Nature, Ends, and Histories

 "The" Jim Davis, Dana Alambaugh, Mike Garrity, and Josh atop the Monkey Face, Smith Rocks, Oregon, February 2010, in what Dewey may have called a "phase of experience (which) manifests objects which are final" (p 70).

 Although Dewey previously wrote "every existence is an event" and argues that everything is in the flux of change, he acknowledges two ends in nature (albeit temporal.)  Immediate qualities, such as “red and blue, sweet and sour, tone, the pleasant and the unpleasant, depend upon an extraordinary variety and complexity of conditioning events; hence they are evanescent.  They are never exactly reduplicated, because the exact combination of events of which they are termini does not precisely recur… they must be hitched to substance as its ‘modes’ to get standing in ‘reality’” (p. 95).  These Dewey occasionally refers to as the primarily natural ends, or a use of the word “esthetic” as more “than that of application to beautiful and ugly” (p. 82).  “Any quality as such is final; it is at once initial and terminal; just what it is as it exists.” 

The other mode of “ends” as found in nature are related to form, whereas “form is change arrested in a prerogative object” (p. 78).  This I think starts along the lines of the Greek idea of form, such as the form of a table, or a tree, although in nature all of the actual objects taking the form of tables and trees will eventually decay and change into something else.  Still, as forms, these ends often function in life as “ends-in-view,” as they result from a series of changes, some of which can be predicted and controlled (although control is at best “partial and experimental” [p. 97]).   Thus, following the steps of construction with materials, one ends with a table.  Dewey does not follow this line of thinking as far as the Greeks, who felt that the natural order of all things was progression towards a final and perfect finished world, to the point that “the actualization in an organic body of the forms that are found in things constitutes mind as the end of nature” (p. 79).  Nor does he follow this line as the thinkers of the 17^th century did, where “purpose and contingency were alike relegated to the purely human and personal; nature was evacuated of qualities and became a homogenous mass differentiated by differences of homogenous motion in a homogenous space” (p. 81).

“To assert that nature is characterized by ends, the most conspicuous of which is the life of mind, seems like engaging in a eulogistic, rather than an empirical account of nature” (p. 82).  Dewey argues that every end is also a beginning, and to take an empirical account of nature we would do well to consider that “the genuine implications of natural ends may be brought out by considering beginnings instead of endings… Clearly the fact and idea of beginnings is neutral, not eulogistic; temporal, not absolute” (p. 83).  Each beginning in nature is unique, with its own particular qualities, even when similar in form to a whole class of others.  While the ends-in-view might end in the construction of a table, that table is a new beginning in nature.

Dewey’s notion of beginnings rather than endings leads one to consider process rather than distinct forms in time, “Space here is joined to space there, and events then are joined to events now; the reality is as much in the joining as in the distinction” (p. 92).  So although ends do exist in nature, they are not “entitled to any such honorific status of completions and realizations as classic metaphysics assigned them” (p. 86).

All of this seems to me to have been built from Dewey’s discussion in chapter two of the relatively constant and the contingent.  It reminds me of discussions I’ve had about the qualitative and the technical, whereas the ends-in-view take on technical forms, and are characterized by specific, temporal qualities.  “Temporal quality however is not to be confused with temporal order.  Quality is quality, direct, immediate, and undefinable.  Order is a matter of relation, of definition, dating, placing, and describing.  It is discovered in reflection, not directly had and denoted as is temporal quality” (p.92).