The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought

7. Body-Mind and Subconsciousness: Dewey and Tragedy

7 Body-Mind and Subconsciousness Dewey and Tragedy It is not easy to think of John Dewey as a tragic figure. There are too many photos of his kind grandfatherly face, of his dandling schoolchildren on his knee, or of his meeting notables. He achieved influence fairly early, and ultimately fame comparable to that of Emerson or James. He lived to a very old age, active and honored practically to the end. But there is another side to the picture. Before World War I, two of his children died quite young, and the advent of the war itself was profoundly shocking. Its gruesome absurdities shook Dewey’s optimism, and its occurrence coincided precisely with his midlife crisis. At fifty-seven he had pretty well summed up his views in the magisterial, tightly organized Democracy and Education (1916). He had no way of knowing he would live for thirtyfive more years, and he entered a period of depression (his views on the war prompted harsh criticism, which did not help). He became romantically involved with a woman not his wife (although the relationship was probably not consummated), and, as we will now see at greater length, he hied himself to the psycho-bio-therapist, F. M. Alexander. Dewey had been criticizing Cartesian psycho/physical dualism for decades. But when his personal problems were confronted in the startling light that Alexander’s body work threw upon the limitations of consciousness, Dewey produced a much deeper critique. In 1918 he accepted an offer from Stanford University to give a series of lectures on morals (published in expanded form in 1922 as Human Nature and Conduct). Dewey acknowledged Alexander’s influence, but it would be clear to the attentive reader even if he had not. Also, vivid allusions occur both to psychoanalysis and the war. What could drive supposedly reasonable people to such insane carnage? Dewey notes James’s seminal “The Moral Equivalent of War,” and observes that the traditional motives—glory, heroism, fame, booty—have been complicated and attenuated by the nation-state organized technologically. Anticipating to some extent Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil, Dewey writes, The activities that evoke . . . a war are of . . . a collective, prosaic political and economic nature. . . . Universal conscription, the general mobilization of all agricultural and industrial forces of folk not engaged in the trenches, the application of every conceivable scientific and mechanical device, the mass movements of soldiery regulated from a common center by a depersonalized general staff: these factors relegate the traditional psychological apparatus of war to a now remote antiquity. . . . [T]he more horrible a depersonalized scientific mass war becomes, the more necessary it is to find universal ideal motives to justify it. . . . The more prosaic the actual causes, the more necessary is it to find glowingly sublime motives.1 On the eve of his sixtieth year, Dewey reconsidered the very meaning of individual identity and behavior—essentially socialized group members that we are. And he wonders what we are to make of groups when they are organized according to scientific and technological principles. Moreover, he reconsiders the meaning of science itself. And it is no surprise that he examined the ability of psychoanalysis to peer behind our cheap talk about motives and to disclose what really makes us tick. But he can give psychoanalysis only a mixed review: It exhibits a sense for reality in its insistence upon the profound importance of unconscious forces. . . . Every movement of reaction and 122 Further Reclamations protest, however, usually accepts some of the basic ideas of the position against which it rebels. So . . . psychoanalysis . . . retain[s] the notion of a separate psychic realm or force. They add a . . . statement of the existence and operation of the “unconscious,” of complexes due to contacts and conflicts with others, of the social censor. But they still cling to the idea of a separate psychic realm and so in effect talk about unconscious consciousness. They get their truths mixed up in theory with the false psychology of original individual consciousness. [86–87] Despite Jung’s and Freud’s creative work, they are stuck, Dewey believes, in unsuspected Cartesian assumptions. In effect, Dewey launches himself on a new career that will see him expose “the false psychology of original individual consciousness” with a severity and thoroughness never before seen in his work, or perhaps in anyone’s. But if the conception of the unconscious or subconscious that he...