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?