Dewey and the Metaphysical Imagination

Dewey and the Metaphysical ImaginationAuthor(s): Thomas AlexanderSource: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 203-215Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40311792 .

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Dewey and the Metaphysical Imagination

Thomas Alexander

If there is one lesson to be learned from all the philosophers who have attacked metaphysics as a legitimate subject for philo- sophical concern, it is that metaphysics, like philosophy itself, is something we all practice: the question is whether we do so well or ill, with conscious, artful intelligence, or slipshod negli- gence. To modify Aristotle's famous remark: All human beings desire to live with a sense of meaning and value. Most of us do so by imbibing the meaning-giving mythic structures of the world, that is, our culture, unquestioningly, along with our mothers' milk.1 Through language, ritual, symbol, and myth we appropriate our shared possibilities for significant existence; philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular is simply a conscious pursuit of this desire, which I call the Human Eros. Be- cause the world is a place of change, conflict, and tragedy, our mythic worlds are not immune and may be confronted, modi- fied, or destroyed entirely. Our traditions may collide with each other, each imperiously convinced of its absolute mandate. Thus we need to reflect upon the world: the world as the ambit of our involvements, as the condition of our symbolic history, and as the domain of possible meanings for the future. Our desire for fulfillment gives singular metaphysical import to the aesthetics of our existence and the permanent possibility for tragedy, the negation of the Human Eros.2

Elie Weisel, in his autobiographical novel about the holocaust, Nighty illustrates such a moment of a negation of a mythic world when the hero, a young Hungarian-Jewish boy who has loved God and studied the Kabbalah with the gentle town mystic, ar- rives at Auschwitz and is marched toward a flaming ditch into which trucks deliver an infernal cargo:



204 Thomas Alexander

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget the lit- tle faces of children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath the silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget the flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which de- prived me, for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.3

The question of metaphysics for Dewey must begin with such recollections, for metaphysics is a form of recollection which is on the way toward action guided by the desire to live a life of embodied value. We recall disaster, or the destruction of value and meaning, that is, evil, and assert its ontological significance rather than repress it and dismiss it as mere "lack of Being," nothing "positive in itself." We begin with the assertion of the equiprimordial status of the precarious with the stable, but we also recognize the existence of the ideal as ideal, as the possibility of creative transformation of the present, thereby making the access to the ontological one of action guided by the aesthetics of human existence. This is why I believe Dewey's metaphysics to be of crucial importance: it teaches the beginning of wisdom, of pervasive awareness of the possibility of tragedy and of freedom. It disposes us toward ontological care and creativity while making our understanding of the world search for completion in the narrative, aesthetic, and active modes rather than in atemporal, cognitive formalisms. At once, metaphysics seeks the careful understanding of nature in ecological ontology and aims at the shared pursuit of creative democratic freedom.

Such a position is called for because the history of Western



Dewey and the Metaphysical Imagination 205

metaphysics has been dominated by the ontology of perfection which degrades tragedy, the creative and the temporal while trans- posing the modality of the ideal from the possible to the actual and completed, thereby making it ineffectual. With the Greeks the envisagement of Being is concretized in the "esti" of Parmenides: the third person singular present tense of Hto be." Being as subject is easily understood here as a purely atemporal object - "it" - which has no past or future, but merely "is." Future and imperfect tenses, subjunctive and conditional moods, plural first person subjects are thus degraded.4 "We might be" and "you could have been" are excluded from the path of ontological inquiry. The Par- menidean esti was seen by Plato as perfect, it was completed, self- sufficient; it needed nothing else; it was "finished" in the sense in which a work of art to which nothing can be added or subtracted is "finished." This immediately revalued the existential human world, which is a world of histories, of futures, of communities where "I," "you," "we" are in need and have to think in conditional and subjunctive moods to survive. With Augustine, the perfect instance of Being became God who stood outside of time and saw all temporal events copresently.

This ideal of the true "God's eye view" became the inheritance of Western civilization, our style of interpreting the world, our cultural hermeneutic. It posits the real as pure "fact," factum, something by nature "complete," "finished," "done," hence knowable with certainty because it is overwith and through. This view of truth and reality is operative in the Laplacean vision of scientific knowledge: knowing the exact position, velocity and di- rection of each atom by which the entire past and future of the universe can be deduced by static, mechanical laws or in the theory that there are exact, ideally locatable "brain states" which at the timeless instant Tx simply and absolutely exist. Perhaps one of the most pervasive ideas inherited from this tradition is Parme- nides' equation: "What-is is the same as knowing," by which I understand that Being is equated with the object of (re)cognition; Being is grasped through knowing and knowledge is exemplified




by the recognition of fixed identity.5 Dewey's philosophy is one of the most important attempts in

recent philosophy to throw this range of assumptions into question. To approach this complex issue, first let us locate the human context of metaphysics - this is highly relevant from Dewey's own assumptions. Such questions as "What is reality?" or "What is knowledge?" existentially or historically occur only well after a culture has embarked upon a long path of acquiring other skills and sciences. The world is culturally appropriated initially through language, custom, and myth as well as through specific arts and skills. And this is true for each of our own personal lives as well as of culture in general. It is only after a lengthy education that we innocently stumble into our first philosophy class and have it make some sense. In Deweyan terminology, there is a vast, complex world of "primary experience," the world as lived in the daily medium of our physical embodiment and cultural understanding, before there can be any refinement of that world and its objects into "secondary experience." The issues which generate the problems which begin to broach the generality of metaphysics only arise when there are already fairly sophisticated astronomical, mathematical, moral, and religious ideas to create problems of interpretation and understanding. When such conflicts are encountered, revolutions in human thought may then occur.

From the Deweyan standpoint, then, metaphysics arises from genuine "problematic situations" and cannot be dismissed as an empty pursuit born of confusion due to misuse of ordinary language. Because of our desire to understand, we seek to explore, integrate, and modify our world of meanings and values, our world of culture and symbol. Through a creative and reflective ap- propriation of our culture, we attempt to grasp the sense of the world we live. The danger lies, Dewey believes, when this human desire to experience the meaning of things is sublimated into the symbol as such, the symbol which ceases to guide action and in- form the world of our primary human pursuits and functions instead as an aesthetic substitute. It is transposed from the modality




of the possible to that of the actually existent. In Plato's Phaedo, the theory of Forms is discovered only by the route of rejecting the "body/ the realm of contingency, confusion and error which drags the poor soul about like a drunkard. With Descartes, even the pursuit of "care of the soul" is eliminated for the search for cognitive certainty of the alien material substance. Western metaphysics, despite heroic exceptions, became a metaphysics of disem- bodiment, which for Dewey was a metaphysics of forgetfiilness. It is highly important to note here that this was not a foolish or mistaken pursuit. For why is it that such a view has exercised such tremendous power? The answer is: for the same reason any idea exercises power over us - because it has an aesthetic significance. Dewey's effort is not to eliminate "metaphysics" but rather to re- locate the status of the aesthetic. The human quest for the aesthetic experience of meaning led to the creation of cultural ideals and symbols. But the need for the embodiment of the symbol in action was often ignored because the ideal was taken as the real, as already completed.

Thus, in Hegelian fashion, the phase of disembodied metaphysics contains its element of truth. But here is where Dewey urges a revolution in metaphysical imagination. For Dewey, our primary problem is our "dualistic" culture, our habit of mind. The central

culprit here, according to Dewey, is the double doctrine that real-

ity "is" absolutely complete (however it appears to us) and that we encounter reality through the act of disembodied knowing: the real is the ideal which is beheld abstractly by theory and not

concretely lived and understood historically and socially. Dewey, it must be recalled, knew the doctrine he criticized, since he had adhered to it in his early years, though with progressive discon- tent. But when he broke with it, he broke with these most an- cient commitments.6

I see the first clear indication of his revolution in the article of

1905, "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism."7 Here and from hence on Dewey rejects the assumption that reality is to be identi-

fied with the object of knowledge. The world encountered through




our embodied, cultural existence, the world as suffered, enjoyed, worked upon, and lived in is the ontological basis of any cognitive operation which itself exists as a transformative moment in that world. This is nothing short of a metaphysical revolution - far more radical in my view than Heidegger's, which holds that we can only overcome the history of Western ontology by certain ap- pointed thinkers preparing themselves to ask the original question over again. Dewey continued to develop this thought, in spite of heated criticism and much misunderstanding.8

Thus metaphysics is for Dewey a way of inquiry to remember the world in order that the Human Eros for meaning and value may be fulfilled in shared, contingent life. Metaphysics is important because it is a part of the reincarnation of intelligence - the reembodiment of our consciously articulated symbolic world. There are several features to be noted here. First, inquiry must understand itself historically: it must grasp itself as an existential project which develops in time. There will be no dismissal of the discussion of origins by labelling it as "the genetic fallacy." This historical understanding also opens up the functional nature of intelligence. To grasp intelligence as involved with a world of context, action, and change is to allow for distinctions without thereby succumbing to the tendency to reify them into abstract dichotomies. In this sense, metaphysics strives to recover the awareness of the transactional situationality of our existence. The recollection of our embodiment means that we must attend to the environmental ambit of our conscious projects. Consciousness focuses upon the "stress points" of our existence, the areas of the situation in need of attention, ignoring the relatively structured world embraced by our habitual or phenomenal body (as Mer- leau-Ponty called it). To remember the transactional context of our inquiries is to discern the horizon of the world without which any inquiry or action would be meaningless and impossible. Meta- physics, then, becomes at once an art of "peripheral vision" rather than the direct vision of cognitive consciousness and an art of transactional or ecological understanding rather than a search for




fundamental elements and universal laws. It is an art of imaginative understanding and creative envisagement of contexts, histories, and possibilities of aesthetic meaning realizeable through shared activity.

This is why the aesthetic dimension of experience is so crucial for Dewey. The horizonal-transformational nature of our existence is usually ignored. Our daily practical existence has no inter- est in or need of this horizonal world; it supports us and is sufficient unto the day. It is when we forget this world in our conscious arts that we have suddenly turned human life into a mystery without an answer. In the aesthetic experience, however, this horizonal world is consciously experienced through the encounter with the work of art. The structuring "pervasive quality" which is felt but also provides the continuity of the meaning of the work reveals that our cognitive pursuits at all times live and breathe and have their being through this dimension of our existence.9 The work of art reveals the incarnation of meaning in a medium transformed into a socially expressive object.

Thus, in works of art which succeed in rendering human experience luminous with the dynamic process of encountering the world in its possibilities for fulfillment, we have an alternative paradigm for the meaning of "Being" which is opposed to the Par- menidean "It-is" and its heirs. This is perhaps the most important point Dewey's metaphysics has to make: rather than accept the

experience of the "It-is" as the ideal ontological instance - derived from a desire for cognitive certainty which narrows meaning to the vanishing point, Dewey asserts the primacy of the aesthetic encounter as the paradigm for grasping the possibilities of existence.

Through the aesthetic, we grasp the significance of the imagination as the transfomation of the world through action. The onto-

logical dimensions of the creative are the intertwining of the actual with the possible and this is the context in which action makes sense. In the aesthetic, the subjunctive and conditional moods are

dramatically counterpoised with the indicative, and the imperfect and future tenses undercut any claim to the supremacy of the




present. The work of art, produced by an "I" for a "you" so that there can be a "we/ is never equated with the mere "it." Through the aesthetic, the temporally developmental continuity of the experience reveals the ontological significance of narrative understanding and dramatic enactment rather than the atemporal formalisms of symbolic logic.

Through the aesthetic encounter we obtain the most complete and complex instance of the possibilities of nature and culture; here the human marks the fulfillment of the natural. The aesthetic grasps nature as form and potentiality for meaning. By simply equating Being with the object of knowledge, the Greeks understood Being as Form - even Aristotle's effort to integrate potentiality and matter made these factors subsidiary to essence. By fo- cusing upon the aesthetic, Dewey makes potentiality equiprimordial with form and understands form dynamically as the temporal and transformational continuity of situations-in- process. While Boisvert has argued for a role of form, so reinter- preted in Dewey's metaphysics, I argue that Dewey also manages to reintroduce the Aristotelian idea of potentiality into metaphysics, from which it had been excluded by the ontology of perfection under the guise of modern determinism. Indeed, Dewey goes further, assigning it equal ontological value. By embracing the po- tential, Dewey radically temporalizes Being and opens it to the contingencies of tragedy as well as aesthetic fulfillment.10

Thus "Being" for Dewey becomes "Nature" - Nature conceived as "Phusis," the encompassing intertwining of complex, pluralistic modalities out of which beings are born and into which they vanish. Nature is not the sum total of the objects which it contains; it is the enabling possibilities of those beings as well as their structural actualities. Nature must be understood then in terms of its possibilities, contingencies, histories and most complex wholes instead of ideally simple atomic parts governed by mechanical laws. This makes Dewey's naturalism a genuine emergentism rather than a scientistic materialism, an emergentism, moreover, which does not posit new "properties" of material




substance, but truly new situations which come-to-be by the immediate potentialities of their materials toward creative organiza- tion. The way in which we most fully comprehend such a com- plexity is through our embodied, social imagination rather than a subjective conscious ego cogito.

The aim of metaphysics, then, is the attempt to achieve an inte- grated understanding of the complex ontological modalities of nature as a whole as well as any particular situation from the transactional point of view: I would prefer to say here, "from the ecological point of view," since I believe these terms to be synony- mous.11 Such a comprehensive understanding was the function of those mysterious "generic traits" Dewey occasionally mentioned: they were devices^ tools or habits of critical intelligence, whereby we could avoid the tendency toward reductionism and the isola- tion of disciplines of inquiry. They teach us to see things in terms of continuities, functions, situations, transformations, and events. They connect and inter-relate various inquiries without trying to reduce them all to some fundamental scheme, like mathematical physics. The generic traits are arts of imaginative interpretation which counteract the tendency of any cognitive inquiry to lose sight of the sustaining periphery or context in its need to focus upon the problematic subject-matter. Such tendencies lead to on- tologies of finite "objects" governed by "laws" and aim at reduc- tionistic "explanation." Dewey 's understanding of continuity and "the principle of continuity," to which he appeals on numerous occasions, states that while we must maintain the effort to grasp the natural histories of any subject, we must also resist the effort to reduce truly novel structures simply to the predispositions of their elements. If the present is merely a mechanical rearrange- ment of the fully complete actualities of the past, then, as Peirce well saw, we must dismiss time as an illusion - an illusion which cannot even be experienced temporally, since, as Kant argues, an illusion which takes time means time is in some sense not unreal.12

It is in this sense that metaphysics is vitally necessary for wisdom. Dewey characterizes wisdom as the art of human existence;




it is the effort to grasp the aesthetic possibilities of shared worlds of meaning which can be actualized through the art of coopera- tive action. In the fece of a universe in which action matters because tragedy is real, philosophy has the role of eventing meaning, not merely describing the fixed structures of Being. Through metaphysics, other arts and inquiries can aim at wisdom instead of re- maining self-enclosed projects. The aim of metaphysics, then, is an imaginative understanding of the ontology of civilization in terms of its possibilities as well as histories. This is well articulated in one of Dewey's most significant essays, "Philosophy and Civili- zation. " There he says:

Meaning is wider in scope as well as more precious in value than is truth, and philosophy is occupied with meaning rather than with truth. ... In philosophy we are dealing with something comparable to the meaning of Athenian civilization or of a drama or a lyric. Significant history is lived in the imagination of man, and philosophy is a further excursion into the imagination of its own prior achievements. . . . Because we are afraid of specula- tive ideas, we do, and do over and over again, an im- mense amount of dead, specialized work in the region of "facts." We forget that facts are only data; that is are only fragments of uncompleted meanings, and unless they are rounded out into complete ideas - a work which can only be done by hypotheses, by a free imagination of intellec- tual possibilities - they are helpless as are all maimed things and as repellent as are needlessly thwarted ones.13

The moral, as I take it from this passage, is that metaphysics becomes a basis for pluralism in our methodologies while keeping the subject-matter of those inquiries in creative communication with each other. More importantly, it aims at the art of transactional perception; it helps us see nature in its interactions and in its developmental possibilities instead of its most isolated and primitive instances. The result is that we undertake not "care of




the soul," but care of the world and of each other. Through the pragmatic aesthetic we discover an eco-ontology of democratic freedom.14

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

NOTES

1. By "myth" I do not mean "false stories given in lieu of scientific explanation." I mean all those narratives which attempt to answer the fundamental questions we need to ask to orient ourselves as human beings: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why do we do what we do? and Where are we going?

2. There is also the possibility, raised by Freud, of a human "Thanatos": a self-destructive desire for the annihilation of meaning; but, except in rare cases, even in their destructive actions, humans seem to believe they are enacting meaning which promises some resolution of their conflicts, inner and outer.

3. Elie Wiesel, The Nyht Trilogy (Nooday, 1985), p. 43. 4. This is the insight which motivates the rethinking of on-

tology in Heidegger's Being and Time, though he tends, in my view, to place too much emphasis on the first person future: "I will be" as the ontological moment, degrading at the same time the "they" or "one" (Das Man). For Dewey, the "you" and the "we" are especially important moments of ontological access.

5. Noein in Greek has the force of recognition. Hence the famous scene in Book III (1.396f.) of the Iliad, in which Helen recognizes the goddess Aphrodite in spite of her mortal disguise or the scene in Book XIX (1.393f.) of the Odyssey in which the maid Eurykleia recognizes Odysseus by his scar. To recognize is to identify, and so knowing guided by this model seeks to reduce itself to an assertion of identity. This becomes the force of "knowing" in Greek metaphysics; the intellect (nous) is precisely the power to recognize the fixed essence, not the power to make abductive inferences, to learn, to mediate ambiguous situations creatively.




6. Sec Dewey's article "Existence and Objective Idealism"

{Middle Works 3: 128-144; The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, 198-

225) for his most systematic critique of idealism. 7. Middle Works 3: 158-167; included in The Influence of

Darwin on Philosophy, 226-241. 8. See especially "The Practical Character of Reality"

(1908), "The Subject Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry" (1917), the Intro- duction to the Essays in Experimental logic (1917), "The Need for a Re-

covery of Philosophy" (1917), and "Time and Individuality" (1940). The culmination, of course, was Experience and Nature (1925) and, I have argued, Art as Experience (1934) and A Common Faith (1934). See

my discussion in John Dewey 's Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (SUNY Press, 1987), Chapter 3.

9. This theme is taken up directly in one of Dewey1 s most

important articles, "Qualitative Thought" {Later Works 5: 243-62; Philos-

ophy and Civilization, 93-116). See also Art as Experience (Later works

10), Chapter 3. 10. This claim is also developed more substantially in my

book. 11. The term "ecology" is used by Dewey as an illustration

of the transaction^ in "Transactions as Known and Named" {Knowing and the Known, pp. 125-28; Later Works 16: 117-121).

12. Dewey' s most extensive discussion of continuity as a

principle of emergentism occurs in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, pp. 18-

23; Later Works 12: 26-30. In a letter to Skudder Klyce (late April or

early May 1915), Dewey writes,

Knowledge is a mode of experience which can be contrasted with non-cognitive modes. ... In net, knowledge is a rule or method for having a non-cognitive experience. . . . For reasons I need not go int[o] here, the idealist logic tends to monism as its limit, the realist to atomistic pluralism, while pragmatism pos- tulates on the metaphysical side continuity - that is a continuous

reorganization of unity. . . . Continuity may be conceived as

identity, but it is not identity as frequently conceived - that is as existential continuity (of which mathematical continuity is a for-




mula or method of handling) [; it] is always the identity of a process and is determinate only as effective - that isy at any particular date it is prospectively incomplete and so indeterminate (the future). . . . (Dewey-Klyce Correspondence, Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University, Car bond ale, Illinois)

13. Later Works 3: 8-10; Philosophy and Civilization, 4-11. This should also be compared to the last chapter of Experience and Na- ture,

14. In response to the other papers given, I would like to make the following comments. First, the McDermott-Sleeper debate over the "metaphysics of experience" vs. the "metaphysics" of existence" seems to me a question of "pick your poison" - both terms are open to misinter- pretation of Dewey' s meaning. My own solution would be to focus on the aesthetic and ecological metaphors. Boisvert has, I believe, raised a significant question with regard to unresolved issues in Dewey' s methodology. If "instrumentalism" is a pluralistic methodology, a range of con- structive and interpretive arts, and not a purely formal, rule-governed "method" such as sought by modern philosophy, in what sense is there a "method" at all, or do we have an empty, playful hermeneutic openness? And to what extent is Dewey justified in constantly appealing to the scientific paradigm? With respect to the "Battle of Gods and Giants" among Deweyans between those like Boisvert, Sleeper, and Gouinlock who, as "friends of Forms," stress the Aristotelian aspect of structure in nature, and those, like McDermott, Stuhr, and Hickman, the "giants" who wish deny forms of any sort to stress the nature of creative process, I must give the answer Plato gives in the Sophist, like a child asked to choose "which hand?" I answer "both." The question of course is how one has one's cake and eats it too. This is an issue of utmost importance in need of further systematic and creative metaphysical reflection.



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Dewey and the Metaphysical Imagination

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