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3 1 TheAestheticsof Reality:TheDevelopment of Dewey’sEcologicalTheoryof Experience Thomas Alexander The Transcendence of Epistemology The period between Dewey’s emergence as a major philosophical voice and his becoming the leading figure in the movement that became known as “pragmatism” is not well understood. That it was something of a mystery to Dewey himself is evident by the prominence it has in his intellectual autobiography, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” (1930). In 1887, with the publication of his Psychology, Dewey, rather than Royce, could well have been called the crown prince of American idealism. In 1903, with the appearance of Studies in Logical Theory,1 Dewey was recognized as the head of the Chicago School, which was understood as presenting a platform of radical, “dynamic” idealism that was taking an affirmative, indeed enthusiastic , approach to contemporary sciences, unlike the defensive theologically driven idealism dominant in Germany and England and represented in America by Royce, among others. Yet Dewey had already been strangely silent on the topic of “idealism” for some time. He left Chicago in 1904, hotly resigning his position in the controversy over his wife’s dismissal from heading the Laboratory School. By 1905 he was at Columbia, and that was the year his article “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” appeared. I believe this article is one of the most radical and revolutionary pieces Dewey wrote, though it is also far from being a clear, accessible statement of the nature or implications of those crucial ideas that indicate a sea change in Dewey’s philosophy. It quite explicitly is a response to James’s articles on radical empiricism, which had begun to appear in 1903, though the relationship of radical empiricism to pragmatism was still nebulous. It was a decade later that the collection of articles known as Essays in Experimental Logic (1916) appeared, containing in its lengthy introduction perhaps the 4 Thomas Alexander most sophisticated explanation to date of Dewey’s theory of experience. And it would be another decade before the appearance of Dewey’s most systematic exploration of the idea in Experience and Nature (1925). As one looks at the developmental dynamics of Dewey’s early period, there seem to be a variety of issues that demand his attention: ethics, logic, psychology, pedagogy, and so on. It is less clear whether there was a basic, underlying issue that drove Dewey from one formulation of his thought to the next. If one looks, however, at the trajectory of his thought, especially from the Psychology (1887b) to the introduction of Essays in Experimental Logic (and beyond to Experience and Nature), the importance of Dewey’s “Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” becomes evident, summing up not only his discontent with idealism but also realism and anticipating the most profound issues that would characterize Dewey’s radical, revolutionary mature philosophy. I maintain that this involves a major transformation of a commitment of the Western tradition from its very inception in the preSocratic period on the correlation of the object of knowledge with the nature of reality. Though articulated by Parmenides, it is perhaps most clearly exhibited in Plato’s famous “Divided Line” (Republic, 509d–511e) with its gradations of the diverse cognitive powers of the soul on one side and their appropriate cognitive objects, ontologically graded, on the other. Dewey’s radical shift is to question this equation. Knowing for him becomes merely one aspect of the ways in which reality manifests itself, a contextualized and mediating way, but certainly not final or ultimate. Rather, experience in its precognitive and postcognitive forms indicates a qualitatively rich and aesthetically diversified field of meaning, conscious and unconscious, that supports and renders intelligible the cognitive enterprise itself. This is one reason why Dewey’s own thought is poorly described by the term instrumentalism, which refers specifically to the theory of inquiry, of knowing. Dewey had difficulty in finding a fitting name for his complete philosophy of experience. The list of terms introducing the subject in the revised first chapter of Experience and Nature, “naturalistic empiricism” and “naturalistic humanism,” left Dewey unsatisfied, so that by 1938, in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, he used the phrase “cultural naturalism ” (LW12:28). Dewey’s frustrations reflected both the depth of his insight and the inability of his opponents—as well as many of his followers —to grasp the nature of his revolution, an inability echoed in the work of many neopragmatists, who still held on to the correlation of natural objects and the objects of knowledge, of metaphysics...

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