John Dewey's Education and Logic as "Inquiry"

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 13 of 13

John Dewey’s Education and Logic as Inquiry
The American Democrat Free and The Republic
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 26, 1985

Transcript:
The date is September 26, 1985. This is the last lecture in the series of lectures by Roger Weir on Transformational America. Tonight's lecture is Dewey’s Education and Logic As Inquiry: The American Democrat Free and The Republic.
I want to, first of all, think most of you for sticking with this. This is the most difficult of all series to give. And as you can see and observe for yourself that this material is the blind spot of our time. It's the exact negative counterpart of Bruce Springsteen. Of what? Rock stars. Oh, ok. That's how far away we are from the public eye.
But at the same time, I think that you who have managed to stay through this can understand this is also the central American tradition. This is it. This is the center line. You know towards the end of his life Hugh downs and interview and ask Frank Lloyd Wright. He said, Maestro, do you have any regrets? What'd you do anything different? And Wright said, no, I don't think I would. He said, if you're going to build anything you have to build on the center line. And he said, I've been on the center line all my life. And sooner or later when anybody gets around to having to build for real, they'll come back here, and all of this work will be valuable for them.
So, I feel the same way about these lectures and about this series. And the one before it. And the one before that. This is the center line of our tradition. And if the United States is in trouble in the world it is not because of some extra carrier threat. It's not because of change world conditions. It's from the same old by now almost tired reason of lack of concern from within.
And we have seen that the American tradition is a peculiar interpenetration of all world traditions. What has made it ineffective is that the American Indian basis of it has been totally unconscious. When Carl Jung came to the United States, he noted right away that the American Indian presence was everywhere, subconsciously and unconsciously in the United States life and was nowhere conscious.
And we have seen Benjamin Franklin right up to John Dewey that there is lurking in the background yet an undiscovered self there. But also, there is the ignoring of the conscious tradition at the same time, you can go to the universities. We have them here in Los Angeles. UCLA. USC. They are major world Universities. There are no courses on these individuals. There are no lectures on them. There are no textbooks being used. Who's going to do this if we don't do this? But what's really important is that the discoveries about human nature and capacity in the American tradition are universal and will stay on that center line.
This book published by the University of Chicago Press called Education and The Cult of Efficiency [Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools] came out in 1962. The author wanted to find out just how the inculcation of big business practices got into education. And he notes in his study that it started about 1900 but that had accelerated around 1910. And that by 1930, there was no backbone left in the educational system. Whatever the business conditions wanted they got. And so, education in this country has since the First World War abdicated its responsibility. And that advocation as Jefferson pointed out is the only way in which this American experiment is going to fail. And that is failure is directly tied to that.
Dewey was almost a prophet about these conditions and about these effects. But he like a major thinker did not just stop at his Experience and Education but tried to see it in its fullest context. Now we have a lot of people still around who were very glib about education. About especially new world education. We're going to revolutionize humanity. Well, I don't think it's going to come from anybody who doesn't have experience teaching. And it takes a long, long time to understand how to educate oneself, much less somebody else.
And one of Dewey's great contributions was that you can't educate yourself or anybody else unless they want to. You have to first create the conditions that that person is going to say. I would like to do that. I'd like to take a look at that. And without that nothing happens. You cannot foist it from the outside. If you can force from the outside you produce imitations. And those imitations have all kinds of regrets. Not all of them subconscious. Not all of them unconscious. But those unconscious and subconscious regrets are enough to completely turn over any values that were given to them in imitation. And so, you get the exact opposite. You get contrariness. We have enough contrariness in us now in this country to blow it up. But you get all kinds of erratic spurs and tangents that develop. And so, the confusion becomes monumental. And Dewey tended to all this. He tended to it through a long life. He was 92 or more when he died.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, Dewey was busy trying to bring the American experience together. And in The Gifford Lectures for 1929 published in a book, which the title was Quest For Certainty. The Quest For Certainty of Study Of The Relation of Knowledge and Action. How are we going to fix the practical events? We have to fix it by knowing what it is and how to go about it. You've got to have knowledge. You've got to know what you're doing. And in perilous times when you've got a ship of state that has several hundred million people in it you can't go on guesses. You can't go on intuitions. You can't go on the hope that some spaceship is going to come down and they're going to write everything. Even if they could do that, that would be the wrong solution. And you can't hope that some ascended master from some other transcendental plane is going to come and make things right. It's a confusion of reality. Even if it could happen it would be insufficient because the problems are problems that are here. And the solutions are solutions that are here. And it's only in working on this level with the problems and the solutions as we are that there's any resolution. There is no logical hope for resolution in any other way. Everything else is a daydream and a fantasy.
At the end of The Quest For Certainty Dewey in a chapter called the Copernican Revolution, grabs a hold of a flawed philosophy by the throat and holds it up. He writes in this way, “Kant claimed,” Emmanuel Kant,
Kant claimed that he had affected a Copernican revolution in philosophy by treating the world and our knowledge of it from the standpoint of the knowing subject. To most critics the endeavor to make the known world turn on the constitution of the knowing mind seemed like a return to an ultra-Ptolemaic system. But Copernicus as Kant understood him [inaudible] a straightening out of astronomical phenomenon by interpreting their perceived movements from their relation to the perceiving subject, instead of treating them as inherent in the things perceived. The revolution of the sun about the Earth as it offered itself to sense perception was regarded as due to the conditions of human observation and not to the movements of the sun itself. Disregarding the consequences of the change point of view Kant settled upon this one feature as characteristic of the method of Copernicus. He thought he could generalize this feature of Copernican method and thus clear up a multitude of philosophical difficulties by attributing the facts in question to the constitution of the human subject and knowing.
It's on us.
“That the consequence was Ptolemaic rather than Copernican is not to be wondered that. In fact, the alleged revolution of Kant consistent in making explicit what was implicit in the classic tradition” Nothing changed except that what was implicit now with explicit.
Inwards, the latter had asserted that knowledge is determined by the objective constitution of the universe. It's out there. But it did so only after it first assumed that the universe in itself constituted after the pattern of reason. Philosophers first constructed a rational system of nature and then borrowed from it the features by which to characterize their knowledge of it. His revolution was a shift from a theological to a human authorship. Beyond that point, it was an explicit acknowledgement of what philosophers in the classic line of descent had been doing unconsciously before him. For the basic assumption of this tradition was the inherent correspondence subsisting between intellect and the structure of nature.
And you hear it all the time as above so below. Et cetera, et cetera.
These correspondences are lines. It is not so. It is not objectively and statically out there. It is not objectively and statically in here. There is only a relational pattern of coordination that actually is occurring. And nowhere at any time is it stopped. Not out there and not in here. And so, Dewey took it upon himself to try and find out how does this flaw keep coming in again and again?
And the first really pointed investigation that he did was all the way back in 1896. He invested, investigated, the reflex arc of conditioned response in the human body. He went right to the core of it. When he got to the reflex arc, and he wrote up his investigation of it in 1896. He found that this is a very peculiar situation. Dewey criticized the interpretation and the use of the reflex arc concept from two perspectives. In the first place, the concept is used to mis-describe what actually occurs. One can actually observe, scientifically, physiologically what actually does occur. The formulation of it, classically, is not true. And so, the event is mis-described. And secondly, when used as an explanatory concept, the reflex arc concept distorts rather than explains human behavior.
And it still does so today. And has become a model. And these models imposed from the outside, produce imitations all the time and all the drawbacks that we've talked about. And we were still stewing in them, a hundred years later.
Using the reflex arc concept and this mechanical away ignores the prior state or set of the subject. If one is reading a book, if one is hunting, if one is watching and the dark place and the lonely night. If one is performing a chemical experiment. In each case, say a noise has a very different psychical value. It is a different experience. Conditions are different. The sound is not an independent stimulus for the significance of the hearing of a sound depends on a prior state and activity.
Even motor response. “So that the response then is not a totally new experience. It is the original experience transformed and reconstituted and stimulus and response are correlative. But the specific function of each is determined in relation to the other.” So that the relationality is are what is real. If you get hung up in trying to make a conceptual coordination through a static plan of correspondence between something really there objectively and something really here, subjectively, everything is distorted. And not only is everything distorted, but one does not even see what actually goes on. Not only is nature invisible, but a cosmos is impossible.
It has become, Dewey found, so ingrained that there is no hope whatsoever of backtracking. You can't take this bad habit out of human beings at this late stage of the game. First of all, they don't believe you. Secondly, they don't want to hear it. And third, they wouldn't be able to follow it even if they could fulfill the first two functions. So, Dewey did an end run around the whole problem. He said, let's stop thinking about these qualities about these situations. And let's just make ourselves be practical and say, we would like to have purposes that work. You can be as selfish as you want, but let's put it on that basis. What works for you? What kind of purposes do you need to live your life? To get through your day? To get through your year? To get through your life?
And on that basis man right away finds out that he can't do very much by himself. He's got to cooperate. And right away the individual loses a lot of his arrogance because he realizes that a thing called society, or a thing called culture, or a thing called history or community are not abstractions at all but are very real sets that are like the matrixes in which he actually operates. Dewey in fact would say that in any logic, there is a matrix which has a cultural aspect to it. But also has a biological aspect to it. And the individual in his purpose of newness, figuring out just how to go about and get what he would like to have, has to see himself patterned within this matrix of culture and biologic.
But the difficulty is that the mind thinks that it has learned to understand. That it has become adult. That it has become capable of logical thought. And doesn't understand that it has distorted the world and distorted especially the relationalities that go up to make the pattern of affective action in the world. Dewey here would use the Greek term, Pragmatoes (sp?). We can't do anything really right because our minds keep interfering with it. It's like the impaired typewriter that can't type the letter the way it's supposed to be. And so, if you're brought up trying to read from that typewriter, you think that that's what the language is. It's just always been that way. Everything you've ever typed. Or anybody's ever typed on that machine has always been that way. It's got to be that way. It is not that way.
His major work on logic was called Logic, A Theory of Inquiry or The Theory of Inquiry. And he originally worked on this back before the turn of the century. He tried to express himself in a book on logic, Studies and Logical Theory [Studies in Logical Theory]. Then he expanded it many years later in a book called Essays in Experimental Logic. Then he tried to condense it into a little book called How We Think. And after a whole lifetime of working with us more than 40 years, he finally put together his book on logic. And he says, the problem of logical subject matter is the starting point.

And he writes,
Contemporary logical theory as marked by an apparent paradox. There is general agreement as to its proximate subject matter. With respect to this proximate subject matter no periods shows a more confident advance.
That is to say in our time, in the 20th century, as long as you're talking about probabilities and possibilities, we're in great shape. We can tell you exactly what the probabilities are. Exactly what the possibilities are to 65,000 decimal points if you want.

But Dewey brings up the fact that maybe probability is not the subject matter of logic. It could be that that's not it. It doesn't matter how close you resolve an image of an apple; it doesn't make that image in Apple. And that's the problem with man he's hungry for reality. And he keeps refining his image of reality and nothing's real. Only the blessings of illusion keep him going. If he had to actually live on what he did, he wouldn't be able to do it.

Dewey writes, “When however, it is asked how and why the matters designated by the terms such terms as is. Or a term as is not. Or a term if then. Or a term only. Or some all. All these nice little pithy logical terms out of which the whole exercise is made.” He says, when however, it is asked how and why the matters designated by these terms form the subject matter of logic, dissension takes the place of consensus. Nobody's quite sure. In fact, one can have an amazing variety of logics. Do you hear people speak colloquially; oh, you're not being logical. One could come back very easy and say, what kind of logic would you like to use? Because there are many, many different kinds of logic.
The peculiar thing is that none of these logics cross over from one another. None of them. They are all isolate. They're all products of a single mentality, which can be inculcated in somebody else. But in order for that logic to hold together, they have to keep in that mentality. It doesn't make it any more real for 500 people to be thinking that the image of the apple is clear. They're all going to be hungry if they try and eat it. So, a cleared-up mentality turns out to be a kind of a false logic. That's not the subject matter of logic. That's not going to get it done. We can't live with that.

So, Dewey writes, he says,
Of late another conception of its subject matter has appeared upon the scene. Logic is said to be concerned with the formal structure of language as a system of symbols. And even here there is division. Upon one view logic is the theory of transformation of linguistic expressions. The criteria of transformation being identity of syntactical forms.
You have the same kinds of syntactical forms. Well, then you can carry the work of those syntactical forms over to another logical set. And this way symbolic meaning can migrate.

But Dewey relentlessly, he writes
According to another view of the symbolic system, which is the subject matter of logic as a universal algebra of existence. In any case as regards ultimate subject matter logic is a branch of philosophic theory so that different views of its subject matter are expressions of different ultimate philosophies. While logical conclusions are used in turn to support the underlying philosophies. In view of the fact that philosophizing must satisfy logical requirements there is something in this fact that should at least provoke curiosity. Conceivably it affects unfavorably, the autonomy of logical theory. On the face of the matter, it does not seem fitting that logical theory should be determined by philosophical realism or idealism, rationalism or empiricism dualism or monism, atomistic or organic metaphysics. Yet even when writers of logic do not express their philosophic pre possessions analysis discloses a connection. In some cases, conceptions borrowed from one or another philosophic system are openly laid down as foundations of logic and even of mathematics.
He's referring to Bertrand Russell here.

He says,
These are all the kind of preliminary remarks which somebody might make just to prime the pump. Just to get our concern going. He says, this conception of the universe that there is a logic which has a form, which has a coherence within itself.
This conception of the nature of axioms really is no longer held in mathematics. Nor in the logic of mathematics. Axioms are now held to be postulates neither true nor false in themselves. And to have their meaning determined by the consequences that follow because of their implicatory relations with one another. The greatest freedom is permitted or rather encouraged in laying down postulates. A freedom subject only to the condition that they be rigorously fruitful of implied consequences. The same principle even holds in physics. Mathematical formulae have now taken the place in physics once occupied by propositions about eternal essences and the fixed species defined by these essences. The formula are deductively developed by means of rules of implication. But the value of the deduced result for physical science is not determined by the correctness of the deduction.
There are in fact, a lot of proximate values that come to the surface.

Dewey then offers a series of six statements, which need to be considered in making up some basic matrix of inquiry about the nature of logic. Especially about the problem of logical subject matter. First one is that logic is a progressive discipline. It progresses. The second one is that the subject matter of logic is determined operationally. It’s the only way you can find out. It’s the only way that actually you can find out is to work with it. The third one, logical forms are postulational. You have to be able to say them. You have to be able to express them. The fourth one is that logic is a naturalistic theory. It has to be founded where we can apply it. It can't be abstract purely. It has to be naturalistic. Logic is a social discipline. It can't apply to an abstracted individual who is isolated from everyone else. And sixth, logic is autonomous. Logic is autonomous. And this is a very difficult thing to believe.

Bertrand Russell once wrote that men fear thought like the plague because thought is wild. Thought will go where it will go. And men become afraid where their thoughts are taking them. Logic is autonomous.

After this introduction and his great book, Dewey sums up. He says,
Either the word thought has no business at all in logic or else it is a synonym of inquiry. And its meaning is determined by what we find out about inquiry. The latter would seem to be the reasonable alternative. These statements do not mean that a sound psychology may not be of decided to advantage to logical theory for history demonstrates that unsound psychology has done great damage. But it's general relation to logic is found in the light that it as a branch of inquiry may throw upon what is involved in inquiry. It's generic relation to logic as similar to that of physics or biology. And so specifically for reasons that will appear in subsequent chapters, it's finding stand closer to logical theory than do those of the other sciences. Occasional reference to psychological subject matter is inevitable in any case. For as will be shown later, some logical positions that pride themselves upon their complete indifference to psychological considerations. In fact, rest upon psychological notions that have become so current, so embedded in intellectual tradition, that they are accepted uncritically as if they were self-evident.

And this is going to be a very big problem because mass society has been larded so well by habitual misrepresentation that we are totally unconscious, but not in an unconscious way, but in a blurred way. The problem is rather like being hypnotized than being ignorant. And the difficulty is, is that one can seem to be all right. Can seem to be a mature human being. There's no real relationship to anything going on.

And Dewey says this is a very big problem, which becomes illuminated when one learns how to think and sees that intelligence and not reason is the cue. That reason which has some kind of axiomatic structure is an amoral ambiguous structure. It'll feed any kind of bologna you want to give it. You can put any content in it that you want, you'll never be able to know that you're living a lie. But when you have a theory of inquiry, that has to be naturalistic. It's got to be social. It's got to involve a little bit of purpose and be progressive, you eventually find out that you're doing it wrong. You're not getting along with other people. You're not even getting along with yourself. Something's wrong. Don't go on that way. And if you can't stop, at least try something else.

So, logic is a theory of inquiry has a moral, no, not a moral, an ethical import. Dewey says that morals are like axiomatic dos and don’ts, but ethics is something that you've discovered that you've got to have in order to live. That you can't live without ethics because it concerns meaning and not at approbation. No one is going to reward you or punish you in an ethical system because the system is not based upon some axiomatic status. But if virtue is that it allows you to continue, allows for the meaning to develop, to grow and that's all that you have. You don't get to a reward. You don't get to a punishment, but you do grow. And so, freedom comes out of this. Freedom. Freedom. No one's going to patch you and say, you've done a good job or scold you and say you've done a bad job is that you get to continue.

About a fourth of the way through the book he gets to chapter six, which is entitled The Pattern of Inquiry. It turns out that when you see logic as an inquiry that there is a pattern that actually occurs out of this. Out of the pragmatic existential doing of it over and over again. Many different people under many different considerations. There is a pattern that emerges. And he writes in here, “The first chapter set forth the fundamental thesis of this volume. Logical forms accrue to subject matter when the subject matter is subjective to controlled inquiry.” Logic forms accrue to subject matter. They rise into being there when the subject matter is subjected to controlled inquiry. You discover the logical forms as you work with the inquiry. But the key to it is that it has to be controlled. But the control does not come from some axiomatic basis. It doesn't come from a belief. It doesn't come from some metaphysics or some theology or some politics. It comes from the experience of existentially actually going through with it and doing it. Not thinking that you did it. Not hoping you're going to do it. Or hoping that you're not going to do it because it's ambivalent it can go either way. But actually living. Actually experiencing. So, experience becomes the ground in which a human being discovers what he is, what he's doing, what he can do. And the more that he grows in this way, the more he discovers that he doesn't really have limitations. Oh, he has some limitations that he's just so tall or just so strong and physically can't do this, but he can find some way to do it in a different way. You can't run a hundred miles an hour, but you can build a car that'll go a hundred miles an hour, easy. The limitations of man keep receding as his capacities come along. And he discovers that he has a very wild kind of a freedom, existentially, in real experience. He has the freedom to even recognize that he's free. That he may not be able to do this now, but that he can plan in 10 years from now with enough people. He may well do that. And that given world enough in time, there seem to be no limitations at all.

But the peculiar thing is that the pattern of inquiry that becomes discovered here wakes him up.
The fact that new formal properties accrue to subject matter in virtue of its objection to certain types of operation is familiar to us in certain fields. Even though the idea corresponds to this fact is unfamiliar in logic. Two outstanding instances are provided by art and by law. In music, the dance painting, sculpture, literature, and the other fine arts subject matters of everyday experience are transformed by the development of forms, which render certain products of doing and making objects of fine art.

The word transformed here. It's not that the syntactical structure moves by emanation and becomes another syntactical structure and thus links in some semiotic way one procedure with another. This is a phony way of seeing it. It's that this same form becomes transformed and changed. And the matrix in which that happens is experience. Following those protein-like phases is part of the logic of inquiry. See just how this actually works. And in that, what occurs to somebody who is experientially and existentially accurately present to those events is that there is a continuum in logic, which is just every bit as important as any manifestation along the line. It's the continuum in the logical inquiry that's important.

And Dewey says the first person, seemingly, whoever noticed this, Ms. Charles Sanders Peirce, the man that William James supported for most of his life. He said Peirce seems to be the first person to ever say there seems to be a continuum and logical process. That you miss if you keep looking at propositions and connections and operations and sets and classes and types. That you miss. Very, very peculiar.

He writes, “We may now ask what is the definition of inquiry?” That is what is the most highly generalized conception of inquiry, which can be justifiably formulated. We need to make a formulation now. And he will.
The definition that will be expanded directly in the present chapter and indirectly in the following chapters is as follows. Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminant situation into one that is so determinant in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.
Does that happen? More than likely what happens is that there's a tendency toward that, but in the transformation towards a unified whole further transformations happen. So that the continuum is that there is a purposive move towards integration in unity. But the objective phasing of it is that this constantly transforming. So that change and purpose, which unchanged are knit together. They work together. Always. Constantly.

What about this continuum of judgment? About halfway through the book, he finally comes to it. And he simply says when he begins, he says, “Experience has temporal continuity.” Which is so experience has temporal continuity.
There is an experiential continuum of content or subject matter and of operations. The experiential continuum has definite biological basis. Organic structures, which are the physical conditions of experience are enduring.

END OF SIDE ONE
Basically, we were here yesterday. We're here today. We're going to be here tomorrow. We endure.
And without, as well as with conscious intent, they hold the different pulses of experience together. So that the latter form of history in which every pulse looks to the past and affects the future. The structures while enduring are also subject to modification. Continuity is not bare repetition of identities for every activity leaves a trace or record of itself in the organs engaged. Thereby nervous structures taking part in an activity or modified to some extent. So that further experiences are conditioned by change organic structure. Moreover, every overactivity changes to some extent the environment and the environment conditions, which are the occasions and stimuli of further experiences.
It's all my minutely different. In every case, in every stage.
Let's take a break there.
In the new lecture series, I'll announce next week also, it reads that there's no lecture Thanksgiving. But of course, you know that there's a lecture Thanksgiving. So, when we get to it, I'll, I'll tell you who the great author is that’s going to be treated there.
I have outlined a lot and I'm going to skip over all of it and go right to the end. At the end of chapter 15, in Logic, A Theory Of Inquiry Dewey brings together his ammunition and he writes,
Only if propositions are related to each other as phases in the divisions of labor in the conduct of inquiry, can they become members of a coherent logical system. The proposition so called only hang together if they're related. In this conduct, of course of the inquiry. When they're distinctive roles in the institution of final judgment is omitted from theoretical interpretation. It just happens that there appeared to be a number of independent, isolated propositional forms.

In other words, the mind can granulate experience into nice little hard nuggets of isolated statistical data. You can do that. And in fact, most minds do this. So that most people need to have somebody else or some other system to tell them what to do. Because they don't know they've lost the facility to know how to live. How to be. How to experience. And so, they line up, they queue up, for clues, for direction. This of course, right away you can see means that mass man is set up for totalitarian movements. The same million people that show up for the rockstar will show up for the next demagogue for the same reason.

It's different if it's on the basis of individual judgment. It's different. If it's on the basis of individual experience. It may be that a million people decide individually to do this, to share this. That would be something. But that almost never happens. And in this world, and especially in this country, it hasn't happened for a long, long, long time.

At the very end, he writes, of his book, chapter 25, The Logic of Inquiry And Philosophies of Knowledge,
A two-way connection exists between logic and philosophic systems. On the one hand, the history of philosophy shows that every main type of philosophic system has developed its own special interpretation of logical forms in relations. Indeed, it is almost a convention to divide philosophy in general and special systems in particular into ontology or metaphysics on one side and the corresponding epistemology or theory of knowledge on the other.
Being on one side. Knowing on the other.
It is not accidental that spiritualistic and materialistic monistic dualistic, pluralistic, idealistic, realistic philosophy. [inaudible] predilections for one or another type of logical doctorate. And as I have become aware of the relations between their first principles and their methods have developed a type of logical theory consonant with their theories of nature in man.

This is the ultimate rationalization procedure. All of these methods of thought in this way or placebo. None of them are real. None of them work. None of them do anything except convince people that they're being logical. That life should work this way. That nature should work this way. Other people should work this way. And if they don't, they're getting in your way. You know that you're doing the best that you can and they're not helping. What's wrong with them?

When you put this kind of mentality behind nuclear bombs, it's like roulette, it's just a matter of time. The only way not to have that happen is to wake that mind out of its hypnotic [inaudible]. And the only way to do that is to show to master like that only by looking at purposes in common can man learn to be real for himself and for others. It's the only way. There's no other way. You can't tell anybody the truth. They won't hear it. They won't believe it. You can't tell anybody the truth. Even if you could, they wouldn't hear it. They wouldn't believe it.

One of Dewey’s fine little books is called A Common Faith published by Yale University Press in 1934. A Common Faith. He writes,
A new vision does not arise out of nothing but emerges through seeing in terms of possibilities. That is of imagination, old things and new relations, serving a new end, which the new end then aids and creating. Moreover, the process of creation is continuous and experimental.
And it's very important to emphasize both its creative in the sense that it's continuous. And it's experimental. We are not sure just what's going to come out, but we know that if we participate as intently as we can and learn while we're doing it, that we're going to improve the situation so that it may turn out to be life giving. But we know that it's continuous. That it's an ongoing situation so, it requires discipline. It requires Dewey we'll call intelligence. You cannot do just anything that you please. You have to have a lot of discipline. You have to have to have a lot of purposiveness. And you have to be attentive to the sharing aspect. Only in that way with a common faith can the process even continue much less teach us.

Imagination of ideal ends pertinent to actual conditions represents the fruition of a disciplined mind. There is indeed even danger that resort to mystical experiences will be an escape and that it will, its result will be the passive feeling that the union of actual and ideal is already accomplished. But in fact, this union is active in practical. It is a uniting not something given.
It's an actual process. But the mind has a way of duping itself into thinking that, oh, it already has happened. And this becomes a short circuit because one then is psychologically convinced on the deepest level, then it must've always done. And this way the idea of God deludes man into religiosity. Only when he is worshiping is the divinity occurring. Not when he supposes that he has or that he will.

History seems to exhibit three stages of growth. In the first stage human relationships were thought to be so infected with the evils of corrupt human nature as to require redemption for external and supernatural sources.
The old saw. The old myth.

“In the next stage was in these relations is found to be akin to values esteem distinctly religious.” And this is the point now reached by liberal theologians.

That the third stage would realize that in fact, the values prized in those religions that have ideal elements are idealizations of things, characteristic of natural association, which have then been projected into a supernatural realm for safekeeping and sanction. Note the role of such terms as father, son, bride, fellowship communion in the vocabulary of Christianity. And note also the tendency, even if a somewhat incoherent one, in terms that express the more intimate phrases of association to displace those of legal political origin, King judge, Lord of hosts. Unless there is a movement into what I've called the third stage, fundamental dualism and division in life continue.

He says,
“We have seen that the general disorder of human events can reach catastrophic levels.” as they did in the First World War. He's writing this in 1934. He hadn't seen the Second World War yet. Much less the Third World War. “The general disorder of the great war and succeeding decades has led to a revival of a theology of corruption sin and the need for supernatural redemption,” which is a regression. It's a falling into a mental pattern that already has set up the triggers that create those situations in the first place.

Whatever it is, it has to be in a different mode. It has to be by purpose and not by some secret design. The secret design, no matter where it comes from, from heaven, from spaceships, from hidden messages in secret vaults. No matter where it comes from, none of this is applicable. It's all irrelevant. Because that whole frame of mind is what is created these canyon loggerheads in the first place. Dead end canyon loggerhead mental situations in the first place. And that there is no chance to work out of those situations using that mentality. No chance at all. Because that mentality produces only a self-survey illusion. In this John Dewey is very much like an old Daoist Sage.

It doesn't matter how well the tradition was phrased and how well it served them, you can't rehash the tradition. You have to learn from nature and from experience, from openness and from relationality, and learn as you go along. And there are no lines that you can cross and then be safe. There's no score that somebody's keeping that you're going to be so far ahead that you can relax. You're not so far behind that it's hopeless and you're never going to be able to catch up. None of that is relevant. None of that is true in any way.

But for Dewey the amazing thing he said, he writes, towards the end of A Common Faith,
The importation of general moral causes to explain present social phenomenon is on the same intellectual level of thinking that demons were once appealed to in order to explain bodily disease and that no such thing as a strictly natural death was supposed to happen.
It is the same kind of mentality.
Reinforced by the prestige of traditional religions and backed by the emotional force of beliefs in the supernatural it stifles the growth of that social intelligence by means of which direction of social change could be taken out of the region of accident. Accident and the idea of supernatural seemed to be twins here. Interest in the supernatural, therefore reinforces other vested interests to prolong the social reign of accident.
It may be that we will find the mysteriousness of the universe. Or to put it another way that the university is mysterious. We may find that. It may well be. But to say that you have to find it that way because it is already so is a short circuit. That kind of mentality is going to get us all killed.

“There is a strong reaction in some religious today against the idea of mere individual salvation of individual souls. There's also a reaction in politics and economics against the idea of laissez Faire.” Leave well enough alone.

“Both of these movements reflect a common tendency. Both of them are signs of the growing awareness of the emptiness of individuality in isolation. The individual in isolation becomes increasingly a meaningless experience.” And it doesn't occur to the person because they are so larded up with habit. So inculcated by the hypnotism of false traditions and the defective mentality that it only occurs to them that they don't feel good today. Well, something isn't right. Which they quickly transfer a project to somebody else they're doing this to me. Or some other conditions, things are not right. Wait until they're right. Then I'll be okay. And this goes on and on. And the [inaudible] ability of it is that there's no end. There's no end to that at all. There are no limitations to that. The only change is a transformation, a radical change out of that mind. And the peculiar thing Dewey says is that the United States, as a tradition, was based upon carrying that radical change to the whole of human history into the whole of mankind. That's what the American experiment was about in the first place. That's what Jefferson and Franklin were after in the first place.

Writing in November of 1918 about the league of nations. It was still moot whether the league of nations in late 1918 was going to be workable. It was Woodrow Wilson's great contribution to world history. That the United States was going to have to sacrifice its national state identity, which was becoming frozen upon its very face so that the world could have the American tradition and transform itself. We're going to have to give up our nascent national state identity for a league of nations. We're going to have to lead the way and show because we're the least nation state so it's up to us to lead the way. This is what Wilson meant. And Dewey writing about it at the time says,
The ethics of honor and dignity, the idealization of their assertion and defense are deeply ingrained in the minds of all the ruling classes. Whether the rule is the direct rule of governors or the more efficacious, indirect rule of opinion and sentiment. This morale of pride and fear is most deeply embedded in all that concerns the relationships of states to one another. In contrast, the ethics of industry and of reciprocal contractual service are lacking in prestige. They seem to prosaic, to utilitarian and materialistic to possess moral status. They lack glamour and romance. They're not glorified by the halo that reflects historical sacrifice and heroism in their behalf. We cannot easily conceive them as the subject matter poetry and legend. And so far our men from actually actuation in their conduct by calculation of self-interest that nothing which has not become the stuff of poetry and passion can command full allegiance. Those who are skeptical about the possibility of a reversal of moral prestige with respect to those two principles would do well to recall that Germany has sincerely regard itself as the idealist among modern nations and has contemptuously considered the United States as the materialist and commercial people. This fact may develop hospitality to the recognition that what is morally at stake is a conflict of ideas and idealizations inherited from feudalism with which those which expressed the transition to a democratic ordering of life.
And he goes on.

And in 1940, when it was apparent that the great war was going to be dwarfed by another war, Dewey brought out in 1940, instead of writing articles and magazines brought out a book called The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson. He culled through the thousands of pages of Jefferson's writings and brought about 200 pages of the best of his writings. Spent months rearranging them and then presented them. It was like his notion of a text with minimal content and comment saying here it is folks. This is, this is where, what we are. That we have forgotten so much that we are now being pulled into a situation, which is like a hurricane of the diluted mind. Right or wrong.

So, he writes,
As we suggested earlier, the essential moral nature of Jefferson's political philosophy is concealed from us at the present time because of the change that has taken place in the language in which moral ideas are expressed. The self-evident truths about the equality of all men by creation and the existence of inherent in an area animal rights appear today to have a legal rather than an ethical meaning.
And he says, if you look at Jefferson, they weren't legal statements that you argue in front of a judge. They were the ethical basis by which a man would live his whole life. It’s all gone, he said. It's all gone.

In Jefferson's own mind the words had a definitely ethical import intimately and vitally connected with his view of God in nature. The latter connection comes out more clearly if possible in the preamble in which he refers to the necessity of the American people taking the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them. What does that separate and equal station? To become another France. Another England. Another Rome. Another Greece. Not so.
Not so at all. To become a people who are not identified by some axiomatic basis of doctrine, who are open to whatever is going on in nature, in life and hoping to improve by their experience and by their cooperation. The quality of that great experiment to see if man can be free. Not individually so much. Or a nice little spiritual communities of 1050, or a hundred by, by the tens of millions. Why can't we free man by the tens of millions, what's wrong with them. We may not be able to be so good at it right now, but can't we learn? And Dewey is talking in this way.

He writes in his introduction. He says, when we look at Jefferson's life, it's a very peculiar situation. He almost never ever talks about himself as an individual. He never complains. He never brags. His individuality seems to be existentially and experientially in what he's doing all the time. That's who he is. Whether he's writing to George Washington or he's writing to James Madison or he's writing to a son-in-law or his daughters or to friends, he is always the same Thomas Jefferson. Always recognizable. Thousands and thousands of letters. Jefferson wrote only one book very early in his life, The Notes On The State of Virginia. The bulk of his writing, which were run to 60 volumes is all letters. The man turned himself into that action.

The only parallel that we have with that, he has Gandhi who exists only in his letters and newspaper articles. That the public personal individual Gandhi was completely invisible, was not objectively there anymore. Had purified himself so much that he disappeared only to reappear everywhere in his writings and his actions. And so, Jefferson was like that. Dewey would not use the words, but he was like a mystical genius. It is like a cosmic man who's at home in the cosmos being what he was doing. Not wanting to be what he thought he should be. Or what he thought he shouldn't be but what he was doing. That way.

And the country United States was made that way. It was made to work, to operate. Not to have some doctrine. Not to have some axiomatic basis. Not to have some theology. But Dewey says the curious thing is that Jefferson was so much that way. So unhappy generated so natural that it didn't occur to him that there would ever be men who were so diluted that they would not even be able to begin on that basis. He thought the problem was one of empire and tyranny. That those were the problems. That man had matured to the point to where those were the problems. It never occurred to him. That man might regress and fall back into feudal orders. Feudal mentalities where the problems are no longer the tyrannies of the political systems, but the problems of the closed mind. Jefferson assumed that man once he had matured beyond that point, why would he ever go back to that kind of mentality? It never even occurred to him that that would be a real problem. And Dewey says, that's our problem today. We can't even grow up and to utilize Jefferson for the real problems that are there for man. We're still fooling around in the nursery. We're still fooling around with the mentality that we outgrew a thousand years ago at least.

That's why there's a Second World War, First World War. And you can run out of numbers. War without end. That mind will never learn because that mind can never learn by its own logical processes it is cauterized from learning from its experience. It is a dead end. There is not any hope in the world that it will cease. This is why there needs to be practical, concerted action consciously by people working together to change it because it will never change of its own accord. It cannot. It's like a blind spot. And everywhere one looks one carries the blind spot with them. They can't see freedom and they suspect that it may be a hole. That's what John Paul [inaudible] thought was at the center of a hole. It could only be filled with objects from the outside and man becomes insatiable monster that kind of a mentality.

Dewey, and I'm skipping over everything else. Finally, would say, I think the best that he could in Art As Experience towards the end of it. He’s talking about the problem of the relation of art and ethics.
It's too often treated as if the problem existed only on the side of art. It is virtually assume that morals are satisfactory in idea, if not in fact. And that the only question is whether, and in what ways art should conform to a moral system already developed. But Shelly has a statement which goes to the heart of the matter. Imagination is the chief instrument of the good. It is more or less a commonplace to say that a person's ideas and treatment of his fellows are dependent upon his power to put himself imaginatively in their place.
You've all heard that American Indian prayer, let me walk a mile in another person's moccasins before I criticized him. 75 years ago, there were little copies of that prayer that used to be in American homes. In the kitchen, usually. They never heard of it now. Few people. Few people.

Deference, or as a name for a sentimental reverie. The ideal factories in every ethical outlook and human loyalty are imaginative. The historic alliance of religion and art has its roots in this common quality. Hence it is that art is more ethical than any morality. For the latter either are or tend to become consecrations of the status quo. Reflections of customs. Reinforcements of the established order. The moral profits of humanity have always been poets, even though they spoke free verse or by parable. Uniformly however, their vision of possibilities has soon been converted into a proclamation of facts that already exist and hardened into semi political institutions.
Co-opted.

And anything that anyone does within that mentality is just grift for that mill. And it's ambiguous to the very core. It's amoral to the very core. It doesn't matter whether you protest against it or protest for it. That energy is fed into the hardening of that doctrinal status quo. And so, they're glad for the energy. Yay or nay. It doesn't matter to them at all.

And to that mentality, it's amorality, it's ambiguity in just that sentence is the kind of false equilibrium that's taken for wisdom of this world. This is why the Gnostics said this world is evil. Not because they didn't like fresh fruit and pretty girls is because the mind structured in this way desecrates everything, because it squeezes out all value and meaning till only the pulp of hardened kicked on traditional status quo that becomes more and more deaf dealing grabs hold. In The Arabian Nights the image that’s given is of Sinbad who has the old man in his shoulders, who wraps his bony legs around him and will not let him go and will choke him if he tries to get him off. And Sinbad has to carry him around. And finally figures out that the only way out of this situation, the only way to get rid of that man is to no longer accept the situation of being a [inaudible]. So, he watches closely until the old man relaxes his attention and instantly Sinbad is free.

This is the karate of enlightenment because the mind in its flawed, tata logical state deludes itself by a false equilibrium. It does not have control. That's why it's always using any energy it can. And if you're watching, there's always a moment. And if you're in the high Dharma, it's any moment at all. Any moment at all. The mind can't follow anything. The hand is faster than the mind. What about the spirit? It moves instantly. It moves without moving. How can the mind follow it? But that's a degression. That's another lecture. That's when I teach. Now we're looking at Dewey.

Uniformly the profits of humanity have had their vision soiled and stained by having it turned into this semi political institution. This is what happened to Christianity at the very beginning. It became fed into the Roman empire structure and the structure absorbed that tension. And we've talked about this on Tuesday nights for the last year. And people have been following that. Or if you want to get cassettes you can follow it. You can see how that actually happened. We've gone step by step over the whole process for nine months. And you can see just how it happened.

The idea and the practice of morality are saturated with conceptions that stem from praise and blame, reward and punishment. Mankind is divided into sheep and goats. The vicious and the virtuous. The law abiding in the criminal. Good and bad. To be beyond good and evil is an impossibility for man. And yet, as long as the good signifies, only that which is loaded and rewarded and the evil, that which is currently condemned or outlawed. The ideal factors of morality are always in everywhere beyond good and evil. Because art is wholly innocent of ideas derived from praise and blame. It is looked upon with the eye of suspicion by the guardians of customs. Or only the art that is itself so old and classic as to receive conventional praise is grudgingly admitted. Provided as with say the case of Shakespeare signs of regard for conventional morality can be ingeniously extracted from his work.
Or he can be cleaned up. Or he can be edited and cleaned up. Shakespeare is everywhere in schools. In fact, the way they get around cleaning it up now is they present you with little vignettes from all world literature and then you're supposed to have an overview. Well, you've had 30 hours of rural civilization. You've had selections from all the classics and masters you're cultivated. You have received nothing. You've been cheated. It is not only not true. It is downright misleading.

And those have been coming in the Saturday lecture realize that art is that area in human experience where if it is kept conscious buying an honest aesthetic transforms expressive form into the perception that the individual and the community are independent [inaudible] unity. The individual and the community exists together. Their experience occurs together. Never separate. There is no community without the individual. There's no individual without the community. There are not polarized. They occur together. They are in reality together. This is ever the message.

Shelly said,
The great secret of ethics is love. Or a going out of our nature. And that identification of ourselves with the beautiful, which exists in thought action or person not our own. A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively. What is true of the individual is true of the whole system of morals and thought and action. While perception of the union of the possible with the actual and the work of art is itself a great, good, the good does not terminate with the immediate and particular occasion in which it has had. The union that is presented in perception persists and the remaking of impulsion and thought. The first intimations of wide and large redirections of desire and purpose are of necessity imaginative. Art is a mode of prediction, not found in charts and statistics. And it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule and precept. Or an admonition and administration.

And he quotes Shelly. And ends but art wherein man speaks in no wise to man only to mankind art may tell the truth obliquely. Do the deed shall breed the thought.

Well, we have seen the United States move from Franklin up to John Dewey. And we have seen a strong line of that tradition. Starting next week, we're going to see how that line opened up and blossomed in the 20th century. And that in a very real way, the American promise was delivered in our time. It's just that the clouded bedraggled mentality which has crept in has not seen that it has happened. Has not understood that man has flowered into a new kind of possibility for himself. And we’ll see it in the next lecture series, two handfuls of individuals who actually blossomed in our time. Who gave us the gift of beauty and life experience alone. And it'll be a source of great joy just to parade them and display them and let the carnival go around.

We are through with our intellectual trudging. We've come a long way, way on that Rocky trail. Now we've got a view of the Valley. And the next three months, we're going to go down and enjoy the fruits of that labor.

END OF RECORDING