John Dewey's Experience and Nature

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 12 of 13

John Dewey’s Experience And Nature
The Influence of Taoism China
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 19, 1985

Transcript:

The date is September 19th, 1985. This is the 12th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on a general subject Transformational America. Tonight's lecture is entitled Dewey’s Experience And Nature: The Influence of Taoism China.


New programs are out for the fall. And you can see that we're going to culminate with a number of different individuals. Instead of taking three or four individuals, we're going to take twelve. And even though it lists November 28th as no lecture. That's not true. It just simply that P.R.S. is closed and the lecture will be held at Whirling Rainbow. I feel seriously still about teaching, and I don't allow for the continuity to be interrupted.

The series of course is as you can see, not drawing well. The P.R.S. mailing list is somewhere around 30,000 people and we draw more Whirling Rainbow and nights with no advertising and no mailing list. But they the need to review the United States as a spiritual tradition is very, very great. And those of you who have been able to attend these lectures or pick up the cassettes and listen to them, I know there have been individuals across the country who've been doing this. They've been quite surprised to find out that we have a very rich tradition indeed. In fact, we have the unknown treasure in the world today. We are the culmination of the Western narrative esoteric tradition. And the United States is simply that bouquet of blossoms of techniques and individuals and commitments, programs and purposes that Western man has always envisioned for himself. The paradox that those of us who are in a time of blooming cannot appreciate it is due simply to the index of mental illusion among our contemporaries. We live in a very great time. It is no accident that for the first time in human history, the penetration to the lunar level has been done by our countrymen in our time. This is not a small event. It is in fact, a very arcane event. And to quote the wonderful words of Dr. Martin Luther King. Free at last. Lord almighty, free at last.”

So, we are tracing. We begin our tradition with Benjamin Franklin. If you think the United States begins with George Washington, with the constitution, you're missing the whole point. You were seeing a political entity. You're not seeing the United States. The United States is a human manifestation. It has a spiritual talent, not a political [inaudible].

And we saw that Franklin's number one characteristic was his self-made-ness, which was open-ended. Franklin continued to develop, to grow, to the end of his life. He was never a finished man. He was never a mask. A persona. He was always a matrix of processes in operation tremendously protein. And it was due to Franklin's character that the United States assumed the shape that it finally has come to display. But the shape of the United States is quite different from the political history, which overlays it like a patina.

And so, in our tracing, we moved from Franklin to Jefferson, but then we left the political arena. We left the world of exterior organization, and we went to Thoreau. And we then spent the second of the lecture series on Our Critical Tradition. We saw how James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, who are usually shunted office writers of children's literature, were in fact, two of our most astute critics understanding the American tradition. But both of them unable to halt the shredding of that tradition. We looked also in that lecture series at Abraham Lincoln. We saw his spiritual excellence. The almost a miraculous quality to his meteoric appearance in the world scene. And we looked also at Henry Adams.

We found in the third series Transformational America that with Whitman, the vision of the United States was reaffirmed and reaffirmed during the Civil War. And now towards the end of Transformational America, we will see in the second lecture on John Dewey, how Dewey is the first American that we have taken, who will live through the First World War. And how Dewey’s tremendous consciousness and astute mind will portray a radical change in the reality of the United States because of the First World War.

We have, because of lack of time and space been unable to include as we would have in a more exfoliated program, one missing figure. We should have had at least one lecture on Woodrow Wilson because Woodrow Wilson is the compliment to Abraham Lincoln. And as Lincoln appeared for the Civil War, Wilson appeared for the First World War. And as Lincoln spoke for the unity of the people, Wilson expanded that unity beyond the continental boundaries to include the entire world for the first time. And for this, of course, Wilson was shunted off the world scene just as effectively as if he had been assassinated. It was a character assassination. And he died a broken man ridiculous in many people's eyes. And his entire legacy, the entire idea of a league of nations, received nothing but ridicule.

John Dewey was there all the time. His intelligence and his comportment give us an accurate record of the inner Hermetic America during this time. And it's significant that right after the First World War John Dewey accepted an extensive lecture tour in China. And he went to China, and he wrote articles for The New Republic. For Asia Magazine. For several other publications. Newspapers. And all the time he was in China he kept writing back to the United States to these national publications his experience in post-World War One, China 1919-1920. And he stayed on over the year. He was invited as the visiting professor of philosophy. And the next visiting professor of philosophy was Bertrand Russell. And when Russell arrived in China, he got desperately ill. And so, John Dewey and his wife took it upon themselves to nurse Bertrand Russell back to health. And they actually saved his life. And so, Dewey stayed in China for quite some time. He also lectured in Tokyo in Japan. He was in the power centers of East Asia at this most opportune time.

And we have to understand, we have to project ourselves out for a moment. We have to understand that Japan and China, after the First World War were a significant archetypal experience for the United States. The United States had begun with Franklin and Jefferson's vision, especially Jefferson's vision, of creating the westward movement. The creating of the pioneer spirit. And that pioneer spirit and that westward movement became almost as the great historian Frederick Merck said a manifest destiny. And it's swept all the way across the continent to California. And for a while, California became the golden land. The terminus of this tremendous movement. But after the First World War in a very deep, subconscious way, the westward movement, the manifest destiny, extended itself across the Pacific Ocean to the next land forms, which were Japan and China. And in a very subtle arcane way, the far East became the farthest West of the manifest destiny of the United States. Of its pioneer spirit. And John Dewey was the only conscious individual who realized this and was there on the spot to investigate, to experience, to record, to try and understand. In the daily sense, in the mental patterning, political sense and in the very large historical, almost archetype sense. What is happening in this world? So, we have a very interesting occurrence.

And from Dewey's involvement in China, and he came back to the United States, 1921. He brought with him an unsettledness in himself. Not in his mind so much because the peculiar nature of his mind is we will see. But three years later, this unsettledness would express itself in one of the greatest books that Dewey ever wrote. Probably he has greatest called Experience and Nature. And Experience and Nature is very much an American Tao Te Ching. It has very much a Chinese flavor to it. Not in the ideational presentation. It is a classic work of Western philosophy in that sense. But its flavor is Chinese.

Dewey is almost invisible. But Dewey in his Chinese connection is the most arcane figure in American history. And for this, I have had to go to a two-volume set that's been very difficult to obtain since it was printed. Popular essays in social and political philosophy by John Dewey, entitled Characters and Events [Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy] published in 1929. And the, this is the first of two volumes. And it has not been available very much since then. And usually, it's not around. It's almost never read. Almost never referred to. Recall now that in 1929, John Dewey was already 70 years old. He was already a mature man. He had lived a full life.

As a prelude leading into Experience and Nature, I wanted, therefore give you a little selection of some of Dewey's thoughts from China. And as a prelude to that, I want to give you a few of his thoughts on William James. Because there is a connection. There is a lining up of William James with his Varieties of Religious Experience, with his Pragmatism, with his Pluralistic Universe, with his Radical Empiricism. There's a lining up of that William James, who was very much in this sense like a Benjamin Franklin. And John Dewey coming after him and overlapping their lives and overlapping their concerns is very much like Thomas Jefferson was to Franklin. And there was this peculiar relationship, almost like a telescope opening up, and what had seemed enormously significant and human terms for William James seemed suddenly of cosmic significance with John Dewey.

When James died in 1910, there were eulogies by many people around the world. He was almost the most famous person alive. Probably Tolstoy was the only individual who had more of a household name around the world. Dewey wrote of James saying that James was in fact, the most significant psychologist of his time. That were it not for the skewed over appreciation of the German tradition, William James would be seen as the most significant psychologist. That his Principles of Psychology had for once and for all related the mental, psychological array of man's capacity to his physiological patterning. That there was a connection which could not be broken at our peril between matter and mind. That they somehow must be seen as an inner penetrate unity. Not only does matter affect mind, but that mind affects matter. And this was the core of the insight of James.

But Dewey says that that insight could not be appreciated if it were understood as a static idea. That in an ideational mentality, the full significance of that observation does not have the right conditions in which to flower and open up. That only in the pragmatically aerated mind is there the right conditions for this perception, for this conception, of the interpenetrate-ness of matter in mind to exfoliate itself in its full significance to come out. And the pragmatic mind is schooled not to look at origins, not to look at axiomatic beginnings, but to look at purposes. To look at directions and functions and possibilities. What is this doing? If we understand such and so, what will occur to us? So that the projecting of experience into a life living frame where the edges of the frame continually open out through experimentation. This is what the conditions were in Dewey's mind for appreciating James.

And he says that,
The most important sense of James was his sense of reality. I would not say that philosophers as a class are lacking in this trait, but the business of philosophy is to generalize and to systematize. And philosophers are under a greater temptation than others to follow the bent of their own leading principles, to fill in missing considerations and to overlook contrary indications. James was extraordinarily free from this defect. He saw things in the varied aspects, which they have by nature, and it was content to report them as he saw them.
A varied sense that reality has an ambivalence which has built into it. It has an uncertainty which occurs in its very nature. And that to truncate this is to misunderstand.

So, he writes,
Most of those who turned away from materialism and positivism sought refuge in German idealism.” And people like Bradley and Greene and [inaudible], they and their active disciples naturalized the thought of Kant and Hegel in England. And many others made that thought at home in this country. But now Mr. James could not find satisfaction in the school any more than in positivism. His training and the methods of natural science made him find Neo-Kantianism and [inaudible] rather formal and empty. They proceeded with too much respect for concepts in general, and with two little four brute facts in the concrete. But more than that they were tarred, to his mind, with that which made the scientific philosophy so objectionable to him. Idealism as well as materialism was absolutism in tendency. Both made the universe what Mr. James called a blocked universe. A world all in one piece.
With emphasis on word piece.

Such a world left no place for genuine novelty. For real change. For adventure. For the uncertain and the vague. For choice and freedom. In short for distinctive individuality. It made little difference to James, whether the hard and fast unity to which these things were sacrificed was called matter or thought the intolerable thing was that they were or seemed to him to be sacrificed.
This turns out to be very important in Dewey’s own thought. These observations.

And then he observes that James as a figure seems to come at a very opportune time in American history. After he describes his philosophic and his psychological importance then Dewey’s mind shifts over and he says that,
It seems that America will justify ourselves as long as she breeds those like William James. Men who are thinkers and thinkers who are men. I love indeed to think that there is something profoundly American in his union of philosophy with life. In his honest acceptance of the facts of science joined to a hopeful outlook upon the future. About the courageous faith in our ability to shape an unknown future. When our country comes to itself in consciousness, when it transmutes into articulate ideas, what are still obscure and blind strivings. Two men Emerson and James will I think stand out as a prosthetic forerunners of the attained creative values.

This ability to extend shaped-ness into the unknown is the very essence of the pragmatic outlook. That purpose and not a priori lends shape to reality. That there is no such thing as some cookie cutter on some transcendental level, which stamps out of matter in mind the shapes that eventually they are understood to obtain. That instead it is a creative process ongoing. And that the unknown remains unknown. And that the shaping process extends itself into the unknown. And for Dewey it was this perception in James, his work in pragmatism, that set him up to appreciate China. He will say in his writings that the visible always rests upon the invisible. And because of that it is the invisible, which is the fulcrum of activity. And this of course is Daoism.

So, we'll skip over now to, that was written in 1910. And this comes from the New Republic, July 16th, 1919. He has been in Japan and now he goes to China, and he says in the three days from Japan to China one makes more of a shift than if one went from San Francisco to Shanghai. And he begins to wonder about this. What is it with the Japanese people that they are so radically different from the Chinese people? More so than the American people and the Chinese people are different. How can this be? Why does this occur to me? Dewey is thinking of this line. And then he begins to shape his thoughts, and he realizes that the Japanese character is one of selectively importing from other civilizations, from other countries, for themselves. And then refining for themselves these importations. And that what the Japanese people have been doing now for the last 50 years is importing Western values. And that Japan has become for all intents and purposes, another nation state.

And then Dewey backs off and says, I do not find the nation state character in China. When he talks to individuals at whatever level, from shopkeepers to editors and university professors, he says the Chinese seem innately able to fend off any kind of idea of a nation state. And they flow with what is it called a tradition. Whereas the Japanese have embraced the creation of a national state, almost with a vengeance as if to make up for lost time. He says, this is a very peculiar situation. And that it shows that the Chinese mind has a different characteristic from the Japanese mind. And that the difference between the Chinese and Japanese mind is also a major difference between the Chinese and European mind. That in fact, what China does is engender within itself new values, but that those values are shaped according to the tradition. And that there's a peculiar quality to the tradition. The interpenetration of Daoism and Confucianism has made the Chinese tradition a creative exploratory experience ongoing for the Chinese people. And that is unimpaired over 4,000 years. Whereas those elements that Japan appropriated from China a thousand years ago via Korea have already suffered major sea changes by the importation of Western industrial values and European nation state militaristic values. And is in the process of completely revamping Japan. Whereas China is seeking to let experience occur to it in a vast monumental way, preparatory to then understanding how the Chinese tradition may extend itself into this new realm. And Dewey points out that the new realm is that a scientific thought. Scientific thought.

Remember, now that this is 1919, there was no such thing as Joseph Needham the Science And Civilization in China. There was no understanding of the great scientific tradition in China, which was for most intents and purposes squelched in China during the Ching dynasty. So that it seemed to Europeans that there just wasn't the scientific tradition there. We know today that this is not so.

But the interesting observation of Dewey was that while Japan was importing Western ideas, China was experiencing and not making any kind of shape at all but being very pragmatic about its future. Not being axiomatic as the Japanese were. And he says, this is one of the reasons why he thinks that he was invited to China. Why when he got to China he found all kinds of people, students, and so forth reading his works. That there had been a number of people studying English in order to read John Dewey's works. And in fact, before the rise of Marxism in China, Dewey was the most influential philosopher all during the 1920’s and into the 1930’s. John Dewey was the major philosophic voice in China.

In his writings he then looks at the Chinese philosophy of life. He's trying to understand for himself and his own pragmatic way, what am I experiencing? What is going on here? There's something in the fact that I'm an American who has now moved westward over the Pacific into China. There's that aspect. I am also experiencing in China, the rising up of a tradition, which seems very reminiscent of what I thought was Avant guard in my outlook. And so, Dewey is beginning to have this kind of a transmutation, I think we would call it.

So, he writes,
It is much easier to raise these questions then to answer them. But a knowledge of Chinese civilization and of the philosophy of life expressed in it, at least makes the questions more real and more pertinent. Two great philosophies of life are intimately connected with the Chinese attitude toward political and social issues. Those have Lao-Tzu and of Confucius. Perhaps a third Buddha should be mentioned.
But the Chinese had a completely revamped Buddhism. And in the end was transformed by Taoism and Confucianism.

So, he says that Confucianism seems to have always affected the shaping top echelons of Chinese life, but that Daoism has influenced the people, the Chinese people. And that the validity of the upper echelons has not been so much a political validity, but a cosmological validity concurred by their ability to help nature penetrate into the lives of the people. And that at times where this was truncated or stopped, the people revolted, and the upper echelons were replaced. And new people came up. And if they could show themselves to have acquired the ability to bridge man and Heaven, of bringing the people back into contact with the Dao, with nature, then they were legitimized in their rule. And that this seems to be the great sign wave of Chinese dynastic confirmation. That this was in fact extraordinarily different from the Western idea of the nation state as derived from Rome and the Roman experience. And the European experience after the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. That in China, the ruling shape is cosmological and natural and is not political. And is not in fact, in a mental abstraction

He writes,
The important thing is the doctrine of the superiority of nature to man. And the conclusion drawn namely the doctrine of non-doing. For active doing and striving are likely to only be an interference with nature. The idea of non-doing can hardly be stated and explained, it can only be felt. It is something more than mere inactivity. It is a kind of rule of moral doing. A doctrine of active patience, endurance, persistence. While nature has time to do her work. Conquering by yielding is its motto.

And of course, Dewey will develop this. And he will say, the West is sorely misunderstanding China. The China is not being victimized by the European powers, but that China is being very Chinese and is yielding to this new situation in order to find its quintessential connection with nature. To find the new ruling cosmological echelon. And when that is attained the Chinese people will rise and create the order for themselves out of this perception. This is 1919.

He writes,
The Chinese seem to have survived intact all the time by this respect for nature. By their methods their soil is still intact. They are able to tell the soil, it still is as fertile as it ever was. Whereas the Western European way seems to finally exhaust soil. After so many years, after so many centuries, just so many thousands of years.
But the Chinese have a conservative what's your principal because of being able to appreciate nature and let it have its way. It's work. That man's wisdom is in this non-doing active patience. And that this is in fact, very close to the pregnant pragmatic outlook which Dewey himself has come to see as quintessentially American.

It is a very strange interpenetration of ideas. And when Dewey would speak this way he was running regarded in the United States as increasingly somebody who was a crackpot. But he was regarded to increasingly in China as a bell whether for the new events to unfold. Because Dewey was there for the May 4th Movement 1919, which was a great spontaneous native student revolt, which changed the nature of the leading edge of change in China. It changed the nature from military warlords to students. And when the students began to take the leadership they began making little publications. So that the precipitant matrix was no longer the gun in the battlefield but was the mind and the writing in journals. So that the to use a Tai Chi phrase, the [inaudible] of the movement of Chinese changed, shifted from the battlefield to the publication.

And in the publications Dewey noted again and again that the titles are all indicative of a new form. Young China, The New Social Order, and on and on. He goes, I don't know if I can find it off the bat, but he gives a whole list of these publications. He had Chinese friends go around and find for him all of these publications. And Dewey sat down and read what he could in English and had them translate it for himself and found that this was an extraordinary happening. And he was in on its scene. I can't find the list now, but you get the general picture and idea.


Dewey then writes of the Chinese philosophy of life,
Though Confucianism has had its especial career among the upper and official classes, yet its net effect has merged with the influence of Lao-Tzu to create a definite contempt for politics and an aversion to government as the West understands the term.
This is an extraordinarily profound realization. Almost nobody in the West understood this. And almost nobody in the West today understands this.

It seems almost impossible to us today that within two or three years of his death [inaudible] whole hold that so called totalitarian hold on the people was almost vanished. Almost vanished. Because it, the perception was that this was a brainwashed people was an illusion. It was not true at all. My Chinese mentor Kai-yu Hsu wrote a very great book on Chou En-lai Sub entitled China's Gray Eminence [Chou En-lai: China's Gray Eminence]. And you can see in there how the great Chinese tradition was working all the time. There might've been a brittle cover of patina called Marxism on top but there was several miles of oceanic water called Chinese civilization underneath that surface level. And the Chinese will be Chinese. Never going to be anything other than that. Much to the distress of the Soviet Union.

Dewey has got it. He had it 60 years ago. A few of the old China [inaudible] understood this then, and they were not listened to. Here's what Dewey says,
The emperor did not govern. He ruled by not governing. By not interfering with the real government, the customs of the people which were so immemorial and so interwoven in agriculture with the operations of nature that they themselves were like the workings of nature. Tribute paid to him was not so much political taxation as an expression of loyalty to the natural and moral forces that he embodied.

So that what the Chinese warlords who tried to impose a nation state upon China in their own terms failed again and again. It was not because of some political ideology, which they were holding against them. It was because no political ideologies were going to obtain. Everything was being experienced and brought into this stew, this traditional matrix, to find the essential contact with the way in which nature has always worked and then reinstate an order based upon that. For that's what China is. And Dewey saw this.

Then for Dewey the problem became very astute. “Is it possible?” He writes in December 1919,
“Is it possible for a Westerner to understand Chinese political psychology?” What's the difficulty? The difficulty is that we are always acting upon the visible. We're always founding ourselves and building upon the visible. And the movement of Chinese experience has its fulcrum from upon the invisible. And we're always grasping at the so-called visible political structures. It's always slipping through our fingers and we're not understanding. And this is true incidentally, not only of China, but of Korea, of Vietnam, of all of Indochina. All the places where Chinese civilization has been effective.

But the peculiar thing that Dewey is beginning to experience is that the United States in its esoteric movement has discovered the secret of the Chinese way. And that the very sophisticated development of the United States is becoming very much like the Chinese. So that the American people themselves are going to lose their own civilization. And they're going to desperately reach out for European models because they think that there's nothing happening when it's just that the American experience is finally maturing like the Chinese experiences always matured. That there is a way of being alive, natural upon the land in such a way that it will seem like you haven't done anything to it. Because the American Indians were very much like the Chinese. Very, very much. And it was what Franklin and Jefferson said at the very beginning, we have to become tribal members of this reality, or we're not going to last. Our breaking away from Europe is not to break away and become competitors to Europe in a European way, but to experiment with mankinds nature to see if there isn't some different kind of man who can come out of this and belong here. And really live here. So that the land verifies his existence by letting him create a cosmos for himself. And if he doesn't do this, there's no amount of mentation and military power and economic success is ever going to let him sleep easy. He'll be living under a [inaudible].

END OF SIDE ONE

Well, we'd better take a break. I guess those cassettes are set fed up with all of this.

I'm trying to get to experience a nature. It's just that this is so difficult to express because it is generally not understood. And I think that if you're hearing somewhat of what I'm saying, a lot of the 20th century has been a gross error. And we have gone nowhere. We've done nothing except play around them all mulberry bush.

Dewey writes, “After a few months in China, a visitor will take an oath if he is wise, never to indulge in prediction.” And a little later, all this is in the article Transforming The Mind of China. He writes, “Analogies, especially when they are obvious or as deceptive in the field of political thinking as they long ago proved in natural science.” We just need to learn that we can't afford to burn ourselves anymore by holding the frying pan of the mind in between ourselves and the world. And coming up with tata logical illusions that deceive us continuously. Not because they want to, or anybody wants to, or doesn't want to. The nature of your mind is [inaudible] and will always produce this doubling effect, this illusion.

When you hear today the phrase nationalist China you will be able to hear in that very phrase now something that ain't right. The European nation state wherever it raises itself up in East Asia produces a monstrosity. And it's not just because of cultural tradition, but because of something in the nature of the mind. Because Dewey will make the same kind of connection in Experience and Nature with science. He will say that we had misunderstood science and technology totally. Because his experience in China will have prepared him to understand the nature of science. That science is born of art. Science is an art. And he was prepared for China because of his affinities with William James book. There's this direct link.

And by 1925, Dewey will have it all in place. And when he expresses it, no one will be willing to listen to it. He will remember William James saying that the trouble with the Americans is that they are getting used to worshiping the bitch God of success. They want to make the money. And they are forgetting the very nature of their great experiment, which is to find a new form of freedom for human beings. Because human beings are going to have to live on a unified world. Even beyond that they may have to live on other worlds. They need a new form of freedom. One which is commensurate with nature in its profoundest way. And without that, they will not be able to make it. Not because there's anything interfering with them, just in the nature and the structure of reality it won't happen. There's no amount of hand ringing, no amount of finger crossing, no amount of money or military power that can make it happen because it just isn't real. And so, a man has to slap himself awake to the fact that he's just playing a game with himself. If he thinks these other elements have efficaciousness in the world. They have none whatsoever. They are phantoms.

I would love to go on, did I have to leave China behind. But I think that I found the list. Here's the name of some of the student publications that came out right after the May the 4th Movement. Youth and Society, The Dawn, New Voice of Society, The New Individual, The Citizen, The Warm Tide, Young China, The Young World, The New Group, The New Life, Upward, Construction, Learning and Labor, and Truth. These were typical names.

And Dewey says when he asked his students and the townspeople wherever he went in China, why are you doing this? They inevitably and invariably replied to bring China back into its greatness. To restore China to its wholesomeness. And he said it was extraordinary because the Western teachers would consider this unctuous insubordination of students, but to the Chinese people it was not a new complaint. They had heard it often before.

And Dewey said,
It is a genuine evidence of a general state of transition with the hesitation, uncertainty and openness to novel stimuli that such periods are bound to exhibit. On the other hand, there is a maturity of interest far beyond that which marks American students of the same years. High school boys and girls listen soberly and intelligently to lectures and subjects that would create nothing but board restlessness in the American school. There was an eager thirst for ideas beyond anything existing I am convinced in the youth of any other country on Earth. At present the zeal for ideas, outruns persistence in getting knowledge with which to back the ideas, but it supplies an extraordinary vitality to the growing desire for knowledge and scientific method. It means that knowledge is being acquired, not as a technical device, nor is it conventional badge of culture, but for social application. If the students in any higher school in China asked, why are they taking a particular course? The greater number will answer to help our country. To promote the reform of society. Discount the superficiality with which many make this reply and there still remains a substantial basis for hope for the future.
And there's much more, there's about 150 pages of Dewey on China. We have to leave that behind.

Or rather instead of leaving it behind we have to now bring it forward because all of this is the same movement. It's coordinated. It's the same movement. It's the discovery that the quintessence of Hermetic America was to be open minded in a real universe that was not completely known. It was not completely shut off. Nothing is settled. Everything is new. Everything is possible. And the major instrument that we have is the fact that we recognize that we have human beings who can develop indefinitely. So, the first thing we have to do is ensure that those human beings are going to be able to develop indefinitely. Which means that the transformative matrix is going to be the educational system.

And we're going to see next week, how education and democracy are the right and left hands of the movement. Without the one, the other doesn't work and vice versa. They just don't work at all. Only in tandem do they work. And that the tandem has to have this pragmatic purposefulness to it in order for the developing persons to begin to learn how to address the unknown from scratch and build a real experiential working relationship with it and with each other. And with that sense of developing community and individuality make what shape a future they need. And change it if they need to change it. Or Jefferson said maybe every 19 years, we should dissolve the whole structure and let those who are alive then make what they need. They'll know better than we do. Well, this is the way this country was thinking in certain minds at the growing core.

When he came back filled with this and you can see he was just brimming with insights, brimming with unvoiced feelings. Remember his phrase, China is not to be understood so much as felt. And when one feels China, one feels the, the vitality. That 4,000 years is not a long time at all. It's all of the career and character of being human in this way.

Then he brought it to science, to the method of empirical naturalism. And he says, he wrote,
I believe that the method of empirical naturalism presented in this volume provides the way and the only way by which one can freely accept the standpoint and conclusions of modern science. The way by which we can be genuinely naturalistic and yet maintain cherished values provided they are critically clarified and reinforce. The naturalistic method when it is consistently followed destroys many things once cherished. But it destroys them by revealing their inconsistency with the nature of things. A flaw that always attended them and deprive them of efficacy for all safe, emotional consolation. But its main purpose is not destructive. Empirical naturalism is rather a windowing fan. Only chaff goes and perhaps the chaff had once been treasured. An empirical method which remains true to its nature does not save. It is not an insurance device nor mechanical antiseptic, but it inspires the mind with courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world.
This was different.

And this was the spirit manifesting itself in Dewey’s mind, this is his preface of 1929 to the second edition, that 40 years later would carry Americans to the moon. You can't do that with the mind, the mind balks, at that spectacle. There is an archetypal terror situation. Only the spirit is free to move that way. This is why the Russians have not been to the moon. The archetypical [inaudible] falling into the universe.


He writes that,
Thus, mind in its individual aspect is shown to be the method of change and progress in the significance is in values attached to things. This trait is linked up to natural events. By recurring to their particular and variable they're contingent quality. In and of itself this factor is puzzling. It accounts for accidents and irrationalities. It was long treated as such in the history of mankind. The individual characteristics of mind were regarded as deviations from the normal and as dangerous against which society had to protect itself.

And of course, sociologically this happens increasingly in our time that as the norm becomes statistically enforced through power authoritarian structures, more and more of the individuality of people are left out. You're not normal. You're not normal. You're not normal. Until finally only the collating machines will be normal, and all of the human beings will be outside. Do you think they're going to stay outside and let those machines have oil? I don't think so.

Life as a trait of natural organisms was incidentally treated in connection with the development of tools, of language, and of individual variations. It's consideration as a link between physical nature and experience forms the topic of the mind body problem. The isolation of nature and experience from each other has rendered the undeniable connection of thought and effectiveness of knowledge and purpose of action with the body as an insoluble mystery.
And people will tell you a competently, we know the possibilities, but we can't really explain to you why. Don't ask. And usually couple that with the second-rate pragmatic co-op answer, we may find out at some time in the future. Then ask us. This total misunderstanding. It's not only naïve, it's vicious. I'm speaking philosophically. Sociologically speaking, it's absurd.

So, Dewey then inexperienced in philosophic method, in Experience And Nature in this section,
What empirical method exacts philosophy is two things. First that refined methods and products be traced back to their origin and primary experience. Primary experience in all of its heterogeneity and fullness. So that the needs and problems at which they arise and which they have to satisfy can be acknowledged. Secondly, that the secondary methods and conclusions be brought back to the things of ordinary experience. In all their coarseness and crudity for verification.
And this of course will find its paradigm in John Dewey's aesthetics because the book you were right after this Human Nature Conduct [Human Nature and Conduct] will lead him into the discovery that art is the primary activity of human nature.

And in 1934, you will write Art As Experience. And in Art As Experience Dewey will say, the model is very simple. Here is the work of art. Our appreciation of it we have to carry ourselves to the work. Then in making whatever judgements we would like to make from that experience, we make them. But then to verify them, we take ourselves back to that work to re-experience it and see whether it's opened up by our judgments. He will say this is the paradigm of the pragmatic method of inquiry. Of using logic as a method of inquiry, not as some kind of a mental structure, which separates experience and nature and demolishes the living unity of reality. And addicts us to all times of theological and metaphysical absurdities. What did, Voltaire say? As long as man believes and absurdities, he will continue to perpetrate the atrocities.

Dewey writes,
It's an old saying that the Gods were born of fear. The saying is only too likely to strengthen a misconception bred by confirmed subjective habits. We first endow man in isolation with an instinct of fear. Then we imagine him irrationally ejecting that fear into the environment, scattering broadcast as it were the fruits of his own purely personal limitations and thereby creating superstition. But fear whether an instinct or an acquisition is a function of the environment. Man fears because he exists in a fearful, awful world. The world is precarious and perilous. It is, it is as easily accessible and striking evidence of this fact that primitive experiences cited. The voice is that of [inaudible] man, but the hand is that of nature. And the nature in which we still live. He was not fear of Gods that created the Gods.
I'm skipping over.

We have substituted sophistication for superstition, at least measurably so. But the sophistication is often as irrational and as much at the mercy of words as the superstition it supplaces. Our magical safeguard against the uncertain character of the world is to deny the existence of chance. To mumble universal unnecessary laws. The ubiquity of cause and effect. The uniformity of nature. Universal progress. The inherent rationality of the universe. These magical formulae borrow their potency from conditions that are not magical. Through science we have secured a degree of power, of prediction, and of control. Through tools, machinery, and the company technique we have made the world more confirmable to our needs. A more secure abode. We heaped up riches and means of comfort between ourselves and the risks of the world. We have professionalized amusement as an agency of escape and forgetfulness. But when all is said and done the fundamentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified. Much less eliminated. Such an incident has the last war and preparation for a future war now remind us that it's very easy to overlook the extent to which after all our attainments are only devices for blurring the disagreeable recognition of a fact. Instead of means of altering the fact that itself.

This is in the section called Existence As Precarious and As Stable,
Natural events are so complex and varied that there is nothing surprising in their possession of different characterizations. Characters so different that they can be easily treated as opposites. Nothing but unfamiliarity stands in the way of thinking of both mind and matter as different characters of natural events in which matter expresses their sequential order and mind the order of their meanings as there are logical connections and dependencies. Processes may be eventful for functions, which taken in abstract separation or at opposite poles. Just as physiological processes eventuated in both anabolic and catabolic functions. The idea that matter in mind are two sides or aspect of the same things like the convex and concave in a curve is literally unthinkable. A curve is an intelligible object and concave and convex are defined in terms of this object. They are indeed but names for properties involved in its meaning. We do not start with convexity and concavity as two independent things and then set up an unknown [inaudible] to unite to disparate things. In spite of the literal absurdity of this comparison, it may be understood, however, in a way, which conveys an inkling of the truth that to which both mind and matter belong is the complex of events that constitute nature. This becomes a mysterious [inaudible] quid in capable of designation. Only when mind and matter are taken to be static structures instead of functional characters.
And it's like a shell game that we fall for all the time. But the Chinese people don't fall for it. The American Indians don't fall for it. And Dewey says, it's a very curious thing. But Americans have grown up now and they're not falling for it. This is 1929.

But it is possible to magnify the place of magical exercise and superstitious legend. The primary interest lies in staging the show and enjoying the spectacle. In giving play to the eradicable interest in stories which illustrate the contingencies of existence, combined with happier endings for emergencies than surrounding conditions often per permit.
He’s saying that nature is wild. It's not tame. It is absolutely wild. But that is not precarious to us because we are wild also. We're not tamed. And to think that we are tamed because we have inculcated in ourselves, some mental systematic view separates us from nature and vanishes both our true selves and nature. Where does it banish them to? Where can they go? They can't go anywhere except really be there where they are. What happens is that the mind takes a flight to fancy and thinks that's the world seeks power there and control. Never happens. It has never happened.

So, Dewey writes, “Jespersen,” Otto Jespersen, “speaks of the origin of language in similar terms. The very origin of language.” He says that many linguistic philosophers appear to imagine our more primitive ancestors after their own image. As if they were serious well-meaning men endowed with a large share of common sense. They'll leave you with the impression that these first framers of speech were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely business matters. Matter of fact, and this is the math, right? Well, language starts with accounts receivable and [inaudible] and so forth. Isn't that the way it is? No, that's not the way it is at all. Not at all.

Jespersen finds that the prosaic side of early culture was capable only of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections. They are the most immutable portions of language and remain now at essentially the same standpoint is thousands of years ago. But he concludes that the genesis of language is found in the poetic side of life. The source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry play. Even youthful hilarity.
And this is a very curious aspect because it shows that we are not understanding aesthetic experience. We're not understanding reality. We're not understanding ourselves. We're not understanding the sham form of all political thoughts, because we are unable to appreciate this.

The other most self-evident thing in experience is useful labor and its coercive necessity. As direct appreciative enjoyment exhibits things in their conservatory phase. Labor manifest things in their connection with things with one another. In efficacy productivity, furthering, hindering, generating, destroying from the standpoint of enjoyment a thing is what it directly does for us. From that of labor a thing is what it will do to other things. The only way in which a tool or an obstacle can be defined. Extraordinary and subtle reasons have been assigned for belief in the principle of causation. Labor and the use of tools seem however, to be a sufficient, empirical reason indeed, to be the only empirical event that can be specifically pointed to in this connection. Modern thinkers though. Influenced by the notion that knowledge is the only mode of experience that grasps things, assuming the ubiquity of cognition and noting that immediacy or qualitative existence has no place in authentic science have asserted that qualities are always in only states of consciousness. It is a reasonable belief that there would be no such thing as consciousness. If events did not have a phase of brute unconditioned is-ness.
That’s the wildness of being just what they irreducibly are.

Consciousness as sensation, image and emotion is thus a particular case of immediacy occurring under complicated conditions. And also, without immediate qualities whose relations with which science deals would have no footing in existence. And thought would have nothing beyond itself to chew upon or dig into without a basis in qualitative events that characteristics subject matter of knowledge would be algebraic ghosts. Relations that do not relate. To dispose of things in which relations terminate by calling them elements is to discourse within a relational and logical scheme. Only if elements are more than just elements in a hole. Only if they have something qualitatively their own can a relational system be prevented from its complete collapse.

And then he brings in and I'm skipping over now,
That the sciences were born of the arts, the physical sciences, the crafts and technologies of healing, navigation war, [inaudible] working of wood, metals, leather, flax wall. The mental sciences of the arts of political management is I suppose an admitted fact. The distinctively intellectual attitude, which marks scientific inquiry was generated in efforts at controlling persons and things so that their consequences issues and outcomes would be more stable and assured. The first step away from oppression by immediate things and events was taking when man employed tools and appliances for manipulating things. So as to render them contributory towards desired objects.

And he will go on to speak in this way and say, this is a very peculiar way because man begins to get lost in this very process. Very process. He gets lost because his mind begins positing static forms. And he begins believing that manipulating those static forms is real. And he begins exiling himself away from nature, which is the only way to experience or is to verify the true functioning. So, the ship goes off course constantly. Constantly. And does not know it's off course because any self-correcting milieu is no longer considered valid taking into consideration.
Anything, approaching a history of the growth of recognition of things and their intellectual or instrumental phase is far beyond our present scope. We can only point to some of its net results. In principle the step is taken whenever objects are so reduced from their status of complete objects as to be treated as signs or indications of other objects. Enter upon this road and the time is sure to come when the appropriate object of knowledge is stripped of all that is immediate and qualitative of all that is final self-sufficient. Then it becomes an anatomized epitome of just an only those traits, which are of indicative or instrumental import. Abstraction is not a psychological incident. It is a following to as logical conclusion of interest and those phases of natural existence, which are dependable and fruitful signs of other things. Which are means of prediction by formulation and terms implying other terms. Self-evidence ceases to be a characteristic trait of the fundamental objects of either sensory or noetic objects. Primary propositions are statements of objects in terms which procure the simplest and completest forming and checking of other propositions. Many systems of axioms and postulates are possible. The more the merrier since new propositions as consequences are thus brought to light. Genuine science is impossible as long as the object is steamed for its own intrinsic qualities is taken as the object of knowledge. It's completeness, it's eminent meaning, defeats its use as indicating and imply. Said William James many were the ideal prototypes of rational order. Teleological and aesthetic ties between things as well as logical and mathematical relations. The most promising of these things at first were of course the richer ones, the more sentimental ones. The [inaudible] and least promising worth mathematical ones. But the history of the later ones application is a history of steadily advancing successes. While that of the sentimental richer ones is one of relative sterility and failure. Take those aspects of phenomenon which interests you as a human being most and baren are all your results called the things of nature as much as you like. By sentimental moral and aesthetic names, no natural consequences follow from the naming. But when you give the things mathematical and mechanical names and call them so many solids in just such positions, describing just such past velocities with just such [inaudible] changed things. Realize the consequences of the names, which you class them.
This is from James’ Principles of Psychology 1890.

Dewey writes and I’ll conclude with this,
A fair interpretation of these pregnant sentences is that as long as objects or [inaudible] viewed tellically. As long as the objects of the truest knowledge, the most real forms of beings are thought of end science does not advance. Objects are possessed and appreciated, but they are not known. To know means that men have become willing to turn away from precious possessions. Willing to let drop what they own, however, precious on behalf of a grasp of objects with which they do not yet as, as yet own. Multiplied and secured end depend upon letting go exist ends reducing them to indicative and implying means. The great historical obstacle to science was unwillingness to make the surrender less moral aesthetic and religious objects suffer. To large groups of persons, the bald and dry objects of natural science are still objects of fear.
And this is growing daily incidentally.

The mechanical or mathematical logical object presents itself as a rival to the ideal and final object. Then philosophy becomes a device for conserving the quote spiritual values of the universe by devices of interpretation, which convert the material and mechanical into mind. By means of a dialectic of the implications of the possibilities of knowledge the physical is transformed into something mental, something psychic. As if psychic existence were sure to be inherently more ideal than the physical. The net result of the new scientific method was conception of nature as a mathematical mechanical object.
And we haven't really moved all that far since then.

The whole second half of Experience and Nature went into theory of knowledge. Very profound. Very deep. But I've chosen to let this profundity rest. You can go to it on your own. And I’ve chosen next week to come back to Dewey late in his life at the age of 90, when he wrote a book called Knowing and the Known. And I'm going to try to present that along with his just a basic look at his logic as a theory of inquiry. To try and show how Dewey’s method very much, almost like American pragmatic Daoism showed the workings of the mind to be commensurate only with nature and freedom and not at all with system. And that insight is worth seeing and it's worth experiencing.

So, I hope that some of you available to stand it and come back.

END OF RECORDING