“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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“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.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMade several attempts to review Chapter 8 and discarded them all on Tuesday. Really, your review of this chapter has a wonderful focus on the most important notions. Including Dewey's notion of "redirecting" philosophy itself. You were right to notice that.
ReplyDeleteIt's more than a nudge. "Redirection" is an action or activity and Dewey felt that as a powerful, sustained need. ("The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy").
An emphasis in this chapter, and noted in your highlights and discussion, is the "transitive nature" of the things Dewey has on the table. These are largely, in the language of traditional philosophy, the fixed objects by which things are grasped (hence the core issue of "vocabulary"). But Dewey was really at one with James here in trying to catch the implications of "grasping things in the making". This really stood out for me when I read through what you wrote here. Words (the stock-and trade of philosophy) may not be the best medium for what "needs" to be done.
"To par-take and to per-ceive are allied performances…(p. 259)"
Per-formance in this sense being a recreative activity realized through partaking and perceiving at the same time. I do believe this is what we do "in performances" of various kinds.
It's easy to see how Dewey was misunderstood and misread....perhaps we are doing the same too?
What Dewey was attempting to do makes James appeal:
in A Pluralistic Universe:
"What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself in the making by a stoke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more absolutely true. Reality fails in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—it buds and burgeons, changes and creates.....
Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality.... "
Seem all too simple or easy in this beautiful expression. Actually getting into this statement is very much what Dewey and Wittgenstein in very different ways did. Dewey by denoting and describing the best he could. Wittgenstein, perhaps improving on this, by sponsoring thought-experiements on a range of topics that evoked similar issues....
But make no mistake, the beautiful statement is just that. What we find when we enter this field of inquiry is mostly the tangled and the complex. In part our task is the reconstruction and reformulation of that complex into more intelligible and humanely useful tools for further inquiry.
Thanks. A motivating and moving way to head into Chapter 9.
In a note this morning to Kurt Stuke about what we've transacted above"
ReplyDeleteI wrote a reply to Brian's review of Dewey's Chapter 8, E&N (not a posting but a reply to his review of the chapter). It evoked a touchstone James passage for me and certainly one we've discussed. From a different perspective, it relates I think to a common project we've been pursuing. In particular, the difficulties of "the movement of reality". How that is experienced. It's not all clear. It's complex and tangled. Today I'm kicking off a series of performances that will extend on a daily basis through Sunday. It's important not to mistake the particular focus of a goal or objective pursued in a performance for the larger picture (end-in-view) (which is alway morphing). But it's important to have these perchings as you move along. The continuity of experience in time is a key factor. How that captures something moving. In HJ of course this kind of performance happens through characters and their transactions in particular settings that they move through. And this of course indicts our reading habits. Do we know how to "read in time"? Whether a novel or a book of philosophy?
Dewey who wrote "emergently" at times in this mature work (his terms of analysis are not fixed but are transforming as we read) invites a different kind of reading. But "how we think now" (how we read now) is often largely an unexamined cultural inheritance that carries with it a host of assumptions and taken-for-granted notions. I think it's good to point that out frequently lest we forget over time.