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six The Evolution of Mind in Nature Ever since he ¤rst laid eyes on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Dewey was determined to complete a systematic statement of his own naturalistic theory of mind. Experience and Nature was Dewey’s most ambitious, but incomplete and sometimes forbiddingly convoluted, attempt to produce a Naturphilosophie in which mind, nature, and culture are understood in common metaphysical terms. Astute reviewers quickly penetrated Dewey’s dense prose to grasp the essential Hegelian nature of his enterprise. In a Dewey retrospective, James Harvey Robinson celebrated Experience and Nature as “the greatest new addition to metaphysical knowledge since . . . Hegel, for all of his insights, is incredible .”1 Robinson observed, correctly in my opinion, that “Dewey took what is living in Hegel, and rejected what is dead, and reconstructed what he took in terms of biological functionalism.”2 Another favorable reviewer called Experience and Nature “pluralistic Hegelianism immersed in the concrete.”3 However, not everyone shared this enthusiasm for Dewey’s book. McGraw recalled that she landed the dif¤cult assignment of typing Experience and Nature , which she remembered doing cheerfully with almost no comprehension of what he was saying.4 Dewey subsequently confessed to having confused readers . He said, “Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today, I would entitle the book Culture and Nature and the treatment of speci¤c subject matters would be correspondingly modi¤ed.”5 The term “experience” had become so loaded with subjective connotations that Dewey believed that the word “culture ” might better express the idea that shared beliefs and values entail shared experiences. Understanding Experience and Nature can prove frustrating because Dewey interweaves several different levels of analysis whose connections are not selfevident . One of Dewey’s objectives involved articulating a philosophy of science . Dewey’s aim here is to show how the history of human scienti¤c and cultural achievement re®ects changing perceptions of the value of human experience . Dewey presented this account in relatively straightforward terms, drawing on arguments that were well-rehearsed in his previous writings. Dewey ’s second objective was to provide paleobiological and anthropological evidence to show how nature gives birth to mind and consciousness, including the extraordinary human capacity to use language to communicate and learn from experience. This is where the going gets rough and where Dewey loses many reviewers who had followed his argument to this point. Finally, there is evidence in Experience and Nature that Dewey’s antagonism toward Freud’s conception of mind persisted. Dewey made a number of telling criticisms that demonstrated the adverse biological and cultural consequences of adopting psychoanalytic assumptions about human nature. This contention of mine is controversial and requires justi¤cation, as Dewey never explicitly mentions Freud or psychoanalysis in Experience and Nature and only refers to Freud three times in his entire collected works. But even these scant references reveal Dewey’s skepticism and antagonism toward Freud’s theories.6 Dewey was put on the defensive by the rapid rise and widespread cultural diffusion of psychoanalysis that many of Dewey’s closest adherents found intellectually compelling. In Human Nature and Conduct Dewey explicitly singled out psychoanalysis as having adopted ®awed premises, described in the last chapter, about human desire and sexuality, the role of self-deception and the nature of human morality . However, the central themes in this book are presented as a manifesto rather than a comprehensive theory. Dewey outlined a natural and social psychology divested of false or misleading assumptions about human instincts, and one that embraces a conception of mind centered in human experience. But Dewey was not content to rest his case at this point. His conception of critical inquiry dictated that he determine whether there was any scienti¤c support for Freud’s assertions that mind is a cultural artifact and that consciousness is simply an epiphenomenon of instinctual behavior. That is why I am contending that Dewey’s theory of mind can be better understood not only in terms of what it af¤rmed, but what it rejected as ungrounded. Dewey’s attempt to critically examine Freudian psychology on evolutionary, biological, and cultural grounds proved to be a more formidable task than Dewey had anticipated when he completed Human Nature and Conduct. In their attempt to ground their theories of mind in science, Dewey and Freud found that human civilization and culture furnish ambiguous and incomplete evidence with which to explain the origins of mind. The different ways they chose to handle these gaps in...

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