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."