John Dewey's Pragmatism

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 11 of 13

John Dewey’s Pragmatism
The Integral Mind Questing in Life Action
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 12, 1985

Transcript:
September the 12th, 1985. This is the 12th lecture [11th lecture] in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on transformational America. Tonight's lecture is on Dewey's Pragmatism, The Integral Mind Questing in Life Action.

So tonight, we come to the least recognized of all the American geniuses, John Dewey. And the reason for this is that his presence is so vast that he's invisible. He's not able to be seen. Dewey is the link in the bridge between the early American tradition and our own time. He was born in Vermont in 1859. The year before Lincoln was elected, October 20th and he died the 1st of June 1952, just at the time that Eisenhower was taking office. So, he spans from Lincoln to Eisenhower in his own life. His first publications were 1882 and his last were 1952. So, he published for 70 years. His last book was written at the age of 90, and it was the most esoteric book ever written by an American called Knowing and the Known. No mention of knower at all.

So, we have with us tonight, the culmination of this whole series, which is called Transformational America. And Transformational America is the bridging of the original impetus that was started by Franklin, given its great combination by Jefferson and was carried on for about a generation after Jefferson by his proteges, Madison and Monroe. And even in a negative way, Andrew Jackson.

Lincoln, as we have seen belongs to a different aspect of the United States. He belongs to the critical tradition. He belongs, as we have tried to show, in the same way that Twain and Henry Adams and James Fenimore Cooper belong to the critical tradition, which were still informed by the early American experience. But we're already looking down the barrels of the guns to come. And the critical tradition spans the era roughly from about 1830-1835 to about 1910. And the American critical tradition ends about 1910. It still carries on in a kind of a dribbling way until the outbreak of the First World War. But remember the American presence in the First World War was not a certainty until late 1916, early 1917.

But 1910 is a real watershed in the American psyche. It is in fact, they terminus [inaudible] which we will get to tonight with John Dewey for he changes radically. Dewey is the first figure that we have considered this year, who will live effectively beyond 1910. It's true that Henry Adams lived until 1918, but he lived in bitter senility, approaching senility, and almost never went out. And for all intents and purposes after 1910, Henry Adams was permanently and effectively retired. So, John Dewey is the first figure that we have that moves past 1910 into the 20th century. And 20th century America will go down for all time and whatever histories will ever be written as the most convulsive period in world history. There never has been and never will be a people subjected to more highs and more lows in the space of just a couple of generations.

Dewey being born in Burlington, Vermont, which is in 1859 Burlington, Vermont was still very much a Yankee town. And Dewey had all of his life, the Yankee directness and curtness in a way. The kind of assumed cordiality, which is defended by bluntness. In Dewey’s writings this kind of personality dominates his syntax. And so, Dewey is extremely hard to read when he gets going. Because Dewey assumes that you're going to be following his every word. And so, he takes advantage of the quick turns of this own thought to express facets that probably were too sudden and hadn't occurred to anyone before. And so, his prose is very difficult to read. It's the one reason why Dewey’s influence though it is gargantuan in American culture is largely by 1985 a negative sentimentality. They wish that he had not been so forceful. That he had not been so domineering. That perhaps everything would have been better without his voice, which convinced so many so soon and nothing seems to have come of it.
The biggest case in point is the misunderstanding of Dewey in progressive education. Letting all the students do as they please has no bearing whatsoever on progressive education. And yet that was the misinterpretation that largely took over and negated all of the excellence that Dewey had come up with in his educational philosophy.

For all of these reasons Dewey is the most invisible philosopher now. Regardless of whether you look for an American philosopher or a major voice in world history, he's the invisible presence.

By the age of 20, he had graduated from the University of Vermont. This was when U.S. Grant was president. And in 1882 he published his first little article. He had been teaching high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania. And he had been having conversations with several friends. And in 1882 he published a little tiny paper, which was called The Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism. He was 22 years old-23 years old. And I'd like to give you the opening paragraph of this first writing. Remember this begins a writing career of 70 years. This is the very first time that he's out. It was published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, which was a Hegelian journal at that time. Which means that it was read by all of the major philosophers in England and Germany and America at this time.

He writes,
Discussions regarding materialism have been for the most part confined to the physiological and psychological aspects of it. Its supporters and opponents have been content to reduce arguments pro and con, as the facts of physical mental life bear upon the case in hand. It is the object of the present paper to discuss its metaphysical phases.
And then he goes on.

And he writes,
What is materialism? It is that theory which declares that matter and its forces adequately account for all phenomena. Those are the material world, commonly so-called and those of life, mine and society. It declares the not only the content of the mind, but that which we call mind itself is determined by matter. We noticed first then that is absolutely monistic, but one substance exists, matter. All phenomenon of mind or really phenomenon of matter. The intellect is a function of the brain in its subordinate nervous organs. The laws of matter are therefore the laws of mind. The mental phenomenon are expressible in terms of material. And since all material phenomena are expressible in terms of the atom and molecule, therefore all mental are simply expressible and the ultimate form of matter contains then implicitly all phenomenon of matter and society. In short, the courses form of matter with what you can begin as well as the highest organism with what you end must all contain emotion, volition, knowledge, knowing subject and its relations.

This will become, for Dewey, in about four or five years, a mental idea, which he will discursively display to his students at the University of Michigan in a diagram which had a six-part function. His first idea was what he called the syncrete. The syncrete is that any given piece of matter has potentially in it, or perhaps not in an Aristotelian sense potentially, but has enfolded in it all of the possibilities of the world. That it must be there in some way enfolded. And he calls this the syncrete. And he will say of the syncrete that it is in fact, distinct from the discreet, which is the expression outward into multiplicity. And these will form extremely important aspects in do his thought.

I'm going to later on put up the diagram for you that he put up for his students. Or perhaps I should do it now. [inaudible] syncrete which is, the sin creed is grounded in the particular. That is any particular has all of the qualities, all of the emotions, all of, everything that could be developed in itself. The discreet is related to the universal as the syncrete is related to the particular. It is the expanding out, expressing out, which is the universal. Notice there's a transposition here in classical philosophy.

The individual is in a relation to something else. As the syncrete is related to in particular and as the discreet is related to the universal. The individual is the interpenetration of the universal and the particular coming into a focus. Syncrete packed possibility with the discreet expressive [inaudible] of form. And so, the individual is related to what Dewey calls a process of adjust. That is to say in the mid-1880’s you would call it a process of adjustment and later on, he will say that it's really what we call freedom. And he will mean this in a very particular exact way, which has never been understood very well and much to our disadvantage.

The article on The Metaphysical Foundations Of Materialism ends with it saying,
To know requires something which knows. To know material phenomenon are required mental phenomenon. A thing is for the mind non-existent until it is an idea or phenomenon of the mind. To know substance matter is required. Substance. Mind. If materialism merely posited knowledge by material phenomenon, there would be required to give it validity only mental phenomena, which do on every theory exist. A theory, however, which posits knowledge of a substance besides it must also posit something more than phenomenon in order to know this substance. If there be no substance mind, then there are only series of mental states or successions of mental phenomena.

And this becomes a catch word, a key phrase, for Dewey and for that time. For it will become a matter of dire importance to decide whether or not mental states in fact do occur simply successively. Or how do they occur? Do they occur in an overlapping way? Are they as classically supposed arranged in patterns? Are they watered down emanations from some archetypal reality? Do they flow in some sort of a stream? What are the actual conditions of mental states? And this of course will lead Dewey into psychology. Very, very, very rapidly.

So, he ends to sum up,
To prove a strict monism materialism has to assume an original irresolvable dualism. To prove the mind a phenomenon of matter it is obliged to assume a substance to give knowledge of that matter. To prove that it is an effective matter it is obliged to assume either an intuitional power of mind or that mind is itself a cause. Both equally destructive of materialism. We conclude therefore that as a philosophical theory, materialism has proved itself a complete [inaudible] to afford itself thinkable basis it assumes things which thoroughly destroyed the theory.

And this of course would be one of the great discoveries later on of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead of logic. That any logic which is worth it's expressive capacity in making sense outstrips its capacity to define its own [inaudible] basis and requires a subsystem to ensure its reality. And this brings on an intranet regression of context. All of this was occurring in the 1880’s.

Dewey's next article. And he wrote it when he was taken into Johns Hopkins University. He went there from 1882 to 1884 as a graduate student. And while he was at Johns Hopkins, he began reading extensively. And at the end of that time period, he was appointed as an instructor in philosophy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And so, in order to except this position, he wrote a very fine paper called The New Psychology. And it is the next step in Dewey’s development, From The Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism to The New Psychology. This is the next article. And this appeared in Andover Review September 1884. And I won't go into it very deeply, but I will give you this.
It is a matter in everyone's knowledge that with the increase of knowledge regarding the structure and functions of the nervous system. There has arisen a department of science known as physiological psychology, which has already thrown great light upon psychical matters.
In other words, physiology has thrown light upon psychic matters. The connection of course is due to William James. It's not a necessary connection at all.
But unless I entirely misapprehend the popular opinion regarding the matter there is a very great confusion in error in this opinion regarding the relations of this science to psychology. This opinion, if I rightly gather is that physiological psychology is a science, which does or at least claims to explain all psychical life by reference to the nature of the nervous system.
And he goes on.
Say, what can be meant then by saying that the rise of this physiological psychology has produced a revolution in psychology. This that it has given a new instrument, introduced a new method. That of experiment, which has supplemented and corrected the old method of introspection. Psychic facts still remain psychical and are to be explained through psychical conditions. But our means of ascertaining what these facts are and how they are conditioned have been indefinitely widened. The two chief elements of the method of experiment are variation of conditions at the will and under the control of the experimenter and the use of quantitative measurement.
So, the experimental psychology as a method of investigation of being able to vary the conditions by an indifferent, supposedly indifferent, observer. And to be able to measure and correlate all findings into one matrix, which has calibrated and of the same consistency logically and experimentally. And experientially.

So, for Dewey in The New Psychology, he says, What has come in is a new method. And it's not the point of the correlation of psychical and physiological things. The correlation is not the important point. It's the method of going about investigating, which shifts the focus from introspection of an individual to experimentation by a number of people. And that the focus then goes out into the practical world, into the scientific world. And this is the, this is the method.

His next article written about two years later at the University of Michigan was called Psychology As Philosophic Method. And now Dewey’s ideas are becoming clear and incidentally quite powerful even at this early date. Psychology As Philosophic Method published in The Professional Journal Mind in April of 1886.

So, we've come in just four years in three articles to a position which in 1886 was almost unheard of. There was almost nobody thinking in these lines. Dewey was a real pioneer, and he was going way out on a limb. It seems to us in the late 20th century, a hundred years later to be almost old hat. And that's because there was almost a complete triumph of this worldview. Almost a complete triumph of it. This is the first time that a human mind has thought in these terms in this logical sequence and gone through it, do it. Dewey a very, very great man. So, Psychology As Philosophic Method. So, he's not only thinking of psychology, experimental psychology, as a method which is revolutionizing that science, but now it's coming into philosophy. And that philosophic method now is psychology.

So, he writes here in an article on The Psychological Standpoint,
I endeavored to point out that the characteristic English development and philosophy, the psychological movement since Locke has been neither a threshing of old straw, nor a movement of purely negative meaning. Who significance for us was exhausted when we had learned how it necessarily led to the movement in Germany, the so-called transcendental movement.

We usually think of transcendentalism as an American phenomenon, but I might remind you that Emerson in his library had more than a hundred books on Goethe. And that it is due to Goethe and Schiller and a number of other figures. Fichter. And even Hegel that transcendental realism came to pass. It was a German phenomenon. And the American reverberation of this through Emerson was largely a German influenced romanticism. There’s a world of difference between Thoreau and Emerson. Thoreau is an American mystic. And Emerson is a European German transcendentalist. There's a world of difference between them.

Dewey writes, “It's positive significance was found to consistent the fact that its consciousness to be the sole content, account and criteria of all reality.” Consciousness. The sole content of reality.
And psychology as the science of this consciousness to be the explicit and accurate determination of the nature of reality and its wholeness. As well as the determination of the value and validity of the various elements or factors of this whole.
The measurement in experimental psychology, the calibration, is a valuing process. That valuing process can only happen in terms of consciousness. The experimenter who varies the conditions is a consciousness.

There was an interesting interplay going on here, which Dewey will never let go of. And remember when he's 90, his last book will be called Knowing and The Known, and he won't mention the knower. But 65 years before that he was writing at this level, which was pretty high at that time.

This in fact, I might just editorialize here. This is the beginnings of American Daoism right here. This is a very peculiar eerie, mystical insight that Dewey is having and can't quite say. But he can see it. He can feel it. This old Vermonter very much like Andrew Wyeth in our time. Able to see through things. And in seeing through things detecting the process of seeing and realizing that in this functioning the individual occurs. Not as an entity, but as the flow. And this is a very, very deep insight on Dewey’s part. But he will express it, not mystically, but with, I suppose what critics will call abject honesty. He will simply say here it is.

“In short philosophic method,” philosophic method, “The ultimate science of reality, because it declares what experience in its totality is.” You have to unpack all that [inaudible]. There's a lot of words in there.
Experimental. This ultimate science of reality because it declares what experiment, what experience in its totality is fixes the worth and meaning of its various elements by showing their development in place within this whole. In short philosophic method.

But he says, “The paper that I wrote two years ago was largely negative.” Negative in expression because he didn't know how to say it.
For it was necessary to point out that as matter of fact the movement had not been successful in presenting psychology as the method of philosophy. For it had not been true to its own basis and ideal. Instead of determining all, both in its totality and its factors through consciousness it had endeavored to determine consciousness from something out and beyond necessary relation to consciousness.

He’s saying here that the curious process, which he is now conscious of. Which he now recognizes. Rather like a psychological term of projection. That he had projected an ideal out to co-op his very process of trying to understand his understanding. And the reason for this was that he was at that time still enamored by the Hegelian system of absolute. And Dewey now in 1886 is beginning to realize that if you posit an absolute ideation in the mind it short circuits the whole process of recognition on a fundamental experiential level. That one then is only dealing with schemata and not with experience. And certainly not with reality. And so now he is trying to come to experiencing reality and is saying the weird thing about it is that reality is unified. So, we have really difficult problem when we use a kind of a discursive language that doesn't move in terms of the real but moves in terms of the mental mapping.

So, he writes,
It had determined its psychology from a dogmatically presupposed ontology instead of getting at its ontology from a critical examination of the nature and contents of consciousness as its standpoint required.

In other words, if you're going to understand consciousness, you have to do it through the experience of consciousness and not through an idea about it. Because the ideas are not conscious. They are already precipitated out into forms and structures, which obviate the living context. It had a thing in itself, something whose very existence was to be opposed to consciousness as the unknowable substances, as in John Locke. The transcendental deity of Berkeley. The sensations or impressions of Hume or Mille. The transfigured real of Spencer. And it used this thing in itself as the cause and criteria of conscious experience, thus it contradicted itself. For if psychology as method of philosophy means anything it means that nothing shall be assumed except just conscious experience itself. And that the nature of all shall be ascertained from and within this. It is a very powerful. This is exquisite.
But the difficulty is, is that you cannot tell somebody else this. This is the very element that you can't tell somebody else because they will always hear it in your telling as an ideational program. They will not believe that you're expressing the veracity of yourself. They will hear it coming from you objectively as if it were your ideas. And in this translation, it twists the very fundamental nature of understanding.

Dewey got to this point in 1886. He spent four years at the University of Michigan then he went up to the University of Minnesota for a year. Came back to Michigan for another five years. So that from 1884 to 1894, he was at the University of Michigan. And then he moved over for about 10 years to the University of Chicago. So, from Ann Arbor to Chicago, it's not very far. A couple hours’ drive. Three-four hours drive.

While he was at the university of Chicago. And he was there remember from 1894 to 1904, Chicago was the center of American culture. Frank Lloyd Wright was there. [inaudible] Sullivan was there. James Adams of hall house was there. Dewey himself was there. The University of Chicago philosophy department was the pragmatic philosophy department. William James said of it, it seems to be the only faculty that is real and doing real thing Chicago at this time. The turn of the century was a real powerhouse. And the emphasis at this time was on making an American culture, not an imitation of anybody else. And especially not just taking over the colonial experience and working with that because obviously that must've been an imitation. And you can see that in those kinds of phrases they had already lost contact with the American roots. They had already misunderstood Franklin and Jefferson. They had already set aside Thoreau and Emerson together as quaint.

And this is bedeviled the American experience in the 20th century. Then it started out in the century with the best of all possible motives and completely ignorant that it was throwing away the very origins that were required to give validity to those motives. Because the American character had been forged all ready. And by not recognizing that, by not knowing the very origins of it, was like being exiled from Eden all over again and not knowing why. Because the development of the ideas at this time, profound as they were, all resonated around the very core that individual experience was consciousness per se. Without any kind of an ideational patterning to it. And that this is what the individual really was. And when they got to that implosion of value, because they had already sealed off the real beginnings of that character, they came up against a blank negativeness, which they themselves had made. Which they themselves had projected in.

This led at the time to the bitter experience of Woodrow Wilson. And we don't have time to go into that, but there was the condition almost tantamount to a sociological crucifixion of the American president at the end of the First World War. Because Wilson told not only American people, but the world that we cannot live in nation state matrixes anymore. And Wilson was very clear of why we couldn't. Because individuals were now so powerful that individuals transcended the limitations of the histories of nation states. There were going to be individuals who were bigger than countries and bigger than whole histories. And unless there was a unified world community to give a real grounding and context to these individuals, they would step out of the national boundaries like Supermen and tear the world apart. This was 1917. Nobody wanted to hear this. Everyone said Wilson is just trying to lure us into all kinds of crazy schemes. He wants a league of nations because he wants to be the leader of it. It's just the same old political stunt. But Wilson was expressing what we have bitterly come to see.

Wilson also predicted the merging together of such large competent individuals into corporate hunting groups, which would roam the world. And the world would become the prey of such powerful groups. And we’re very rapidly approaching that state today. A corporation like GM can buy Hughes Corporation for 5 billion and just stick it into one portfolio. It's nothing.

Dewey having made this tremendous leap into understanding. Having come from criticizing the metaphysical foundations of materialism, to the understanding of the new psychology, to the bringing in of psychology as a philosophic method. Because consciousness pure was the process going on. It occurred to him that the individual is the focus that is needed to be in investigated and that the investigation should go along these philosophic method lines of the new experimental psychology. And so, he became interested in ethics. And the reason that ethics comes up so strongly here, those have been coming to the Saturday class will realize that ethics is the first expressive form matrix in which the individual realizes the true context that he lives in. It's a religious realization. The very core of religion is to have become a person who realizes that his personal reality is real in terms of the community to which he belongs. And if he does not belong to a community one sets about to make one.

So, he became interested in ethics. And he designed a series of courses. And the syllabus to one of these courses began saying that, “Philosophy is the conscious inquiry into experience. It is the attempt of experience to attain to its own validity and fullness. The realization of the meaning of experience.” This, this means that if I realized myself and I'm doing this in a philosophic way, I am engaged all the time in understanding, in extracting or in creating meaning. And that the meaning becomes the very defining context in which I occur. And that this works vice versa, that that meaningfulness also gains a stability and a focus through my individuality.

Science and philosophy can only report the actual condition of life or experience. Their business is to reveal experience in its truth. It's reality. They state what is. The only distinction between science and philosophy is that the latter reports, the more generic, wider features of life in the form of the more detailed and specific.
So, science is a particularizing.

END OF SIDE ONE
But philosophy treats the discreet, the fanned out phenomenal occurrence of life and science treats the syncrete, the compacted detailed. And their functions where they meet are kept into relation by a third function that is happening called consciousness in which the individual occurs. And in which something which used to be called process of adjustment occurs and eventually will be for Dewey called freedom. So that reality occurs only where there is an individual in freedom in philosophic, in scientific activity. That that is the condition of freedom as a reality. And without all of those elements together, doesn't happen.

Well, let's take a break there and we'll come back after the break.

I realize that you're coming from freeways and work and homes and all kinds of living conditions that are not conducive to strenuous thinking like this. I'm aware of that. But that's why I keep myself out of a yogic disposition so I can approach and appreciate that. I live like the rest of us.

As well you should.

Dewey’s work is extremely difficult to appreciate because it is a culmination and without his work the Keystone or the American tradition doesn't hang together. And what we're left with is the new network TV series that come out every September and slowly through attrition bore us to tears. And while all that's going on the land is dying. The dropout rates in high schools is now more than 50%, which is a failure rate. The corporations are becoming so vicious that it's like being in constant warfare. And just generally, it's a distasteful sort of a world. The only way out of that is not to fight against it, but to go back and take the boards off the windows and open them up and let some sunlight in. The sunlight will purify the air a little bit. So that's what we're doing very quietly.

I tried fighting against it. I tried all the revolutionary techniques there are. And I could see that none of them worked. This is the only way that works. This is the path that leads out.

In the Second World War Columbia University, where eventually Dewey was for many, many years. After Chicago he went to Columbia, and he was there for a quarter of a century, and he was the mainstay. And in 1943, Columbia published a volume called The Origin of Dewey’s Instrumentalism. Instrumentalism. By Morton G. White. He has a very famous American philosopher. Chapter 11 was the conclusion. And the conclusion contained some words like this throughout this, “Throughout this essay I have tried to point out the future significance of many of the things Dewey was saying in the eighties and nineties.” He's writing this in 1943 in the middle of the Second World War. Many of the things Dewey was saying already in the 1880’s and 1890’s have a real message for the future. We saw how heavily Dewey was influenced in his philosophical development, turning from Hegel and turning away from the kind of British empiricism in the Kantian idealism and so forth. Because he is trying to unburden himself. Unburden his mind. In the process of unburdening, he's not stepping into a new content, which will create a new burden, but he has to step somewhere. So instead of stepping into any kind of new content, he sidesteps into a methodological procedure. Which obviates the need for a content. And when he does this, he discovers as human beings at any time at any age discover that they exist quite well without any content whatsoever. And the first thing they ask themselves, when they sober up to that fact, how can this be? I'm not thinking about anything and I'm totally aware. I don't have any kind of plan and I'm leading a very structured life. And I can't identify the structure, but it's really there. What in the world is going on?

And Dewey says that this is discovery. That there's a relationship between becoming an individual and recognizing freedom. That they go together. That they go together in a very realistic way. And this tandem recognition occurs when there is a methodological process, which he eventually will adopt William James term Pragmatism.

White writing in 1943 says,
I cannot stress too heavily the importance and the concept of dualism in Dewey's development. No position large or small that Dewey attacked was not charged at some point or other with being dualistic. This charge was deemed sufficient to destroy any philosophic claim. Many people scoffed at it. Many. We have seen how this opposition to dualism was originally associated with a belief in the organic unity of the world. The distinction between organic and mechanical relations and the belief that the knowledge relation is organic. For knowledge to be an organic relation it is necessary that an organic unity embrace both the knower and the known object.
This is the way write…Martin White was writing.
Remember, now that Dewey's last book is called Knowing and The Known. There's no knower. That's, that's dualism.

So,
This is provided by the theory of the universal consciousness or objective mind. It serves two progressive purposes. First it presented what I've called the schema for Dewey's later naturalism because it enabled Dewey to conceive of the human and nonhuman things as united in some sense. Second the view that there is an absolute mind was the forerunner of Dewey's believe that all human behavior takes place in a cultural matrix.
He will eventually write a book called Culture and Freedom [Freedom and Culture]. And the, and in there more than just a conjunctive. To think that one is free outside of a cultural matrix is an arrogance of unprecedented qualities.

Dewey in this time, and I'm trying to skip over for you so that it makes sense, but doesn't truncate the, the impact. Dewey’s whole emphasis at the end of the 1880’s. And at the beginning of the 1890’s was on ethics. And all through his teaching through the 1890’s, his courses on ethics were the ones that received the most emphasis. At the end of his philosophic, syllabus to his students he defined ethic. “Ethic unites the two sides distinguished [inaudible] logic and anesthetic. It deals with the practical situation, the organized action.” Logic and aesthetic.

He will later write a very great book called Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. And the third lecture on Dewey will be all about the achievement of that. It's a very high level of achievement. One that hasn't been achieved in the West ever before. And one that was only approached in China and in India previously.

His work finally culminated in 1908 in a very large volume called Ethics, which has just been reprinted by the Southern Illinois University Press. And the Ethics of 1908, almost a 600-page volume, was the combination for Dewey for his personal involvement at this time. And he followed it with a short essay on The Realism of Pragmatism. And I'm going to bypass because of lack of time, his book, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy [The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays]. There's a lot of references to William James in here, but I'm just going to have to pass that by.

In The Realism of Pragmatism Dewey brought to a close right at the middle of his investigation on ethics, the core of his understanding of why this process, why this methodological process, would clear up human life. Clear up politics. Clear up the sociological jungle. Clear up the psychological ambiguities. Clear up the philosophical conundrums. And so, he entitled this The Realism of Pragmatism.

Professor Colvin in his instructive article On Subjective Idealism In Psychology, let's drop the significant remark. Quote. “It is an extremely fascinating doctrine, this radical subjectivism, which becomes solipsism when interpreted in terms of the intellect and pragmatism when formulated in the categories of the will.” Unquote.

Dewey writes, The words that I have italicized are significant.” And they are. And Pragmatism when formulated in the categories of the will.
The words I have italicized are significant because thrown in incidentally by this writer and not in an argument pro or con as to Pragmatism, they reveal what seems to be the general assumption. Accordingly, this may offer a fit and uncontroversial opportunity for making a somewhat personal and dogmatic final statement. Speaking of the matter, only for myself, the presuppositions and tendencies of Pragmatism are distinctly realistic and not idealistic in any sense, which in which idealism connotes or is connoted by the theory of knowledge.

He's saying that there is a radical misunderstanding going on. That this stepping in to content and then stepping out of one content into another content. This is willful. But sidestepping into a methodological context or process has nothing to do with the will. There's no willfulness at all in that. There's only experience. There's only consciousness. He's saying that this misinterpreting of the pragmatic method as if it were a new doctrine is very curious psychologically because it shows that somebody is habituated. Somebody is really trapped. Somebody is drugged out on the content level of the mind and can't sidestep.

So, Dewey become interested in education because of this problem. Why is it so that some people can't do this? Is it because certain types of people can't do this? Is it because of certain home backgrounds that they can't? Who does this all the time? And Dewey will say, well, children do this all the time. They side step all the time. So, Dewey will become interested in children's education. And he and his wife will do a lot of work in Chicago. They will go to Jane Adams and her Hull House where a lot of just advantage and underprivileged to people and children were. And Dewey will put in long years. And they would set up experimental kindergarten type situations and just be there. Be there as pure consciousness experience with the kids. Year after year. And just feeling how that is.

And he will eventually write very great work called The School and Society, because he will discover that if you have an education that teaches how to side step it gets rid of this whole addictive content mongering. And all kinds of virtues blossom very freely. Children grow up to be adults who are tolerant, alert, aware. They're not fragile. They're mobile. And they have consciousness instead of opinions.

Instead of what?

Instead of opinions. Which is different. They can entertain opinions, many of them for as long as you would like, or they would like, but they don't claim to them. They'll try something and if it doesn't work, they'll try something else. And out of this comes a different kind of society. A different kind of people. Then Dewey will find two places on Earth that were responsive to it. Some people in the United States and some people in China. And those were the two places that were really responsive to him. Of actually getting things done on the basis of an open consciousness and not on the basis of some kind of a doctrinaire planned mentality.

So, he writes in The Realism of Pragmatism,
Speaking of the matter, only for myself, the presuppositions and tendencies of Pragmatism are distinctly realistic, not my idealistic in any sense in which idealism connotes or was connoted by the theory of knowledge. Pragmatism believes that in knowledge as a fact and accomplished matter things are representative of one another. To employ Professor Woodbridge’s happy because correct phrase ideas, sensations, mental states are in their cognitive significance media of so adjusting things to one another that they become representative of one another. When this is accomplished, they drop out and things are present to the agent in the most naively realistic fashion.

This is pure Zen. Things drop out and they are present to the agent in the most naively realistic fashion. You know, Christian [inaudible] talks this way all the time. This is just the language that he uses. Dewey was writing this way at the turn of the century. He still had another 50 years to go.

“States of consciousness,” in quotation marks. “States of consciousness refer to getting knowledge.” Italicized. Getting knowledge. It's a process.
To the situation when things as objective fail us have so to speak gone back on us when accordingly, we neither have them to know your nor yet to know with. It is in this situation and only in this situation that states of consciousness exist or have meaning. Cognitively speaking. And if I put in the phrase, cognitively speaking, it is only to take account of the emotions. And with reference to the emotions the significant point is that they also arise in function in problematic situations. In situations whose objective determination or character is not known, not presented.

This is purely mysterious. But realistically mysterious. It’s not mysterious from ambiguity, but from precise precision. Not the precision of content, but of following the methodology through to its pure working state. That Dewey will say that that is freedom. And in that matrix, the individual is really.

So, I'm going to just read this again and then jump down and give you one more paragraph real quick.
States of consciousness refer to getting knowledge. It is in this situation and only in this situation that states of consciousness exist or have meaning. Knowledge, even getting knowledge, must rest on facts, on things. But the need of truth of cognitively assured things means once more that such things are not present.
Italicized, not. Not present.
Just as the beef steak is not eating in a situation which money stands for it. Things in problematic situations must operate through representatives, ministerial agents. Through psychical things, which for the purpose in hand, and for that only.
That's italicized. They're represented for the purpose at hand and for that only. This is an exclusive phenomenological processing, and that is the functioning of consciousness purely. And this then can be said to be mutually realistic insignificance. Because it's true of all things no matter what they are in the same way.

Psychical things are thus themselves, realistically conceived. They can be described and identified in biological and even physiological terms. In terms with an adequate science of even chemical, physical correspondence. Psychologically they are themselves literal emotions and felt impulses. Moreover, they are realistically conditioned from the genetic side. Their origin as existences can be stated and must be stated in terms of adjustments and maladjustments. Among habits, biological functionings. The reproach that has been brought against pragmatism of utilizing biological evolutionary data might, it would seem at least to have preserved it from the reproach of subjectivism. In short, the point that the critics of pragmatism have missed with a surprising unanimity is that in giving a reinterpretation of the nature and function of knowledge, pragmatism gives necessarily a thorough going re-interpretation of all the cognitive machinery. Sensations, ideas, concepts, whatever one which inevitably tends to take these things in a much more literal and physically realistic fashion than is current. What Pragmatism takes from idealism as just an owner empiricism. That too it is the real lesson of the subjectivism which has held sway since the time of Descartes and Locke. This lesson learned, we can think freely and naively in terms of things, because things are no longer entities in a world set over against another world called mind or consciousness with some sort of mysterious anthological tie between them. Pragmatism has learned that the true meaning of subjectivism is just anti dualism. Hence philosophy can enter again into the realistic thought and conversation of common sense and science. Where dualisms are just dualities. Distinctions having an instrumental and practical but not ultimate metaphysical worth. Or rather having a metaphysical worth in a practical and experimental sense not in that of indicating a radical existential [inaudible] in the nature of things.

So, Dewey was writing this way about the time that William James was giving his lectures on radical empiricism and a pluralistic universe. And you can see that American thought in 1906 and 1907 was really very, very, very sophisticated. The American people couldn't hear it. They wouldn't buy it. It didn't seem like you could make money with it.

And so, after the First World War, the whole educational system was co-opted by American business and power interests, which had political designs. And refashioned and changed in the 1919, the United States was made into a daydream of the military industrial complex. As early as that.

And Dewey was the only representative who lived into that new era. Because William James would die. Mark Twain would die. Henry Adams would die. And Dewey found himself the only individual who was really still living into that new era. The only other person who was cognizant of this transition and of this change, who was around, was Frank Lloyd Wright. And Wright didn't want to waste time talking to anybody. He would write books called Genius and the Mobocracy and would say, there's no sense that even talking to them. Look at it. It's a free for all they're in it to get as much as they can, as fast as they can and get out of it. Who needs them? And so, in Wright's artistic, imperiousness write them off. They count for nothing anyway.

It's rather the attitude of the great master artist. Like the time that Goethe and Beethoven were walking together down the street and the French troops of Napoleon came and Goethe was trying to get out of the way and Beethoven grabbed his arm and said, let them get out of the way for us. Napoleon's army is nothing compared to us. We make reality. They only make countries in history.

But Dewey would not give up. And Dewey is the real hero in the world because he kept thinking, there must be a way to express this. There must be a way. Because here I am at Columbia University, the professor. They can't get rid of me.

And so, towards the close of the First World War Dewey write a monumental work called Democracy and Education. And in Democracy and Education he would put forth the radical program that the only way that there is going to be in America is to have an American educational matrix out of which individuals and freedom can occur together. Otherwise, it's not going to ever happen. And of course, people didn't like this. And he followed up by all kinds of interesting books, Essays In Experimental Logic, Creative Intelligence [Creative Intelligence; Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude], Reconstruction in Philosophy, Human Nature and Conduct [Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology], Experience and Nature, The Public and Its Problems. And you can see just by the titles, just in a few years, what a prolific outpouring, almost like an outcry of an intelligent man saying, dammit, these problems are real. Look at them. Again, and again and again. And the solutions are real also. Why don't we just do it?

And in the early 1920’s, in order to get a break Dewey left the United States for two years. He went to Tokyo and then he went to China. And when he was in China, he found a new kind of affinity. He had never thought of China before. And when he got there, he found that there wasn't kind of an elan with the Chinese mind, which he could experience. And when he came back from China, there was a tremendous change in Dewey. And his book Experience and Nature is very much like an American Tao Te Ching. Very interesting. And we'll talk about that next week.

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