Criticism of a wood pile

THIS IS A DRAFT



Wood pile, April 28^th, 2011

Was Dewey an “environmentalist?”  So far as I know that term was not used during Dewey’s time as it is now, so our immediate answer would have to be no, Dewey was just what he was.  I believe that even at the end of Dewey’s life in the early 1950s the environmental movement was not present, certainly not something in the mainstream.  Was Rachel Carlson’s book Silent Spring the start of popular environmental awareness in the 1960s?  It may have been possible that in scientific circles environmental issues were discussed and debated, however “science is an elite language” (I can’t find the quote I’m looking for just yet) and environmental science was probably not one Dewey was deeply involved in. 

Would Dewey have been an environmentalist if he were alive today?  That doesn’t really matter, does it?  But to the extent that his ideas are artistic, that is, “as a work of art, (they) directly liberate subsequent action and makes it more fruitful in a creation of more meanings and more perception” (E&N p.278) we can draw from Dewey’s vast discussions of the environment, and the absolute necessity the organism has of it.

Today, I believe the single most pressing environmental issue is climate change, which I believe is the consequence of greenhouse gases, which have been put into the atmosphere to a large extent by burning fossil fuels.  There are other pressing environmental issues, but so far as it is my belief, and I have not been persuaded through argument otherwise (baring in mind that I am a music teacher, not a scientist,) climate change is the issue which comes to mind foremost when I consider how the world will be when my children are old. 

This week I have been preparing firewood to burn in my house next winter.  We also have an oil furnace, and I believe that burning wood is “cleaner,” therefore I believe it is a good when chosen against burning oil.  This year we are planning to replace our furnace to a more efficient model, perhaps even switching fuel sources, and we are also planning on replacing our woodstove, to a more efficient model.  There is also a financial motive to burning firewood; for $160 I purchased my medium sized Hasqvarna chainsaw, and for small investments in gasoline, oil, a chain file and the occasional replacement chain, I can cut firewood from the land around my house.  I had cut stove length pieces of firewood with the chainsaw previously and I estimated that I had about one cord of wood, which is 128 cubic feet, or a stack 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet.  I have a 16 inch bar on my saw, which I had used to roughly measure for stove length.  I would need three stacks of wood, 4 feet high and 8 feet long, which together would be 4 feet wide.   This wood only needed to be split in order to dry out over the summer to be useful next winter.  I would be better if it could season for an additional year, but I don’t believe it is completely necessary.

So this week I began splitting wood, on the far side of my field, which has rather nice views and is fairly secluded from other people, despite being out in the open.  The wood pile is along the eastern border of our property, along an old stone wall, there is a smaller field beyond it and then a steep hill dropping roughly 300 feet.  The neighbors who own the smaller field have been away in Florida for the winter and will not return for another month or so.  Early in the week the skies were overcast, with the occasional rain and thunder storm rolling through.   Thursday a high pressure system had cleared away the humidity and clear blue skies were accompanied by a slight breeze and a high temperature somewhere in the low 60s. 

After waking up Thursday I ate breakfast with Ashley on the couch while watching the royal wedding (it’s not every day that the prince of England gets married.)  It was nice time with Ashley, allowing us to break out of the normal work morning routine (she had to work) and discuss the things we noticed and thought about from this novel situation.  It is the type of event which, although not earth shattering, offers us opportunities to understand each other just a little bit better.  The digital reception starting breaking up during the Men’s choir performance of a John Rutter piece (a name I recognized and mentioned to Ashley) so she left for work; I decided to spend the morning out at the wood pile.  I assumed that I would be able to finish splitting the stove length pieces (I had done a little less than half of a cord, what I thought was about half of the pile, but had not cut many more logs into stove lengths yet.)  I brewed a pot of coffee while cleaning the breakfast dishes and then brought a mug with me (and a water bottle) across the not too wet field with Nada (the dog.)  I heard a male Chickadee and two birds which I cannot name, calling back and forth.  Or it sounded as though they were singing back and forth as their songs were the same except for the final note, which was slightly lower from the bird to my right.  So it sounded like one would call and the other would answer.  Occasionally they called at the same time, sounding in unison until that last pitch.  I noticed that the grass in the field was definitely starting to grow, the temperature had been rather cool until the previous day, when a thunder storm came through in the afternoon which must have been a warm front. 

I got to the pile around 7:15, the sun was hitting parts of the pile although the trees at the edge of the field cast long shadows over the pile and westward into the field.  The wood which I had split earlier in the week seemed almost to shine brightly, with different intensities, hues, tones, and colors varying with wood type and the texture with which the wood had split.  There was one full stack at what I estimated to be 4 feet high and 8 feet long, although I had not taken a tape or stick to the stack to be sure; I felt as though I wanted to test my judgment and my past experience.  There was a little less than half of a second stack.  At the ends of each pile I had stacked wood, three pieces at a time, alternating in direction in order to make something of a tower to hold up each end.  With the full stack (which I had done first,) the bottom course of this end tower was stacked parallel to the pile itself.  When starting the second pile I placed the pieces in this first course of the tower perpendicularly to the rest of the pile, thinking that it would offer more resistance to settling wood and that the integrity of the stack would be stronger.  Time will tell. 

Towers at the end of each stack, the one of the right with the first course parallel to the stack

Soon, after quickly surveying the scene, I split a few pieces, as I tend to feel like starting things right away.  The birds stopped their calls momentarily at the loud clap of the splitting mall hitting the wood, but within seconds were calling again.  After just a few pieces I stopped in order to more fully appreciate this moment.

I had been taking a few pictures already, so I took a few more, and I got two particularly good pictures of Nada, sitting on the east side of the pile, with a backdrop of the sunlight on the wood pile and beyond that our field and house, with the blue sky. 

The other picture was of her playing in the splitting zone, and I felt as though I were out here playing as well, just something of a different game.  We had burned approximately two cords of wood this past winter, and had roughly one half cord left in the shed.  I estimate it will take two cords to fill the shed, and it seems likely with us being home more through the winter that we’ll burn more than this past winter (we will both be home through November with a newborn baby, Ashley will not be working full time afterwards, and her mother will be babysitting, possibly at our house.  During all of these times we will likely be burning the wood stove, times when we were not this past year.)   So I will need to split two cords of wood this spring in order that they will dry out enough to burn in order to fill the shed.  I would like to have a half cord split and dried additionally, so that we would have a total of three cords just in case.  Throughout the summer and fall I would like to split an additional three cords, allowing additional time for the wood to season and to get ahead of what I would need. 

As I surveyed the log length pieces, I estimated that I had my second cord there, but I wanted to split this cord first to get it out of the way and to refine my estimates.  I had more treed which I wished to cut, and could do so if my estimates were short (and would do throughout the summer and fall anyways.)  As I continued splitting I felt a sense of awareness of more than just my labor, and that felt a bit like much needed exercise.  I kept listening to the birds, the ones just overhead and close by, and the ones further away in the woods, making different calls.  Some of them were out in the field, many of them fluttered between the trees along this stone wall.  I kept watch of the gradual shift of the shadows and the quality of light, which was continually pleasing.  There was a consistent slight breeze, as there usually is near the edge of this hill, and although I would sweat while working the air felt as though it had a lively cool snap, it felt awake. 

When I felt tired, I stopped, occasionally walking the stone wall, or sitting in a sunny spot.  I stretched to keep my shoulders loose and to keep the blood moving through them.  I drank my coffee and water, and took quite a few pictures.  As I stacked the wood, I took care to place it as to reinforce the integrity of the stack, though not to the point of obsession (we’ll see if these stacks stand until the fall when I collect them.)  At some point I made plans to meet my mother and grandmother for lunch, and felt a slight sense of urgency to finish the pile before then, which I soon realized would not be difficult to do.  I thought about Dewey, this post as a “criticism of splitting wood,” fatherhood, and I remembered an idea about responded to Cindi’s ED 5010 final prompt, which was about her father.   I thought about my stepfather’s wood splitter, and my 5-6 cord goal for the year.  I repositioned the splitting block in order to make more efficient use of the space and the piles, and found that in this new position I could not fully extend my arms when swinging, but that this seemed to work better and easier when splitting.  I had a few direct strikes of wood to the handle of the splitting mall, but it did not seem to be breaking at all (which I had done once or twice in my youth.)  I continued to survey the grain of wood in each piece, as well as the knots where branches had been, in order to split each piece with the most ease I could find. 

At 9:55 I finished splitting and stacking, noticed that my third stack was only about 3 feet tall and not 4, so by my estimates I was slightly under a cord.  I felt really good, so I sat on the sunny rock, facing the sun with my back to the one large pine tree along the wall, until 10:00.  Nada and I went back to the house and started other projects until I left to meet my family for lunch.  Later my grandmother came to the house, we split a beer while sitting in the back yard, and then walked across the field to the wood pile and the view.  She mentioned again how grateful she is, at 91, to have spent so much time in such a  beautiful state.

I first had the thought (after E&N) to use the wood pile as an experience for criticism when I started the second stack and placed the first few pieces of the end tower perpendicular to the pile, rather than parallel to it.  I felt I could discuss in great detail the aesthetics of splitting and stacking wood.  As I worked on the pile the idea changed, as I considered the advantages of using a gasoline powered splitter.  It seems like an obvious environmental  discussion, weighing the advantages of time saved and availability of a cleaner, renewable fuel source in contrast to a relatively miniscule amount of carbon emissions from the splitter, given that I’ve already used a mechanical saw and diesel powered tractor while working with the wood.  I decided to split the first cord by hand before making a decision, but as I did I felt the discussion changing again, towards one of overall aesthetics.

 Disregarding the economical and environmental considerations (no matter what on some level I would turn out to be hypocritical,) the experience of splitting a cord of wood by hand and by machine, I think, are completely different.   As I wrote above this experience felt more like play than work, and after years and years of laboring hard and efficiently for other people, in exchange for wages, I find a deep sense of pleasure in doing many of these same jobs for my own immediate benefit, at my free and leisurely pace, at my home, with my dog.  There is something in looking at a pile of wood which I have split by hand which is more fulfilling than one split with a machine, and there is certainly more worth remembering in the process of labor when done by hand.  Would I have considered Cindi's post while hunched over a loud engine sucking in fumes?  I felt something of a desire to be the type of father she describes, having fun working with his children.  I do feel an overall environmental discussion still, when rereading my thoughts of fatherhood, my grandmother’s affection for the beauty of our state, and the image of my children at her age.  It’s an ever present, but almost subliminal background to my thinking. 

Face on a coffee mug?  A homemade wedding gift watching me work.

A Conceptual Blaze: How to go on

You wrote:  "Dewey concludes by urging us to test this mode of philosophic discourse in experience, to tie the other end of the vine of theory back to experience.   It falls somewhere between science and art, but it, like everything else, is held accountable to the results in experience."


Wittgenstein Paragraph 155 in PI:    "Thus what I wanted to say was: when he suddenly knew how to   go  on, when he understood the principle, then possibly he had a special experience—and if he is asked: "What was it? What took place when you suddenly grasped the principle?" perhaps he will describe it much as we described it above—but for us it is the circumstances under which he had such an experience that justify him in saying in such a case that he understands, that  he knows how to     go      on."


The form of the question, which is paradigmatic of both Dewey and Wittgenstein is:  How do I go on?   That's their alternative to "This is how it is."   


I read Dewey's treatment (in E&N)  of "test this mode of philosophical discourse in experience" as an elaborated consideration of the form and content of Wittgenstein's statement (my paraphrase) "Now I know how to go on."   This is the linguistic form or sentence that captures the notion of  "understanding".    Hence, it can be considered almost as a paradigm form of expression for getting around in the experienced world.   The means by which we move ourselves to a more perspicuous representation (another sentence/hypothesis/testing action) by which then becomes the next test in experience.   


And of course we have in Wittgenstein:   the immediate "circumstances under which he had such an experience" (that is of  how to go on).    And this states not just possibilities but also limitations.  And this hooks up with Dewey's treatment of working with experience (refining/discriminating/critically evaluating) in order to return to experience as another test of "how to go on".    "Success and failure are the primary 'categories'  of life...."  (Dewey, J.  (1985).  Essays on philosophy and education.  In J. Boydston (Ed.), The middle works, 1899-1924, Vol. 10.  Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, p. 10)


One might observe:   Now I know how to go on to  read Democracy and Education.   An hypothesis to be tested in those experiences.

Existence, Value and Criticism

“As to truth, then, philosophy has no preeminent status; it is a recipient, not a donor” (p. 307).

Beede Falls, Fabruary 19th, 2011.

“If we are to recur to the Greek conceptions, the return must be a return with a difference.  It must surrender the identification of natural ends with good and perfection; recognizing that a natural end, apart from endeavor expressing choice, has no intrinsic eulogistic quality, but is the boundary which writes ‘Finis’ to a chapter of history inscribed by a moving system of energies.  Failure by exhaustion as well as by triumph may constitute an end; death, ignorance, as well as life, are finalities” (pp. 295-296) (emphasis mine).

In considering values (which Dewey writes are analogous to ends, “All that can be said of them concerns their generative conditions and the consequences to which they give rise” [p. 297]) Dewey suggest we consider the line of Greek thinking, however the differences we must apply to it seem to summarize Dewey’s position in this book.  I found it interesting (after your comment on my chapter 9 post) that he, in the second paragraph of this chapter, pointed to failure and death as ends.   He continues to summarize his argument:

Again, the return must abandon the notion of a predetermined limited number of ends inherently in an order of increasing comprehensiveness and finality.  It will have to recognize that natural termini are as infinitely numerous and varied as are the individual systems of action they delimit; and that since there is only relative, not absolute, impermeability and fixity of structure, new individuals with novel ends emerge in irregular procession.  It must be recognized that limits, closures, ends, are experimentally or dynamically determined, presenting, like the boundaries of political individuals or states, a moving adjustment of various energy-systems in their cooperative and competitive interactions, not something belonging to them of their own right.  Consequently, it will surrender the separation in nature from each other of contingency and regularity, the hazardous and the assured; it will avoid that regulation of them to distinct orders of Being which is characteristic of the classical tradition.  It will note that they intersect everywhere; that it is uncertainty and indeterminateness that create the need for and the sense of order and security; that whatever is most complete and liberal in being and possession is for that very reason most exposed to vicissitude, and most needful of watchful safeguarding art. (p. 296).

With this, Dewey quickly gives his conception of the hand philosophy has to play. 

“…philosophy is inherently criticism, having its distinctive position among various modes of criticism in its generality; a criticism of criticisms, as it were” (p. 298).

“It does not annihilate the differences among beliefs; it does not set up the fact that an object believed in is perforce found good as if it were a reason for belief.  On the contrary: the statement is preliminary.  The all-important matter is what lies back of and causes acceptance and rejection; whether or no there is method of discrimination and assessment which makes a difference in what is assented to and denied” (pp. 302-303).

“When the question is raised as to the ‘real’ value of the object for belief, the appeal is to criticism, intelligence” (p. 303).

“Its primary concern is to clarify, liberate and extend the goods which inhere in the naturally generated functions of experience.  It has no call to create a world of ‘reality’…”(p 305).

“As to truth, then, philosophy has no preeminent status; it is a recipient, not a donor” (p. 307).

“poetic meanings, moral meanings, a large part of the goods of life are matters of richness and freedom of meanings, rather than truth; a large part of our life is carried on in a realm of meanings to which truth and falsity as such are irrelevant” (p. 307).

The charge to philosophy is to liberate and extend the goods through intelligent criticism, through the arguments behind thoughtful choice.  It is to find meaning, not truth.  Thus far Dewey has avoided value, he answers the obvious question of what is good through the relations not of good and bad (which would be immediate ends in themselves and therefore unknowable,) but we could say “better” or “worse.”

“Any liking is choice, unwittingly performed.  There is no selection without rejection; interest and bias are selective, preferential” (p. 320).

“But when we recognize that in effect the assertion is that one is better than another thing, the issues shift to something comparative, relational, causal, intellectual and objective.  Immediately nothing is better or worse than anything else; it is just what it is” (pp. 320-321).

“To make a valuation, to judge appraisingly, is then to bring to conscious perception relations of productivity and resistance and thus to make value significant, intelligent and intelligible” (p. 321).

“…the arts, those of converse and literary arts which are enhanced continuations of social converse, have been the means by which goods are brought home to human perception” (p. 322).

Dewey concludes by urging us to test this mode of philosophic discourse in experience, to tie the other end of the vine of theory back to experience.   It falls somewhere between science and art, but it, like everything else, is held accountable to the results in experience.

“What the method of intelligence, thoughtful valuation will accomplish, if once it be tried, is for the result of trial to determine” (p. 326). 

“The import of such knowledge as we have acquired and such experience has been quickened by thought is to evoke and justify the trial” (p. 326).



Experience, Nature and Art - revisited

“For all art is a process of making the world a different place in which to live, and involves a phase of protest and compensatory response” (p. 272).

“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 differentiation of arts, not a record of separation from art” (p. 290).

Buds on a recently pruned apple tree, slightly out of focus.  April 25^th, 2011.

“When this perception dawns (previous paragraph), it will be a commonplace that art –the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession –is the complete culmination of nature, and that ‘science’ is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue” (p. 269) (emphasis mine.)

“Thus, the issue involved in experience as art in its pregnant sense and in art as process and materials of nature continued by direction into achieved and enjoyed meanings, sums up in itself all the issues which have been previously considered.  Thought, intelligence, science is the intentional direction of natural events and meanings capable of immediate possession and enjoyment; this direction –which is operative art –is itself a natural event…” (p. 269) (emphasis mine).

“And the distinguishing feature of conscious experience, of what for short is often called ‘consciousness,’ is that in it the instrumental and the final, meanings that are signs and clews and meanings that are immediately possessed, come together in one.  And all of these things are preeminently true of art” (p. 269).

Upon revisiting this chapter I had a feeling of happiness and ease.  Many of the “issues which have been previously considered” do feel summed up in this chapter; and they fit together nicely in a rather optimistic and uplifting philosophy.  When considering art as a mode of activity charged with meanings, and conscious experience as the union of signs, clues, and meanings, we do have experience as art.  This idea, that art is something of a holistic lifestyle, seems something like our final ED 5010 prompt, and the saying attributed to Dewey, “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” 

 

Recently grafted apple trees, in a row, out in a field.  April 25^th, 2011.

 “Thus the theme has insensibly passed over into that of the relation of means and consequence, process and product, the instrumental and the consummatory.   Any activity that is simultaneously both, rather than in alteration and displacement, is art” (p. 271).

It would not be appropriate to discuss this chapter without Dewey’s consideration of social situations of economy.  His argument, if I understand him correctly, is that “the existence of activities that have no immediate enjoyed intrinsic meaning is undeniable” (p. 271) and that the leisure class (held over from Greek thought) continues to avoid these activities by employing a working class; it could probably be argued that this is done in a way to ensure the continuation of class separation.  The working class is held in economy as needing to work in order to survive, that working is a means to survival.  “…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).   This separation is unaesthetic and unnatural.   

Split and stacked wood (which will be used to warm my house next winter.)  April 25^th, 2011.

 “…a measure of artistic products is their capacity to attract and retain observation with satisfaction under whatever conditions they are approached… a genuinely esthetic object is not exclusively consummatory but is causally productive as well” (p. 274).

“When this fact is noted, it is also seen that the limitation of fineness of art to paintings, statues, poems, songs and symphonies is conventional, or even verbal.  Any activity that is productive of objects whose perception is an immediate good, and whose operation is a continual source of enjoyable perception of other events exhibits fineness of art” (p. 274) (emphasis mine).

My goal then, as indicated in earlier posts, is to realize an enactment of education as art. 

Replaced and refinished clapboards and trim, on house built ca. 1835.

“Science is an instrumentality of and for art because it is the intelligent factor in art” (p. 276).

“When appetite is perceived in its meanings, in the consequences it induces, and these consequences are experimented with in reflective imagination… we live on the human plane, responding to things in their meanings.   A relationship of cause-effect has been transformed into one of means-consequence.  Then consequences belong integrally to the conditions which may produce them, and the latter posses character and distinction” (p. 278). 

“Thus, to be conscious of meanings or to have an idea, marks a fruition, an enjoyed or suffered arrest of the flux of events… we may be aware of meanings, may achieve ideas, that unite wide and enduring scope with richness and distinctions… it [these large scope ideas] marks the conclusion of long continued endeavor; of patient and indefatigable search and test.  The idea is, in short, art and a work of art.  As a work of art, it directly liberates subsequent action and makes it more fruitful in a creation of more meanings and more perceptions” (p. 278) (emphasis mine).

Not only is art a lifestyle in actions, but a lifestyle in thinking.  And this makes me think of formal education; I wonder how often we foster the transformation of cause-effect into means-consequence, how often these consequences belong integrally to the conditions from which they arose, and how often students participate in the long continued endeavor of forming ideas. 

Dave, an Ed 5010 student, behind the ice cave at Beede Falls. February 19^th, 2011.

“In esthetic perceptions an object interpenetrated with meanings is given; it may be taken for granted; it invites and awaits the act of appropriate enjoyment… [aesthetic objects] are pleasing endings that occur in ways not informed with  meaning of materials and acts integrated into them” (pp. 280-281).

“Artistic sense on the other hand grasps tendencies as possibilities; the invitation of these possibilities to perception is more urgent and compelling than that of the given already achieved” (p. 281).

“Art in being, the active productive process, may thus be defined as an esthetic perception together with an operative perception of the efficiencies of the esthetic object” (p. 281).

“…the difference between the diffuse and postponed change of action due in an ordinary person to release of energies by an esthetic object, and the special and axial direction of subsequent action in a gifted person is, after all, a matter of degree”(p. 281).

----------------------------------------------------

 “…fine art consciously undertaken as such is peculiarly instrumental in quality.  It is a device of experimentation carried on for the sake of education.  It exists for the sake of specialized use, use being a new training of modes of perception” (p. 293). 

Existence, Ideas and Consciousness

focal trait of a shifting object of consciousness (as such)
Bearcamp River Trail, April 24, 2011

In Chapter 8 the traits of living creatures are considered in connection with the conscious aspect of behavior and  experience, the quality of immediacy attaching to events when they are actualized in experience by means of organic and social interactions. The difference and the connection of mind and consciousness is set forth. The meanings that form mind become consciousness, or ideas, impressions, etc., when something within the meanings or in their application becomes dubious, and the meaning in question needs reconstruction. This principle explains the focal and rapidly shifting traits of the objects of consciousness as such. A sensitive and vital mental career thus depends upon being awake to questions and problems;  consciousness stagnates and becomes restricted and dull when this interest wanes (p. 8).

In the discussions of the last chapter the word° "consciousness" was avoided. It is a word of unsettled signification (p. 226).

I used the experience and photo record above to get around the problems Dewey mentions with "consciousness" as such.   The word "consciousness" did not occur to me at all.    The experience of walking on the trail, encountering the  sight above, and taking the picture which has a bright, sun focus and then a fringing out into shadow—and yes it was changing while I waited to get the picture— I can look at the photo and then read through Dewey's overview of Chapter 8 finding it connects quite well to what I actually experienced.   The picture is one possible denotation of my consciousness. 


As you cited but I went back a few sentences further in the text:

For the immediately given is always the dubious; it is always a matter for subsequent events to determine, or assign character to. It is a cry for something not given, a request addressed to fortune, with the
pathos of a plea or the imperiousness of a command. It were, conceivably, "better" that nature should be finished through and through, a closed mechanical or closed teleological structure, such as philosophic schools have fancied. But in that case the flickering candle of consciousness would go out.

The immediate perceptibility of meanings, the very existence of ideas, testifies to insertion of the problematic and hazardous in the settled and uniform, and to the meeting, crossing and parting of the substantial, static, and the transitive and particular (pp, 262-63).

This I think is a kind of "cry" for the place, nuances, and possible significance of the "immediate" in experience.   It's also the starting point of a kind of reasoned inference (which is, I think for Dewey what we call "science").  If nothing was unsettled....what would we need to know or inquire into?    And this, like many other passages in  chapter 8 are directly related to the Maxine Greene essay "Toward Wide-Awakness".    There's recognition of the "plane of consciousness" leading to perceptions (which is not just mental activity but some version of, mind-body,  thought and action in the world) and then recognition and honoring of the "problematic" (which is the triumphant note on which her essay ends). Better yet, it's the arts that do this best for Greene.  And funny, where is Dewey headed in his text chapter?   


It's my intention, probably on Tuesday to made some additions and write some comments into your piece on Chapter 8.   

The immediately  given is a request addressed to fortune.

Existence, ideas, and knowledge



“Ideas are largely the obverse side of action; a perception of what might be, but is not, the promise of things hoped for, the symbol of things not seen” (p. 263).

“We dream, but the material of our dream life is the stuff of our waking life” (p. 259).

“Only when organic activity achieves a conscious plane shall we be adequately aware of what we are about” (p. 239).

 Purple Fringed Orchid, which at some point appeared to me vaguely as a flower, and was then moved into my consciousness through an educative action.

Dewey starts by pointing out that the term “consciousness” has been used in different ways.  “On the one hand, it is employed to point out certain qualities in their immediate apparency, qualities of things sentiency, such as are, from the psychological standpoint, usually termed feelings… On the other hand, consciousness is used to denote meanings actually perceived, awareness of objects: being wide-awake, alert, attentive to the significance of events, present, past, future” (p. 226).  This multiple use of the term is not problematic, so long as we do not take one for the other, although I think Dewey intends to use “consciousness” in a somewhat different way.

Consciousness

“Meanings do not come into being without language, and language implies two selves involved in a conjoint or shared undertaking.”

“The same considerations define the ‘subconscious’ of human thinking.  Apart from language, from imputed and referred meaning, we continually engage in an immense multitude of immediate organic selections, rejections, welcomings, expulsions, appropriations, withdrawals, shrinking, expansions, elations and dejections, attacks, wardings off, of the most minute, vibrantly delicate nature.  We are not aware of the qualities of many or most of these acts; we do not objectively distinguish and identify them” (p. 227).

“The subconscious of a civilized adult reflects all the habits he has acquired… it operates most successfully in meanings associated with language that is highly technical, affairs remote from fundamental and exigent needs, as in mathematics, or philosophizing far away from concrete situations, or in a highly cultivated art form” (p. 228).

“While on the psycho-physical level , consciousness denotes the totality of actualized immediate qualitative differences, or ‘feelings,’ it denotes, upon the plane of mind, actualized apprehensions of meanings, that is, ideas.  There is thus an obvious difference between mind and consciousness; meaning and an idea.   Mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life; consciousness in a being with language denotes awareness or perceptions of meanings; it is the perception of actual events , whether past, contemporary or future, in their meanings, the having of actual ideas” (pp. 229-230).

This to me seems like a very important distinction.  Consciousness on the psycho-physical, I think that means alive and awake? Is dealing with feelings.  I think at almost every human level this exists, and being prior to language, I think many other species of animals have consciousness in this sense.  When mind is applied however, meaning is derived (from feelings?) and the idea is born.  This form of consciousness is only possible with language.

“One great mistake in the orthodox psychological tradition is its exclusive preoccupation with sharp focalization to the neglect of the vague shading off from the foci to into a field of increasing dimness… The larger system of meaning suffuses, interpenetrates, colors what is now here uppermost; it gives them sense, feeling, as distinct from signification” (p. 231).

“It is impossible to tell what immediate consciousness is-not because there is some mystery in or behind it, but for the same reason we cannot tell just what sweet or red immediately is: it is something had, not communicated and known” (p. 232).

“These considerations enable us to give a formal definition of consciousness in relation to mind and meanings.  Consciousness, an idea, is that phase of a system of meanings which at a given time is undergoing re-direction, transitive transformation… its causation is the need and demand for filling out what is indeterminate” (p.  233).

“The familiar does not consciously appear, save in an unexpected, novel, situation, where the familiar presents itself in a new light and is therefore not wholly familiar.  Our deepest-seated habits are precisely those of which we have the least awareness” (p. 235).

 “We have little or no art of education of the fundamentals, namely in the management of the organic attitudes which color qualities of our conscious objects and acts… Only when organic activity achieves a conscious plane shall we be adequately aware of what we are about” (p. 239).

After our discussion yesterday, and your post and picture of the sunlight peaking through to a small patch of snow in the woods, I feel that “consciousness” for Dewey is something of an immediate quality, the moment of “wide-awakeness” only in that moment.  It seems like a quality of mind, which is alert to the point of excluding other qualities of mind, such as remembering, thinking, knowing.  It seems to be related to or compatible with our discussions of “the performative” mode of mind.  I also get the sense that because consciousness is so temporal and fleeting, difficult to sustain and constantly re-directed, it is very difficult to become conscious of what Dewey calls the fundamentals, our basic attitudes which color the qualities of our consciousness, in other words our paradigms through which we filter our experiences.  I think this is what Dewey meant with “Only when organic activity achieves a conscious plane shall we be adequately aware of what we are about”

Perception

“…the difference between assertion of a perception, belief in it, and merely having it is an extrinsic difference; the belief, assertion, cognitive reference is something additive, never merely immediate… it[perceptions of fanciful things] is capable  of being revealed only by the results of acting upon them… part of the conditions of any perception, valid as well as invalid, scientific as well as esthetic, lie within the organism… Both acts and consequences lie outside the primary perception; both have to be diligently sought for and tested.  Since conditions in the two cases are different, they operate differently.  That is, they belong to different histories, and the matter of the history to which a given thing belongs is just the matter with which knowledge is concerned” (pp. 242-243).

“To discover that a perception or an idea is cognitively invalid is to find that the consequences which follow from acting upon it entangle and confuse the other consequences which follow from the causes of perception, instead of integrating or coordinating harmoniously with them” (p. 244).

Philosophy

“Philosophy must explicitly note that the business of reflection is to take events which brutely occur and brutely effect us, to convert them into objects by means of inference as to their probable consequences” (p. 245).

“In formulating the distinction between existences and objects of reference, whether cognitive, esthetic or moral, philosophy does not exact that violent break with common sense which is found in the assertion of idealism that events themselves are composed of meanings.  Nor does it involve that break with common sense found in epistemological realism, with its assertion of a direct dealing of mind with naked existences unclothed by the intervention of meanings.   Philosophy has only to state, to make explicit, the difference between events which are challenges to thought and events which have met the challenge and hence posses meaning… seeking and finding unapparent connections, so that thinking terminates when an object is present:  namely, when a challenge is endowed with stable meanings through relationship to something extrinsic but connected. ” (p. 245-246).

“Recognition, identified and distinguished meaning, is an indispensible condition of effective experience.  It is a prerequisite of successful practice; except in so far as the situation in which we are to act is distinguished as having a notable character, behavior is hopelessly lost.  It is a prerequisite to an act of knowing… But, recognition is not cognition.  It is what the word implicitly conveys; re-cognition” (p. 247).

“Such gross ideas as a world of things and persons external to our personal wishes and fancies, and as the continuance of energies once set in motion, are so recurrently and emphatically taught that they are never sincerely doubted.  Ideas of specific features of this external world…ideas of fire, food, furniture, weather and crops, of our friends and enemies, and of our own past and probably future, are so repeatedly presented in the connections of actions and so confirmed by consequences that they become matters of course, substantially valid.  They thus for a kind of privileged domain…” (p. 260).

So, philosophy is to identify just what it is that we do not understand, and to seek to understand it so that it may serve as a reminder, so that we can re-cognize it for some future purpose (probably to direct the qualities of our futures.)  On the path to understanding we use what we already know kind of as Dewey discusses “tools” earlier in this book, and what we already know of the external world are the ideas which have been tested in our experience and have been confirmed over and over again so that we can consider them final.   This seems like something of a problem in itself, or perhaps Dewey’s nudge towards where philosophy should go?  The nature of consciousness makes it very difficult to perceive ourselves on a fundamental level, because the familiar does not readily appear unless it becomes novel, and we are most familiar with our own habits established from the history of the human event.  It seems very difficult to discover our own attitudes and biases, to study humanism without a humanistic bias. 

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“To par-take and to per-ceive are allied performances… If a man has experienced a world which is good, why should not he act to remake a bad world till it agrees with the good world which he has once possessed?  And if the task of overt transformation is too great for his powers, why should he not at least act so as to get the renewed sense of a good world?  These questions express the working logic of human action; the first, the way of objective transformation, is the method of action in the arts and sciences; the second, of action that is fanciful, “wish-fulfilling,” romantic, myth-making” (pp. 259-260).

“It were, conceivably, ‘better’ that nature should be finished through a through, a closed mechanical or closed teleological structure, such as philosophic schools have fancied.  But in that case the flickering candle of consciousness would go out.  The immediate perceptibility of meanings, the very existence of ideas, testifies to insertion of the problematic and hazardous in the settled and uniform, and to the meeting, crossing and parting of the substantial, static, and the transitive and particular” (pp. 262-263).

“Ideas are largely the obverse side of action; a perception of what might be, but is not, the promise of things hoped for, the symbol of things not seen” (p. 263).

I believe this is something of a set up for the next chapter.

organism and environment

photo recording of a natural event

I think that one can't really comprehend Dewey unless one is able to read and translate each move he makes into life within life situations. His thoughts require testing as hypotheses in thought and action in the world. 

""This, then, is the significance of our introductory statement that the "solution" of the problem of mind-body is to be found in a revision of the preliminary assumptions about existence which generate the problem (pp. 201-2)."

"The foregoing discussion is both too technical and not elaborately technical enough for adequate comprehension. It may be conceived as an attempt to contribute to what has come to be called an "emergent" theory of mind. But every word that we can use, organism, feeling, psycho-physical, sensation and sense, "emergence" itself, is infected by the associations of old theories, whose import is opposite to that here stated (p. 207)."

"....premising that while there is no isolated occurrence in nature, yet interaction and connection are not wholesale and homogenous. Interacting events have tighter and looser ties, which qualify them with certain beginnings and endings, and which mark them off from other fields of interaction (pp. 207-8)."

"The world is subject-matter for knowledge, because mind has developed in that world; a body-mind, whose structures have developed according to the structures of the world in which it exists, will naturally find some of its structures to be concordant and congenial with nature, and some phases of nature with itself (p. 211)."

"....the mystery that mind should use a body, or that a body should have a mind, is like the mystery that a man cultivating plants should use the soil; or that the soil which grows plants at all should grow those adapted to its own physico-chemical properties and relations (pp. 211-12)." 

"At every point and stage, accordingly, a living organism and its life processes involve a world or nature temporally and spatially "external" to itself but "internal" to its functions (p. 212)."

"The problem of how one person knows the existence of other persons, is, when the relation of mind and life is genuinely perceived, like the problem of how one animal can associate with other animals....(p. 212)."

"It is also an obvious empirical fact that animals are connected with each other in inclusive schemes of behavior by means of signaling acts.... In the human being, this function becomes language, communication, discourse, in virtue of which the consequences of the experience of one form of life are integrated in the behavior of others.  With the development of recorded speech the possibilities of this integration are indefinitely widened....(p. 213)." 

"....life goes on between and among things of which the organism is but one....(p. 215)."

"Speaking in terms of captions familiar in rhetoric, exposition and argument are always subordinate to a descriptive narration, and exist for the sake of making the latter clearer, more coherent and more significant. Body-mind designates an affair with its own properties. A large part of the difficulty in its discussion—perhaps the whole of the difficulty in general apart from detailed questions—is due to vocabulary (pp. 216-17)."

"But body-mind simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication and participation. In the hyphenated phrase body-mind, "body" designates the° continued and conserved, the registered and cumulative operation of factors continuous with the rest of nature, inanimate as well as animate; while "mind" designates the characters and consequences which are differential, indicative of features which emerge when "body" is engaged in a wider, more complex and interdependent situation (p. 217)."

"Sounds do not cease to be sounds when they become articulate speech; but they do take on new distinctions and arrangements (p. 217)."

"....meanings, ideas, are also, when they occur, characters of a new interaction of events; they are characters which in their incorporation with sentiency transform organic action, furnishing it with new properties. Every thought and meaning has its substratum in some organic act of absorption or elimination of seeking, or turning away from, of destroying or caring for, of signaling or responding. It roots in some definite act of biological behavior; our physical names for mental acts like seeing, grasping, searching, affirming, acquiescing, spurning, comprehending, affection emotion are not just 'metaphors.' (p. 220-21)."

"Thought, deliberation, objectively directed imagination, in other words, is an added efficacious function of natural events and hence brings into being new consequences (p. 221)."

".... ideas are qualities of events in all the parts of organic structure which have ever been implicated in actual situations of concern with extra-organic friends and enemies....The nervous system is in no sense the "seat" of the idea.  It is the mechanism of the connection or integration of acts (p. 222)."

"To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy (p. 224)."

"Clearly we have not carried the plane of conscious control, the direction of action by perception of connections, far enough. We cannot separate organic life and mind from physical nature without also separating nature from life and mind. The separation has reached a point where intelligent persons are asking whether the end is to be catastrophe, the subjection of man to the industrial and military machines he has created (p. 225)."

Isn't the plane of consciousness referenced here related to "wide-awakeness" as we get it in the Maxine Greene essay?   There it comes up in passages referenced to Thoreau,  Schultz and Merleau-Ponty.   


However, in the above, I think Dewey is careful to distinguish something he doesn't call "consciousness" but rather "a plane of conscious control, the direction of action by perception of connections."    It will be interesting to see in the next chapter how he manages these distinctions.

Nature, Life and Body-Mind

“The more an organism learns-the more that is, the former terms of a historic process are retained and integrated in this present phase-the more it has to learn, in order to keep itself going; otherwise death and catastrophe” (p. 214-215).

Dewey defines mind in a number of different ways, but he seems to almost always tie “mind” to “communication” and “language.”

“’mind’ is an added property assumed by a feeling creature, when it reaches that organized interaction with other living creatures which is language, communication.   Then the qualities of feeling become significant of objective differences in external things and of episodes past and to come.  This state of things in which qualitatively different feelings are not just had but are significant of objective differences, is mind” (p. 198).

 “with language they (qualities of organic action-feelings) are discriminated and identified” (p. 198).

“’Feeling’ is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction.  More specifically, it is a name for the coming to existence of those ultimate differences in affairs which mark them off from one another and give them discreteness; differences which upon the physical plane can be spoken of only in anticipation of subsequent realization, or in terms of different numerical formulae, and different space-time positions and contiguities” (p. 204).

Language is what allows qualities, feelings, and specific relationships to be identified, perhaps remembered, but certainly communicated and triangulated.

“Sense is distinct from feeling, for it has a recognized reference; it is the qualitative characteristic of something, not just a submerged unified quality or tone.  Sense is also different from signification.  The latter involves use of a quality as a sign or index of something else, as when the red of a light signifies danger…” (p. 200).

“Whenever a situation has this double function of meaning, namely signification and sense, mind, intellect is definitely present” (p. 200).

So I think that mind exists to varying degrees.  Intellect being a property of mind on a relatively high degree.  If we consider that communication happens in ways other than human speech, feeling could be communicated without the presence of intellect.

“Apart from communication, habit-forming wears grooves; behavior is confined to channels established by prior behavior.  In so far the tendency is towards monotonous regularity.  The very operation of learning sets a limit to itself, and makes subsequent learning more difficult.  But this holds only of a habit, a habit in isolation, a non-communicating habit.  Communication not only increases the number and variety of habits, but tends to link them subtly together, and eventually to subject habit-forming in a particular case to the habit of recognizing that new modes of association will exact a new use of it” (p. 214).

Here I believe Dewey is suggesting that language and communication allow us to examine our habits, our customs, our “modes of life” and to consider changes or modifications.  I believe this application of mind is the beginning of “wide-awakness” or what Thoreau calls “Living deliberately.”  I would argue that this is accomplished incompletely, I don’t think we have the ability to habitually recognize all of our habits; in some cases we will never get out of the groove of prior behavior.

“The more an organism learns-the more that is, the former terms of a historic process are retained and integrated in this present phase-the more it has to learn, in order to keep itself going; otherwise death and catastrophe” (p. 214-215).

“The world seems mad in preoccupation with what is specific, particular, disconnected in medicine, politics, science, industry, education.  In terms of a conscious control of inclusive wholes, search for those links which occupy key positions and which effect critical connections is indispensible.  But recovery of sanity depends upon seeing and using these specifiable things as links functionally significant in a process” (p. 224).

“We know that locomotives and aeroplanes and telephones and power-plants do not arise from instinct or the subconscious but from deliberately ascertained perceptions of connections and orders of connections.  Now after a period in which advance in these respects was complacently treated as proof and measure of progress, we have been forced to adopt pessimistic attitudes, and to wonder if this ‘progress’ is to end in the deterioration of man and the possible destruction of civilization.  Clearly we have not carried the plane of conscious control, the direction of action by perception of connections, far enough” (p. 225).

I think Dewey is arguing that we have so impressed ourselves with the realizations of what we can create when we become aware of connections and orders of connections that we have been blinded to see the effects in the bigger picture.  I think of the popularity of the automobile and its design based on burning petroleum, and the lack of foresight connecting the pollution from automobiles to our environment.  So long as we strive for progress, and not progress for something, or the awareness of progress at the expense of… then we are cutting ourselves short of what is needed to avoid death and catastrophe, this is madness.   “Recovery of sanity depends upon seeing and using these specifiable things as links functionally significant in a process.”  And that makes me think of my arguments for arts education.

setting the stage for the psycho-physical

WHAT IF? 


 "A Distinctive Opacity?"


p. 172:  "Freedom of thought denotes freedom of thinking; specific doubting, inquiring, suspense, creating and cultivating of tentative hypotheses,
trials or experimentings that are unguaranteed and that involve risks of waste, loss, and error."

pl 181: "Enough, however, of negation. The positive consequence is an understanding of the shift of emphasis from the experienced, the

objective subject-matter, the what, to the experiencing, the method of its course, the how of its changes."

p. 182:  "Since myth and science concern the same objects in the same natural world, sun, moon, and stars, the difference between them cannot be determined exclusively on the basis of these natural objects. A differential has to found in distinctive ways of experiencing natural objects; it is perceived that man is an emotional and imaginative as well as an observing and reasoning creature, and that different manners of experiencing affect the status of subject-matter experienced."

p. 183:  "In truth, attitudes, dispositions and their kin, while capable of being distinguished and made concrete intellectual objects, are never separate existences. They are always of, from, toward, situations and things."

p. 186:  Existentially speaking, a human individual is distinctive opacity of bias and preference conjoined with plasticity and^°

permeability of needs and likings. One trait tends to isolation, discreteness; the other trait to connection, continuity. This
ambivalent character is rooted in nature, whose events have their own distinctive indifferencies, resistances, arbitrary closures and
intolerances, and also their peculiar openness, warm responsiveness, greedy seekings and transforming unions. The conjunction
in nature of whimsical contingency and lawful uniformity is the result of these two characters of events. They persist upon the human plane, and as ultimate characters are ineradicable. Boundaries, demarcations, abrupt and expansive over-reachings
of boundaries impartially and conjunctively mark every phase of human life."

p. 189:  "For to arrive at new truth and vision is to alter. The old self is put off and the new self is only forming, and the form it finally takes will depend upon the unforeseeable result of an adventure. No one discovers a new world without forsaking an old one; and no one discovers a new world who exacts guarantee in advance for what it shall be, or who puts the act of discovery under bonds with respect to what the new world shall do to him when it comes into vision."

Emerson from "Self-Reliance"

"This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death.....Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim."

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Is there any Dewey book without one chapter that uses "the history of ideas" as a foil?   Sometimes we have to cull out a perspective from all the considerations.  Still a variety of themes emerges and we should expect nothing less since the treatment here can't be reductive or simplistic, but, has to have a mode of approach or consideration or inquiry that maintains a connection to the fullness of life.   

Dewey's segue to the next chapter:

p. 190:  "Thus we are brought to a consideration of the psycho-physical mechanism and functioning of individual centres of action." 

of course is meant to be read forward.  But it also signifies a unifying purpose in the present chapter.   Woven throughout the many themes is the notion that our dispositions toward things are part of "objective reality"  (for lack of a better phrase).   And to Dewey this comes to mean that the inherited traditions of philosophy and the sciences that perpetuate how we think now about "mind" and "body" have to be challenged.   This emerges in a passage I can't find again immediately where he suggests that our "psychology" isn't good enough yet to get it on equal footing with the seemingly more substantial "objective objects".   

Immediately, given how we think now, our minds tend to jump to certain projections and assumptions about what this might mean.  (Even before we read the next chapter).    And since Dewey wrote, now there is a substantial literature throughout the 20th Century (phenomenological and interdisciplinary) that attempts to inhabit/create a sphere that unifies what has become  a lived dualism.   Somewhat along the lines of Wittgenstein's observation about contradictions:  One can identify them in the history of ideas or in writing.  But the real issue is in our public life:  How we think and act now  (as  "centres of action") in social situations/environments.   

This view of what "reality is"  has not been adequately denoted.  And, as a kind of substantiation of the vigor of how we tend to think now, almost any description that enters into this new sphere seems absurd to the point of being comical.   It's a laugh of derision such that we give when we know with certainty that we know better.   But What if?

"It is not enough that certain materials and methods have proved effective with other individuals at other times. There must be a

reason [in the here and now]  for thinking that they will function in generating an experience that has educative quality with particular individuals at a particular time." Dewey "Experience and Education" (p. 47)

For me, the main focus of "studying performance" (as a species of human conduct) (as we talked about it last Saturday) is to better appreciate in specifically grounded ways and then by those to better understand how, when playing the piano or climbing a cliff or running a marathon,  there is a sequence of "unified mind-body" moments.   These are later given an eventful history when we write them up or look at photos.    What assumptions and received traditions of how we think now color that history/denotation/narrative/story?