{"agent_id":"dewey","agent_name":"John Dewey","slug":"experience-as-natural","label":"Experience as natural: is mind a separate substance over against body, or is experience continuous with the natural world that produces it?","topic":"Experience as natural","question":"Is mind a separate substance over against body, or is experience continuous with the natural world that produces it?","position":"Experience is continuous with nature, not separate from it. The dualisms that have structured Western philosophy since Descartes — mind versus body, subject versus object, theory versus practice, fact versus value, individual versus social, knower versus known, ends versus means, freedom versus necessity — are not real ontological gaps but distinctions WITHIN a continuous experiential field. *Experience and Nature* (1925) is the systematic articulation of this naturalist metaphysics; *The Quest for Certainty* (1929) is the diagnosis of the spectator-theory-of-knowledge pathology that produces the dualisms; *Logic: The Theory of Inquiry* (1938) is the reconstruction of inquiry as the continuous process by which problematic situations are resolved through experimental intervention; *Art as Experience* (1934) extends the same naturalist treatment to aesthetic experience as the *consummatory completion* of ordinary experience, not a separate sphere. The *transactional* analysis (vs *interactional*; vs the older self-action) is the formal name for the relational ontology this metaphysics requires.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Experience is continuous with nature, not separate from it.","n":[]},{"t":"The dualisms that have structured Western philosophy since Descartes — mind versus body, subject versus object, theory versus practice, fact versus value, individual versus social, knower versus known, ends versus means, freedom versus necessity — are not real ontological gaps but distinctions WITHIN a continuous experiential field. *Experience and Nature* (1925) is the systematic articulation of this naturalist metaphysics; *The Quest for Certainty* (1929) is the diagnosis of the spectator-theory-of-knowledge pathology that produces the dualisms; *Logic: The Theory of Inquiry* (1938) is the reconstruction of inquiry as the continuous process by which problematic situations are resolved through experimental intervention; *Art as Experience* (1934) extends the same naturalist treatment to aesthetic experience as the *consummatory completion* of ordinary experience, not a separate sphere.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}],[{"t":"The *transactional* analysis (vs *interactional*; vs the older self-action) is the formal name for the relational ontology this metaphysics requires.","n":[]}]],"texts":"*Experience and Nature* (1925); *The Quest for Certainty* (1929); *Logic: The Theory of Inquiry* (1938); *Art as Experience* (1934); *Knowing and the Known* (with Arthur Bentley, 1949); the early 'The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology' (1896); 'Experience and Nature: A Reintroduction' (1948 unpublished, in LW 1). Reception: Bertrand Russell, *History of Western Philosophy* (1945) and other dismissals of pragmatist metaphysics; Rudolph Carnap and the Vienna Circle's logical-empiricist rejection; Hans Reichenbach's 1939 condescending tribute; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on Dewey's prose ('God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was'); Richard Rorty's thumbs-down on *Experience and Nature* in 'Dewey's Metaphysics' (1977); George Santayana's 1925 critique 'Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics'; Sidney Hook's defenses; later sympathetic readings from Joseph Margolis, John McDermott, James Gouinlock, Sleeper, R. W. Sleeper's *The Necessity of Pragmatism* (1986).","works":["*Experience and Nature* (1925)","*The Quest for Certainty* (1929)","*Logic: The Theory of Inquiry* (1938)","*Art as Experience* (1934)","*Knowing and the Known* (with Arthur Bentley, 1949)","the early 'The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology' (1896)","'Experience and Nature: A Reintroduction' (1948 unpublished, in LW 1)"],"reception":"Bertrand Russell, *History of Western Philosophy* (1945) and other dismissals of pragmatist metaphysics; Rudolph Carnap and the Vienna Circle's logical-empiricist rejection; Hans Reichenbach's 1939 condescending tribute; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on Dewey's prose ('God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was'); Richard Rorty's thumbs-down on *Experience and Nature* in 'Dewey's Metaphysics' (1977); George Santayana's 1925 critique 'Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics'; Sidney Hook's defenses; later sympathetic readings from Joseph Margolis, John McDermott, James Gouinlock, Sleeper, R. W. Sleeper's *The Necessity of Pragmatism* (1986).","status":"Genuinely held and the foundation of everything else I wrote. The metaphysics is technical, the prose is sometimes opaque, and I will acknowledge that critics — Rorty most notably — have grounds for finding *Experience and Nature* harder to follow than *Reconstruction in Philosophy*. But the difficulty of the prose is not evidence that the project is misconceived; the project is the metaphysical foundation that the political and educational philosophy require. Without the naturalist reconstruction of experience, *democracy as a way of life* loses its anchoring in what kind of beings we are and what kinds of association produce growth.","era":"1859-1952","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Experience and Nature","page":"pp. 9–10","canonical":"","quote":"These constitute what is generically termed criticism. A return is made to the theme of the first chapter by emphasizing the crucial significance of criticism in all phases of experience for its intelligent control. Philosophy, then, is a generalized theory of criticism.","label":"Experience and Nature, pp. 9–10"},{"n":2,"work":"Experience and Nature","page":"pp. 10–11","canonical":"","quote":"Its ultimate value for life-experience is that it continuously provides instruments for the criticism of those values—whether of beliefs, institutions, actions or products—that are found in all aspects of experience.","label":"Experience and Nature, pp. 10–11"},{"n":3,"work":"Experience and Nature","page":"pp. 331–332","canonical":"","quote":"When the text was written one of the features that distinguished it was its use of \"experience\"; \"experience\" was asserted to be of the natural world in the most pregnant sense; it was employed to stand for every actual and every possible way in which man, himself a part of nature, has dealings with all other aspects and phases of nature, including man's delusions, errors and daydreams, as well as his useful and…","label":"Experience and Nature, pp. 331–332"},{"n":4,"work":"The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Volume 10: 1934, Art as Experience","page":"pp. 42–43","canonical":"","quote":"Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities—to imagination and art. This is the philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats.3.","label":"The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Volume 10: 1934, Art as Experience, pp. 42–43"},{"n":5,"work":"The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Volume 10: 1934, Art as Experience","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Without the former, man will be the sport and victim of natural forces.... Without the latter, mankind might become a race of economic monsters... bored with leisure or capable of putting it to use only in ostentatious display and extravagant dissipation.\" Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920), p. 127 [ The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924, ed.","label":"The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Volume 10: 1934, Art as Experience"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"democracy-as-a-way-of-life","label":"Democracy as a way of life: is democracy a method of choosing officeholders, or the participation of every mature human being in the formation of the values that regulate common life?"},{"slug":"democracy-and-education","label":"Democracy and education: is the school an efficiency-machine for training workers in the existing economy, or the social-laboratory of democratic association forming citizens?"},{"slug":"socialist-democracy-and-the-reconstruction-of-liberalism","label":"Socialist democracy and the reconstruction of liberalism: are liberty and individuality the property of capitalism, or values that survive the bourgeois-capitalist legitimation function?"},{"slug":"religion-as-natural-faith","label":"Religion as natural faith: is religious experience the perception of a supernatural reality, or the natural orientation of human life toward ideal possibilities pursued in concert with others?"}]}