Locating John Dewey: Place Theory and Dewey’s Retirement in Key West

Locating John Dewey Place Theory and Dewey's Retirement in Key West William Gaudelli Experimentalism is philosophy rooted in the interaction of the self with experience and environment. While centuries of philosophic thought has attempted to disembody human experience and essentialize core elements (e.g., thought, emotion , logic), these efforts have been contested, particularly by twentieth-century experimentalists like John Dewey. Dewey lamented philosophers' attempts to dismember experience and environment and reduce humanity to discreet elements and schema, thinking typified by the Cartesian mind/body dualism, wherein both are distinct substances that interact. Arguing against such dichotomies, Dewey and others sought a monistic understanding of experience wherein people exist in situations and engage experiences that shape thinking and future action. Place theory is a theoretical tool for understanding how specific locations shape and are shaped by people. The ubiquity of place makes it easy to neglect since people exist in specific places continuously. What is meant by place in this regard? Place is a broad concept that can be thought of in various dimensions, such as the physical/tangible, social/interactional, and metaphysical/educative. Each provides a unique way of framing place and understanding the interactive and subtle ways that place affects people and people affect places. Deweyan philosophy indicates a focus not only on people (monistic organism) and their interactions in the world (experience), but also on place as an integral dimension of experience. Though Dewey does not use this terminology, referring to environment and situation instead of place, he has an emergent notion of place manifest in his theory. In this paper I apply Dewey's monistic conceptualization of experience and environment to the time he spent in Key West, Florida.1 Place theory is used to frame the study, as it develops Dewey's notion of environment as an integral dimension in experimentalism. Drawing on primary source data, publications, and secondary source material, I develop connections between the place of his active retirement in Florida and his published and unpublished discourse during this time. Locating Dewey involves exploring the ordinary elements of his life in Key 18 • E&C/Education and Culture 21(1) (2005): 18-38 Locating John Dewey • 37 West (place as location/tangible), his constructions of this place with others (place as social/interactional) and those transcendent aspects of Dewey's discourse there (place as metaphysical/educative) to examine the educative dimensions of this place. Place Theory Clifford Geertz observes that people do not live in the world in general, but in particular places (1996, p. 259). Michel Foucault (1986) suggests that while the obsession of the nineteenth century was history, place is a concern of the new epoch, where juxtaposition, proximity, and dispersal are foci of discourse: "we do not live in a void, inside of which we could place individuals and things . . . we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites" (p. 23). Foucault argues that time and space represent a unique intersection in Western thought, as spaces are constructed as hierarchical (e.g., holy and corporeal sites), segmented (e.g., open and closed spaces, urban and rural places), and earthly domains (e.g., terrestrial places). Place, thus conceived, provides a way of organizing myriad experiences while simultaneously imbuing those happenings with value and meaning. Place is a multidisciplinary construct that has been employed in diverse fields such as environmental science, geography, anthropology, pedagogy, and architecture that examines phenomena in specific locations. Despite an emergent interest in place theorizing, it remains of secondary interest on a broad scale. Why? David Gruenewald (2003b) suggests that the ubiquity of space makes it easy to ignore. "A fundamental paradox of place, then, is that although we can experience it everywhere, everywhere it recedes from consciousness as we become engrossed in our routines in space and time" (p. 622). The routinized quality of place may have marginalized theorizing about this concept, especially since traditional epistemologies shun the ideographic in favor of the universal and general. Postmodern discourses, in contrast, are imbued with a germ of particularistic thought that values the detail and individuality of the specific. Place theory, then, aptly fits within a postmodern intellectual milieu where the physical world is viewed less as a mere tableau...