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6 John Dewey Philosopher and Poet of Nature The title of this volume, Experience and Nature. . . . To many the associating of the two words will seem like talking of a round square, so ingrained is the notion of the separation of man and experience from nature. . . . Experience reaches down into Nature; it has depth. It also has an indefinitely elastic extent. . . . That stretch constitutes inference. . . . “Experience”. . . is “double-barrelled” in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. “Thing” and “thought”. . . are single-barrelled; they refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience. —John Dewey But the glory of these forest meadows is a lily. . . . The tallest are from seven to eight feet high with magnificent racemes of ten or twenty or more small orange-colored flowers. . . . And to think that sheep should be allowed in these lily meadows! after how many centuries of Nature’s care planting and watering them . . . yet, strange to say, allowing the trampling of devastating sheep. . . . And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep . . . but as far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroy these gardens. —John Muir Following Charles Darwin, and his own instincts and perceptions, John Dewey believes that experience can have integrity because it is integral with Nature. Yes, for better or worse, experience stretches beyond what Nature could provide without us, but its integrity requires recognition of its ineluctable rootedness in Nature. Fruitful experience digs back into its ground as it stretches toward its possibilities. It is primal and pragmatic. Dewey died in 1952. Now we live at the cusp of millennia, and are vividly aware of the destruction of Nature. Many feel alone, bored, or disempowered , painfully aware of our loss of kindred in wild Nature, and dimly apprehensive that we will be left with only domesticated creatures, or worse, with Disney’s humanoid ducks, rabbits, mice. Some of us are more inclined now to think of animals as fellow subjects, not just entertaining objects, who experience the world in their own way. Shouldn’t our experiencing of Nature, our meaning-making, include our experiencing of other creatures’ experiencing of Nature, insofar as we can discern this? Though Dewey maintains we should emulate animal grace, he tells us something, but not very much, about animals’ experiencing. In any case, for him the concepts of human experience and Nature interpenetrate . At least a strong negative statement can be made about his thought. Human experiencing is not conceived along Cartesian lines, is not essentially self-reflexive and grandly isolated from the rest of creation. So the line drawn by some ecologists between “a human-oriented” approach to the world and “a thing-oriented” one is artificial and misleading. There is no Nature “in itself” or humanity “in itself”—whatever those phrases might mean. John Muir in My First Summer in the Sierra points out how humans often behave as if they were out of place in Nature, wantonly disregarding her. This sets the problem for us: What is our place in Nature? Dewey gives us a tantalizing clue and a question: How can the stretching of experience, our powers of inference and imaginative symbolization, be wisely employed? So that we don’t disrupt local environments that must always hold us, and without which we could not think, dream, plan, or do anything else? Dewey’s commentators have typically stressed our powers of logical inference, which includes science. But Dewey himself employed a vast battery of resources to try to reground us in Nature, to regain a sense of harmony and solidity. This includes his fugitive powers of metaphor and poetry—magical speech, if you will—aspects of Dewey’s work that have been singularly ignored, and when not ignored, maligned. “Dewey a poet?! Ridiculous.” Let us focus on salient points of his vast and somewhat problematical homecoming trajectory over the decades. What is our place in Nature?—a formidable question, for we are ecstatic creatures who feel and imagine beyond horizons, and who construct and reconstruct ourselves and the world in the light of our feelings and imaginings. Our ecstatic transcendence into endless possibilities permeates our lives. Human verbal language, for example, is open ended: its creative powers cannot be precisely mapped. Plankton, other plants, animals, insects deeply affect the rest of Nature, but not, presumably, at the behest of...

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