JOHN DEWEY'S LOGICAL THEORY
BY
DELTON THOMAS HOWARD, A.M.
FORMERLY FELLOW IN THE SAGE SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY
A THESIS
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
Cornell University in Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor
of Philosophy
NEW YORK
LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.
1919
PRESS OF
THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY
LANCASTER, PA.
PREFACE
It seems unnecessary to offer an apology for an historical treatment of Professor Dewey's logical theories, since functionalism glories in the genetic method. To be sure, certain more extreme radicals are opposed to a genetic interpretation of the history of human thought, but this is inconsistent. At any rate, the historical method employed in the following study may escape censure by reason of its simple character, for it is little more than a critical review of Professor Dewey's writings in their historical order, with no discussion of influences and connections, and with little insistence upon rigid lines of development. It is proposed to "follow the lead of the subject-matter" as far as possible; to discover what topics interested Professor Dewey, how he dealt with them, and what conclusions he arrived at. This plan has an especial advantage when applied to a body of doctrine which, like Professor Dewey's, does not possess a systematic form of its own, since it avoids the distortion which a more rigid method would be apt to produce.
It has not been possible, within the limits of the present study, to take note of all of Professor Dewey's writings, and no reference has been made to some which are of undoubted interest and importance. Among these may be mentioned especially his books and papers on educational topics and a number of his ethical writings. Attention has been devoted almost exclusively to those writings which have some important bearing upon his logical theory. The division into chapters is partly arbitrary, although the periods indicated are quite clearly marked by the different directions which Professor Dewey's interests took from time to time. It will be seen that there is considerable chance for error in distinguishing between the important and the unimportant, and in selecting the essays which lie in the natural line of the author's development. But, valeat quantum, as William James would say.
The criticisms and comments which have been made from time to time, as seemed appropriate, may be considered pertinent or irrelevant according to the views of the reader. It is hoped that they are not entirely aside from the mark, and that they do not interfere with a fair presentation of the author's views. The last chapter is devoted to a direct criticism of Professor Dewey's functionalism, with some comments on the general nature of philosophical method.
Since this thesis was written, Professor Dewey has published two or three books and numerous articles, which are perhaps more important than any of his previous writings. The volume of Essays in Experimental Logic (1916) is a distinct advance upon The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays, published six years earlier. Most of these essays, however, are considered here in their original form, and the new material, while interesting, presents no vital change of standpoint. It might be well to call attention to the excellent introductory essay which Professor Dewey has provided for this new volume. Some mention might also be made of the volume of essays by eight representative pragmatists, which appeared last year (1917) under the title, Creative Intelligence. My comments on Professor Dewey's contribution to the volume have been printed elsewhere.[1] It has not seemed necessary, in the absence of significant developments, to extend the thesis beyond its original limits, and it goes to press, therefore, substantially as written two years ago.
I wish to express my gratitude to the members of the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy for many valuable suggestions and kindly encouragement in the course of my work. I am most deeply indebted to Professor Ernest Albee for his patient guidance and helpful criticism. Many of his suggestions, both as to plan and detail, have been adopted and embodied in the thesis, and these have contributed materially to such logical coherence and technical accuracy as it may possess. The particular views expressed are, of course, my own. I wish also to thank Professor J. E. Creighton especially for his friendly interest and for many suggestions which assisted the progress of my work, as well as for his kindness in looking over the proofs.
D. T. Howard.
Evanston, Illinois,
June, 1918.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] "The Pragmatic Method," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1918, Vol. XV, pp. 149-156.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page I. "Psychology as Philosophic Method" 1 II. The Development of the Psychological Standpoint 15 III. "Moral Theory and Practice" 33 IV. Functional Psychology 47 V. The Evolutionary Standpoint 59 VI. "Studies in Logical Theory" 72 VII. The Polemical Period 88 VIII. Later Developments 105CHAPTER I "PSYCHOLOGY AS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD"
Dewey's earliest standpoint in philosophy is presented in two articles published in Mind in 1886: "The Psychological Standpoint," and "Psychology as Philosophic Method."[2] These articles appear to have been written in connection with his Psychology, which was published in the same year, and which represents the same general point of view as applied to the study of mental phenomena. For the purposes of the present study attention may be confined to the two articles in Mind.
Dewey begins his argument, in "The Psychological Standpoint," with a reference to Professor Green's remark that the psychological standpoint is what marks the difference between transcendentalism and British empiricism. Dewey takes exception to this view, and asserts that the two schools hold this standpoint in common, and, furthermore, that the psychological standpoint has been the strength of British empiricism and desertion of that standpoint its weakness. Shadworth Hodgson's comment on this proposal testifies to its audacity. In a review of Dewey's article, he says: "If for instance we are told by a competent writer, that Absolute Idealism is not only a truth of experience but one attained directly by the method of experiential psychology, we should not allow our astonishment to prevent our examining the arguments, by virtue of which English psychology attains the results of German transcendentalism without quitting the ground of experience."[3]
Dewey defines his psychological standpoint as follows: "We are not to determine the nature of reality or of any object of philosophical inquiry by examining it as it is in itself, but only as it is an element in our knowledge, in our experience, only as it is related to our mind, or is an 'idea'.... Or, in the ordinary way of putting it, the nature of all objects of philosophical inquiry is to be fixed by finding out what experience says about them."[4] The implications of this definition do not appear at first sight, but they become clearer as the discussion proceeds.
Locke, Dewey continues, deserted the psychological standpoint because he did not, as he proposed, explain the nature of such things as matter and mind by reference to experience. On the contrary, he explained experience through the assumption of the two unknowable substances, matter and mind. Berkeley also deserted the psychological standpoint, in effect, by having recourse to a purely transcendent Spirit. Even Hume deserted it by assuming as the only reals certain unrelated sensations, and by trying to explain the origin of experience and knowledge by their combination. These reals were supposed to exist in independence of an organized experience, and to constitute it by their association. It might be argued that Hume's sensations are found in experience by analysis, and this would probably be true. But the sensations are nothing apart from the consciousness in which they are found. "Such a sensation," Dewey says, "a sensation which exists only within and for experience, is not one which can be used to account for experience. It is but one element in an organic whole, and can no more account for the whole, than a given digestive act can account for the existence of a living body."[5]
So far Dewey is merely restating the criticism of English empiricism that had been made by Green and his followers. Reality, as experienced, is a whole of organically related parts, not a mechanical compound of elements. Whatever is to be explained must be taken as a fact of experience, and its meaning will be revealed in terms of its position and function within the whole. But while Dewey employs the language of idealism, it is doubtful whether he has grasped the full significance of the "concrete universal" of the Hegelian school. The following passage illustrates the difficulty: "The psychological standpoint as it has developed itself is this: all that is, is for consciousness or knowledge. The business of the psychologist is to give a genetic account of the various elements within this consciousness, and thereby fix their place, determine their validity, and at the same time show definitely what the real and eternal nature of this consciousness is."[6]
Consciousness (used here as identical with 'experience') is apparently interpreted as a structure made up of elements related in a determinable order, and having, consequently, a 'real and eternal nature.' The result is a 'structural' view of reality, and the type of idealism for which Dewey stands may fittingly be called 'structural' idealism. This type of idealism does, in fact, hold a position intermediate between English empiricism and German transcendentalism. But it would not commonly be considered a synthesis of the best characteristics of the two schools. 'Structural' idealism is, historically considered, a reversion to Kant which retains the mechanical elements of the Critique, but fails to reckon with the truly organic mode of interpretation in which it culminates. As experience, from Kant's undeveloped position, is a structure of sensations and forms, so Dewey's 'consciousness' is a compound of separate elements or existences related in a 'real and eternal' order.
Dewey illustrates his method, in the discussion which follows, by employing it, or showing how it should be employed, in the definition of certain typical objects of philosophical inquiry. The first to be considered are subject and object. In dealing with the relation of subject to object, the psychological method will attempt to show how consciousness differentiates itself, or 'specifies' itself, into subject and object. These terms will be viewed as related terms within the whole of 'consciousness,' rather than as elements existing prior to or in independence of the whole in which they are found.
There is a type of realism which illustrates the opposite or ontological method. It is led, through a study of the dependence of the mind upon the organism, to a position in which subject and object fall apart, out of relation to each other. The separation of the two leads to the positing of a third term, an unknown x, which is supposed to unite them. The psychological method would hold that the two objects have their union, not in an unknown 'real,' but in the 'consciousness' in which they appear. The individual consciousness as subject, and the objects over against it, are elements at once distinguished and related within the whole. All the terms are facts of experience, and none are to be assumed as ontological reals.
Subjective idealism, Dewey continues, makes a
So far, two factors in Dewey's standpoint are clearly discernible. In the first place, all noumena and transcendent reals are to be rejected as means of explanation, and definition is to be wholly in terms of experienced elements, as experienced. In the second place, experience is to be regarded as a rational system of related elements, while explanation is to consist in tracing out the relations which any element bears to the whole. The universal 'Consciousness' is the whole, and the individual mind, again, is an element within the whole, to be explained by tracing out the relations which it bears to other elements and to the whole system. It is not easy to avoid the conclusion that Dewey conceives of 'consciousness' as a construct of existentially distinct terms.
Dewey does not actually treat subject and object, individual and universal consciousness, in the empirical manner for which he contends. He merely outlines a method; and, while this has a negative bearing as against transcendent modes of explanation, it has little content of its own. But in spite of Dewey's lack of explicitness, it is evident that he tends to view his 'objects of philosophical inquiry' as so many concrete particular existences or things. The idea that they can be empirically marked out and investigated seems to imply this. But subject, object, individual, and universal are certainly not reducible to particular sensations, even though it must be admitted that they have a reference to particulars. These abstract concepts had been a source of difficulty to the empiricists, because they had not been able to reduce them to particular impressions, and Dewey's proposed method appears to involve the same difficulty.
In his second article, on "Psychology as Philosophic Method," Dewey proposes to show that his standpoint is practically identical with that of transcendental idealism. This is made possible, he believes, through the fact that, since experience or consciousness is the only reality, psychology, as the scientific account of this reality, becomes identical with philosophy.
In maintaining his position, Dewey finds it necessary to criticise the tendency, found in certain idealists, to treat psychology merely as a special science. This view of psychology is attained, Dewey observes, by regarding man under two arbitrarily determined aspects. Taken as a finite being acting amid finite things, a knowing, willing, feeling phenomenon, man is said to be the object of a special science, psychology. But in another aspect man is infinite, the universal self-consciousness, and as such is the object of philosophy. This distinction between the two aspects of man's nature, Dewey believes, cannot be maintained. As a distinction, it must arise within consciousness, and it must therefore be a psychological distinction. Psychology cannot limit itself to anything less than the whole of experience, and cannot, therefore, be a special science dependent, like others, upon philosophy for its working concepts. On the contrary, the method of psychology must be the method of philosophy.
Dewey reaches this result quite easily, because he makes psychology the science of reality to begin with. "The universe," he says, "except as realized in an individual, has no existence.... Self-consciousness means simply an individualized universe; and if this universe has not been realized in man, if man be not self-conscious, then no philosophy whatever is possible. If it has been realized, it is in and through psychological experience that this realization has occurred. Psychology is the scientific account of this realization, of this individualized universe, of this self-consciousness."[7]
It is difficult to understand exactly what these expressions meant for Dewey. Granting that the human mind is both individual and universal, what objection could be raised against the study of its individual or finite aspects as the special subject-matter of a particular science? All the sciences, as Dewey was aware, are abstract in method. Dewey's position appears to be that the universal and individual aspects of consciousness are nothing apart from each other, and must be studied together. But 'consciousness' in Dewey's view is, in fact, two consciousnesses. Reality as a whole is a Consciousness, and the individual mind is another consciousness. A problem arises, therefore, as to their connection. Dewey affirms that, unless they are united, unless the universal is given in the individual consciousness, there can be no science of the whole, and therefore no philosophy. The epistemological problem of the relation of the mind to reality becomes, accordingly, the raison d'être of his method. The problem was an inheritance from subjective idealism. It may be pointed out that there is some similarity between Dewey's standpoint and Berkeley's. Both conceive of consciousness as a construct of elements, and Dewey's 'Consciousness in general' holds much the same relation to the finite consciousness that the Divine Mind holds to the individual consciousness in Berkeley's system. The similarity between the two standpoints must not be overemphasized, but it is none the less suggestive and interesting.
In attempting to determine the proper status of psychology as a science, Dewey is led into a more detailed exposition of his standpoint. His position in general is well indicated in the following passage: "In short, the real esse of things is neither their percipi, nor their intelligi alone; it is their experiri."[8] The science of the intelligi is logic, and of the percipi, philosophy of nature. But these are abstractions from the experiri, the science of which is psychology. If it be denied that the experiri, self-consciousness in its wholeness, can be the subject-matter of psychology, then the possibility of philosophy is also denied. "If man, as matter of fact, does not realise the nature of the eternal and the universal within himself, as the essence of his own being; if he does not at one stage of his experience consciously, and in all stages implicitly, lay hold of this universal and eternal, then it is mere matter of words to say that he can give no account of things as they universally and eternally are. To deny, therefore, that self-consciousness is a matter of psychological experience is to deny the possibility of any philosophy."[9] Dewey assures us again that his method alone will solve the epistemological problem.
Self-consciousness, as that within which things exist sub specie æternitatis and in ordine ad universum, must be the object of psychology. The refusal to take self-consciousness as an experienced fact, Dewey
This criticism of Kant's 'logical method' fails to take account of the transitional nature of Kant's standpoint. Looking backward, it is easy enough to ask why Kant did not begin with the organic view of experience at which he finally arrived. But the answer must be that the organic standpoint did not exist until Kant, by his 'logical method,' had brought it to light. The Kantian interpretation of experience, in which, as Dewey asserts, conception and perception were never brought into organic relation, is a half-way stage between mechanism and organism. But how does Dewey propose to improve upon Kant's position? He will first of all put Kant's noumenal self back into experience, as a fact in consciousness. But how will this help to bring perception and conception into closer union? There seems to be no answer. Dewey's view appears to be that organic relations are achieved whenever an object is made a part of experience and so brought into connection with other experienced facts. 'Organic relation' is interpreted as equivalent to 'mental relation.' But mental relations are not organic because they are mental. It would be as easy to assert that they are mechanical. The test lies in the nature of the relations which are actually found in the mental sphere and the fitness of the organic categories to express them. Dewey's 'consciousness,' as has been said before, appears to be a structure, not an organism. Its parts are external to each other, however closely they may be related. An organic view of experience would begin with a denial of the actuality of bare facts or sensations, and would not waver in maintaining that standpoint to the end.
Hegel's advance upon Kant, Dewey continues, "consisted essentially in showing that Kant's logical standard was erroneous, and that, as a matter of logic, the only true criterion or standard was the organic notion, or Begriff, which is a systematic totality, and accordingly able to explain both itself and also the simpler processes and principles."[10] The logical reformation which Hegel accomplished was most important, but the work of Kant still needed to be completed by "showing self-consciousness as a fact of experience, as well as perception through organic forms and thinking through organic principles."[11] This element is latent in Hegel, Dewey believes, but needs to be brought out.
T. H. Green comes under the same criticism. He followed Kant's logical method, and as a consequence arrived at the same negative results. The nature of self-consciousness remains unknown to Green; he can affirm its existence, but cannot describe its nature. Dewey quotes that passage from the Prolegomena to Ethics in which Green says:[12] "As to what that consciousness in itself or in its completeness is, we can only make negative statements. That there is such a consciousness is implied in the existence of the world; but what it is we only know through its so far acting in us as to enable us, however partially and interruptedly, to have knowledge of a world or an intelligent experience." If, Dewey observes, Green had begun with the latter point of view, and had taken self-consciousness as at least partially realized in finite minds, he would have been able to make some positive statements about it. Dewey, however, has not given the most adequate interpretation of Green's 'Spiritual Principle in Nature.' This was evidently, for Green, a symbol of the intelligibility of the world as organically conceived, an order which could not be comprehended by the mechanical categories, but which was nevertheless real. As Green tended to hypostatize the organic conception, so Dewey would make it a concrete reality, with the further specification that it must be something given to psychological observation.
The chief point of Dewey's criticism of the idealists is that they fail to establish self-consciousness as an experienced fact; and, Dewey maintains, it must be so established if it is to be anything real and genuine. If it is anything that can be discussed at all, it must be an element in experience; and if it is in experience, it must be the subject-matter of psychology. It is inevitable, from Dewey's standpoint, that transcendentalism should adopt his psychological method.
In the further development of his standpoint, Dewey considers (1) the relations of psychology to the special sciences, and (2) the relation of psychology to logic. Dewey's conception of the relation of psychology to the special sciences is well illustrated in the following passage: "Mathematics, physics, biology exist, because conscious experience reveals itself to be of such a nature, that one may make virtual abstraction from the whole, and consider a part by itself, without damage, so long as the treatment is purely scientific, that is, so long as the implicit connection with the whole is left undisturbed, and the attempt is not made to present this partial science as metaphysic, or as an explanation of the whole, as is the usual fashion of our uncritical so-called 'scientific philosophies.' Nay more, this abstraction of some one sphere is itself a living function of the psychologic experience. It is not merely something which it allows: it is something which it does. It is the analytic aspect of its own activity, whereby it deepens and renders explicit, realizes its own nature.... The analytic movement constitutes the special sciences; the synthetic constitutes the philosophy of nature; the self-developing activity itself, as psychology, constitutes philosophy."[13]
The special sciences are regarded as abstractions from the central or psychological point of view, but they are legitimate abstractions, constituted by a proper analytic movement of the total self-consciousness, which specifies itself into the special branches of knowledge. If we begin with any special science, and drive it back to its fundamentals, it reveals its abstractness, and thought is led forward into other sciences, and finally into philosophy, as the science of the whole. But philosophy, first appearing as a special science, turns out to be science; it is presupposed in all the special sciences, and is their basis. But where does psychology stand in this classification?
At first sight psychology appears to be a special science, abstract like the others. "As to systematic observation, experiment, conclusion and verification, it can differ in no essential way from any one of them."
If psychology is to be identified with philosophy in this fashion, the mere change of name would seem to be superfluous. There would be no reason for maintaining psychology as a separate discipline. Perhaps Dewey did not intend that it should be maintained separately. In that case, the total effect of his argument would be to prescribe certain methods for philosophy. It seems necessary to suppose that Dewey proposed to merge philosophy in psychology, and make it an exact science while retaining its universality. "Science," he argued, "is the systematic account, or reason of fact; Psychology is the completed systematic account of the ultimate fact, which, as fact, reveals itself as reason...."[16] Self-consciousness in its ultimate nature is conceived of as a special fact, over and above what it includes in the way of particulars. Psychology, as the science of this ultimate fact, must at the same time be philosophy. The identification of the two disciplines depends upon taking the 'wholeness' of reality as a 'fact,' which can be brought under observation. This is a natural conclusion from Dewey's structural view of reality.
In taking up the subject of the relation of psychology to logic, Dewey remarks that in philosophy matter and form cannot be separated. "Self-consciousness is the final truth, and in self-consciousness the form as organic system and the content as organized system are exactly equal to each other."[17] Logic abstracts from the whole, gives us only the form, or intelligi of reality, and is therefore only one moment in philosophy. Since logic is an abstraction from Nature, we cannot get from logic back to Nature, by means of logic. We do, as a matter of fact, make the transition in philosophy, because the facts force us back to Nature. Just as in Hegel's logic, the category of quality, when pressed, reveals itself as inadequate to express the facts, and is compelled to pass into the category of quantity, so does logic as a whole, when pressed, reveal its inadequacy to express the whole of reality. The transition from category to category in the Hegelian logic is not an unfolding of the forms as forms, but results from a compulsion exerted by the facts, when the categories are used to explain them. Logic is, and must remain, abstract in all its processes, and its outcome (with Hegel, Geist) may assert the abstract necessity of one self-conscious whole, but cannot give the reality. "Logic cannot reach, however much it may point to, an actual individual. The gathering up of the universe into one self-conscious individuality it may assert as necessary, it cannot give it as reality."[18] Taken as an abstract method, logic is apt to result in a pantheism, "where the only real is the Idee, and where all its factors and moments, including spirit and nature, are real only at different stages or phases of the Idee, but vanish as imperfect ways of looking at things ... when we reach the Idee."[19]
Dewey has in mind logic as a science of the forms of reality taken in abstraction from their content. In reality, however, there can be no logic of concepts apart from their concrete application. Hegel certainly never believed that it was possible to abstract the logical forms from reality and study them in their isolation. As against a purely formal logic, if such a thing were possible, Dewey's criticism would be valid, but the transcendental logic of his time was not formal in this sense. The psychological method which Dewey offers as a substitute for the logical method escapes, he believes, the difficulties of the latter method. At the same time it preserves, in his opinion, the essential spirit of the Hegelian method. Dewey's comments show that he conceives his method to be a restatement, in improved form, of the doctrine of the 'concrete universal.' But the 'psychological method' and the method of idealism are, if anything, antithetical. An excellent summary of Dewey's theory is afforded by the following passage: "Only a living actual Fact can preserve within its unity that organic system of differences in virtue of which it lives and moves and has its being. It is with this fact, conscious experience in its entirety, that psychology as method begins. It thus brings to clear light of day the presupposition implicit in every philosophy, and thereby affords logic, as well as the philosophy of nature, its basis, ideal and surety. If we have determined the nature of reality, by a process whose content equals its form, we can show the meaning, worth and limits of any one moment of this reality."[20]
It would be useless to speculate upon the various possible interpretations that might be given of Dewey's psychological method. The most critical examination of the text will not dispel its vagueness, nor afford an answer to the many questions that arise. It does, however, throw an interesting light on certain tendencies in Dewey's own thinking.
Dewey's attempt to show that English empiricism and transcendentalism have a common psychological basis must be regarded as a failure. That the nature of the attempt reveals a misunderstanding, or fatal lack of appreciation, on the part of Dewey, of the critical philosophy and the later development of idealism by Hegel, has already been suggested. He does not appear to have grasped the significance of the movement from Kant to Hegel. Kant, of course, believed that the a priori forms of experience could be determined by a process of critical analysis, which would reveal them in their purity. The constitutive relations of experience were supposed by him to be limited to the pure forms of sensibility, space and time, and the twelve categories of the understanding, which, being imposed upon the manifold of sensations, as organized by the productive imagination, determined once and for all the order of the phenomenal world. His
Dewey recognized the need of an empirical method in philosophy, but failed to show specifically how psychology could deal with philosophical problems. He appears to have conceived that sensation and meaning, facts and forms, were present in experience or 'Consciousness,' as if this were some total understanding which retained the elements in a fixed union and order. While, according to his method, the forms of this universal consciousness could not be considered apart from the particulars in which they inhered, they might be studied by a survey of experience, a direct appeal to consciousness, in which 'form and content are equal.' He seems to have held that truth is given in immediate experience. A study of reality as immediately given, therefore, to psychological observation, would provide an account of the eternal nature of things, as they stand in the universal mind. Dewey did not attempt a criticism of the categories and methods which psychology must employ in such a task. Had he done so, the advantages of a critical method might have occurred to him.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Vol. XI, pp. 1-19; pp. 153-173.
[3] "Illusory Psychology," Mind, Vol. XI, 1886, p. 478.
[4] "The Psychological Standpoint," Mind, 1886, Vol. XI, p. 2.
[5] Ibid., p. 7.
[6] Op. cit., p. 8 f.
[7] "Psychology as Philosophic Method," Mind, 1886, Vol. XI, p. 157.
[8] Ibid., p. 160. (Observe that this is a direct reference to Berkeley.)
[9] Op. cit.
[10] Op. cit., p. 161.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Third Edition, p. 54.
[13] Mind, Vol. XI, p. 166 f.
[14] Ibid., p. 166.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Op. cit., p. 170.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Op. cit., p. 172.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Op. cit.
CHAPTER II THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDPOINT
The "psychological method," as so far presented, is an outline which must be developed in detail before its philosophical import is revealed. For several years following the publication of his first articles in Mind Dewey was occupied with the task of working out his method in greater detail, and giving it more concrete form. His thought during this period follows a fairly regular order of
In 1887 Dewey published in Mind an article entitled "Knowledge as Idealisation."[21] This article is, in effect, a consideration of one of the special problems of the "psychological method." If reality is an eternal and all-inclusive consciousness, in which sensations and meanings are ordered according to a rational system, what must be the nature of the finite thought-process which apprehends this reality? In his previous articles Dewey had proposed the "psychological method" as an actual mode of investigation, and questions concerning the nature of the human thought-process naturally forced themselves upon his attention.
The thought-process is, to begin with, a relating activity which gives meaning to experience. Says Dewey: "When Psychology recognizes that the relating activity of mind is one not exercised upon sensations, but one which supplies relations and thereby makes meaning (makes experience, as Kant said), Psychology will be in a position to explain, and thus to become Philosophy."[22] This statement raises the more specific question, what is meaning?
Every idea, Dewey remarks, has two aspects: existence and meaning. "Recognizing that every psychical fact does have these two aspects, we shall, for the present, confine ourselves to asking the nature, function and origin of the aspect of meaning or significance—the content of the idea as opposed to its existence."[23] The meaning aspect of the idea cannot be reduced to the centrally excited image existences which form a part of the existence-aspect of the idea. "I repeat, as existence, we have only a clustering of sensuous feelings, stronger and weaker."[24] But the thing is not perceived as a clustering of feelings; the sensations are immediately interpreted as a significant object. "Perceiving, to restate a psychological commonplace, is interpreting. The content of the perception is what is signified."[25] Dewey's treatment of sensations, at this point, is somewhat uncertain. If it be a manifold that is given to the act of interpretation, Kant's difficulty is again presented. The bare sensations taken by themselves mean nothing, and yet everything does mean something in being apprehended. The conclusion should be that there is no such thing as mere existence. Dewey's judgment is undecided on this issue. "It is true enough," he says, "that without the idea as existence there would be no experience; the sensuous clustering is a condition sine qua non of all, even the highest spiritual, consciousness. But it is none the less true that if we could strip any psychical existence of all its qualities except bare existence, there would be nothing left, not even existence, for our intelligence.... If we take out of an experience all that it means, as distinguished from what it is—a particular occurrence at a certain time, there is no psychical experience. The barest fragment of consciousness that can be hit upon has meaning as well as being."[26] An interpretation of reality as truly organic would treat mechanical sensation as a pure fiction. But Dewey clings to 'existence' as a necessary 'aspect' of the psychical fact. The terms and relations never entirely fuse, although they are indispensable to each other. There is danger that the resulting view of experience will be somewhat angular and structural.
At one point, indeed, Dewey asserts that there is no such thing as a merely immediate psychical fact, at least for our experience. "So far is it from being true that we know only what is immediately present in consciousness, that it should rather be said that what is immediately present is never known."[27] But in the next paragraph Dewey remarks: "That which is immediately present is the sensuous existence; that which is known is the content conveyed by this existence."[28] The sensation is not known, and therefore probably not experienced. In this case Dewey is departing from his own principles, by introducing non-experienced factors into his interpretation of experience. The language is ambiguous. If nothing is immediately given, then the sensuous content is not so given.
The 'sensuous existences' assumed by Dewey are the ghosts of Kant's 'manifold of sensation.' The difficulty comes out clearly in the following passage: "It is indifferent to the sensation whether it is interpreted as a cloud or as a mountain; a danger signal, or a signal of open passage. The auditory sensation remains unchanged whether it is interpreted as an evil spirit urging one to murder, or as intra-organic, due to disordered blood-pressure.... It is not the sensation in and of itself that means this or that object; it is the sensation as associated, composed, identified, or discriminated with other experiences; the sensation, in short, as mediated. The whole worth of the sensation for intelligence is the meaning it has by virtue of its relation to the rest of experience."[29]
There is an obvious parallel between this view of experience and Kant's. Kant, indeed, transcended the notion that experience is a structure of sensations set in a frame-work of thought forms; but the first Critique undoubtedly leaves the average reader with such a conception of experience. It is unjust to Kant, however, to take the mechanical aspect of his thought as its most important phase. He stands, in the opinion of modern critics, at a half-way stage between the mechanism of the eighteenth century and the organic logic of the nineteenth, and his works point the way from the lower to the higher point of view. This was recognized by Hegel and by his followers in England. How does it happen, then, that Dewey, who was well-read in the philosophical literature of the day, should have persisted in a view of experience which appears to assume the externally organized manifold of the Critique of Pure Reason? Or, to put the question more explicitly, why did he retain as a fundamental assumption Kant's 'manifold of sensations'?
So far, Dewey has been concerned with the nature of meaning. He now turns to knowledge, and the knowing process as that which gives meaning to experience. Knowledge, or science, he says,
Sensations acquire meaning through being identified with and discriminated from other sensations to which they are related. But it is not as mere existences that they are compared and related, but as already ideas or meanings. "The identification is of the meaning of the present sensation with some meaning previously experienced, but which, although previously experienced, still exists because it is meaning, and not occurrence."[31] The existences to which meanings attach come and go, and are new for every new appearance of the idea in consciousness; but the meanings remain. "The experience, as an existence at a given time, has forever vanished. Its meaning, as an ideal quality, remains as long as the mind does. Indeed, its remaining is the remaining of the mind; the conservation of the ideal quality of experience is what makes the mind a permanence."[32]
It is not possible, Dewey says, to imagine a primitive state in which unmeaning sensations existed alone. Meaning cannot arise out of that which has no meaning. "Sensations cannot revive each other except as members of one whole of meaning; and even if they could, we should have no beginning of significant experience. Significance, meaning, must be already there. Intelligence, in short, is the one indispensable condition of intelligent experience."[33]
Thinking is an act which idealizes experience by transforming sensations into an intelligible whole. It works by seizing upon the ideal element which is already there, conserving it, and developing it. It produces knowledge by supplying relations to experience. Dewey realizes that his act of intelligence is similar to Kant's 'apperceptive unity.' He says: "The mention of Kant's name suggests that both his strength and his weakness lie in the line just mentioned. It is his strength that he recognizes that an apperceptive unity interpreting sensations through categories which constitute the synthetic content of self-consciousness is indispensable to experience. It is his weakness that he conceives this content as purely logical, and hence as formal."[34] Kant's error was to treat the self as formal and held apart from its material. "The self does not work with a priori forms upon an a posteriori material, but intelligence as ideal (or a priori) constitutes experience (or the a posteriori) as having meaning."[35] Dewey's standpoint here seems to be similar to that of Green. But as Kant's unity of apperception became for Green merely a symbol of the world's inherent intelligibility, the latter did not regard it as an actual process of synthesis. Dewey fails to make a distinction, which might have been useful to him, between Kant's unity of apperception and his productive imagination. It is the latter which Dewey retains, and he tends to identify it with the empirical process of the understanding. Knowing, psychologically considered, is a synthetic process. "And this is to say that experience grows as intelligence adds out of its own ideal content ideal quality.... The growth of the power of comparison implies not a formal growth, but a synthetic internal growth."[36] Dewey, of course, views understanding as an integral part of reality's processes rather than as a process apart, but it is for him a very special activity, which builds up the meaning of experience. "Knowledge might be indifferently described, therefore, as a process of idealisation of experience, or of realisation of intelligence. It is each through the other. Ultimately the growth of experience must consist in the development out of itself by intelligence of its own implicit ideal content upon occasion of the solicitation of sensation."[37]
The difficulties of Dewey's original position are numerous. The relation of the self, as a synthetic activity, to the "Eternal Consciousness," in which meaning already exists in a completed form, is especially perplexing. Does the self merely trace out the meaning already present in reality, or is it a factor in the creation of meaning? It is clear that if the thinking process is a genuinely synthetic activity, imposing meaning on sensations, it literally 'makes the world' of our experience. But, on the other hand, if meaning is given to thought, as a part of its data, the self merely reproduces in a subjective experience the thought which exists objectively in the eternal mind. The dilemma arises as a result of Dewey's initial conception of reality as a structure of sensations and meanings. This conception of reality must be given up, if the notion of thought as a process of idealization is to be retained.
In 1888, Dewey's Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding appeared, and during the two years following he appears to have become interested in ethical theory, the results of his study beginning to appear in 1890. Dewey's ethical theories have so important a bearing upon his logical theory as to demand special attention. They will be reserved, therefore, for a separate chapter, and attention will be given here to the more strictly logical studies of the period.
The three years which intervened between the publication of the essay on "Knowledge as Idealisation" and the appearance of an article "On Some Current Conceptions of the term 'Self,'" in Mind (1890),[38] did not serve to divert Dewey's attention from the inquiries in which he had previously been interested. On the contrary, the later
The immediate occasion for the article on the Self was the appearance of Professor Andrew Seth's work, Hegelianism and Personality (1889). Dewey appears to have been influenced by Seth at an even earlier period,[39] and he now found the lectures on Hegel stimulating in connection with his own problems about thought and reality.
It will not be necessary to go into the details of Dewey's criticism of the three ideas of the self presented by Seth. Since it is Dewey's own position that is in question, it is better to begin with his account of the historical origin of these definitions, "chiefly as found in Kant, incidentally in Hegel as related to Kant."[40] Dewey turns to the 'Transcendental Deduction,' and follows Kant's description of the synthetic unity of apperception. "Its gist," he says, "in the second edition of the K.d.r.V., is the proof that the identity of self-consciousness involves the synthesis of the manifold of feelings through rules or principles which render this manifold objective, and that, therefore, the analytic identity of self-consciousness involves an objective synthetic unity of consciousness."[41] To say that self-consciousness is identical is a merely analytical proposition, and, as it stands, unfruitful. "But if we ask how we know this sameness or identity of consciousness, the barren principle becomes wonderfully fruitful."[42] In order to know reality as mine, not only must the consciousness that it is mine accompany each particular impression, but each must be known as an element in one consciousness. "The sole way of accounting for this analytic identity of consciousness is through the activity of consciousness in connecting or 'putting together' the manifold of sense."[43]
In the 'Deduction' of the first Critique, Dewey continues, Kant begins with the consciousness of objects, rather than with the identity of self-consciousness. Here also consciousness implies a unity, which is not merely formal, but one which actually connects the manifold of sense by an act. "Whether, then, we inquire what is involved in mere sameness of consciousness, or what is involved in an objective world, we get the same answer: a consciousness which is not formal or analytic, but which is synthetic of sense, and which acts universally (according to principles) in this synthesis."[44]
The term 'Self,' as thus employed by Kant, Dewey says, is the correlative of the intelligible world. "It is the transcendental self looked at as 'there,' as a product, instead of as an activity or process."[45] This, however, by no means exhausts what Kant means by the self, for while he proceeds in the 'Deduction' as if the manifold of sense and the synthetic unity of the self were strictly correlative, he assumes a different attitude elsewhere. The manifold of sense is something in relation to the thing-in-itself, and the forms of thought have a reference beyond their mere application to the manifold. In the other connections the self appears as something purely formal; something apart from its manifestation in experience. In view of the wider meaning of the self, Dewey asks, "Can the result of the transcendental deduction stand without further interpretation?" It would appear that the content of the self is not the same as the content of the known world. The self is too great to exhaust itself in relation to sensation. "Sense is, as it were, inadequate to the relations which constitute self-consciousness, and thus there must also remain a surplusage in the self, not entering into the make-up of the known world."[46] This follows from the fact that, while the self is unconditioned, the manifold of sensation is conditioned, as given, by the forms of space and time. "Experience can never be complete enough to have a content equal to that of self-consciousness, for experience can never escape its limitation through space and time. Self-consciousness is real, and not merely logical; it is the ground of the reality of experience; it is wider than experience, and yet is unknown except so far as it is reflected through its own determinations in experience,—this is the result of our analysis of Kant, the Ding-an-Sich being eliminated but the Kantian method and all presuppositions not involved in the notion of the Ding-an-Sich being retained."[47]
Dewey's interpretation of Kant's doctrine as presented in the 'Deductions' is no doubt essentially correct. But granting that Kant found it necessary to introduce a synthesis in imagination to account for the unity of experience and justify our knowledge of its relations, it must not be forgotten that this necessity followed from the nature of his presuppositions. If the primal reality is a 'manifold of sensations,' proceeding from a noumenal source, and lacking meaning and relations, it follows that the manifold must be gathered up into a unity before the experience which we actually apprehend can be accounted for. But if reality is experience, possessing order and coherence in its own nature, the productive imagination is rendered superfluous. Dewey, however, clings to the notion that thought is a "synthetic activity" which makes experience, and draws support from Kant for his doctrine.
Dewey now inquires what relation this revised Kantian conception of the self bears to the view advanced by Seth, viz., that the idea of self-consciousness is the highest category of thought and explanation. Kant had tried to discover the different forms of synthesis, by a method somewhat artificial to be sure, and had found twelve of them. While Hegel's independent derivation and independent placing of the categories must be accepted, it does not follow that the idea of self-consciousness can be included in the list, even if it be considered the highest category. "For it is impossible as long as we retain Kant's fundamental presupposition—the idea of the partial determination of sensation by relation to perception, apart from its relation to conception—to employ self-consciousness as a principle of explaining any fact of experience."
Hegel, Dewey continues, develops only one aspect of Kant's Critique, that is, the logical aspect, and consequently does not fulfil Kant's entire purpose. "This is, I repeat, not an immanent 'criticism of categories' but an analysis of experience into its aspects and really constituent elements."[50] Dewey, as usual, shows his opposition to a 'merely logical' method in philosophy. He plainly indicates his dissatisfaction with the Hegelian development of Kant's standpoint. He is unfair to Hegel, however, in attributing to him a 'merely logical' method. Kant's self was, as Dewey asserts, something more than a category of thought, but it is scarcely illuminating to say of Kant that his purpose was the analysis of experience into its 'constituent elements.' Kant did, indeed, analyze experience, but this analysis must be regarded as incidental to a larger purpose. No criticism need be made of Dewey's preference for the psychological, as opposed to the logical aspects of Kant's work. The only comment to be made is that this attitude is not in line with the modern development of idealism.
The question which finally emerges, as the result of Dewey's inquiry, is this: What is the nature of this self-activity which is more than the mere category of self-consciousness? "As long as sensation was regarded as given by a thing-in-itself, it was possible to form a conception of the self which did not identify it with the world. But when sense is regarded as having meaning only because it is 'there' as determined by thought, just as thought is 'there' only as determining sense, it would seem either that the self is just their synthetic unity (thus equalling the world) or that it must be thrust back of experience, and become a thing-in-itself. The activity of the self can hardly be a third something distinct from thought and from sense, and it cannot be their synthetic union. What, then, is it?"[51] Green, Dewey says, attempted to solve the difficulty by his "idea of a completely realized self making an animal organism the vehicle of its own reproduction in time."[52] This attempt was at least in the right direction, acknowledging as it did the fact that the self is something more than the highest category of thought.