“if we once start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out, except that many objects, ends and institutions are surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place” (p. 172).
The union graft of root stock with an off shoot, April 12th, 2011. The two objective experiences become shared, and hopefully they will grow into one well formed and fruit baring apple tree.
The discussions in Dewey’s 6th chapter revolve around the nature of the individual, the necessity of community (and lack of individuality,) individual experience, and a shift from what is experienced to how something is experienced.
He argues against the classical position that the form of humanity is fixed, and the individual is a deviation from the classic form. “mind in an individualized mode has occasionally some constructive operation. Every invention, every improvement in art, technological, military and political, has its genesis in the observation and ingenuity of a particular innovator” (p. 164). He also argues, but not to the same point, the opposing argument of forms, “The immediate qualitative differences of things cannot be recognized without noting that things possessed of these qualitative traits fall into kinds, or families” (p. 163). Dewey rejects both positions in favor of one valuing the novelty of the individual, or the contributions made by individuals, but connecting those individuals to their social and physical environments. “An adherent of empirical denotative method can hardly accept either view which regards subjective mind as an aberration or that which makes it an independent creative source. Empirically, it is an agency of novel reconstruction of a pre-existing order” (p. 168).
He explains this balance, the need for individual thought, “the truth of which the social compact was a symbol is that social institutions as they exist can be bettered only through the deliberate interventions of those who free their minds from the standards of the order which obtains” (p. 169). And the connection to the environments, “but the whole history of science, art and morals proves that the mind that appears in individuals is not as such individual mind. The former is in itself a system of belief, recognitions, and ignorances, of acceptances and rejections, of expectancies and appraisals of meanings which have been instituted under the influence of custom and tradition” (p. 170).
As individuals, within our shared cultures, experience happens. Dewey argues that it is not owned, or rather that it is not entirely owned. Your experience, my experience, is shared with “objective natural events,” making it “a serial course of affairs with their own characteristic properties and relationships, (it) occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves” (p. 179).
“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 if its course, the how of its changes” (p. 181). I see in this citation that by considering the various topics in this work, mind, self, experience, as verbs, Dewey is getting after the quality of these things, the “how of its changes,” rather than the static, objective qualities.
“Thus an individual existence has a double status and import. There is the individual that belongs in a continuous system of connected events which reinforce its activities and which form a world in which it is at home… Then there is the individual that finds the gap between distinctive bias and the operations of the things through which alone its need can be satisfied; it is broken off, discrete, because it is at odds with its surroundings… In the later process, intelligence is born – not mind which appropriates and enjoys the whole of which it is a part, but mind as individualized, initiating, adventuring, experimenting, dissolving” (p. 188).
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