John Dewey Hottakes

johndeweyquotes.md

The quest for certainty

• “Conception and systems of conceptions, ends in view and plans, are constantly making and remaking as fast as those already in use reveal their weaknesses, defects and positive values.” The Quest for Certainty, p 133f
• “…action is at the heart of ideas. The experimental practice of knowing, when taken to supply the pattern of philosophic doctrine of mind and its organs, eliminates the age-old separation of theory and practice.” p 134
• “There are no sensory or perceived objects fixed in themselves. In the course of experience, as far as that is an outcome influenced by thinking, objects perceived, used and enjoyed take up into their own meaning the results of thought they become ever richer and fuller of meaning” 134
• “Practical activity deals with individualized and unique situations which are never exactly duplicable and about which, accordingly, no complete assurance is possible” 6
• “Perfect certainty is what man wants. It cannot be found by practical doing or making; these take effect in an uncertain future, and involve peril, the risk of misadventure, frustration and failure. Knowledge, on the other hand, is thought to be concerned with a region of being which is fixed in itself.” 17
• “The theory of knowing [in ancient greek philosophy] is modeled after what was supposed to take place in the act of vision. The object refracts light to the eye and is seen; it makes a difference to the eye and to the person having an optical apparatus, but none to the thing seen.” Ch1, 19
• “Indeed, through the diffusion of religious doctrines, the idea that ultimate values are a matter of special revelation and are to be embodied in life by special means radically different from the arts of action that deal with lower and lesser ends has been accentuated in the popular mind.” 25
• “…no one would care about any exclusively theoretical uncertainty or certainty. For by definition in being exclusively theoretical it is one which makes no difference anywhere.” 31
• “[philosophy] also retained three significant elements of ancient thought: the first, that certainty, security, can be found only in the fixed and unchanging; the second, that knowledge is the only road to that which is intrinsically stable and certain; the third, that practical activity is an inferior sort of thing, necessary simply because of man's animal nature and the necessity for winning subsistence from the environment.”
• “Derogation on principle of application of knowledge is, in itself, merely an expression of the old tradition of the inherent superiority of knowledge to practice, of reason to experience.” 65
• “When we speak of a musical movement, or a political movement, we come close to the sense attached to the idea in ancient science: a series of changes tending to complete or perfect a qualitative whole and fulfill an end.” 75
• “The notion that the findings of science are a disclosure of the inherent properties of the ultimate real, of existence at large, is a survival of the older metaphysics.” 83
• “The homogeneity of scientific objects, through formulation in terms of relations of space, time and motion, is precisely the device which makes this indefinitely broad and flexible scheme of transitions possible.” 107
• “The test of ideas, of thinking generally, is found in the consequences of the acts to which the ideas lead, that is in the new arrangements of things which are brought into existence.” 109
• Knowledge which is merely a reduplication in ideas of what exists already in the world may afford us the satisfaction of a photograph, but that is all. ” 110
• “To magnify thought and ideas for their own sake apart from what they do (except, once more, esthetically) is to refuse to learn the lesson of the most authentic kind of knowledge-the experimental-and it is to reject the idealism which involves responsibility.” 111
• “‘Thought’ is not a property of something termed intellect or reason apart from nature. It is a mode of directed overt action. Ideas are anticipatory plans and designs which take effect in concrete reconstructions of antecedent conditions of existence.” 133
• “As a matter of fact, smells, tastes, sounds, pressures, colors, etc., are not isolated; they are bound together by all kinds of interactions or connections, among which are included the habitual responses of the one having the experience.” 141
• “We are constantly referring to what is already known to get our bearings in any new situation.” 149
• “Abstraction is simply an instance of the economy and efficiency involved in all intelligent practice: Deal first with matters that can be effectively handled, and then use the results to go on to cope with more complex affairs.” 173
• “Material dealt with by specialized abstractive processes comes to have a psychological independence and completion which is converted – hypostatized – into objective independence and self-sufficiency.” 174
• “Desire, purpose, planning, choice, have no meaning save in conditions where something is at stake, and where action in one direction rather than another may eventuate in bringing into existence a new situation which fulfills a need.” 180
• “Anything that may be called knowledge, or a known object, marks a question answered, a difficulty disposed of, a confusion cleared up, an inconsistency reduced to coherence, a perplexity mastered.” 181
• “We define mind and its organs in terms of this doing and its results, just as we define or frame ideas of stars, acids, and digestive tissues in terms of their behavior. ” 183
• “Modern thought, largely under the influence of a Newtonian philosophy of nature, tended to treat all existence as wholly determinate. The inherently incomplete was eliminated from nature along with qualities and ends. In consequence, the mental was sharply marked off from the physically natural; for the mental was obviously characterized by doubt and uncertainty.” 185
• “A situation undergoes, through operations directed by thought, transition from problematic to settled, from internal discontinuity to coherency and organization.” 185
• “ Situations have problematic and resolved characters in and through the actual interactions of the organism and the environment.” 187
• “…situations are precarious and perilous because the persistence of life-activity depends upon the influence which present acts have upon future acts. The continuity of a life-process is secured only as acts performed render the environment favorable to subsequent organic acts.” 187
• “…all experienced objects have a double status. They are individualized, consummatory, whether in the way of enjoyment or of suffering. They are also involved in a continuity of interactions and changes, and hence are causes and potential means of later experiences. Because of this dual capacity, they become problematic. Immediately and directly they are just what they are; but as transitions to and possibilities of later experiences they are uncertain.”
• “Values are constituted by liking and enjoyment… Since science has extruded values from its objects, these empirical theories do everything possible to emphasize their purely subjective character of value.” 206
• “It is impossible to form a just estimate of the paralysis of effort that has been produced by indifference to means” 223
• “Ends separated from means are either sentimental indulgences or if they happen to exist are merely accidental. The ineffectiveness in action of "ideals" is due precisely to the supposition that means and ends are not on exactly the same level with respect to the attention and care they demand” 223
• “Yet the life which men, women and children actually lead, the opportunities open to them, the values they are capable of enjoying, their education, their share in all the things of art and science, are mainly determined by economic conditions. Hence we can hardly expect a moral system which ignores economic conditions to be other than remote and empty.” 225
• “The problem of knowledge… is a problem never ended, always in process; one problematic situation is resolved and another takes its place. The constant gain is not in approximation to universal solution but in betterment of methods and enrichment of objects experienced.” 236
• “Hopes and fears, desires and aversions, are as truly responses to things as are knowing and thinking.” 367

Human Nature and Conduct

• “Causes for an  act  always exist,  but  causes  are  not  excuses.  Questions  of causation  are  physical,  not  moral  except  when  they  concern  future  consequences.” 17
• “Our individual habits are links in forming the endless chain of humanity. Their significance depends upon the environment inherited from our forerunners, and it is enhanced as we foresee the fruits of our labors in the world in which our successors live. For however much has been done, there always remains more to do.” 19
• “neither external materials nor bodily and mental organs are in themselves means. They have to be employed in coordinated conjunction with one another to be actual means, or habits.” 22
• “The act must come before the thought, and a habit before an ability to evoke the thought at will. Ordinary psychology reverses the actual state of affairs.” 25
• “The difference between means and ends is a questions of perspective … To reach an end we must take our mind off from it and attend to the act which is next to be performed.” 27
• “Habits deprived of thought and thought which is futile are two sides of the same fact.” 49
• “Activity is creative in so far as it moves to its own enrichment as activity, that is, bringing along with itself a release of further activities” 99
• “Writers, usually male, hold forth on the psychology of woman, as if they were dealing with a Platonic universal entity, although they habitually treat men as individuals, varying with structure and environment.” 106
• The fallacy “…consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned” 123
• “We begin with a summary assertion that deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action.” 132
• “…deliberation, as a tentative trying-out of various courses of action, is outlooking.“ 141
• “The present, not the future, is ours.” 144  
• “If he attempts to provide for all contingencies, he will never do anything; if he allows his attention to be much distracted by them, he won’t do well his present planning and execution.“ 184
• “…it is better to travel than to arrive, it is because traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.” 195
• “Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not “in” that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.” 204
• “The stuff of belief and proposition is not originated by us. It comes to us from others, by education, tradition and the suggestion of the environment.” 217
• “The social environment may be as artificial as you please. But its action in response to ours is natural not artificial. In language and imagination we rehearse the responses of others just as we dramatically enact other consequences. We foreknow how others will act, and the foreknowledge is the beginning of judgment passed on action. We know with them; there is conscience.” 217
• “By means of symbols, whether gestures, words or more elaborate constructions, we act without acting.” 121
• “‘Thought’ is not a property of something termed intellect or reason apart from nature. It is a mode of directed overt action. Ideas are anticipatory plans and designs which take effect in concrete reconstructions of antecedent conditions of existence.” 133
• “The active power of ideas is a reality, but ideas and idealisms have an operative force in concrete experienced situations; their worth has to be tested by the specified consequences of their operation.” 133
• “…smells, tastes, sounds, pressures, colors, etc., are not isolated; they are bound together by all kinds of interactions or connections, among which are included the habitual responses of the one having the experience.” 141
• “Even non-scientific experience, as far as it has meaning, is neither mere doing nor mere undergoing, but is an acknowledgment of the connection between something done and something undergone in consequence of the doing.” 142
• “We are constantly referring to what is already known to get our bearings in any new situation.” 149
• “ Any instrument which is to operate effectively in existence must take account of what exists, from a fountain pen to a self-binding reaper, a locomotive or an airplane. But "taking account of," paying heed to, is something quite different from literal conformity to what is already in being.” 165
• “Desire, purpose, planning, choice, have no meaning save in conditions where something is at stake, and where action in one direction rather than another may eventuate in bringing into existence a new situation which fulfills a need” 180
• “By means of symbols, whether gestures, words or more elaborate constructions, we act without acting.” 121

How we think

• "…that the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt." 12
• "Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful." 13
• "There is such a thing as too much thinking, as when action is paralyzed by the multiplicity of views suggested by a situation." 30
• "Our intellectual progress consists, as has been said, in a rhythm of direct understanding—technically called apprehension—with indirect, mediated understanding—technically called comprehension" 89
• "But vague meanings are too gelatinous to offer matter for analysis, and too pulpy to afford support to other beliefs. They evade testing and responsibility." 96
• "language becomes a resource by which imaginative combinations and variations may be built up” 98
• "Instruction always runs the risk of swamping the pupil's own vital, though narrow, experience under masses of communicated material." 162

Experience and Nature

• “The commonest assumption of philosophies, common even to philosophies very different from one another, is the assumption of the identity of objects of knowledge and ultimately real objects.” 19
• “Selective emphasis, with accompanying omission and rejection, is the heart-beat of mental life. To object to the operation is to discard all thinking” 25
• “Our magical safeguard against the uncertain character of the world is to deny the existence of change, to mumble universal and necessary law, the ubiquity of cause and effect, the uniformity of nature, universal progress and the inherent rationality of the universe” 44
• “Every existence is an event” 71
• “…the word [End] has an almost inexpugnable honorific flavor, so that to assert that nature is characterized by ends… [but] We constantly talk about things coming or drawing to a close; getting ended, finished, done with, over with. It is a commonplace that no thing lasts forever.” 97
• “…all directional order resides in the sequential order. This no more occurs for the sake of the end than a mountain exists for the sake of the peak which is its end. A musical phrase has a certain close but the earlier portion does not therefor exists for the sake of the closed as if it were something which is done waway with when the close is reached. And so a man is not an adult until after he has been a boy, but childhood does not exist for the sake of maturity.” 99
• “Each successive event being a stage in a serial process is both expectant and commemorative.” 101
• “…because a tool is a thing used as means to consequences, instead of being taken directly and physically. It is intrinsically relational, anticipatory, predictive. Without reference to the absent, or “transcendence,” nothing is a tool.” 185
• “All discourse, oral or written, which is more than a routine unrolling of vocal habits, says things that surprise the one that says them, often indeed more than they surprise any one else.” 194
• “We bring to the simplest observation a complex apparatus of habits, of accepted meanings and techniques. Otherwise observation is the blankest of stares, and the natural object is a tale told by an idiot, full only of sound and fury.” 219
• “Communication is uniquely instrumental and uniquely final. It is instrumental as liberating us from the otherwise overwhelming pressure of events and enabling us to live in a world of things that have meaning.” 204
• “There is nothing in nature that belongs absolutely and exclusively to anything else; belonging is always a matter of reference…” 234
• “No one discovers a new world without forsaking an old one; and no one discovers a new world who exacts guarantee in advance for what it shall be” 246
• “In the old dispute as to whether a stag runs because he has long and slender legs, or has the legs in order that he may run, both parties overlook the natural descriptive statement; namely, that it is of the nature of what goes on in the world that the stag has long legs and that having them he runs.” 276
• “Mind is contextual and persistent; consciousness is focal and transitive. Mind is, so to speak, structural, substantial; a constant background and foreground; perceptive consciousness is process, a series of heres and nows.” 303
• “The familiar does not consciously appear, save in an unexpected, novel, situation, where the familiar presents itself in a new light and is therefore not wholly familiar. 311
• “The readier a response, the less consciousness, meaning, thinking it permits; division introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation.” 314
• “To be acquainted with anything is to have the kind of expectancy of its consequences which constitutes an immediate readiness to act, an adequate preparatory adjustment to whatever the thing in question may do. To know about it is to have a kind of knowledge which does not pass into direct response until some further term has been supplied.” 329
• “To a person building a house, the end-in-view is not just a remote and final goal to be hit upon after a sufficiently great number of coerced motions have been duly performed. The end-in-view is a plan which is contemporaneously operative in selecting and arranging materials.” 373
• “To prefer this is to exclude that ” 429
• “Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.” Ch6

Art as experience

• “When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience.” Ch1
• “For life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception and movement toward its close, each having its own particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout.” Ch3
• For each art has its own medium and that medium is especially fitted for one kind of communication. Each medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or as completely in any other tongue. Ch6
• Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment. Ch6
• “The live creature demands order in his living but he also demands novelty. Confusion is displeasing but so is ennui.” Ch8
• “The connection of intensity and extensity and of both with tension is not a verbal matter. There is no rhythm save where there is alternation of compressions and releases. Resistance prevents immediate discharge and accumulates tension that renders energy intense.” Ch8
• “The true artist sees and feels in terms of his medium and the one who has learned to perceive esthetically emulates the operation.” Ch9
• Experience is a matter of the interaction of organism with its environment, an environment that is human as well as physical, that includes the materials of tradition and institutions as well as local surroundings. The organism brings with it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the interaction. The self acts as well as undergoes, and its undergoings are not impressions stamped upon an inert wax but depend upon the way the organism reacts and responds" Ch 11
• “In an experience, things and events belonging to the world, physical and social, are transformed through the human context they enter, while the live creature is changed and developed through its intercourse with things previously external to it.” Ch. 11
• “Since life is activity, there is always desire whenever activity is obstructed” Ch. 11
• “Whenever anything is undergone in consequence of a doing, the self is modified. The modification extends beyond acquisition of greater facility and skill. Attitudes and interests are built up which embody in themselves some deposit of the meaning of things done and undergone.” Ch 11
• “mind forms the background upon which every new contact with surroundings is projected; yet “background” is too passive a word, unless we remember that it is active and that, in the projection of the new upon it, there is assimilation and reconstruction of both background and of what is taken in and digested.” Ch 11
• “Mind is more than consciousness, because it is the abiding even though changing background of which consciousness is the foreground.” Ch 11
• “There is always a gap between the here and now of direct interaction and the past interactions whose funded result constitutes the meanings with which we grasp and understand what is now occurring. Because of this gap, all conscious perception involves a risk; it is a venture into the unknown” Ch 12
• “Imaginative vision is the power that unifies all the constituents of the matter of a work of art, making a whole out of them in all their variety.” Ch 12
• The thoroughgoing integration of what philosophy discriminates as “subject” and “object” (in more direct language, organism and environment) is the characteristic of every work of art. Ch12
• But children are not conscious of any opposition between play and necessary work. The idea of the contrast is a product of the adult life in which some activities are recreative and amusing because of their contrast with work that is infected with laborious care. The spontaneity of art is not one of opposition to anything, but marks complete absorption in an orderly development. Ch. 12
• The contrast between free and externally enforced activity is an empirical fact. But it is largely produced by social conditions and it is something to be eliminated as far as possible, not something to be erected into a differentia by which to define art Ch12
• … the medium of expression in art is neither objective nor subjective. It is the matter of a new experience in which subjective and objective have so coöperated that neither has any longer an existence by itself. Ch12
• Knowledge of social conditions of production is, when it is really knowledge, of genuine value. But it is no substitute for understanding of the object in its own qualities and relations. Ch13
• 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 custom, or only the art that is itself so old and “classic” as to receive conventional praise is grudgingly admitted Ch 13
• “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, admonition and administration.” Ch13