#Addams, #Dewey & #James pointed to where there is most struggle to survive as where the most vital experiences of life exist. Addams went so far as to say that if we "shut ourselves away" from sympathy with those experiences, we can mobilize only "half our [own] faculties."
If you are in #Dewey#Oklahoma please take shelter IMMEDIATELY, this storm has destroyed large areas, has a debris ball, and 2 deaths have been reported.
Given his stature in philosophy, and for all its apparent incongruence, John #Dewey's "mystic experience" is surprisingly unknown. Yet its conclusion is a thing of serene beauty. He described it to Max Eastman, maybe 60 yrs after the fact, for Eastman's book 'Heroes I Have Known':
"It is not the rise of the irrational as such...that must give pause to those who would use #intelligence as a director of instinct & passion. It is the deliberate cultivation of the irrational. For the cult is not spontaneous & natural; it is intentional & purposeful."
John #Dewey, 1918... two days before Armistice, to be precise.
#Nietzsche's yes-saying #philosophy can be read as a poetic formulation of what later occurred as the universal approach to #instrumentalism in #Dewey's philosophy. The moral disposition resulting from wholly embodying either is the same: Come what may, I will find a way to use it.
The Zone of Interest is one of the most cognitively intense/demanding films I have ever seen. No other film to compare it to comes to mind. This is a piece of art that, in truly Deweyan terms, works on you.
Deep into Jane #Addams' writings and works at the moment. Can't shake the feeling that the most fruitful reconstruction we could work on #pragmatism studies would involve raising her work to its rightful level of attention alongside the three classical "founders" of pragmatism, i.e. #Peirce, #James, #Dewey. The sheer depth of influence on Dewey from Addams' insights, resulting from her own hands-on cooperative work at Hull House, is as staggering as it is inspiring.
This is an exceptionally powerful docu series about #Reconstruction, as told through a #blackhistory lens by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
My current research activity consists of feeling out how many elements of what #Dewey would reconstruct into #pragmatism were already manifest in his national environment. And it strikes me that certain key Afro-American figures are those who most profoundly embodied that #philosophy in their acts.
"The only conservative who can respect himself as a conservative, is the man who puts to himself this question: What is the meaning, the idea which has animated the past, and what attitude, what change of outward form does that spirit demand of me in order that I may remain true to it?"
"I believe that #education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social #consciousness; and that the
adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social
consciousness is the only sure method of social #reconstruction."
John #Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897)
"I believe that #education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social #consciousness; and that the
adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social
consciousness is the only sure method of social #reconstruction."
John #Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897)
Love the simple but profound shift of disposition this implies for the actual carrying out of inquiries, such as empirical experiments: go into it ready and willing to have your self re-formed by the results, whatever they may in reality be.
At the heart of #Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy, written in the aftermath of WWI, re-prefaced in the wake of WWII, is an unabashed criticism of how professional #philosophy retreats from rather than openly inquires into the most urgent and present real world moral situations.
Re ⬆️
"To view philosophy in the context of our present urgent needs and the resources which the further development of science will put at our command, is the measure of sanity and sober wisdom."
Back when I was writing on @boingbot, I'd slam out 10-15 blog posts every day, short hits that served as signpost and public notebook, but I rarely got into longer analysis of the sort I do daily now on Pluralistic. Both modes are very useful for organizing one's thoughts, and indeed, they complement each other:
@boingbot
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"History cannot escape its own process. It will, therefore, always be rewritten. As the new present arises, the past is the past of a different present."
"every temporal proposition is a /narrative/ proposition [...] is about a /course/ of sequential events, not about an isolated event at an absolute point in time."
The romantic lure of the philosopher "breaking away" and "going up the mountain" is so seductive that when it's absent from a #philosophy, such as #pragmatism, many find it difficult to connect to.
In #Dewey, for ex., any such breaking away from society is anathema to a goal of "finding ourselves." Being wholly social, we can only find ourselves socially. Coming back down from the mountain, back into the cavern, fails because the means forged "up there" are individual not social.
"One can scarcely say that those who glorify intelligence and reason in the abstract, because of their value for those who find personal satisfaction in their possession, estimate intelligence more truly than those who wish to make it the indispensable guide of intellectual and social life. [...] one should ask how it is possible to make all men participators in this inestimable wealth."