousness and ambivalence of reality." Their naturalism is one of humility, yet it is a prideful humility, whose expression attained classic form in Greek tragic poetry.
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I've come to appreciate the Chambliss mode of "highlighting" things like: "unreconciled diversity" and "the ambiguousness and ambivalence of reality". I'd also add to these: "so much about comprehending the universal and so little about the recalcitrant particular".
What are we to denote? What characterizes the confusions and set the problems we have to solve? The recalcitrant particulars that make up an unreconciled diversity, the ambiguousness and ambivalence of reality.
That Dewey in this little citation brings together these features as pervasive dimensions of reality—of course "a reality" that he imagined in reflection or the act of writing—but also one that was his life experience: It is a piece of genius I think. Dewey then propels these things toward his notion of "doing philosophy" when he wrote: "These things form the problem." This is Maxine' Greene's notion of making sense of a confusing world, when she writes about doing philosophy and honoring the nature of problems.