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[ 233 ] 13 ] Eagerness for Experience: Dewey and Deleuze on the Problematic of Thinking and Learning Inna Semetsky Richard Rorty, in his Consequences of Pragmatism, acknowledging the pragmatic direction taken by both modern and postmodern philosophy, declared that “James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling.”1 Gilles Deleuze, a French poststructuralist philosopher, never cited John Dewey; however, he was familiar with Charles Sanders Peirce, whose unorthodox logic or triadic semiotics Deleuze used in a number of his original works.2 This chapter does not aim to establish who traveled the farthest along the road posited by Rorty. Instead, its purpose is to trace a common direction as a sort of pragmatic trajectory that will map a territory constituting both philosophers’ anti-Cartesian image of thought, which encompasses, contra static factual knowledge, a dynamic process of experimental learning from experience. The approach of positioning the philosophical figure of Gilles Deleuze as a Deweyan counterpart does not aim to compare or contrast the two philosophers or to pick up any of the postmodern trends lurking in the background of the modern epoch. Rather, this chapter is based on the idea of freely juxtaposing —following Richard Bernstein’s methodological model—two thought processes so as to be able to construct a commonly shared plane between the two.3 Bernstein addressed the possible intersections of continental and pragmatic traditions from both substantive and methodological perspectives .4 He specifically acknowledged the importance and value of “experimental knowing” advocated by both traditions.5 This chapter employs the cartographic method of Deleuze’s philosophy, which—instead of following analytic philosophy’s narrow path of reasoning solely—employs the contemporary cultural studies’ format of diverse and broad forms of mapping. Such a geographical metaphor was prominent in the process-oriented metaphysics of both Dewey and Deleuze.6 )DLUILHOG&KLQGG $0 234 Inna Semetsky Experimental knowing is embedded in human experience per se. This method of inquiry is not reduced to the knowledge of facts but encompasses practical understanding of meanings “located” in real life, in the middle of experiential events. Stressing the difference between a pragmatic inquiry and traditional epistemology, the former focusing on “the relation to one another of different successive states of things,” Dewey considers such a relation to be a powerful substitute for the eternal question of “how one sort of existence, purely mental . . . immaterial . . . can get beyond itself and have valid reference to a totally different kind of existence—spatial and extended.”7 Reorganization of experience must include “a threshold (. . . or plateau), . . . waxings and wanings of intensity,” therefore constituting a continuous process of experimental , practical adaptation and readaptation when “the old self is put off and the new self is only forming.”8 All thinking and learning—or “reaching the absent from present”—involves a particular dynamics described as “a jump, a leap, a going beyond what is surely known to something else accepted on its warrant. . . . The very inevitableness of the jump, the leap, to something unknown, only emphasizes the necessity of attention to the conditions under which it occurs.”9 It is the conditions of the experiential problematic situation that “calls up something not present to the senses,” which would otherwise guarantee and determine the direct action-reaction or cause-effect link.10 What Dewey in his analysis of thinking described as a pre-reflective state of mind is a necessary condition arising from a disturbed and perplexed situation that calls for the momentous state of suspense,11 which is an affective state filled with desire and uncertainty and open to imagination. Imagination functions so as to create a vision of realities “that cannot be exhibited under existing conditions of sense-perception”; instead, they constitute an uncertain reality that may be called virtual in the sense of it being “the remote , the absent, [and] the obscure.”12 Still, these realities are not imaginary but totally real and potentially amenable to a “clear insight.”13 Such an “eagerness for experience” contains in itself—in the shared and social world— “the germ of intellectual curiosity,” because “to the open mind, nature and social experiences are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further.”14 Experience exceeds its confinement to a private Cartesian mind; in Dewey’s experiential reality, things are had prior to becoming known. It cannot be otherwise, because experience is not shut off...

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