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.