Education, Experience and Existence : Engaging Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger [1 ed.] 9781135969905, 9780415825856

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Education, Experience and Existence

Education, Experience and Existence proposes a new way of understanding education that delves beneath the conflict, confusion and compromise that characterize its long history. At the heart of this new understanding is what John Dewey strove to expound: a coherent theory of experience. Dewey’s reputation as a pragmatist is well known, but where experience is concerned, pragmatism is only half the story. The other half is phenomenological, as crafted by Martin Heidegger. Encompassing both is Charles Sanders Peirce, whose philosophy draws pragmatism and phenomenology together into a partnership that enables a truly experiential philosophy to emerge. The book approaches the problem of confusion in education and philosophy by beginning with our most basic understanding of existence. Existence as an interaction is the starting point of modern science, and existence as individuality offers an aesthetic origin, interpreting existence as a simple unity. In our contemporary world where scientific ways of thinking are privileged, the aesthetic whole is often overlooked, especially in education. However both are connected. A coherent theory of experience is therefore a marriage between phenomenology and pragmatism, enabling each to maintain its position by acknowledging that both are required. The book is divided into three main parts: • • •

confusion in philosophy and education a coherent theory of experience a coherent theory of education

Quay suggests that education will benefit from such a coherent theory of experience by better comprehending its connection to life. More than just knowing, more than just doing, education is about being. This book will be of interest to philosophers, educators and educational philosophers. John Quay is Senior Lecturer at the Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia.

New Directions in the Philosophy of Education Series Series Editors Michael A. Peters, University of Waikato, New Zealand; University of Illinois, USA Gert Biesta, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

This book series is devoted to the exploration of new directions in the philosophy of education.After the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, and the historical turn, where might we go? Does the future promise a digital turn with a greater return to connectionism, biology and biopolitics based on new understandings of system theory and knowledge ecologies? Does it foreshadow a genuinely alternative radical global turn based on a new openness and interconnectedness? Does it leave humanism behind or will it reengage with the question of the human in new and unprecedented ways? How should philosophy of education reflect new forces of globalization? How can it become less Anglo-centric and develop a greater sensitivity to other traditions, languages, and forms of thinking and writing, including those that are not rooted in the canon of Western philosophy but in other traditions that share the ‘love of wisdom’ that characterizes the wide diversity within Western philosophy itself? Can this be done through a turn to intercultural philosophy? To indigenous forms of philosophy and philosophizing? Does it need a post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of education? A postpostmodern philosophy? Or should it perhaps leave the whole construction of ‘post’-positions behind? In addition to the question of the intellectual resources for the future of philosophy of education, what are the issues and concerns that philosophers of education should engage with? How should they position themselves? What is their specific contribution? What kind of intellectual and strategic alliances should they pursue? Should philosophy of education become more global, and if so, what would the shape of that be? Should it become more cosmopolitan, or perhaps more decentred? Perhaps most importantly in the digital age, the time of the global knowledge economy that reprofiles education as privatized human capital and simultaneously in terms of an historic openness, is there a philosophy of education that grows out of education itself, out of the concerns for new forms of teaching, studying, learning and speaking that can provide comment on ethical and epistemological configurations of economics and politics of knowledge? Can and should this imply a reconnection with questions of democracy and justice? This series comprises texts that explore, identify and articulate new directions in the philosophy of education. It aims to build bridges, both geographically and temporally: bridges across different traditions and practices, and bridges towards a different future for philosophy of education. In this series On Study Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality Tyson E. Lewis Education, Experience and Existence Engaging Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger John Quay

Education, Experience and Existence Engaging Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger

John Quay

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 J. Quay The right of J. Quay to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Quay, John (Senior lecturer in education), author. Education, experience, and existence : engaging Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger / John Quay. pages cm -- (New directions in the philosophy of education) 1. Education--Philosophy. 2. Dewey, John, 1859-1952. 3. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914. 4. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 5. Experiential learning. 6. Phenomenology. I. Title. LB14.7.Q39 2013 370.1--dc23 2012050057 ISBN: 978-0-415-82585-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-53815-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

It is not sheer revolt against things as they are which stirs human endeavor to its depths, but vision of what might be and is not. (Dewey 1940a: 109)

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Contents

List of figures Series editors’ preface Acknowledgments Prologue

x xiii xv xvii

PART I

Confusion in philosophy and education

1

1

3

Education, philosophy and existence Overview 3 Division in education 3 Compromise is not a way out of educational confusion 6 Dewey, philosophy and education 11 Dewey’s search for a truly experiential philosophy 16 Existence as twofold: individual (one) and interaction (two) 18 Summary 21

PART II

A coherent theory of experience

23

2

25

Reflective experience and the logical difference Overview 25 Two types of reflective experience: incidental and regulated 25 Interaction between organism and environment 29 Three modes of relation (not two) 32 The logical difference 36 Common sense and scientific thinking 40 Knowledge as instrument 42 Pragmatism and continuity 45 Summary 50

viii Contents 3

The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience

52

Overview 52 The contexts of inquiry (a pragmatic view of non-reflective experience) 52 Non-reflective experience as aesthetic experience 58 Qualitative, affective thinking 63 The ineffability of immediacy: a temporal problem 64 Quality conditioning existence 66 Summary 68 4

The ontological difference

70

Overview 70 The unity of individuality as aesthetic experiential whole 70 The simple and the multiple: two sides of existence 73 Dasein as aesthetic experience-experienced 78 Ereignis: be-ing as being-here 81 The ontological difference: two different ways of questioning be-ing 83 A fundamental ontology 86 Two ways of time: ordinary and originary 90 Ordinary time and calculative thinking 91 Machination (enframing): the domination of calculative thinking 95 Two ways of thinking: calculative and meditative 96 Forgetting be-ing, remembering be-ing 98 Summary 102 5

The way of phenomenology

104

Overview 104 Remembering be-ing as phenomenological reduction 104 Phenomenological construction 107 Interpreting interpreting: the circle as opening, not process 109 Two ways of language 112 Two ways of truth 115 Phenomenological concepts as formal indications 117 Phenomenological destruction of pragmatic concepts 122 Summary 125 6

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing Overview 127 Two turning questions in Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 127 The meaning of being: temporality as the movement of meaning 130 The truth of be-ing: temporality as the movedness of truth 140 Fourfold as onefold 146 Ontological difference as passageway 148 Summary 152

127

Contents ix PART III

A coherent theory of education

155

7

157

Four causes of educational confusion Overview 157 Child and curriculum, individual and social: four causes 157 Four causes and four curriculum ideologies: a source of educational confusion 161 Education through occupations is not vocational education 168 Summary 171

8

Educating through occupations as ways of be-ing

172

Overview 172 Occupations and projects: difficulties for educators 172 Leaping in for the other: educating as preparing for a remote future 175 Leaping ahead of the other: educating as letting others learn 178 Projects as educative occupations: Dewey’s test of interest and effort 180 The trinity of occupation: be-ing, doing and knowing 184 How to educate through occupations: discovering and arranging 187 Educating through occupations as a way out of educational confusion 191 Summary 194 Epilogue Notes References Index

196 198 205 219

Figures

1.1 1.2

1.3 2.1

2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1

3.2 4.1 4.2

Educational confusion arising from conflict across two different sects Peirce’s structure of experience as experienced – firstness, secondness, thirdness – in Dewey’s logical (top) and psychological (bottom) interpretations The twofold of existence as individual and interaction A diagrammatical representation of the logical movements in Dewey’s (1916b: 176) general features of reflective (and non-reflective: steps one and six) experience, noting the distinction between the trial and error method (steps two and five) and the distinctively reflective phase (steps three and four) The operation of inquiry showing the three different modes of relation in Dewey’s attempts to forge a coherent theory of experience The range of different terms Dewey employs to convey the nature of the logical difference between inference and implication (secondness and thirdness) The continuity between law, habit and rhythm. Habit in primary experience and law in secondary experience Context as foreground and background in non-reflective experience, showing the continuity between the background of context and reflective thinking. Dewey’s is an attempt to understand non-reflective experience from the position of reflective experience The continuity of aesthetic and reflective experience across the twofold of secondness, as well as firstness and thirdness The positioning of the secondness of thirdness and the firstness of secondness across the ontological difference Peirce’s triad of unity: wholeness as absence of binarity (firstness), individuality or oneness (secondness) and totality (thirdness)

5

17 21

28 35 38 49

53 67 71 73

Figures 4.3

4.4

4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2

6.1 6.2

My adaptation of the hand sketch that Heidegger produced in a lecture and which was recorded by student Franz-Josef Brecht. The sketch identifies Heidegger’s “four-part schema” (Kisiel 1993: 21). The text in bold is from the sketch (Heidegger 2000/1919: 186). Also included is the connection with Peirce’s experiential structure of firstness, secondness and thirdness, as well as Dewey’s distinction between aesthetic and reflective or scientific experience. This distinction mirrors Heidegger’s distinction between the pre-theoretical and the theoretical. Ereignis and the ontological difference have not yet been discussed in detail but will be covered later in this chapter Heidegger’s distinction between authenticity (individuality) and inauthenticity (interaction) across the twofold of secondness that describes the difference between aesthetic and reflective experience. Also important is the relation of identity between the secondness of thirdness and thirdness (logical difference) in contrast to the relation of sameness between firstness and the firstness of secondness (Ereignis), as described in the next section The ontological difference between being and beings, the twofold of secondness Highlighting the importance of the ontological difference to understanding the different emphases in existence Language and truth on both sides of the ontological difference The four senses of world across three differences or hinges: Heidegger’s four-part schema. Also identified here are the two different meanings of circularity across the ontological difference, as well as the distinction between poetry and poesy The sense of turning between Heidegger’s questions of the meaning of being and the truth of being, always of Ereignis From the perspective of the question of the meaning of be-ing, being-in-the-world is analogously being-in-the-world as who, as care and being-in-the-world as world, as significance. Each of these phenomenological concepts (being-in-the-world, who, care, world, significance) are attempts to formally indicate the aesthetic whole that is being-here. These concepts are analogous and equiprimordial, as are all of Heidegger’s phenomenological concepts. Heidegger speaks of the analogous relation between these concepts as one of signifying; but this is not a pragmatic relation between different things

xi

77

80 84 97 114

119 129

137

xii Figures 6.3

6.4

6.5

7.1 7.2

8.1 8.2 8.3

Temporal movedness as fourfold unconcealment of onefold (the truth of be-ing). This is an adaptation of a diagram which Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 218) drew to convey the unconcealment of the open between of Ereignis. Mortals and gods are logos; earth and heaven are physis Crossing the ontological difference involves a shift from the analogical relation between various ways of understanding the simple as aesthetic whole, to the cause and effect relation between things in a totality, and vice-versa. In this crossing, phenomenological for-the-sake-of-which (as a way of meditatively thinking the whole) becomes destructed to pragmatic identity (a part of a totality thought reflectively). Likewise, in-order-to becomes purpose, what-for becomes use, what-in becomes spatial location, and what-with becomes spatial positioning The fourfold and the four causes in communion across the ontological difference. On the phenomenological (left) side the arrows show the movedness responsible for opening the onefold of Ereignis as place of being, as Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 218) depicts them in a similar diagram. On the pragmatic (right) side, on the other side of the ontological difference, the arrows point in the opposite directions to portray the four causes having certain effects. Here the onefold is not seen; instead these causes have effects in a totality of things in relation Four factors of educational conflict as four causes Each curriculum ideology as an accentuation of two causes. Also revealed here is the affiliation between curriculum ideologies based on their shared emphasis of a particular cause Dewey’s two conditions of interest and effort that must be met for a project to be regarded as an occupation The trinity of the school and the trinity of occupation Discovering occupations is phenomenological, while arranging occupations is pragmatic

146

149

152 159

162 183 185 191

Series editors’ preface

John Quay’s Education, Experience and Existence proposes a coherent theory of experience informed by Dewey, Heidegger and Peirce – a marriage of pragmatism and phenomenology – to embrace the dimension of experience understood as our perception of existence as both an interaction between things and a simple (aesthetic) whole. The former is the basis of pragmatism and its account of science, the latter emerges from the work of Heidegger. This marriage of pragmatism and phenomenology – a double understanding – works with notions of being, knowing and doing. Quay maintains that a coherent theory of experience elucidates the interrelationships between education and life, re-examining the foundations of education by examining the philosophical connections between being, doing and knowing. He returns to Dewey’s characterization of “educational confusion” found in the alleged conflict between the child and the curriculum, between individual nature and social culture. Quay builds on the legacy of Dewey, using Peirce and Heidegger to position, clarify and enhance Dewey’s understanding. In particular, Quay uses Peirce’s categories consisting in firstness, secondness and thirdness, as he says in the Prologue, to “provide the backbone of such a coherent theory of experience”: Dewey’s pragmatism, which he describes as “the logical version of pragmatism” (1916a: 331), is primarily involved with secondness and thirdness; he admits to having some difficulty with firstness (1935a: 708). It is my contention that Heidegger’s phenomenology is chiefly concerned with firstness and secondness. Peirce presented his paper “On a New List of Categories” to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1827 that outlines a theory of predication based on three universal categories. These categories, following Aristotle’s suggestion, were considered aspects of reason that helped to makes expressions clear and to render signs ready for the application of logical laws. Peirce’s Categories taken from a consideration of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel are predicates of predicates that deal with qualities, relations and representations where the valence of each, in turn, is essential monadic, dyadic (the relational) and triadic (sign, object, interpretant).

xiv

Series editors’ preface

From this perspective Quay engages with the legacy of Dewey, Pierce and Hedeigger to solve the confusions of philosophy and education that continue to persist in the opposition between the traditional and progressive that Quay illustrates by way of a direct quotation from Dewey: To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world. (Dewey 1938a: 19-20) This is Quay’s starting point in the first chapter to address the confusion in philosophy and education, Dewey’s search for a truly experiential philosophy and the notion of existence as twofold: individual (one) and interaction (two). Part 2 concerns itself with a coherent theory of experience, examing reflective experience and the logical difference, two types of reflective experience and three modes of relation.This amounts to a reworking and explication of Dewey and Pierce. In Chapter 3 Quay addresses “The Challenge of Non-reflective Experience” as aesthetic experience that is essentially qualitative and immediate and explores Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and the ontological difference, “The Way of Phenomenology” (Chapter 5) and Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing” (Chapter 6). Part 3 returns to the theme of a coherent theory of education examining the four causes of educational confusion (Chapter 7) and educating through occupations as ways of be-ing—be-ing, doing and knowing—as a way out of educational confusion (Chapter 8), before an epilogue wherein he states: This book has been all about finding coherence amidst confusion, particularly in education but also of necessity in philosophy. Dewey embraced this confusion, which spurred him to seek coherence in both philosophy and education. For without a coherent theory of experience, a coherent theory of education is not possible. And without a coherent theory of education, Dewey’s professed way out of educational confusion itself remains unclear. Quay fully embraces the philosophical challenge inherent in an account of aesthetic experience and reflective experience as a basis for a theory of inquiry and demonstrates the significance of Dewey, Pierce and Heidegger as providing the foundations for a coherent theory of experience. Michael A. Peters and Gert Biesta

Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making. It took root within my doctoral studies and since then it has matured. Over this time there have been numerous people who have supported my efforts in various ways, for which I am sincerely grateful. The most important have been my family. My wife Loren has had to contend with the many inconveniences that have ensued because of the attention I have given to researching and writing. Without her understanding the book would still be a pipe dream. Our son Patrick and daughter Leah have grown up with me writing this book, so it is their book as well. Also, we benefitted enormously from the support of my mother and father, who have always been in the background offering a kind word while at the same time helping with the children. My colleagues and students in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne have been pivotal to the evolution of the arguments I make in this book. Probably unbeknown to most, a comment here and some feedback there all contributed to the crafting of the text, always with the goal of making the arguments clearer by dealing with possible confusions. Rod Fawns, Maurizio Toscano and Jeff Kinsman have offered the most detailed comments, consistently accompanied by a dose of positive reinforcement. I thank them sincerely for their patience and good humor. Julianne Moss and David Beckett have been very generous with their time, offering to peruse earlier versions and making critical points leavened with a dose of goodwill. Of course, I must also thank Brian Nettleton, whose support during the early phases of my research was immensely important. Beyond my immediate workplace I would like to thank those who have helped me to bring this work to publication. Ian Westbury and Tim Leonard examined my doctoral thesis. Richard Bernstein read an earlier version and encouraged me to continue with the project. Michael Peters and Gert Biesta, the editors of this series, also saw something of value in the book and were willing to take it on for publication. Last but never least, those involved with the publication process, including reviewers, have made supportive and critical comments that have helped to improve the text to make it into the book you see before you. This includes the permission given by John Wiley and Sons Publishers to reproduce Figure 4.3, an earlier version of which appeared

xvi

Acknowledgments

as Figure 1 in a review of the book “Heidegger’s Philosophic Pedagogy” by Michael Ehrmantraut, published in 2011 in Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(5), 571–575. John Quay Melbourne, Australia

Prologue

Shared sensitivities The most fitting way to describe this book is via two associated sensitivities that I share intimately with John Dewey, so I employ his words to aid in their communication.The first emerges in the experience of “educational confusion” (1931a: 1),1 a confusion marked by numerous “conflicts” in “educational tendencies” (p. 3) with “no general agreement as to what conflict is most important.” Clearly, general agreement is difficult when “all of the conflicts are more or less bound up together” (p. 3). In its basic form this conflict and confusion mark “the case of the child2 vs. the curriculum;3 of the individual nature vs. social culture” (1902a: 5). As a school and university teacher this is a confusion in which I recognize I am immersed, and as such I continue to perpetuate it while also seeking “a way out” (1931a: 1) as Dewey did. Searching for a way out describes the second shared sensitivity, the felt “need for a sound philosophy of experience” (1938a: 91) or “a coherent theory of experience” (p. 30)4 aimed at addressing the problem of educational confusion. Both of these sensitivities together, confusion and coherence, characterize some fundamental aspects of my experience that have led me to research and write this book. They also motivated Dewey, so I draw extensively on his work in expressing the problem and the potential solution as I see it. However, in doing so I do not simply repeat Dewey’s work. Instead I build on his legacy by enlisting the support of two other significant philosophical figures, Charles Sanders Peirce and Martin Heidegger. Peirce and Heidegger enable me to position Dewey’s work in a specific way, and thereby to clarify some of the difficulties Dewey himself experienced. Peirce’s categories of “Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness” (1931/1903a: 177) provide the backbone of such a coherent theory of experience. Dewey’s pragmatism, which he describes as “the logical version of pragmatism” (1916a: 331), is primarily involved with secondness and thirdness; he admits to having some difficulty with firstness (1935a: 708). It is my contention that Heidegger’s phenomenology is chiefly concerned with firstness and secondness. Therefore, the pragmatism of Dewey and the phenomenology of Heidegger connect with each other through secondness. However, this connection is not a conflation. Dewey’s pragmatism is not a phenomenology, and neither is Heidegger’s

xviii Prologue phenomenology a pragmatism. Instead, their connection could perhaps be described as a “marriage” (Blattner 2008: 75), wherein both partners maintain their distinctiveness but cohere in complementarity. By engaging with Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger in this way, I am building on the legacies of all three. Heidegger (1991/1955–56: 102) argues that a legacy is “liberating” and as such “a legacy raises concealed riches of what has-been into the light of day, even if this light is at first only that of a hesitant dawn.” Many have seen this dawn in the works of Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger. By engaging with all three, my intention is to bring aspects of their work into the fuller light of day such that, via a coherent theory of experience, the problem of educational confusion can more readily be seen – and perhaps, one day, overcome.

An argument for achieving coherence amid confusion The book is divided into three parts. In Part One my main concern is to address two aims: sharing with you the problem of educational confusion in the hope that you can begin to see it as I do (and Dewey does), and beginning to sketch out a coherent theory of experience that may help to overcome this confusion. The middle chapters of this book, Part Two, continue with the second aim and express my fuller engagement with the philosophies of Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger as they contribute to a coherent theory of experience. In Part Three my argument again picks up the issue of educational confusion, now equipped with a coherent theory of experience.This enables me to address the educational confusion introduced in Part One in a way that illuminates important aspects of Dewey’s educational philosophy which he believed pointed to a way out of this confusion.The epilogue presents a brief conclusion to the book, entwining all the various threads together in a simple summary. Now allow me to provide a little more detail in relation to the chapters. In Chapter One I endeavor to convey the sense of educational confusion that Dewey and I share, cognizant of the need to begin with a shared perspective on the problem. The aim of this sharing is to enable you, the reader, to better comprehend the problem itself, for as Dewey (1906: 129) notes, “to see the problem another sees, in the same perspective and at the same angle – that amounts to something. Agreement in solutions is in comparison perfunctory.” In sharing this problem I draw on the work of educationists, notably Larry Cuban, Herbert Kliebard, John Goodlad and Michael Schiro, to elaborate and frame the argument. However, just seeing the problem of educational confusion is not sufficient unless it leads us into the search for a solution. Dewey’s search focuses on a coherent theory of experience – as does mine. This solution lies in philosophical work. Therefore, in this chapter I also provide a brief overview of the connections between the philosophies of Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger5 that form the basis of “a truly experiential philosophy” (Dewey 1935a: 708), one which underpins a way out of educational confusion. Central to these connections is the backbone provided by Peirce’s categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness. As stated above, Dewey’s pragmatism

Prologue xix and Heidegger’s phenomenology cohere within secondness. Secondness is a synonym for existence (Dewey 1935a: 702), and thus there are two different ways of understanding existence – one pragmatic, the other phenomenological – revealing existence as possessing a twofold character. One of these ways we are all familiar with – a reflective appreciation of existence as interaction between things, between organism (us) and environment (things around us), understood scientifically via cause-effect relations. This is existence for a pragmatist. The other way is even simpler, but it is often overlooked because of the primacy of understanding thinking as reflective and scientific. This other way is an aesthetic appreciation of existence as a simple qualitative whole. This is a whole which each of us ‘carries’ around with us – we live in it, it ‘contains’ all the things and other people with which we are dealing at any particular time. It shifts as our understanding and mood shift, it changes as we change; in fact, it is us and everything and everyone we are concerned with. There is no distinction here between me, other things and other people, so therefore there is no conception of ‘relation’ as such. However, grasping this understanding of existence is difficult, precisely because it so simple. There are no separate parts in it – everything makes basic sense in the meaningful whole. Capturing this holistic and indivisible character – this ‘oneness’ – is achieved using the term ‘individual.’There is a further problem, however, in that this term can also mean a separate thing involved in an interaction. Therefore, the term individual here has two meanings.The reader needs to be aware of this; we shall cover this issue in more detail in Chapter One. It is at the heart of this book and all that is to follow, and understanding it experientially, personally, is therefore crucial. In Chapter Two I describe in more detail how Dewey’s theory of inquiry works, particularly his logical version of pragmatism with its focus on reflective experience and thinking. I begin my exposé here as Dewey’s notion of inquiry is among the more familiar aspects of his work for educators. It is chiefly premised on understanding existence as interaction, for inquiry works with parts in relation, reconstructing these relations reflectively; this is a key aspect of Dewey’s pragmatic sense of education. However, this does not mean that educators will be familiar with Dewey’s work at this level of detail. A strategy that may help you to come to terms with this framework more easily involves taking a rectangular piece of paper – say A4 size – and hold it in a ‘landscape’ orientation. Fold it in half so that the fold is vertical.You now have a twofold. On the left hand side, close to the fold, write ‘simple qualitative whole’; while on the right hand side, again close to the fold, write ‘interaction.’ Now, somewhere in the middle of the right hand side, write ‘reflective experience’. Just beneath this, write ‘pragmatic.’We’ll keep adding to this prop as we progress through the Prologue. In fleshing out Dewey’s theory of inquiry I start by addressing his identification of the “the logical difference” (1938b: 354) that describes the difference and connection between secondness and thirdness. For Dewey, at the heart of this difference is a differentiation between “two types” (1916b: 169) of reflective thinking (i.e. these two types remain within Dewey’s sense of reflective experience). These are functionally connected, but distinct. One type remains

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Prologue

more concerned with concrete interaction; Dewey describes this as a “trial and error” (p. 170) type of reflective thinking, because it is aimed at solving a problem without stopping to consider options beyond what is concretely available. Engaging the other type of reflective thinking involves a move across the logical difference, a move signalling a shift from concrete to abstract reflection. This other type is a “regulated” (1929a: 7) reflection. However, inquiry neither begins nor concludes in this abstract regulated reflection. If it did so, it would remain purely theoretical and hypothetical. A move back across the logical difference is required, to the concrete reflection (trial and error) which is concerned with application to the actual problem at hand. Dewey considers abstract universal forms of knowledge to be connected instrumentally, as means to an end, to the resolution of some concrete problem. This is the nuts and bolts of pragmatism. Yet Dewey is aware that his logical version of pragmatism – involving concrete and abstract reflective thinking and experience – emerges from a pre-reflective situation and ends in a post-reflective situation. Thus there is a “non-reflective” (1916a: 137fn) form of experience that surrounds reflective experience. Therefore, beyond the reflective experience of logical pragmatism, Dewey recognizes that non-reflective experience plays a part in inquiry. Using your paper prop, now take the right hand edge and fold it into the center, so that it touches the central fold. This creates another fold in the middle of the right hand side. This fold is the logical difference within reflective experience, so you should label this. To the right of the logical difference, write ‘regulated reflective thinking’; underneath this write ‘formal.’ To the left of the logical difference, between the logical difference and the central fold, write ‘trial and error reflective thinking’; underneath this write ‘concrete.’ Then, in the middle of the left hand side of the paper (to the left of the central fold) write ‘non-reflective experience.’ In Chapter Three I further explore Dewey’s sense of the connection between non-reflective and reflective experience, a sense which is chiefly functional and pragmatic.The connection is characterized by the development of a problem in non-reflective experience.When this occurs, reflective experience is engaged in order to (hopefully) sort through the problem. Of course, this is a legitimate way of understanding the connection, but it is achieved from the pragmatic position of reflective experience, where existence is interaction. From this perspective, non-reflective experience forms the context within which reflective experience occurs. Dewey describes the deeper levels of this context as a background, an existential matrix constructed from the outcomes of reflective thinking, both concrete and abstract, which is at the same time, in an active sense, mind. It is important to note that these deeper levels are pragmatic extrapolations derived from the position of reflective experience. Dewey also recognizes that there is a non-reflective foreground to this background, one that is more subjective. This he connects with art, and through art with emotion and aesthetic experience. However, for Dewey, such experience is “naïve experience” (1929a: 12) in the sense that, because it is nonreflective, it cannot be analyzed. Affective or qualitative thinking, the way of thinking aesthetic experience, is merely an aesthetic awareness of the whole, for

Prologue xxi Dewey considers analysis to be only reflective. His position here is aligned with a particular perception of time. Aesthetic experience is immediate, and as such, anchored to a point in time, it is not accessible to reflective thinking because reflection is always focused on something that is past. Returning to your paper prop, in the middle of the left hand side of the paper, perhaps just above ‘non-reflective experience’, write ‘aesthetic experience.’ However, Heidegger is focused on another way of comprehending time, a phenomenological way, which enables him to consider (what Dewey calls) aesthetic experience differently. He perceives (what Dewey calls) affective or qualitative thinking as another way of comprehending existence. This is a simple, holistic, qualitative comprehension of one’s present experiencing. Here the present isn’t just the immediate, as a point on a timeline; the present is a feeling-thinking-awareness that we ‘carry’ with us, although we are not usually aware of it. When we do become aware of it, it is “experiencing experienced” and “experienced experiencing”; “the empowering experiencing of living experience that takes itself along” (Heidegger 2000/1919: 99). In Chapter Four I explore the many ramifications of Heidegger’s interpretation of this awareness and the resultant twofold in secondness or existence. These include differing senses of time, of experience, of thinking. Heidegger (1995/1929–30: 358) calls the difference between the two philosophical stances embraced within this twofold the “ontological difference,” because it is “the distinction between being and beings.” For Heidegger, phenomenological feeling-thinking-awareness opens a way to think being (verb), whereas an awareness of existence as interaction focuses on beings (noun) in a reflective thinking. By way of the ontological difference, a difference within secondness, Heidegger is able to perceive a third difference in experience: that between firstness and secondness. Just as Dewey perceives the logical difference between formal and concrete types of reflective experience, Heidegger sees a difference between formal and concrete in experience which is “non-cognitive” (1985/1925: 165), here understood in the sense of nonreflective. This distinction between concrete and formal phenomenological modes of thought, while it is also a difference, has a character very unlike either the logical difference or the ontological difference. Heidegger (2003/1969: 60) refers to it as “Ereignis.” On your paper prop, on the left hand side just below ‘non-reflective experience’ write ‘phenomenology.’ Then the central fold, the one you made first, should be labelled the ‘ontological difference.’ Just to the right of the ontological difference, below ‘interaction,’ write ‘beings.’ Just to the left of the ontological difference, below ‘simple qualitative whole,’ write ‘being.’ Once this is done, take the left hand edge of the paper and fold it into the center, so that it touches the central fold.This creates another fold in the middle of the left hand side.This fold is Ereignis. Between Ereignis and the ontological difference, write the label ‘concrete’. On the left hand side of Ereignis, write the label ‘formal’. Additionally, to the left of Ereignis write the label ‘firstness,’ to the right of the logical difference write ‘thirdness,’ and between Ereignis and the logical difference write ‘secondness,’ split down the middle by the ontological difference.

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With his awareness of the ontological difference, Heidegger set out to investigate Ereignis by means of a “hermeneutic phenomenology” (1971/1953– 54: 9). My understanding of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology is detailed in Chapter Five. He identifies three features of phenomenology as a way of analysis: reduction, construction and destruction. These three do not prescribe a method in the sense of a logical process; rather, they are all different ways of describing the way of phenomenology. Reduction is the crossing of the ontological difference to aesthetic experience, to existence as simple qualitative whole, as being (verb). This is also a crossing to phenomenological thinking, which explores this simple qualitative whole but not in the sense of seeing parts in relation (interaction). This phenomenological thinking suggests (or constructs) ‘conceptual’ ways of understanding the simple qualitative whole. In doing this Heidegger is cognizant of the need to use terms that have already been employed scientifically and pragmatically. Such use then involves destruction of the pragmatic meaning to form a phenomenological understanding. However, perhaps the most important feature of these “phenomenological concepts” (2004/1920–21: 223) is that each is analogous of the whole. In other words, all of Heidegger’s phenomenological terms are analogous ways of describing the whole as a whole. In this way they are also analogous to each other. Heidegger, after Aristotle, calls this “the unity of analogy” (1995/1931: 33), as “in analogy … what counts is relation to a one” (2008/1926: 134). In this analogous way, each of these phenomenological concepts is equally foundational of what is “equiprimordial” (2010/1927: 111). In Chapter Six I offer an interpretation of the broad range of analogous concepts that Heidegger develops via his hermeneutic phenomenology. These emerge from his questioning, first of “the meaning of being” (2010/1927: 4) and second of “the truth of be-ing” (1999/1936–38: 36). The first question is addressed specifically to the formality inherent in the concrete sense of being as simple qualitative whole, which he refers to as “Dasein” or “being-here” (2005/1923–24: 83). Such questioning raises many possibilities, among which sits perhaps the best known of Heidegger’s phenomenological concepts: “beingin-the-world” (1996/1927: 49). The second question of the truth of being is his attempt to address those aspects which disclose being-here as simple qualitative whole. Through this phenomenological analysis Heidegger arrives at what he calls ‘the fourfold,’ a phenomenological destruction of Aristotle’s four causes.The fourfold is a ring of four, at the center of which is being-here as onefold, for “out of the fourfold, the simple onefold of the four is ventured” (1971/1950a: 179). Having shown how this engagement between pragmatism and phenomenology offers a coherent theory of experience, in Chapter Seven I again take up the issue of educational confusion. Here I draw a connection between Aristotle’s four causes and the four goal areas of education (Goodlad 1984), also understood as four ideological interest groups (Kliebard 2004) and four curriculum ideologies (Schiro 2008).These four constructs are further revealed in Dewey’s identification of educational conflict involving “the child vs. the curriculum” and “the individual nature vs. social culture” (1902a: 5). Dewey’s

Prologue xxiii four align pragmatically with the other versions of four, offering differing perspectives on education. However, because they are understood pragmatically, these four will always remain in conflict.They are four causes involved in causeeffect relations where the four together represent a totality, but never belong as a simplicity. However, with a phenomenological destruction to the fourfold, the onefold is revealed – a sense of simple unity disclosed by the four. In terms of Dewey’s educational philosophy, this simple unity is ‘occupation.’ Kliebard (2004: 60) notes that Dewey, in his search for “unity in the curriculum,” “found that unifying concept in what he called occupations.” Hence the importance of Dewey’s (1916b: 361) claim that an “education through occupations … combines within itself more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method.” The full extent of Dewey’s education through occupations is described in Chapter Eight. Phenomenologically, in aesthetic experience, occupation is be-ing (verb), captured in the phenomenological concept of being-in-theworld. However, occupation, as experience, also has its pragmatic meanings. Pragmatically, in reflective experience occupation is concrete doing (trial and error reflection) as well as formal knowing (regulated reflection). This threefold of be-ing, doing and knowing is aesthetic experience (embracing Ereignis) in connection with concrete reflective experience (across the ontological difference) and abstract reflective experience (across the logical difference). In educational terms this threefold of be-ing, doing and knowing is the “trinity of the school”: “(1) the life of the school as a social institution in itself; (2) methods of learning and of doing work; and (3) the school studies or curriculum” (Dewey 1909a: 29). Occupations are the life of the school (as they inform the way the school is organized), as well as the pedagogy and the curriculum. The central focus of teaching is then on “discovering” significant occupations in an aesthetic sense, and “arranging” (1933a: 52) these occupations in a reflective way. This is Dewey’s democratic vision for education, and his way out of educational confusion. Finally, in Chapter Nine I summarize the journey taken through the book, one that has the potential to lead us from a confused situation in education and philosophy to an understanding that offers coherence. However, the real journey still awaits you, the reader; all you have seen so far is a sketch. This journey will not be an easy one, as it involves grappling with areas of philosophy that are undoubtedly challenging. But, if you remain aware of the distinction within secondness between two differing ways of understanding existence – one pragmatic (interaction) and the other phenomenological (simple qualitative whole) – then you will be well equipped to comprehend the subtlety of the ideas that follow.

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Part I

Confusion in philosophy and education

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1

Education, philosophy and existence

Overview The aim of this chapter is firstly to introduce the idea of educational confusion as expressed initially by Dewey, and then also by Cuban, Goodlad, Kliebard and Schiro. Each of these authors is concerned with the various and seemingly opposing forces that have conflicted over numerous years in the broad sphere of education. Such conflict is managed in a practical way via compromises, but these never resolve the underlying confusion. In order to approach this problem so as to find a way out, philosophy is required, specifically a sound philosophy of experience. Dewey brings his considerable philosophical talents to bear on this task, supported by the work of Peirce. The second aim of this chapter is then to flesh out the ideas that sit at the heart of such a sound philosophy of experience. Central to this is the identification of a twofold understanding of existence as both actuality (interaction between parts) and strictly individual (as a simple whole). While comprehending this twofold nature of existence presents challenges, it is crucial to the development of a coherent theory of experience.

Division in education Dewey (1902b: 18) describes the educational situation that he experienced as marked by “confusion” rather than “unity.” While this sentiment was expressed more than a century ago, it still rings true for many involved in education today. The continued relevance of Dewey’s perspective is attested to by Westbury (2002: 121), who claims that “Dewey’s conclusions around the educational situation of the school still hold in virtually every aspect.” This confusion is especially conspicuous when the conflict created by the addition of new areas of study to an already “crowded curriculum” (Dewey 1896a: 9) is given due consideration. Dewey (1902b: 18) recognized that “every movement” for an addition to the curriculum, “whether for nature study or spelling, for picture study or arithmetic, for manual training or more legible handwriting, is treated as an isolated and independent thing.” In such a circumstance any regard for the holistic and unified nature of curriculum is missing. In consequence, “it is this

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separation, this lack of vital unity, which leads to the confusion and contention which are so marked features of the educational situation” (p. 18). Dewey saw this lack of unity commonly portrayed as an opposition between two broadly defined educational forms: “The opposition, so far as practical affairs of the school are concerned, tends to take the form of contrast between traditional and progressive education” (1938a: 17). In a basic sense, progressive education designates the “new education” (p. 20) which emerged in opposition to the more traditional or “older education.”6 Dewey is widely considered to be the father figure of progressive education, although Reese (2001: 2) points out that “Dewey refused the honorific title.” “I am not, I hope and believe,” Dewey attested, “in favor of any ends or any methods simply because the name progressive may be applied to them” (1938a: 90). He argued that many of those who were involved with progressive education were overly intent on identifying themselves in opposition to traditional education, thereby creating a dualism. “The phrase ‘progressive education’,” he insisted, “is one, if not of protest, at least of contrast, with an education which was predominantly static in subject-matter, authoritarian in methods, and mainly passive and receptive from the side of the young” (1934a: 211). He saw this dualistic contrast as a problem in education, not a solution. Even today, many who align themselves with progressive education see themselves as being involved in an open or covert battle against those espousing ideas and practices associated with traditional education, and they in turn fight back. Modernists and traditionalists are opponents engaged in a battle for superiority within an assumed contest, a dualistic hierarchy underpinning both conceptions of education. Rather than working towards an understanding of education as a whole, many who are involved with progressive education seek to win this perceived contest and thus rearrange the hierarchy. This is the underlying conflict that gave rise to Dewey’s identification of educational confusion. “There is confusion due to the smoke of battle obscuring the scene from the onlooker,” he asserted, “and there is a different confusion due to combatants losing sight of what they are doing and where they are going, a chaos of uncoordinated movements and actions” (1931a: 2) (Figure 1.1). The development of the newer forms of education as a response to the problems perceived with the older forms exacerbated these dualistic tendencies. Dewey (1902a: 15) pointed out that “just as, upon the whole, it was the weakness of the ‘old education’ that it made invidious comparisons between the immaturity of the child and the maturity of the adult” by “regarding the former as something to be got away from as soon as possible and as much as possible,” then “so it is the danger of the ‘new education’ that it regards the child’s present powers and interests as something finally significant in themselves.” In other words, progressive education is chiefly defined by its reaction against traditional education, thus rendering it consequent upon traditional education and not a form of education that was developed in its own right. “There is always the danger in a new movement that in rejecting the aims and methods of that which it would supplant, it may develop its principles negatively rather than positively and constructively” (1938a: 20).

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Figure 1.1 Educational confusion arising from conflict across two different sects

So, because it developed mainly “as a product of discontent with traditional education” (Dewey 1938a: 18), it becomes clear that progressive education lacks its own philosophy and is instead founded negatively, naively rooted in its contrast with traditional education rather than in its own beginning. Progressive education takes “its clew [clue] in practice from that which is rejected instead of from the constructive development of its own philosophy” (p. 20). This rejection holds within it an acceptance of the underlying contest with traditional education and the consequent hierarchical dualism. “The problems are not even recognized, to say nothing of being solved, when it is assumed that it suffices to reject ideas and practices of the old education and then go to the opposite extreme” (p. 22). The oppositional relationship between the newer and older forms of education prompted Dewey (1902a) to refer to them as differing “schools of opinion” (p. 4), or more strongly, as “different educational sects” (p. 7). He typified the older sect by referring to a “moral” that implored teachers to “ignore and minimize the child’s individual peculiarities, whims, and experiences. They are what we need to get away from. They are to be obscured or eliminated” (p. 8). In urging movement away from “these superficial and casual affairs,” the moral urges teachers “to substitute … stable and well-ordered realities; and these are found in studies and lessons” (p. 8). “Thus emphasis is put upon the logical subdivisions and consecutions of the subject-matter” (p. 8). However,“not so, says the other sect” (Dewey 1902a: 9). For this newer school “the child is the starting-point, the center, and the end. His7 development, his growth, is the ideal. It alone furnishes the standard” (p. 9). This sect stands in direct opposition to an isolated focus on subject matter, and instead emphasizes the character of the child.“To the growth of the child all studies are subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the needs of growth. Personality, character, is more than subject-matter. Not knowledge or information, but selfrealization is the goal” (p. 9). Dewey summarized the opposition between these two sects, traditional and progressive, by way of a series of direct juxtapositions. To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of

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Confusion in philosophy and education attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world. (Dewey 1938a: 19–20)

Dewey recognized that this division between traditionalists and modernists in education stood in the way of a more holistic and unified understanding. “Instead of seeing the educative steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms,” he realized (1902a: 4–5).“We get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs. social culture” (p. 5). Furthermore, “below all other divisions in pedagogic opinion lies this opposition” (p. 5).

Compromise is not a way out of educational confusion A hybridization of teaching practices Frustrated with this confused state of affairs,Dewey (1938a:17) broadly opined that “mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors.” However, “when forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are all right in theory but that when it comes to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise” (p. 17). With practical compromise in mind, Dewey (1931a: 4) observed that “there are few, perhaps none, who go to the limit in either direction.” “Such oppositions are rarely carried to their logical conclusion” (1902a: 10). The extreme positions “are left to theorists, while common-sense vibrates back and forward in a maze of inconsistent compromise” (p. 10). In practice, the consequence of this inconsistent compromise is a hybridization of education in the guise of various combinations of old and new. There is no longer any old education [in pure form] save here and there in some belated geographic area. There is no new education in definite and supreme existence.What we have is vital tendencies.These tendencies ought to work together; each stands for a phase of reality and contributes a factor of efficiency. But because of lack of organization, because of lack of unified insight upon which organization depends, these tendencies are diverse and tangential. Too often we have their mechanical combination and irrational compromise. More prophetic, because more vital, is the confusion which arises from their conflict. (Dewey 1902b: 19–20) This sense of a hybridization between various forms of education is evident in Larry Cuban’s analysis of teaching as practiced in the USA during much of the twentieth century. Over this period Cuban recognized a broad cyclical pattern that exacerbated this tendency towards combination and recombination. Educational “reforms do return again, again, and again. Not exactly as before

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or under the same conditions, but they persist” (Cuban 1990: 11). Underlying these cycles of reform he discerned a more stable structure that supported the persistence of the pattern: “stability exists amid change” (p. 8). This stability could be expressed in the form of “at least two traditions of how teachers should and do teach” that “have fired debates and shaped practice” (1993: 7). Drawing “from a large number of varied sources in diverse settings,” Cuban (1993: 245) reasoned that “the data show striking convergence in broadly outlining two traditions of teaching (teacher-centered and student-centered) that have persisted for centuries.” “What I call teacher-centered instruction has been described as subject-centered, ‘tough-minded,’ ‘hard pedagogy,’ and ‘mimetic’” (p. 7). In contrast, “what I call student-centered instruction has been labelled at different times as child-centered or ‘progressive,’ ‘tender-minded’ or ‘soft’ pedagogy, and as ‘transformative’” (p. 7). Like traditional and progressive education, both of Cuban’s conventions are defined in educational discourse by their respective emphases on child and curriculum, individual nature and social culture. Both traditions of teaching are anchored in different views of knowledge and the relationship of teacher and learner to that knowledge. In teachercentered instruction, knowledge is often (but not always) “presented” to a learner, who – and the metaphors from different cultures vary here – is a “blank slate,” a “vessel to fill,” or a “duck to stuff .” In student-centered instruction, knowledge is often (but not always) “discovered” by the learner, who, again using different metaphors, is “rich clay in the hands of an artist,” or “a flourishing garden in need of a masterful cultivator.” (Cuban 1990: 3–4) Cuban points out that the proponents of each of these two traditions are usually engaged in public battles for supremacy. “Champions of each tradition believe that all students regardless of background grasp subject matter, acquire skills, cultivate attitudes, and develop behaviors best through its practise” (2007: 4). As a result, “fierce rhetorical struggles erupted over which ways of teaching and learning are best for all or some students” (p. 4). These battles are waged over many different issues, right down to the basics of literacy and numeracy. Cuban (p. 4) cites the “recent example, in 2003” of “New York City Chancellor of schools Joel Klein” who “mandated ‘Balanced Literacy’ – a progressive whole language approach – as a preferred way of teaching children to read in nearly 750 elementary schools rather than a largely phonics-based approach.” Cuban (p. 4) also refers to “the latest battle in the ‘math wars,’” wherein “the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) issued a report in 2006 urging that math teaching in elementary and middle school concentrate on knowing multiplication tables, how to do division and manage decimals.” This is in contrast to “their earlier report in 1989” which “called for engaging students in learning concepts thoroughly and applying them in real world situations” (p. 4).

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While the two traditions can theoretically be construed as offering a choice between clear-cut alternatives, the practical situation is more complex and confused because neither tradition provides an ultimate solution, just as Dewey noticed. “The accumulated evidence of actual classroom practices producing particular student outcomes to support advocates of each tradition has been mixed or unconvincing,” reports Cuban (2007: 4). As a consequence, “no preponderance of evidence is yet available to demonstrate the inherent superiority of either pedagogy in teaching the young” (p. 4).This leaves teachers to struggle through the various claims and counterclaims made in the battles between the two traditions in order to structure their practice. In addition, Cuban observes that these reforms have less impact where it matters most: in the classroom, especially when considered over a long period of time. “Few reforms aimed at classrooms make it past the door permanently” (1990: 11). However, he is not suggesting that there have been no successful reforms. “Schools have changed over the decades” (p. 8) – but while change is occurring, it is not the fundamental change that would enable the reform cycle to be broken. Instead, the change is primarily a result of the compromises that teachers make in order to accommodate the reform cycles. These compromises reflect what Cuban (2007: 5) describes as “a blending of the two traditions.” As teachers seek compromises between the two extremes, the specific nature of the blending or hybridization employed by any particular teacher, working in a particular school and community, is positioned somewhere along a continuum joining the two traditions. Cuban (2007: 11) saw that “most teachers hugged the middle of the continuum, blending activities, grouping patterns, and furniture to create hybrids of the two traditions.” He labelled the most common hybrid with “the phrase teacher-centered progressivism” (p. 22). Teacher-centered progressivism points “to the hybrid classroom practices and particular student-centered features that have been incorporated into most teachers’ repertoires over the decades as they adapted their practices to regulatory policies” (p. 22). It is Cuban’s belief that much of education policy-making promotes teacher-centeredness, in the form of “district, state, and federal pressures to meet curricular standards and raise test scores” (p. 22). Teacher-centered progressivism is therefore the result of “teacher adaptiveness in melding progressive classroom practices to fit current policies that sustain teacher-centeredness” (p. 22). However, such adaptation does not occur outside of any student-centered response; hence the hybrid approach. A hybridization of ideological interest groups Cuban’s broad distinctions between student-centered and teacher-centered traditions, and the adaptive hybridization occurring between them, are described in greater complexity by Kliebard (2004), whose analysis of the educational situation in the USA during the period between 1893 and 1958 (therefore spanning most of Dewey’s career) suggests the interaction of “four major interest groups that were to vie for control of the American curriculum in the

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twentieth century” (p. 9). Kliebard labels these four interest groups as humanist, developmentalist, social efficiency, and social reconstructionist (or meliorist). Each of these interest groups operates as “a force for a different selection of knowledge and values drawn from the culture and hence a kind of lobby for a different curriculum” (p. 7). Importantly, the humanist interest group stands mainly for traditional education, while the other three seek various reforms of this tradition. By some, the traditional curriculum [represented by the humanist interest group] was seen as ignoring the natural course of development in children and youth as well as their interests and penchant for activity [as maintained by the developmentalist interest group]; by others, it was regarded as supremely non-functional, dangerously ignoring the actual activities that adults are called upon to play in our society, leaving society bereft of the trained individuals that would make it work [a fundamental concern of the social efficiency interest group]; and by still others it was clearly lacking in social direction, particularly irrelevant to issues of social justice and social renewal [a claim made by the social reconstructionist interest group]. (Kliebard 2004: 190) Kliebard’s four interest groups align well with the “four broad areas of goals for the schools” that emerged from Goodlad’s (1984) examination of “a vast array of documents reporting the ongoing effort to define, over a period of more than three hundred years, the goals of education and schooling in this country [the USA]” (p. 36). These four broad areas of goals, which “presumably frame the educational function of schools” (p. 37), are academic, vocational, social and civic, and personal. Four broad areas of goals for the schools have emerged. They are the following: (1) academic, embracing all intellectual skills and domains of knowledge; (2) vocational, geared to developing readiness for productive work and economic responsibility; (3) social and civic, related to preparing for socialization into a complex society; and (4) personal, emphasizing the development of individual responsibility, talent and free expression. (Goodlad 1984: 37) Leading an extensive study of schooling through the 1970s, Goodlad (1984) then used these “same categories” (p. 37) to question parents, teachers and students, asking them “to rate the goal areas” (p. 38). Based on the results of this research he reported that “those closest to schools – parents, teachers and students – see as important all four of those goal areas which have emerged over the centuries” (p. 38). Clearly, across the thousands of parents, teachers and students surveyed there was significant support for each of the four goal areas. However, not every parent, teacher or student believed that each goal was equally important. Reflecting on the outcomes of Goodlad’s study in relation

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to the four categories, Schiro (1992: 251) notes that “each of these goals is supported as the primary goal of education by both a substantial segment of our society as a whole and by a substantial group of teachers.” However, raising any particular goal to a position of primacy, even while acknowledging the importance of all four, is a blueprint for educational confusion and conflict. Educators find themselves immersed in constant debate and disharmony over critical philosophical and ideological issues concerning (1) the competing struggle among the academic, vocational, social, and personal goals for influence over their school curricula, (2) the discrepancy between perceived and preferred goal emphases for their schools, and (3) their actual ability to choose which goals or combinations of goals they will promote. (Schiro 1992: 252) Kliebard sketched a detailed picture of what he perceived to be the conflict between the four interest groups during the first half of the twentieth century. He described it as “a searing conflict which ultimately was fought over whose deep-seated convictions would predominate in the emerging new society” (2004: 291), but “at any given time, we do not find a monolithic supremacy exercised by one interest group” (p. 7). Instead “we find different interest groups competing for dominance over the curriculum and, at different times, achieving some measure of control depending on local as well as general social conditions” (p. 7). Hence he recognized “a hybridization of what were once distinct and easily recognizable curriculum positions” (p. 180). Therefore, “although leading reformists tended to be purists in what they advocated, the exigencies of school life and public expectations virtually dictated that, at best, some kind of composite in terms of classroom practice would materialize” (p. 218). Like Kliebard, Schiro sees these four goal areas of schooling as more than just historical constants; rather, they are ideological positions. Kliebard (1986: xi) described his primary analytical task as “delineating the main ideological positions [italics added] of the various interest groups and the way they balanced as well as contradicted one another.” Schiro (1992: 252) labels these “four ideologies [as] Scholar Academic, Social Efficiency, Social Reconstruction, and Child Study.” Furthermore, he suggests that “these ideologies roughly parallel the academic, vocational, social, and personal goals for schools” (p. 252).8 However, a significant aspect of Schiro’s interest is focused on the way these ideological positions influence everyday teaching practice. Thus for Schiro, “curriculum ideology means a practical philosophy that influences educators’ day-to-day behaviors toward curriculum issues” (p. 252). In other words, he is concerned with how teachers cope day-to-day with the general confusion they perceive between these ideologies. By way of a biographical investigation into the influence of the four curriculum ideologies on the “life histories” of educators, Schiro (1992: 257) highlights not only the persistent hybridization of the different ideologies, but

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also the changes in the primary curriculum ideology that one adheres to at any particular time – changes that emerge over the course of an educator’s career. These changes in emphasis develop “in response to professional and personal transitions” (p. 281) occurring in an educator’s life, with “the major professional transitions” being those that alter “the everyday regularities” experienced in an educator’s work in schools. These major professional transitions include “changing the grade level taught (and thus also the age of the children and the colleagues with whom one most closely works), changing the school in which one works (and thus the colleagues with whom one works and the community in which one works),” as well as “changing the type of job one performs (where, if the change is from teacher to administrator, the authority and power relationships among peers change)” (pp. 281–282). The shifts in primary curriculum ideology instigated by these major professional transitions between grades, schools, and teaching and administrative roles further highlight the complex ways in which the hybridization of the four ideologies plays out in reforms that have differently affected grades, schools, and roles. Such complexity, underpinned by the conflict between four curriculum ideologies (as represented by four educational goal areas and four interest groups), has meant that “systematic improvement in our school curriculum has been difficult” (Schiro 2008: 2–3). Schiro goes on to point out that this “confusion in American education … disrupts the effectiveness of educators as individuals and our schools as organizations (of supposedly cohesive groups of people)” (p. 3). He believes that this educational confusion results “from a lack of perspective in the four curriculum ideologies, ignorance about the nature of these four visions for education, and the continuing disagreement among educators and the general public over what the nature of the school curriculum should be” (p. 3). Therefore, systematic improvement remains elusive.

Dewey, philosophy and education This continuing disagreement highlights the fundamental nature of the educational confusion that Dewey identified a century ago, although for many who are involved with education the sense of confusion is not readily apparent; rather, it is experienced as the conflict between competing educational ideas. However, in order to find a way out of this predicament, the conflict has to be recognized as a problem in itself. Once the existence of the problem is clearly recognized, a solution can then perhaps be sought. Yet, Dewey’s proposed solution to this problem differs from Schiro’s desire for settlement “on a single ideological orientation or a negotiated compromise among ideological orientations” (2008: 3). Instead, Dewey argued that the way out of this confusion would require an alternative theory which moved beneath the conflict. “Instead of taking one side or other,” he wrote, “it is the business of an intelligent theory of education … to indicate a plan of operations proceeding from a level deeper and more inclusive than is represented by the practices and ideas of the contending parties” (1938a: 5). Dewey sought this deeper level

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philosophically, arguing that “the philosophy of education must go beyond any idea of education that is formed by way of contrast, reaction and protest” (1934a: 211). He therefore proclaimed “the fundamental issue” to be “not of new versus old education nor of progressive versus traditional education but a question of what anything whatever must be to be worthy of the name education” (1938a: 90) Those who are looking ahead to a new movement in education … should think in terms of Education itself rather than in terms of some ’ism about education, even such an ’ism as “progressivism.” For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ’ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ’isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities. (Dewey 1938a: 6) Dewey had, by this stage, lost faith in his ability to overcome the various popular understandings of progressive education. He was also aware that while confusion was caused by the conflict between progressive and traditional education, this confusion could only be exacerbated by the contested nature of progressive education itself.Therefore, rather than taking sides, the way out he sought would need to somehow move beneath all sides in education. Additionally he argued that a resolution would require more than an acceptance of some compromise. “This formulation of the business of the philosophy of education does not mean that the latter should attempt to bring about a compromise between opposed schools of thought” (1938a: 5). The confusion could not be overcome by an attempt “to find a via media, nor yet make an eclectic combination of points picked out hither and yon from all schools” (p. 5). On the contrary, it necessitated “the introduction of a new order of conceptions leading to new modes of practice” (p. 5). Dewey recognized that such a philosophy should upset both sides, but more than this it must also disrupt belief in the contest itself, and therefore face resistance. It is for this reason that it is so difficult to develop a philosophy of education, the moment tradition and custom are departed from. It is for this reason that the conduct of schools, based upon a new order of conceptions, is so much more difficult than is the management of schools which walk in beaten paths. (Dewey 1938a: 5) Dewey realized that this philosophy would need to move beyond an understanding of education conceived simply in terms of the various ideological interest groups. He therefore defined education more fundamentally in terms of the underpinning notion of experience. This was reflected in his “technical definition of education” as “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct

Education, philosophy and existence 13 the course of subsequent experience” (1916b: 89–90). Such an understanding of education draws on more basic beliefs about experience and human nature. Before we can formulate a philosophy of education we must know how human nature is constituted in the concrete; we must know about the working of actual social forces; we must know about the operations through which basic raw materials are modified into something of greater value. (Dewey 1934a: 211) For Dewey, the core questions of philosophy and of education could never define two separate realms, but were always co-implicated. From a philosophical perspective he recognized that when “a [philosophical] system becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of interests calling for some program of social adjustment may always be discovered. At this point, the intimate connection between philosophy and education appears” (1916b: 383). In the opposite direction, from an educational understanding, he saw that “the educational point of view enables one to envisage the philosophical problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice” (p. 383). Thus, “education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic discussions” (p. 383). Hence, Dewey (1938c: 471) never considered “the philosophy of education” to be “a poor relation of general philosophy,” although he was aware that it was “often so treated even by philosophers.” Rather, he believed that the philosophy of education was “ultimately the most significant phase of philosophy” (p. 471). To put it more succinctly,“philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately conducted practice” (1916b: 387).9 Furthermore, “if we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education” (p. 383). Indeed, it would be difficult to find a single important problem of general philosophic inquiry that does not come to a burning focus in matters of the determination of the proper subject matter of studies, the choice of methods of teaching, and the problem of the social organization and administration of the schools. (Dewey 1938d: 476) However, Dewey was also aware of the differences between philosophy and education, especially in relation to language, and of the fact that many philosophers and educators did not perceive the connection in the same way he did. Phillips (1970: 47) points out that “commentators on John Dewey’s writings have differed in their views of the relationship between his philosophical and education ideas.” Phillips’ own position is that “Dewey was mistaken in thinking there was any logically necessary relationship between his work in philosophy

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and his work in education” (p. 51). However, on the positive side Phillips considers Dewey’s philosophy to have “helped determine the perspective from which he was able to make a fresh examination of the whole area” – and of education especially (p. 54). In other words, Dewey chose to apply his philosophical perspective to education while at the same time gleaning many philosophical insights through his study of education. Dewey’s challenge was then to clearly articulate these philosophical insights to educators, without necessarily having to engage them in the underpinning philosophical discourse. On numerous occasions Dewey took up this challenge and attempted to articulate his philosophical perspective on education, even going to the extent of presenting a lecture titled The Way Out of Educational Confusion at Harvard University in 1931. In this lecture he proposed “to consider some of the main conflicts in present educational tendencies, hoping that that course may at least clarify vision” (1931a: 3). However, at the same time he recognized that this effort “may only add to the confusion” (p. 3). For many in education the latter sentiment was the most enduring. “Though loaded with thoughts that are pertinent for education,” one commentator considered these “brief pages” of Dewey’s to “leave confusion no less confounding” (Hullfish 1932: 85–86). Another reviewer reflected a similarly disillusioned opinion, emphasizing what he perceived to be the dualistic and conflicted nature of the task ahead. “It is not likely that there can be any such agreement as to the way out which is proposed, unless all can be persuaded to believe that process is more important than product, that activity is more important than what comes out of activity” (Morrison 1932: 68). This dualistic choice between two sides was, of course, a misconstrual of Dewey’s position, and further highlights the extent of the challenge he faced. Central to the philosophic insights that Dewey applied to education were his attempts to reconcile what he perceived to be many and various philosophic dualisms, where “a hard and fast antithesis” had been made “between terms which are related in experience” (1911b: 374). The “philosophic dualisms” that he considered to “have chiefly influenced education” were “those between spirit and matter, mind and body, logic and psychology” (p. 374). However, these were not the only dualisms that Dewey discerned in connection with education. Phillips (1970: 54) points out that “in Democracy and Education Dewey identified and attacked more than three dozen dualisms.” A crucial part of Dewey’s philosophical perspective is the reintegration of both sides of these many dualisms in an operational relationship that achieves a functional unity. He considered it possible to overcome most, if not all of these dualisms via the same strategy – theorizing their functional relation: “For educational purposes, the opposite of dualism is not necessarily monism, but a philosophy which regards the distinction of antithetical terms … as relative and working, not fixed and absolute, so that they are capable of coming together in functional unity” (1911b: 374). Thus the way out of educational confusion could only be found via a new beginning “on the basis of a new philosophy of experience” (Dewey 1938a: 21–22) which embraced functional unity. This new philosophy of experience would recognize the “intimate and necessary relation between the processes of

Education, philosophy and existence

15

actual experience and education” (p. 20); it would provide an understanding of education that reached beneath dualistic division, with its attendant conflict, compromise, and confusion; and it would be holistic and unified, unlike the pervading dualistic conceptions that plagued both education and philosophy. Without such a unified theory of experience, there was no basis for a way forward and out of educational confusion. Having no sense of the unity of experience, and of the definitive relation of each branch of study to that unity, we have no criterion by which to judge and decide. We yield to popular pressure and clamor; first on the side of the instinct for progress, and then on the side of the habit of inertia. As a result, every movement, whether for nature study or spelling, for picture study or arithmetic, for manual training or more legible handwriting, is treated as an isolated and independent thing. It is this separation, this vital lack of unity, which leads to the confusion and contention which are so marked features of the educational situation. Lacking a philosophy of unity, we have no basis upon which to make connections, and our whole treatment becomes piecemeal, empirical and at the mercy of external circumstances. (Dewey 1902b: 18) However, philosophy, according to Dewey, had thus far not offered a unified solution to the division. A sound philosophy of experience had yet to be articulated. “We are living in a mixed and divided life,” he observed (1944a: 184). “We are pulled in opposite directions. We have not as yet a philosophy that is modern in other than a chronological sense. We do not have as yet an educational or any other social institution that is not a mixture of opposed elements” (p. 184). Hence, any “practical attempts to develop schools based upon the idea that education is found in life-experience are bound to exhibit inconsistencies and confusions” – that is, “unless they are guided by some conception of what experience is” (1938a: 51). Informed by his understanding of the intimate connection between philosophy and education, Dewey appreciated that inquiring into what experience is and inquiring into what education is are in fact the same question. The basic question concerns the nature of education with no qualifying adjectives prefixed. What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or slogan. It is for this reason alone that I have emphasized the need for a sound philosophy of experience. (Dewey 1938a: 90–91) The conflict, confusion and compromise Dewey perceived during his examinations of the educational situation could not be overcome by simply

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Confusion in philosophy and education

joining the fray or by trying to make peace through give and take. What was needed was a sound philosophy of experience, since this would enable a recasting of the situation, offering the opportunity to move beyond confusion not by way of conflict or compromise, but via coherence.

Dewey’s search for a truly experiential philosophy Dewey’s search for a coherent theory of experience begins with his identification of various “modes of experience, e.g. the practical, cognitional, aesthetic, etc.” (1905a: 653). While acknowledging the possibility of describing other modes of experience, these three modes are the most basic for Dewey; they constitute experience in its living unity. Importantly, “this unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual” in any separate sense,“for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it” (1934b: 37). In other words, the three modes together describe a unity, but distinctions between them are also important. The distinctions between the three modes are not divisions. However, Dewey is aware that these modes are often problematically considered to be entities in their own right. “Philosophical discourse is the chief wrongdoer in this matter,” he argues (1948a: 203). “Either directly or through psychology as an ally it has torn the intellectual, the emotional, and the practical asunder, erecting each into an entity, and thereby creating the artificial problem of getting them back into working terms with one another” (p. 203). However, “it is not possible to divide in a vital experience the practical, emotional, and intellectual from one another and to set the properties of one over against the characteristics of the others” (1934b: 55). In a vital, living experience “the emotional phase binds parts together into a single whole; the ‘intellectual’ simply names the fact that the experience has meaning; ‘practical’ indicates that the organism is interacting with events and objects which surround it” (p. 55) (Figure 1.2). These three modes constitute the basic structure of vital, living experience; a position Dewey regarded as being supported by the philosophy of Peirce. By way of what Dewey (1935a: 701) describes as a “logical analysis of experience” (although Peirce (1932/1902a: 67) designates it as “pre-logical”), Peirce is able to discern a structure of “experience as experienced” (p. 701) that involves three aspects or categories, which he labels firstness, secondness and thirdness. “No conceptions are simpler than those of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness,” Peirce attests (1934/1903: 109). He applies this framework to a broad range of human endeavors, including “reasoning,” “metaphysics,” “psychology,” “physiology,” “biology,” “physics,” “sociology,” and “theology” (1931/1890: 181–182). He considers the categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness to “meet us not once but at every turn” (p. 198).10 Dewey (1935a: 701) defines these three categories, keeping close to Peirce’s original words and meaning, as follows: “Firstness, or sheer totality and pervading unity of quality in everything experienced, whether it be odor, the drama of King Lear, or philosophic or scientific systems; Secondness, existentiality, or singular occurrence; and Thirdness, mediation, or continuity.”

Education, philosophy and existence 17

Figure 1.2 Peirce’s structure of experience as experienced – firstness, secondness, thirdness – in Dewey’s logical (top) and psychological (bottom) interpretations

It is important for Dewey that this threefold logical structure should be interpreted in terms of its psychological significance and therefore rendered in terms of lived experience.Thus for Dewey (1929a: 307),“psychological does not mean psychic, or refer to events going on exclusively within the head.” Rather, it is “the business of Psychology to take the whole of conscious experience for its scope” (1886: 14). Dewey interprets Peirce’s (1931/1890: 200) reference to firstness, secondness and thirdness as “categories of consciousness” in this broad psychological way, revealing them to be categories of conscious lived experience. The “first” of these categories Peirce (1931/1890: 200) describes as “feeling, the consciousness which can be included with an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis.” Then follows “second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, sense of resistance, of an external fact, of another something” (p. 200). Finally, “third, synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense of learning, thought” (p. 200). In his psychological work Dewey employs a similar tripartite structure, a threefold experiential framework with which he describes “consciousness or experience” (1886: 8) as feeling, volition and thought. It can be affirmed that, psychologically, it is through feeling (including sensation as such) that qualities present themselves in experience; that it is through volitional experiences that existence, as a matter of action-reaction, is actualized in experience, and it is through thought that continuities are experienced. (Dewey 1935a: 707) For Dewey (1891: 15) “consciousness” is constituted as “cognitive, emotional, and volitional,” equating to the three basic modes of experience.11 Akin to the distinct but not separate character of the three modes of experience, these categories are “not three kinds of consciousness, but three aspects of the same consciousness” (p. 20); they are all within conscious experience, not outside it. Firstness is therefore the aesthetic or emotional mode of experience, secondness the practical

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or volitional mode, and thirdness the intellectual or cognitive mode. In this way Peirce’s triadic structure describes features of experience as experienced, rather than sitting outside experience in some supernatural or transcendental realm. This understanding also illuminates Dewey’s position on structure. “Structure” signifies “constancy of means, of things used for consequences, not of things taken by themselves or absolutely” (Dewey 1929a: 62–63). Hence Dewey argues “that all structure is structure of something” (p. 62). The structure does not exist independently outside that something. “Anything defined as structure is a character of events, not something intrinsic and per se” (p. 62). Structure is what makes construction possible and cannot be discovered or defined except in some realized construction, construction being, of course, an evident order of changes. The isolation of structure from the changes whose stable ordering it is, renders it mysterious – something that is metaphysical in the popular sense of the word, a kind of ghostly queerness. (Dewey 1929a: 63) With such an understanding of structure, Dewey (1910a: 6) is able to discern the choice faced by philosophers between “two alternative courses” in relation to comprehending experience, especially in connection with epistemological arguments.“We must either find the appropriate objects and organs of knowledge in the mutual interactions of changing things; or else, to escape the infection of change, we must seek them in some transcendent and supernal region” (pp. 6–7). Such a transcendent realm constitutes a disconnected metaphysics for Dewey, one “derived not from observation or experience, but treated as a principle which is necessary to the having of experience” (1902c: 280). Dewey also considers ontology to be constituted in this way (1902d: 204), judging it to be a discipline primarily concerned with “being-in-itself (things as they really are),” outside of any experience. In this regard, Dewey believes Peirce’s analysis to have only minimal ontological implications: “All that is required on the ontological side is that existence itself is qualitative [aesthetic], not merely quantitative, is marked by stress and strain [volitional], and by continuities [cognitive]” (1935a: 707). Therefore “that much, but only that much, of ontological interpretation is postulated in Peirce’s logical analysis of experience” (p. 707).Thus Dewey believes (1932: 221) that Peirce’s philosophy takes the first of the two alternative courses, being “based upon observations which are within the range of every man’s normal experience.” By this measure Dewey considers Peirce to have “opened the road which permits a truly experiential philosophy to develop” (1935a: 708).

Existence as twofold: individual (one) and interaction (two) Positioned at the heart of Peirce’s threefold experiential structure is secondness, the practical mode of experience that Dewey describes as “the ‘proof ’ of existence in general” (1937: 416). Following Peirce, Dewey employs the terms secondness and existence interchangeably (1935a: 702), referring to “secondness

Education, philosophy and existence 19 or existence” when recounting Peirce’s definition. Secondness, existence, sits at the center of Peirce’s categories, flanked by firstness on one side and thirdness on the other. Peirce and Dewey both recognize that this position gives existence a subtle twofold character. Secondness is “actuality in the literal sense,” while also being “strictly individual” (Dewey 1935a: 702). Here, actuality and individuality do not signify two separate parts of existence, but rather two ways of considering existence, two emphases within our experience. It is of crucial import to the unfolding philosophical and educational story being presented in this book that the term individual12 is not interpreted in contemporary psychological or sociological ways, where it tends to refer to a separate entity, one amongst many. This is not the meaning intended here. When characterized as individual, Dewey (1935a: 701) interprets existence as a unique or “singular occurrence.” However, this singular occurrence need not be comprehended as a single existence within a multiplicity, in the way of thirdness. Instead one must make the effort to comprehend this singular occurrence as the singular whole of one’s living existence, as directly experienced. Singular does not mean one amongst many, but rather one as a simple whole. Dewey’s singular occurrence can therefore be perceived as more akin to the “immediate qualitative nature” of firstness, which is “neither subjective, nor objective, nor a relation of the two” (1943: 316).This existential individuality thus expresses the experienced unity of one’s own living existence as immediate and qualitative, the sense of one’s existence as an indivisible whole, playing here on the Latin roots of the term individual as connected with a sense of indivisibility, of oneness. In order to achieve the necessary personal understanding of the difference between the sides of this twofold comprehension of existence, we must take a moment to actually experience the difference. This is important, otherwise the difference between these two ways of experiencing the same existence, one’s own existence, secondness, remains at a theoretical level – which plays chiefly into the hands of the idea of existence considered as interaction. Such a onesided understanding renders individuality as merely one half of an interaction, but this is not what individuality means here. Rather, individuality implies taking existence to be itself wholly indivisible; here there is no sense of interaction. Furthermore, this twofold understanding must be an understanding that one experiences oneself. Beginning with existence as “strictly individual” (Dewey 1935a: 702), if you (the reader) look up from the page at this point you can experience an awareness of existence as strictly individual, a simple qualitative whole. This awareness is a feeling awareness, which is at the same time thinking, but which is distinguishable from reflectively analytic thinking as this is usually practiced. In this feeling-thinking awareness there is no deliberate attempt to raise a problem or to focus deliberately on any particular thing; simply an awareness of your own living experience, which is simple (in the sense of being indivisible). One can be aware of things, of course, but this awareness does not develop to the point where the focus pushes the whole into the background, where it disappears (and interaction between individual things thus becomes the major

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emphasis). In fact, this awareness is so simple that we tend to be oblivious to it and therefore to overlook it. This is existence as individuality, as simple qualitative whole, as one. For Heidegger, this simple concrete indivisible whole of experience is “experiencing experienced” and “experienced experiencing”;“the empowering experiencing of living experience that takes itself along” (2000/1919: 99). Heidegger equates gaining an awareness of this existential singularity with learning to swim in a river. “We shall never learn what ‘is called’ swimming … or what it ‘calls for,’ by reading a treatise on swimming. Only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming” (1968/1951–52: 21). If one doesn’t make this leap, then “one is supposed to learn swimming, but only goes meandering on the riverbank, converses about the murmuring of the stream, and talks about the cities and towns the river passes. This guarantees that the spark never flashes” (1984/1928: 7). The same applies to awareness of existence as singular occurrence, as individuality, as simple qualitative whole. One must think with it, experience it, for the spark to flash. In contrast with existence understood as strictly individual, Dewey understands existence as actuality by way of “the fact that we are forced to react and that things react upon us in return for our reaction to them” (1937: 416). Such a conception of existence as reaction points to it being characterized as “interaction” (1935a: 702) or “transaction” (1938a: 43) and open to the mediation of thirdness (cognition). This way of thinking and experiencing is not the same as an awareness of existence as simple qualitative whole. So, again, if you look up from your reading and take in the situation around you in a way that could be described as more scientific thinking, then you can experience an awareness of existence as interaction. In this case there is an awareness of separate entities held in relation (usually described as causeeffect); in other words, these individual entities are interacting and there is a discoverable rationale to their interaction (which can be classified by science). These entities include the chair, the book, your body, the coffee cup, the table – all these are separate things involved in interaction, as are you amongst other people. There is a contextual sense here, but it is a context comprised of the relations between parts. These parts contribute to a relational whole that is a multiplicity in the way of a totality. In this scientific way of thinking and experiencing, the simple qualitative whole, the singular occurrence, cannot be seen. It takes a shift to the other way of feeling-thinking to perceive existence as individuality, as simple qualitative whole. Therefore, in the more scientific way of thinking, individuality is perceived to mean one individual amongst many other individuals in a multiplicity. In short, secondness is both individual (simple wholeness) and interaction (parts in relation); where the simple individual whole and the interaction amongst parts together offer a twofold interpretation conditioned in the differing directions of firstness and thirdness (Figure 1.3).This twofold distinction within existence sits at the very heart of this book, and the reader is advised to carry it with them as necessary equipment for travelling the unfolding pathway ahead.

Education, philosophy and existence 21

Figure 1.3 The twofold of existence as individual and interaction

Summary In this chapter we have examined the problem of educational confusion as Dewey experienced it in the educational situation of his day. Whilst many educators would not consider themselves confused, educational confusion as Dewey understood it conveys the nature of the educational situation taken more holistically. Confusion is the outcome of conflicts occurring on a range of fronts. Therefore, while the combatants in any particular conflict may be certain of their positions, the situation as a whole is not assured, and educational confusion is the result. For Dewey, these conflicts were precipitated by those pursuing a newer or more progressive form of education in contrast to the older or more traditional form. He described the two sides which evolved around these positions as sects. One sect took the side of the child, while the other prioritized the curriculum. In his historical analysis spanning the century from 1890 to 1990, Cuban reveals how these two sides have continued to shape education in the form of teacher-centered and student-centered approaches. Another historical analysis, performed by Kliebard, moves beyond a two-sided conflict and identifies four ideological interest groups as contributing to the confusion. Schiro perceives Kliebard’s four ideological interest groups as curriculum ideologies; in addition, he connects them with the four goal areas of education developed by Goodlad. So a general picture of educational confusion emerges, involving four basic positions. However, Dewey is aware that conflict among these various positions does not equate to a black and white choice between them, couched in terms of either/or. Instead, ideological conflict leads to practical compromises in a process that both Cuban and Kliebard labelled hybridization. Education is thus constituted by a range of compromises that emerge from the shifts in priority being accorded to the four positions. So the conflicts continue, with the result being an ongoing climate of reform that does not get beyond the underlying confusion. Thus, Dewey recognizes that educational confusion cannot be overcome through conflict and/or compromise. What is needed instead is a coherent

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theory of education that moves beneath the conflicting positions and practical compromises so as to illuminate a way out of educational confusion. However, he also perceives that this cannot be achieved through education alone, hamstrung as it is by confusion. As a result he draws on the connections he sees between education and philosophy, particularly as this applies to an understanding of experience. However, philosophy is itself rent by confusions, highlighting the need to develop a new philosophy of experience that will then inform a coherent theory of education. To help him achieve this goal Dewey turns to the philosophy of Peirce, particularly his categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness which constitute the basic structure of living experience. Firstness highlights the holistic sense of feeling or quality, secondness is actuality as action-reaction, and thirdness is the mediation of these interactions. All three categories together form the universal phenomenon which is our living experience. However, what is most important to the fleshing out of a coherent theory of experience is an awareness of how secondness, which equates to the brute fact of existence, has two characters – one which aligns more closely with thirdness, and an other which aligns with firstness. In its alignment with thirdness, secondness is characterized as interaction. Understanding existence as interaction is necessary for thirdness, which is often equated with thinking, because thinking mediates the cause-effect relation at the heart of any interaction. However, secondness is also, in Dewey’s terms, strictly individual. Here secondness is perceived not as an interaction but holistically, as a simple qualitative whole having no separable parts – a quality which is more suggestive of firstness. A coherent theory of experience is built around this distinction, so it is crucial that the reader comes to terms with it so as to comprehend it experientially.

Part II

A coherent theory of experience

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2

Reflective experience and the logical difference

Overview The aim of this chapter is to provide a detailed sketch of Dewey’s theory of inquiry, which emphasizes existence as interactional and highlights the difference and connection between secondness and thirdness. Dewey presents the basic framework of this theory in various places throughout his oeuvre, and with each iteration it becomes more intricate. This theory is the common backbone of Dewey’s logic, his pragmatism, and his instrumentalism. It centers on his notion of reflective experience, which is also reflective thinking. Reflective thinking can be differentiated into two types: one of these is concretely focused, the other is abstract. The difference between them he refers to as the logical difference: the difference between concrete and abstract logical forms. However, as aspects of the larger task of inquiry, both types are connected. Further, they are connected to a pre-reflective and post-reflective situation which surrounds reflective thinking. It is here, in this non-reflective experience, that problems emerge which induce reflective thinking. In this theory of inquiry, knowledge is instrumental to the resolution of problems. This continuity between nonreflective experience, concrete reflection and abstract reflection is at the heart of Dewey’s pragmatism, and it is primarily informed by Peirce.

Two types of reflective experience: incidental and regulated The detailed expression of a coherent theory of experience begins with reflective experience, with inquiry, as this is the centerpiece of Dewey’s theory of experience. The focus of Dewey’s inquiry is inquiry itself. His logical theory is premised on an “inquiry into inquiry,” “a circular process” that does “not depend on anything extraneous to inquiry” (1938b: 20). Thus “reflective inquiries themselves exist and are had in direct experience as other things are had. They are then capable of being made the objects of reflective inquiry” (1930a: 178). Furthermore, “when so inquired into, their distinctive properties are ascertained” (p. 178). Being self contained in this circular way of inquiry into inquiry means that logic is “autonomous” (1938b: 20). However, autonomy does not here signal some transcendent position, but rather the opposite. Such a method “precludes resting logic upon metaphysical and epistemological

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assumptions and presuppositions” (p. 21). Therefore, “the latter are to be determined, if at all, by means of what is disclosed as the outcome of inquiry. They are not to be shoved under inquiry as its ‘foundation’” (p. 21). Such autonomous logic, as inquiry, always begins with a problematic situation, as “all reflective inquiry starts from a problematic situation” (Dewey 1929c: 189). In an unproblematic situation, “inquiry does not take place at all, because no problem or difficulty in the quality of the experience has presented itself to provoke reflection” (1903: 11). Thus “the most ‘natural’ thing for anyone to do is to go ahead; that is to say, to act overtly” (1933a: 107). In other words, it is considered more natural to continue acting overtly than to stop and think about something. Continuing to do what one is already doing is a normal state of affairs, but “the disturbed and perplexed situation arrests such direct activity temporarily” (p. 107). When a problem is encountered it can be difficult to proceed with normal activity, so reflective thinking is engaged in order to attempt to rectify the situation. Hence Dewey (p. 15) regards “the origin of thinking” – that is, of reflective thinking – as “some perplexity, confusion, or doubt.” As such he (1939: 559) identifies “the function of a problematic situation in regulating as well as evoking inquiry” as “the controlling factor” in his “entire view.” Hence, “the two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled or confused situation at the beginning and a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation at the close. The first of these situations may be called pre-reflective” (Dewey 1933a: 106). A pre-reflective problematic situation “sets the problem to be solved; out of it grows the question that reflection has to answer” (p. 107).“In the final solution,” when “the doubt has been dispelled,” then “the situation is postreflective; there results a direct experience of mastery, satisfaction, enjoyment” (p. 107). Dewey (1938b: 104–105) condenses this understanding of inquiry into a definition: “Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.” It is with this understanding of inquiry that Dewey (1938b: 64) judges “the old phrase ‘stop and think’ to be ‘sound psychology.’” “Thinking” is then “stoppage of the immediate manifestation of impulse until that impulse has been brought into connection with other possible tendencies to action so that a more comprehensive and coherent plan of activity is formed” (p. 64). Such reflective thinking is concerned with connections and consequences, and thus with planned action, rather than just with action per se. “Thinking enables us to direct our activities with foresight and to plan according to ends-in-view, or purposes of which we are aware” (1933a: 17). In effect, “it enables us to act in deliberate and intentional fashion to attain future objects or to come into command of what is now distant and lacking” (p. 17). In order to encapsulate this broad account of reflective thinking, Dewey (1916b: 176) endeavors to set out its “general features.” He identifies five steps or phases. They are (i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in an incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined; (ii) a

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conjectural anticipation – a tentative interpretation of the given elements, attributing to them a tendency to effect certain consequences; (iii) a careful survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of all attainable consideration which will define and clarify the problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent, because squaring with a wider range of facts; (v) taking one stand upon the projected hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing something overtly to bring about the anticipated result, and thereby testing the hypothesis. (Dewey 1916b: 176) Within this description of reflective experience Dewey perceives a distinction based on relative levels of cognition. These “two types of experience” (1916b: 169) – both forms of reflective cognitive experience – are distinguished “according to the proportion of reflection found in them.” The less reflective type of cognitive experience proceeds via a “trial and error method” (p. 170) in a more practical or action-orientated sense. “We simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and keep on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then we adopt that method as a rule-of-thumb measure in subsequent procedure” (pp. 169–170). Furthermore, “some experiences have very little else in them than this hit and miss or succeed process” (p. 170). However, such a trial and error method neglects aspects of the problem. “We see that a certain way of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not see how they are. We do not see the details of the connection; the links are missing. Our discernment is very gross” (p. 170). This less reflective type of cognitive experience can be engaged to sort through basic problems in a trial and error way, although it is concrete in its approach and not always effective. In order to deal more thoroughly with a problem, a more reflective type of cognitive experience is needed, one which can access abstract reflection. This more reflective reflection is evident in the general features of reflective experience that Dewey lays out, where “it is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and error plane. They make thinking itself into an experience” (1916b: 176). When Dewey refers to reflective thinking per se he is usually embracing steps three and four. Steps two and five are still reflective thinking, only of the less reflective type. Step one is ambiguous in relation to reflection (since it is the initial impetus for reflection in pre-reflective experience), and there is also perhaps a step six; these steps refer to the beginnings and endings of reflective thinking in non-reflective (prereflective and post-reflective) experience (Figure 2.1). This distinction between the two types of cognitive experience can be described as “one between what is experienced as the result of a minimum of incidental reflection and what is experienced in consequence of continued and regulated reflective inquiry” (1929a: 6–7). Regulated reflection moves beyond incidental reflection – that form of reflection contained by the concrete actuality

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Figure 2.1 A diagrammatical representation of the logical movements in Dewey’s (1916b: 176) general features of reflective (and non-reflective: steps one and six) experience, noting the distinction between the trial and error method (steps two and five) and the distinctively reflective phase (steps three and four)

of the interaction – to more clearly discern the problem, as well as the relations or connections amongst the matters being considered in the problem, thereby enabling a mediation of these relations. However, a move to the regulated reflection of steps three and four always requires a move back to incidental reflection, the less reflective type of cognitive experience, in order to return to the actual practical interactions that constituted the problem in the first place. “We never get wholly beyond the trial and error situation. Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be tried in the world and thereby tried out” (1916b: 177). In an effort to convey and not lose the methodological association he perceives between the two types of reflective cognitive experience, an association central to his reintegration of logic, Dewey (1929a: 7) describes the less reflective concrete cognitive experience as “primary” and the more regulated abstract reflective experience as “secondary” (Figure 2.1). He draws a “contrast between gross, macroscopic, crude subject matters in primary experience and the refined, derived objects of reflection” (p. 6).Thus “our primary experience as it comes is of little value for purposes of analysis and control, crammed as it is with things that need analysis and control” (p. 31).

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So Dewey definitely comprehends the importance of secondary experience to inquiry, but a major contribution of his logic is in theorizing the dependence of secondary experience on primary experience, an insight which he also discerns in Peirce’s work. Dewey (1932: 221) believes that Peirce’s “notion of philosophy will dominate thought in some future time,” perhaps due to its “similarity” to his own conception “that the starting point and the ultimate test of philosophy is what I have called gross or macroscopic experience.”

Interaction between organism and environment Because it is gross or macroscopic, primary experience (secondness) is only able to be reflectively thought in a trial and error way; it equates to the actuality of interaction, the practicality of secondness, “in all its heterogeneity and fullness” (Dewey 1929a: 33). However, in acknowledgment of existence as twofold, Dewey also describes “primary experience” (p. 15) as “direct,” immediate or individual. This form of “primary experience is innocent of the discrimination of the what experienced and the how, or mode, of experiencing” (1916a: 136fn– 137fn). “We are not in it aware of the seeing, nor yet the objects as something seen. Any experience in all of its non-reflective phases is innocent of any discrimination of subject and object” (p. 137fn). Hence primary experience, existence, is both individual (indivisible) and interaction (Figure 2.1). However, while Dewey acknowledges the importance of understanding primary experience as individual, his emphasis is chiefly on interaction. Dewey (1946: 90) quotes a passage from Peirce that he believes to be “both representative and conclusive” in order to more fully express this particular understanding of secondness. This passage highlights the actuality of interaction. We are continually bumping against hard fact. … There can be no resistance without effort; there can be no effort without resistance. They are only two ways of describing the same experience. It is a double consciousness. … As the consciousness itself is two-sided, so it has also two varieties; namely action, where our modification of other things is more prominent than their reaction on us, and perception, where their effect on us is overwhelmingly greater than our effect on them. And this notion, of being such as other things make us, is such a prominent part of our life that we conceive other things also to exist in virtue of their reactions against each other. The idea of other, of not, becomes a very pivot of thought. To this element I give the name of Secondness. (Peirce 1931/1903b: 162, as cited in Dewey 1946: 90) Due to his pragmatic preoccupation with functional relations, Dewey focuses intently on this interactional emphasis in secondness, rather than on individuality. He (1946: 90) argues that “in its ‘two-sidedness’”13 (the two sides here are those involved in interaction, not the twofold of existence)

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this description of experience as interaction “anticipates what James, later, but probably independently, called double-barrelledness of experience.” This is in contrast to “the single-barrelled terms of ‘thought’ and ‘thing’” (James 1912: 10), where each is considered as separate. Dewey (1929a: 10) affirms that “‘experience’ is what James called a double-barrelled word. Like its congeners, life and history, it includes what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure,” and, in addition, “also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine – in short, processes of experiencing.” In this double-barrelled sense Dewey (1917a: 11) considers “experience” to be “a matter of simultaneous doings and sufferings. Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of events; our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves.” Importantly, this reaction is a relationship. “An experience has pattern and structure, because it is not just doing and undergoing in alternation, but consists of them in relationship” (1934b: 44). Hence “a separation of the active doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience” (1916b: 177). Experience is a matter of interaction of organism with its environment, an environment that is human as well as physical, that includes the materials of tradition and institutions as well as local surroundings. The organism brings with it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the interaction. The self acts as well as undergoes, and its undergoings are not impressions stamped upon an inert wax but depend upon the way the organism reacts and responds. There is no experience in which the human contribution is not a factor in determining what actually happens. (Dewey 1934b: 246) Simultaneous doing and undergoing, involving experienced and experiencing, what and how, is an interaction or “a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment” (Dewey 1938a: 43). In other words, the doublebarreledness of experience can be understood, in terms adapted from biology, as an interaction or transaction between an organism and its environment. “No organism is so isolated that it can be understood apart from the environment in which it lives” (1930b: 411). Organism and environment are related in the way of doing and undergoing. Environment is never separate from organism; rather, organism and environment are entwined in interaction. Dewey (1938b: 33) acknowledges that “a natural world … exists independently of the organism,” but he also stipulates that “this world is environment only as it enters directly and indirectly into life-functions.”“Environment, therefore, is not equivalent merely to surrounding physical conditions. There may be much in the physical surroundings to which an organism is irresponsive; such conditions are no part of its true environment” (1911c: 487). “The environment, in other words, is whatever conditions interact with personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the experience which is had” (1938a: 44). Hence “the words ‘environment,’ ‘medium’ denote something more than surroundings

Reflective experience and the logical difference 31 which encompass an individual. They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies” (1916b: 13). Some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him. The things with which a man varies are his genuine environment.Thus the activities of the astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about which he calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is most intimately his environment. (Dewey 1916b: 13) So “every experience in its direct occurrence is an interaction of environing conditions and an organism. As such it contains in a fused union some what experienced and some processes of experiencing” (Dewey 1939: 544). This means that “no complete account of what is experienced … can be given until we know how it is experienced or the mode of experiencing that enters into its formation” (1930b: 417). However, this is not to be understood such that “organism and environment are ‘given’ as independent things and interaction is a third independent thing which finally intervenes” (1938b: 33). This is why Dewey refers to interaction as an integration or transaction.“Integration is more fundamental than is the distinction designated by interaction of organism and environment” (p. 34). The “interaction is the primary fact, and it constitutes a trans-action” (1930b: 411). Hence, “the processes of living are enacted by the environment as truly as by the organism; for they are an integration” (1938b: 25). An experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment, whether the latter consists of persons with whom he is talking about some topic or event, the subject talked about being also a part of the situation; or the toys which he is playing with; the book he is reading (in which his environing conditions at the time may be England or ancient Greece or an imaginary region); or the materials of an experiment he is performing. (Dewey 1938a: 43–44) Thus, “even when a person builds a castle in the air he is interacting with the objects which he constructs on fancy” (Dewey 1938a: 44). Dewey (1938b: 25) further attempts to clarify this notion of environment by emphasizing that “an organism does not live in an environment,” like an object contained in a box of other, separate things; instead, “it lives by means of an environment.” So interaction “assigns equal rights to both factors in experience – objective and internal conditions” (1938a: 42), environment and organism. “Any normal experience is an interplay of these two conditions. Taken together, or in their interaction, they form what we call a situation” (p. 42). In this way a situation is analogous to primary experience, as “the conceptions of situation and of interaction are inseparable from each other” (p. 43).

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A situation includes the what and the how, environment and organism, in a double-barrelled interaction of simultaneous doing and undergoing. It is only in the regulated (not incidental) reflection of secondary experience that these are discriminated and the barrels split from each other. “Only by analysis and selective abstraction can we differentiate the actual occurrence into two factors, one called organism and the other, environment” (Dewey 1930b: 411). So while “‘thing’ and ‘thought’, as James says …, are single-barrelled; they refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience” (1929a: 11). Therefore primary experience “is ‘double-barrelled,’ in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality” (pp. 10–11). As an unanalyzed totality of interaction, primary experience is still able to be thought in a trial and error manner, but this incidental reflection is not analysis in the way of secondary experience. Secondary experience involves a more regulated reflective cognition that emerges from and returns to primary experience. This functional connection between primary and secondary experience is at the heart of Dewey’s reintegration of philosophy, his theory of inquiry, as well as his application of philosophy in education. Dewey’s “technical definition of education” (1916b: 89–90) defines education as “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.” Such reconstruction involves the relation between secondary experience and primary experience.

Three modes of relation (not two) Signs and symbols Aligned with his identification of two types of reflective cognitive experience, Dewey recognizes two types of sign. It is in this regard that his understanding of signs is important, for it further elucidates his views on reflective experience and inquiry. Dewey (1938b: 51) prefers to “mark the difference” between these two types of sign “by confining the application of sign to so-called ‘natural signs’ – employing symbol to designate ‘artificial signs.’” For Dewey a natural sign is “an actual existence” that “points to” or “is evidence of ” some other actual existence (p. 51), such as the existence of smoke pointing to the existence of fire (both are actual existences). In this sense natural signs are “non-symbolic objects” (1916a: 226). A natural sign acts like an index referencing something else that is also a natural sign. Hence, a “natural sign” is an “actual quality,” or “something that exists in an actual spatial-temporal context” (1938b: 52). In contrast to natural signs are symbols, artificial signs, which are synonymous with the notion of “a word as a word, that is, as a meaning carried by language in a system” (Dewey 1938b: 51). So, while “a word, [or] an algebraic sign, is just as much a concrete existence as a horse, a fire-engine, or a flyspeck … its value resides in its representative character” (1916a: 226). Symbols (artificial signs) are words or numerical characters, meaningfully structured in propositions

Reflective experience and the logical difference 33 or formulae, which re-present (natural) signs. Symbols are also different to signs in that they can release a meaning from its associations with a specific concrete context such that this meaning is instead carried in a scientific or abstract language system, a “system of symbols, notably in mathematics, where the system determines the meaning of any particular symbol” (1931b: 205). Here a meaning is able to be abstracted such that it is “liberated with respect to its representative function” (1938b: 52) and “no longer tied down.” It can then “be related to other meanings in the language-system” (p. 52). The greater capacity of symbols for manipulation is of practical importance. But it pales in comparison with the fact that symbols introduce into inquiry a dimension different from that of existence. Clouds of certain shapes, size and color may signify to us the probability of rain; they portend rain. But the word cloud when it is brought into connection with other words of a symbol-constellation enable us to relate the meaning of being a cloud with such different matters as differences of temperature and pressures, the rotation of the earth, the laws of motion, and so on. (Dewey 1938b: 53) Dewey identifies three modes of relation concerning signs and symbols: “(1) Symbols are ‘related’ directly to one another; (2) they are ‘related’ to existence by the mediating intervention of existential operations;” and, “(3) existences are ‘related’ to one another in the evidential sign-signified function” (1938b: 55). However, while the relations between symbols (1) and the relations between signs (3) are generally acknowledged, the operational mode of relation (2) is often overlooked, resulting in a division within logic between symbols and signs, with symbols taken to be formal or non-existential in isolation of signs, which are concrete or existential.This division equates to that between primary and secondary experience. It is especially visible from the side of symbols when they are employed in distinctively reflective reasoning or discourse and thus are considered purely formal. “The relations of terms and propositions in discourse is such as to make possible purely formal statements” (p. 280). Here “purely formal” is meant “in the sense that it is the very nature of ordered discourse to deal with possibilities in abstraction from existential material” (p. 280). However, understanding symbols and reasoning in this way “fails to provide the logical ground for discourse and its forms, and to provide a rational explanation of their applicability to existence” (p. 280). In other words, without understanding all three modes of relation involving signs and symbols there is a disconnection in logic. Having introduced these three modes of relation Dewey highlights a further issue, namely the obscurity surrounding the distinction between each of the three modes. In this he is concerned to “avoid … the disastrous doctrinal confusion that arises from the ambiguity of the word relation” (1938b: 55). Attempting to move beyond this confusion, he stipulates the use of different terms for each mode of relation. “The word relation” (p. 55) he employs “to

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designate the kind of ‘relation’ which symbol-meanings bear to one another as symbol-meanings”, while he uses “the term reference to designate the kind of relation they [symbols] sustain to existence.” He applies “the words connection (and involvement) to designate that kind of relation sustained by things [as signsignificances] to one another” (p. 55). Facts and ideas The three modes of relation are encapsulated in Dewey’s understanding of inquiry. Inquiry reveals the interplay of relations between existential signs and non-existential symbols. In an analogous way inquiry can be portrayed as a set of relations involving facts (as data) and ideas (suggested solutions that reconstruct these facts). Facts, like existential signs, are of primary experience, while ideas, like non-existential symbols, are commonly associated with secondary experience14 (Figure 2.2). “Data (facts) and ideas (suggestions, possible solutions) thus form the two indispensable and correlative factors in all reflective activity” (Dewey 1933a: 104). Facts are existential and constituted by signs, while ideas, as ideas, are non-existential and constituted by symbols. “Ideas as ideas … would not exist were it not for symbols and meanings as distinct from signs and significances” (1938b: 53). However, facts and ideas are operationally related through inquiry. Inquiry underpins the reference relation between signs and symbols, facts and ideas.The problem of the division in logic is therefore “insoluble” unless “it is recognized that both observed facts and entertained ideas are operational” (p. 112). Inquiry begins with the facts or subject-matter of primary experience. “The subject-matter of primary experience sets the problems and furnishes the first data of reflection which constructs the secondary objects” (Dewey 1929a: 7). The secondary objects are ideas, and the subject-matter of primary experience is the content of these ideas. So “when it is necessary to refer to subject-matter in the context of either observation or ideation, the name content will be used” (1938b: 119). As content, this material is involved in forming the “suggested solutions for the difficulties disclosed by observation” (1933a: 104). There is thus “a time” in any investigation when “meaning is only suggested; when we hold it in suspense as a possibility rather than accept it as an actuality. Then the meaning is an idea. An idea thus stands midway between assured understanding and mental confusion and bafflement” (p. 132). Ideas are operational in that they instigate and direct further operations of observation; they are proposals and plans for acting upon existing conditions to bring new facts to light and to organize all the selected facts into a coherent whole. (Dewey 1938b: 112–113) In the regulated reflection of secondary experience, ideas are suggestions as to the reorganization or reconstruction of the facts of the problematic situation.

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Figure 2.2 The operation of inquiry showing the three different modes of relation in Dewey’s attempts to forge a coherent theory of experience

When a particular idea is settled on it is tried out such that the contents of this idea then become objects and therefore existential: “The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry” (Dewey 1938b: 119). Thus “ideas are anticipatory plans and designs which take effect in concrete reconstructions of antecedent conditions of existence” (1929c: 166–167). However, “only execution of existential operations directed by an idea in which ratiocination terminates can bring about the re-ordering of environing conditions required to produce a settled and unified situation” (1938b: 118). Involvement, inference and implication Dewey refers to the operational relation between facts and ideas, signs and symbols, as inference (Figure 2.2). By way of inference one infers, or forms an idea that offers a possible reconstruction of the relevant facts. “This process of arriving at an idea of what is absent on the basis of what is at hand is inference” (1933a: 95). Inference works operationally with facts and ideas, signs and symbols. Dewey emphasizes the association between inference and the involvement relation within primary experience by declaring “inference” to be “conditional upon an existential connection which may be called involvement” (p. 278). As a consequence of this dependence “the sign-significance relation defines inference” (p. 54); it underpins it, but it does not constitute inference in its entirety. The existential operation of inference, dependent on involvement, operates with the reference of sign to symbol, fact to idea. In this process, “what is present carries or bears the mind over to the idea and ultimately acceptance of something else” (p. 95). Every inference therefore involves “a jump from the

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known into the unknown,” or “a leap beyond what is given and already established” (p. 96). The inference, as both fact and idea, is focused on a future situation that is resolved, thereby transforming in thought the confusion of the present problematic situation: “An idea may be formed on the basis of presented fact (which is not the reality of which there is the idea) which may succeed in transforming the given fact, the fact there, into a complete reality, the reality in which the idea is true” (1907: 258). Thus in its basic form (without regulated reflection) Dewey considers inference to be a trial and error method that holds both facts and ideas together. However, the success of any inference will most likely be improved if the more regulated reflection of secondary experience is engaged. Dewey refers to this regulated reflection of secondary experience as reasoning or implication: “The process of developing the bearings – or, as they are more technically termed, the implications – of any idea with respect to any problem, is termed reasoning” (1910b: 75). Dewey (1938b: 54) defines “reasoning or ordered discourse” as the “development of symbol-meanings in relation to one another.” Reasoning is therefore “the operation of relating ideas to one another, without having to depend upon the observations of the senses” (1933a: 112). Here “meanings” are taken to be “[artificial] signs [i.e. symbols] which imply other meanings” (1916a: 52). “As soon as a meaning is treated as a meaning, it becomes a member of a system of meanings” (1938b: 301), a language system. However, the term “reasoning” becomes problematic because it is “sometimes used to designate inference as well as ratiocination” (Dewey 1938b: 111fn). Furthermore, “when so used in logic the tendency is to identify inference and implication and thereby seriously to confuse logical theory” (p. 111fn). In other words, inference and implication are commonly conflated in logical theory. To distinguish inference from reasoning Dewey points out that, just “as an idea is inferred from given facts, so reasoning sets out from an idea” (1910b: 75–76). However, the possibility of conflation remains. As a consequence he increasingly opts to refer to reasoning using the phrase “implication in discourse” in order to distinguish it from inference (1938b: 54). This “relation of implication” (p. 301) describes the relations amongst abstract symbols in a language system of meanings.

The logical difference Generalization as generic and universal Involvement, inference and implication describe the three modes of relation which structure Dewey’s understanding of inquiry, his theory of logic. Problematically, however, the difference between inference and implication tends to be overlooked in logical theory because both employ symbols (inference is also concerned with signs), and therefore both are conflated as reasoning. The concealment of this difference results in a neglect of inference in comparison with implication, removing the operational reference that inference provides with involvement. Also, “the confusion, when inference is

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treated as identical with implication, has been a powerful agency in creating the doctrinal conception that logic is purely formal” (Dewey 1938b: 54). The “logical difference” (1936a: 674) between inference and implication must therefore be acknowledged so that the phases of inquiry can be more clearly discerned and appreciated (Figure 2.3). For “logic can be a coherent and unified theory only as it brings implication and inference into relation with each other” (1936b: 288). This requires comprehending the logical difference between secondness and thirdness (primary experience and secondary experience). Without such comprehension, inference is conflated with implication (but not with involvement), thereby resulting in the perception of a division between existential involvement and non-existential implication that leaves logic confused. Highlighting this confusion in the understanding of logic and experience, Dewey (1938b: 367) points out that “current logical formalism in logic claims to be allied exclusively with non-existential propositions such as are exemplified in mathematics, while at the same time it recognizes propositions of existential import.” This confusion also pertains to understanding what is meant by the term general in logic, “confusing two modes of the general, the generic and the universal” (p. 367). Dewey is aware that “‘general’ as a logical term is ambivalent,” for “it is employed to designate both the generic and the universal” (p. 354).“No point has been more disputed in logic and philosophy than the true nature of the general,” he argues (1911d: 171). The general is concerned with generalization and can be understood as both generic (in the sense of pertaining to a specific group like a genus) and universal. “Contemporary logical writings are full of the confusion of the generic (general) and the universal” (1936c: 258). Logical confusion occurs “because generalizations of the generic and universal form are identified with each other” (1938b: 443).This same ambivalence and confusion hampers awareness of the difference between inference and implication. “The difference [between generic and universal] is intimately connected with that which exists between inference and implication” (1936c: 255). “The confusion of the two” – generic and universal, inference and implication – results in a “failure to observe the logical difference of the existential and non-existential, the factual and ideational” (Dewey 1938b: 354, italics added). Importantly, this logical difference is between inference (primary experience), an existential operation using symbols while grounded in involvement, and implication (secondary experience), which is nonexistential. Hence, “the difference in question is between propositions of existential (and contingent) import and those of non-existential and necessary or universal import” (1936c: 255). Dewey (1936a: 673) believes that this “confusion has arisen in logical theory” because “universal if-then propositions” composed of “abstract terms” are “not definitely and consistently marked off from propositions that are general in the sense of generic, that is, referring to kinds, the latter being designated linguistically by common nouns instead of abstract nouns.” However, while it is not normally emphasized, he considers this logical difference to be commonly perceived.

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“I take it there is general acknowledgment that a radical difference is found between universal and particular propositions. The latter alone are existential in import, the former being hypothetical or of the ‘if-then’ type” (1929d: 701). Generic propositions and universal propositions Using the example proposition “‘All men are mortal,’” Dewey (1936a: 675) demonstrates how this proposition may be interpreted in two ways across the logical difference. It “may be interpreted to mean there is a relation between being human and being mortal. In that case, it is an if-then proposition, free from existential reference; it expresses a relation of abstract characters” (p. 675).15 The most important aspect of this interpretation is its concern with the ifthen relation. Here, it means “‘if anything whatever is human, then that thing is mortal.’ Such a proposition does not affirm that any man exists” (1936c: 254). Instead “it states a relation, taken to be necessary, between the characters or attributes being human and being mortal” (p. 254). This is a universal proposition expressing an implicatory relation. Therefore, in Dewey’s terms it is a definition, in contrast to a description. Hence it highlights “the logical difference between description, propositions that state things are so-andso, and definitions, which affirm a relation being [between] such-and-such characters” (p. 256) (Figure 2.3). However, Dewey recognizes that this same example proposition can also be interpreted existentially as a generic proposition, an inference. Thus “‘All men are mortal’” affirms in a concrete sense that “‘every human being who has ever existed, now exists, or will exist in the future has died or will die’” (1936c: 254). Such an inference supports the notion “that certain observed qualities

Figure 2.3 The range of different terms Dewey employs to convey the nature of the logical difference between inference and implication (secondness and thirdness)

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of a thing or event are … evidential signs of something not now observed, but which has nevertheless existence somewhere in the space-time world” (p. 255). Dewey refers to such concrete, immediate and individual “qualities” as “characteristics,” which differ from abstract “characters” or attributes (p. 255). In a collective sense these characteristics or qualities are known to Dewey as kinds. Thus in the example proposition, “the term ‘all’” refers to “a collection, which is existential” (p. 254). As existential, this collection is “about kinds,” in contrast to classes. Dewey suggests “that the term ‘class’ be restricted to the modes that are determined by definition, or an if-then proposition” (p. 259). However, he also acknowledges the confusion caused by the fact that these terms, kind and class, are taken to be “synonymous” in “taxonomic classification.” The specific kind in Dewey’s example is the collection of all human beings understood in a concrete, existential way. In contrast, being human is considered an abstract class. Dewey recognizes the difficulty posed by the structure of language in conveying this logical difference. “Unless there are words which mark off the two kinds of relations in their distinctive capacities and offices, with reference to existence, there is danger that two things as logically unlike as inference and implication will be confused” (1938b: 54). However, “if the particular names given are objected to [i.e. the names Dewey has introduced to highlight the logical difference, such as description and definition (Figure 2.3)], some other words must be found if we are to avoid basic confusion in logical theory” (1936c: 255). Dewey (1936c: 255) is aware that “in [everyday] language, the difference in question is expressed by ‘concrete’ and abstract words. It is the difference expressed linguistically by red and redness, by heavy and weight, by hot and heat, by just and justice, by man and humanness,” where the former of each pair is concrete and the latter abstract. “Words designating immediately experienced qualities” are thus “concrete par excellence. For example, sweet, hard, red, loud when they are used to characterize observed subject-matter so as to discriminate and identify it: that is, as evidential marks or signs” (1938b: 351). In contrast, abstract words are “taken without reference to actual application to things, for example, sweetness, solidity, redness, loudness, presence, absence, position, location, fatherhood, angularity, etc.” (p. 351). However, “while certain verbal endings, such as -ity, -ness, and -tion are characteristic of abstract words, the English language gives no sure indication in its verbal forms of the force of a word” (1936c: 255); that is, whether a word is concrete or abstract, descriptive or definitional (Figure 2.3). When we say “The leaves are turning color,” we are referring to an existential quality. But there is no word “colority” or “colorness” in common use. Yet in physical science, “color” stands for a definition; it formulates a relation of characters of the nature of periodic vibrations to other characters of radiation and absorption – vibration, absorption and radiation being abstract nouns. There is the same difference between what is defined in this formula

40

A coherent theory of experience and color as a quality as there is between the T [temperature] of physics and hot and cold as existential qualities. (Dewey 1936c: 255)

Hence “redness, blueness, whiteness are ways of being colority, not kinds of color (in the concrete), like red, blue and white” (Dewey 1938b: 259).“Whiteness does not designate a color as a quality at all. It designates a certain way or mode of being colority, the abstract universal” (p. 258). Here Dewey labels abstract universals as attributes in contrast to existential qualities. “Any quality has temporo-spatial import; attributes appear only in if-then propositions” (1936c: 253).

Common sense and scientific thinking The logical difference between generic and universal propositions is a difference in meaning.This “difference in the two types of language meanings fundamentally fixes the difference between what is called common sense and what is called science” (Dewey 1938b: 50). “In the vernacular” or common sense language use, “the mind proceeds directly from the symbol to the thing signified” (1916b: 259). This is the reference from symbol to sign. “Association with familiar material is so close that the mind does not pause upon the [artificial] sign. The [artificial] signs are intended only to stand for things and acts [which are natural signs]” (pp. 259–260). However, “scientific terminology has an additional use. It is designed, as we have seen, not to stand for the things directly in their practical use in experience, but for the things placed in a cognitive system” (p. 260). Common sense is concerned with the concrete connections amongst qualities and kinds; science is about the relations of characters and classes formulated in abstract language systems as in the disciplines. This is a distinction equivalent to “the difference between uncritical and critical thinking” (1922a: 31). In uncritical common sense … inferences are drawn on the basis of qualities of things, the qualities being selected for logically irrelevant reasons; such as their intensity, frequency of appearance, congeniality to our emotions, etc. The laws or principles of science state those operations by the consequences of which we can determine what qualities are evidential signs and what are not. (Dewey 1936b: 284) Thus “common sense inquiries are concerned with qualitative matter and operations upon their distinction from scientific inquiries” (Dewey 1938b: 65). Unlike science, common sense remains within inference, accepting in judgment the meanings suggested by way of a trial and error method, without extending the inquiry to reasoning with implicatory relations. “One of the most marked differences between poor thinking and good thinking is the former’s premature acceptance and assertion of suggested meanings. One of the marks of controlled thinking is postponement of such acceptance” (1922a: 31). This postponement

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of acceptance of suggested meanings for the purpose of critical thinking enables a clarification of the problem as well as a check of the implications of ideas – steps three and four in Dewey’s general features of reflective experience (Figure 2.1). “In critical or scientific inquiry great pains are taken to secure an accurate specification and collection of observed data as the means of control” (p. 32). Dewey regards “this ‘step’” to be “the characteristic trait of scientific induction” (p. 32). However, this does not mean “that suggestions do not arise until this step is taken. On the contrary suggestions swarm and press for acceptance. That is the very danger against which systematically executed analytic observation protects us” (p. 32). The distinction between common sense and science, uncritical and critical thinking, distinguishes the move from inference to implication across the logical difference, from generic to universal propositions and meanings, a move that “divests experienced things of their qualities” (Dewey 1929c: 137). “This removal, judged from the standpoint of the whole operation of which it is one part, is a condition of the control which enables us to endow the objects of experience with other qualities which we want them to have” (p. 137). Scientific inquiry enables the significances of qualities to be reconstructed by liberating them from a concrete situation through the use of attributes in their stead, and exploring the implications of any suggested reformulations in meaning. However, such exploration via ideas and disciplinary language systems eventually requires judgments to be made. “Unless the pertinence and force of each seemingly evidential fact and seemingly explanatory idea is judged, appraised, the mind goes on a wild-goose chase” (Dewey 1933a: 125–126). “To judge is to render determinate; to determine is to order and organize, to relate in definite fashion” (1938b: 221). However,“judgment is not something occurring all at once. Since it is a manifestation of inquiry, it cannot be instantaneous and yet be inquiry” (p. 133). The operation of inquiry involves many “partial judgments” (p. 133) before any “final judgment” can be attained. Thus, beyond simple trial and error judgments, the first check is a partial judgment involving the relation of implication. Here “the condition to be satisfied in reasoning or discourse is constituted by the implicatory relation” (p. 278). This is a check “in thought to see whether different elements in the suggestion are coherent with one another” (1933a: 97). The check upon immediate acceptance is the examination of the meaning as a meaning. This examination consists in noting what the meaning in question implies in relation to other meanings in the system of which it is a member, the formulated relation constituting a proposition. If such and such a relation of meanings is accepted, then we are committed to such and such a relation of meanings because of their membership in the same system. (Dewey 1938b: 111) Science, regulated reflection, is focused on securing a better order amongst abstract relations of meaning in an abstract language system. Yet this is always

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A coherent theory of experience

only an intermediate step in the process of inquiry. The “scientific subjectmatter” of reflective experience is only ever “intermediate, not final and complete in itself ” (Dewey 1938b: 66). Thus, following a check in implication and before any particular test for concrete verification can be conducted, a concretion of the abstract universal proposition (or propositions) is required, a shift in meaning from universal to generic proposition. This is because “ultimately” the scientific words so important for implication must denote “the things of our common-sense acquaintance” (1916b: 260). So, in order to “secure” the “existential application” of an if-then proposition, “there must be an independent particular proposition asserting the existence of something having the properties denoted by the ‘if ’ clause” (1929d: 701). In other words, “when we can establish a relation between one character of being such-andsuch and another such-and-such character [implicatory relation], we can direct experimental observation to determine whether the conditions are present that as characteristic traits, warrant an inference” (1936b: 284). In short, a check is made to see whether an abstract implicatory relation can be translated meaningfully into a concrete inference. However, this move from science back into common sense is no simple fait accompli, for “the return road into common sense is devious and blocked by existing social conditions” (Dewey 1938b: 77). Dewey recognizes that while developing “an adequate statement and understanding of a new view is all one with ability to see its connections, continuities and completions of what went before” (1927b: 2), there is a problem to be faced in that “the establishment of these continuities demand[s] a recasting, a re-seeing, of old beliefs, and the latter resist modification even more than refractory physical substances.” He is keenly aware that “old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference” (1910a: 19).

Knowledge as instrument The habits of common sense are such that any generic proposition remains conditional until tested, and “while a meaning is conditionally accepted, accepted for use and trial, it is an idea, a supposal” (Dewey 1933a: 132). The testing of any judgment necessitates putting an idea into practical action. The existential situation provides the test for the universal proposition “by action to see whether the consequences that are anticipated in thought occur in fact” (p. 97). For “meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behaving toward facts,” and therefore “active experimentation is essential to verification” (1916a: 332). Therefore, “we have to act in order to discover the conditions underlying the ‘if ’ in physical matters” (1931c: 277). “Test and verification is secured only by return to the things of crude or macroscopic experience – the sun, earth, plants and animals of common, everyday life” (1929a: 7).Without such testing, implication and inference remain isolated from involvement.

Reflective experience and the logical difference 43 Abstraction from use in special and direct situations was coincident with the formation of a science of ideas, of meanings, whose relations to one another rather than to things was the goal of thought. It is a process, however, which is subject to interpretation by a fallacy. Independence from any specified application is readily taken to be equivalent to independence from application as such; it is as if specialists, engaged in perfecting tools and having no concern with their use and so interested in the operation of perfecting that they carry results beyond any existing possibilities of use, were to argue that therefore they are dealing with an independent realm having no connection with tools or utilities. (Dewey 1929c: 154) Dewey explicitly warns that “when intellectual experience is taken to be primary, the cord that binds experience and nature is cut” (1929a: 23). As a result “there is no verification, no effort even to test and check” (p. 8) the validity of the objects of secondary experience. “Not tested by being employed to see what it leads to in ordinary experience and what new meanings it contributes, this subject-matter becomes arbitrary, aloof ” (pp. 8–9). Without such testing, universal propositions remain “‘abstract’ when that word is used in a bad sense to designate something which exclusively occupies a realm of its own without contact with the things of ordinary experience” (p. 9). Here the “abstract” is regarded as “the unduly abstruse, the excessively theoretical and useless”, in that it means “abstraction arrested, so that it has become an end in itself instead of a preliminary to recognition of a general principle” (1911e: 14). However, with a successful test, generic propositions and supporting universal propositions are verified and positively accepted; abstract is operationally connected with concrete. Primary experience, now reconstructed, resumes. “If not, there is frustration, and inquiry continues” (Dewey 1916a: 13). However, when an idea is “positively accepted, some object or event” is then “understood” (1933a: 132). Furthermore, “to understand is to grasp meaning” (p. 132). “All knowing, including all scientific inquiry, aims at clothing things and events with meaning – at understanding them” (p. 138). So “until we understand, we are, if we have curiosity, troubled, baffled, and hence moved to inquire.After we understand, we are, comparatively at least, intellectually at home” (p. 132). The function of the “objects attained in reflection” is therefore to “explain the primary objects” so as to “enable us to grasp them with understanding, instead of just having sensecontact with them” (1929a: 7).Then the “return to experienced things is of such a sort that the meaning, the significant content, of what is experienced gains an enriched and expanded force” (p. 8). Once accepted in this way, “meaning is so consolidated with a thing that we do not dream of separating the thing from its significance” (1933a: 149). Accordingly “a known object, a thing understood, a thing with a meaning” are “all three … synonymous expressions” (p. 137). When positively accepted, “meanings get standardized; they become logical concepts” (Dewey 1933a: 126). “These established meanings, taken to be secure and warranted, are conceptions” (p. 149).“Conceptions standardize our knowledge.

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They introduce solidity into what would otherwise be formless, and permanence into what would otherwise be shifting” (p. 150). Such standardization makes generalization possible, for “without this conceptualizing or intellectualizing, nothing is gained that can be carried over to the better understanding of new experiences” (p. 153). In other words, the relevance of conceptions is not constrained to the specific inquiry in which these are developed. “Conceptions enable us to generalize, to extend and carry over our understanding from one thing to another” (p. 150).Thus “intellectualization is the deposit of an idea that is both definite and general” (p. 154). “The moment a meaning is gained it is a working tool of further apprehensions, an instrument of understanding other things” (p. 157). This instrumental character of conceptions, of meanings, is of central importance to Dewey’s logic. “All reflective knowledge as such is instrumental” (1929c: 218). Therefore, “knowledge … is not a copy whose truth is to be judged by its fidelity to an original; it is an instrument or organ of successive action” (1908: 2). In this way “instrumentalism … assigns a positive function to [reflective] thought, that of reconstituting the present stage of things instead of merely knowing them” (1925: 372). In addition, “instrumentalism is an attempt to constitute a precise logical theory of concepts, of judgments and inferences in their various forms, by considering primarily how thought functions in the experimental determinations of future consequences” (p. 367). Dewey employs the term instrumentalism to highlight this reconstructive relation between the two types of reflective experience (incidental and regulated) and non-reflective (pre-reflective and post-reflective) experience. Emphasizing this instrumental understanding, Dewey (1920: 145) proclaims that “knowing is not self-enclosed and final but is instrumental to reconstruction of situations.” In fact, it “is the only means of regulation” (1929c: 219). As such, “knowledge is instrumental to the enrichment of immediate experience through the control over action that it exercises” (1934b: 290). However, this standardization of meanings by way of conceptions does not result in complete certainty and control; permanence is not for eternity, sitting somehow outside experience and inquiry. “There is no subject-matter of the scientific kind which is eternally the same and not subject to improvement with further development in efficacy of inquiry-procedures” (Dewey 1944b: 282). Thus “the ‘settlement’ of a particular situation by a particular inquiry is no guarantee that that settled conclusion will always remain settled” (1938b: 8). While the outcome of inquiry is a “state of affairs” that “may be designated by the words belief and knowledge” (p. 7), Dewey finds these words too closely associated with notions of transcendent certainty. Knowledge can never be some object or thing captured in static assertions viewed as perpetual facts. “Knowledge is partial and incomplete, any and all knowledge, till we have placed it in the context of a future which cannot be known, but only speculated about and resolved upon” (1919: 47). Yet the conviction that knowledge is fixed and certain is commonly held. “Like the term ‘science’ …, the word ‘knowledge’ is itself used mainly in a

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passive sense to denote the content, the subject matter, which is the outcome of the successful performance of the function of knowing” (Dewey 1912a: 611). Indeed, “science has been so frequently presented just as so much ready-made knowledge, so much subject-matter of fact and law” that we miss seeing it “as the effective method of inquiry into any subject-matter” (1910c: 124). Dewey (1938b: 7) therefore prefers to employ the phrase “‘warranted assertibility’” in order to retain the operational connection with inquiry. “‘Warranted assertion’ is preferred to the terms belief and knowledge” because it “is free from the ambiguity of these latter terms.” Furthermore, and importantly, “it involves reference to inquiry as that which warrants assertion” (1938b: 9). Thus, “when knowledge is taken as a general abstract term related to inquiry in the abstract, it means ‘warranted assertibility’” (p. 9).Warranted assertibility conveys “potentiality rather than an actuality,” and highlights how “all special conclusions of special inquiries are parts of an enterprise that is continually renewed, or is a going concern” (p. 9).

Pragmatism and continuity The pragmatisms of Peirce and James Dewey’s logic of inquiry constitutes a theory of the method of knowing, where “knowing is itself a kind of action, the only one which progressively and securely clothes natural existence with realized meanings” (1929c: 167–168). He describes this theory as pragmatic and summarizes it in the following way. The theory of the method of knowing … may be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which purposely modifies the environment. It holds that knowledge in its strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual resources – all of the habits that render our action intelligent. Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. Knowledge is not just something which we are now conscious of, but consists in the dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now happens. Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world in which we live. (Dewey 1916b: 400) Dewey (1948b: 207) acknowledges that he has “consistently treated the pragmatic theory as a theory of knowing and as confined within the limits of the field of specifically cognitive subject-matter.” Thus Dewey’s pragmatism, while conceding the importance of non-reflective thinking, is ensconced in reflective thinking. His (1916a: 331) is therefore “the logical version of pragmatism,”16 a pragmatism that embraces scientific thinking and which remains operationally connected to practicality via the common sense thinking of everyday life.

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A coherent theory of experience Pragmatism is content to take its stand with science; for science finds all such events to be subject-matter of description and inquiry – just like stars and fossils, mosquitoes and malaria, circulation and vision. It also takes its stand with daily life, which finds that such things really have to be reckoned with as they occur interwoven in the texture of events. (Dewey 1917a: 55)

Dewey’s pragmatic theory was heavily influenced by Peirce and James, both of whom recognized the inherent connection between primary and secondary experience, but who engaged with pragmatism from differing perspectives. For Dewey (1925: 359) “Peirce was above all a logician” who focused on the logical structure of pragmatism, “whereas James was an educator” and therefore more concerned with the existential consequences of pragmatic method. Regarding “pragmatic method,” James (1907: 45) asks: “What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?” James (1904a: 674) thus prefers “to express Peirce’s principle by saying that the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience.” In Dewey’s (1925: 359) view, James “wished to force the general public to realize that certain problems, certain philosophical debates have a real importance for mankind, because the beliefs which they bring into play lead to very different modes of conduct.” However, Dewey considered this interpretation to conceal an important logical insight achieved by Peirce. William James alluded to the development which he gave to Peirce’s expression of the [pragmatic] principle. In one sense one can say that he enlarged the bearing of the principle by the substitution of particular consequences for the general rule or method applicable to future experience. But in another sense this substitution limited the application of the principle since it destroyed the importance attached by Peirce to the greatest possible application of the rule, or habit of conduct – its extension to universality. (Dewey 1925: 358) This “insistence upon ever growing continuity, or generality of ways of action and disposition, differentiates the pragmatism of Peirce from that of James” (Dewey 1937: 416). Where Peirce is concerned with the logical continuity of thought and action, particularly from the perspective of thirdness, James is focused on the practical implications of such continuity. Peirce “was peculiarly, and with intellectual conscientiousness, concerned with working out the implications of this idea of continuity” (Dewey 1935b: 338).This interpretation can readily be stated in Peirce’s own words: “I chiefly insist upon continuity,” Peirce (1935/1898: 138) declared, as “the characteristic of my doctrine.” In this connection Dewey (1938b: iii) called attention “to the principle of the continuum of inquiry, a principle whose importance,” he believed, “only Peirce

Reflective experience and the logical difference 47 had previously noted.” This continuum of inquiry is always an experiential continuum: “the experiential continuum of inquiry” (1938b: 470). In a restatement of Peirce’s “pragmatic principle,” Dewey (1935b: 338) highlights Peirce’s emphasis on the logical continuity between ideas and consequences, a continuity that underpins meaning: “The meaning of terms, propositions, and arguments or reasoned inference, of ideas and trains of ideas, is always found in the consequences, in the practical effects to which they lead” (p. 338). Hence Peirce’s logic and James’s practicality come together. “Things gain meaning when they are used as means to bring about consequences (or as means to prevent the occurrences of undesired consequences), or as standing for consequences for which we have to discover means” (Dewey 1933a: 146). This relation between means and consequences is pivotal for Dewey’s own logical pragmatism. “The relation of means-consequence is the center and heart of all understanding,” he asserts (p. 146). Means-consequence is the meaning-laden version, the humanized version, of the bare physical cause and effect relation, expressed universally as if-then. Although we have to act in order to discover the conditions underlying the “if ” in physical matters, yet the material constituting the “if ” is there apart from our action; like the movements of the sun and earth in an eclipse. But in social phenomena the relation is: “If we do something, something else will happen.” The objective material constituting the “if ” belongs to us. We are concerned not with a bare relation of cause and effect, but with one of means and consequences, that is, of causes deliberately used for the sake of producing certain effects. (Dewey 1931c: 277) Dewey (1934b: 25) acknowledges that “apart from relations of cause and effect in nature, conception and invention could not be.” However, cause and effect relations are only meaningful when embedded within human concerns, be they the investigations of a scientist or the deliberations of a carpenter. Here they are means-consequence relations, such that means are always associated with consequences that have practical, existential import. In this way, “a relationship of cause-effect has been transformed into one of means-consequence” (1929a: 300), and these “consequences belong integrally to the conditions which may produce them.” Thus “things that were causally effective in producing experienced results became means to consequences” (1929c: 234). “For all the intelligent activities of men, no matter whether expressed in science, fine arts, or social relationships, have for their task the conversion of causal bonds, relations of succession, into a connection of means-consequence, into meanings” (1929a: 299). “Experience” is therefore “a transformation of interaction” in its brute actuality “into participation and communication” (1934b: 22). Means are always at least causal conditions; but causal conditions are means only when they possess an added qualification; that, namely, of being freely

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A coherent theory of experience used, because of perceived connection with chosen consequences. To entertain, choose and accomplish anything as an end or consequence is to be committed to a like love and care for whatever events and acts are its means. Similarly, consequences, ends, are at least effects; but effects are not ends unless thought has perceived and freely chosen the conditions and processes that are their conditions. (Dewey 1929a: 297)

Based on this realization,“the supposed grounds for opposing human experience to the reality of nature disappear” (Dewey 1929a: 234), a position supported by Peirce’s notion of continuity.“Peirce realized most explicitly that the relationship postulated by his principle – between ideas or judgments and their consequences – cannot be maintained except upon the basis of real continuity in nature” (1935b: 338). Furthermore, the character of such pragmatic continuity is habit. Dewey (1938a: 35) considers the “principle of continuity” to,“at bottom, … rest upon the fact of habit, when habit is interpreted biologically.” “It, habit, operates in and through the human organism,” and “that very fact is to him [Peirce] convincing evidence that the organism is an integrated part of the world in which habits form and operate” (Dewey 1946: 94). “Habit has a physical basis,” James (1892: 134) likewise claims. “The philosophy of habit is …, in the first instance, a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or psychology” (p. 135). Thus “unless nature had regular habits, persistent ways, so compacted that they time, measure and give rhythm and recurrence to transitive flux, [then] meanings, recognizable characters, could not be” (Dewey 1929a: 285). The continuity of habit and law In making such claims for habits, Dewey (1938a: 35) is keenly aware that his use of the term habit is “deeper than the ordinary conception of a habit as a more or less fixed way of doing things, although it includes the latter as one of its special cases.” Habit, for Dewey, is a formal character of experience. Habit is “that kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of action; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation” (1922b: 40–41). In addition, habit is “operative in some subdued subordinate form, even when not obviously dominating activity” (p. 41). In this subdued or “submerged” form (1934b: 274) habit characterizes involvement, and – in a note pre-empting the discussion of occupation in Chapters Seven and Eight – habit is always governed by an occupation. “Occupations determine the fundamental modes of activity, and hence control the formation and use of habits” (1902e: 219). So, supported by Peirce’s notion of continuity, Dewey (1938b: 13) regards “any habit” as “a way or manner of action, not a particular act or deed. When it is formulated it becomes, as far as it is accepted, a rule, or more generally, a principle or ‘law’ of action.” Habits are thus continuous with universal laws (Figure 2.4).

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Figure 2.4 The continuity between law, habit and rhythm. Habit in primary experience and law in secondary experience

Dewey (1912b: 655) defines a law pragmatically as “the statement of an order or relation among the elements of an object or situation, this order or relation being a means of understanding, organizing, and controlling other traits of the object or situation in question.” Therefore “a law is …, logically speaking, a statement of a relation or order which is employed as an effective method of procedure in further dealings with phenomena” (p. 655). Universal if-then propositions are laws or principles in this sense, continuous with concrete habits in the way of means-consequence relations, all consistent with the rhythms of nature (also understood as habits). “Universal propositions are formulations of possible ways or modes of acting or operating” (1938b: 264). “Both the material and the mental worlds show a tendency to the formation of habits. Physical nature tends to fall into rhythms” (1902f: 397). Thus “the terms ‘natural law’ and ‘natural rhythm’” are “synonymous” for Dewey (1934b: 149). He directly attributes the origin of this idea of continuity between laws, habits and rhythms to Peirce. “It is my conviction that Peirce has laid the basis for a valid logical theory of universals” (Dewey 1936b: 284). Although C.S. Peirce did not employ the operational terminology, his account of the nature of “leading principles” is an anticipation of this conception of them. He starts from the fact that habits are active when we make inferences. At first we use these habits or are used by them without being aware of them. Gradually we become conscious of them on the basis of the consequences they yield. We then find that some of these habits in their recurrences produce consequences that are unstable. The former as they are formulated become consciously guiding principles in drawing further inferences. (Dewey 1936b: 283)

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So “where there is a habit, there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment to which action is applied.There is a definite way of understanding the situation in which the habit operates” (Dewey 1916b: 57). Put another way, “a habit means an ability to use natural conditions as means to ends” (p. 55). Habit “covers the formation of attitudes, attitudes that are emotional and intellectual; it covers our basic sensitivities and ways of meeting and responding to all the conditions which we meet in living” (1938a: 35). For “we do not approach any problem with a wholly naïve or virgin mind” (1933a: 125); rather, “we approach it with certain acquired habitual modes of understanding, with a certain store of previously evolved meanings or at least of experiences from which meanings may be educed.” Thus “we bring to the simplest observation a complex apparatus of habits, of accepted meanings and techniques” (1929a: 180). The “stuff ” from which thinking draws its material in satisfying need by establishing a new relation to the surroundings is found in what, with some extension of the usual sense of the word, may be termed habits: namely, the changes wrought in our ways of acting and undergoing by prior experience. (Dewey 1926a: 5) “There are habits involved in every inference, in spite of difference of subjectmatter, and when these habits are noted and formulated, then the formulations are guiding and leading principles” (Dewey 1938b: 12–13). Habits are thus the beginning of inquiry, and via the instrumental nature of knowledge in the form of universal propositions, they are also its practical and theoretical outcome. Reflecting on Peirce’s pragmatic theory, Dewey notes that “knowledge tends to produce ways of action, and these ways of acting are immensely more important than is any particular result effected by action” (1937: 416). He saw that for “Peirce habits of reasonable action, of general modes of action, were the end of knowledge” (p. 416).This is Peirce’s extension of pragmatism to universality.The application of any habit is, like knowledge (law), not confined to the outcome of the one particular inquiry through which it was initially warranted. Habits and knowledge are continuous. Thus, “wherever there is generality, continuity, there is habit” (Dewey 1946: 94).

Summary In this chapter we began the task of sketching out a coherent theory of experience by examining Dewey’s sense of reflective experience. Reflective experience, as reflective thinking, forms the mainstay of Dewey’s logical theory, his theory of inquiry. As inquiry, reflective thinking is the method of science. Importantly, in terms of the twofold of existence, it builds on secondness, an understanding of existence as interaction. Dewey recognizes that this interaction is evident firstly as natural signs, which may then be represented in language by artificial symbols. A central

Reflective experience and the logical difference 51 aspect of Dewey’s logical theory is that signs and symbols are involved in three modes of relation: signs are related to signs (as significances), symbols are related to symbols (as meanings); but most importantly for Dewey, signs are functionally related to symbols. Without this functional relation between signs and symbols, logic is problematically divided between natural (existential) signs and artificial (non-existential) symbols. The sign to sign relation Dewey calls involvement, the sign to symbol relation is inference (the suggestion of an idea involving concrete facts), and the symbol to symbol relation is implication (between ideas). Through his identification of these three forms of logical relation, Dewey exposed a commonly experienced but not well understood confusion in logic. Here inference and implication can both be understood as reasoning because both concern symbol use. So without an awareness of the three modes of relation, inference is overlooked in favor of implication, thereby denying the functional relation between existential signs and non-existential symbols. The difference between inference and implication is thus of crucial importance for Dewey, and he calls this difference the logical difference. It is the difference between generic (concrete or existential) propositions and universal (abstract or non-existential) propositions. In Peirce’s terms it is the difference between secondness and thirdness. Without an awareness of this difference, logic is confused. The logical difference is very important for Dewey’s understanding of reflective experience, as it characterizes the difference between incidental reflective thinking (which remains in the concrete) and regulated reflective thinking (which is able to abstract from the concrete). Dewey sees this difference in thinking as that between common sense and science. The general features of reflective thinking describe movement from involvement to inference (via the identification of a problem) and if necessary, if the problem is deemed to require abstract thought for its resolution, across the logical difference to implication. However, as inquiry, this thinking must return from the abstract to the concrete; it must be applied in some existential situation. In this process knowledge is understood to be instrumental, it is an instrument employed in the resolution of a concrete problem. This instrumental understanding of knowledge, supported by Dewey’s theory of inquiry, is pragmatic. In James’s pragmatic terms this theory highlights the practical consequences of ideas. In Peirce’s pragmatic terms it is founded on the continuity between the practical habits of action and the theoretical laws of action, primarily between secondness and thirdness. Dewey’s theory of inquiry thus contributes significantly to a coherent theory of experience. However, it is not the whole picture.

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The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience

Overview The aim of this chapter is to highlight the difficulties Dewey experiences in trying to flesh out a coherent theory of experience. He recognizes that such a coherent theory requires a sense of the connection between reflective and non-reflective experience. However, because he considers all forms of analysis to be reflective only, his attempts to understand this connection are purely from the perspective of reflective experience. Dewey’s beliefs about analysis as reflective only are premised on his understanding of time as chiefly governed by temporal continuity, meaning that time exists as a timeline, with pastpresent-future as points along this line. This means that the immediate present moment is always fleeting, moving into the past before it can be reflected upon. From this perspective, non-reflective experience is background context to reflective experience, a background which is continuous with the two types of reflective experience. In other words the products of concrete and abstract reflective experience accumulate as the contextual background to further analysis; they operate in this way as mind. However, in Dewey’s framework the immediate non-reflective moment remains problematic. He understands it as subjective consciousness. Importantly, he connects this with emotion and from there with art, calling it aesthetic experience. This aesthetic experience is much closer in kind to existence understood as simple qualitative whole.

The contexts of inquiry (a pragmatic view of non-reflective experience) Background as existential matrix Much of Dewey’s inquiry into inquiry is focused on clarifying the logical difference between the two types of reflective thinking (incidental and regulated). However, from this point of view non-reflective thinking is more difficult to comprehend, and it poses quite a problem for Dewey. Nevertheless, he believes that the pragmatic continuity between habit and knowledge points towards a way of understanding non-reflective thinking. From this pragmatic position, involvement, characterized as submerged habit, includes both an immediate

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foreground and a background constituted by the accumulated habits of culture, as well as a scientifically founded comprehension of the rhythms of nature (Figure 3.1). Applying such a pragmatic approach to non-reflective thinking is therefore to see it as the context within which reflective thinking takes place. Dewey (1931b:204) recognizes that“signs and symbols depend for their meaning upon the contextual situation in which they appear and are used.” He refers to this context as a background implicit to reflective thought: “A background is implicit in some form and to some degree in all thinking” (p. 212). Therefore, “the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context” (p. 206). Supported by his understanding of pragmatic continuity, Dewey describes “three deepening levels or three expanding spheres of context” (p. 223). All three of these levels he considers to be of the non-reflective type of experience, framing this non-reflective experience in three ways.The first level, which Dewey regards as “the narrowest and most superficial” (p. 223), is the individual and contextual “foreground” (1934b: 265–266) of the “immediate scene” (1931b: 223).This is the “most limited consideration” of context and describes “the range and vitality of the experience of the thinker himself, that is, his most direct personal experience – which, however, only systematic misunderstanding construes to be merely an experience of his own person” (p. 223).17 Surrounding, bathing, saturating, the things of which we are explicitly aware is some inclusive situation which does not enter into the direct material of reflection. It does not come into question; it is taken for granted with respect to the particular question that is occupying the field of thinking. To think of it in the sense of making it an object of thought’s examination and scrutiny is an irrelevant and confusing distraction. (Dewey 1931b: 213)

Figure 3.1 Context as foreground and background in non-reflective experience, showing the continuity between the background of context and reflective thinking. Dewey’s is an attempt to understand non-reflective experience from the position of reflective experience

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Beyond this immediate and individual foreground of context is the deeper “background” that Dewey (1931b: 212) considers to be “the whole environment of which philosophy must take account in all its enterprises.”This background is always there,“although as background” it does not come into “explicit purview” (p. 212). This sense of a background is very important to the coherency of Dewey’s logical version of pragmatism, because it is the background of inquiry, “the existential matrix of inquiry” (1938b: 23) that Dewey describes as being both “biological and cultural” (p. 246). This background therefore has two levels: “a background of culture” and another “of theory” (1931b: 214). For Dewey the difference between these two levels is the non-reflective equivalent of the logical difference, i.e. that between concrete and abstract. Dewey describes the second “deeper and wider” level as “the culture of the people in question” (1931b: 223). This second level is not a theoretical level as it is the specific cultural background of the people involved. This level is concrete, and as background it is continuous with the concrete type of reflective experience, with incidental reflective thinking. In contrast, the third “widest and deepest” (p. 223) level of background is theoretical or scientific in its origin. This level is continuous with regulated reflective thinking, the abstract type of reflective experience more concerned with universal laws, which are to be “found in recourse to the need of general understanding of the workings of human nature” (p. 223). Importantly, when Dewey brings these two terms together, human and nature, he is attempting to express an overcoming of the dualism between the social and the natural or physical, between humanism and naturalism. He believes that “contemporary philosophy and contemporary educational theory may be said to be confronted with a common problem: The discovery of the common background or matrix in which humanistic and naturalistic interests are united” (1912c: 340). This common background or matrix has the two levels of concrete and abstract: at the concrete level with culture, and at the theoretical or abstract level with the sciences, both physical (natural) and social (human). So within each of these background levels, the interaction of human (organism) and nature (environment) is primary for Dewey. At the deepest and most theoretical level, that continuous with regulated reflective experience, there is no “opposition of the physical and social sciences” (Dewey, 1928a: p. 165). At the concrete cultural level, that continuous with incidental reflective thinking, “the physical environment is part of a more inclusive social or cultural environment” (1938b: 20).Thus the habits of interaction between organism and environment (human and nature) form the concrete cultural background in level two, while at level three they are more formally considered as laws. For Dewey (1940b: 245) this continuity between laws, habits and rhythms puts “experience in connection with nature, with the cosmos,” a position which frames “its view of experience on the ground of conclusions reached in the natural sciences.” This continuity enables the third, deepest level of background to be understood as “the sum total of facts which actually and potentially are the subject of inquiry and knowledge” (1944b: 283). Here

The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience 55 everything remains within experience by way of the alignment of experience, inquiry and knowledge in Dewey’s “whole theory of experience, inquiry, and knowledge” (1941: 185). In other words, inquiry is constituted by reflective and non-reflective experience, and thus “experience presents itself as the method, and the only method, for getting at nature, penetrating its secrets, and wherein nature empirically disclosed (by use of the empirical method in natural science) deepens, enriches and directs the further development of experience” (1929a: 2). Therefore “experience, if scientific inquiry is justified, is no infinitesimally thin layer or foreground of nature,” but rather “it penetrates into it, reaching down into its depths, and in such a way that its grasp is capable of expansion” (p. 2). In this expansion via inquiry, experience “tunnels in all directions and in so doing brings to the surface things at first hidden – as miners pile high on the surface of the earth treasures brought from below” (p. 2). This accumulation is always of things known in a warranted way, things as particularly understood, things having meanings specific to a cultural context which is itself a background to inquiry. Such accumulation via inquiry occurs as the third or widest and deepest background level of context, which is for Dewey the “context of the makeup of experience itself ” (1931b: 224). This is “the inclusive and pervasive context of experience in which philosophic thinking must, for good or ill, take place and without reference to which such thinking is in the end but a beating of wings in the void” (p. 224). This context of the makeup of experience is continuous with the totality of our knowledge, the conclusions of the sciences, which are, in this experiential continuum, “the very conclusions that provide the means for forming a theory of experience” (p. 246). He professes that “for many years” he has “consistently – and rather persistently – maintained that the key to a philosophic theory of experience must proceed from initially linking it with the processes and functions of life as the latter are disclosed in biological science” (1939: 530). However, in seemingly prioritizing biology he is not suggesting that only one science can assist with understanding experience, especially nonreflective experience. Rather, he is focused on the association of biology with understanding life. So when Dewey (1931b: 224) claims that “the boundless multiplicity of the concrete experiences of humanity will naturally terminate in some sense of the structure of any and all experience,” including nonreflective experience, it is to the sciences concerned with comprehending life that he turns. “Biology, psychology, including social psychology and psychiatry, anthropology, all afford indications as to the nature of this structure [of any and all experience], and these indications were never so numerous and so waiting for use as now” (p. 224). So “philosophy must depend on the best science of its day” (1919: 45). “It can intellectually recommend its judgments of value only as it can select relevant material from that which is recognized to be established truth, and can persuasively use current knowledge to drive home the reasonableness of its conception of life” (p. 45).

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Background as mind Experience tunnels into nature, as organism interacting with environment, and the result is that things are brought to the surface: things understood in certain ways, things having certain meanings, things that contribute to the existential background, things which are incorporated into the context. This changed existential background, which is altered via inquiry, then functions as the background for further inquiries. However, such a background is not simply passive – it can be active. Things exist as objects for us only as they have been previously determined as outcomes of inquiries. When used in carrying on new inquiries in new problematic situations, they are known as objects in virtue of prior inquiries which warrant their assertibility. In the new situation, they are means of attaining knowledge of something else. (Dewey 1938b: 119) So meanings are not only “the outcome of inquiry” (Dewey, 1938b: 118–119); they are also possibly useful as “instrumental meanings” (1928b: 348) in further inquiries. In this active sense Dewey considers the contextual background to constitute mind. For mind is knowledge, understandings, meanings,“funded from prior experiences” (1934b: 289) and embedded in habits, which Dewey also considers to be active.Thus “mind forms the background upon which every new contact with surroundings is projected” (p. 264). However, “‘background’ is too passive a word, unless we remember that it is active and that, in the projection of the new upon it, there is assimilation and reconstruction of both background and of what is taken in and digested” (p. 264). Therefore “mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life” (1929a: 247). “Mind … is the body of organized meanings by means of which events of the present have significance for us” (1934b: 273). “Mind is the means by which participation is rendered fruitful through sense; by which meanings and values are extracted, retained, and put to further service in the intercourse of the live creature with his surroundings” (p. 22). “Mind is capacity to refer present conditions to future results, and future consequences to present conditions” (1916b: 120). Defining mind as the accumulated fund of meanings which can be actively engaged in this instrumental way positions “habits” as “the organized instrumentalities through which the mind carries out its various ideas” (1902g: 5). With this pragmatic understanding of the continuity, via inquiry, between knowledge and mind, science and context, laws and habits, there is no need in Dewey’s philosophy for appeal to metaphysics, a realm outside experience. His “philosophical view, or theory, of experience does not include any existence beyond the reach of experience” (1949a: 709). In this way he attempts “to state a view upon which the words metaphysics and metaphysical would make sense on experiential grounds” (p. 712). Such a metaphysical position is founded on his understanding of existence, secondness, as primarily the interaction or transaction between organism (human) and environment (nature). Endeavoring

The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience 57 to capture this sense of interaction or transaction inherent to philosophy conceived in this way, Dewey (1929a: 1) labels it “either empirical naturalism or naturalistic empiricism, or, taking ‘experience’ in its usual signification, naturalistic humanism.” Yet this position presents a difficulty in the form of a perceived logical circularity.“There is a circularity in the position taken regarding the connection of experience and nature,” Dewey admits (1940b: 245). However, “this circle is not vicious; for instead of being [formally] logical, it is existential and historic” (p. 246). In other words, Dewey’s logic is not simply formal or non-existential (which would render it circular), but as pragmatic inquiry, it involves the three modes of relation between existential and non-existential, a connection evident in the concrete historical progress made via science (which suggests that there is a reconstructive movement occurring over time). “In … the experiential continuum of inquiry, methods are self-rectifying so that the conclusions they yield are cumulatively determined” (1938b: 470). If we look at human history and especially at the historic development of the natural sciences, we find progress made from a crude experience in which beliefs about nature and natural events were very different from those now scientifically authorized to the latter. At the same time we find the latter now enable us to frame a theory of experience by which we can tell how this development out of gross experience into the highly refined conclusions of science has taken place. (Dewey 1940b: 246) For Dewey, this logically circular but historically reconstructive movement describes the cycle of the operational relation of inquiry between primary and secondary experience, which is the basis for his claim that logic is “autonomous” and “does not depend on anything extraneous to inquiry” (1938b: 20). Thus, when he points out that “analysis and interpretation of nature is made dependent upon the conclusions of the natural sciences, especially upon biology,” and that biology “is itself dependent upon physics and chemistry” (1940b: 245– 246), he has a particular view of dependency in mind. This is a dependency on inquiry and the conclusions of inquiry in the continuity of habits, rhythms and laws.This is the circular and autonomous “connection of methods with the existential material instituted and ordered by methods” (1938b: 470). When I say dependent I mean that the intellectual instrumentalities, the organs, for understanding the new and distinctive material of experienced objects are provided by the natural sciences. I do not mean that the material of experienced things qua experienced must be translated into terms of the material of the physical sciences; that view leads to a naturalism which denies distinctive significance to experience, thereby ending in the identification of naturalism with mechanistic materialism. (Dewey 1940b: 246)

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For Dewey, such mechanistic materialism harbors a “confusion of the product of thought with its acceptance and further use” (1931b: 217). Knowledge, understanding, and meaning are never simply product, but are always warranted by their instrumentality. Thus he makes a systematic distinction between “knowledge as the outcome of special inquiries (undertaken because of the presence of problems) and intelligence as the product and expression of cumulative funding of the meanings reached in these special cases” (1939: 521). Intelligence more clearly suggests that knowledge is active. “The function of intelligence is therefore not that of copying the objects of the environment, but rather of taking account of the way in which more effective and more profitable relations with these objects may be established in the future” (1925: 371). Meanings or conceptions are thus “capable of being separated from the special cases of knowledge in which they originally appear and of being incorporated and funded cumulatively in habits so as to constitute mind, and to constitute intelligence when actually applied in new experiences” (1939: 564).

Non-reflective experience as aesthetic experience For Dewey, mind (as intelligent) is the active existential background, cultural (concrete) and theoretical, to inquiry. It is also background to the contextual foreground, the first level of context which he considers the most narrow. However, “since it [the foreground] cannot in its entirety be made an explicit object of reflection and yet since it affects all matters thought of, it is legitimately called a phase of context” (1931b: 216).18 He describes this first level of context as “‘selective interest’” (p. 215), and significantly he gives it the “more neutral and modest name of individuality” (p. 217). Here again this term ‘individuality’ is encountered, creating a link back to the twofold of existence. However, for Dewey this is still an area of ambiguity, as he regards this individuality or selective interest of foreground to be “a unique manner of entering into interaction with other things” (pp. 216–217). Individuality remains subordinated to interaction, rendering individuality as one element of an interaction. In another attempt to comprehend this foreground, Dewey builds on his understanding of mind as background, such that the selectively interested and individual foreground becomes consciousness. “‘Consciousness’ is foreground in a pre-eminent sense” (1927a: 61). As foreground, consciousness is different to mind as background, yet it is not separate from it. “Mind is more than consciousness, because it is the abiding even though changing background of which consciousness is the foreground” (1934b: 265–266). Dewey (1931b: 216) is keenly aware that the foreground “aspect of context” is also “known in philosophical terminology as the ‘subjective.’” Consciousness, as selective interest, is subjective. He also considers “interest, as the subjective,” to be “equivalent to individuality or uniqueness” (p. 216). However, in his further explorations of individuality as subjectivity, he makes an important connection with art, and through this with emotion, which enables him to perceive individuality more holistically. In this way individuality begins to take

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on its own character, one that is not founded on interaction. “One realizes its [individuality’s] nature best in thinking of genuine works of art. In the field of fine art, one never objects to that peculiar way of seeing, selecting, and arranging which defines the actual nature of the ‘subjective’” (1931b: 217). For Dewey, “‘art’” denotes “any selective activity by which concrete things are so arranged as to elicit attention to the distinctive values realizable by them” (1926c: 11). In this way art is active, not passive, and as a selective activity, art involves rejection of what is irrelevant. “Art is a selection of what is significant, with rejection by the very same impulse of what is irrelevant, and thereby the significant is compressed and intensified” (1934b: 208). Importantly, art achieves this because it is emotional: “That art is selective is a fact universally recognized. It is so because of the role of emotion in the act of expression. Any predominant mood automatically excludes all that is uncongenial with it” (p. 67). In fact, “an emotion is more effective” in this role “than any deliberate challenging sentinel could be” (p. 67). So in this active role of selection, emotion characterizes individuality in a holistic qualitative sense. Dewey (1934b: 42) considers feeling or “emotion” to be “the moving and cementing force” in experience. “It selects what is congruous and dyes what is selected with its color, thereby giving qualitative unity to materials externally disparate and dissimilar. It thus provides unity in and through the varied parts of an experience” (p. 42). So “when the unity is of the sort already described [qualitative unity], the experience has esthetic character” (p. 42).19 Here “the uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no … distinction of self and object exists in it” (p. 249). In aesthetic experience “organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears” (p. 249). Hence “all the elements of our being that are displayed in special emphases and partial realizations in other experiences are merged in esthetic experience” (p. 274). “And they are so completely merged in the immediate wholeness of the experience that each is submerged: it does not present itself in consciousness as a distinct element” (p. 274). Aesthetic experience is thus individuality understood as holistic, simple, immediate. In fact, “the immediacy of esthetic experience” is “an esthetic necessity” (p. 119). “It cannot be asserted too strongly that what is not immediate is not esthetic” (p. 119). Dewey brings these analogous descriptions of aesthetic experience together by referring to it as pure experience. Esthetic experience is experience in its integrity. Had not the term “pure”20 been so often abused in philosophic literature, had it not been so often employed to suggest that there is something alloyed, impure, in the very nature of experience and to denote something beyond experience, we might say that esthetic experience is pure experience. For it is experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience; freed, that is, from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself. (Dewey 1934b: 274)

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“To esthetic experience, then, the philosopher must go to understand what experience is,” Dewey (1934b: 274) asserts, specifically referring to the immediate, individual nature of non-reflective experience. However, acknowledging the tension between individuality and interaction, he (p. 274) also highlights the “challenge to thought” presented by the “uniqueness of esthetic experience.” For “at all times one of the most perplexing problems of general philosophy, including logic, has been the relation of individual and universal; the discrete and the continuous; the immediate and the relational” (1929b: 260). “I lay no claim to inventing an environment that is marked by both discreteness and continuity. Nor can I even make the modest claim that I discovered it,” he admits (1939: 545). However, this perplexing issue “looms as the central and dividing issue” (1929b: 261). “It is particularly a challenge to that systematic thought called philosophy” (1934b: 274), when philosophy is understood primarily as reflective thinking. “It is a test of the capacity of the system he [a philosopher] puts forth to grasp the nature of experience itself. There is no test that so surely reveals the one-sidedness of a philosophy as a treatment of art and esthetic experience” (p. 274). Dewey believes that many philosophical systems have failed this test, simply because “of forgetfulness of the nature of the actual experience in favor of enforcement of some prior philosophical conception to which their authors have been committed” (p. 290). These a priori systems “superimposed some preconceived idea upon experience instead of encouraging or even allowing esthetic experience to tell its own tale” (p. 275). Dewey came to believe that he had, after all, developed a philosophic system that could overcome the challenge of aesthetic experience, thereby enabling him to articulate a coherent theory of experience. “I find that with respect to the hanging together of various problems and various hypotheses in a perspective determined by a definite point of view, I have a system” (1940b: 244). He therefore felt the need “to retract disparaging remarks … made in the past about the need for system in philosophy” (pp. 244–245). Dewey’s system is founded primarily on understanding existence as interaction, with pragmatic continuity between the two types of reflective experience and an existential background of context that functions actively as mind. In this system the foreground is aesthetically individual. He claims that “from one angle,” almost everything he has written “is a commentary on the fact that situations are immediate in their direct occurrence, and mediating and mediated in the temporal continuum constituting life experience” (1939: 546).Yet for Dewey the relation of aesthetic experience to reflective experience remained a significant problem, one that he continued to struggle with. When aesthetic experience is juxtaposed with reflective experience it presents “a problem so deep-seated and far-reaching that it may be said to be the problem of experience” (Dewey 1929a: 299). The problem lies in “the distinction between the instrumental and the final” (p. 299), where the instrumental is reflective scientific experience (logical pragmatism) and the final (or consummatory) is non-reflective aesthetic experience. Here finality conveys

The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience 61 the unique qualitative sense of aesthetic experience in its simple completeness. So while the instrumentality of science is founded in interaction, in the meansconsequence relation, for aesthetic experience neither interaction nor relation are apparent; they are submerged. So “in art everything is common between means and ends” (p. 299). “Any activity that is simultaneously both, rather than in alternation and displacement, is art” (p. 293). In this aesthetic experience “means-consequences constitute a single undivided situation”, such that “when [reflective] thought and discussion enter, when theorizing sets in, when there is anything beyond bare immediate enjoyment and suffering, it is the meansconsequence relationship that is considered” (1929a: 322). For Dewey the relation of means-consequence (interaction) is the foundation for both art and science. In art it is submerged in the individual whole, but in science it is exposed reflectively as interaction. However, science also has its own aesthetic quality. “Scientific thought is, in its turn, a specialized form of art, with its own qualitative control” (1930c: 17). Thus “esthetic [experience] cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual experience since the latter must bear an esthetic stamp to be itself complete” (1934b: 38). “Hence an experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality” (p. 38). “‘Scientific’ thinking, that expressed in physical science, never gets away from qualitative existence,” because “directly it always has its own qualitative background” (1930c: 31). In other words, a confused feeling or quality engenders that inquisitive quality which marks an inquiry, while the qualitative confusion that initiated the inquiry (as this emerged from and continues to be part of a more original aesthetic) remains in play until a hypothesis has been successfully tested; in this sense aesthetic experience can be understood as a background. Confusion and incoherence are always marks of lack of control by a single pervasive quality. The latter alone enables a person to keep track of what he is doing, saying, hearing, reading, in whatever explicitly appears. The underlying unity of qualitativeness regulates pertinence or relevancy and force of every distinction and relation; it guides selection and rejection and the manner of utilization of all explicit terms.This quality enables us to keep thinking about one problem without our having constantly to stop to ask ourselves what it is after all that we are thinking about.We are aware of it not by itself but as the background, the thread, and the directive clue in what we do expressly think of. For the latter things are its distinctions and relations. (Dewey 1930c: 11–12) Dewey (1948b: 208) does not consider his understanding of aesthetic experience to involve “application of my pragmatism,” instead acknowledging the difference between two ways of experience and thinking, one reflective (scientific) and the other non-reflective (aesthetic). Unlike reflective pragmatic experience, aesthetic experience is direct and immediate, for “science is concerned about the remote and identical or repeated things that are conditions of actual experience and not with experience in its own right [as direct]” (1934b: 207–208). These

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conditions are the cause-effect (as means-consequence) relations that mediate interaction and which accumulate as the background context of inquiry: the wider and deeper – and widest and deepest – layers of context as existential matrix and as mind; but not so much the individual whole of the foreground which he rendered as consciousness and as subjectivity. “Science assumes that there are such individual realizations in which something exists immediately for its own sake, but it passes over what they are: it does so because its business is elsewhere, namely in the relations which they have to other things” (1926c: 11). Yet “without aesthetic appreciation we miss the most characteristic as well as the most precious thing in the real world” (p. 11), since “the world in which we immediately live, that in which we strive, succeed, and are defeated is preeminently a qualitative world” (1930c: 5). Hence “aesthetic appreciation and art … represent … the only ways in which the individualized elements in the world of nature and man are grasped” (1926c: 11). This alternate, non-reflective experiencing is discernible in the “esthetic quality that rounds out an experience into completeness and unity as emotional” (Dewey 1934b: 41). Thus when “an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency,” then “it is an experience” (p. 35). An experience is “rounded out” qualitatively, holistically, such that “its close is a consummation and not a cessation” (p. 35).21 Reflective experience is also qualitative in this way. Therefore, in this qualitative and “vital sense” (p. 36), an experience can be likened to Dewey’s use of the term situation, but conceptualised here as simple whole rather than as interaction. So while “the conceptions of situation and of interaction” (1938a: 43) are inseparable from each other, a situation is also an individual qualitative whole, as foreground. .

A situation is a whole in virtue of its immediately pervasive quality. When we describe it from the psychological side, we have to say that the situation as a qualitative whole is sensed or felt. Such an expression is, however, valuable only as it is taken negatively to indicate that it is not, as such, an object in discourse [considered to be reflective]. Stating that it is felt is wholly misleading if it gives the impression that the situation is a feeling or an emotion or anything mentalistic. On the contrary, feeling, sensation and emotion have themselves to be identified and described in terms of the immediate presence of a total qualitative situation. (Dewey 1938b: 68) In this way, “the existence of unifying qualitativeness in the subject-matter defines the meaning of ‘feeling’” (Dewey 1930c: 12). If we “hypostatize” (p. 12) this qualitative unity by reflecting on it objectively, then “we call it a feeling,” but “to term it a [italics added] feeling is to reverse the actual state of affairs” (p. 12). When quality is considered via reflective thinking it is reified, whereas the unifying qualitative sense belongs to a direct immediate experience, “wholly irrespective of any cognitive or reflective reference” (1935a: 706). “The notion that ‘a feeling’ designates a ready-made independent psychical entity is a product

The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience 63 of a reflection which presupposes the direct presence of quality as such” (1930c: 12).Any reflective reference is in the “domain of knowledge” and therefore in “the domain of Thirdness, not Firstness” (1935a: 706).Yet reflective experience also has its qualitative background – it is aesthetic. In this sense thirdness presupposes firstness; reflective experience presupposes aesthetic experience.

Qualitative, affective thinking Dewey’s interpretation of firstness as quality contributes significantly to his understanding of a situation as a qualitative whole. Garrison (1999a: 681) points out that “the key to comprehending Dewey’s theory of quality is recognizing that it derives from Peirce’s theory of firstness.” “A firstness is exemplified in every quality of total feeling,” Peirce argues (1931/1903c: 281). “It is perfectly simple and without parts; and everything has its quality” (p. 281). In this way of firstness, Dewey (1938b: 522) appreciates that “immediate qualitative experience is not itself cognitive [reflective].” “Cognitive experience must originate within that of a non-cognitive [non-reflective] sort” (1929a: 23). This points to Dewey’s instrumental understanding of “knowledge” as “the only medium to controlled enrichment and control of subsequent experiences of a qualitative non-cognitive type” (1939: 528), Furthermore, it also feeds into his technical definition of education as that “reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.” (1916b: 89–90). Like reflective experience, aesthetic experience is associated with its own way of thinking, one that is closer to feeling, such that Dewey (1926a: 3) describes it as “affective thought.” He also refers to it as “qualitative thought” (1930c: 18) and “artistic thought” (p. 17). Qualitative affective thinking is concerned with “the logic of artistic construction and esthetic appreciation,” both of which exemplify “in accentuated and purified form the control of selection of detail and mode of relation, or integration, by a qualitative whole” (p. 17). Here “the underlying quality that determines the work, that circumscribes it externally and integrates it internally, controls the thinking of the artist; his logic is the logic of what I have called qualitative thinking” (p. 16). Dewey also associates this way of thinking with intuition: “The penetrating quality that runs through all the parts of a work of art and binds them into an individualized whole can only be emotionally ‘intuited’” (1934b: 192). Thus “intuition … signifies the realization of a pervasive quality such that it regulates the determination of relevant distinctions or of whatever, whether in the way of terms or relations, becomes the accepted object of thought” (1930c: 14). Intuition is in this sense non-reflective experience and prior to any reflection. Reflection and rational elaboration spring from and make explicit a prior intuition. But there is nothing mystical about this fact, and it does not signify that there are two modes of knowledge, one of which is approximate to one kind of subject-matter, and the other mode to the other kind. Thinking and

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A coherent theory of experience theorizing about physical matters sets out from an intuition, and reflection about affairs of life and mind consists in an ideational and conceptual transformation of what begins as an intuition. (Dewey 1930c: 14)

However, Dewey is aware that any reference to intuition often introduces suspicion, for “the word ‘intuition’ has many meanings” (1930c: 14) because it “is one of the most ambiguous in the whole range of thought” (1934b: 294).Yet “examination indicates that the popular sense is really much more philosophical than the one professedly so” (1897b: 88). “In its popular, as distinct from refined philosophic, usage it is closely connected with the single qualitativeness underlying all details of explicit reasoning” (1930c: 14). Hence “we mean by intuition the power to seize as a whole, in a single and almost instantaneous survey, a complete group of circumstances. It is the power to read off at a glance the meaning of a given situation” (1897b: 88). In this way, intuition “may be relatively dumb and inarticulate and yet penetrating; unexpressed in definite ideas which form reasons and justifications and yet profoundly right” (1930c: 14). Dewey thus considers intuition to be “opposed not to experience, but to abstract logical reflection” (1897b: 88).

The ineffability of immediacy: a temporal problem Dewey considers non-reflective aesthetic experience and reflective scientific experience to be connected. However, his understanding of this connection is chiefly supported by the pragmatic emphasis which highlights reflective experience and thinking. Via his inquiry into inquiry, into pragmatic scientific experience, he is able to explain the process of reflective thinking by way of reflective thinking, acknowledging that this always emerges from, is contextualized (in a foreground sense) by, and returns to aesthetic experience. From this same perspective he is able to shed some light on the sense of a further background context for reflective thinking. However, he considers a similar investigation and analysis of aesthetic experience to be impossible, for while in affective qualitative thinking a basic awareness of the simple qualitative whole is achieved, this does not equate to analysis. This consideration is premised on his belief in the impossibility of actually reflecting on aesthetic experience, because when reflection is undertaken, it is always a reflection dealing with something in the past, never addressing aesthetic experience in its immediacy, as in qualitative thinking. One is therefore able to have an awareness of aesthetic experience via affective thinking, but never to analyze aesthetic experience. In making these points Dewey, following Peirce, refers to aesthetic experience in its connection with firstness, quality, as ineffable. Considered in itself, quality is that which totally and intimately pervades a phenomenon or experience, rendering it just the one experience which it is. Of course, then it is “ineffable.” Mr. Peirce or any one can only call attention

The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience 65 to it and invite others to note its presence in any and every experience they have a mind to take. When it is described, even when it is denotatively mentioned, there is another and new experience having its own, so to say, totalizing unifying quality – and so on ad infinitum. (Dewey 1935a: 704–705). So there is always “a point in deliberate action where definite thought [reflection] fades into the ineffable and indefinable – into emotion” (Dewey 1922b: 264), a point “which effort and reflection cannot touch.” Yet “there is nothing mystical about such ineffability. It expresses the fact that of direct existence it is futile to say anything to one’s self and impossible to say anything to another” (1929a: 73). However, in acknowledgement of qualitative thinking, Dewey (1930c: 16) claims that “language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought” and without verbal symbols, analysis is impossible. Thus “the idea [of ineff ability] might be expressed by saying ‘presence in a non-symbolic way.’ Something can be said about a situation so present or ‘had,’ but it [this direct experience] cannot possibly be duplicated by any possible number or combination of symbols” (p. 346fn). Thus it is the “immediacy of existence” that “is ineffable” (1929a: 73). Ineffability is therefore premised on an understanding of time underpinned by pragmatic continuity, for Dewey argues that “experience has temporal continuity” (1938a: 245). In this pragmatic sense, experience is constituted by a “temporal course of sequential events” (p. 229) that works with the “temporal continuity of past-present-future” (p. 237). This sequential time is evident as a temporal order, and Dewey believes that such “temporal seriality is the very essence … of the human individual” (1940a: 92). It is this temporal seriality which characterizes inquiry; because of it, Dewey’s understanding of individuality is confused across both reflective and aesthetic experience. In a reference to this temporal seriality, Peirce notes that reflective thinking is constrained in always having to consider an instant that is in the past and never the immediate present instant. “We can make no inference from the present, since it will be past before the inference gets drawn” (Peirce 1931/1897: 68). Immediate consciousness can then only ever be “immediate consciousness of the past” (p. 68). In other words, in the reflective way of thinking, experience can never have immediate access to itself. As such, Peirce (1931/1903a: 173) believes the notion of true immediacy to be “a pure fiction.” “Nothing is more occult than the absolute present” (1932/1902b: 45). James (1892: 280) agrees, calling it “an altogether ideal abstraction.” “Reflection leads us to the conclusion that it must exist, but that it does exist can never be a fact of our immediate experience” (p. 280). Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it,

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A coherent theory of experience this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. (James 1892: 280)

On the basis of such an understanding of time as temporal continuity, it is impossible to investigate immediate and qualitative aesthetic experience via reflective experience. The immediate present is positioned on a timeline, a temporal continuity, which renders it fleeting and thus inaccessible to reflective experience. However, supported by Peirce’s phenomenological notions of firstness, secondness and thirdness, Dewey does attempt to pursue aesthetic experience via reflective thought. Mindful that he cannot directly reflect on firstness, Dewey looks for what firstness, quality, must be if secondness and thirdness are as they are reflectively. Thus, one way of understanding firstness is as the background of context informed by reflective thinking in its two levels of culture and theory; but there is another way to understand firstness reflectively.

Quality conditioning existence Another reflective route to understanding firstness or quality that Dewey follows is similar to his consideration of the background context of reflective thinking. Again, Dewey is seeking an understanding of firstness by way of its relation to secondness. Here Dewey considers the ways in which firstness conditions secondness, existence, in the sense that there is a cause-effect relation between them. “When … quality is reflected upon in relation to existence, it [existence] is seen to be a potentiality and to be general” (1935a: 705). Here, in his consideration of the ways firstness conditions secondness, Dewey indicates two alternatives that align with the twofold of secondness: (1) as possibility or potentiality, where “potentiality” is “a characteristic of individuality” (1940a: 102); and (2) as generality in the sense of the “common qualities” (1935a: 702) of different experiences, where qualities are considered generalizable, generic. Such a consideration is based on his acquaintance with the twofold nature of Peirce’s definition of secondness, where “in reference to existence so defined, quality is both possibility and generality” (Dewey 1935a: 702) (Figure 3.2). For Dewey, qualitative conditioning of the individuality side of secondness renders it as “material potentiality or power” (p. 701). Material potentialities are possible qualities, powers or ways of behaving, able to be actualized in interaction. For example, “we characterize an element, say hydrogen, not only, as the name implies, in terms of its water-forming potentiality but ultimately in terms of consequences effected in a whole range of modes of conjoint behavior” (1928a: 162). Therefore it is “in interactions alone” that these “potentialities” are “released and actualized” (p. 162). Thus, “individuality itself is originally a potentiality and is realized only in interaction with surrounding conditions” (1934b: 281). Like most of Dewey’s work in this area, this understanding can be traced back to Peirce’s pragmatism.

The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience

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Figure 3.2 The continuity of aesthetic and reflective experience across the twofold of secondness, as well as firstness and thirdness

What in my opinion is Peirce’s most characteristic philosophical contribution, namely, his original theory of the relation between the existential and the logical, is wholly meaningless if it is not seen that he is speaking of possibility and generality as ways or modes that with respect to actualization are potential and general, being actualized only under individualized conditions of interaction with other things. (Dewey 1935a: 703–704) However, this is as far as Dewey can pursue aesthetic experience via reflective scientific method. With his pragmatic emphasis on secondness as interaction in its logical support of thirdness as the continuity of reflective thinking, Dewey’s logical version of pragmatism is coherent. His pursuit of a coherent theory of experience necessitates an acknowledgment of the connection between reflective and non-reflective or aesthetic experience, where aesthetic experience provides some sense of a qualitative whole as well as a qualitative background. At this point, however, Dewey’s coherent theory of experience is as complete as he can make it, built as it is on his logical version of pragmatism. Constrained by an understanding of time as temporal continuity, aesthetic experience remains closed to Dewey’s reflective analysis. Firstness is beyond the reach of reflective analysis. From a reflective perspective, aesthetic experience is thus considered “naïve” (1929a: 12). However, the enormity of the importance of firstness for a coherent theory of experience is captured in Peirce’s (1931/1903c: 281) view (cited in Dewey 1935a: 702) that “‘universal Firstness is the mode of being of itself.’”Yet Dewey admits to having unresolved difficulties with Peirce’s understanding of firstness. “I do not profess … to agree completely with Peirce’s analysis [of quality/ firstness], for I do not think that I have fully mastered it” (p. 708).22 It is here that Heidegger’s work contributes to a coherent theory of experience. With his phenomenological rather than pragmatic emphasis, Heidegger is concerned (in Peirce’s terms) with firstness in the way that Peirce positioned it as being.23 Like Peirce and Dewey, Heidegger never disconnects

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A coherent theory of experience

being from existence, but Heidegger’s phenomenological approach, beginning with aesthetic experience (although he did not commonly refer to it as such), is very different to Dewey’s pragmatic method. Heidegger recognizes that aesthetic experience is constituted by a different understanding of time, a sense of time which characterizes the living moment. So for Heidegger the moment is not immediate in the sense of being a point on a timeline. By way of phenomenology and its different sense of time, Heidegger is able to think aesthetic individuality afresh, taking Dewey’s understanding of qualitative affective thinking further.24 Heidegger’s phenomenology therefore augments and complements Dewey’s pragmatism to afford a coherent theory of experience that remains within experience in the way of Peirce’s truly experiential philosophy.

Summary In this chapter we have pursued Dewey’s attempts to come to terms with nonreflective experience, with the individual unity emphasis in existence, and with firstness. Without an understanding of this side of existence and experience, a coherent theory of experience remains impossible. Dewey achieves much in his attempts to understand this side of existence and experience, but he admits that he struggles with Peirce’s firstness. Dewey approaches non-reflective experience in two distinct but related ways. One involves his search for the context within which reflective thinking takes place. This is an approach to non-reflective experience via reflective experience. By way of his logical pragmatism he recognizes that there must be a context within which reflective thinking occurs and he identifies three levels that describe this context. The two deep (deeper and deepest) levels of context are pragmatically continuous with his two types of reflective thinking: concrete (incidental) and abstract (regulated).The concrete is deeper, while that affiliated with the abstract is the deepest level. Both of these levels, deeper and deepest, constitute the existential matrix of inquiry for Dewey.The deeper level is cultural, it is concrete habit, while the deepest is continuous with theoretical laws. Dewey describes these together as the background of experience, and because this background is continuous with reflective thinking he argues that this background of culture and theory is always within experience, never outside it. However, this still leaves the shallowest of his three levels of context, which is not a background but a foreground context to reflective thinking. Dewey perceives this foreground as subjective, but importantly he associates this sense of subjectivity with emotion, as qualitative whole. He therefore regards it as aesthetic in the sense of selective interest guided by emotion.This points toward the connection between this foreground of context and Dewey’s views on aesthetic experience, experience as it is directly had. As Dewey struggles with aesthetic experience a different view of individuality begins to appear, one more holistic, simple and qualitative, which is less subordinated to interaction. Aesthetic experience is accessible via a non-reflective way of thinking. Dewey’s

The challenge of non-reflective (aesthetic) experience 69 understanding of this way of thinking leads him to describe it as affective thinking or qualitative thinking. This is a thinking awareness of a qualitative whole; it is a way of thinking more akin to feeling than the reflective thinking we are so used to calling thinking in general. Yet this way of qualitative thinking does not offer Dewey any possibility for further analysis of aesthetic experience. It remains the foreground of context; it is naïve. Dewey reaches this conclusion because he understands aesthetic experience to be immediate. In its immediacy aesthetic experience is not open to reflective analysis because any attempt to think about it has already positioned it in the past. Based on his understanding of temporal continuity, time exists as a timeline. Hence Dewey’s problems with firstness can be traced to his pragmatic scientific conception of time. Dewey does consider aesthetic experience in one other reflective way, as the logical condition of reflective experience, which leads him to describe it as potentiality. However, these two reflective attempts to comprehend nonreflective experience are as far as he can go pragmatically, with the consequence that Dewey’s coherent theory of experience remains limited by his understanding of time as temporal continuity. Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis is not limited in this way, and it therefore offers a way forward beyond this impasse.

4

The ontological difference

Overview The aim of this chapter is to highlight the centrality of what Heidegger calls the ‘ontological difference’ to our understanding of the twofold of existence: individuality and interaction. This difference is, in Dewey’s terms, between aesthetic and reflective experience, but Dewey did not fully comprehend it because he approached it primarily from a pragmatic perspective in reflective experience. Peirce helps here, as he describes the unity inherent to existence as individuality, thereby distinguishing it more clearly from interaction. For Heidegger, the ontological difference marks the difference between being and beings; between the simple and the multiple; between two different ways of questioning being (the grounding question and the guiding question); between originary and ordinary senses of time; between meditative and calculative thinking. Comprehending the ontological difference in this way, within existence or secondness, also distinguishes it from the logical difference (between secondness and thirdness) and Ereignis (between firstness and secondness). In this chapter we also discuss the character of Ereignis, which is unlike either the ontological difference or the logical difference. Each of these three, marking folds in experience, is unique.

The unity of individuality as aesthetic experiential whole From the standpoint of Dewey’s (1916a: 331) “logical version of pragmatism,” secondness is interaction; secondness is a logical condition of thirdness, of continuity.When understood as interaction, secondness can perhaps, in Peirce’s (1931/1903c: 281) terms, be designated as “the Secondness of Thirdness” (Figure 4.1). Secondness in the way of interaction is logically necessary for thirdness. Dewey (1938a: 44) refers to thirdness and secondness in pragmatic terms as “the two principles of continuity and interaction” respectively, and they are “not separate from each other. They intercept and unite. They are, so to speak, the longitudinal and lateral aspects of experience.” Secondness (as interaction) and thirdness together underwrite the logical version of pragmatism.

The ontological difference 71

Figure 4.1 The positioning of the secondness of thirdness and the firstness of secondness across the ontological difference

However, Peirce (1905: 178) also associates secondness with “individual existence,” a position which Dewey acknowledges but with which he struggles. Secondness as individual qualitative whole is unlike thirdness. As individual qualitative whole, secondness is “of a radically different sort from Thirdness. It is particularity as against generality; brute interruption as against continuity; contingency as against law” (Dewey 1946: 90). The immediacy of aesthetic experience highlights how the brute fact of existence “cannot be explained, much less explained away. It simply is; we cannot leave it because we must take it” (1937: 416). This understanding of secondness positions it as “the nonintellectual, non-rational element in our experience” (p. 416). In this sense secondness is non-cognitive, non-reflective. In connection with existence as individual qualitative whole, Peirce highlights the work of scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus. Peirce (1931/1890: 221) is particularly interested in “what Scotus calls the haecceities of things, the hereness and nowness of them.” “Hic et nunc [here and now] is the phrase perpetually in the mouth of Duns Scotus, who first elucidated individual existence” (p. 248). Like Peirce, Dewey (1902h: 423) recognizes Duns Scotus as the philosopher who insists “upon the primal character of individuality (haecceitas).” Dewey interprets the term “haecceitas” to mean “this special uniquely distinguished individual” (p. 423). This individual is “not one of a kind in general, a sample of a cloud or river,” but rather “is this individual thing existing here and now with all the unrepeatable particularities that accompany and mark such existences” (1934b: 177). In tune with this understanding of individuality, Dewey points out that “esthetic perception is occupied with ‘this’ in its individuality” (1929c: 237). Such individuality is aesthetic individuality. However, Dewey’s sense of individuality remains ambiguous. Crucial to an understanding of individuality as individual qualitative whole is Peirce’s consideration of individuality as a form of unity. Each of Peirce’s categories of experience – firstness, secondness and thirdness – emphasizes a different sense of unity. Peirce (1902: 734) suggests that “the first unity might be named simplicity or firstness; the second is very appropriately termed individuality”; and “the third, which is nearly what Kant terms synthetical unity, ought to have some better designation than totality or universality” because “in Kant’s synthetic unity the idea of Thirdness is predominant. It is an attained unity” (1931/1894a:

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A coherent theory of experience

149). However, Peirce also suggests here that Kant’s synthetic unity “would better have been called totality” (p. 149). Unity is thus simplicity (firstness), individuality (secondness) and totality (thirdness – as an attained unity). Firstness expresses unity as a pervading simplicity where there is just wholeness with no sense that this whole has any boundaries or is one amongst others. “Here would be an utter absence of binarity” (Peirce 1932/1902b: 46). “If we consider the number one, irrespective of the possibility of two, three, etc., it involves no idea of number (and therefore not of totality or collection), nor even any idea of relation” (1902: 734). Here even the notion of unity itself is problematic as unity commonly presupposes plurality: “I cannot call it unity; for even unity supposes plurality” (1932/1902b: 46). Thus Peirce (p. 46) opts to “call its form Firstness, Orience, or Originality. It would be something which is what it is without reference to anything else within it or without it, regardless of all force and of all reason.” “The idea would, therefore, be found in a pure state only in an immediate consciousness which should make no distinction of any kind, whether between subject and object, or of the parts of the object” (1902: 734).Yet Peirce does not equate firstness with immediate consciousness directly. “Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a pure fiction, by the way), would be Firstness, but that the quality of what we are immediately conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness” (1931/1903a: 173–174). However, unity in the way of firstness is not the usual sense in which the term unity is employed. Rather, “the idea which the word unity is usually employed in philosophy to express is that of a general (in the most general sense) in its relation to particulars, which would be much more accurately called ‘totality’” (Peirce 1902: 734). Here unity is used “not to express pure oneness,” as in firstness, “nor yet positive oneness,” as in secondness, “but to express the negation of multitude in the object to which it is attributed. Thus it involves a distinct reference to the possibility, not of duality merely, as positive unity does, but of plurality” (p. 734). Furthermore,“the general idea of plurality is involved in the fundamental concept of Thirdness” (1933/1905: 269). Thirdness is logically associated with plurality and totality, which come together in the idea which most clearly exemplifies thirdness: continuity. “Totality means continuity – the carrying on of a former habit of action with the readaptation necessary to keep it alive and growing” (Dewey 1916b: 379–380) (Figure 4.2). In distinction from both totality (thirdness) and simplicity (firstness), the unity of secondness is “the oneness element of experience which involves a positive assignment of the number one, and which must be originally one, and not a total” (Peirce 1902: 734). Unlike firstness, secondness does involve distinction and is therefore the awareness of an individual unity, but not as the unity of totality, which is thirdness. “The word unity is seldom applied to this sort of oneness, which goes by the name of individuality” (p. 734). Individuality or haecceitas is the unity of secondness: not the unity of a totality of interactions open to mediation, but unity in the sense of an aesthetic oneness, an individual qualitative wholeness which is not internally differentiated into parts. In this regard, Peirce (1931/1890: 221) describes “haecceity” as “pure secondness.”

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Figure 4.2 Peirce’s triad of unity: wholeness as absence of binarity (firstness), individuality or oneness (secondness) and totality (thirdness)

Another way of expressing this notion is as “the Firstness of Secondness – that is what Secondness is, of itself ” (1931/1903c: 281). So, of itself, secondness is individuality: individual qualitative whole. Yet for Dewey, secondness is chiefly understood in reflective experience as interaction, a position that emphasizes thirdness.

The simple and the multiple: two sides of existence Peirce’s sense of the unity inherent to firstness, to simplicity, is shared by Heidegger, who highlights the difficulty in comprehending it. Much easier to comprehend is the plurality or multiplicity of an attained totality, of thirdness. “The simple … is our name for what is inconspicuously the most difficult, which, when it occurs, appears to everyone immediately and ever again as the easiest and most accessible; yet it remains incontestably the most difficult” (Heidegger 1994/1937–38: 13). For Heidegger, the simple is the difficult notion of the oneness of being: “Oneness belongs to the essence of being in general, and being is always already implied in oneness” (Heidegger 1995/1931: 24).This simple oneness of which Heidegger speaks can be thought of as involving the unities inherent to both firstness and secondness (i.e. as the firstness of secondness), the simplicity of individuality, the wholeness of oneness. Such cannot be attained via reflective experience as this sense of unity (the wholeness of oneness) is not an object to be reflected on as something past, but living experience itself, as lived: experiencing experienced, or experienced experiencing (cf. the more experiential introduction to this way of thinking described at the end of Chapter One). Dewey (1935a: 701) struggles to interpret this ‘wholeness of oneness’ because he approaches it from a pragmatic standpoint. He characterizes it as “sheer totality” as well as the “pervading unity of quality in everything experienced”; his emphasis here is reflective and pragmatic. For Dewey, “experience” is always, at bottom, “a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies” (1916b: 196–197, italics added). However, such a totality is not the simple of which Heidegger speaks. In contrast to Dewey’s pragmatic perspective, Heidegger (1971/1947: 7) is enamored with “the splendor of the simple.” To convey his understanding

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of simplicity, Heidegger contrasts the simple with the multiple, or in Peirce’s terms, with secondness (as interaction) and the totality or plurality of thirdness (Figure 4.2). “The simple is the most difficult, for the multiple admits and favors dispersion” (Heidegger 1994/1937–38: 13). In such dispersion, thinking is a reflective process concerned with the cause and effect or means-consequence relations between things. In this sense “the multiple is the easy – even where concern over it seems toilsome. For progress from one thing to another is always a relaxation, and it is precisely this progress that is not allowed by the simple” (p. 13).The difficulty inherent in comprehending the simple is also perceived by Peirce, who aligns this comprehension with the difficult task of understanding that which is closest to us in everyday life. Philosophy “confines itself … to the universal phenomena of experience; and these are, generally speaking, sufficiently revealed in the ordinary observations of every-day life” (Peirce 1896: 23–24). However, “these observations escape the untrained eye precisely because they permeate our whole lives” (1931/1902: 110). Dewey (1937: 416) is keenly interested in Peirce’s concern to expose “the elements that he [Peirce] thought were found in every experience of every man.” Using Peirce’s (1931/1905a: 50) own words to make his point, Dewey (1937: 415) asserts “that the universal or common subject matter of philosophy consists ‘of those observations which every person can make in every hour of his waking life.’” However, “it does not follow … that because the material of philosophy is derived from observations which every man can make, these observations are easy to make” (p. 415). Again quoting Peirce (1931/1894b: 55), Dewey (1937: 415) points out that “‘it is extremely difficult to bring our attention to elements of experience that are constantly present …. Roundabout devices have to be resorted to, in order to enable us to perceive what stares us in the face with a glare that, once noticed, becomes almost oppressive with its insistency.’” “I know of nothing that cuts deeper than this remark,” Dewey asserts (p. 415). Dewey (1935a: 701) identifies Peirce’s efforts to perceive these constantly present elements to include “phenomenology, or the matter of experience as experienced.” Heidegger (2000/1919: 99) employs a similar phrase in his descriptions of phenomenology when he speaks of “experiencing experienced” and “experienced experiencing.”25 For Peirce (1934/1903: 77) “phenomenology … contemplates the Universal Phenomenon and discerns its ubiquitous elements, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.” These are “the universal categories” belonging “to every phenomenon” (p. 30). Peirce (1931/1905b: 301) also acknowledges that his ability to clearly describe these categories emerged only “after the hardest two years mental work,” a sentiment close to Dewey’s heart: “The most difficult thing in the world to learn to see is the obvious, the familiar, the universally taken for granted” (Dewey 1921: v). Such is the phenomenon which is the focus of phenomenology. Heidegger, too, acknowledges the difficulty inherent in a phenomenological way of thinking. “At times it requires a greater effort. It demands more practice. It is in need of even more delicate care than any other genuine craft”

The ontological difference 75 (1966/1955: 47). “That all men cannot all follow the thought processes of modern theoretical physics is considered quite in order,” he observes, “but to learn the thinking of thinkers is in essence much more difficult, not because this thinking is still more involved but because it is simple – too simple for the easy fluency of common notions” (1968/1951–52: 239). These common notions are, in Heidegger’s terms, those of “ordinary thinking, whether scientific or prescientific or unscientific”; a way of thinking that “thinks beings [multiples], and does so in every case according to their individual regions, separate strata, and circumscribed aspects” (1992/1942–43: 7). This ‘thinking beings,’ with concern for the cause and effect or means-consequence relations that constitute them, is at the heart of Dewey’s logical version of pragmatism. Furthermore, like Dewey but with a greater degree of insight, Heidegger perceives another way of thinking beyond the pragmatic method of reflective thinking. Heidegger, understands how a qualitative way of thinking, a way of thinking that is non-reflective, can access aesthetic experience. However, where Dewey’s understanding of qualitative thought is limited by his sense of the aesthetic as the immediate present of a temporal continuity, Heidegger’s phenomenological way of thinking engages with a different sense of time. Like Peirce, Heidegger always remains within the phenomenon of experienced experiencing; his thinking does not retreat to a supernal realm outside experience. Heidegger also sees a triad within this phenomenon. “Each experience – as experiencing, and what is experienced – can ‘be taken in the phenomenon’” (2004/1920–21: 43). In other words, “one can ask: 1. After the original ‘what,’ that is experienced therein (content). 2. After the original ‘how,’ in which it is experienced (relation). 3. After the original ‘how,’ in which the relational meaning is enacted (enactment)” (p. 43). Again like Peirce, Heidegger stresses that “these three directions of sense (content-, relational-, enactmentsense) do not simply coexist.‘Phenomenon’ is the totality of sense in these three directions” (p. 43). The phenomenon of experienced experiencing involves all three senses, a triad holding similarities to that devised by Peirce. However, for Heidegger the enactment sense, as the simple, is the most intriguing, yet it is not easily attained. “The simple is the most difficult, and can only be experienced after long endeavor” (Heidegger 1993/1941: 17). For Heidegger, like Peirce, the simple is be-ing. Heidegger’s ongoing concern is with various interpretations of “the question of being” (2010/1927: 6), or expressed in Peirce’s terms, with firstness. In contrast Peirce (1935/1898: 138), while acknowledging firstness, concentrates primarily on thirdness, calling his theory “Synechism, because it rests on the study of continuity.” In this vein Peirce describes firstness and secondness as “other elements, without the independence of which Thirdness would not have anything upon which to operate” (p. 138). However, Peirce’s focus is on thirdness, and Peirce’s view informs Dewey’s efforts. Dewey paraphrases Peirce’s understanding of the importance of thirdness, stating that “if there were no other element in experience [beyond firstness and secondness], then thought and knowledge would be impossible” (1937: 416).

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However, while varying in their emphasis and direction, both Peirce and Heidegger (as well as Dewey) understand their investigations to be grounded in secondness, existence. Further, like Peirce and Dewey, Heidegger (2000/1919: 63) perceives a twofold within secondness, two ways of comprehending existence as two “modes of experience.” However, for Heidegger this fold is more emphatic. He refers to the reflective scientific side as “thing experience” (p. 75) and the aesthetic side as “environmental experience” (p. 75). Thing experience (reflective experience) is objectifying, whereas environmental experience (aesthetic experience) is non-objectifying. However, Heidegger does not commonly refer to this non-objectifying experience as aesthetic experience, because for him ‘aesthetic’ is usually understood reflectively (in the historical context within which he is writing) as “aesthetics [plural]” (Heidegger 2002/1935–36: 50), as art theory concerned with “a cultural phenomenon that has become routine” (p. 49).Yet phenomenologically Heidegger is aware that aesthetic aligns with the Greek “αἴσθησις [aisthesis], the simple sense perception of something” (2010/1927: 31),“aesthetic beholding in the proper sense” (1982/1927: 110). Thus Heidegger would prefer to consider art phenomenologically, as aesthetic (singular). For esthetics [plural] art is representation of the beautiful in the sense of the pleasing, the pleasant. But art is disclosure of the being of the essent. On the strength of a recaptured, pristine, relation to being we must provide the word “art” with a new content. (Heidegger 1959/1935: 132) Heidegger’s sense of environmental experience is aesthetic, holistic; it is not experience of the environment as we might understand that term in its scientific and ecological significance. Environmental experience is pre-reflective or pretheoretical and thus phenomenological. Environmental experience is “the unity of genuine life itself ” (Heidegger 2000/1919: 76).The difference or hinge between these two ways of comprehending experience – as thing experience (interaction) and environmental experience (individual qualitative whole) – forms the central fold of a “four-part schema which Heidegger [2000/1919] … sketched by hand on the board” (Kisiel 1993: 21) during a lecture (Figure 4.3). When Heidegger’s four-part schema is interpreted using Peirce’s categories, the middle two parts are the concrete aspects of secondness – individual and interaction – positioned on each side of the central fold; and on the outsides are the formal senses of each of these concrete aspects. One is formal in the pragmatic way of thirdness, the other is formal in the phenomenological way of firstness. Thus Heidegger (2000/1919: 96) recognizes “two fundamentally different sorts of the theoretical,” or formal.26 Crucial to Heidegger’s investigation of experience is his methodological insight that hermeneutic phenomenological thinking begins with haecceitas, with individual qualitative whole, thisness. As Tonner (2010: 29) observes, “Heidegger’s engagement with Scotus” is “motivated by the possibility

The ontological difference 77 of retrieving a philosophy of radical singularity expressed in the concept of haecceitas.” For Heidegger, haecceitas conveys the phenomenological sense of individual qualitative whole as the genuine experiential aesthetic of experiencing-experienced, the fundamental moment of definite experiential spheres as meaningful worlds (Figure 4.3). In contrast to the pragmatic emphasis on secondness as interaction, haecceitas is secondness as individual qualitative whole, another way of describing aesthetic experience, that mode of experience which is more exemplary of everyday life. Heidegger considers Scotus to have “a more extensive and accurate nearness (haecceitas) to real life, to its manifoldness and possible tensions than the scholastics before him” (1978/1916: 15). Hence Tonner (2008: 153) argues that “it was the crucially important notion of haecceitas that gave Heidegger the insight required into the individuality of the individual.” Heidegger gained an insight into the nature of Dasein (human existence) from his reading of Scotus. It was Scotus’s ability to think “near to real life” that so impressed Heidegger. This ability arose out of Scotus’s metaphysical inquiries and should not be read as something wholly other than them. The concept to which the young Heidegger refers was one of Scotus’s most celebrated innovations, the notion of haecceitas (literally, “thisness”) with which Scotus brought philosophy near to the real life of the individual. (Tonner 2006: 40)

Figure 4.3 My adaptation of the hand sketch that Heidegger produced in a lecture and which was recorded by student Franz-Josef Brecht. The sketch identifies Heidegger’s “four-part schema” (Kisiel 1993: 21). The text in bold is from the sketch (Heidegger 2000/1919: 186). Also included is the connection with Peirce’s experiential structure of firstness, secondness and thirdness, as well as Dewey’s distinction between aesthetic and reflective or scientific experience. This distinction mirrors Heidegger’s distinction between the pre-theoretical and the theoretical. Ereignis and the ontological difference have not yet been discussed in detail but will be covered later in this chapter

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Heidegger’s awareness of haecceitas cannot be separated from the concomitant developments he made in phenomenology as he learnt it with Husserl, specifically in relation to categorial intuition. “Scotus’s haecceitas, the very form of individuality, shows promise [for Heidegger], since it invests each individual with its own ‘this-here-now’ (Dasein!) and so brings out a rich categorial structure” (Kisiel 1993: 30). Categorial intuition is an acknowledgment that there is more meaning present in the brute immediacy of any perception than the senses can detect, “an irremovable excess (as we provisionally call it) of perceivables within the region of perception” (Heidegger 2002/1931–32: 135). For Heidegger (2003/1973: 67) categorial intuition is “Husserl’s decisive contribution” and “an essential impetus” for his own work. Indeed, Heidegger (p. 65) considers categorial intuition to be “the focal point of Husserlian thought.” McGrath (2003: 357) observes that by “fusing the notions of haecceitas and categorial intuition, Heidegger turned Husserl’s reflective phenomenology into the ‘hermeneutics of facticity,’” where the factical is the unique individual qualitative whole of aesthetic experience, the brute fact of existence (secondness) in its unity as individuality. Thus “with Heidegger, haecceitas became facticity” (Tonner 2008: 153). For Heidegger, hermeneutic phenomenology is a way of thinking enabling access to the categories of the factical, the concrete individuality of haecceitas, which he characterizes in a formal phenomenological way as facticity.

Dasein as aesthetic experience-experienced “‘Facticity’ is the designation we will use for the character of the being of ‘our’ ‘own’ Dasein,” Heidegger (1999/1923: 5) stipulates. Facticity is the formal or theoretical characterization of Dasein, German for existence. Literally meaning being-here (or being-there) with temporal overtones of being here now, 27 Dasein is analogous to the individual qualitative whole of this “factical life” (p. 5), haecceitas, aesthetic experience. Comprehending Dasein in the way that Heidegger means it is crucial to making the distinction between aesthetic experience and reflective experience, between existence as individual and as interaction. Heidegger (p. 5) goes on to state “more precisely,” that “this expression [facticity] means: in each case ‘this’ Dasein in its being-there for a while at the particular time … insofar as it is, in the character of its being ‘there’ in the manner of be-ing.”28 Heidegger is here struggling to express the simple aesthetic whole of experience-experienced which can be brought to a qualitatively thought awareness (cf. the experiential accounts described at the end of Chapter One). This whole is being-here, now – as perceived. In this sense, Dasein is “in each instance mine” (1985/1925: 153). “Being-there is ‘in every case mine’” (1959/1935: 28). Crucially, however, this sense of ownership means “neither ‘posited through me’ nor ‘apportioned to an individual ego’” (pp. 28–29). Being-here is not reflective individualism, but aesthetic individual whole; the uniquely experienced whole of present existence – as perceived. As such, in my aesthetic awareness of being-here, a ‘me’ separate from others is not

The ontological difference 79 perceived. Achieving this aesthetic awareness is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the difficulty Heidegger speaks of in relation to the simple. If we say “Dasein is in each case essentially mine,” and if our task is to define this characteristic of Dasein ontologically, this does not mean we should investigate the essence of myself, as this factical individual, or of some other given individual. The object of inquiry is not the individual essence of my self, but it is the essence of mineness and selfhood as such. (Heidegger 1984/1928: 188) Thus “individuation does not mean clinging obstinately to one’s own private wishes but being free for the factical possibilities of current existence” (Heidegger 1982/1927: 288). The mineness of factical life is distinct from considerations of interaction and rather points to the qualitative wholeness of aesthetic experience. Importantly, this whole includes other people as well as things, but not in their reflective and objective individualism. Dewey touches on this aesthetic and phenomenological understanding when he acknowledges that “somehow, the work of art operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an enveloping undefined whole that accompanies every normal experience. This whole is then felt as an expansion of ourselves” (1934b: 195). Mineness is not a reflective prioritization of self over others and things, but a phenomenological sense attributable to aesthetic awareness of existence. Phenomenologically, mineness never refers to an organism in interaction with other individuals (people or things) in an environment understood as a collection of such individuals. However, Heidegger (2009/1934: 124) recognizes problematically that “there is nothing more familiar than the idea of the human being as an individual who is found among others, among his equals, and among things.” Such a position reveals “the bounds of the human being” to “run along the surface of his skin; it is, as it were, the boundary of that which is without and that which is within” (p. 124). This boundary forms the barrier that divides subject and object.Yet phenomenologically, my being-here invokes a sense of individual qualitative whole, a “knowing awareness” that “is the actual Da-sein” (Heidegger 2006/1938–39: 100). In its concrete phenomenological sense this awareness of being-here is “the empowering experiencing of living experience that takes itself along” (2000/1919: 99). Heidegger (1999/1923: 12) also characterizes this awareness as “the wakefulness of Dasein for itself,” a wakeful and knowing awareness of being-here distinguished as authentic or resolute existence:“resoluteness is our name for authentic existence” (1982/1927: 287). This is in contrast to an inauthentic or irresolute existence where there is not a contemplative awareness of being-here, but instead a reflective focus on the relations of interacting things. Heidegger (2010/1927: 42) develops the distinction between “authenticity and inauthenticity” to highlight “the fact that Dasein is in general determined by always being-mine.” Authenticity signals a specific phenomenological thinking awareness of being-here necessarily involving a sense of mineness as individual qualitative whole (Figure 4.4).

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Figure 4.4 Heidegger’s distinction between authenticity (individuality) and inauthenticity (interaction) across the twofold of secondness that describes the difference between aesthetic and reflective experience. Also important is the relation of identity between the secondness of thirdness and thirdness (logical difference) in contrast to the relation of sameness between firstness and the firstness of secondness (Ereignis), as described in the next section

In relation to Heidegger’s four part schema (Figure 4.3) this sense of authenticity is a concrete individuality, as distinct from a formal wholeness; in Peirce’s terms it is the firstness of secondness (concrete) as distinct from firstness (formal). Heidegger also employs the notion of ‘world’ to capture this sense of an aesthetic individual qualitative whole. He (1996/1927) refers to the factical sense of beinghere, Dasein, as “being in a world” (p. 11), which becomes “being-in-the-world” (p. 49) when formal.This world is living experiential sphere (Figure 4.3), but it is never an environment interacting with an organism. In a similar way Heidegger uses the term ‘who’ to express the character of Dasein, or being-here (we shall later see how ‘who’ and world’ are analogous ways of understanding being-here). However, who is never an organism interacting with an environment; who is not a private I separate from you and we. Instead, these objectifying ways of conceiving human being are answers to the “What-question” (Heidegger 2009/1934: 31) of being that is aligned with the pragmatic and scientific howquestion of relation. Heidegger points out that “the How-question does not release us from the what” (p. 31). Thus the significance of the “Who-question” (p. 31) has so far been overlooked. Heidegger (p. 31) is adamant that phenomenologically “we do not ask, ‘What is the human being?’, but ‘Who is the human being?’” And in more specific terms, “‘Who are we ourselves?’” (p. 33). “The point is that in the determination of the humanity of the human being … what is essential is not the human being but being” (1998/1946: 254). In this sense “Dasein is not constituted by whatness but – if we may coin the expression – by whoness” (1982/1927: 120). The what question of existence posits an individualism, an individual human being as thing in the form of an ‘I’ or subject. However, “the self is no distinguishing determination of the I. This is the fundamental error

The ontological difference 81 in modern thinking” (2009/1934: 35). In contrast, the who-question never distinguishes amongst “I, you, we” (1982/1927: 120). The phenomenological who-question concerns individual qualitative whole as “being-a-possibility” (2005/1923–24: 39), which always concerns I, you, we – inseparably. Hence awareness of factical life requires a phenomenological way of thinking which never posits self as I, but still recognizes a sense of selfhood – an owning of being-here (mineness as oneness understood in Peirce’s sense of individuality as unity) which is characterized by a sense of care or concern. Heidegger (2010/1927: 185) recognizes that being-here “is concerned in its being about that being.” Thus the fundamental problem of human being-here is this beinghere. Expressed formally, in a phenomenological sense of formal, “being-inthe-world is essentially care” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 186). Interestingly, Dewey (1930c: 20) also perceives the fundamental nature of this sense of care in aesthetic experience and qualitative thinking, asserting (in his pragmatic way) that “the underlying pervasive quality [firstness] in the last instance, when it is put in words, is some care or concern for human destiny.”

Ereignis: be-ing as being-here Facticity (formal) is the character of factical life (concrete) in a phenomenological, not pragmatic, direction. This ‘relation’ between formal and concrete suggests that Heidegger’s phenomenological beginning in concrete secondness (firstness of secondness) with Dasein, being-here, cannot be separated from firstness, from be-ing; oneness cannot be separated from wholeness. “Being-there is itself by virtue of its essential relation to being” (1959/1935: 29). He (1969/1957: 36) refers to this ‘relation’ in German as Ereignis, a “key term” that he believes can “no more be translated than the Greek λόγοσ [logos] or the Chinese Tao.” However, it is translated into English (somewhat problematically) as “event of appropriation” (2000/1919: 64) and “enowning” (1999/1936–38: 6). One difficulty with comprehending Ereignis lies in understanding that it is phenomenological and positioned between firstness and secondness, not between secondness and thirdness (as is the pragmatic logical difference). As a consequence, Heidegger (1972/1962: 20) highlights “how Appropriation must not be thought.” “The term event of appropriation here no longer means what we would otherwise call a happening, an occurrence” (1969/1957: 36), in the sense of an interaction, as one interactional event in a series of such events. “It is now [here] used as a singulare tantum [single only in the way of simplicity]. What it indicates happens only in the singular, no, not in any number, but uniquely” (p. 36). What the name “event of Appropriation” names can no longer be represented by means of the current [everyday] meaning of the word; for in that meaning “event of Appropriation” is understood in the sense of occurrence and happening – not in terms of Appropriating as the extending and sending which opens and preserves. (Heidegger 1972/1962: 20)

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Event of appropriation, Ereignis, is not an event of interaction, as one interaction amongst a series of other such unique interactions, as part of a totality of objectlike heres and nows. Ereignis is instead the appropriating ‘relation’ of firstness and the firstness of secondness, of wholeness and oneness, of formal and concrete in a phenomenological sense, the “relation of be-ing to Da-sein, which is en-owned by be-ing” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 6).Appropriation or enowning, Ereignis, is be-ing as being-here, wholeness as oneness – in Peircean terms the distinction or difference between firstness (be-ing) and the firstness of secondness (being-here). This is not a relation via process such as that which connects secondness (the secondness of thirdness) and thirdness across the logical difference (Figure 4.3). Instead, Heidegger speaks of this appropriating relation in terms of the belonging of the same, deliberately distinguishing this tautological sense of belonging from an understanding of the side-by-side equality between two identical things. Same does not here mean two identical things, but one and the same. The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical. The equal or identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything may be reduced to a common denominator. The same, by contrast, is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say “the same” if we think difference. It is in the carrying out and settling of differences that the gathering nature of sameness comes to light. The same banishes all zeal always to level what is different into an equal or identical. The same gathers what is distinct into an original being-at-one. The equal, on the contrary, disperses them into the dull unity of mere uniformity. (Heidegger 1971/1951a: 218–219) “We interpret Sameness to mean a belonging together” (Heidegger 1969/1957: 28) as one and the same. However, Heidegger recognizes that this belonging together can be interpreted in two ways, in two directions (belonging together and belonging together). Belonging together emphasizes the customary togetherness of two things supposedly identical in the way of concrete and abstract across the logical difference, as the secondness of thirdness (interaction) and thirdness (mediation). “If we think of belonging together in the customary way, the meaning of belonging is determined by the word together, that is, by its [italics added] unity” (p. 29), a unity governed by the formal order inherent to a totality. In this way of togetherness, “‘to belong’ means as much as: to be assigned and placed into the order of a ‘together,’ established in the unity of a manifold, combined into the unity of a system, mediated by the unifying center of an authoritative synthesis” (p. 29). However, “being cannot be a genus” (1995/1931: 30). “What is a genus? That which is universal and common to the many and can be differentiated and organized into species by the addition of specific differences” (p. 29). “However, belonging together can also be thought of as belonging together. This means: the ‘together’ is now determined by the belonging” (Heidegger

The ontological difference 83 1969/1957: 29). This is the other way of belonging together, which stresses a tautological belonging of firstness and the firstness of secondness (Figure 4.3), a belonging of one and the same. Hence, “this reference makes us note the possibility of no longer representing belonging in terms of the unity of together, but rather of experiencing this together in terms of belonging” (p. 29). In contrast to the attained sense of unity in totality, Heidegger (pp. 29–30) regards this sense of “belonging together” to be “difficult to keep in mind, because it is so simple.” This simple belonging is “tautology in that highest sense” (1998/1961: 362).Thus “tautological thinking … is the primordial sense of phenomenology” (2003/1973: 80).The notion of tautology captures the sameness of the belonging of firstness and the firstness of secondness, as Ereignis: be-ing as being-here.

The ontological difference: two different ways of questioning be-ing Heidegger (2006/1938–39: 123) believes that “the question of being and along with it also Da-sein is not yet grasped.” This situation is exemplified in Dewey’s logical version of pragmatism, especially when considered outside of his work on aesthetic experience as encountered in Chapter Three. In this pragmatic focus achieved via reflective experience, “one still takes Dasein as the ‘subject’ [italics added]” (p. 123), and then in the attempt to cross the logical difference and generalize from the concrete individual, one “arrives at the ridiculous demand that now the individual subject … would have to be replaced by people as subject” (p. 123), where people as subject is considered to be a generalization of individual as subject. However, this is not the case for being-here, which is phenomenological. For Heidegger, being-here, Dasein, is not subject interacting with object understood as a cause-effect or means-consequence relation. Beinghere is not constituted by interaction, thereby giving priority to interaction. “‘Factical’ does not mean naturally real or causally determined, nor does it mean real in the sense of a thing” (2004/1920–21: 7), such that “what exists are subjects and objects” (1999/1923: 62). So, for facticity to be seen, “this schema must be avoided” (p. 62). This problem forms the basis of all those possibilities which are tried out over and over again and let loose on each other in endless discussions: the object is dependent on the subject, the subject on the object, or both on each other in a correlative manner. This constructivistic forehaving, almost ineradicable on account of the pertinacity of a sedimented tradition, fundamentally and forever obstructs access to that which we have indicated with the term “factical life.” (Heidegger 1999/1923: 63) The problem of subject-object remains within the demands of a way of questioning be-ing that begins with beings, with things in interaction. “If we inquire into beings as beings … and thus inquire into the being of beings in this starting point

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and direction, then whoever inquires stands in the realm of the question that guides the beginning of Western philosophy” (1999/1936–38: 52). “Therefore we call this question concerning being (of beings) the guiding-question” (p. 52). Here, being “means beingness” (p. 52) in the formal or abstract sense associated with crossing the logical difference (Figure 4.5). “Being (as beingness) is always and only meant as … what is common and thus common for every being” (p. 52), in the sense of universality. This way of questioning being is pragmatic and looks for being as the universal sense of beings, where being is generalized as beingness: “the ‘universal’ of all beings, the highest genus, that which beings would fall under as particular instances” (Heidegger 2001/1921-22: 44). However, “‘being’ cannot be encountered in representation as a subtracted and dissipated being and finally be emptied as a general or even the ‘most general’ concept” (Heidegger 2006/1938–39: 276). This most general concept is beingness, which is the general sense of the being of all beings. When this pragmatic way of questioning is aimed at the being of human beings, it is expressed in those sciences concerned with an objectified human being, sciences that include psychology, sociology, anthropology, and physiology. This scientific way of understanding human beings emphasizes one side of the twofold of secondness, and for Dewey it is the pragmatic way to “the context of the makeup of experience itself ” (1931b: 224). However, when no other way is perceived, or the other (aesthetic) side is believed to be closed to thought (considered only as reflection), the scientific way is problematically considered to be the only way. The sciences remain of necessity on the one side. In this sense they are one-sided, but in such a way that the other side nevertheless appears as well. The sciences’ one-sidedness retains its own many-sidedness. But that manysidedness may expand to such proportions that the one-sidedness on which it is based no longer catches our eye. And when man no longer sees the one side as one side, he has lost sight of the other side as well. (Heidegger 1968/1951–52: 33)

Figure 4.5 The ontological difference between being and beings, the twofold of secondness

The ontological difference 85 On the scientific side, being is regarded as the most general, the beingness of beings. On the aesthetic side, be-ing is of Dasein, be-ing as being-here, Ereignis. Heidegger (2006/1938–39: 116) refers to this two-sidedness or twofold as “Being (beingness) – contrivance of man and posited by man. And man? The possible en-ownment of be-ing (as Da-sein).” Thus “man has the distinction of being able to be that being that is not only a being, but grounds his ‘is’ in enownment [appropriation] by be-ing” (p. 84) “Briefly: we have our residence in the distinction between beings and being” (1993/1941: 41). Man obviously is a being. As such he belongs to the totality of Being – just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle. To “belong” here still means to be in the order of Being. But man’s distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being; thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it. Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being. (Heidegger 1969/1957: 31) Man is thus “the guardian of the ‘in-between’” (Heidegger 2006/1938–39: 116). Within the twofold of secondness, “man is at play each time and each time in different ‘ways’” (p. 116): one aesthetic experience, the other reflective experience. Yet these ways “are incomparable because here subject is not replaced with Dasein and object with be-ing; because here this very juxtaposition of the word formulas misleads and particularly fills up or covers over the abyss that exists between both ‘ways’” (p. 116). Heidegger is adamant that existence as Dasein is not subject or organism involved in interaction with an object, environment or world – where world is considered a collection of objects. “Not subject-object, Dasein-World, but Dasein as [appropriated by] being” (2001/1959–72: 193). As “subject-object: here man is put on the stage [like a thing, a being] and secured in the pursuit of his security” (2006/1938–39: 116). Whereas, in contrast with “Dasein-be-ing: here man is risked as the guardian of the most question-worthy” (p. 116).The most question worthy is Ereignis: be-ing as being-here; where being and being-here are one and the same. Questioning be-ing as being-here is achieved in what Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 5) calls the “grounding-question” (Figure 4.5). “The grounding question is: How does be-ing hold sway?” (p. 54).This is a question of appropriation, of Ereignis, for “insofar as be-ing is experienced as the ground of beings, the question of the essential swaying of be-ing, when asked in this way, is the grounding-question” (p. 53). This question stands “over against the hitherto ‘guiding-question’ of philosophy, which has been the question about beings” (p. 5). Importantly, Heidegger’s reference to ground and grounding is never meant to imply a transcendent foundation; rather, ground is phenomenological and always within experience, as Ereignis. Ground is of the belonging of Dasein and be-ing, a belonging he describes as inclusion. “Ground is the inclusion that gathers out of itself and into itself ” (1993/1941: 74). Such an understanding

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is always a characterization in the direction of firstness. Hence “‘ground’ means being itself” (p. 74). When considered in its belonging with Dasein, this ground of be-ing, firstness, is always one with a fulfillment in the concreteness of being-here, the firstness of secondness; they are one and the same, they belong together. However, as Ereignis, this ground is not able to be pinned down reflectively as a thing. Here “the ground grounds as ab-ground” (1999/1936–38: 21), where “ab-ground is the staying away of ground” (p. 265), staying away in the sense of not able to be grasped in thought. This formal phenomenological sense of ground as firstness is ontologically different to Dewey’s pragmatic sense, which approaches ground as background context via the guiding question and finds it in the cultural habits and theoretical laws understood as existential matrix. While attempting to approach firstness, Dewey’s pragmatism leads him to propose a ground as background context that arises in thirdness, a ground of beings in relation. Thus Dewey’s ground is grounded in continuity, but it is not ground as firstness. The twofold of secondness, now understood as grounding question and guiding question, hinges around what Heidegger (1995/1929-30: 358) calls the “ontological difference,” which describes “the distinction between being and beings.” “Being is different than beings, and only this difference in general, this possibility of distinction, insures an understanding-of-being” (1984/1928: 152). Without an awareness of this difference, be-ing can only be seen by way of beings as beingness, across the logical difference. However, this is not be-ing by way of being-here. But then, “how is this [difference] to be understood? Difference … means to keep separate. The ontological difference holds being and the being together at a distance from one another” (2003/1969: 48). Therefore “difference is not merely negation (separation) but at the same time [it is] conjunction” (1978/1916: 43). Indeed, “by the word difference … it is intimated that beings and Being are somehow set apart from each other, separated, and nonetheless connected to each other” (1982/1940: 155).

A fundamental ontology The ontological difference acknowledges the twofold of secondness as a distinction but never a division. It is “the oldest difference; there are none older” (Heidegger 1995/1931: 20), for the ontological difference is older in the history of thought than the logical difference. “This oldest difference … is prior to all science and therefore cannot first be introduced through science and theoretical reflection about beings” (p. 20). The ontological difference is that between be-ing and beings. As such it is the difference between two differing senses of ontology. For Heidegger (1999/1923: 1), “ontology” means “doctrine of being,” in contrast to a separate scientific discipline about the beingness of beings. Here, therefore, phenomenologically the term ontology is to be “taken in its broadest sense” (2010/1927: 10), rather than in a scientific sense as one discipline amongst the various sciences. In this broadest sense, ontology signifies

The ontological difference 87 “the endeavor to make being manifest itself ” (1959/1935: 41). However, Heidegger is not blind to the tension surrounding this term. If we hear in this term [ontology] only the indefinite and vague directive that … being should in some thematic way come to be investigated and come to language, then the word has performed its possible service …. However, if ontology is regarded as designating a discipline [a science of beingness], … then the word “ontology” is not … fitting for what our theme and manner of treating it will be. (Heidegger 1999/1923: 1) For Dewey, ontology is a problematic discipline. He (1886: 5) considers “ontologists” to posit the existence of “things-in-themselves” outside of experience, in order to account for the “origin of knowledge or experience.” Perceiving such a problem with ontology, Dewey’s (1949b: 321) goal is “to convert all the ontological, as prior to inquiry, into the logical as occupied wholly and solely with what takes place in the conduct of inquiry as an ever-going concern.” In contrast to Dewey’s pragmatic logical aims, however, Heidegger’s goal is to pursue the ontological phenomenologically – not as a discipline, not as positing things in themselves, but by staying within experiencingexperienced as aesthetic. Heidegger (2010/1927: 33) recognizes that “ontology is only possible as phenomenology” and he shifts from the guiding question to the grounding question, a shift Dewey never clearly makes, because shifting from the guiding question to the grounding question requires more than application of the reflective thinking of the guiding question to this new question. Going from the guiding-question to the grounding-question, there is never an immediate, equi-directional and continuous process that once again applies the guiding-question ([this time] to be-ing); rather there is only a leap, i.e., the necessity of an other beginning. (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 53) This leap involves “the deciding transformation of the ‘question of being’ from guiding-question to grounding-question” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 208). This transformation must be a “crossing to an other beginning” (p. 4) and not just a reaction against metaphysics. “If we ponder this task of the other beginning … then it will also become clear that all attempts that react against metaphysics … persist in being re-active” (p. 122) (cf. Dewey’s awareness that progressive education was merely a reaction against traditional education). They are thus “in principle dependent upon metaphysics and thereby remain themselves metaphysics” (p. 122). Heidegger (p. 298) specifically uses “the name ‘metaphysics’ … for characterizing the whole history of [Western] philosophy up until now. This name is not meant as the title of a ‘discipline’” of philosophy. “Metaphysics,” as a discipline of philosophy, is primarily concerned with the guiding question, with “the determination of

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the beingness of beings” (2006/1938–39: 333). It is therefore “the mediate and deeply rooted basis for the blindness and arbitrariness of what is called ‘biologism,’” and “also of what is known under the heading ‘pragmatism’” (1998/1946: 268).29 Heidegger considers the ontological difference to be a passageway connecting the two questions.The “‘ontological difference’ is a passageway that becomes unavoidable if the necessity of asking the grounding-question out of the guiding-question is to be made manifest” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 328). This passageway is a crossing from one way of approaching ontology to another. For the guiding question, ontology is always about the beingness of beings, of things. In this way “ontological means: to carry out the gathering of beings in respect to their beingness” (2002/1942–43: 133). This traditional disciplinary understanding of ontology, aligned with traditional metaphysics, enables division into various regional ontologies which each reference a different character of beingness – for example, in the different sciences. “As research, every science is based on the projection of a bounded object domain and necessarily possesses, therefore, an individualized character” (2002/1938: 63). As such, “specialization is not the consequence but rather the ground of all progress in research” (p. 63). In Dewey’s terms these regional ontologies, considered logically, are the ordered language systems of scientific thinking. For Heidegger, a regional ontology holds beings within a specific framework, a “material complex” (2004/1920–21: 3) that offers an attained unity. He points to the disciplines of “theology, biology, sociology” as examples (2010/1927: 27). Each of these titles designates “the objects of the respective disciplines in terms of their content” (p. 32). Theology, biology and sociology are respectively “the science of God, of life, of the community” (p. 27). In addition, each regional ontology or discipline harbors certain assumptions that remain unquestioned within the bounds of that discipline. “The sciences are not in a position at any time to represent themselves to themselves, to set themselves before themselves, by means of their theory and through the modes of procedure belonging to theory” (1977/1954: 177). Every science is therefore “in need of a preliminary circumscription of the constitution of the being of the beings it takes for its theme” (1982/1927: 52). Using biology as a specific example, Heidegger (1987/1939: 41) observes that “the essential realm in which biology moves can itself never be posited and grounded by biology as a science, but can always only be presupposed, adopted and confirmed. This is true of every science.” This essential realm is not a regional ontology but rather the formal ontological sense of the grounding question. It is phenomenological, not pragmatic. Heidegger (2010/1927: 12) refers to ontology understood in this sense of the grounding question as “fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can originate.” “Fundamental ontology is not merely the general ontology for the regional ontologies, a higher sphere, as it were, suspended above (or a kind of basement beneath)” (2001/1959–72: 190-191). Instead, “fundamental ontology is that thinking which moves within the foundation of

The ontological difference 89 each [regional or disciplinary] ontology” (p. 191). In other words, fundamental ontology is phenomenological, not simply a general ontology cast as somehow more foundational. In contrast, regional ontologies, language systems, are pragmatic. Hence, “fundamental ontology” is only accessible “in the crossing” (1999/1936–38: 215), a crossing of the ontological difference as a passageway between logical pragmatism and hermeneutic phenomenology (cf. crossing between the two different ways of considering existence expressed in the Prologue and in the last section of Chapter One). Problematically, however, the ontological difference between fundamental ontology and regional ontologies cannot be perceived via traditional metaphysics, which approaches ontology in the way of the guiding question about beingness:“Why is the ontological difference not able to become a theme for metaphysics? Because if this were the case, the ontological difference would be a being and no longer the difference between being and beings” (Heidegger 2003/1969: 48). “The two-fold [of the ontological difference] is not an object of mental representation” (1971/1953–54: 33). Always “the danger is that, within the horizon of metaphysics, the difference leads to representing being as a being” (2003/1968: 24). Heidegger (1973/1936–46) is therefore intent on “overcoming metaphysics” (p. 84), for within the horizon of metaphysics “man is constituted with faculties as a being among others” (p. 87), and thus best interrogated and comprehended via anthropology and other sciences. However, this direction of inquiry is the opposite of Heidegger’s own question of being. Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 47) strenuously asserts that he is not pursuing an “improved anthropology.” The ontological difference differentiates the grounding and guiding questions and thus “the question of being and the question of man: fundamental ontology and anthropology” (p. 215). In forging these insights Heidegger (1999/1936–38: p. 208) comes to realize that his earlier work positions Dasein “in the shadow of the ‘anthropological,’ the ‘subjectivistic,’ and the ‘individualist,’ etc. – and yet the opposite of all of this is what we have in view.” This is the same difficulty faced when dealing with the individuality emphasis in existence (cf. the end of Chapter One). Heidegger (2003/1973: 69) acknowledges that he has sometimes employed Dasein “very awkwardly and in an unhelpful way,” especially when describing Dasein as both a being and being-here, akin to his use of the term man. In this way Heidegger sometimes confusedly positions Dasein across both sides of the ontological difference when he is specifically concerned with beinghere, with “Dasein” as “the ground of man” (1999/1936–38: 231), for “Da-sein is not a being” (2013/1941–42, p. 120). Thus the ontological choice within the twofold of secondness is “‘either’ be-ing or a being” (2006/1938–39: 116). Heidegger chooses be-ing as his focus, the belonging of Dasein and be-ing, but fails in some circumstances to clearly articulate this decision in his struggle to enunciate the twofold of existence.

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Two ways of time: ordinary and originary At the heart of Heidegger’s consideration of the ontological difference is time. “Time must be brought to light and genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding and interpretation of being” (2010/1927: 17). “Time is that from which Dasein tacitly understands and interprets something like being at all” (p. 17). However, this focus on time is not merely “about another theory of the time-concept” (2009/1934: 100). Guiding and grounding questions are both grasped in different horizons of time. Heidegger (2010/1927: 17) recognizes that for this twofold of time to become clear, what is needed is “an original explication of time as the horizon of the understanding of being, in terms of temporality as the being of Dasein which understands being.” A phenomenological understanding of time goes hand in hand with an experiential appreciation of being-here.This is a sense of time which Heidegger (p. 224) formally refers to as “temporality”, to distinguish it from ordinary time. “Temporality” acknowledges “the free-play of the time-space of the ‘t/here’” (1999/1936–38: 16). Here time-space is the phenomenological “originary onefold” (p. 264). Thus ordinary (pragmatic) “space and time, each represented for itself and in the usual connection, themselves arise from time-space, which is more originary than they themselves and their calculatively represented connection” (p. 298). The common understanding of time is pragmatic; it is reflective, scientific.This is the ordinary sense of time consisting of separate nows positioned objectively on a timeline connecting past, present and future in their temporal seriality. Such a sequential sense of time renders the present now as the immediate now, separate from other nows. “The occurrence of the immediate is at the mercy of the sequential order” (Dewey 1929a: 96). However, an appreciation of Heidegger’s (2010/1927: 17) phenomenological sense of time requires “that the concept of time thus gained be distinguished from the common understanding of it.”The common understanding of time can be seen to underpin a notion of history conceived as a collection of dated events, but a phenomenological sense of history is different, and Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 23) refers to it formally as “historicity.” “History, here, does not mean a sequence of events in time, no matter how important” (2002/1935–36: 49). “History here is not meant as one domain of beings among others, but solely with a view to … be-ing itself ” (1999/1936–38: 23). For Dewey, however, time is premised on the temporal continuity of experience which he describes as temporal order. “Temporal order is instituted through rhythms which involve periodicities, intervals, and limits; all of which are inter-involved” (1938b: 221). Such an understanding of time is gained via reflective scientific thinking where the sequential events of experience are perceived. “Temporal order is a matter of science” (1929a: 93). “Order is a matter of relation, of definition, dating, placing and describing” (p. 93). Thus time for Dewey is the time of the clock, the measured time of science and history that refers to positions along a timeline. He acknowledges that each individual and unique point in time has “temporal quality” (p. 93), in the sense of being “direct, immediate and undefinable.” However, as with

The ontological difference 91 aesthetic experience, he has difficulty moving beyond the connection between aesthetic and immediate, such that “temporal quality is an immediate trait of every occurrence” (p. 93) and immediacy remains reflectively understood as ineff able.

Ordinary time and calculative thinking Temporal order is integral to Dewey’s pragmatic understanding of inquiry. Hence he (1940b: 256) emphasizes “the temporal continuity of inquiry.” Inquiry involves a sequential relation between past-present-future, evident in the changes wrought via inquiry.“Inquiry, which yields judgment, is itself a process of temporal transition effected in existential materials. Otherwise, there is no resolution of a situation but only a substitution of one subjective unwarranted belief for another unwarranted one” (1938a: 246). In this way Dewey (p. 246) can claim that there is “no such thing as an instantaneous inquiry; and … in consequence, no such thing as a judgment (the conclusion of inquiry) … isolated from what goes before and comes after.” This is the operational connection between non-reflective and reflective experience. Reflective experience is positioned temporally between an earlier pre-reflective (aesthetically problematic) experience and a later postreflective (aesthetically resolved) experience. From the standpoint of temporal order, we find reflection, or thought, occupying an intermediate and reconstructive position. It comes between a temporally prior situation (an organized interaction of factors) of active and appreciative experience, wherein some of the factors have become discordant and incompatible, and a later situation, which has been constituted out of the first situation by means of acting on the findings of reflective inquiry. (Dewey 1916a: 18–19) However, Heidegger is aware of the problems accruing to any investigation of the question of be-ing if that investigation is dependent on the temporal order and continuity of reflective experience, that mode of experience most commonly associated with science.“Science is knowledge and knowledge has objects. Science determines and fixes in an objective manner. A science of experiences would have to objectify experiences and thus strip away their non-objective character as lived experience and event of appropriation” (Heidegger 2000/1919: 64). As such, there remains something “intractable and inaccessible for the sciences and through the sciences” (1977/1954: 177). This inaccessibility is the ineffability of immediacy, wherein immediate experience is always left behind in the past to be objectified, looked at in the way of re-presentation, for in reflective experience “we are no longer living in the experiences, but looking at them. The lived experiences now become looked-at experiences” (2000/1919: 83). The reflection makes something which was previously unexamined, something merely unreflectively experienced, into something “looked at.”

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A coherent theory of experience We look at it. In reflection it stands before us as an object of reflection, we are directed towards it and make it into an object as such, standing over against us. Thus in reflection we are theoretically orientated. All theoretical comportment … is de-vivifying. This now shows itself in the case of lifeexperiences, for in reflection they are no longer lived but looked at. (Heidegger 2000/1919: 84–85)

By way of reflective experience one looks in a way which objectifies, perceiving an interaction between beings, as organism and environment. “When we reflect upon an experience instead of just having it, we inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects toward which we sustain the attitude” (Dewey 1916b: 195). “Such reflection upon experience gives rise to a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing – the how” (p. 196). Dewey also sees a connection here with education, for “when we give names to this distinction we have subject matter and method as our terms” (p. 196). Yet this way of thinking can never authentically access being-here. In reflective thinking, organism as self is re-presented as ‘I’, as objectified subject. “One is used to grasping the ‘self ’ initially in the relation of the I to ‘itself.’ This relation is taken as a representing one” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 224), but “what is ownmost to self can never be obtained in this way, or correspondingly modified ways” (p. 224). “The self is never ‘I’” (p. 226). “Coming to oneself is never a prior, detached I-representation” (p. 225), for “being-there in the manner of be-ing means: not, and never, to be there primarily as an object” (1999/1923: 5). Hence “selfhood is more originary than any I and you and we” because “these are primarily gathered as such in the self” (1999/1936–38: 225). It must be emphasized: The human being is not a self because he is an I, but the converse: He can only be an I because he is in essence a self. The HeHimself is neither limited to the I, nor reducible to the I. Hence, from the rightly understood self, no way leads to the I as essential ground; otherwise, the self would remain in the I-likeness and in representation. (Heidegger 2009/1934: 36) In Heidegger’s phenomenological terms, concrete self is Dasein, being-here, to be understood in a formal phenomenological way as selfhood or whoness. In other words, being-here (as be-ing) is self (as selfhood); this is one way to describe the simple whole which is analogous to other phenomenological descriptions – as all are of the simple whole. However, in reflective thinking, the pragmatic method, self is objectified as I, as organism in interaction with environment, subject with objects. “The presentation of objects as specifically different things in experience is the work of reflection, and … the discrimination of something experienced from modes of experiencing is also the work of reflection” (Dewey 1916a: 136fn). “We always know, love, act for and against things, instead of experiencing ideas, emotions and mental intents, [although] the attitudes themselves may be made a special object of attention”

The ontological difference 93 (1929a: 13–14). These modes of experiencing “thus come to form a distinctive subject-matter of reflective, although not of [aesthetic] primary, experience” (p. 14). Objectification provides the subject-matter for inquiry in a process of increasing generalization. Thus Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 44) observes that “‘thinking’ in the ordinary and long since customary determination is the … re-presentation of something in general.” For one thing, this [reflective] thinking relates to what is extant and already present (a definite interpretation of beings). But, for another, this thinking is always supplementary in that it provides what is already interpreted with only what is most general to it. This thinking rules in different ways in science. (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 44) This scientific and rational way of thinking is re-presentation characterized by increasing generalization as thirdness. In fact, Peirce (1931/1903c: 281) claims that “representation is precisely genuine Thirdness.” For Heidegger, “reason, ratio, evolves in [reflective] thinking” (Heidegger 1968/1951–52: 3), and “‘ratio’ is called ‘reckoning.’ When we reckon, we represent what must be held in view, namely, that with which and in terms of which we reckon with some matter” (1991/1955–56: 100).This form of thinking as reckoning cannot be dissociated from a pragmatic understanding of existence as interaction. If we consider the place of man within beings, then at once a reassuring situation shows itself: the essence of man has been decided long ago. Namely, man is an “organism” and indeed an “organism” that can invent, build, and make use of machines, an organism that can reckon with things, an organism that can put everything whatsoever into its calculation and computation, into the ratio. Man is the organism with the gift of reason. Therefore, man can demand that everything in the world happen “logically.” (Heidegger 1993/1941: 76) Reckoning re-presents in order to ascertain the objects, the data or subjectmatter which are to be reckoned with in the logical procedure of inquiry, for “‘logic’ understands thinking to be the representation of beings in their being[ness], which representation proposes to itself in the generality of the concept” (Heidegger 1998/1946: 265). Thus “representing is making-standover-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters” (1977/1938: 150). “Representation, setting-before, is a making everything stand over and against as object” (2002/1938: 82). It means “to set something before one and to make what has been set in place secure as thus set in place” (p. 82). Hence, “this placing-in-securedness must be a calculating, since only calculation guarantees being certain, in advance and always, of that which is to be presented” (p. 82). Reckoning works in a calculative way in a process that mediates the relations between objects. “‘Calculation’ is reckoning as deliberating: one thing is placed over against another so as to be compared and appraised” (1991/1955–56:

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100). This calculation underpins the way in which any thing is considered pragmatically. “What is thus reckoned and computed affords us an account of what is going on with something, what is in it that determines it” (p. 100). Calculation and representation are mutually supportive and “grounded in terms of knowing in the mathematical” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 84). However, “mathematics” is more than simply “a reckoning in the sense of performing operations with numbers for the purpose of establishing quantitative results” (1977/1954: 170). Mathematics is better described as “the reckoning that, everywhere by means of equations, has set up as the goal of its expectation the harmonizing of all relations of order” (p. 170), thus constituting an attained unity of totality. Mathematics “therefore ‘reckons’ in advance with one fundamental equation for all merely possible ordering” (p. 170). Reasoning, calculation, is primarily concerned with ordered relations, a position Dewey supports. The thoughtful person “puts two and two together.” He reckons, calculates, casts up an account. The word “reason” is connected etymologically with the word “ratio.” The underlying idea here is exactness of relationship. All reflective thinking is a process of detecting relations; the terms just used indicate that good thinking is not contented with finding “any old kind” of relation but searches until a relation is found that is as accurately defined as conditions permit. (Dewey 1933a: 77) Thus, calculative thinking is “thinking in ‘causalities’ that is assured of results” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 102). These results are explanations structured as “‘if-then’ relationships in the form of where-then (to which the statistics of modern physics belongs …)” (p. 102).“The basic character of proceeding in every explaining is to follow and lay out in advance individual series and sequences of consecutive cause-effect relations” (p. 102). Thus “modern physics is called ‘mathematical’ because it makes use, in a remarkable way, of a quite specific kind of mathematics. But it is only able to proceed mathematically because, in a deeper sense, it is already mathematical” (2002/1938: 59). Furthermore, “it is only because contemporary physics is a physics that is essentially mathematical that it is capable of being experimental” (p. 61). Here “experiment is that method which, in its planning and execution, is supported and guided by what is postulated as a fundamental law, in order to bring forth the facts which either confirm the law or deny it such confirmation” (pp. 61–62). However, understood in this way, experiment involves a “lack of questioning in somehow managing” (1999/1936–38: 84). “Everything must be adjusted to the existing state of calculation. From here on the priority of organization” (p. 84). Such organization is evident in scientific language systems as regional ontologies. They are attained unities, totalities. This calculative way of thinking, associated strongly with science, is the modern way of thinking, and “modern thinking is ever more resolutely and exclusively turning into calculation” (Heidegger 1971/1957–58: 84). “Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising

The ontological difference 95 and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself ” (1966/1955: 46). Importantly, such a way of thinking is not confined to scientists; rather, it is a “way of being human which means the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole” (1977/1938: 132). In other words, “calculation” means a “basic law of comportment … which belongs to every human action” (1999/1936–38: 84). It is “not … the mere consideration or even cleverness of an isolated action” (p. 84).

Machination (enframing): the domination of calculative thinking Heidegger (1968/1951–52: 26) calls this calculative way of thinking “‘onetrack thinking,’” to emphasize that no other way of thinking is even considered. “It is only on the plane of the one-sided uniform view that one-track thinking takes its start” (p. 34). His fear is that “the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking” (1966/1955: 56). This is a danger because when thinking becomes one sided in the way of calculation, the other side of the twofold of secondness is concealed; it is still there, of course, but it is hidden. Heidegger refers to this one-track emphasis on calculation as machination. “What does machination mean? That which is let loose into its own shackles. Which shackles? The pattern of generally calculable explainability” (1999/1936– 38: 92). “Machination is the domination of making and what is made. But in this regard one is not to think of human dealings and operating but rather the other way around” (p. 92). “Such [human activity] is only possible … on the basis of machination” (p. 92), and “the dominion of this manner of perception is so vast today that our eyes can barely encompass it” (1968/1951–52: 26). He also refers to this way of perceiving, or better revealing, as “enframing” (1977/1949: 20). “Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological” (p. 20). Enframing, machination, is not technological; rather, it is a way of experiencing, of thinking as reckoning in a calculative way, that is only ever one side of secondness. “Enframing is, as it were, the photographic negative of enowning” (2003/1973: 60) (Figure 4.6). Thought calculatively, reflectively, being-here is considered an immediate and unique (one-off) event or occurrence that must be re-presented to be thought. “In the hitherto and still customary usage Dasein means the same as being extant here and there, occurring in a where and a when” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 210). The when is the now of sequential and ordered time (rather than the now of the knowing awareness of being-here), understood as one of a series of “nows” in a timeline, nows that are “objectively present” (Heidegger 1996/1927: 387). Here “the nows pass away, and the past ones

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constitute the past. The nows arrive, and the future ones define the ‘future’” (p. 387). For “the ‘now’” serves as “a phase in the stream of time” (1975/1946: 34). “Time familiar to us as the succession in the sequence of nows is what we mean when measuring and calculating time” (1972/1962: 11). This “succession of nows is interpreted as something somehow objectively present; for it itself moves ‘in time’” (1996/1927: 387). These nows can, of course, be measured by a clock. “The clock measures time in so far as the stretch of the duration of the occurrence is compared with identical sequences on the clock and can thereby be numerically determined” (1992/1924: 4). However, “today’s reckoning in sports, for instance, with tenths of seconds, in modern physics even with millionths of seconds, does not mean that we have a keener grasp of time, and thus gain time” (1968/1951–52: 101) in a somehow truer sense. “Such reckoning is on the contrary the surest way to lose essential time” (p. 101), where essential is always in the direction of the simple. An essential notion of time is not concerned with an ordered sequence, with the movement of a stream of individualized nows. Instead, “time itself, in the wholeness of its nature, does not move; it rests in stillness” (1971/1957–58: 106). Here time involves a very different sense of the present. This is not the present of an immediate now. “Here we are thinking not with regard to ‘duration’ but with regard to presencing” (1998/1939: 206). This “manner of presencing … by no means coincides with presencing in the sense of the immediate present” (1972/1962: 13). “The present in the sense of presence differs so vastly from the present in the sense of the now that the present as presence can in no way be determined in terms of the present as now” (p. 11). This is the “two-fold of presence and present beings” (1971/1953–54: 32) across the ontological difference. Heidegger also refers to presence or presencing as “abiding” (1993/1941: 105), “dwelling” (1971/1951b: 151),“preserving” (1999/1936–38: 49), and “lingering” (2002/1946a: 263), all of which convey the phenomenological enduring stillness of time and nothing like a mere objective now in a series of nows, the ordered notions of past, present, future on a timeline. Enduring stillness is simultaneity of time as the oneness of experiencing experienced, of living presencing, which encompasses past and future in presence. Thus “time times simultaneously” (p. 106). However, this simultaneity does not mean “that future, past and present are before us ‘at the same time’” (1972/1962: 14). Hence the “threefold simultaneity” of time is not a continuum but “the concordant oneness of the has-been, presence, and the present waiting the encounter” (1971/1957–58: 106). “Neither merely the present nor merely the past nor merely the future, nor indeed these reckoned together – but rather their unarticulated unity in the simplicity of … all at once” (1995/1929–30: 148).

Two ways of thinking: calculative and meditative The twofold of time, hinged via the ontological difference, marks a “methodological cross-road” (Heidegger 2000/1919: 53). “We stand at an abyss: either into nothingness, that is, absolute reification, pure thingness, or we

The ontological difference 97 somehow leap into another world, more precisely, we manage for the first time to make the leap into the world as such” (p. 53). In order to make this leap and gain access to the presencing of living experience, that “empowering experiencing of living experience that takes itself along” (p. 94), another way of thinking is required, one that does not attempt to re-present experience but to remain with experience as it is being lived as presencing. In making this point Heidegger explicitly identifies “two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking” (1966/1955: 46). In Dewey’s terms these are reflective and qualitative thinking respectively, although Dewey does not take qualitative thinking further in a meditative direction because, for him, it is premised on a different understanding of time. Each kind of thinking, qualitative/meditative and reflective/calculative, is relevant in relation to its particular direction, firstness or thirdness. Importantly, Heidegger is not attempting to replace calculative thinking with meditative thinking, pragmatism with phenomenology, such that a new version of onetrack thinking would come to dominate. He argues that “science is one way, and indeed one decisive way, in which all that is presents itself to us” (1977/1954: 156). So Heidegger acknowledges the importance of both kinds of thinking. To do so he must understand their difference: that “calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is” (1966/1955: 46). This is the ontological difference, the same difference that distinguishes reflective thinking from qualitative thinking, but Dewey does not perceive the nature of the ontological difference and its fuller ramifications (Figure 4.6). Heidegger understands that while it is open to everyone, engaging in meditative or phenomenological thinking is not necessarily easy. The “primal habitus of the phenomenologist cannot be appropriated overnight, like putting on a uniform,” nor can it be “treated merely mechanically in the manner of a routine” (Heidegger 2000/1919: 93). Still, “anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits” (1966/1955: 47). “Thus meditative thinking need by no means be ‘high flown.’ It is enough

Figure 4.6 Highlighting the importance of the ontological difference to understanding the different emphases in existence

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if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now” (p. 47). In a phenomenological sense, the closest is presencing, being-here, and being-here is always concerned about being-here. As mentioned in Chapter One, Heidegger uses learning how to swim in a river as an example to illustrate the necessity of learning this way of thinking by way of immersion – experientially rather than vicariously via abstract instruction. “We shall never learn what ‘is called’ swimming … or what it ‘calls for,’ by reading a treatise on swimming. Only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming” (1968/1951–52: 21). Without such a leap “one is supposed to learn swimming, but only goes meandering on the riverbank, converses about the murmuring of the stream, and talks about the cities and towns the river passes. This guarantees that the spark never flashes” (1984/1928: 7). An immersion in meditative thinking has to first move beyond a belief that thinking is primarily objectifying and therefore to be held at a distance from one’s self. “In order to learn how to experience the … essence of thinking purely, and that means at the same time to carry it through, we must free ourselves from the technical interpretation of thinking” (Heidegger 1998/1946: 240). Thus “we can learn [meditative] thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally” (1984/1928: 8). Traditional reflective thinking is ensconced in a natural affinity towards the objective. Dewey (1929a: 14) observes that “the natural and original bias of man is all toward the objective; whatever is experienced is taken to be there independent of the attitude and act of the self.” In this way both experienced and experiencing can be construed as things, as objects. Heidegger (1982/1927: 271) refers to this tendency as “that mode of being of the Dasein which we call falling,” a falling towards beings and thus away from be-ing. He analogously calls it “the entanglement of Dasein” (2010/1927: 169), stipulating that “this term, which does not express any negative value judgment, means that Dasein is initially and for the most part together with the ‘world’ that it takes care of.” Here world, when expressed by Heidegger “in quotation marks” (p. 65) in the text (Being and Time) means a multiplicity of beings, a collection of things, a totality. Hence this falling or entanglement is an “absorption in” (p. 169) the multiple things of everyday life.

Forgetting be-ing, remembering be-ing This falling and entanglement are premised on “the flight of Dasein from itself, a flight from itself into the world [as collection of things] discovered by it” (Heidegger 1985/1925: 282), a flight from being-here to beings, towards objectivity. Importantly, this flight is not something to be done away with, as it is a side of the twofold of secondness, an emphasis in existence, not just an occasional occurrence. “Dasein has initially always already fallen away from itself and fallen prey to the ‘world’” (2010/1927: 169). However, this “falling tendency of factical life experience which constantly threatens to slip into the objective” (2004/1920–21: 44) stands in the way of any thinking access to

The ontological difference 99 factical life, to being-here.Thus it is “out of ” this falling tendency that “we must still retrieve the phenomena” (p. 44), for absorption in the multiplicity of beings hides being-here and be-ing. “What remains concealed in an exceptional sense, or what falls back and is covered up again, or shows itself only in a ‘disguised’ way, is not this or that being but rather … the being of beings” (2010/1927: 33). In the falling tendency toward beings, being “can be covered up to such a degree that it is forgotten” (p. 33). Being [be-ing] is something forgotten. The forgottenness of Being holds us in its grip. … The forgottenness of Being dominates, i.e., it determines our relation to beings, so that even beings, that they are and what they are, remain a matter of indifference. It is almost as if beings have been abandoned by Being, and we are heedless of it. (Heidegger 1994/1937–38: 159) This “forgetting refers to something that withdraws into concealment” (Heidegger 1968/1951–52: 171). This forgetting is of be-ing (wholeness, firstness), understood by way of being-here (oneness, firstness of secondness), as Ereignis. So “as it reveals itself in beings, Being withdraws” (1975/1946: 26). Such forgetting is analogously one with falling, for “this [forgetfulness] is nothing accidental and temporary, but on the contrary is necessarily and constantly formed” (1997/1929: 164). However, this forgetting of be-ing is not the usual notion of forgetting, which we mostly know “only in the form of ‘no longer thinking about something’” (Heidegger 1996/1942: 132), where “forgetting means something escaping us, a loss” (p. 132). In contrast to this, forgetting can also “mean our pushing something away and avoiding it, a fleeing” (p. 132). This fleeing is the flight of Dasein, of being-here, away from a knowing awareness of being-here in an authentic or resolute sense and into the inauthenticity or irresoluteness of an entangled interaction with things. This fleeing into a commerce with things involves calculative thinking, where the authenticity of being-here is overlooked. “Such fleeing is easiest whenever it has somewhere to flee to, and this itself takes us prisoner straightaway, so that here, as we say, we ‘forget ourselves’” (p. 132). In other words, an authentic thinking of the individual indivisible whole of the firstness of secondness, of being-here, is forgotten. Dasein has a peculiar selfsameness with itself in the sense of selfhood. It is in such a way that it is in a certain way its own, it has itself, and only on that account can it lose itself. Because selfhood belongs to existence, as in some manner, “being-one’s-own,” the existent Dasein can choose itself on purpose and determine its existence primarily and chiefly starting from that choice; that is, it can exist authentically. However, it can also let itself be determined in its being by others and thus exist inauthentically by existing primarily in forgetfulness of its own [phenomenological] self. (Heidegger 1982/1927: 170)

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“It is precisely this irresoluteness which characterizes the everyday actuality of the Dasein” (Heidegger 1982/1927: 289).Therefore, in order to access authentic being-here, this forgetting has to be countered: a remembering is required. However, in countering the falling of Dasein, this remembering cannot be the retaining or recalling of something that has escaped into the past in ordinary time. “Simply recalling something is not a remembering” (2001/1959–1972: 171). Retaining or recalling in this objective way of re-presenting is grounded in “the psychological theory of memory” which “only refers to what one does not have present right now” (p. 220), – present in the sense of temporal seriality. This is an objective retaining, grounded in time understood as a stream of nows positioned along a timeline. In contrast, remembering or “remembrance” (1968/1951-52: 141) acknowledges the temporality of being-here in the moment. “To see the Moment means to stand in it” (1984/1937: 57). This moment is that of being-here and hence of a “knowing-awareness … more originary than any kind of ‘cognition’ and any kind of ‘will’” (2006/1938– 39: 100). This is an aesthetic awareness, a feeling awareness of the individual qualitative whole of being-here. Thus presencing is never to be confused with time understood in “the sheer now, cut off in its complete structure, that is called the ‘present’” (2010/1927: 405). So “there is in principle no prospect of explaining or even deriving the … phenomenon of the Moment … from this now” (p. 405). Remembrance of the moment is the resoluteness of Dasein in the sense of a “primordial and authentic existing” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 321), in contrast to an irresolute entangled existing. “Resolute, Dasein has brought itself back out of falling prey in order to be all the more authentically ‘there’ for the disclosed situation in the ‘Moment’” (p. 313). Remembrance is a mindful meditating in the moment as being-here, a sense Heidegger (1968/1951–52: 11) gathers from the etymology of the word “memory” which he reveals as being “from Latin memor, mindful.”Thus “‘memory’ initially did not at all mean the power to recall” (1968/1951–52: 140). Rather, “the word designates the whole disposition in the sense of steadfast intimate concentration upon the things that essentially speak to us in every thoughtful meditation” (p. 140). This remembrance as mindfulness is a crossing of the ontological difference from interaction to simple individual whole. Thus “mindfulness transfers man unto Dasein” (2006/1938–39: 40). “The basic fundamental-ontological act … is hence a ‘remembering again’” (Heidegger 1997/1929: 164). Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 39) also describes this meditative and mindful phenomenological remembrance of the “other beginning” as “inceptual thinking,” a thinking that is concerned with presencing as an ever present beginning. For “a beginning is present, insofar as it remains in its coming” (2000/1959: 195), and “grasped inceptually the beginning is being itself ” (1999/1936–38: 41). Here “the thinkers are begun by the beginning, ‘in-cepted’ by the in-ception; they are taken up by it and are gathered into it” (1992/1942–43: 8).Thus “remembrance of the inception is not concerned with beings and what is past, but with what has been, and that means with what still

The ontological difference 101 presences, being” (1993/1941: 73). In other words, “what has been is being that still presences but is concealed in its incipience” (p. 73). As presencing, being can be thought of as what has been, in the sense of what has always been presencing. Furthermore, as what has always been presencing, being is prior or before beings, but not in the way of a sequence or series. Being is accessible as what has been – and as what has been, being is always already. In an obscure sense, being is prior …. Being is what we recall, what we accept as something we immediately understand as such, what is always already given to us; being is never alone but always familiar, “ours.” Being is, accordingly, what we always already understand, and we only need to recall it once again to grasp it as such. In grasping being we do not conceive anything new but something basically familiar; we always already exist in an understanding-of-being, insofar as we relate to what we now call “beings.” This recollection pertains to being and thus reveals an original connection of being with time: always already there and yet always grasped only in coming back to it. This is not the common recollection of something ontic that happened, a being. (Heidegger 1984/1928: 147) Hence “this is the problem. It is precisely the problem of how being is ‘earlier,’ how it, qua being, originally relates to time. Being and time, this is the basic problem!” (Heidegger 1984/1928: 147). Yet “as long as this problem is not posed or relatively solved, even the use of the term ‘a priori’ remains unjustified and unwarranted, as does talk of ‘a posteriori’ and the distinction in general” (p. 147). Thus be-ing is not prior in the objective sense of before. Instead, “being is what is always present, in constant presentness” (p. 146). This constant presentness or “enduring presence” (1959/1935: 202) of be-ing as presencing is not characterized by an objective presentness; be-ing is never a being. Remembrance, as a way of thinking, does not objectify be-ing as a being. “We remember being and the way it inceptively presences, and presences still as the inception, without thereby ever becoming a present being” (1993/1941: 73). This is only achievable via a phenomenological mindfulness, a knowing awareness of being-here (cf., the end of Chapter One). Be-ing “does not, of course, ‘subsist’ somewhere ‘in itself,’ but is what is properly historical in the past, the imperishable, and that means it is an incipiently having been and an incipiently presencing again” (p. 73). Highlighting this same sense of the imperishable, Heidegger analogously refers to be-ing as what remains. “To remain means: not to disappear, thus, to presence” (1972/1962: 5). What remains – is something that lasts and abides. Is this not known to all of us, out of the wishes of our hearts, even if we have never actually found something that remains? What remains is the unchangeable. And yet, even that can just vanish in a moment along with its unchangeableness. Hence, only that remains which does not vanish, which does not pass away because it

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is imperishable. The imperishable shows itself as the everlasting. Remaining, then, consists in persisting, in the sense of constant presence. (Heidegger 2000/1943: 166) Importantly, by referring to “something remaining,” Heidegger (2000/1943: 166) is not intending to promote a “remaining in general” as an object of calculative thinking – a remaining “which is meant indefinitely and without any particular aspect,” as a transcendent something. On the contrary,“something remaining is that which abides in a special kind of lasting” (p. 166). “To last here means to remain as what is vouchsafed rather than simply to persevere as some transitional thing in the void of passing away” (1991/1955–56: 6061). Here, what remains as imperishable is the giving or granting as what has been, and what has been is always already: be-ing. This is be-ing in the way of firstness. Firstness, be-ing, is a giving, a granting. For something to be given in the theoretical sense, there must be a more primal or original sense of giving which Heidegger expresses, with difficulty, as “‘it gives’” (1998/1946: 254). “The ‘it’ that here ‘gives’ is being itself. The ‘gives’ names the essence of being that is giving, granting” (p. 255), in the sense of “gifting” (1999/1936–38: 268) or “vouchsafing” (1991/1955–56: 60). This giving is of the “giving in ‘It gives time’” (1972/1962: 17). However, the being itself that gives is not some thing that can be objectively pinned down. Hence “what is ‘it’ that does the ‘giving’ here?” (1998/1955: 317) remains an open question. “For time itself remains the gift of an ‘It gives’ whose giving preserves the realm in which presence is extended. Thus the ‘It’ continues to be undetermined” (1972/1962: 17). Thus the ‘it’ is ab-ground.30

Summary In this chapter we have again endeavored to engage with the difference between the two emphases in existence, in Dewey’s terms between aesthetic and reflective experience, so as to more fully flesh out a coherent theory of experience. However, unlike the previous two chapters where Dewey’s work was the focus, in this chapter the work of Peirce and Heidegger was brought into conversation via their shared interest in the scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, particularly around the notion of haecceitas, or thisness: being here now. For Peirce and Heidegger, haecceitas is the individual qualitative whole of existence, of experiencing experienced. Heidegger refers to haecceitas as factical life, the basic fact of existence. However, this basic fact or brute actuality is not that of reaction or interaction as Dewey would have it. Instead, factical life is the unity of genuine life itself (cf. the end of Chapter One); Heidegger calls it Dasein, the German for existence, or more literally ‘being-here.’ In pursuing his investigation of being-here, Heidegger extols the importance of understanding the different emphases in existence.Without an understanding of this difference, the tendency is to think of existence as interaction and overlook haecceitas. Heidegger calls this difference the ontological difference

The ontological difference 103 because it concerns being: it highlights the distinction between be-ing and beings. On one side existence is the simple oneness of be-ing, and on the other it is the multiplicity of beings. Expressed using Peirce’s categories, secondness is thus twofold, leading to what Heidegger described as a four-part schema: firstness, a twofold secondness, and thirdness. Perhaps Heidegger’s major contribution is to understand that the individual qualitative whole emphasis in existence (haecceitas, factical life, Dasein, beinghere) can be analyzed. However, such analysis is not in reflective thinking. Heidegger’s analysis is phenomenological, recognizing a different way of thinking which is premised on a different understanding of time. Heidegger highlights these two different senses of time: time can be a series of points on a timeline stretching from past to future (pragmatic), and time can be that of haecceitas, of being-here, where being-here has a future and a past in the present (phenomenological). These two senses of time are distinguished across the ontological difference, as are the two different ways of thinking. Dewey refers to these two ways of thinking as reflective and qualitative, whereas Heidegger calls them calculative and meditative thinking. Calculative thinking is reflective thinking. With calculative thinking Heidegger stresses the rational reckoning with things related by cause and effect. When such thinking dominates, what prevails is the belief that everything can be ordered in a totality of relations of cause and effect. Heidegger calls this machination or enframing, and even human beings are caught up in this ordering. However, with the domination of calculative thinking, meditative thinking is overlooked. Existence as individual qualitative whole, being-here as a simple oneness, is not seen. Instead, existence is perceived primarily as interaction between things, beings. In such a circumstance be-ing is forgotten. Therefore, along with machination goes a forgetting of be-ing. As such, Heidegger describes the initial task of phenomenology, the beginning of phenomenology, as a remembering of be-ing. Yet this is not remembering in a pragmatic sense of time, as remembering something in the past.This is remembering something that is always already: be-ing.

5

The way of phenomenology

Overview The aim of this chapter is to illuminate Heidegger’s method, which he describes phenomenologically as a ‘pathway’ to distance it from a sense of logical process. Such a pathway is not a technical routine, but rather involves three unified aspects – reduction, construction and destruction. Heidegger considers phenomenological reduction to be the move across the ontological difference from an interactional awareness of beings to an awareness of the simple qualitative whole of being-here, Dasein. This is a remembering of being. It gets one on the path, enabling an exploration and description of this path via phenomenological concepts, which are always words that have been or could be used in a more familiar pragmatic sense, but are now destructed to have a phenomenological meaning. As such, Heidegger identifies two understandings of language, one phenomenological and the other pragmatic. These he aligns with two understandings of truth. Phenomenologically, truth and language are concerned with revealing or disclosing, which is saying as showing; pragmatically, they are about the correctness of designation.

Remembering be-ing as phenomenological reduction In terms also used by Husserl in relation to his phenomenology, Heidegger (1982/1927: 21) describes remembrance of something remaining as a “leading back or re-duction” understood as “phenomenological reduction.” However, he acknowledges that he is here“adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent” (p. 21). Contrary to Husserl, Heidegger (p. 21) maintains that “for us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being[-here].”31 Phenomenological reduction is the access to Dasein, to the other beginning, the crossing of the ontological difference within secondness. Heidegger acknowledges that in such a phenomenological reduction, as mindful access to Dasein, “what is initially ‘there’ is nothing else than the selfevident, undisputed prejudice of the interpreter” (1996/1927: 141). Hence it is

The way of phenomenology 105 an “error of phenomenology [particularly Husserl’s phenomenology] to believe that phenomena could be correctly seen merely through unprejudiced looking” (2002/1931–32: 203). However, “it is just as great an error to believe that, since perspectives are always necessary, the phenomena themselves can never be seen, and that everything amounts to contingent, subjective, anthropological standpoints” (p. 203). It should be said … that even to make a beginning with philosophy one must have rid oneself of the illusion that man could pose, let alone solve a problem, without some standpoint. The desire to philosophize from the standpoint of standpointlessness, as a purportedly genuine and superior objectivity, is either childish, or, as is usually the case, disingenuous. The hiddenness of the matter itself, i.e. of the being of beings, only gives way to an attack which has an unambiguously human starting point and path. Not freedom from any standpoint (something fantastic), but the right choice of standpoint, the courage to a standpoint, the setting in action of a standpoint and the holding out within it, is the task; a task, admittedly, which can only be enacted in philosophical work, not prior to it and not subsequently. (Heidegger 2002/1931–32: 57–58) Dewey supports this position: “One can only see from a certain standpoint, but this fact does not make all standpoints of equal value. A standpoint which is nowhere in particular and from which things are not seen at a special angle is an absurdity” (1931b: 216). Dewey’s standpoint is predominantly pragmatic (apart from his work on aesthetic experience), emphasizing secondness as interaction, whereas Heidegger’s standpoint is phenomenological; it is resolute authentic Dasein, being-here, highlighting secondness as simple qualitative whole, oneness. Yet both standpoints, distinguished across the ontological difference, are necessary for a coherent philosophy of experience. This difference in standpoint raises a further difference in relation to methodological rigor. Heidegger (2000/1919: 93) believes “the ‘rigor’ of the scientificity awakened in phenomenology gains its original sense from this basic [phenomenological] bearing” of mindfulness, of aesthetic knowing awareness of being-here. This basic bearing is the “primordial bearing of lifeexperience and life as such, the absolute sympathy with life that is identical with life-experience” (p. 92). In this sense it is “of the essence of phenomenological investigations that they cannot be reviewed summarily but must in each case be rehearsed and repeated anew” (1985/1925: 26), meaning that they must be taken up by someone in their own experience as they cannot be understood outside of experience. Thus “there is no such thing as the one phenomenology, and if there could be such a thing it would never become anything like a philosophical technique” (1982/1927: 328). The rigor attributable to phenomenology is contrary to and “incomparable with the ‘rigor’ of derivative non-primordial sciences” (Heidegger 2000/1919: 93). “Inceptual thinking in the other [phenomenological] beginning has a

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rigor of another kind” (1999/1936–38: 45). The rigor of inceptual meditative thinking is reliant upon the standpoint of thinking being-here, Dasein, as simple qualitative whole. This is not “the ‘exactitude’ of a ‘reasoning’ that is let loose, is indifferent, belongs to every man – a ‘reasoning’ whose results are equally valid for every man” (pp. 45–46). Here Heidegger alludes to the rigor commonly associated with universal propositions, a rigor “compelling only because … fitting into an established and calculable order,” the order of a regional ontology or discipline, of a scientific language system, of machination (p. 46). In contrast, the rigor of meditative thinking is harnessed to resolute being-here. Thus phenomenological rigor cannot be disconnected from the basic bearing of phenomenological reduction. Yet Dasein’s falling conceals this rigor, leaving calculative thinking as seemingly the only source of rigor. With the forgetting of being-here, “only calculation guarantees being certain, in advance and always” (Heidegger 2002/1938: 82). Therefore “mindfulness must realize that the indifference with regard to being … is nothing less than the utmost intensification of the power of calculation. What is at work here is the most indifferent and blind denial of the incalculable” (1999/1936–38: 314). However, “man will know the incalculable … only in creative questioning and forming from out of the power of genuine reflection” (2002/1938: 72). This genuine reflection (not Dewey’s reflective thinking) is meditative phenomenological thinking where “what is essential always remains unprovable, or more precisely, lies outside the sphere of provability and unprovability” (2002/1931–32: 57). Thus meditative thinking “does not bring knowledge as do the sciences,” “does not produce usable practical wisdom,” “solves no cosmic riddles,” and “does not endow us directly with the power to act” (1968/1951–52: 159). Phenomenological thinking is non-relational (in the pragmatic sense of cause-effect relation), and hence is “not a means to gain knowledge”; rather this “thinking cuts furrows into the soil of Being” (1971/1957–58: 70). Here any sense of certainty or proof is unthinkable.Thus Peirce (1958/1904: 222) emphasizes “the naïveté of Firstness.” Phenomenological rigor lies only in being-here, and has therefore to be rehearsed in terms of access and repeated anew in order to be comprehended. “What is provable (in the sense of formal-logical reckoning, detached from the fundamental decision and stance of human existence) is already dubious in respect of essentiality” (Heidegger 2002/1931–32: 57). Yet “from the point of view of the sciences, it is not just difficult but impossible to see this situation” (1971/1957–58: 75). Thus “the phenomenological question of method is not a question of a methodical system, but rather a question of access that leads through factical life experience” (2004/1920–21: 24). This positions Dasein’s falling as a “flight from thinking” (2002/1942–43: 134), understood as a flight away from meditative thinking and “into a system of opinions” in the way of calculative thinking, for “‘system’ is only possible as a consequence of the mastery of mathematical thinking” (1999/1936–38: 45). So meditative thinking stands “outside this domain” (p. 45) of system. Meditative thinking is not of machination but of “mindfulness”, which “cannot become inflexible as the

The way of phenomenology 107 finished product of a usable presentation either in a ‘doctrine’ or in a ‘system,’ or as ‘exhortation’ or ‘edification’” (2006/1938–39: 17). However, if meditative thinking is simply “measured against system,” then it can be considered as “essentially without system, un-systematic,” where “un-systematic would … merely mean something like ‘chaotic’ and disordered” (1999/1936–38: 45). Hence, from a pragmatic perspective, meditative thinking is classed as “arbitrary and chaotic” (p. 45), yet it does not attempt to attain a generalized order amongst beings. It is instead a way of thinking Ereignis, be-ing as being-here.

Phenomenological construction Phenomenology necessarily involves access through factical life experience via the phenomenological reduction. “What counts is to bring oneself into position to see phenomenologically in the very work of discussing the matters at issue” (Heidegger 1997/1924–25: 7). However, Heidegger isn’t wedded to phenomenology as a term used to describe this position and the matters made accessible. “Once an understanding of these is gained, then phenomenology may very well disappear” (p. 7). Here Heidegger is addressing his move away from using phenomenology as a label to describe his thinking. This move “was done, not – as is often thought – in order to deny the significance of phenomenology, but in order to abandon my own path of thinking to namelessness” (1971/1953–54: 29). In what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of [meditative] thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained, it can disappear as a designation in favor of the matter of thinking whose manifestness remains a mystery. (Heidegger 1972/1963: 82) Instead of the name phenomenology, Heidegger prefers the simpler term thinking, which he variously characterizes as meditative, mindful or inceptual, so as to contrast it with the reflective method of scientific and calculative thinking. Like Dewey, Heidegger understands the connection between a way of thinking, method, and a philosophical standpoint. In place of the term ‘method’, which points to system and process, Heidegger (1968/1951–52: 168) considers “thinking itself,” meditative thinking, to be “a way” in the sense of a path or trail. He (2003/1973: 80) distinguishes “between path and method” in an attempt to distance meditative thinking, where “there are only paths” one follows in thinking being as being-here, from calculative or pragmatic thinking “in the sciences,” where “on the contrary, there are only methods, that is, modes of procedure.” Hence he considers “method, especially in today’s modern scientific thought,” to be “not a mere instrument serving the sciences; rather, it has pressed the sciences into its own service” (1971/1957–58: 74). Method is an expression of machination, and it is in this sense that Heidegger

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claims “science does not think” (1968/1951–52: 8), for science simply follows method. In contrast, a phenomenological path does not equate to methodical procedure; a path ventures into be-ing as being-here, offering various analogous forks and branches. A one-track consideration of method as the process of reflective thinking overlooks meditative thinking along a path. When [meditative] thinking comes to an end by slipping out of its element [being-here] it replaces this loss by procuring a validity for itself [in reflective thinking] as … an instrument of education and therefore as a classroom matter and later a cultural concern. By and by philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest to lowest causes. One no longer thinks; [rather] one occupies oneself with “philosophy.” In competition with one another, such occupations publicly offer themselves as “-isms” and try to outdo one another. (Heidegger 1998/1946: 242) However, Heidegger recognizes that meditative phenomenological thinking must involve some movement along the path (although this movement is not a process), for without any further movement it would simply be awareness of aesthetic experience as achieved by Dewey. Meditative thinking must therefore be more than just reduction to being-here; it must also require getting underway along this path. And “in order to get underway, we do have to set out” (Heidegger 1968/1951–52: 169); we have to venture forth. This is meant “in a double sense. For one thing, we have to open ourselves to the emerging prospect and direction of the way itself ” (p. 169), via remembrance of beinghere as phenomenological reduction. “And then we must get on the way, that is, must take the step by which alone the way becomes a way” (p. 169). Being underway is important as “we respond to the way only by remaining underway” (pp. 168–169). “Only when we walk it, that is, by thoughtful questioning, are we on the move on the way” (p. 169). To be underway on the way in order to clear the way – that is one thing. The other thing is to take a position somewhere along the road, and there make conversation about whether, and how, earlier and later stretches of the way may be different, and in their difference might even be incompatible – incompatible, that is, for those who never walk the way, nor ever set out on it, but merely take up a position outside it, there forever to formulate ideas and make talk about the way. (Heidegger 1968/1951–52: 169) Walking the way and making talk about the way both concern be-ing as being-here, Ereignis, and “this guidance of vision back from beings to being requires at the same time that we should bring ourselves forward positively toward being itself ” (1982/1927: 21). This involves “projecting of the antecedently given being[-here] upon its being and the structures32 of its

The way of phenomenology 109 being,” or what in Husserlian terms is called “phenomenological construction” (p. 22). Such a projection “must always be … a free projection” (p. 21). This free projection is not analytic in the sense of “breaking … into elements, but rather the reverse”; this “freeing … loosens the seeds of ontology. It unveils those conditions from which an ontology as a whole is allowed to sprout” (1997/1929: 29). “As thus unveiled, this structure at the same time determines the construction of the substructures necessary to it” (p. 29). In other words, as phenomenological thinking, free projection is not beholden to the demands of a pragmatic regional ontology; instead it can explore being-here in a more foundational or basic phenomenological sense by taking a position somewhere along the way and checking this out, then moving on to find another position from which to make further examination of the way itself. This is then a meditative exploration of the meditative paths of thinking, a meditative thinking of meditative thinking. Emphasizing Heidegger’s notion of hermeneutic phenomenology, this could be expressed as interpreting interpreting, where one is interpreting one’s own present act of interpreting. This is in some ways comparable to Dewey’s inquiry into inquiry as a reflective thinking of reflective thinking, but it is also very different because it is nonreflective. Heidegger (2010/1920: 4) is adamant that “the theory of philosophical concept formation has in phenomenology … a completely different position than in the philosophy of reflection.”

Interpreting interpreting: the circle as opening, not process Heidegger sees in phenomenological construction a hermeneutical or interpretational sense. He describes three “factors of the hermeneutical situation” (2005/1923–24: 80) that equate with phenomenological construction. These three hermeneutical factors are: “1. The pre-possession …, what is had from the outset for the investigation, upon which the look constantly rests,” which here is resolute being-here attained in the phenomenological reduction; “2. The preview …, the sort and manner of seeing what is held onto in the pre-possession,” which is the free projection of be-ing as being-here, with the emphasis on being; and “3. The pre-hension,” which Heidegger (pp. 79–80) describes as “how what is seen in a specific way is conceptually explicated on the basis of specific motivation.” The pre-hension involves expression of the substructures (not to be understood as parts but as analogies, analogous of the whole) of be-ing as being-here. What the investigation itself has in advance, the pre-possession is being-here. The pre-view, that in regard to which being-here itself is seen as such, is being, being-here in terms of its being, in terms of the possibilities and manners of its being. The pre-hension is determined by the fact that the characters of being are explicated. Being-here is seen in regard to a genuine possibility of being, with regard to existence. (Heidegger 2005/1923–24: 80)

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This interpretative construction offers a pre-hension in the form of a hermeneutic phenomenological description. The “meaning of phenomenological description is interpretation” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 35). Hence “phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the original signification of that word, which designates the work of interpretation” (p. 35).“The expression ‘hermeneutics’ is used here to indicate the unified manner of the engaging, approaching, accessing, interrogating, and explicating of facticity” (1999/1923: 6).Thus “hermeneutics has the task of making the Dasein which is in each case our own accessible to this Dasein itself with regard to the character of its being,” and therefore “communicating Dasein to itself in this regard, hunting down the alienation from itself with which it is smitten” (p. 11). Such an understanding of “interpretation … is grounded in fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception” (2010/1927: 146), which are equivalent to pre-possession, pre-view and prehension. This “existential fore-structure” is “of Dasein itself ” (2010/1927: 148). Here “‘fore’” means “into that nearest nearness which we constantly rush ahead of, and which strikes us as strange each time anew when we catch sight of it” (1971/1953–54: 12).This nearest nearness is being-here, Dasein, comprehended in its concreteness as interpreting – hence, interpreting interpreting. So here, “hermeneutics, used as an adjunct word to ‘phenomenology,’ does not have its usual meaning, methodology of interpretation, but means the interpretation itself ” (p. 28). If one were to describe facticity – improperly – as the “object” of hermeneutics (as plants are described as the objects of botany), then one would find this (hermeneutics) in its own object itself (as if analogously plants, what and how they are, came along with botany and from it). (Heidegger 1999/1923: 12) Therefore “hermeneutics means neither the theory of the art of interpretation nor interpretation itself, but rather the attempt first of all to define the nature of interpretation on hermeneutic grounds” (Heidegger 1971/1953–54: 11). In other words, hermeneutics moves in the belonging of be-ing as being-here, Ereignis, in the seemingly circular way of interpreting interpreting. However, this phenomenological circularity is very different to the pragmatic “circular process” of Dewey’s (1938a: 20) logical inquiry into inquiry.“To see a vitiosum in this circle and to look for ways to avoid it, even to ‘feel’ that is an inevitable imperfection, is to misunderstand understanding from the ground up,” Heidegger stresses (2010/1927: 148). Contrary to the “most elementary rules of logic,” which reveal “the circle” as “a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle],” he advises that “what is decisive [in hermeneutic phenomenology] is not to get out of the circle, but to get in it in the right way” (p. 148). The circular nature of hermeneutics is not the moving spiral of a process, but rather an opening, only accessible via phenomenological reduction as authentic being-here. This is “the encircling circle” (1959/1935: 204). Hence “the theme of the hermeneutical investigation is the Dasein which is in each case our own” (1999/1923: 12). Dasein is “hermeneutically

The way of phenomenology 111 interrogated with respect to and on the basis of the character of its being and with a view to developing in it a radical wakefulness for itself ” (p. 12). So this encircling circle is not method as procedure, but being-here itself as meditative thinking open to meditative thinking: interpreting interpreting. “In hermeneutics what is developed for Dasein is a possibility of its becoming and being for itself in the manner of an understanding of itself ” (Heidegger 1999/1923: 11). Hermeneutic phenomenological questioning “has in a peculiar manner placed in the question the one who questions with the one who is questioned.The questioner is here always also affected by the question” (2009/1934: 36). Thus “in [meditative] thinking the situation is different from that of scientific representation. In [meditative] thinking there is neither method nor theme, but rather region, so called because it gives its realm and free reign to what thinking is given to think” (1971/1957–58: 74). This region is Dasein. Meditative, phenomenological, inceptual thinking does not involve a stepwise process method aimed at solving a practical or theoretical problem concerned with the cause-effect relations between things. Rather, it is a thinking within the belonging of be-ing as being-here, Ereignis, which is the circle as opening, as the simple qualitative whole which is Dasein. Hence “[meditative] thinking has this enigmatic property, that it itself is brought to its own light – though only if and only as long as it is [meditative] thinking, and keeps clear of persisting in ratiocination about ratio [calculative thinking]” (1968/1951–52: 28). This opening as Dasein is the Da, usually translated as there, but more subtly meaning here and there together as “t/here” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 210), because in being-here spatiality is different.33 “According to the familiar meaning of the word, ‘there’ points to ‘here’ and ‘over there’” (1996/1927: 125). However, this objective meaning is not what is intended. Instead, “‘here’ and ‘there’ are possible only in a ‘there’” (p. 125).34 As t/here, Dasein “opens itself up in its manifestness” (1995/1929–30: 149). Therefore “the t/here [Da] does not mean a here and yonder that is somehow each time determinable but rather means the clearing of be-ing itself, whose openness first of all opens up the space for every possible here and yonder” (1999/1936–38: 210). Heidegger (2002/1931–32: 44) uses the notion of a clearing in the way of “a ‘forest clearing’ that means a place which is free from trees, which gives free access for going through and looking through.” Clearing also holds the active sense of an illuminating or a “lighting up” that is similarly concerned with “making-free, giving-free” (p. 44). Thus “the Da is namely the word for the open expanse” (1982/1927: 69). Hence “Dasein must be understood as being-the-clearing” (2003/1973: 69). This being-here cannot be objectively located; rather, it is the living open of “being in a world” (2010/1927: 12), of presencing, which Heidegger (p. 53) renders in a formal phenomenological sense as “being-in-the-world.” Thus “Dasein is revealed to itself … in such a way that it itself is this revealing and being revealed” (p. 294). This revealing is “hermeneutic phenomenology” (1971/1953–54: 9), interpreting interpreting, understood in the temporal sense of presencing.

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Two ways of language Before continuing this exposition of Heidegger’s phenomenological way, particularly in connection with his construction of phenomenological concepts, it is necessary to say something about the issue of language, which cannot be disconnected from the issue of truth. By way of hermeneutic phenomenological construction, Heidegger thinks and describes, and therefore communicates, the analogous formal features of the open as being-in-the-world. However, from a pragmatic perspective premised on an objective understanding of time, such description of what is considered to be immediate experience is deemed impossible. Dewey therefore refers to it as ineffable. This ineffability is related to the process or method of inquiry, from primary experience to secondary experience to primary experience, which is a circular or spiral process within the movement of ordinary time.This is a circle that moves across the logically differing relations of natural signs and artificial signs, or symbols, within language, for “anything deliberately and artificially employed as a sign is, logically, language” (Dewey 1933: 231). In this pragmatic sense language is a tool or a set of tools, an instrumentality used in both reflective thought and communication to designate things and the relations between them. Dewey (1929a: 154) therefore calls language “the tool of tools.” However, in this sense language is not of itself thought or communication; rather, it is the symbols, as things, employed for same. Thus “while language is not thought, it is necessary for thinking as well as for communication” (p. 230). These tools are the designating symbols or artificial signs of language. Quoting Peirce (1903: 10), Dewey (1946: 92) asserts that “‘the woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols; and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols’”; as such, “‘it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is of the essence of it.’” Regarding language in this way, as a set of tools (as things), positions language on the pragmatic side of the ontological difference; Dewey also refers to this sense of language as discourse. He therefore speaks of “the derived relationship of discourse to primary experience” (1939: 546), where discourse is language understood in reflective experience, and primary experience is here chiefly of the qualitative aesthetic kind. He remonstrates that “anyone who refuses to go outside the universe of discourse [reflective experience] … has of course shut himself off from understanding what a ‘situation’ as directly experienced subject-matter is” (p. 546, italics added). He therefore considers “a universe of experience” to be “the precondition of a universe of discourse” (1938b: 68), in the same way that aesthetic experience is the precondition of reflective experience. “Without its controlling presence, there is no way to determine the relevancy, weight or coherence of any designated distinction or relation. The universe of [aesthetic] experience surrounds and regulates the universe of discourse but never appears as such within the latter” (p. 68). Instead, what appears in a universe of discourse are artificial signs conveying reflective appreciation of what was originally held within a universe of (aesthetic) experience.

The way of phenomenology 113 Cognizant of the sequentiality of temporal order, Dewey (1938b: 68–69) also recognizes that “a universe of discourse cannot be a term or element within itself.” However, “one universe of discourse may … be a term of discourse within another universe. The same principle applies in the case of universes of experience” (p. 69). Thus “it would be a contradiction if I attempted to demonstrate by means of discourse, the existence of universes of experience” (p. 69), because a universe of experience is immediate and a universe of discourse cannot access immediacy; it is ineffable. Importantly, however, while the existence of universes of experience cannot be demonstrated directly in universes of discourse, the communication through discourse of a situation, of a universe of experience, can be such as to invite someone else to directly (aesthetically) experience that situation, that universe of experience. It is not a contradiction by means of discourse to invite the reader to have for himself that kind of an immediately experienced situation in which the presence of a situation as a universe of experience is seen to be the encompassing and regulating condition of all discourse. (Dewey 1938b: 69) In this form of communication as discourse, language is not apprehended reflectively or scientifically, but aesthetically as an expression of meanings that convey an experience as a qualitative whole. Thus there are two forms of discourse: scientific and artistic. “Science states meanings, art expresses them,” Dewey argues (1934b: 84). “The poem, or painting, does not operate in the dimension of correct descriptive statement but in that of [aesthetic] experience itself ” (p. 85). Dewey makes similar remarks in relation to his poetic use of language when describing qualitative thinking. The foregoing remarks [regarding qualitative thinking] are intended to suggest the significance to be attached to the term “qualitative thought.” But as statements they are propositions and hence symbolic. Their meaning can be apprehended only by going beyond them, by using them as clues to call up qualitative situations.When an experience of the latter is had and they are re-lived, the realities corresponding to the propositions laid down may be had. (Dewey 1930c: 18) Like Dewey, Heidegger recognizes that when understood in a pragmatic or scientific sense, “the ‘human being’ ‘has’ ‘language’” (Heidegger 2004/1939: 3). In other words, the human being possesses language as an instrument, a tool for designating used in communicating and thinking. Yet in a phenomenological or aesthetic sense the opposite is the case; here “the ‘word’ ‘has’ the ‘human being’” (p. 3). In this phenomenological sense language is not a collection of symbols wielded as a tool that designates; rather, more holistically, language is itself “lived in” (2005/1923–24: 13) as aesthetic experience, in the sense that one is “lived by it.”

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However, the relation across the ontological difference between these two considerations of language is not well understood, and the one track of machination is the consequence. “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man” (Heidegger 1971/1951a: 215). Consequently, “when this relation of dominance gets inverted” – that is, when language is believed to be ultimately controllable – then “man hits upon strange maneuvers. Language becomes the means of expression [as speech]. As expression [in the way of communication], language can decay into a mere medium for the printed word” (p. 215). So “according to the usual [pragmatic] account, language is a kind of communication. It serves as a means of discussion and agreement, in general for achieving understanding” (2002/1935–36: 45). Yet considered in the direction of firstness, of being, “language is neither merely nor primarily the aural and written expression of what needs to be communicated” (p. 45). This “conveying of overt and covert meanings is not what language, in the first instance, does. Rather it brings beings as beings, for the first time, into the open” (pp. 45–46). Phenomenologically, language brings beings into the open, into beinghere. As such, “the essential being of language is Saying as Showing” (Heidegger 1971/1959: 123). “But what does ‘say’ mean?” Heidegger queries (p. 122). “In order to find out, we must stay close to what our very language tells us to think when we use the word. ‘Say’ means to show, to let appear, to let be seen and heard” (p. 122). Hence, “to say and to speak are not identical. A man may speak, speak endlessly, and all the time say nothing. Another man may remain silent, not speak at all and yet, without speaking, say a great deal” (p. 122). Importantly this “showing character” of language is “not based on signs of any kind” (p. 123). Instead,“all signs arise from a showing within whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs” (p. 123). In this way the pragmatic use of symbols or artificial signs is underpinned by or premised upon phenomenological showing (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 Language and truth on both sides of the ontological difference

The way of phenomenology 115

Two ways of truth The difference between phenomenological and pragmatic understandings of language also indicates a change or transformation evident in considerations of truth. The “transformation of the sign from something that shows [phenomenological] to something that designates [pragmatic] has its roots in the change of the nature of truth” (Heidegger 1971/1959: 115). Just as language is different on either side of the ontological difference, so too is truth. In a pragmatic sense, truth is correctness: “the correspondence of the matter to knowledge”; or vice-versa, “truth is the correspondence of the knowledge to the matter” (1998/1930: 138). Here “the understanding measures up to the idea only by accomplishing in its propositions the correspondence of what is thought to the matter, which in turn must be in conformity with the idea” (pp. 138–139). In Dewey’s pragmatic terms, this truth as the correctness of correspondence is understood as the validity of an idea. Validity requires correspondence between ideas and facts, a correspondence always attained and warranted by way of inquiry and thus referring to consequences in use. “Truth means fulfillment of the consequences to which an idea or proposition refers” (Dewey 1911f: 621).Thus truth as validity always involves “warranted assertion” (1939: 603). Every proposition … is a hypothesis concerning some state of affairs; … it is of its nature to be doubtful, not assured, of truth; and … its assertion of its own truth is only conditional: … it is a means of setting on foot activities of inquiry which will test the worth of its claim. Truth, then, can exist only in the testing of the claim, in making good through the subsequent acts it prescribes. (Dewey 1911f: 558) However, Dewey (1939: 572) also acknowledges “a distinction” in his theory “between validity and truth. The latter is defined, following Peirce, as the ideal limit of indefinitely continued inquiry. This definition is, of course, a definition of truth as an abstract idea.” For Dewey, validity is warranted by a particular inquiry; it is concrete. However, truth in itself is an abstract notion encompassing all inquiry. Peirce (1878: 299) conveys this abstract notion of truth in his claim that “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth.” This truth is the notion of a perfect attained totality wherein there is complete generality; all relations are continuous with each other. Heidegger recognizes that “the change” in the nature of truth, from phenomenological to pragmatic, is “brought about in the determination of the being of beings as idea” (1998/1931–32: 179). Here “the idea, is the universal vis-à-vis the particular, and so idea immediately receives the characterization of … something common to many individuals” (1982/1940: 162-163). This pragmatic notion of truth as universal idea is on the thirdness side of the logical difference. Yet truth is also to be had on the phenomenological side

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of the ontological difference, towards firstness, as Ereignis. There are thus two ways of considering truth: “truth as unhiddenness” in the phenomenological way of showing, and “truth as correctness,” which is pragmatic. These two different ways of truth are “quite different things; they arise from quite different fundamental experiences and cannot at all be equated” (2002/1931–32: 8). However, Heidegger is concerned that the fundamental experience of existence as interaction, supporting a notion of truth as correctness, has usurped a phenomenological understanding of truth as unhiddenness. Truth is no longer, as it was qua unhiddenness, the fundamental trait of being itself. Instead, as a consequence of getting yoked under the idea, truth has become correctness, and henceforth will be a characteristic of the knowing of beings. Ever since, there has been a striving for “truth” in the sense of the correctness of the gaze and the correctness of its direction. Ever since, what matters in all our fundamental orientations toward beings is the achievement of a correct view of ideas. (Heidegger 1998/1931–32: 179) Truth and language are always entwined. For pragmatic truth as correctness, language is a tool used to designate things in reflective thinking and communicating. In contrast, the notion of truth as unhiddenness or unconcealment is the formal phenomenological character of language: the saying of the opening as showing. As Ereignis, this formal phenomenological character is never separable from the concreteness of being-here, where language is the aesthetic unconcealment of a particular opening as whole. This concrete aesthetic language is best expressed in poetry, via poesy. Formal phenomenological language is then poetical, but not poesy in the concrete sense. “Since language is that happening in which, each time, beings are disclosed as beings, poesy, poetry in the narrower [concrete] sense, is the most primordial form of poetry in the essential sense” (Heidegger 2002/1935–36: 46). “Language itself is poetry [poetical] in the essential sense” because “poetry [as poesy] is the saying of the unconcealment of beings” (p. 46). This is the distinction around Ereignis between the poetic nature of philosophical language and an aesthetic work of poetry. Both belong together as Ereignis, yet one is concrete while the other formal. A work of poetry [poesy], a work like Hölderlin’s hymns, can for its part be thoughtful in the highest degree. It is nonetheless never philosophy. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is poetic in the highest degree, and yet it is not a work of art, but “philosophy.” Because all actual, that is, all great philosophy is inherently thoughtful-poetic, the distinction between “theoretical” and “poetical” cannot be applied to philosophical texts. (Heidegger 1984/1937: 73) In the aesthetic work of poesy, language can invite the reader or listener (as perceiver) to have or “re-live” a concrete experience, as Dewey (1930c: 18)

The way of phenomenology 117 discerned in relation to qualitative thought. Such re-living is not re-flection. This re-living is, for Heidegger, a bringing oneself back to an experience, remembering in the way of “making-present” (2002/1931–32: 213) in phenomenological time as presencing. Such presencing is the phenomenological reduction, but it is not yet a setting out on the path of remembering be-ing. Poesy is not poetical philosophy in the sense of formal phenomenological construction. Formal hermeneutic phenomenology requires getting underway with interpreting interpreting as the construction of concepts that poetically convey such experience. Heidegger (2001/1921–22: 40) refers to these as “formal indications.”

Phenomenological concepts as formal indications Existential and existentiell In a formal poetical way, Heidegger (2004/1920–21: 223) conveys the substructures of concrete presencing via “phenomenological concepts.” He also refers to these phenomenological concepts as “hermeneutic concepts” (1985/1925: 228) to highlight how “they express something which in its sense is understandable as a structure of Dasein.” This is interpreting interpreting. As structural in this phenomenological way, these concepts are never isolated from the concrete experiencing of which they are an interpretation. They are always and only able to be understood by way of concrete being-here, as they are formal hermeneutic analogies of concrete being-here. In this sense these concepts show or unhide being-here. So, when attempting to comprehend phenomenological concepts, “the point is not to listen to a series of propositions, but rather to follow the movement of showing” (Heidegger 1972/1962: 2). This showing shows concrete being-here by way of its own hermeneutic phenomenological concepts, analogous to the simple qualitative whole. Phenomenological concepts only make sense if they are of concrete being-here. Such showing therefore requires the phenomenological reduction. Because they are phenomenological, these concepts can never be elements of a language system, discipline or regional ontology in the way of thirdness, of an attained totality of related things. “A [phenomenological] ‘concept’ is not a schema but rather a possibility of being, of how matters look in the moment [of presencing], i.e., is constitutive of the moment … [and] points to a forehaving, i.e., transports us into a fundamental experience” (1999/1923: 12). This forehaving or fundamental experience is authentic being-here, existence as individual qualitative whole.Thus Heidegger (p. 12) refers to the “conceptual explicata which grow out of this interpretation … as existentials.” Existentials convey “being-here’s characters of being” (2005/1923–24: 84). “The coherence of these structures” is then “existentiality” (2010/1927: 11). These existentials are formal phenomenological “categories of Dasein” (1999/1923: 51), arising from an effort to “interrogate existence with regard to its categories of being” (2005/1923–24: 214). Existentials are the categories of Heidegger’s interpreting

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interpreting; they are the analogous ontological substructures of Ereignis, being as being-here (Figure 5.2). Heidegger is always cognizant of the formal-concrete belonging constitutive of phenomenological concepts. However, he draws attention to the distinction in play here between “an existential (ontological) assertion” which is formal, and “an existentiell (ontic) assertion” that is concrete (1984/1928: 170). A phenomenological analysis “does not have the character of an existentiell understanding but rather an existential one” (2010/1927: 11). The existential sense is the formal, hinting at firstness, while the existentiell is of concrete aesthetic experience as the firstness of secondness. This distinction between existential and existentiell is not a portrayal of the ontological difference but is rather the belonging of be-ing and being-here as Ereignis, the play of firstness and the firstness of secondness. So while the ontic or concrete encompasses both sides of the twofold of secondness (like Dewey’s primary experience), the existentiell is specifically secondness on the side of being-here, of aesthetic individuality. “The existentielle means this: In his humanity man is not only related to what is real through ways of behavior [as in the habits of interaction], but as an existing being he is concerned about himself, that is, about these relations and what is real” (1973/1941: 73). 35 Hence, “in existentiell understanding one’s own Dasein is first experienced as something that is, a being[-here], and in that process being is understood” (1982/1927: 280), for “an understanding of the being of existence … is enclosed in every existentiell understanding” (p. 279). While it is always concrete in the way of secondness and therefore ontic, an existentiell understanding is important because it bears the seeds of formal ontological understanding, such that it is “pre-ontological” (2010/1927: 11).This does “not signify being simply ontical, but rather being in the manner of an understanding of being” (p. 10) (Figure 5.2). This distinction in language between a concrete pre-ontological “existentiell understanding” and a formal “existential one” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 11) is exemplified by describing the four ways in which the notion of world can be understood. These “four concepts of world” follow Heidegger’s (1984/1928: 180) four-part schema (Figure 5.2). Here, world senses one and two are pragmatic and the difference between them is the logical difference: world one designates beings in a concrete way, world two describes formal regional ontologies. World senses three and four are phenomenological: world three is being-here as existentiell, and world four is the formal existential of world or worldliness. Both of these phenomenological concepts of world belong together as one and the same, as Ereignis. Additionally, world senses one and three are both ontical or concrete; they span the ontological difference between concrete being-here (existence as simple qualitative whole) and concrete beings (existence as interaction between organism and environment), revealing the twofold of secondness.

The way of phenomenology 119 1 2

3

4

World is used as an ontic concept and signifies the totality of beings which can be objectively present within the world. World functions as an ontological term and signifies the being of those beings named in 1. Indeed, “world” can name the region which embraces a multiplicity of beings. For example, when we speak of the “world” of the mathematician [of mathematics], we mean the region of all possible mathematical objects. Again, world can be understood in an ontic sense, but not as beings essentially unlike Dasein that can be encountered within the world; rather, it can be understood as that “in which” a factical Dasein “lives” as Dasein. Here world has a pre-ontological, existentiell meaning. There are various possibilities here: world can mean the “public” world of the we or one’s “own” and nearest (domestic) surrounding world. Finally, world designates the ontological and existential concept of worldliness. (Heidegger 2010/1927: 64–65)

The unity of analogy Each of the three differences distinguishing the four notions of world has its own character: Ereignis, ontological difference and logical difference. The contrast across the ontological difference between the character of Ereignis (as belonging of the same) and the logical difference (as togetherness of the identical), highlights how existentials can never be positioned in a systematic order as in thirdness. Instead, it is by way of the unity of analogy that existentials express Ereignis.While emphasizing that “being is the primary and decisive one that has to be said of beings,” Heidegger (1995/1931: 27) also acknowledges that “at the same time, being is said in various [i.e. analogous] ways.” Be-ing is simple as one, but can be said in analogous ways via phenomenological concepts. However, the relation here is not one of species and genus. Rather,

Figure 5.2 The four senses of world across three differences or hinges: Heidegger’s fourpart schema.Also identified here are the two different meanings of circularity across the ontological difference, as well as the distinction between poetry and poesy

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these various ways of saying be-ing are “modes of being” (2008/1926: 133), capturing the “polysemic” character of being. Following Aristotle, Heidegger (2010/1927: 2) refers to the simple coherence inherent to this polysemous character of being as the “‘unity of analogy’”: “In addition to the numerical unity of many different things and the unity of species and genus, Aristotle recognizes the unity of analogy” (1995/1931: 33), and “in analogy … what counts is relation to a one” (2008/1926: 134). This unity of analogy is not the unity of an ordered system of things positioned together in relation, a totality. Rather, existentials analogously express be-ing as being-here, as simple qualitative whole, via the phenomenological reduction, the remembrance of be-ing.Also, they are “equiprimordial” (2010/1927: 155): each is equally fundamental in the sense of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.Thus the most important aspect to comprehend regarding interpretation of existentials is that they run “counter to the tendency toward falling” (Heidegger 2002/1922: 120). Existentials are not pragmatic, they are not about the interaction of beings, they are not concerned with a hierarchical ordering. Instead they are on the other side of the ontological difference, they are poetical. However, phenomenological concepts can very easily be misconceived as pragmatic concepts. So Heidegger (2004/1920–21: 43) asks “how can this prejudice, this pre-judgment [toward beings], be prevented?” “This is just what the formal indication achieves” (p. 43). Hermeneutic phenomenological concepts, existentials, are formal indications or hints, in the sense that “hints only remain hints when thinking does not twist them into definitive statements and thereby come to a standstill with them. Hints are hints only as long as thinking follows their allusions while meditating on them” (1991/1955–56: 129). Thus, with formal indications “there is no insertion into a material domain, but rather the opposite: the formal indication is a defense, a preliminary securing so that the enactment-character still remains free” (2004/1920–21: 44). Hence “the necessity of this precautionary measure arises from the falling tendency of factical life experience, which constantly threatens to slip into the objective” (p. 44). By referring to phenomenological concepts as formal indications or hints, Heidegger intends to alert the reader or listener to awareness of the ontological difference and to thinking these concepts phenomenologically, meditatively, poetically, via the phenomenological reduction to authentic being-here. “The formal indication possesses, along with its referential character, a prohibiting (deterring, preventing) one at the same time” (2001/1921–22: 105). With the formal indication Heidegger is signposting the need for the phenomenological reduction, for resolute Dasein, in the comprehension of any hermeneutic concept. The reduction is the “decisive departure-situation for the actualizing movement” (p. 27). Thus “there resides in the formal indication a very definite bond; this bond says that I stand in a quite definite direction of approach” (p. 26), an approach which is phenomenological. We can only understand the concepts that open up this connection as long as they are not taken to signify characteristic features or properties of

The way of phenomenology 121 something present at hand, but are rather taken as indications that show how our understanding must first twist free from our ordinary conceptions of beings and properly transform itself into the Da-sein in us. (Heidegger 1995/1929–30: 296) The notion of formal indication can be misinterpreted in the direction of thirdness, where formal is taken separately from indication to designate the generalized framework of a regional ontology,“a ‘material domain’” (Heidegger 2004/1920–21: 41). However, “the formal indication has nothing to do with generality” (p. 41). Rather, “‘formal-indicative’ is a unified inseparable concept in philosophy” (2001/1921–22: 27). “The formal is not the ‘form,’ and the indication its content; on the contrary, ‘formal’ means ‘approach toward the determination,’ approach-character” (p. 27). A formal indication or hint conveys the need to comprehend phenomenological concepts via the approach of the phenomenological reduction as concrete being-here. Thus formal indications do not designate objects. Instead, they hint at be-ing as being-here. In this sense formal indications “‘indicate’ something that does not show itself ” (2010/1927: 28). Formal indication is formal in the indicated direction of Ereignis. So “in order to grasp the sense” of a formal indication fully, “a radical interpretation of the ‘formal’” (2001/1921–22: 27) is required. Formally indicative concepts are “‘emptily’ meant: and yet decisively!” (p. 26). Such emptiness is a reference to Husserlian “empty intending,” where “we mean the matters themselves [i.e. the moment of presencing or authentic being-here] and not images or representations of them, yet we do not have them intuitively given” (Heidegger 1985/1925: 41). These concepts are then empty in their formal sense. “A large part of our ordinary talk goes on in this way,” where “the intended [content] is itself directly and simply intended, but merely emptily, which means without any intuitive fulfillment” (p. 41). Formally indicating concepts are empty in that they are formal in the direction of firstness, so they are developed from, but always require fulfillment via, ontic-existentiell beinghere in order to be comprehended. These are not universal concepts able to be abstracted from primary experience and positioned in a regional ontology, an abstract language system. They are always of Ereignis. Hence “there is no ‘generality’ in hermeneutical understanding over and above what is formal” (Heidegger 1999/1923: 14). As such, comprehension of formal indications is phenomenological, requiring the phenomenological reduction and a crossing of the ontological difference. These concepts are indicative because, insofar as they have been genuinely acquired, they can only ever address the challenge of such a transformation to us, but can never bring about the transformation themselves. They point into Dasein itself. But Da-sein – as I understand it – is always mine. These concepts are formally indicative because in accordance with the essence of such indication they indeed point into a concretion of the individual Dasein

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in man in each case, yet never already bring this concretion along with them in their content. (Heidegger 1995/1929–30: 296) A formal indication is “a foreconception, i.e., calls for a how of addressing and interrogating” (Heidegger 1999/1923: 12–13). It “transports us into the beingthere of our Dasein in accord with its tendency to interpretation” (p. 13). A formal indication “points to a forehaving, i.e., transports us into a fundamental experience” (p. 12), into resolute Dasein, a knowing awareness of being-here. As a foreconception, a formal indication is a phenomenological description and thus an expression of be-ing as being-here, where being-here is forehaving, addressed and interrogated via be-ing as foresight. Thus formal indications, as phenomenological concepts, are not just about being-here but are of beinghere. These “fundamental concepts are not later additions to Dasein, but rather express it in advance and propel it forward: grasping Dasein and stirring it by way of their pointing” (p. 13).

Phenomenological destruction of pragmatic concepts36 Yet even when the authentic and resolute approach of reduction and remembrance is followed, there remains the possibility that phenomenological concepts, as language, will slip back over the ontological difference to be interpreted in the way of a disciplinary regional ontology, such as anthropology. “It is possible for every phenomenological concept and proposition drawn from genuine origins to degenerate when communicated as a statement. It gets circulated in a vacuous fashion, loses its autochthony, and becomes a free-floating thesis” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 34). Furthermore, “as soon as one takes these concepts without reference to their indicative character like a scientific concept according to the conception of ordinary understanding, philosophical questioning gets led astray with respect to every single problem” (1995/1929–30: 297). Thus “a formal indication is always misunderstood when it is treated as a fixed universal proposition and used to make deductions from and fantasized with in a constructivistic dialectical fashion” (1999/1923: 62). “The material concept is absolutely incomparable to the phenomenological concept” (2004/1920–21: 62), for “in the formal indication one stays away from classification; everything is kept precisely open” (p. 44). Formal indications are an attempt at phenomenological description of Ereignis along the pathway that is accessed via an authentic knowing awareness of being-here.Yet while this phenomenological description is never pragmatic, formal indications have to be expressed using terms also employed in ordinary (pragmatic) language. Heidegger (eventually) sees no possibility for developing a special phenomenological form of language, a phenomenological jargon, but instead relies on the reader’s transformation via phenomenological reduction to authentic being-here to comprehend phenomenological concepts.

The way of phenomenology 123 The truth of be-ing cannot be said with the ordinary language that today is ever more widely misused and destroyed by incessant talking. Can this truth ever be said directly, if all language is still the language of beings? Or can a new language for be-ing be invented? No. And even if this could be accomplished – and even without artificial word-formation – such a language would not be a saying language. All saying has to let the ability to hear arise with it. Both must have the same origin. Thus only one thing counts: to say the most nobly formed language in its simplicity and essential force, to say the language of beings as the language of be-ing. (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 54) Heidegger realizes that in his phenomenological construction of existentials, he will be using terms employed in the pragmatic language of beings in order to express the language of be-ing. The terms he is using can therefore be interpreted in two ways, across the twofold of the ontological difference. Such a twofold interpretation also applies to Heidegger’s use of diagrams and the way in which they are employed in this book. Heidegger (2002/1931– 32: 221) acknowledges that his own use of diagrams in his classes was done “naturally with great reservation.” His concern was that his diagrams would be comprehended pragmatically, as things encompassed within regional ontologies, as universals, the attained totalities of relation. His diagrams would then be grasped as exacting representations of structures that are not even considered to be warranted assertions, but separate from actual experience, from being-here; whereas he intends them as formal indications, as poetical. A diagram “does not present the matter in a more exact way, but the reverse” (Heidegger 2002/1931–32: 221). This reverse is aesthetic, in the direction of firstness. Like a hint or formal indication, a diagram is “an aid for understanding, simply scaffolding around the phenomenon, scaffolding that must be torn down immediately” (p. 221). In Peirce’s terms, a diagram of this kind is to be understood in the way of firstness as a “diagrammatic sign or icon, which exhibits a similarity or analogy to the subject of discourse” (1931/1890: 194). The diagrams used in this book, when referencing phenomenological concepts, are in this sense formal indications.They are not pointing to a totality of relations representative of experience; rather, they are meant to engender aesthetic engagement via the phenomenological reduction; for, as Peirce notes, “a great distinguishing property of the icon is that by the direct observation of it other truths concerning its object can be discovered than those which suffice to determine its construction” (1932/1895: 158). Phenomenological concepts, as “scaffolding” (Heidegger 2002/1931–32: 221), are always of the phenomenon, of being-here, necessitating a move from calculative to meditative thinking via phenomenological reduction. The intention is always “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself ” (2010/1927: 32). This phenomenological interpretation of signs, be they words or diagrams, requires a transformation of meaning from pragmatic to phenomenological, from designating to showing. Heidegger refers

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to this transformation of meaning, achieved in the crossing of the ontological difference via the phenomenological reduction, as “phenomenological destruction” (2002/1920: 126). “Construction in [phenomenological] philosophy is necessarily destruction, that is to say, a de-constructing of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition” (1982/1927: 23). The store of the basic philosophical concepts derived from the philosophical condition is still so influential today that this effect of tradition can hardly be overestimated. It is for this reason that all philosophical discussion, even the most radical attempt to begin all over again, is pervaded by traditional concepts and thus by traditional horizons and traditional angles of approach, which we cannot assume with unquestionable certainty to have arisen originally and genuinely from the domain of being and the constitution of being they claim to comprehend. It is for this reason that there necessarily belongs to the conceptual interpretation of being and its structures, that is, to the reductive construction of being, a destruction – a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn. (Heidegger 1982/1927: 22–23) These sources are, of course, the concrete aesthetic experiential wholes of dwelling, of presencing, of being-here. Heidegger’s explication of the four concepts of world offers an example of such destruction of a traditional concept. From a pragmatic focus on beings, on things, the concept of world is “destructed” (Heidegger 2004/1920–21: 202) so that its meaning is phenomenological in both pre-ontological and ontological ways, both concrete and formal. Heidegger employs the same destruction in relation to the concept of self. In a pragmatic sense self, subject, I, is considered as organism interacting with environment. “The word ‘subject,’ if it is to be used at all, has the organism for its proper designatum” (Dewey 1939: 542). However, on the phenomenological side, the self is destructed from its traditional sense as I or subject. In a concrete phenomenological sense, self is who. Formally, it is “whoness” (Heidegger 1982/1927: 120), “selfhood” or “mineness” (p. 170). Associated with this destruction are the terms ‘individual’ and ‘individuality’ which pragmatically refer to the separateness of an organism or other thing, while phenomenologically they convey the simple qualitative whole of beinghere, Dasein. This destruction of pragmatic or scientific concepts in their phenomenological comprehension is a freeing up of existence, removing it from the bond of objective interpretation which is a “self-obstruction” (Heidegger 2005/1923–24: 85). Here “existence has obstructed itself from itself in the entire sphere of its being” (p. 85). So “freeing existence up by way of a dismantling, a destruction, occurs by tracing concepts back to their distinctive origin” (p. 85): being-here. Pragmatic understanding of these concepts is inadequate for accessing a

The way of phenomenology 125 phenomenological comprehension of existence as individual qualitative whole. Hence, “what is accomplished at the same time on this path is the elucidation of the inadequacy of the concepts for existence” (p. 85). Importantly, however, this destruction of concepts is not intended in a negative sense as an elimination, as a doing away with the pragmatic meanings. “This is not a negation of the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse, it signifies precisely a positive appropriation of tradition” (p. 23). Phenomenology opens up one side of the phenomenon of existence. Heidegger is not intending to prescribe phenomenology as his own version of one-track thinking set up in competition with pragmatism. In his phenomenological interpreting interpreting, Heidegger sets out to dwell along the path of meditative thinking, to authentically think being-here in the way of his own hermeneutic questioning. In doing so he recognizes that the “three basic components of phenomenological method – reduction, construction, destruction – belong together” as descriptions of a path or way, not as a method or process (1982/1927: 23). Reduction, construction and destruction are all analogously of meditative thinking, of thinking the formal indications that hint analogously at Dasein, factical life, haecceitas, as individual indivisible whole. However, just as with Dewey’s logical pragmatism, understanding of hermeneutic phenomenological concepts cannot be separated from hermeneutic phenomenology. There is an inseparable association in both pragmatism and phenomenology between the character of concepts and the way of thinking. Pragmatic concepts are involved in cause and effect relations, while phenomenological concepts are analogous of the aesthetic whole.

Summary In this chapter we have addressed Heidegger’s phenomenological method (noting that he moves away from referring to it as a method in order to distinguish it from the pragmatic methods of the sciences). Heidegger refers to his phenomenological undertaking as a thinking path, a pathway along which meditative thinking journeys. For Heidegger this path can be characterized in three analogous ways: as pheno-menological reduction, phenomenological construction and phenomenological destruction. To get on the path one must engage with phenomenological reduction, which for Heidegger is the same as remembering be-ing, a crossing of the ontological difference to an authentic awareness of being-here. Being on the path cannot be properly distinguished from setting off along it, which involves playing with possible understandings, possible descriptions of be-ing as being-here. Importantly, these descriptions are always of beinghere as whole. In this way they are analogously of the whole, not parts related somehow by cause and effect in a system of relations. The thinking involved here is meditative, it is hermeneutic, it is interpretation, it is interpreting being-here. As meditative it is not reflective, but instead it is

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of the phenomenological moment. Interpreting being-here is thus interpreting interpreting. One lives in an interpreting of one’s interpreting as being-here. This is a circle, but not moving in time as a process; rather, it is an opening, a clearing. The phenomenological descriptions arrived at are analogies of interpreting interpreting; they are phenomenological concepts achieved via this play of meditative thinking which Heidegger calls phenomenological construction. Heidegger recognizes that phenomenological concepts can readily be misunderstood as pragmatic when the ontological difference and phenomenological reduction are not comprehended. He therefore acknowledges that terms used traditionally as pragmatic concepts must undergo phenomenological destruction if they are to be understood phenomenologically. In other words, the terms Heidegger uses as his analogous phenomenological concepts are also pragmatic terms, so they cannot be comprehended phenomenologically without the reduction. In order to signal this Heidegger describes his phenomenological concepts as formal indications, as hints, in the sense that they point towards Ereignis. The ontological difference therefore heralds a distinction between two understandings of language as well as of truth. Phenomenologically language and truth are aesthetic, they are poetical.

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Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing

Overview The aim of this chapter is to finally flesh out the detail of a coherent theory of experience on the phenomenological ‘side’ of existence, as this sits in relation to the pragmatic ‘side.’ Achieving this means following Heidegger further along his way of phenomenology to arrive at an understanding of the formal phenomenological concepts he suggests, which relate across the ontological difference to nondestructed pragmatic concepts. This pathway is defined by his questioning of being, which is initially approached via the question of the meaning of beinghere and is then addressed by the question of the truth of be-ing. Both questions are of the question of being, culminating in his notion of the place of be-ing. So Heidegger moves from a focus on being-here as being-in-the-world, analogously comprehended as time-space, to the opening of this opening, the truth of be-ing, the fourfold of mortals and gods, earth and sky.These four exist in temporal tension, opening being-here, the clearing. At the heart of this fourfold is the belonging of logos and physis, of word and nature, of who and world, as onefold place of being. It is here that we dwell, and as dwellers we build – a building which is both phenomenological and pragmatic, poiesis and techne, utilizing the passageway of the ontological difference. Such is a coherent theory of experience – offering a new way of illuminating the problem of educational confusion.

Two turning questions in Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing Heidegger’s phenomenological standpoint, the origin of his pathway of thinking, is accessed via the reduction: a leap across the ontological difference from beings to being-here, a leap undertaken on behalf of the “question of being” (2010/1927: 4). However, having made this leap, the question of being can be approached with two differing emphases while still maintaining the sense of the whole. In this questioning of Ereignis the emphasis can be on be-ing as being-here, or it can be on be-ing as being-here. With the initial departure along the pathway, the emphasis is more on be-ing as being-here. Here the focus is the being-here of “the questioner” (p. 4), as interpreter, which is founded in meaningfulness. Hence Heidegger’s initial question of be-ing is “the question of the meaning of being” (p. 4).This question of the meaning of being

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is directed at expressing or articulating the analogous substructures, as formal indications, of the meaningful open of being-here. This question could perhaps also be formulated as the question of the meaning of being-here: the question of the meaning of life! But not in a pragmatic sense. So the question of the meaning of being-here is not about the concrete meaning of any particular being such as a human being. Phenomenologically and ontologically, meaning is “an existential of Dasein, not a property which is attached to beings” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 147). “When we ask about the meaning of being, our inquiry does not become profound and does not brood on anything which stands behind being, but questions being itself in so far as it stands within the intelligibility of Dasein” (p. 147).The question of the meaning of being-here is a phenomenological question that aims to address the analogous substructures of being-here – which is meaningful. The open of being-here is intelligible because it is meaningful;37 it is as it is by way of meaning. “Meaning is that in which the intelligibility of something keeps itself, without coming into view explicitly and thematically itself. Meaning signifies … that in terms of which something can be conceived in its possibility as what it is” (p. 309). “Meaning, structured by fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception,” – by interpreting – is that “in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something” (p. 147). Thus, “the concept of meaning includes the formal framework of what necessarily belongs to what interpretation that understands articulates” (p. 147).This formal phenomenological framework is that of the meaningful open of Dasein, as being-in-the-world. The other emphasis which Heidegger places on his question of be-ing is not directly concerned with the substructures of the meaningful open of Dasein. This other emphasis is on be-ing as being-here, which Heidegger (1999/1936– 38: 36) expresses as “the question of the truth of being.”This is a second version of the grounding question of being. It specifically stresses the importance of the phenomenological notion of truth as unconcealment or unhiddenness. With the question of the truth of be-ing, Heidegger is asking beyond the analogous substructures of the meaningful open of Dasein to address the unconcealment or openness of this open itself. He relinquishes “the word ‘meaning of being’ in favor of ‘truth of being’” so as to highlight “the openness of being itself, rather than the openness of Dasein in regard to this openness of being” (2003/1969: 47). Both questions are still of Ereignis; they are different ways of approaching the question of be-ing (Figure 6.1). Heidegger (1998/1946: 250) describes this shift in emphasis in his questioning of be-ing as a reversal or “turning.” However, this turning is “not a change of standpoint” (p. 250), as is sometimes thought.38 “The thinking of the reversal is a change in my thought,” he acknowledges (1967: xvi). “But this change is not a consequence of altering the standpoint, much less of abandoning the fundamental issue” (p. xvi). Rather,“the reversal is in play with the matter itself ” (p. xviii). This matter or issue is Ereignis. The reversal of perspective involves a shift from the question of the meaning of being-here to that of the question of the truth of be-ing, from questioning be-ing as being-here to questioning be-ing as being-here – or, as Heidegger (p. xviii) also describes it, from “Being and Time” to “Time and Being,” referencing here his earlier book Being and Time

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Figure 6.1 The sense of turning between Heidegger’s questions of the meaning of being and the truth of being, always of Ereignis

(1962/1927, 1996/1927, 2010/1927) and a later lecture titled Time and Being (1972/1962). Richardson refers to these two perspectives as Heidegger I and Heidegger II to differentiate the questions and emphases. “Heidegger I and Heidegger II are not the same – but they are one,” Richardson notes (1967: 625). Heidegger concurs, but clarifies the nature of the distinction. The distinction you [Richardson] make between Heidegger I and II is justified only on the condition that this is kept constantly in mind: only by way of what Heidegger I has thought does one gain access to what is to-bethought by Heidegger II. But [the thought of] Heidegger I becomes possible only if it is contained in Heidegger II. (Heidegger 1967: xxiii) The question of the meaning of being-here, Heidegger I, and the question of the truth of be-ing, Heidegger II, are both aspects of Heidegger’s “one and only question,” the question of be-ing (1999/1936–38: 8). Both sub-questions are grounding questions and ask after Ereignis. Thus “‘meaning of Being’ and ‘truth of Being’ say the same” (1998/1949: 286). However, while each question asks after the same, these questions are distinct, showing Ereignis from two emphases, both of which are required in Heidegger’s investigation. Thus “turning is counter-turning” (p. 287). Heidegger’s questioning of the truth of be-ing emerges from his questioning of the meaning of being-here. Each question reveals analogous phenomenological concepts which are structural features of Ereignis seen from differing angles. The approach taken here, then, to express these two sub-questions of be-ing, is not achieved by considering each in isolation, but rather in their counter-turning. While both questions are distinct, the interpretation presented here of Heidegger’s question of the meaning of being-here is influenced by his investigation of the question of the truth of be-ing, and vice-versa. Both questions are sub-questions of the question of be-ing, a question which is always one of time.

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The meaning of being: temporality as the movement of meaning39 Being-in-the-world as time-space Similar to Peirce, Heidegger’s phenomenological investigation reveals “three directions of sense,” which he refers to as “content-, relational-, [and] enactmentsense” (2004/1920–21: 43). The relation sense is secondness, which Heidegger (1985/1925: 36), via Husserl, refers to as an extant “intentional relation.” For Dewey this is existence as interaction between experiencing and experienced, organism and environment, but Heidegger is not focused on the intentional relation per se. Instead he is concerned with “the task of understanding in ever more radical ways the notion of intentionality” (2002/1945: 30). Existence can be understood pragmatically, as interaction, as intentional relation, or it can be understood phenomenologically, as simple qualitative whole, as Dasein. So the first radical way in which Heidegger understands intentionality is as concrete being-here, as haecceitas. Here he is working “against the erroneous objectivizing of intentionality” (1982/1927: 65). Then, even more radically, Heidegger considers intentionality in a formal phenomenological sense, as being-in-theworld. “Being-in-the-world is the basic constitution of Dasein” (1984/1928: 169). Thus Heidegger (1982/1927: 161) regards “being-in-the-world as [the] foundation of intentionality.” Hence, importantly, “being-in-the-world is never to be equated and identified with intentionality; if one does so, as often happens, one proves only that he is far from understanding this phenomenon” (1984/1928: 168). Such a misunderstanding occurs when the ontological difference is overlooked. Dasein is then considered objectively as I, an organism interacting with environment, rather than as the simple qualitative whole of being-here, formally considered as being-in-the-world. So, phenomenologically, “self and world are not two beings, like subject and object” (Heidegger 1982/1927: 297). Rather, self and world are analogous ways of expressing Dasein. The unity of these analogies is then captured by Heidegger using the phrase being-in-theworld. The compound expression “being-in-the-world” indicates, in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unified phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole. But while being-in-the-world cannot be broken up into components that may be pieced together, this does not prevent it from having several constitutive structural factors. (Heidegger 1996/1927: 49) Thus “the structure of being-in-the-world is unitary but it is also organized” (Heidegger 1982/1927: 291). These analogous structural factors are organized in that they are of the simple, the unitary, Ereignis. Organization is here phenomenologically understood; structural factors are analogous to a one. Because they are phenomenological these structures can only be comprehended

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 131 by way of the simple whole, and for Heidegger this simple whole is always one with a phenomenological understanding of time. Therefore Heidegger’s path can be described as a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of Dasein “via temporality” (1982/1927: 291). Time must be brought to light and genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding and interpretation of being. For this to become clear we need an original explication of time as the horizon of the understanding of being, in terms of temporality as the being of Dasein which understands being. (Heidegger 2010/1927: 17) Such a phenomenological understanding of be-ing by way of time has significant ramifications for an understanding of space, which Heidegger also considers phenomenologically in terms of temporality. In this phenomenological regard, space cannot be considered apart from time; space is of time (whereas pragmatically, time is of space). Bringing these analogies together using another unified compound phenomenological expression Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 259) describes this as the onefold of “time-space”, in contrast to the pragmatic “space and time.” In the phenomenological sense “time is not the product of man, man is not the product of time. There is no production here. There is only giving in the sense of extending which opens up time-space” (1972/1962: 16). This extending is not a Cartesian extending, but rather the clearing, the opening, as oneness. So this is “a temporality whose essential time together with essential space forms the originary oneness of that time-space by which even being itself essences” (2002/1946b: 230). Thus “time-space … is the name for the openness which opens up in the mutual self-extending of futural approach, past and present. This openness exclusively and primarily provides the space in which space as we usually know it can unfold” (1972/1962: 14). Phenomenological time-space is not a calculative determination; it is not “the coupling of space and time in the sense that time, taken as the (t) of calculation, becomes the fourth parameter and thus the four dimensional ‘space’ of physics” (1999/1936–38: 263). In contrast to this pragmatic sense of space and time, time-space is the sense of the “clearing of being” (2006/1938–39: 289), which Heidegger understands via the question of the meaning of be-ing. The compound being-in-the-world is itself analogous to the compound time-space in that both are constituted by two analogous structural factors underpinned by temporality. These can be seen in emphasis as being-in-theworld (as time-space) and being-in-the-world (as time-space). Hence “we must interpret the phenomenon of being-in as such and the phenomenon of world in their temporal constitution” (1982/1927: 291). Central to this temporal constitution is Heidegger’s understanding of a phenomenological sense of movement, which he describes, via the question of the meaning of being, as care. In this analogical and tautological way, temporality is care; care is temporality. Being-here “is concerned in its being about that being” (2010/1927: 185); this is Heidegger’s way of describing this phenomenological

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movement of care as expressed in terms of the meaning of being-here. In other words, phenomenologically, meaning is care. Heidegger (2002/1922: 116) is adamant that this “movement of care is not a process.”“The movement of existence is not the motion of something objectively present. It is determined from the [temporal] stretching along of Dasein” (2010/1927: 358).The temporal stretching of being-here conveys this concrete movement of care, Heidegger’s “interpretation of care as temporality” (p. 316).Therefore “being-in-the-world is essentially care” (p. 186). Being-in-the-world is analogously care as temporal movement. Temporality as care: who With Heidegger’s emphasis on care as temporality, being-in-the-world is a phenomenological description of meaningful “being-a-possibility” (2005/1923– 24: 39) and “potentiality-for-being” (2010/1927: 185). Heidegger highlights the temporality of being-in-the-world as “being-ahead-of-oneself-already-being-inthe-world” (p. 186).This is a compound term meant to stress the analogous unity, in presencing, of the temporal notions ahead of and already,“can-be” and “havingbeen” (1982/1927: 266). Being-in-the-world emphasizes “the unity of time’s three dimensions” (1972/1962: 15) in presencing. “Being-ahead-of-oneself is grounded in the future. Already-being-in … makes known having-been” (2010/1927: 312). However, these are not ordinary or pragmatic senses of time. “It is automatically ruled out to conceive the ‘ahead’ in the ‘ahead-of-itself ’ and the ‘already’ in terms of the vulgar [ordinary] understanding of time,” Heidegger stipulates (p. 312). “The ‘ahead’ does not mean the ‘before’ in the sense of a ‘notyet-now, but later.’ Nor does the ‘already’ mean a ‘no-longer-now, but earlier’” (p. 312). Rather, ahead of and already are to be understood phenomenologically via the temporal movement of care as “futurally having-been” (p. 314). Stressing the meaningful intelligibility of being-here, Heidegger analogously interprets ahead-of and already, can-be and having-been, as understanding and attunement respectively. “Understanding is primarily grounded in the future; attunement, on the other hand, temporalizes itself primarily in havingbeen” (2010/1927: 325). Both concepts are analogous of being-in-the-world. “Attunement always has its understanding …. Understanding is always attuned” (p. 138). In connection with attunement, Heidegger (2010/1927: 130) points out that “we must see this phenomenon as a fundamental existential and outline its structure.” As a formal phenomenological concept, however, attunement is always understood via an existentiell being-here. In this existentiell sense, attunement is the “most familiar and … everyday kind of thing: mood, being in a mood” (p. 130). However, being in a mood is not the same as reflective identification of a specific mood hypostasized in reflective thinking. Existentiell mood equates to Dewey’s aesthetic and qualitative emotion: it has to be comprehended in aesthetic experience and as a whole, not in reflective terms. “[Aesthetic] experience is emotional,” Dewey declares (1934b: 42), “but there are no separate things called emotions in it.” In other words, the pragmatic sense

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 133 of emotion must be phenomenologically destructed. Like Dewey, Heidegger (1995/1929–30: 64) recognizes that moods are generally regarded reflectively and objectively as “feelings” and are considered to be “events occurring in a subject.” However, when thought aesthetically, meditatively, “mood makes manifest ‘how one is and is coming along’” (2010/1927: 131). Attunements [moods] are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the “how” … according to which one is in such and such a way. Certainly we often take this “one is in such and such a way” … as something indifferent, in contrast to what we intend to do, what we are occupied with, or what will happen to us. And yet this “one is in such and such a way” is not – is never – simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing and acting. It is – to put it crudely – the presupposition for such things, the “medium” within which they first happen. (Heidegger 1995/1929–30: 67) The qualitative necessity of mood shows that “Dasein is always already in a mood” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 131). This sense of always already conveys the formal phenomenological notion of thrownness: “attunement is grounded in thrownness” (p. 325). “Attunement brings Dasein before its thrownness in such a way that the latter is not known as such, but is disclosed far more primordially in ‘how one is’” (pp. 324–325). Thus “attunement reveals ‘how one is’” (p. 182). “We are in some sense – as we say – ‘affected’” (1985/1925: 256). In other words, being-here is temporally thrown, it is characterized by a specific past (understood phenomenologically as held in the present with an accompanying future sense) which is accepted without question; it is always already affected, always already attuned in some way, “always already having-been” (p. 301). However, having-been is not the past of ordinary time as “no longer objectively present” (p. 301). “That which we are as having been has not gone by, passed away, in the sense in which we say that we could shuffle off our past like a garment” (1982/1927: 265). On the contrary, “Dasein can as little get rid of its [having-been as] … escape its death” (p. 265). For being-here, having-been is never the past, as being-here is always already affected, attuned, having-been. Cognizant of the simple onefold unity of time as care, Heidegger (2010/1927: 138) points out that attunement is only “one of the existential structures” of being-in-the-world. Understanding is another analogous and equiprimordial existential structure. Phenomenologically, understanding emphasizes a futural sense of the aesthetic whole of being-here. Like attunement and mood, understanding is also open to misinterpretation as a pragmatic term, rather than phenomenologically destructed. “With the term understanding we mean a fundamental existential,” Heidegger stipulates (p. 321).This is “neither a definite kind of cognition, as distinct from explaining and conceiving, nor a cognition in general in the sense of grasping something thematically” (p. 321). Understanding is a formal indication aligned with the futural sense of canbe, or being-here’s “potentiality of being” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 148). In

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this way of attuned understanding, “‘being-alive’ means being-a-possibility” (2005/1923–24: 39). Such possibility or potentiality is very different to Dewey’s (1935a: 701) pragmatic “material potentiality” which is expressed in interaction. Hence “the being-possible, which Dasein always is existentially, is … distinguished from empty, logical possibility and from the contingency of something objectively present, where this or that can ‘happen’ to it” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 139). As being-a-possibility, being-here is always concerned about this possibility as a potentiality of being-here. As being-a-possibility, being-here “is concerned in its being about that being” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 185).“The term existence formally indicates that Dasein is as an understanding potentiality-of-being which is concerned in its being[-here] about its being[-here]” (p. 221).40 Care conveys this fundamental existential concern. Being-here is always a concern for beinghere; not in the pragmatic and reflective sense, but qualitatively, aesthetically. This care is only able to be comprehended phenomenologically. Being-here is always being-a-possibility, a potentiality-for-being, a can-be. Being-here “is occupied with its own capacity to be” (1982/1927: 170). Being-here “is for the sake of its own capacity-to-be-in-the-world” (p. 170). Heidegger uses the term project to describe potentiality-for-being. “Understanding in itself has the existential structure which we call project” (2010/1927: 140). “The project character of understanding constitutes beingin-the-world with regard to the disclosedness of its there as the there of a potentiality of being” (pp. 140–141). Also,“project always concerns the complete disclosedness of being-in-the-world” (p. 141).The open or clearing that is beinghere is always characterized by some concrete sense of understanding (even if this could be reflectively considered as misunderstanding, or not understanding). However, “projecting has nothing to do with being related to a plan thought out” (p. 141). Such a notion of project as a plan thought out is pragmatic and to do with ordering things. Phenomenologically, Dasein “has always already projected itself and is, as long as it is, projecting. As long as it is, Dasein always has understood itself and will understand itself in terms of its possibilities” (p. 141). Thus being-here is always “projecting upon possibilities” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 143). In an existentiell sense these are particular possibilities. Existential being-a-possibility, as potentiality-for-being or can-be, is always one with an existentiell expression, a concrete aesthetic possibility of being-here. “In being-ahead-of-oneself as the being toward one’s ownmost potentialityof-being lies the existential and ontological condition of the possibility of being free for authentic existentiell possibilities” (p. 186). Furthermore, “as free, Dasein projects itself on the for-the-sake-of-itself, as the whole of the essential possibilities in its capacity-to-be. Suspending before itself this for-the-sakeof-itself and existing in this suspension, this being[-here] applies itself, in its mode, for itself ” (1984/1928, p 196). Thus “the for-the-sake-of-which always concerns the being of Dasein which is essentially concerned about this being itself in its being” (2010/1927: 83). Heidegger’s phenomenological sense of the for-the-sake-of-itself is at the heart of the temporal movement of care.

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 135 However, for-the-sake-of-itself does “not … mean a solipsistic selfishness” (Heidegger 1984/1928: 196) on the part of an “egoistic subject” (p. 190), as it perhaps would if this phrase was interpreted pragmatically. Rather, the phenomenological for-the-sake-of-itself does not exclude “being-with-others” (1996/1927: 115). “As being-with, Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of others” (2010/1927: 120), and “the everyday possibilities of being of Dasein are at the disposal of the whims of the others” (p. 118). In other words, “Dasein stands in subservience to the others” (pp. 122–123). However, “these others are not definite others” (p. 123).The various “modes of being-with-one-another tend to mislead the ontological interpretation into initially interpreting this being[-here] as the pure objective presence of several subjects” (p. 118). Phenomenologically, being-with-one-another does not involve a reflective consideration of others as subjects or objects, but a public normative sense that is temporal in nature which Heidegger (p. 123) refers to as “the they.”41 “The they maintains itself factically in the averageness of what belongs to it, what it does and does not consider valid, and what it grants or denies success” (p. 123). We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves.We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the “great mass” the way they withdraw, we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness. (Heidegger 2010/1927: 123) The they “governs” (Heidegger 1985/1925: 246) being-here in such a way that “there is constant care as to the way one differs from them, whether this difference is to be equalized, whether one’s own Dasein has lagged behind others and wants to catch up in relation to them” (2010/1927: 122). Beingin-the-world is constituted by “care about this distance” (p. 122). Heidegger refers to the existential concern with bridging this distance as “the character of distantiality” (p. 122). However, distantiality is not psychological in the sense of a pragmatic motivation, reflectively identified as one amongst other possible motivations. Rather, distantiality shows that “Dasein is [italics added] for the sake of the ‘they’” (1962/1927: 167).The they is existential possibility, as beinga-possibility. As such, the who of Dasein is the they. “The who is not this one and not that one, not oneself and not some and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the they” (2010/1927: 123). Phenomenologically, who is mine and the they at once. Being-here is for itself by projecting the they as a possibility of itself.When one’s authentic self is not grasped in authentic being-here, one’s self is the “they-self” (2010/1927: 125).The they-self is distinguished“from the authentic self,that is,the self which has explicitly grasped itself ” (p. 125); but this distinction is no division.Therefore, on the one hand,“authentic being a self … is an existentiell modification of the they as an essential existential” (p. 126), while on the other hand,“the they-self is an existentiell modification of the authentic self ” (p. 303). Acknowledging both modes of self, Heidegger believes that “with the

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expression ‘self,’ we answered the question of the who of Dasein” (p. 257). Self, who, is constituted by care as the temporal movement involving authentic self and theyself, where the they offers the working interpretation of being-a-possibility, of canbe. Concern for the distance between these modes of self or who characterizes the temporal movement of being-in-the-world; this is care as temporality. It analogously characterizes attunement and understanding, having-been and can-be, which Heidegger (1987/1939: 174) also refers to in a unified sense as “thrown project.” “As thrown, Dasein is thrown into the mode of being of projecting” (2010/1927: 141).Thrown project is always characterized by the temporal movement of care. Temporality as significance: world Being-in-the-world is being-a-possibility, is who. It expresses the phenomenological unity of the three dimensions of time in the movement of temporality as care. However, being-in-the-world can be misunderstood as a pragmatic designating meaning “‘being-in something’” (Heidegger 1996/1927: 50), where world is comprehended objectively as a container holding a collection of things. Hence, problematically, “with this term, the kind of being of a being is named which is ‘in’ something, as water is ‘in’ the glass, the dress is ‘in’ the closet” (p. 50). This is not Heidegger’s sense of world, however. Such a pragmatic interpretation positions being-in-the-world as an ordered spatial relationship between “objectively present” (p. 50) things, where “we mean the relation of being that two beings extended ‘in’ space have to each other with regard to their location in that space” (p. 50).When considered in this pragmatic way, world is an “expanded” Cartesian space of containment: “the bench in the lecture hall, the lecture hall in the university, the university in the city, and so on until: the bench in ‘world space’” (p. 50). This pragmatic sense of space is not that of the onefold of time-space. The pragmatic standpoint overlooks the phenomenological sense of time-space as an opening or clearing of care as temporality. This is “the prespatial region which first gives any possible ‘where’” (Heidegger 1972/1962: 16).Thus “world is never an object that stands before us and can be looked at” (2002/1935–36: 23). “World never is but worlds” (1998/1929: 126) as the phenomenological movement of temporality, not as cause and effect. “World worlds, and is more fully in being than all those tangible and perceptible things in the midst of which we take ourselves to be at home” (2002/1935–36: 23). World as a wholeness “is” not a being, but that from out of which Dasein gives itself the signification of whatever beings it is able to comport itself toward in whatever way.That Dasein gives “itself” such signification from out of “its” world then means: In this coming toward itself from out of the world Dasein gives rise to itself as a self, i.e., as a being entrusted with having to be. (Heidegger 1998/1929: 121) Thus, phenomenologically, “world is not the totality of beings, is not the accessibility of beings as such, not the manifestness of beings as such that lies at

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 137 the basis of this accessibility” (Heidegger 1995/1929–30: 284). Instead, “world is … the manifestness of beings as such as a whole” (p. 284), where the whole is the open, the clearing, as being-here. This aesthetic manifestness is in concrete terms an existentiell individuality grounded in meaningfulness. “The basic structure of worldhood … lies in meaningfulness” (1985/1925: 203). Hence “the structure of the world, of that in which Dasein as such always already is,” is constituted by “significance” (2010/1927: 85). Meaningfulness is significance is care; it is phenomenologically analogous to self as who, as it is always of the whole, the open, the clearing, being-here (Figure 6.2). Thus Heidegger acknowledges that it is “the they itself, for the sake of which Dasein is every day,” which “articulates the referential context of significance” (p. 125). In this phenomenological sense of being-in-the-world, who is analogously world and world is analogously who; care is significance and significance is care. There is no separation in this unity of analogy – all are equiprimordial. The manifestness of world is of the onefold of time-space, being-in-the-world.Thus the phenomenological time-space of being-in-the-world as significance is one with the phenomenological time-space of being-in-the-world as care.

Figure 6.2 From the perspective of the question of the meaning of be-ing, being-inthe-world is analogously being-in-the-world as who, as care and being-inthe-world as world, as significance. Each of these phenomenological concepts (being-in-the-world, who, care, world, significance) are attempts to formally indicate the aesthetic whole that is being-here.These concepts are analogous and equiprimordial, as are all of Heidegger’s phenomenological concepts. Heidegger speaks of the analogous relation between these concepts as one of signifying; but this is not a pragmatic relation between different things

Understood via the question of the meaning of be-ing, this analogous relation is one of “signifying” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 85), since it is analogy based in meaning. Each phenomenological concept offers a way of expressing the meaningful whole, and thus each analogy signifies other meaningful analogies; each analogy is phenomenologically organized via this meaningful whole of which it is an analogy. Understanding and attunement are other analogous phenomenological concepts that signify and are signified in the same way. In his continuing analysis Heidegger recognizes that significance can also be said in other ways, and he attempts to convey this using a very basic example.

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For example, the thing at hand which we call a hammer has to do with hammering, the hammering has to do with fastening something, fastening something has to do with protection against bad weather. This protection “is” for the sake of providing shelter for Dasein, that is, for the sake of a possibility of its being. (Heidegger 2010/1927: 82) In a formal existential way, Heidegger expresses the signifying relations between these analogies thus: “the for-the-sake-of-which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance” (2010/1927: 85). However, as signifying, there is no direction to these relations, no process is involved, only analogy, as they are all analogous ways of saying being-in-theworld. In Heidegger’s example, significance is primarily captured in the forthe-sake-of-which, where the protection is for the sake of providing shelter for Dasein, that is, for the sake of a possibility of its be-ing. This is care. In the being of this being[-here] what is at issue for it is its potentiality for being. Dasein is in such a way that it exists for the sake of itself. If, however, it is a surpassing in the direction of world that first gives rise to selfhood, then world shows itself to be that for the sake of which Dasein exists. World has the fundamental character of the “for-the-sake-of …,” and indeed in the originary sense that it first provides the intrinsic possibility for every factically self-determining “for your sake,” “for his sake,” “for the sake of that,” etc. Yet that for the sake of which Dasein exists is itself. To selfhood there belongs world; world is essentially related to Dasein. (Heidegger 1998/1929: 121–122) At the heart of this essential signifying relation is the ‘for-the-sake-of …’; this in turn signifies other analogous phenomenological concepts. In Heidegger’s hammering example, significance signifies and is signified by relevance as inorder-to and what-for, where the what-for of the things he is using is to fasten something, and this fastening is in-order-to protect against bad weather. Also phenomenologically implicated in this hammering example, but not explicitly stated, is reference. Significance signifies relevance signifies reference; these are analogous phenomenological concepts. The what-in of reference is the “totality of useful things … a referential context” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 81) – not a context in a pragmatic sense (although Heidegger uses terms here that are commonly considered pragmatic) but a referential context as meaningful indivisible whole. Expanding on Heidegger’s example, we could imagine that he may be fastening some tiles on the roof of his mountain hut, such that this hut on this mountainside is the what-in, and all the things he is using (hammer, nails, tiles, ruler and so on) refer to each other as what-with. Significance, relevance and reference are analogous ways of saying the aesthetic whole in its meaningfulness, via the question of the meaning of being-here.

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 139 In addition to what-for, what-in and what-with, there may also (although Heidegger does not state this) be who-for (relevance), who-in and who-with (reference) as possible ways of considering “other Dasein” (2010/1927: 241) in the whole of the clearing.While he does not explicitly speak of who-for, whoin and who-with, Heidegger acknowledges that “together with the useful things found in work, others are ‘also encountered’ for whom the ‘work’ is to be done” (pp. 114–115). Hence “beings are a who … or else a what” (p. 44). Each other Dasein is a who, like Dasein, and Heidegger therefore speaks of “being-with” (p. 116) wherein other Dasein are “a matter of concern” (p. 118) – whereas familiar things are whats (not whos) and for “taking care of.” In this example the who-for and who-with could existentielly include the other family members who also dwell in the hut, while who-in is the family itself. These others “are encountered from out of the world in which Dasein, heedful and circumspect, essentially dwells” (p. 116). Heidegger employs another example of “a room with its furnishings” (1985/1925: 186) in his attempt to convey the meaningful phenomenological wholes of what-in and what-with. Here the room is what-in, and all the furnishings are what-with, but only when comprehended phenomenologically. He interprets his “encounter with the room” not in the reflective sense “such that I first take in one thing after another and put together a manifold of things in order then to see a room” (p. 187). It is not furniture first, then room, but the other way around. The referential relations of what-with (and who-with) are of the what-in (and who-in). “I primarily see a referential totality as closed, from which the individual piece of furniture and what is in the room stand out” (p. 187). The pieces of furniture stand out within the meaningful whole of the room as what-in, which is analogous to and signifies what-for, in-order-to and for-the-sake-of-which. Useful things always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things: writing materials, pen, ink, paper, desk blotter, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These “things” never show themselves initially by themselves, in order then to fill out a room as a sum of real things. What we encounter as closest to us, although we do not grasp it thematically, is the room, not as what is “between the four walls” in a geometrical, spatial sense, but rather as something useful for living. On the basis of this an “organization” shows itself, and in this organization any “individual” useful thing shows itself. A totality of useful things is always already discovered before the individual useful thing. (Heidegger 2010/1927: 68) Such a referential totality, considered phenomenologically, is not an objective multiplicity of relations between things, even though the words Heidegger uses here could very easily be understood pragmatically, without phenomenological destruction. Phenomenologically, however, this “referential context of significance” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 120) is a simple qualitative whole “anchored in the being of Dasein toward its ownmost being.” This

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being of Dasein towards its ownmost being is the for-the-sake-of-which. The signifying relations involving who-world, care-significance, time-space are “‘anchored’ in a for-the-sake-of-which” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 185). Thus, world as significance is also constituted by who as care, and also therefore by the temporal movement involving authentic self and they-self. So “if Dasein is familiar with itself as the they-self, this also means that the they prescribes the nearest interpretation of the world and of being-in-the-world” (p. 125).

The truth of be-ing: temporality as the movedness of truth The temporal movedness of logos: mortals and divinities42 Heidegger realizes that addressing the question of being requires a turning within his question of being from an emphasis on be-ing as being-here, the meaning of being-here, to an emphasis on be-ing as being-here, the truth of be-ing. Along his path of meditative thinking, Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 174) is turning between both of these questions, or “counter-turning,” as they are of the same, Ereignis. Importantly, the question of the meaning of be-ing, of which the who-question is a critical development, is not negated in this turning. Rather, “the whoquestion is an essential path for the enactment of the question concerning what is most question-worthy, i.e., that question that alone opens up the worthiness of the question-worthy: the question of the truth of being” (p. 36).The question of the meaning of be-ing lies along the same pathway as the question of the truth of be-ing: the pathway of the question of be-ing.Thus the counter-turning between questions means that the question of the truth of be-ing is influenced by the way Heidegger questions the meaning of being-here, and vice-versa. Heidegger recognizes that the who-question is not able to be adequately addressed if the question of the meaning of being-here is the only approach to the question of be-ing.The question of the truth of be-ing enables thinking further along this path to the unconcealment or disclosedness (phenomenological truth) of being-in-the-world, thus further illuminating phenomenological concepts – such as selfhood in its temporal stretching movement between authentic self and they-self. For “it is the question of the truth of being that prepares the domain of selfhood” (1999/1936–38: 47). Without addressing the question of the truth of be-ing, any hermeneutic phenomenological thinking of the who-question is incomplete and left open to pragmatic misinterpretation in the direction of the human sciences as either a subjective psychology, an anthropology, or sociological in relation to the they. Just as he denies subjective psychological interpretations of mineness, Heidegger is adamant that the they is not a sociological concept. The “they” in no way means to furnish an incidental contribution to sociology. Just as little does the “they” mean merely the opposite, understood in an ethical-existentiell way, of the selfhood of persons. Rather, what is said there contains reference, thought in terms of the question of the truth of being, to the primordial belonging of the word to being. (Heidegger 1998/1946: 242–243)

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 141 The they, as who, is of language, understood phenomenologically as showing. “Saying is showing,” Heidegger (1971/1959: 126) asserts, and further, “who is sustained by the word” (2004/1939: 77). Therefore, “to discuss language, to place it, means to bring to its place of being not so much language as ourselves: our own gathering into the appropriation” (1971/1950b: 190). The who-question is a phenomenological and ontological question of language. “The One [the they] maintains itself, has its genuine dominion, in language” (2009/1924: 45). “The genuine bearer of this One [this they] is language” (p. 45). Heidegger finds this connection between who and language in the Greek expression of human being. “Dasein, that is, the being of the human being, is delineated as ζῶον λόγον ἔχον [zoon logon echon], that creature whose being is essentially determined by its ability to speak” (2010/1927: 24). However, Heidegger’s interpretation of this Greek notion of human being as speaking or discoursing is not aligned with the pragmatic sense of language as “the tool of tools” (Dewey 1929a: 154) employed in both thought and communication by man as the “‘rational living being’” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 159). This ability to speak does “not mean that the possibility of vocal utterance belongs to him” (p. 155). When the Greeks say that the human being is a living thing that speaks, they do not mean, in a physiological sense, that he utters definite sounds. Rather, the human being is a living thing that has its genuine being-there in conversation and in discourse. (Heidegger 2009/1924: 74) Here discourse has a phenomenological sense tied to temporality. “Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility” and “intelligibility is … always already articulated” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 155). Such articulation of intelligibility is not achieved by particular words spoken or thought. For Heidegger this articulation is the phenomenological sense of language as showing, not an amalgam of word parts. “The words that language uses are only fragments that have precipitated out of the word” (1998/1939: 213). Intelligibility is always already articulated by language considered phenomenologically as the word and governed by the they. The they has always already articulated intelligibility, prescribing significance in terms of understanding and attunement. In this sense of the they, “we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter” (1985/1925: 56). The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Dasein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one “sees.” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 164) A phenomenological understanding of language as showing cannot be separated from being-in-the-world as care, as temporal movement, “a movement which

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constitutes a genuine movedness of life, in which and through which life exists” (Heidegger 2001/1921–22: 87). Here it is noticeable that Heidegger shifts in his word use from movement to the more formal phenomenological movedness. Temporality as care is “motion as movedness” within life itself, “the ontological meaning of motion” (2008/1926: 151) in the sense of temporally “havingitself-within-its-end” (1998/1939: 218); that phenomenological circularity of the opening which is “the essence of movedness.” A phenomenological understanding of language as showing and as connected with the they reveals a turning between the two grounding questions of being. In his turning towards the question of the truth of be-ing, Heidegger strives to meditatively think the unconcealment of being-here influenced by his analysis of the meaning of being-here. One aspect of this thinking focuses on the temporal movedness of language as showing, a movedness Heidegger perceives in Greek philosophy as the belonging of mortals and gods. Expressed in the counter-turning between the question of the meaning of being-here and the question of the truth of be-ing, mortals are analogous to authentic self and gods to they-self. In this reference to gods Heidegger is not addressing a strictly religious notion, but rather the temporal movedness of language. Thus gods are “not from within ‘religion’; not as something extant, nor as an expedient of man; rather [they come] from out of be-ing, as its decision, [they are] futural” (1999/1936–38: 357). Additionally, Heidegger refers to gods plural rather than singular, not so as to specify the plurality of gods, but in order to leave this question open. “The talk of ‘gods’ here does not indicate the decided assertion on the extantness of a plurality over against a singular but is rather meant as the allusion to the undecidability of the being of gods, whether of one god or of many gods” (1999/1936–38: 308). This interpretation is very different to an understanding of god or gods arrived at via the guiding question of traditional metaphysics, the beingness of beings. Considered according to metaphysics, god must be represented as the mostbeing, as the first ground and cause of being, as the un-conditioned, in-finite, absolute. None of these determinations arises from the divine-character of god but rather from what is ownmost to a being as such, insofar as this is thought as what is constantly present, as what is objective and simply in itself and is thus, in re-presenting explaining, attributed as what is most clear to god as ob-ject. (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 308) Gods are not a being or beings but word, divine word, word that has already articulated intelligibility in the sense of an underpinning narrative, which the Greeks call myth or legend. “Μῦθοσ [Mythos] is legend, this word literally taken in the sense of essential primordial speech” (Heidegger 1992/1942–43: 61). “Μῦθοσ is the Greek for the word that expresses what is to be said before all else” (p. 60). “It is μῦθοσ [mythos] that reveals, discloses, and lets be seen;

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 143 specifically, it lets be seen what shows itself in advance and in everything as that which presences in all ‘presence’” (p. 60). Hence “the divine … is that which is to be said, and is what is said in legend” (p. 112). Heidegger’s reference to gods is a formal indication hinting at the divine sense of language as word, mythos. Here “it is language that speaks” (1971/1951a: 216). So “we do not merely speak the language – we speak by way of it. We can do so because we have always already listened to the language. What do we hear there? We hear language speaking” (1971/1958: 124). Thus “language speaks by saying, this is, by showing” (p. 124). “Our speaking merely follows language constantly” (1971/1957–58: 75). However, mythos is only one of the ways in which the Greeks said word. Heidegger points out that along with mythos, the Greeks said word as epos and logos. “A Greek word for the word is μῦθοσ [mythos]. Another word for ‘word’ is ἔποσ [epos]. It is not accidental that the primordial poetizing word of the Greeks, the word of Homer, is an ‘epic.’ Again, another word for ‘word’ is λόγοσ [logos]” (Heidegger 1992/1942–43: 69). “Μῦθοσ, ἔποσ, and λόγοσ belong together essentially” (p. 71). However, “the oldest word … for Saying, is λόγοσ” (1971/1958: 155). While mythos and epos convey the divine or epic character of the word, Heidegger interprets logos as more original; not divine word only, but the movedness of temporality between mortals and gods, authentic self and they-self. “Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal” (p. 216). In this sense, “language beckons us” (p. 216), a beckoning of mortals by way of divine word. “The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead” (1971/1951b: 150), where the godhead, in the counter turning of Heidegger’s grounding questions, is the they. Mortals listen to the appeal of the word of gods, just as authentic self listens to they-self in the movement of care. This appeal is temporal and thus it is of possibility, potentiality-for-being, can-be. However, the appeal of possibility offered by gods is an inauthentic evading of the possibility always closest to beinghere, the possibility that defines mortals: “Dasein’s ownmost possibility,” that of “death, as the end of Dasein” (Heidegger 1962/1927: 303). Mortals confront death, whereas, like gods, “the they never dies because it is unable to die” (2010/1927: 403-404). “The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death” (1971/1951b: 150). Here, however, death is not a “perishing” of “what is only alive” (2010/1927: 232) in a biological sense. Instead, death is an aesthetic rounding out of a unique and simple qualitative whole, similar to the way in which Dewey describes “an experience” aesthetically in the way of a “consummation not a cessation” (1934b: 35). This consummation of one’s existence is therefore not death as an event of cessation, as a particular point in time when one dies. Rather, “with [awareness of one’s own inevitable] death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-being. In this possibility, Dasein is concerned about its being-in-the-world absolutely” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 241). Thus beingtoward-death as potentiality-for-being offers “the possibility of authentic existence” (p. 252), where being-here is “torn away from the they” (p. 252). Death, confronted

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in this way as possibility rather than as one’s demise, reveals the authentic self. Death is the “insuperable possibility of Dasein” (p. 248), the possibility of authentic being-here, enabling awareness of the distinction between authentic self and they-self. As such, “being-toward-death” is never a separation from care; instead it is “grounded in care” (p. 248). Care is disclosed in the temporal movedness of mortals and gods. Thus “Da-sein is the between between man … and gods” (Heidegger 1999/1936– 38: 219). “Dasein is … the self-opening midpoint of the mirroring of call [of gods] and belongingness [of man]” (p. 219). Heidegger describes the temporal movedness which opens this between as “countering: godship – humankind in one” (2006/1938–39: 3). Gods call or beckon, and mortals listen to this call in a “counter resonance between man and gods” (1999/1936–38: 185). It is important to recall here that this movedness is phenomenological, not pragmatic as a process. In this way “countering is rending open the ‘between’” (p. 320). The question of the truth of be-ing reveals whoness, selfhood, as the open between within the temporal movedness of logos, the countering of mortals and divinities. The temporal movedness of physis: earth and heaven43 The movedness of logos is the opening of who, but this is not the only factor constituting the truth of be-ing. The movedness of logos belongs (as one and the same, Ereignis) to another movedness, that of physis. “To φύσις [physis], to the prevailing of beings as a whole, there belongs this λόγοσ [logos]” (Heidegger 1995/1929–30: 26). Physis and logos co-constitute Ereignis. Heidegger describes “the essence of being as λόγοσ and φύσις” (1991/1955–56: 109). “Though it had other names in early Western thinking, ‘being’ means λόγοσ” (p. 109), and “Heraclitus, who is the same thinker who spoke this word [λόγοσ], also called being φύσις” (p. 109). Heidegger is further supported in recognizing this “bond between λόγοσ and φύσις, their unity … with the help of Parmenides” (1959/1935: 136). In speaking of being, the unity must be understood as Parmenides understood the word en [ἐν]. We know that this unity is never empty indifference; it is not sameness in the sense of mere equivalence. Unity is the belongingtogether of antagonisms. This is original oneness. (Heidegger 1959/1935: 138) This unity, the belonging together of physis and logos as one and the same, can be seen in their Greek meanings.“Φύσις [Physis]” is how “the Greeks” referred to “the coming forth and rising up in itself and in all things” (Heidegger 2002/1935– 36: 21), while “the Greek noun λόγοσ [logos] belongs to the verb λέγειν [legein]. It means ‘to gather, to lay one beside the other’” (1991/1955–56: 107).The unity of physis and logos is in logos gathering physis, logos revealing or unconcealing physis, in the way of the truth of be-ing. Heidegger (1995/1929–30: 27) perceives

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 145 “the connection between φύσις and λόγοσ as revealing,” a revealing that is the open between of Ereignis. “Man as such, insofar as he exists, in the λόγοσ tears φύσις … from concealment and thus brings beings to their truth” (p. 29). This truth is disclosedness or unconcealment as Ereignis, the unity of the movedness of logos and physis. As with logos, physis is ontologically (in Heidegger’s sense of this term) constituted by temporality. While countering is the temporal movedness of logos between mortals and gods, strife is the temporal movedness of physis. Both “strife and countering” (1999/1936–38: 22) are of the open between. Strife is the resonance in physis between what Heidegger, again alluding to the Greeks, refers to variously as “earth and world” (1999/1936–38: 22), “earth and sky” (2002/1946b: 202) and “earth and heaven” (2000/1959: 175). “Φύσις [Physis] means sky and earth, plants and animals, and in a certain sense, human beings as well” (2002/1946a : 244). Human beings are of physis. In the temporal movedness of physis, “the ringing out of the earth is the echo of heaven. In resounding, the earth by its own movement replies to heaven” (p. 191). Here, then, strife, like countering, is not a cleavage. “Strife is not rift, in the sense of a tearing open of a mere cleft; rather it is the intimacy of the mutual dependence of the contestants” (p. 38).Thus “earth rises up through world” (2002/1935–36: 26) in reaching for sky. Heidegger expresses this temporal movedness of physis through the example of a tree. The tree roots soundly in the earth. Thus it is sound and flourishes into a blooming that opens itself to heaven’s blessing. The tree’s towering has been called. It spans both the ecstasy of flowering and the soberness of the nourishing sap. The earth’s abated growth and the sky’s open bounty belong together. (Heidegger 1971/1950b: 201) Heidegger (1971/1951b: 149) refers to “earth” as “the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up in plant and animal.” This blossoming and rising is toward the call of sky or heaven, “what genuinely-is-always” (2009/1924: 78). Here “sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night” (1971/1951b: 149). Hence “man dwells by spanning the ‘on the earth’ and the ‘beneath the sky.’ This ‘on’ and ‘beneath’ belong together” (1971/1951a: 223). Being-here is of physis. In this understanding of temporal movedness, earth can never be conceived simply as matter with sky its concomitant form. “What this word [earth] means … is far removed from the idea of a mass of matter and from the merely astronomical idea of a planet” (Heidegger 2002/1935–36: 21). “Matter and form and the difference between them have a deeper origin” (p. 15).This deeper origin is physis when understood ontologically as the resonating temporal movedness of earth and heaven.

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In temporal movedness, physis is unconcealed (and concealed) via logos. Logos and physis are thus “the same in the sense of belonging-together” (1959/1935: 138). As such, logos-physis reveals the onefold, time-space, beingin-the-world, a onefold that is unconcealed via the fourfold of gods and mortals, sky and earth (Figure 6.3).

Fourfold as onefold The fourfold is Heidegger’s (1977/1949: 7) phenomenological destruction of Aristotle’s “doctrine of the four causes.” As such, Heidegger does not interpret the fourfold as causal, but rather as phenomenologically “responsible” (p. 7), in the way of gifting rather than action, for the unconcealment of the open between, for the truth of be-ing, for letting something “come forth into presencing” (p. 9). “The four causes are the ways, all belonging to each other, of being responsible for something else” (p. 7). Belonging together, the four are fourfold, and “out of the fourfold, the simple onefold of the four is ventured. This appropriating mirror-play of the simple onefold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals, we call the world” (1971/1950a: 179). Here world, previously understood by way of significance in the question of the meaning of be-ing, is now place of be-ing gifted by truth of be-ing (in the counter-turning between the questions of be-ing).Thus Heidegger (2003/1969: 47) acknowledges a third “formulation” of the question of be-ing: from meaning of being-here, to truth of be-ing, to place of be-ing. “Three terms which succeed one another and at the same time indicate three steps along the way of thinking: MEANING –

Figure 6.3 Temporal movedness as fourfold unconcealment of onefold (the truth of being). This is an adaptation of a diagram which Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 218) drew to convey the unconcealment of the open between of Ereignis. Mortals and gods are logos; earth and heaven are physis

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 147 TRUTH – PLACE (τόποσ) [topos]” (p. 47). Place of being is world as fourfold gifting onefold, a place that is the gifting of logos in its unconcealment of physis. Logos and physis co-constitute the place of being as logos-physis, the open between of the temporal mirror-play of earth and heaven, mortals and gods. Earth and sky, divinities and mortals – being at one with one another of their own accord – belong together by way of the simpleness of the united fourfold. Each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others. Each therewith reflects itself in its own way into its own, within the simpleness of the four. This mirroring does not portray a likeness. The mirroring, lightening each of the four, appropriates their own presencing into simple belonging to one another. Mirroring in this appropriatinglightening way, each of the four plays to each of the others. (Heidegger 1971/1950a: 179) This mirroring of the fourfold is the temporal movedness of logos-physis. The place of be-ing is fourfold gifting onefold, and as such is never one or other of earth, heaven, mortals, gods. “The center, so called because it centers, that is, mediates, is neither earth nor heaven, God nor man” (Heidegger 2000/1959: 188). The fourfold is not a pragmatic combination of parts. “‘Four’ does not name any calculated sum” (p. 195). Rather, “by a primal oneness the four – earth and sky, divinities and mortals – belong together in one” (1971/1951b: 149). Thus “‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky.’ Both of these also mean ‘remaining before the divinities’ and include a ‘belonging to men’s being with one another’” (p. 149). This is the “simple singlefoldedness of the four” (1971/1950a: 173), where “none of the four insists on its own separate particularity” (p. 179). This unity of the fourfold is “the fouring” (p. 180). “The fouring, the unity of the four, presences as the appropriating mirror-play of the betrothed, each to the other in simple oneness” (p. 180). The four are involved in “the round dance of appropriating” (p. 180), a dance of Ereignis. “The round dance is the ring that joins while it plays as mirroring. Appropriating, it lightens the four into the radiance of their simple oneness” (p. 180). For Heidegger, “language” is phenomenologically “Saying of the world’s fourfold” (1971/1957–58: 107). Highlighting the belonging together of logosphysis in the fouring, he describes “language” as “the flower of the mouth” (p. 99). Hence, “in language the earth blossoms toward the bloom of the sky” (p. 99). Logos is of physis and logos gathers physis. Thus “no thing is where the word [logos] is lacking” (p. 62). A thing is not merely physis, it is logos-physis. “The word [logos] alone gives being to the thing” (p. 62). This belongingtogether of word and thing is the “be-thinging of the thing in the word” (1971/1958: 151). Further, the thinging of the thing is logos-physis; it is “the gathering of the fourfold” (1971/1951b: 153), for “out of the ringing mirrorplay [of the fourfold] the thinging of the thing takes place” (1971/1950a: 180). In this ringing gathering of the fourfold,“the being of anything that is resides in

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the word. Therefore this statement holds true: Language is the house of Being” (1971/1957–58: 63). Logos gathers physis in the thinging of the thing; this is the house of be-ing. It is here in this house of be-ing, as place of be-ing, that being-in-the-world, care, is gifted as dwelling, understood phenomenologically and temporally. “Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth” (Heidegger 1971/1951b: 148), and “dwelling is the essence of ‘being-in-the-world’” (1998/1946: 272). Dwelling is caring, the meaning of be-ing, being-in-the-world, unconcealed in the temporal movedness of the fourfold. “Dwelling occurs as the fourfold preservation of the fourfold” (1971/1951b: 151), where “to spare and preserve means: to take under our care, to look after the fourfold in its presencing” (p. 151). So this presencing as dwelling is not logos alone. “Φύσις [Physis] lights up that on which man bases his dwelling. We call this the earth” (2002/1935–36: 21). “On and in the earth, historical man founds his dwelling in the world” (p. 24).Thus “dwelling preserves the fourfold by bringing the presencing of the fourfold into things” (1971/1951b: 151). Such a presencing as a thinging of things is a “gathering or assembly” (p. 153), “the gathering of the fourfold,” as logos-physis. “But through what do we attain to a dwelling place? Through building,” Heidegger asserts (1971/1951a: 215). “To build is in itself already to dwell” (1971/1951b: 146). The temporal movedness of dwelling is building, which Heidegger (2001/1921–22: 95) also refers to in a temporal way as “maturation.” This dwelling as maturing is different, but related to (across the ontological difference), the pragmatic sense of building as constructing beings; it is a building or maturing of be-ing. “Building in the sense of preserving and nurturing is not making anything” (1971/1951b: 147), where making is understood in the pragmatic sense of an art or craft which the Greeks referred to as “techne [τέχνη]” (1977/1949: 13). However, Heidegger points out that making has a phenomenological sense, “poiesis [ποίησίσ]” (p. 13). “Making is, in Greek, poiesis” (1971/1951a: 214). This is a phenomenological sense of making as poetic creation. “Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building” (p. 215). “Poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling [the place of be-ing], is the primal form of building. Poetry first of all admits man’s dwelling into its very nature, its presencing being. Poetry is the original admission of dwelling” (p. 227). Thus “poetry and dwelling belong together” (p. 227). This poetic creating of dwelling as maturing, building be-ing, is the fouring of the fourfold as onefold, of the belonging of logos-physis. However, it is also connected via inquiry, across the ontological difference, to a pragmatic sense of building as technical construction in reflective thinking.

Ontological difference as passageway Poetic building and pragmatic building The connection between poiesis and techne is evident in the various phenomenological analogies Heidegger uses to describe being-in-the-world when juxtaposed alongside their pragmatic interpretations. Taken over to the

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 149 pragmatic side in reflective thinking, Heidegger’s analogous phenomenological concepts appear as pragmatic concepts objectified and related by cause and effect in the guise of a philosophical anthropology. Heidegger shows this using as an example the concept of world. When “world is used as an ontic concept” it “signifies the totality of beings which can be objectively present within the world”; world can also be used in this pragmatic way to “name the region which embraces a multiplicity of beings” (2010/1927: 64). Similarly, the analogous phenomenological substructures of world (significance, relevance, reference) can be understood pragmatically. Phenomenological for-the-sake-of-which, inorder-to, what-for, what-in, and what-with become pragmatic identity, purpose, use, location, and the connections between other things or people, respectively; all of these pragmatic concepts, as beings, are related via cause and effect (Figure 6.4). Likewise, phenomenological attunement and understanding are, in pragmatic terms, objectified feelings and specific knowledge. The analogous and compound equiprimordial unity of who-world becomes the cause and effect relation of subject-object, or organism-environment. Pragmatically, who is the self as individual I or organism, and world is a collection of things as environment. On the pragmatic side of the ontological difference these concepts are able to be technically built and rebuilt via reflective experience; on the phenomenological side there is a poetic building, a maturation. In Dewey’s

Figure 6.4 Crossing the ontological difference involves a shift from the analogical relation between various ways of understanding the simple as aesthetic whole, to the cause and effect relation between things in a totality, and viceversa. In this crossing, phenomenological for-the-sake-of-which (as a way of meditatively thinking the whole) becomes destructed to pragmatic identity (a part of a totality thought reflectively). Likewise, in-order-to becomes purpose, what-for becomes use, what-in becomes spatial location, and whatwith becomes spatial positioning

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pragmatic terms this building as being-here is the difference between prereflective and post-reflective experience – but this maturation is a qualitative movement, an ontological movement, it is not simply one of knowing and logic. Both ways, phenomenological as poiesis and pragmatic as techne, are of existence as twofold across the ontological difference. They are never separate; they are of “the Universal Phenomenon” (Peirce 1934/1903: 77) that encompasses both phenomenological and pragmatic standpoints. Thus Heidegger states that “building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings” (1971/1951b: 148). This unfolding is from building being to building beings, a move from phenomenological to pragmatic emphasis across the passageway of the ontological difference. This move across the passageway of the ontological difference is central to inquiry, which Dewey (1938b: 104–105) defines as “the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.” An indeterminate situation is aesthetically experienced as problematic; in other words, the original aesthetic situation has changed. Inquiry is necessary in order to resolve this problematic aesthetic by rebuilding the relations between beings and thus their meaning (these beings could be knowledge concepts or even particular feelings), thereby poetically building or maturing the original aesthetic experience. Thus the original qualitative situation is not only the beginning and end of inquiry, it is the movedness of the inquiry itself; and it is poetic dwelling. Unfolding to building beings is always premised on building be-ing. Seen in this way, inquiry serves poetic building, it is within poetic building. “Building as cultivating …, and building as raising up of edifices … are comprised within genuine building” (Heidegger 1971/1951b: 147). Thus inquiry can never be considered apart from poetic building, as it belongs to poetic building. “Techne belongs … to poiesis” (1977/1949: 13). Technical building of beings, as cultivating growing things and erecting buildings as well as building knowledge, is always founded in poetic building, as dwelling. Heidegger (1971/1951b: 161) perceives this twofold of building be-ing and building beings as “the real dwelling plight”: “that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.” Fourfold and four causes This understanding of building as both phenomenological (of the onefold place of be-ing) and pragmatic (of habits and laws) furnishes a coherent theory of experience. This coherence across the ontological difference between poiesis and techne can also be seen when the question of the truth of being, the fourfold, is considered. Heidegger’s phenomenological destruction of Aristotle’s four causes shows how the four causes are pragmatic versions of the phenomenological fourfold. Heidegger is aware of the pragmatic cause and

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 151 effect relation amongst Aristotle’s four causes, and he conveys this by way of the example of a silver chalice. For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and matter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith. (Heidegger 1977/1949: 6) Dewey (1911g: 553) lists these “four ‘causes’” as “material, formal, efficient, and final” and notes that they are derived from “Aristotle’s analysis of every subjectmatter into four primary aspects or ‘principles’ which exhaust all points of view from which the subject can be intelligently discussed.” However, Heidegger (1977/1949: 7) is most concerned with the coherence among these four from a phenomenological standpoint where the four causes, embraced along the pathway of meditative thinking, are “responsible for,” in the sense of giving or gifting, disclosedness of the onefold place of be-ing. The coherence of this responsibility as gifting is in temporality. Here the four causes are not simply pragmatic causes of effects but the phenomenological fourfold. Yet this does not negate the connection between the fourfold and the four causes across the ontological difference (Figure 6.5). Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to the question of be-ing, first via the question of the meaning of be-ing, and then the related question of the truth of be-ing, reveals a rich hermeneutic that is not disconnected from a pragmatic interpretation. The ontological difference is not a division. Hence the two sides, considered as distinct but also in their relation, herald a more fully fleshed out and coherent theory of experience. This phenomenological and pragmatic coherence across the ontological difference—proffered as a more coherent theory of experience—provides a new way in which to approach the problem of educational confusion,and it is expressive of the “intimate connection between philosophy and education” (Dewey 1916b: 383). The educational confusion between the four goal areas (Goodlad 1984) as four ideological interest groups (Kliebard 1986, 1995, 2004) and as four curriculum ideologies (Schiro 1992, 2008) is premised, as Dewey recognized, on the lack of a coherent theory of experience. However, Dewey’s struggle to articulate such coherence in experience can be traced back to the difficulty he had in perceiving the ontological difference and what this means for understanding time and method. When the ontological difference is acknowledged then the connection across this difference between Heidegger’s phenomenological fourfold and Aristotle’s four causes (understood pragmatically) illuminates a way of understanding the confusion that reigns between the four goal areas as four ideological interest groups. Pragmatically, these four interest groups can be

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Figure 6.5 The fourfold and the four causes in communion across the ontological difference. On the phenomenological (left) side the arrows show the movedness responsible for opening the onefold of Ereignis as place of being, as Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 218) depicts them in a similar diagram. On the pragmatic (right) side, on the other side of the ontological difference, the arrows point in the opposite directions to portray the four causes having certain effects. Here the onefold is not seen; instead these causes have effects in a totality of things in relation

mapped onto Aristotle’s four causes, thus highlighting their conflict. This then enables a phenomenological destruction of the four educational goal areas or interest groups (as Heidegger achieved with Aristotle’s four causes) that reveals a onefold place of be-ing gifted by fourfold. Most important to recognize here is the ontological difference between educational confusion on the pragmatic side (created by conflict between four differing views on education, each founded in differing emphases on the four causes) and the simple unity on the phenomenological side (onefold place of be-ing gifted by fourfold).This simple unity is a phenomenological destruction of Dewey’s occupation, enabling a more complete comprehension of his “education through occupations” (1916b: 361) which spans both aesthetic and reflective experience and thus offers the coherent theory of education to be detailed in Part Three.

Summary In this chapter we have followed Heidegger in his questioning of be-ing so as to introduce the analogous phenomenological concepts he constructs. These phenomenological concepts are Heidegger’s descriptions of being as beinghere, Ereignis, and as such they contribute significantly to a coherent theory of experience. Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing has two connected phases, often spoken of as ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ Heidegger. These phases coincide with two ways in which Heidegger approaches the question of be-ing. The earlier way is via the question of the meaning of be-ing (which emphasizes be-ing as being-here); the later way is via the question of the truth of be-ing (focusing on be-ing as being-

Heidegger’s questioning of be-ing 153 here). Both approaches remain within his broader questioning of be-ing; both approaches are premised on a phenomenological understanding of time. The question of the meaning of be-ing yields a range of analogous phenomenological descriptions of existence (as individual qualitative whole: being-here), perhaps most clearly expressed via the phrase being-in-the-world. The temporality of being-in-the-world reveals Heidegger’s phenomenological sense of care: being-here’s concern for being-here (this is not selfishness or solipsism, as it would be if interpreted pragmatically). Analogously, Heidegger identifies a phenomenological sense of significance that characterizes beinghere as meaningful encounter with things and others. Care and significance are at the heart of Heidegger’s response to the question of the meaning of being; they can also be expressed analogously as who and world. However, this is not the pragmatic cause and effect relation (reflectively considered) between subject and object or organism and environment. Heidegger recognizes that the question of the meaning of be-ing can only take him so far in his questioning of be-ing. The question of the meaning of be-ing investigates be-ing as being-here, with an emphasis on concrete beinghere. However, this question does not deal with how being-here is disclosed or opened, Heidegger’s sense of phenomenological truth as disclosedness. Hence he engages with the associated question of the truth of be-ing, with a greater emphasis on be-ing as being-here. The question of the truth of be-ing continues to work with many of the phenomenological concepts Heidegger identified in his questioning of the meaning of be-ing. However, he addresses them in different ways, turning to the philosophies of the ancient Greeks for guidance. Employing a phenomenological destruction of Aristotle’s four causes, Heidegger argues for a phenomenological fourfold that is responsible (not as cause and effect, but as gifting) for the open of being-here. Being-here is the between as the opening at the center of the four. Two of these four (sitting in temporal tension opposite each other) are concerned with who, with care, but Heidegger now articulates more clearly that they are of language, when language is understood phenomenologically as logos. The other two (also sitting opposite each other in temporal tension) are of world as nature, when nature is understood phenomenologically as physis – logos and physis, word (who) and nature (world), belonging together temporally as one and the same, opening being-here. Thus fourfold reveals onefold place of be-ing. Both pragmatic and phenomenological understandings of experience, emerging from the twofold of existence across the ontological difference, contribute to a coherent theory of experience. Such a coherent theory of experience, developed with the help of Dewey, Peirce and Heidegger, illuminates the problem of educational confusion in a new way. Here Heidegger’s destruction of Aristotle’s four causes can be developed in a play across the ontological difference between phenomenological and pragmatic. On the pragmatic side Aristotle’s four causes align with the four goals (interest groups, ideologies) of education, showing how these four aspects of educational

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confusion cannot offer any possible way out. On the phenomenological side Heidegger’s fourfold reveals onefold, and this onefold can be understood as an aesthetic understanding of Dewey’s sense of occupation. When occupation is understood as aesthetic experience, then Dewey’s education through occupations offers a way out of educational confusion, supported by a coherent theory of experience which embraces both the phenomenological and pragmatic sides of existence, experience and education.

Part III

A coherent theory of education

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7

Four causes of educational confusion

Overview The aim of this chapter is to introduce a new way of looking at the problem of educational confusion. This new way draws a connection between Aristotle’s four causes and the four goal areas (Goodlad), the four ideological interest groups (Kliebard) and the four curriculum ideologies (Schiro) of education. Alignment between these various forms of four on the pragmatic side connects across the passageway of the ontological difference to the phenomenological fourfold, which gives the onefold place of be-ing. This phenomenological onefold offers an aesthetic understanding (a phenomenological destruction) of Dewey’s particular sense of occupation, which has been mired in educational confusion since its inception in the early twentieth century. Such confusion occurs because occupation is aligned pragmatically with certain educational goals/ideological interests/curriculum ideologies – meaning that it exists in conflict with others. Comprehended phenomenologically, however, occupation is the place of be-ing.

Child and curriculum, individual and social: four causes Dewey’s understanding of Aristotle’s four causes In Chapter One the conflict between traditionalist and modernist forms of education was explored, highlighting how the conflict contributed to Dewey’s conception of educational confusion. Cuban’s investigation identified a two-way hybridization of these forms of education; teacher-centered and student-centered pedagogies both realize a teacher-centered progressivism. Other analyses, such as those performed by Kliebard and Schiro, support this sense of hybridization but expand the complexity of the conflict to include four curriculum ideologies (scholar academic, social efficiency, social reconstructionist and learner centered) in order to better come to grips with a “positively perplexing” (Kliebard 2004: 190) educational situation. Kliebard (p. 23) considers the four interest groups to be the “four major forces” struggling for control of the curriculum. This position is founded on his belief that the “use of interest groups as a framework” enables him “not only to identify the key ideological refrains in the period but to emphasize, rather than merely

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acknowledge, the contrasting agendas for reform that the various interest groups advanced” (p. 287). Developing the notion of interest groups further, Schiro interprets the research conducted by both Goodlad and Kliebard, as pointing to the four interest groups and four educational goals being four curriculum ideologies, not merely historical phenomena. The curriculum ideologies are major conceptual systems that have competed for educators’ allegiance and control over their endeavors for most of this [the twentieth] century. These ideologies go beyond the philosophical realm of beliefs about “what should be,” for they are the conceptual systems that dictate “how one should behave” when confronted with curriculum and instructional tasks. Each ideology is more akin to a pedagogical substructure than to a goal; for each has its own set of beliefs about the nature of knowledge, learning, teaching, children, and evaluation, as well as its own set of goals, slogans, heroes, values, and myths. (Schiro 1992: 252) However, these four curriculum ideologies emerge from a more basic structure that is evident in Dewey’s descriptions of the conflict between traditional and progressive education, as well as his understanding of Aristotle’s four causes. When applied to education, Aristotle’s four pragmatic causes align with Dewey’s remarks on the conflicts marking educational confusion, where Dewey identifies four interconnected factors: “the child vs. the curriculum” and “the individual nature vs. social culture” (1902a: 5). While Dewey’s expression of these four factors does signal the similarity inherent to the two conflicts, such that child as individual is in conflict with curriculum as social culture. However, these four factors – child, individual, curriculum, social culture – are also distinct, highlighting four “vital tendencies” (1902b: 19) at work in the struggle for education, each of which stands “for a phase of reality.” So while distinct, the four factors are related in conflict as Dewey presents them (child vs. curriculum, individual nature vs. social culture), revealing alignment with the ways in which Aristotle’s four causes cohere “logically and practically” for Dewey (1920: 60). In other words, Dewey recognizes how curriculum and child, social and individual, are the logically and practically coherent relations between the causes or underpinning factors constituting education as well as educational confusion. In Aristotle’s terms, curriculum and child are formal and material causes, while social and individual are final and efficient causes (Figure 7.1). Formal and material causes: curriculum versus child Formal and material describe a particular line of difference within the four causes. Dewey (1929a: 50) refers to this as the “Aristotelian division into form which is actuality and matter which is potential.” For Aristotle,“the formal cause was the nature or essence, the universal character, which constituted anything what it is” (Dewey 1911g: 553). The formal cause is thus “the inherent nature or character which ‘makes’ something what it is so far as it does not change”

Four causes of educational confusion 159

Figure 7.1 Four factors of educational conflict as four causes

(1920: 60). It is the unchanging or permanent essence of the subject, whereas the material cause refers to the subject’s potentiality, its changing material.With education as the subject here, the formal cause can be aligned with the actuality of the curriculum, while the material cause is the potentiality of the child. This line of difference is “the child vs. the curriculum” (1902a: 5). Dewey (1938b: 385) regards this difference pragmatically as a functional connection where matter is undergoing change in the direction of this form; it is “formed-matter.” And the forms are also subject to change, being “forms-ofmatter” (p. 385). However, when these two causes are seen in their separation, rather than as being functionally related, a different view of education is gained. Here the curriculum is the permanent form of education in the way of abstract knowledge, and the child is simply educational material with potentiality for change achieved by making and doing. Dewey (1902a: 30) recognizes the problems with such a dualistic conception of education, where knowledge is “still just so much geography and arithmetic and grammar study” seen in isolation of the “potentiality of child-experience with regard to language, earth, and numbered and measured reality.” When the relation between formal and material causes is not perceived, this division is construed as a “primary metaphysical dualism” involving “division into some things which are inherently defective, changing, relational, and other things which are inherently perfect, permanent, self-possessed” (Dewey 1929a: 104). Dewey (1929c: 22) connects such a position to an underlying “quest for certitude which has determined our basic metaphysics.” This quest places certainty above change in a dualistic and hierarchical opposition. It is a dualism central to traditional conceptions of education.

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Perfect certainty is what man wants. It cannot be found by practical doing or making; these take effect in an uncertain future, and involve peril, the risk of misadventure, frustration and failure. Knowledge, on the other hand, is thought to be fixed in itself. Being eternal and unalterable, human knowing is not to make any difference in it. It can be approached through the medium of the apprehensions and demonstrations of thought, or by some other organ of mind, which does nothing to the real, except just to know it. (Dewey 1929c: 21) Such a pervasive quest for certainty, as knowledge, conceals any functional relation between permanence and change, between curriculum and child. Dewey argues that this is then a “quest for complete certainty” (1929c: 8), which can “only be fulfilled in pure knowing alone.” The extreme nature of this quest places a fundamental separation at the heart of philosophical understanding, especially in the Western world. So while “this Greek formulation was made long ago,” Dewey recognizes that “the main tradition of western culture has retained intact this framework of ideas” (p. 21). “We are so accustomed to the separation of knowledge from doing and making that we fail to recognize how it controls our conceptions of mind, of consciousness, of reflective inquiry” (p. 22). In the conflict of educational confusion this separation underpins more extreme interpretations of both traditional and progressive education, where the conflict is perceived hierarchically. Single-minded advocates of progressive education pursue a reversal of the traditional hierarchy, placing child (material cause) above curriculum (formal cause). However, “the problems are not even recognized, to say nothing of being solved, when it is assumed that it suffices to reject the ideas and practices of the old education and then go to the opposite extreme” (Dewey 1938a: 22). Heidegger also comments on this issue in connection with education. “The task is not to decide which kind of intentionality, practical or theoretical, is prior, but to get beyond the terms altogether. Displacing the priority of theoria is not achieved by simply inverting its relation with praxis” (2002/1945: 42). Final and efficient causes: social versus individual Like the formal and material causes, the final and efficient causes are different from each other but can be understood pragmatically in their functional relation. Dewey (1920: 60) regards “the ‘efficient cause’” to be “that which produces and instigates a movement.” So for Aristotle the efficient cause was the agent of movement, whereas “the final cause was the end or purpose” (Dewey 1911g: 553), “the explanation or reason” (1920: 60) of this movement. In educational terms the final cause can be aligned with social ends, and the efficient cause with individual agency. This line of difference is that of “the individual nature vs. social culture” (1902a: 5). However, the difference between these causes highlights difficulties for understanding education more holistically. Dewey (1936d: 465) refers to

Four causes of educational confusion 161 education as “a difficult process … precisely because it is so extremely difficult to achieve an effective coordination of the factors which proceed from the make-up, the psychological constitution, of human beings with the demands and opportunities of the social environment.” Kliebard (2004: 54) underlines this distinction between social and individual in Dewey’s work, reporting that in “a privately printed ‘plan of organization’ for what he was then calling the University Primary School, Dewey (1895) began … by declaring that, ‘the ultimate problem of all education is to coordinate the psychological and the social factors’” (p. 224). Significantly, Kliebard (p. 54) observes this to be “a problem that Dewey wrestled with all his life.” On the one hand we had the individual, and education aimed at the fullest possible development of that individual’s powers. On the other hand, there was the social environment in which the individual lived, and social environment implied that the expression of the individual’s powers would somehow be coordinated with “social end.” (Kliebard 2004: 54) Dewey (1929e: 64) recognizes the relation between these two causes, arguing that “the social question is intertwined with the psychological.” In this relation “there is general agreement that psychology lies nearer to the question of means and the social sciences to that of ends” (p. 61). However, when these two causes are seen in their separation rather than as functionally related, individual (psychological) as means and social as end take on decidedly different meanings. In his efforts to describe a “social-psychology,” Dewey (1922b: 84) notes that “orthodox psychology starts … from the assumption of … independent minds.” Therefore, “however much different [psychological] schools may vary in their definitions of mind, they agree in this premise of separateness and priority” (p. 84).This isolation is also prevalent in relation to social ends where “the doctrine of ‘social adjustment’ is preached as if ‘social’ signified only a fitting of the individual with some preordained niche of the particular social arrangements that happen to exist at the time” (1936d: 466).Yet Dewey (1916a: 73) sees “no reason for continuing the idealization of a remote and separate mind or knower now that the method of intelligence [theory of inquiry] is perfected.” This pragmatic method of inquiry underpins “a democratic criterion of education” (1916b: 115) that affords “a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.”

Four causes and four curriculum ideologies: a source of educational confusion Each curriculum ideology as the effect of emphasizing two causes There is an alignment between Dewey’s considerations of the causes of educational confusion and Aristotle’s four causes. Aristotle’s four causes can be seen in educative terms as organized around the two lines of difference

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identified by Dewey: child versus curriculum and individual nature versus social culture. Child as potential/progress (material cause) versus curriculum as knowledge/tradition (formal cause) is one line of difference. Individual as agent (efficient cause) versus social as purpose (final cause) is the other. Significantly, however, this arrangement also reveals that each of the four curriculum ideologies can be best characterized as an accentuation of two causes over the other two, along the same lines of difference perceived by Dewey (Figure 7.2). For example, the scholar academic ideology is conditioned by an emphasis on curriculum (formal cause) more than child (material cause), and on the individual (efficient cause) more than social (final cause) – this claim will be justified in the next section. So a particular curriculum ideology does not simply align with one of the four causes; rather it is constituted by emphasis on two, being positioned along both lines of difference. Seen from the perspective of the causes, this highlights how each cause more clearly informs understanding of two ideologies. Highlighting the formal cause as an example, it can be seen that an emphasis on the formal cause (curriculum as knowledge/tradition) is connected with both scholar academic and social efficiency ideologies. This arrangement, then, further illuminates the character of each curriculum ideology, each being conditioned chiefly by an emphasis on two causes above the others. As such it points to a way of understanding the conflict engulfing them all.

Figure 7.2 Each curriculum ideology as an accentuation of two causes. Also revealed here is the affiliation between curriculum ideologies based on their shared emphasis of a particular cause

Four causes of educational confusion 163 Scholar academic (humanist) ideology: formal and efficient causes The two causes most influential in the scholar academic (humanist) ideology are the formal and efficient (Figure 7.2). In educational terms the formal cause is the abstract knowledge of the curriculum. This is brought together with the efficient cause, the individual agent. However, in this connection the individual agent, as the person learning or being taught, is understood specifically as a rational mind well suited to contend with abstract knowledge. Schiro (2008: 41) notes that “Scholar Academics are less concerned with the child than with curriculum content. When they do speak of the child, they speak of the child’s mind. In particular, they speak of the rational or intellectual aspects of the child’s mind.” Dewey (1916b: 342) recognizes that here “mind, the source and possessor of knowledge, was thought of as wholly individual.” One theory [of the nature of mind] is that the highest faculty of mind is reason or pure thought, whose exercise results in knowledge. This view goes along with the notion that knowledge is an end in itself, apart from social uses and applications; it results in a theoretic type of education, one which its opponents condemn as scholastic and academic, while its upholders always defend it on the ground of “culture” and a “liberal,” “humanistic” education. This type of education has prevailed almost entirely in the schools aiming to produce “gentlemen” in the English conventional sense – that is, as members of the ruling and leisure class. (Dewey 1909b: 5) Highlighting the importance of this sense of rationality for the humanist ideology, Kliebard (2004: 23) describes “the humanists” as “the guardians of an ancient tradition tied to the power of reason and the finest elements of the Western cultural heritage.” The humanists believe that “the right selection of subjects, along with the right way of teaching them, could develop citizens of all classes endowed in accordance with the humanist ideal – with the power of reason, sensitivity to beauty, and high moral character” (p. 10). For those advocating the humanist or scholar academic ideology, acquisition of a particular body of knowledge is training for the mind, it is discipline. “Curriculum workers who use the Scholar Academic ideology view curriculum creation from the perspective of the academic disciplines” (Schiro 2008: 17). Thus it is the different academic disciplines that underpin each subject in the curriculum. Beyond the benefits accruing to acquisition of disciplinary knowledge, the subjects of the traditional academic curriculum were (and in some cases still are) believed to train or discipline the mind in certain ways. “Certain subjects of study had the power to strengthen faculties such as memory, reasoning, will, and imagination” (Kliebard 2004: 4), and “certain ways of teaching these subjects could further invigorate the mind and develop these powers.” Dewey (1933a: 55) refers to this as “the so-called ‘faculty psychology’” that “went hand in hand with the vogue of the formal-discipline idea in education.”

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If thought is a distinct piece of mental machinery, separate from observation, memory, imagination, and common-sense judgments of persons and things, then thought should be trained by special exercises designed for the purpose, as one might devise special exercises for developing the biceps muscles. Certain subjects are then to be regarded as intellectual or logical subjects par excellence, possessed of a pre-destined fitness to exercise the thought faculty, just as certain machines are better than others for developing arm power. (Dewey 1933a: 55) Hence the “mind-as-a-muscle metaphor”, which was considered “the basis for explaining to future teachers what they ought to teach and how they ought to go about it” (Kliebard 2004: 5). Expressed in contemporary terms, these subjects are believed to teach “ways of thinking, reasoning, understanding, and reflecting that allow individuals to comprehend their world” (Schiro 2008: 21). Social efficiency ideology: formal and final causes The formal cause so important to the scholar academic ideology is also emphasized in the social efficiency ideology. However, when blended with the final cause of social purpose rather than the efficient cause of individual as agent, it takes on a different educational expression (Figure 7.2). Here the formal cause highlights not abstract knowledge but the skills, competencies or standards associated with traditional vocations, particularly trades. The science of social efficiency is “a science of exact measurement and precise standards in the interest of maintaining a predictable and orderly world” (Kliebard 2004: 76). Therefore “the strategy for change is not to look for new behaviors more appropriate than existing ones, but to reinforce strengths and desirable traits within current society while eliminating weaknesses and deficiencies” (Schiro 2008: 64). The priorities of “the social efficiency educators … lay in creating a coolly efficient, smoothly running society” (Kliebard 2004: 24), and in order to do so they argued for a form of education designed to train all social classes toward roles already existent in society. “Vocationalism” was therefore “a key component of social efficiency ideology” in the sense that it “singled out projected work roles in particular as the principal guideposts for driving the curriculum” (2002: 4). Schiro (2008: 61) likewise considers contemporary versions of “the Social Efficiency ideology” to view “education as a social process that perpetuates existing social functions.” These social functions are the social purpose of education, the final cause. With its emphasis on social purpose in the way of formal standards, this curriculum ideology regards the child’s position in education in a particular way. Kliebard (2002: 4) reports that “principles of efficiency were introduced … to make the curriculum as a whole socially efficient by ensuring that whatever children and youth studied would relate directly to their ability to function in their future adult roles.” Therefore, akin to the scholar academic

Four causes of educational confusion 165 ideology, the social efficiency ideology understands education as preparation. Social Efficiency educators show “little concern for the child per se while [they are] developing and using curricula” (Schiro 2008: 84). Here “childhood is not important in and of itself. It is important because it provides a time to prepare for adulthood” (p. 62). Social reconstructionist ideology: final and material causes As with the social efficiency ideology, the final cause of social purpose is stressed in the social reconstructionist ideology. However, when this emphasis is blended with the material cause, understood in the way of potentiality, the blended effect is very different. The social purpose is no longer to perpetuate and perfect existing vocations as it is when combined with the final cause in the social efficiency ideology. Instead the social reconstructionist ideology is focused on the school and curriculum as social institutions capable of alleviating various issues of social injustice via the reconstruction of society. “Social Reconstructionists dedicate themselves to the reconstruction of society. Their approach consists of analyzing and understanding society, constructing a vision of an improved society, and acting to transform the existing society into a better one” (Schiro 2008: 148). “Social reconstructionists begin with the assumption that the survival of our society is threatened by many problems,” Schiro explains (2008: 133). These problems include “racism, war, sexism, poverty, pollution, worker exploitation, global warming, crime, political corruption, population explosion, energy shortage, illiteracy, inadequate health care, and unemployment” (p. 133). Thus “for Social Reconstructionists, education provides the means by which society is to be reconstructed” (p. 134). The curriculum is seen as a way to address these and other problems and thereby achieve the reconstruction desired as social end. From the perspective of the social reconstructionists, “corruption and vice in the cities, the inequalities of race and gender, and the abuse of privilege and power could all be addressed by a curriculum that focused on those issues” (Kliebard 2004: 24). “The curriculum” is then “the vehicle by which social injustice” can “be redressed and the evils of capitalism corrected” (p. 154). Along with this ideology goes a particular position on children. Here “children are not viewed primarily as children” in the sense of individual actors; “rather, children are viewed as products of society, as social actors” (Schiro 2008: 157). Expressive of the material cause, children are “potential contributing members of society who can aid in its reconstruction” (p. 157). In this social reconstructionist ideology, potentiality is defined by the social purpose. Therefore this is not the potentiality of child development as emphasized by the learner centered or developmentalist ideology. “Children are not viewed primarily from a developmental context that emphasizes their living fully in each stage through which they pass” (p. 158). Rather, “as they grow, children progress toward an educated state from which they can contribute to society’s reconstruction. It is the role of education to speed children toward

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this educated state” (p. 158). Children are the material potentiality of social reconstruction.Thus social reconstruction is also referred to as social meliorism, the improvement of social conditions via the potential of the child. Learner centered (developmentalist) ideology: material and efficient causes Unlike the social reconstructionists, those advocating a learner centered ideology consider the material cause by way of the child’s own development. Here “the key to the question of what to teach lay in the unfolding of natural forces within the child” (Kliebard 2004: 148). This “genetic psychology” (p. 145) is the material cause which, when blended with the individual agency of the efficient cause, produces or effects a learner centered ideology, emphasizing “freedom and individuality for children and adolescents” (p. 157). “Learner Centered educators believe people contain their own capabilities for growth, [and] are the agents who must actualize their own capabilities” (Schiro 2008: 103). Hence “the Learner Centered ideology values children because they are unique individuals. Educators are concerned about each child’s uniqueness rather than his or her ability to conform to standardized norms” (p. 117). This learner centered or developmentalist ideology underpins many of the more commonly espoused understandings of progressive education. However, it was here that Dewey “raised some doubts” (Kliebard 2004: 160) about the direction in which progressive education was headed, especially in relation to the more extreme versions of progressivism defined in opposition to other curriculum ideologies. Congruence and conflict between four curriculum ideologies The association between the four causes and the four curriculum ideologies reveals each curriculum ideology as the effect of emphasizing two causes above the other two (along the lines of difference). This same relation can be considered to highlight the affiliation between pairs of curriculum ideologies, owing to their association with a common cause (Figure 7.2). The scholar academic and learner centered ideologies are both intent on emphasizing the agent (efficient cause) over any particular social purpose. The social efficiency and social reconstructionist ideologies stress the importance of the social purpose (final cause) above any individual concern. The learner centered and social reconstructionist ideologies highlight the importance of potentiality (material cause) in a futural sense, with less concern for tradition, while the scholar academic and social efficiency ideologies focus on this tradition (formal cause) to the detriment of unfolding potentiality. This congruence between two ideologies founded in a shared cause also reveals the discriminating effect of the four causes. Each congruent pair of ideologies conflicts with the opposing congruent pair along the respective line of difference. In addition, each ideology belongs in two congruent pairs, meaning that all the curriculum ideologies are in conflict with each

Four causes of educational confusion 167 other for contrasting reasons associated with the differing emphases among the four causes. Therefore, when seen from the perspective of one of the curriculum ideologies, the other three are regarded as obstacles to a better educational situation. For example, the social reconstructionists, with their focus on the potentiality of social institutions, rail against the “obsessional fixation on the child and child psychology” (Kliebard 2004: 25) expressed by those advocating a learner centered approach, as well as the determinacy in the realm of the social expressed by the social efficiency educators. “Social meliorists [reconstructionists] … were wary of both developmentalism and social efficiency” (p. 208). Given their commitment to social reform, social meliorists [reconstructionists] were especially critical of the developmentalists’ insistence that adult imposition in deciding what to teach was to be avoided, since adult guidance was necessary in directing the child’s studies in the direction of social issues. … At the same time, they were just as critical of the doctrine of social efficiency for, at least implicitly if not directly, promoting the status quo. (Kliebard 2004: 209) Kliebard (2004: 159) highlights how these two disagreements, one “the opposition between the social reconstructionists and the social efficiency educators,” the other the “bitter opposition” between the “social meliorists [reconstructionists] and the developmentalists,” played out in the confused arena of “the Progressive Education Association,” revealing in some way the difficulties Dewey perceived with progressive education. Also prominent were the battles which occurred between social efficiency advocates and developmentalists. “The social efficiency educators and the developmentalists, ultimately, were as far apart from one another as they were from their common enemy,” which Kliebard (pp. 20–21) here describes as “the humanistic position.” From the standpoint of each curriculum ideology, the hybridized educational situation is problematic, and from each standpoint the most obvious solution to such a complex problem is to attempt to dominate the other ideologies. In more concrete terms this means battling the advocates of other interest groups with the aim of installing a supreme controlling ideology and its associated practices. Thus the “three major reform thrusts, developmentalism, social efficiency, and social meliorism [reconstructionism], differed dramatically from one another” (Kliebard 2002: 56). All were reformist with “virtually their only common thread” being “their mutual antagonism to the … traditional humanist curriculum” (p. 56). The humanists were, of course, pitted against all three reformist ideologies. Such is the nature of educational confusion and conflict. The result is a hybridized state marked by continuing cycles of reform, where no ideology is able to attain complete control or remain in control indefinitely. This has been the character of the educational situation for more than a century.

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Education through occupations is not vocational education When the problem of educational confusion is acknowledged and the educational situation considered reflectively, the result is an awareness of the four causes effecting education. Dewey (1902a: 5) indicates these four educational causes as involved in the conflicts “of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs. social culture.” The effects of these four causes in their combinations are the four goals of education (Goodlad 1984), the four ideological interest groups (Kliebard 1986, 1995, 2004) and the four curriculum ideologies (Schiro 1992, 2008). The pragmatic relation of cause and effect (means and consequence) reveals education as a totality comprised of four parts that exist in conflict, confusion and compromise, but it cannot shed any light on their simple unity. More than a century ago Dewey (1909c: 6) was aware of the general “outcry against an overloaded curriculum, lacking in unity and concentration, scattering and overstraining the activities of both teachers and children.” Such protestation often resulted in a “cry for a return to the simplicity of the meager fare of the old-fashioned three R’s” (p. 6), a cry that still resonates today. “But is there not some other way of securing organization of material and unity of purpose?” (p. 6). Here Kliebard (2004: 60) identifies how Dewey, in his search for “unity in the curriculum,” “found that unifying concept in what he called occupations.” However, this particular sense of occupation – as unifying – was not pragmatic, it was aesthetic experience; it was phenomenological, destructed across the ontological difference. It was for this reason that Dewey (1916b: 360) found the task of comprehensively communicating his understanding of “an occupation,” “vocation,” or “calling”, acknowledging both reflective and aesthetic senses, such a difficult one. Dewey’s (1916b: 361) endeavor to promote his version of an “education through occupations” was seriously derailed at the time by those promoting vocational education understood via the social efficiency ideology.44 He decried this social efficiency version of “vocational education” as “nothing but technical trade-training dignified with a high-sounding title” (1915a: 284). Kliebard (2004: 60) believes that Dewey’s use of the “term [occupation]” was “perhaps … an unfortunate choice,” “because it could easily be identified with vocational education [in the form of training] or with an overriding emphasis on overt activity.” Indeed Dewey (1916b: 369) was justifiably concerned that his more subtle understanding of education through occupations would be misinterpreted “in theory and practice as trade education: as a means of securing technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits.” The direct link between vocational education and training for a job or career dominates the way in which vocation is understood in the education systems of many countries today. Bell and Donnelly (2009: 27) note that “within the English education system the word ‘vocational’ is commonly heard as indicating a narrow, technical curriculum, often related to manual work.” In this sense “it is usually contrasted with ‘academic’ education based on traditional disciplines and ostensibly promoting generalized intellectual ability” (p. 27).This understanding of vocational education is problematically tied to the final and formal causes

Four causes of educational confusion 169 and thus aligned with the social efficiency ideology, rendering it “an instrument of perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society, instead of operating as a means of its transformation” (Dewey 1916b: 369). Dewey appreciated that his effort to promote education through occupations was caught in a major conflict between curriculum ideologies, particularly the humanist (scholar academic) and social efficiency ideologies. He was aware that the idea of vocational education was not new, and indeed was at the roots of the humanist curriculum, although this link had mostly been forgotten with the heightened emphasis on the individual mind: “Contrary to the general opinion, popular [humanist or scholar academic] education has always been rather largely vocational” (1917b: 331). However, Dewey pointed out that such “education for vocations” was specifically focused on “those vocations which happened to be esteemed as indicating social superiority or which were useful to the ruling powers of the given period” (p. 331). With the newer push for vocational education by advocates of social efficiency in the early decades of the twentieth century, a re-emphasis on vocation was being promoted, but this re-emphasis highlighted different types of vocation than had traditionally been the focus. “There has arisen a demand for vocational and industrial education as if this were an entirely new thing,” Dewey observed (p. 332), “while, in fact, it is demand that the present industrial education be so modified as to be efficient under the conditions of present machine industry, rapid transportation and a competitive market.” Plainly, this was not the adoption of education through occupations as the way out of educational confusion that Dewey envisaged. Instead it was an aggravation of the problem in education, and he (1913a: 71) regarded it as “the greatest evil now threatening the interests of democracy in education.” Therefore “occupation … must … be carefully distinguished from work which educates primarily for a trade” (1915b: 133). Dewey (1916b: 373) described the trade-focused notion of vocational education as that “movement in behalf of something called vocational training which, if carried into effect, would harden these ideas into a form adapted to the existing industrial régime.” However, “the kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime” (1915c: 42). Dewey was actually pleased with the occupational evolution that he saw slowly taking place in the educational situation of the time. This was development towards education through occupations, which was very different to what he saw being touted as vocational education more broadly. The old time general, academic education is beginning to be vitalized by the introduction of manual, industrial and social activities; it is beginning to recognize its responsibility to train all the youth for useful citizenship, including a calling in which each may render useful service to society and make an honest and decent living. Everywhere the existing school system is beginning to be alive to the need of supplementary agencies to help it fulfill this purpose, and is taking tentative but positive and continuous steps toward it. (Dewey 1913a: 71)

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“The issue at stake” for Dewey (1915a: 284) was “not whether the existing school system shall be progressively reorganized and supplemented to care for social functions not adequately cared for in the past.” Instead he argued that a more positive utilization of industry in the existing school system had already been “in active development” (p. 284) and was progressing well, but it was now to be dismantled because of the move to vocational education. He denounced the interpretation of vocations as fixed adult roles in society and the creation of separate school systems for trades and for academics, a development which drew “a sharp line of cleavage … as respects administrative control, studies, methods and personal associations of pupils, between schools of the traditional literary type and schools of the trade preparatory type” (1915a: 284). Dewey was definitely not in favor of splitting the school system and thereby removing the possibility for unity in education. “For Dewey the source of the problem was the wall that had been erected between academic and vocational studies, between the theoretical and the practical, between thinking and doing,” a division which Kliebard describes as “curricular bifurcation” (1999: 233). Dewey saw occupations as the way forward beyond such bifurcation. Dewey held out the hope that vocational education, properly conceived, had the potential for alleviating that problem [of bifurcation], although his hopes in that regard failed to materialize. It is in this sense that vocationalists, with all their intense lobbying and exaggerated claims as to its material benefits, missed a historic opportunity. (Kliebard 1999: 234) This historic opportunity was missed because of the very different understandings of vocation, resulting in confusion. As Dewey (1916b: 369) perceived it, the problem of the connection of vocation and education was “not that of making the schools an adjunct to manufacture and commerce,” of striving to directly connect schools with industry in a training role. Rather, the challenge was one “of utilizing the factors of industry to make school life more active, more full of immediate meaning, more connected with out-of-school experience” (p. 369). Industry, the adult world, could inform the education of young people in a functional way, but education should not be seen simply as a passive preparation for this pre-existing adult world. Failure to take up this opportunity was also exacerbated by the difficulties Dewey faced in communicating his philosophical ideas to an education audience. Thus Kliebard (1999: 232) suggests that Dewey’s difficulty stemmed from “the subtlety of his position on the subject.” Dewey’s sense of an education through occupations was too subtle a notion to be heard amid the conflict and confusion which characterized the situation. Even today “it is difficult to disentangle Dewey-like claims for the educational role of occupations, economically-driven agendas, and differentials of status and progression” (Bell and Donnelly 2009: 28).

Four causes of educational confusion 171 A significant portion of this difficulty can be traced to the aesthetic character Dewey attributes to occupations. In this sense occupations are both phenomenological and pragmatic. They are aesthetic, place of be-ing, gifted by phenomenological fourfold, but they are also pragmatic and open to planning. Both understandings of occupation are connected through the passageway of the ontological difference, but without a coherent theory of experience this connection cannot be seen. This way out of educational confusion through occupations will be further described in the next chapter.

Summary In this chapter we have seen how the connectedness between pragmatic and phenomenological philosophies across the ontological difference (a coherent theory of experience) sheds new light on the problem of educational confusion. This coherent theory of experience does not attempt to discredit pragmatic understandings of education and replace them with a phenomenological version. On the contrary, both emphases within existence (individual and interaction) are engaged with and contribute to understanding the whole phenomenon of experience. Importantly it is the distinction and connection between these two sides of existence (across the ontological difference) that affords a more coherent view of the problem. We began with the distinction and connection between Heidegger’s phenomenological fourfold and Aristotle’s four causes. The four pragmatic causes can be aligned with the four interconnected factors that Dewey identifies as marking the tensions in the educational situation: child and curriculum, individual and social. Respectively, child and curriculum are material and formal causes while individual and social are efficient and final causes. In a pragmatic orientation these causes underpin, in various associations, the four curriculum ideologies or goal areas described by Kliebard, Schiro and Goodlad. When curriculum (formal) and individual (efficient) causes combine they realize the scholar academic or humanist ideology. When child (material) and individual (efficient) causes combine we have the learner centered or developmentalist ideology. When social (final) and child (material) causes combine the social reconstructionist ideology is the result. Lastly, when social (final) and curriculum (formal) causes combine we see the social efficiency ideology. However, from a phenomenological perspective these four are the fourfold. Instead of competing and conflicting, leading to some form of compromise, they all four contribute in the way of gifting the onefold of be-ing, the place of be-ing. This place of be-ing is an aesthetic interpretation (phenomenologically destructed) of Dewey’s sense of occupation (also referred to as vocation and calling). This clarifies the great difficulty Dewey had in distinguishing his sense of occupation from that espoused within the social efficiency ideology by way of vocational education. Dewey’s idea of an education through occupations is very different from vocational training.

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Educating through occupations as ways of be-ing

Overview The aim of this chapter is to convey how educating through occupations works. This is supported by the connections Dewey sees between educative occupations and Kilpatrick’s sense of projects.Yet even though Kilpatrick was very successful with his project method, both Dewey and Kilpatrick experienced difficulty communicating the more subtle aspects of their ideas to teachers who already held various positions on education aligned with one or more of the four curriculum ideologies. However, to comprehend educating through occupations a teacher must be aware of how to work with the occupations of others. This requires a phenomenological understanding of occupation as place of be-ing, as being-inthe-world, as care. In order to work positively with the occupations of others, Heidegger suggests that one needs to leap ahead of the others in a way that allows them to maintain their care, rather than leaping in for them and taking their care away. Teaching in this way (cognizant of occupation) involves understanding that occupations are constituted by both interest (phenomenological) and effort (pragmatic). Occupations are therefore phenomenological, as interest or care, as well as being pragmatic in the sense of the effort necessary to resolve problems impacting on the continuance of the occupation, via trial and error and regulated reflection. In Dewey’s terms, teachers must therefore discover an occupation as the significant interest or care (being-in-the-world) of those they are teaching, and they must arrange the occupational efforts required as doing and knowing. In this way occupations are concerned with being, doing and knowing, a threefold reflected in Dewey’s understanding of the trinity of the school as the life of the school, methods and subject matter.

Occupations and projects: difficulties for educators In contrast to the ambiguity that seriously impeded Dewey’s efforts to communicate the unifying character of occupations, William Heard Kilpatrick had much more success with his notion of educational projects. Kilpatrick’s (1918) essay on the project method “caused such an immediate sensation that the Teachers College Bureau of Publications was obliged to distribute an astounding 60,000 reprints” (Kliebard 2004: 135). Kliebard argues that Kilpatrick’s project

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method offered educators at the time “a clear alternative to the reforms being promoted by the social efficiency interest group” (p. 138); Dewey’s efforts had failed to do so, being mired in confusion. Dewey’s call for education to be conducted through occupations was not popularly comprehended because of the confusion with trade education, whereas education through projects sounded a chord with teachers. Yet education through occupations and the project method were not that different. Like Dewey, Kilpatrick (1918: 319–320) “felt increasingly the need of unifying more completely a number of important related aspects of the educative process,” and he “began to hope for some one concept which might serve this end.” Similar to Dewey, he found this “unifying idea … in the conception of whole-hearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment” (p. 320). It was “to this purposeful act with emphasis on the word purpose,” that Kilpatrick applied “the term ‘project’” (p. 320), openly acknowledging that he “did not invent the term,” nor “start it on its educational career.”45 However, he did believe that he had appropriated “the word [project] to designate the typical unit of the worthy life” (p. 320). By way of this unifying factor, Kilpatrick (p. 319) described his conception of education as “the project method.”Yet “the particular word, project, is of small consequence; the idea or point of view back of the word is the important element” (1921a: 283). The project method seemed to provide teachers with a less confusing way of grasping a message similar to that which Dewey had tried to convey via occupations, although when the gloss was removed from the apparent success, there remained significant misunderstandings amongst teachers. For one, many teachers simply interpreted projects in line with traditional (humanist) practice as units of varying size focused on subject-matter topics. It may not be out of place by way of negative definition to say emphatically that a project is not a topic – large or small. What gave rise to the idea that a large topic constitutes a project is beyond my power to explain. We hold no copyright for the term; but what sense or purpose there can be in introducing this kind of confusion is more than I can see. Projects may arise in connection with topics; but most emphatically a topic as such is not a project. (Kilpatrick 1921a: 286–287) However, it was not only the humanists who misunderstood the project method. Kilpatrick (1921a: 286) also found himself clarifying the notion of a project with the developmentalists, specifically in relation to “the origin of purpose.” Problematically, he saw that his “insistence upon child purposes has been taken to mean that the choice by the child himself of his activity is essential in our point of view” (1921b: 315), a position that seemed to advocate the notion of educational control resting ultimately with the child and not the teacher. However, this was not Kilpatrick’s position. “Some have feared that we call upon the teacher to wait for a move from the child. This is wrong”

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(1921a: 286). Also, “perhaps the most hurtful of all the misconceptions is the idea that we propose to turn children loose to make their own decisions, to decide their own course” (1921b: 314). “Far from it” was Kilpatrick’s (p. 314) response this accusation. Instead he stressed that “the reasons urged for desiring child-purposing … center about the conception of a mind-set-toan-end.” This connection of mind-set-to-an-end was Kilpatrick’s rendering of Dewey’s (1916b: 117) stipulation that an educational aim must fall “within an activity, instead of being furnished from without.” It must be “an end-in-view, an aim, a purpose, a prediction usable as a plan in shaping the course of events” (Dewey 1929a: 86). Such an understanding, while expressed pragmatically here, is founded in a phenomenological sense of time. Similar to Kilpatrick’s description of projects, Dewey (1916b: 361) describes “an occupation” (in a pragmatic way) as “a continuous activity having a purpose.” Furthermore, an “education through occupations … combines within itself more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method” because it “calls instincts and habits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. It has an end in view [italics added]; results are to be accomplished” (p. 361). An occupation “appeals to thought; it demands that an idea of an end be steadily maintained, so that activity cannot be either routine or capricious” (p. 361). In the work of his Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, Dewey (1900: 26) identifies such possible educative occupations as “manual training, shop-work, and the household arts – sewing and cooking.”These are just a few of many possibilities. Outdoor excursions, gardening, cooking, sewing, printing, book-binding, weaving, painting, drawing, singing, dramatization, story-telling, reading and writing as active pursuits with social aims (not as mere exercises for acquiring skill for future use), in addition to countless variety of plays and games, designate some of the modes of occupation. (Dewey 1916b: 230) However, “it is not enough to introduce plays and games, hand work and manual exercises,” Dewey warns (1916b: 230). “Everything depends upon the way in which they are employed” (p. 230). “The problem of the educator” is then “to engage pupils in these activities in such ways that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained and immediate satisfaction found in the work, together with preparation for later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated to education,” where education means “intellectual results and the forming of socialized disposition” (p. 231). In Dewey’s work with the Laboratory School, which preceded that of Kilpatrick, Dewey does not refer to projects but rather stresses occupations. Following a thorough examination of “the records, notes, and plans” of the Laboratory School, Tanner (1991: 102) highlights how “detailed reports” of the plans of the teachers indicate “that curriculum for Dewey and the Laboratory School teachers was not synonymous with projects.” However, when considered broadly in relation to purpose, as Kilpatrick stipulates regarding projects, Dewey accepts some

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correspondence between projects and occupations – the connection is dependent on what the notion of a project actually means educationally. “Constructive occupations have in recent years found their way increasingly into the schoolroom. They are usually known as ‘projects’” (Dewey 1933a: 217). Informed by his conception of occupations, Dewey adopts the language of projects. One of the chief causes for failure in school to secure that gain in ability to understand that is a precious educational result is the neglecting to set up the conditions for active use as a means in bringing consequences to pass – the neglecting to provide projects that call out the inventiveness and ingenuity of pupils in proposing aims to realize, or finding means to realize, consequences already thought of. (Dewey 1933a: 147) So, while both Dewey and Kilpatrick pursued similar developments in education around the notion of occupations or projects, neither could claim that teachers understood their ideas without confusion. A significant issue seems to be the perspectives which teachers bring to these new ideas, perspectives which align with one or more of the four interest groups.Therefore achieving a new understanding of education, especially one that moves radically beyond the conflicts between the four interest groups, is not easy. It requires not only the support of a coherent theory of experience, but a clear understanding of how this theory should inform the occupation of being-a-teacher. This difficulty is conveyed in Dewey’s (1928c: 204) description of “the art of education” as “the most difficult and the most important of all human arts.” In a similar way Heidegger (1968/1951–52: 15) points out that “teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it.” The difficulty with teaching stems from having to genuinely embrace the care (as being-in-theworld) of others within one’s own care (as being-a-teacher), but without taking away the other’s care: a subtle and delicate art. Thus teaching is not a choice amongst differing emphases between child and curriculum, individual nature and social culture; being-a-teacher involves letting others build their own be-ing, both pragmatically and phenomenologically. Understanding being-a-teacher in this way is crucial for setting off along the pathway out of educational confusion.

Leaping in for the other: educating as preparing for a remote future Being-a-teacher as a way of be-ing is constituted phenomenologically via possible modes of being-with. Heidegger (2010/1927: 118) characterizes these as concrete “modes of concern.” For example, “being for-, against-, and without-one-another, passing-one-another-by, not-mattering-to-one-another, are possible ways of concern” (p. 118). Many of these modes are distinguished by their “indifference” (p. 118) to an other. Of course, there are also “positive modes” (p. 118) of being-with. Amongst these positive modes Heidegger

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identifies “two extreme possibilities” (p. 118) that are of crucial importance for being-a-teacher. One of these extreme possibilities for positive being-with “can, so to speak, take the other’s ‘care’ away from him and put itself in his place in taking care” (p. 118). Heidegger describes this taking away of another’s care as to “leap in for” an other in terms of care (p. 118). Leaping in for an other, as one version of an extreme positive way, is revealed in modes of concern that involve supporting the other by doing everything for the other, standing in for the other’s care. In educational terms, leaping in for an other holds connections with the problematic aspects of preparation for a remote future, which Dewey (1938a: 47) regards as “a treacherous idea.” Leaping in for, in order to prepare an other for a “more or less remote future” (Dewey 1938a: 19), is not advantageous to building be-ing as beinga-possibility or occupation. “To predetermine some future occupation for which education is to be a strict preparation is to injure the possibilities of present development and thereby to reduce the adequacy of preparation for a future right employment” (1916b: 362–363). Further, Dewey warns that “when preparation is made the controlling end, then the potentialities of the present are sacrificed to a suppositious future.When this happens, the actual preparation for the future is missed or distorted” (1938a: 49). “The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits, and even shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for the future” (p. 49). These conditions are the occupations of the present, relevant to one’s life now. It is present occupations which are the building blocks of the future. Of course, the problematic use of the present merely as preparation for a remote future does build a way of be-ing (as presencing). One is always beinga-possibility in some way of being. Thus education as preparation is itself an occupation – that of being-a-student, and especially being-an-academicstudent – which is particularly prevalent when the formal cause is emphasized, as in the scholar academic and social efficiency ideologies. Kliebard (2004: 59) observes that the humanist or scholar academic ideology “sought merely to impose a collection of subjects on the child,” with “the goal” of each of these subjects being “the induction of the child into an academic discipline” (Schiro 2008: 17). Here “disciplines” are not considered merely as bodies of knowledge and intellectual skills per se; rather they are “viewed as hierarchical communities consisting of inquirers into new knowledge [usually researchers/scholars], teachers of knowledge [teachers], and learners of knowledge [students]” (p. 25). At the top of the hierarchy are scholars, who rule over the disciplines as scholar-kings …. It is their function to search for knowledge that is yet unknown. At the next level of the hierarchy are teachers, who disseminate knowledge that has been discovered by scholars and sanctioned by the discipline. At the bottom of the hierarchy are students, who are neophytes in their encounters with the discipline. It is their job to learn the discipline’s knowledge so that they may become proficient members of the discipline. (Schiro 2008: 25)

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This hierarchical conception of education is aimed at the induction of young people into a discipline. However, it generally works to achieve this by leaping in for the young person with a focus on beings, mainly in the form of standardized concepts derived from the very different labor of scholars, but now useful for assignments and exams. This emphasis on beings, which is characteristic of Dasein’s “‘falling unto’ beings” (Heidegger 2006/1938–39: 288), overlooks be-ing. Even though it is overlooked, however, building being is of course also occurring in the guise of the occupation of beinga-student. Thus, educating as preparing “simply substitutes one interest for another” (Dewey 1913b: 2). This substitute occupation, being-a-student, engenders effort by imposing “fear of the teacher or hope of future reward” (p. 2), a reward which usually comes from the teacher in the form of marks and grades. However, while this education as preparation involves the learning of concepts derived from the work of scholars, it is not induction into an academic discipline as the occupation of scholar – for example, being-a-mathematician, being-a-historian or being-a-scientist. Instead it is induction into being-astudent with an emphasis on acquiring a body of knowledge derived from a disciplinary occupation. In this way of educating, the disciplines “have become so abstracted from the world that children and adolescents inhabit” that when presented as school studies, they “are no longer recognizable as being themselves forms of experience” (Kliebard 1984: 28). Thus “the problem, as Dewey repeatedly emphasized, is one of restoring the subjects of study to their place in experience” (p. 28). The study of the sciences, no less than the study of the humanities, suffers from abstraction of these studies from their origins in human interests and human purposes.The mechanical dissection of frogs in a so-called laboratory and the routine combining of chemical elements to make a mixture turn blue is as anti-intellectual as the familiar recitation of amo, amas, amat or the recounting of the bare plot of a novel.The vague association of these activities with the aura of scholarly activity serves only to mask their fundamentally anti-intellectual character. (Kliebard 1984: 28) This discontinuity between being-a-student and being-a-disciplinary-scholar is further hinted at in Dewey’s description of the way a problem is encountered when being-a-student. A pupil has a problem, but it is the problem of meeting the peculiar requirements set by the teacher. His problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher wants, what will satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and outward deportment. (Dewey 1916b: 183)

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As a result, “relationship to subject matter is no longer direct” (Dewey 1916b: 183) in the sense of directness experienced by the scholar. By this lack of directness, Dewey is here alluding to the vicarious nature of being-a-student when subject matter is considered. In being-a-student, “the occasions and material of thought are not found in the arithmetic or the history or geography itself, but in skillfully adapting that material to the teacher’s requirements” (pp. 183–184), requirements that are primarily governed by assessment. This is building be-ing, a place of be-ing, but primarily in the way of being-a-student. “The pupil studies, but unconsciously to himself the objects of his study are the conventions and standards of the school system and school authority, not the nominal ‘studies’” (p. 184). Being-an-academic-student is the central occupation within the scholar academic ideology,but it is a problematic occupation when education is understood as building be-ing. “Young people in traditional schools do have experiences,” Dewey acknowledges; “the trouble is not the absence of experiences, but their defective and wrong character – wrong and defective from the standpoint of connection with further experience” (1938a: 27). Here being-a-student is associated with “the unfavorable connotation of ‘academic,’ the suggestion of living in the past rather than the present, in the cloister rather than the world, in a region of abstraction rather than practice” (1902b: 81). Being-an-academicstudent is an occupation, but for many young people it is a substitute for those occupations which are of genuine interest, and as a result, care is taken away.

Leaping ahead of the other: educating as letting others learn Contrary to ‘leaping in for,’ Heidegger recognizes another positive mode of being-with. “In contrast to this [leaping in for], there is the possibility of a concern which does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of him in his existentiell potentiality-of-being” (2010/1927: 119). This is “not in order to take ‘care’ away from him, but rather to authentically give it back as such. This concern … helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and free for it” (p. 119). In an educational sense this freedom for care is freedom for learning, as learning to dwell, for “teaching … does not mean anything else than to let the others learn” (1967/1935–36: 73). An awareness of the importance of aesthetic experience, of being-here as occupation, reveals teaching to be more than a pragmatic dealing with knowledge in the form of standardized concepts to be applied by students in various forms of assessment (as being-an-academicstudent). Instead, being-a-teacher involves concern for an other’s care, their being-in-the-world. This is the difficulty with the art of education. Why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than – learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn

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nothing from him, if by “learning” we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they – he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relation between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of the knowit-all or the authoritative sway of the official. It is still an exalted matter, then, to become a teacher – which is something else entirely than becoming a famous professor. (Heidegger 1968/1951–52: 15) Heidegger’s understanding of being-a-teacher is very different to that described by Schiro in connection with the scholar academic ideology, where the teacher is the disseminator of disciplinary knowledge. For Heidegger (1968/1951–52: 15) the central difficulty and opportunity of the art of teaching is the building of be-ing, which requires the teacher to “learn to let them learn.” Letting learn is a positive mode of being-with that leaps ahead of the other and lets them be in the projective sense of being-a-possibility, which in Dewey’s aesthetic sense is an occupation. Letting learn is letting be, a phenomenological sense of freedom as care. Heidegger clarifies this phenomenological sense of freedom as letting be by juxtaposing it with its pragmatic meaning. Ordinarily we speak of letting be whenever, for example, we forgo some enterprise that has been planned. “We let something be” means we do not touch it again, we have nothing more to do with it. To let something be has here the negative sense of letting it alone, of renouncing it, of indifference and even neglect. However the phrase required now – to let beings be – does not refer to neglect and indifference but rather the opposite. To let be is to engage oneself with beings. On the other hand, to be sure, this is not to be understood only as mere management, preservation, tending, and planning of the beings in each case encountered or sought out. To let be – that is, to let beings be the beings they are – means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which every being comes to stand, bringing that openness, as it were, along with itself. (Heidegger 1998/1930: 144) Letting be, as letting learn, is not freedom in the pragmatic sense as “mere absence of constraint with respect to what we can or cannot do” (Heidegger 1998/1930: 145). “Prior to all this (‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom), freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such” (p. 145). This freedom is the movedness of care, “through which the openness of the open region, i.e., the ‘there’ [‘Da’], is what it is” (p. 145). Thus letting learn is not the freedom of an extreme progressive education which prefers “free activity” to “external discipline” (Dewey 1938a: 19). It is not an ideological emphasis on efficient or

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material causes. Instead letting learn, as letting be, concerns the onefold, the place of be-ing, as being-in-the-world. Here “the pupil’s mind is no longer to be on study or learning. It is given to doing the things that the situation calls for, while learning is the result” (Dewey 1928c: 204). Heidegger (1968/1951–52: 8) describes learning using different terms, but with the same meaning: “To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at the given moment.” These essentials are of a way of be-ing, an occupation as interest, learning to dwell.

Projects as educative occupations: Dewey’s test of interest and effort Occupation as interest Freedom as letting learn is visible in educational projects when these are understood as educative occupations.As previously mentioned, Kilpatrick (1918: 320) orients his project method around “the unit element of … activity,” which he describes as “the hearty purposeful act.” In a similar way Dewey perceives this “unity” in a “progressively growing occupation or project” (1928c: 201), where growth is future orientated in a phenomenological sense, a projecting on possibilities as being-a-possibility. Projects as educative occupations are thus the unities or units of education, for “the unit of study, as Heidegger, among others, points out, is a ‘being-in-the-world’” (Huebner 1967: 15). Being-ateacher involves learning to let learn, and letting learn requires leaping ahead of the other. This leaping ahead of the other is itself a projecting that embraces the projecting of an other. “In projecting, project throws possibility before itself as possibility, and as such lets it be” (Heidegger 2010/1927: 141). Projecting as being-a-teacher is concern for the projecting of an other, for the being-in-theworld of an other. This is the sense of an educational project, as occupation and as interest. However, Dewey (1931a: 31) derides “many so-called projects” as being “of such short-time span and … entered upon for such casual reasons, that extension of acquaintance with facts and principles is at a minimum.” Such projects are thus “too trivial to be educative” (p. 31); they are not units as unities. These projects fail Dewey’s occupation test on two conditions: (1) interest – this condition offers a phenomenological understanding of occupation/project; and (2) effort – this condition offers a pragmatic understanding of occupation/ project. These conditions describe the twofold of phenomenological and pragmatic across the ontological difference. They are the “conditions that should be fulfilled” in order that projects “be truly educative” (1933a: 217–218). Dewey’s first condition is phenomenological, requiring a project to involve enduring “interest” (1933a: 218) understood as intrinsic worth beyond “immediate pleasure.” Importantly, this is not interest as a “trick of method” (1902a: 30) designed “to arouse interest” so as to make something “interesting; to cover it with sugar-coating.” In contrast to this shallow understanding of interest, Dewey’s sense of interest has phenomenological undertones which

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align it with Heidegger’s care, anchored in the for-the-sake-of-which. In this sense interest is phenomenological, although Dewey expresses it in terms more usually recognized as pragmatic. “The genuine principle of interest is the principle of the recognized identity of the fact to be learned or the action proposed with the growing self; that it lies in the direction of the agent’s own growth” (Dewey 1913b: 7). Therefore, “genuine interest … simply means that a person has identified himself with, or has found himself in, a certain course of action” (p. 43). For Dewey such a course of action is an occupation, pragmatically understood. Indeed, he considers “occupations” to “determine the fundamental modes of activity” (1902e: 219), a sense of determination which resembles Heidegger’s idea of a phenomenological enactment sense. Phenomenologically understood, interest and occupation are inseparable, they are analogous: reference to one’s interest and one’s occupation are both reference to the simple aesthetic whole. “Interest … is a name for the fact that a course of action, an occupation, or pursuit absorbs the powers of an individual in a thoroughgoing way” (1913b: 65). Interest is personal; it signifies a direct concern; a recognition of something at stake, something whose outcome is important for the individual. It has its emotional as well as its active and objective sides. Patent law or electric inventions or politics may be a man’s chief interest; but this implies that his personal well-being and satisfaction is somehow bound up with the prosperity of these affairs. (Dewey 1913b: 16–17) In this aesthetic way, Dewey (1916b: 408) argues that “self and interest are two names for the same fact.” This tautology of interest and self is analogous with care, being-here’s concern for being-here, which Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 36) explores by way of “the who-question” that “asks the question concerning the self-being.” Such a phenomenological understanding of interest embraces the aesthetic whole as being-here. This standpoint of Dasein affords no separate self as I. Dewey’s reference to personal interest is therefore not to selfish solipsistic interest. Instead, it refers to both personal and “shared common interest” (Dewey 1916b: 100) in the way of Heidegger’s authentic self and they-self, mortals and gods. Hence Dewey highlights “the etymology of the term” as “inter-esse,” which means “‘to be between’” (p. 17).This between is best understood phenomenologically as it speaks to the fourfold; it is not a pragmatic balance or compromise as middle way. Interest, as care, is between the individual (efficient) and social (final) causes, as well as potential (material) and traditional (formal) causes. Using a pragmatic phrase to describe this phenomenological sense, interest signals an “organic union” (Dewey 1913b: p. 17) of self and others, as well as material things. Thus “interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the material and results of his action” (p. 17). This annihilation of distance is a phenomenological positioning of interest as occupation. Dewey (p. 91) points out that “at bottom all misconceptions of

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interest, whether in practice or in theory, come from ignoring or excluding its moving, developing nature,” implying a phenomenological sense of time: interest as phenomenological projecting. Thus occupation can be aesthetic experience, providing the simple unity that can then be taken up in reflective experience.“What is important about Dewey’s conception of vocation is that it is qualitative,” Higgins affirms (2005: 447).Thus “Dewey’s discussion of vocation opens onto his treatment of aesthetics” (p. 449). An occupation, vocation or calling can refer to an aesthetic whole. “Wholes for purposes of education are not … physical affairs. Intellectually the existence of a whole depends upon a concern or interest; it is qualitative, the completeness of appeal made by a situation” (Dewey 1916b: 232). This qualitative sense of an occupation as concern or interest is care for Heidegger, anchored in the forthe-sake-of-which. Hence the way through the confusion engendered by the four causes is to avoid emphasizing any particular cause or causes and to instead focus phenomenologically on the aesthetic unity of the fourfold as onefold. When understood via the question of the meaning of being-here, this onefold is being-in-the-world, as being-a-possibility, as occupation. Occupation as effort Interest is central to inquiry, but it is of affective thought, not reflective thought. Hence it is within the pre-reflective aesthetic occupation as interest, as forthe-sake-of-which, as care, that there arise “problems that awaken curiosity and create demand for information” (Dewey 1933a: 218). Problems emerge in aesthetic experience (occupation as interest) and engender the effort of reflective experience directed at the continuance of that occupation. Therefore “the demand for effort is a demand for continuity in the face of difficulties” (1913b: 47). “An occupation has continuity,” Dewey states (1933a: 219). “An occupation … is of necessity a continuous thing. It lasts, not only for days, but for months and years. It represents, not a stirring of isolated and superficial energies, but rather a steady, continuous organization of power along certain general lines” (1915b: 138). Therefore a project or occupation is “not a succession of unrelated acts,” but rather “a consecutively ordered activity in which one step prepares the need for the next one and that one adds to, and carries further in a cumulative way, what has already been done” (1933a: 219). Furthermore, “since the movement of activity must be progressive, leading from one stage to another, observation and ingenuity are required at each stage to overcome obstacles and to discover and readapt means of execution” (1916b: 361). Thus maintenance of continuity requires effort, particularly effort in reflective thinking: “The really important matter in the experience of effort concerns its connection with thought” (1913b: 51). “The significant thing is that effort is diverted into thinking” (p. 51). Hence “the emotion of effort, or of stress, is a warning to think, to consider, to reflect, to inquire” (pp. 49–50) (Figure 8.1). Dewey’s second condition stresses the need for effort in reflective thinking so that any problem encountered within an occupation can be overcome allowing

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Figure 8.1 Dewey’s two conditions of interest and effort that must be met for a project to be regarded as an occupation

the occupation to continue. However, this also highlights how such effort is substantiated by an interest as occupation, the first condition.“It is interest in the occupation as a whole – that is, in its continuous development – which keeps a pupil at his work in spite of temporary diversions and unpleasant obstacles” (Dewey 1916b: 410). “The demand for effort is a demand for continuity in the face of difficulties” (1913b: 47), and “what carries a person over these hard stretches is not loyalty to duty in the abstract, but interest in his occupation” (1916b: 410). This is because “a man’s interest in keeping at his work in spite of danger to life means that his self is found in that work” (1916b: 408). So, “if he finally gave up, and preferred his personal safety or comfort, it would mean that he preferred that kind of self ” (p. 408). Interest (aesthetic experience) and effort (reflective experience) are together across the ontological difference. Effort to maintain the continuity of an occupation is founded within commitment to that occupation as interest, as self, as being-in-the-world, that necessitates an occupation having a “considerable time span for its adequate execution” (1933a: 218). So when Dewey reflects on the employment of occupations in the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, the two conditions of interest and effort are central. “Occupations as engaged in by the pupils themselves were means of securing the transformation of crude and specific impulses into activities having a sufficiently long time-span

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[i.e. interest]” so “as to demand foresight, planning, retrospective reviews, the need for further information and insight into principles of connection [i.e. effort]” (1936d: 474). The same applies to educative projects. The test of a good project is whether it is sufficiently full and complex to demand a variety of responses from different children and permit each to go at it and make his contribution in a way which is characteristic of himself [interest]. The further test or mark of a good activity, educationally speaking, is that it have a sufficiently long time-span so that a series of endeavors and explorations are involved in it, and included in such a way that each step opens up a new field, raises new questions, arouses a demand for further knowledge, and suggests what to do next on the basis of what has been accomplished and the knowledge thereby gained [effort]. (Dewey 1928c: 202) Dewey (1928c: 202) goes on to point out that “occupational activities which meet these two conditions will of necessity result not only in amassing known subject matter but in its organization.” He suggests here that an occupation, vocation or calling is also characterized by the way it organizes knowledge. “A calling is of necessity an organizing principle for information and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth” (1916b: 362). Thus an occupation “provides an axis which runs through an immense diversity of detail; it causes different experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with one another” (p. 362). In other words, the thinking effort necessary to continuing an occupation, be that trial and error or regulated reflection, is applied within an occupation. The occupation is the organizing principle for this thinking and for the knowledge that is developed. In relation to regulated reflection especially, this organized knowledge is often thought of as a discipline or an intellectual “body of knowledge” (p. 45). This means that a body of knowledge is organized because it is the body of knowledge of an occupation. Knowledge does not have any organizational character that sits somehow outside experience; rather, knowledge is always instrumental within an occupation. Additionally, any particular knowledge can of course be instrumental within more than one occupation, resulting in that knowledge having various meanings because its instrumentality is always as means-consequence (Figure 8.2). Hence occupation also straddles the logical difference. Occupations, vocations, callings, are organizing factors for knowledge; they are continuous purposeful activities requiring effort (which always includes the activity of thinking), and they are interests understood phenomenologically as care. In this sense occupations do provide the coherence necessary for a “whole theory of experience, inquiry, and knowledge” (Dewey 1941: 185).

The trinity of occupation: be-ing, doing and knowing Dewey’s two conditions of interest and effort, necessary for aligning projects with occupations, reveal occupations as organizing factors that span the ontological

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difference as well as the logical difference. In relation to the logical difference the body of knowledge is occupation as “subject-matter” or “what,” while the practical doing or “method” is occupation as “how”. This understanding is based in Dewey’s (1916b: 196) recognition that “reflection upon experience gives rise to a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing – the how.” Dewey’s appreciation of this distinction is supported and extended across the ontological difference by Heidegger’s (2004/1920–21: 43) insight that “each experience – as experiencing, and what is experienced – can ‘be taken in the phenomenon.’” In other words, “one can ask: 1. After the original ‘what,’ that is experienced therein (content). 2. After the original ‘how,’ in which it is experienced (relation). 3. After the original ‘how,’ in which the relational meaning is enacted (enactment)” (p. 43). This enactment sense, across the ontological difference, is occupation as interest. This original how is who, and analogously world. So the what (knowledge-knowing) and how (doing) of experienced and experiencing, content sense and relation sense, are of the enactment sense (be-ing) which is care, being-in-the-world (Figure 8.2). Thus occupations are phenomenological and pragmatic; they are care or interest (being-in-the-world as who-world), activity (how) and knowledge (what).This threefold sense of occupation incorporates the twofold of existence identified by Dewey via Peirce; Peirce’s three categories of experience; and the four-part schema of Heidegger. In educational terms this threefold sense is

Figure 8.2 The trinity of the school and the trinity of occupation

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borne out in Dewey’s (1909a: 29) consideration of “the moral trinity of the school” as “(1) the life of the school as a social institution in itself; (2) methods of learning and of doing work; and (3) the school studies or curriculum.” This trinity of the school is a trinity of occupation as a coherent theory of experience. Significantly, it highlights the importance of the life of the school – as life – to education, where occupation as care or interest must be embraced. Without this, education is simplistically considered as the interaction of method and subject matter, how and what, doing and knowing, child and curriculum, individual nature and social culture; as interaction characterized by the compromises that attend conflict and confusion. However, the life of the school is the enactment sense, so its organization is critical to education. Yet “it is easy to fall [italics added] into the habit of regarding the mechanics of school organization and administration as something comparatively external and indifferent to educational purposes and ideals” (Dewey 1902b: 22). This falling is towards objectivity and away from being-here, separating school organization and therefore the life of the school from life outside of school, from everyday ways of be-ing. This “is the isolation of the school – its isolation from life” (1900: 89). Pertinent to education, Heidegger (2010/1927: 33) notes that in the falling tendency toward beings, be-ing “can be covered up to such a degree that it is forgotten.” Organization of the life of the school must embrace being-here via qualitative, affective ways of thinking. For too long has the life of the school been dominated by calculative thought, by machination, resulting in enframing. Dewey (1902b: 23) points out that while “the reality of education is found in personal and face-to-face contact of teacher and child,” it is “the conditions that underlie and regulate this contact” which “dominate the educational situation.” In order to confront the educational situation as the whole “trinity of … subject matter, methods, and administration” (1916b: 193), one must consider not only how and what, method and subject matter, as they play out in the contact between teacher and child, but also the life of the school expressed via the organizational and administrative conditions which underlie and regulate this contact. For it is here that ways of be-ing, occupations, are most radically determined. In his considered view of the confused educational situation, Dewey highlights how traditional ideas and practices have dominated educational administration and the life of the school. In fact, he describes “the key to the conflict” as being recognition of how “the studies of the symbolic and formal sort represented the aims and material of education for a sufficiently long time to call into existence a machinery of administration and of instruction thoroughly adapted to themselves” (1902b: 22). Awareness of this key highlights how educational confusion cannot be overcome without addressing the organization and administration of the life of the school as a social institution. However, the key to the conflict is presented here in a solely negative sense. In positive terms the key to unlocking the problem of educational confusion is a well-formed understanding of Dewey’s notion of “education through occupations” (1916b: 361) that expresses a coherent theory of experience in educational terms.

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How to educate through occupations: discovering and arranging Dewey’s attempts to explain how to educate through occupations cannot be separated from his refrains regarding social life. In the sense of how, as teaching method, Dewey (1915b: 132) describes an “occupation” as “a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work carried on in social life [italics added].” In making this connection between occupations and forms of social life, Dewey appreciates that teachers will need guidance when grappling with the problem of “discovering the valuable occupations” as well as “arranging” them (1933a: 52), a problem that involves the whole trinity of the school. He is thus aware of the “need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life” (1916b: 96). Hence he selects “two points … by which to measure the worth of a form of social life”: (1) “the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members”; and (2) “the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups” (p. 115). Further, he is adamant that these “two elements in our criterion both point to democracy” (p. 100). The first signifies not only more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The second means not only freer interaction between social groups … but change in social habit – its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society. (Dewey 1916b: 100) This connection between democracy and education is premised on Dewey’s belief “that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group” (1916b: 94). He recognizes that “in any social group whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find [1] some interest held in common, and we find [2] a certain amount of interaction and cooperative discourse with other groups” (p. 96). However, it is the extent of this shared interest and interaction with other groups that is the measure of an occupation. This is highlighted by Dewey’s acknowledgment of “mis-educative” experiences (1938a: 25). He considers “any experience” to be “mis-educative” if it “has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience” (p. 25). Dewey speaks of burglar, gangster and corrupt politician as examples of mis-educative occupations that distort the growth of further experience because they are wrong and defective from the standpoint of connection with further experience. That a man may grow in efficiency as a burglar, as a gangster, or as a corrupt politician, cannot be doubted. But from the standpoint of growth as

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education and education as growth the question is whether growth in this direction promotes or retards growth in general. (Dewey 1938a: 36) Using Dewey’s two measures of educative occupations as forms of social life, being-a-student in the traditional sense can be aligned with these mis-educative occupations. Dewey (1938a: 27) associates the experiences had by “young people in traditional schools” with “their defective and wrong character – wrong and defective from the standpoint of connection with further experience.” This sense of further or future experience must be understood via a phenomenological sense of time as living, as be-ing, not the ordinary pragmatic sense of time as an objective series of points on a timeline. Emphasizing this phenomenological sense of time, Dewey (1893: 660) reveals that if he was “asked to name the most needed of all reforms in the spirit of education,” he “should say: ‘Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make of it the full meaning of the present life.’” For “life is growth,” and “that growth, while it involves meeting and overcoming obstacles, and hence has hard and trying spots, is essentially something to be enjoyed now” (1933b: 448).Therefore “every worthwhile education” should be understood as “a direct enrichment of the young and not merely a more or less repellent preparation for the duties of adult life” (p. 448). In contrast, the traditional meaning of being-a-student is built on an objective sense of time, time considered reflectively, chiefly from an adult perspective. Here the connection between education and further experience is understood as preparation for an adult future that is remote from present life, a point so far along the timeline that it seems irrelevant. So the extent of shared interest that exists for many young people around this premise is less than would be expected of an educative occupation. When being-a-student is considered with the increased specificity associated with particular subject or discipline areas – for example, being-a-science-student or being-a-mathematics-student (especially around the middle years of schooling) – then the extent of interaction between these occupations and others is also less than would be expected of an educative occupation. These academic occupations tend to be considered in seeming isolation of each other because interaction between occupations is viewed as inefficient, a waste of precious time in a crowded timetable and crowded curriculum. So the twofold task for teachers lies in “discovering some worthwhile activity and … arranging the conditions under which it can be carried forward” (Dewey 1928c: 202, italics added). The task of discovery refers to an educative occupation as interest.The teacher must discover an educative occupation which involves numerous and varied points of shared common interest for the young people involved. Dewey recognizes that growing, building be-ing, requires an understanding of the interests of the particular young people involved, in their being-here as being-in-the-world, as being-a-possibility. Thus “the types of activity remaining as true educative interests vary indefinitely with age, with individual native endowments, with prior experience, with social opportunities.

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It is out of the question to try to catalogue them” (1913b: 67). Hence the great difficulty of being-a-teacher: the teacher “has to learn to let them learn” (Heidegger 1968/1951–52: 15) in the sense that “the teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices,” for the teacher is always learning of the being-in-the-world, the care, the interests, of these others.Teaching is not premised on “the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official” (p. 15). Being-a-teacher “is something else entirely” (p. 15) than beinga-famous-professor. This is the creative difficulty of the art of education, but it is also an opportunity. The problem and the opportunity with the young is selection of orderly and continuous modes of occupation, which, while they lead up to and prepare for the indispensable activities of adult life, have their own sufficient justification in their present reflex influence upon the formation of habits of thought. (Dewey 1933a: 51) In discovering an educative occupation or project a teacher must leap ahead of the others, for the educative occupation must involve a high level of genuine interest, it must afford their care. However, leaping ahead of others in this educational way never involves surrendering the discovery of an occupation to these young people, as is sometimes advocated within the learner centered or developmentalist ideology. Kilpatrick faced this mistaken perception as a significant issue in communication of the project method. It is “not purpose as the act of original choosing which we have in mind in demanding purposeful activity,” he stressed (1921b: 315). “None of these considerations [of purposeful activity] … depends upon the original initiation of the purpose, but only upon its effective functioning after it has been set up” (p. 315). The original initiation (discovering) and the setting up (arranging) are tasks for the teacher in leaping ahead of the particular others with concern for their care, their shared interest. Now, this could perhaps involve teachers offering young people an array of possible educative occupations to choose from in an elective style format. However, these educative occupations will already have been discovered and arranged by teachers. Discovering an educative occupation is always an act of poetic creation (poiesis) concerned with the learning to dwell of the others, with letting learn. This poetic creation of an occupation is connected, via the passageway of the ontological difference, with the technical arranging (techne) of this occupation as the effort involved in a continuous activity that requires the effort of reflective thinking for its maintenance. Discovery of interests and arrangement of interactions are the two entwined tasks of the teacher in planning and conducting educative occupations or projects. However, discovering and arranging also align with the two points which Dewey argues can be used as a democratic measure of the worth of an occupation, enabling these points to be employed when considering discovering and arranging. Thus, teachers must discover an occupation that rates highly on a measure of (1) “the extent in which

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the interests of a group are shared by all its members”; and they must arrange this occupation such that (2) “the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups [occupations]” (1916b: 115) is maximized. While the first point involves discovering an occupation on the basis of its fit with the genuine occupational interests of the young people involved, the second point is concerned with arranging this occupation as a continuous activity or set of activities, of efforts, paying particular attention to interactions with other occupations. This second point mitigates against the pitfalls associated with the isolation of any one occupation. “Any one occupation loses its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy at something in the degree in which it is isolated from other interests” (Dewey 1916b: 359). If so isolated, an occupation tends to be relatively static, whereas Dewey is arguing for dynamic occupations characterized by inquiry and continual development or reconstruction. Thus “the second [point] means not only freer interaction between social groups … but change in social habit – its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse” (p. 100). This intercourse is arranged by the teacher such that an educative occupation is continually maturing, being developed and improved by the young people involved via arranged interactions with other occupations (and some interactions that are not deliberately arranged but which occur as a result of other arrangements). However, it must be remembered that this arranging is premised on discovering; it has little meaning if the educative occupation is not genuine. By way of arranged interactions between occupations, occupations are potentially problematized, engendering inquiry. Problematizing occupations is crucial for education to be more thoroughly democratic, as evident in Dewey’s critique of the relatively unquestioned nature of mis-educative occupations such as burglar, gangster and corrupt politician, not to mention being-astudent.46 Interactions between occupations potentially result in awareness that there is more than one way of doing things or knowing things (and that there is more than one way of be-ing). If this creates a genuine problem, inquiry may be stimulated in aesthetic experience, in the original educative occupation, engendering reflective thinking (Figure 8.3). Via inquiry, choice may be afforded between different ways of knowing, doing and be-ing, requiring judgments to be made. Many such opportunities for choosing, leading to judgments, will have been arranged by teachers, but some may be less predictable.Any decisions made would result in further development of the original educative occupation as influenced by the other occupations, or even a rejection of the original occupation altogether (the preferred outcome if the original occupation is mis-educative), reflecting a preference for “that kind of self ” (Dewey 1916b: 408). This embraces Dewey’s “technical definition of education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (pp. 89–90). Such reconstruction or reorganization is of occupation, as be-ing, doing and knowing.

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Figure 8.3 Discovering occupations is phenomenological, while arranging occupations is pragmatic

Educating through occupations as a way out of educational confusion As noted at the very beginning of this book, occupation as be-ing, doing and knowing can be equated to the three basic “modes of experience” Dewey (1905a: 653) identifies: “the practical [doing], cognitional [knowing], aesthetic [be-ing].” However, now that we are equipped with a coherent theory of experience, these three modes can be understood much more profoundly in their phenomenological and pragmatic interpretations across the ontological difference and the logical difference (as well as Ereignis). These three modes constitute experience in its living unity, one that is “neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual” in any separate sense, “for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it” (1934b: 37). However, Dewey saw that “either directly or through psychology as an ally it [philosophy] has torn the intellectual, the emotional, and the practical asunder, erecting each into an entity, and thereby creating the artificial problem of getting them back into working terms with one another” (1948a: p. 203). This dividing is a product of the dominance of reflective, calculative thinking, in machination, and it places knowing above other modes of experience. Further, Dewey also recognizes that “knowing is instrumental to gaining control in a troubled situation,” and “it is also instrumental to the enrichment of the immediate significance of subsequent experiences” (1916a: 17). In other words, knowing cannot be dissociated from be-ing and doing. Heidegger (2010/1927: 60) also sees this, and rails against the traditional “interpretation of knowledge, still prevalent today, as a ‘relation between subject and object.’”

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Here, “in this approach, which has many variations, the question of the kind of being of this knowing subject is completely omitted” (p. 60). “But knowing neither first creates a ‘commercium’ of the subject with the world [world understood objectively], nor does this commercium originate from an effect of the world on a subject” (p. 62). In contrast, Heidegger argues that “knowing is a mode of Dasein which is founded in being-in-the-world” (p. 62). “Knowing is a kind of being of being-in-the-world” (p. 61). Hence, knowledge is of (owned by) occupation, it is of doing and be-ing. A change in knowledge is a change in doing and be-ing; in fact, a change in any one is a change in all three, as all three are of the one living unity, as universal phenomenon. When the nature of the instrumentality of knowledge is understood via its position in this living unity, then the adult future so important to traditional forms of education becomes a problem. Dewey offers the example of arithmetic (or mathematical knowledge) to highlight this issue, and he suggests how knowledge must be addressed when educating through occupations. The way to enable a student to apprehend the instrumental value of arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit it will be to him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him discover that [experiencing] success in something he is interested in doing depends upon ability to use number. (Dewey 1916b: 281) It is important to note here that Dewey is not simply suggesting that being-amathematician be developed into an educative occupation. In a description of the occupation of “trained mathematician” Dewey (1933a: 182–183) highlights how, for the mathematician, “nothing is more fascinating than to follow out the relations of concepts and, by discovering unexpected relations among them, see them unfold into a harmonious system whose contemplation gives great esthetic satisfaction.” Yet “higher and secondary [school] mathematics is to the majority of students a practical riddle with no definite intellectual content in itself ” (1896b: 288). This is because the intellectual content of mathematics is held within the occupation in which it is instrumental. For many young people this intellectual content is held within the occupation of being-a-mathematicsstudent. Here mathematics is knowledge known within doing the many tasks that are central to being-a-mathematics-student: primarily text book exercises, tests or exams. Thus the instrumentality of the mathematical content for a mathematics students is very different to the instrumentality of this same content for a mathematician. In other words, attempting to create a school-based occupation that engages with mathematical content by aligning being-a-mathematics-student with being-a-mathematician misses the insight that a major strength of mathematics, as with other disciplines, is the applicability of disciplinary knowledge in a broad range of occupations which are of more genuine interest to young people. Mathematical knowledge can have a wide variety of instrumental meanings and

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values beyond those original to being-a-mathematician. Similarly, the subject matter of “science, for example, may have any kind of value, depending upon the situation into which it enters as means” (Dewey 1916b: 282). To some the value of science may be military; it may be an instrument in strengthening means of offense and defense; it may be technological, a tool for engineering; or it may be commercial – an aid in the successful conduct of business; under other conditions, its worth may be philanthropic – the service it renders in relieving human suffering; or again it may be quite conventional – of value in establishing one’s social status as an “educated” person. As a matter of fact, science serves all these purposes, and it would be an arbitrary task to try to fix upon one of them as its ‘real’ end. (Dewey 1916b: 282) So education through occupations does not mean that the life of the school should be primarily constituted by occupations aligned with those of the scholars who more originally sought this disciplinary knowledge. In its traditional form this simply results in the creation of the proxy occupation of being-a-student, wherein knowledge may be somehow instilled outside of a genuinely meaningful occupation – for future use in other, remote occupations which are considered genuine by (some) adults. However, this is to turn life upside down. It is to ignore how experience works in its coherency, as be-ing, doing and knowing (phenomenological and pragmatic). Dewey (1902a: 20) points out that “the logically formulated material of a science or branch of learning, of a study, is no substitute for the having of personal experiences.” What is important is not the knowledge per se, but the experience, the genuine occupation as be-ing, doing and knowing within which that knowledge is instrumental and thus richly meaningful. This highlights the positive side of Dewey’s position. Education through occupations does mean that educative occupations must be discovered and arranged by teachers leaping ahead of young people. Additionally, educative occupations must be brought into intercourse with the be-ing, doing and knowing of other occupations (for example, the knowing of disciplinary occupations) such that the be-ing, doing and knowing (not just the knowing) that are seen as important in a curriculum may be known in an educative occupation, maturing and developing ways of doing and ways of be-ing (that are also ways of knowing). Here the proxy occupation of being-a-student disappears, to be replaced by more significant and genuine educative occupations, each as being-a-possibility. At the same time the life of the school is enriched because it is now constituted by the ways of be-ing, doing and knowing (the occupations) that express the interests of young people, their selves. Thus, through “the introduction into the school of various forms of active occupation … the entire spirit of the school is renewed. It has a chance to affiliate itself with life” (Dewey 1900: 31). Such an education through occupations is a way out of educational confusion, one based in a coherent theory of experience.

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Summary In this chapter we have further applied the coherent theory of experience espoused in Part Two of this book in order to achieve an interpretation of Dewey’s understanding of an education through occupations, so as to detail how such a coherent understanding of education offers a way out of educational confusion. When education is understood by way of occupations, the issue of time becomes central. Dewey spoke of the danger of regarding education as preparation for a remote future, one so distant that for a young person it does not seem connected with the present. However, from the perspective of the adults involved in designing such an education, this disconnection does not appear. This adult perspective is gained chiefly via reflective thinking; it is the connection between adult present and adult past, a connection of hindsight that informs education as preparation. A phenomenological comprehension of time highlights how an occupation is lived as being-a-possibility. It is future oriented, but this future as can-be is inseparable from having-been; this is presencing, dwelling. In other words, if a future is so remote that it does not appear within this occupation (it does not feature as can-be), then it is beyond comprehension. It is beyond care. Heidegger’s phenomenological sense of care is of great importance when education is understood by way of occupations. This is because education involves at least two occupations: being-a-teacher and being-a-student. Beinga-teacher requires genuinely embracing the care of others within one’s own care as being-a-teacher, without taking away the other’s care.This is the greatest challenge of teaching. Heidegger refers to this as leaping ahead of the other in relation to their care, not in terms of preparation but as enabling them to be this occupation. Therefore education is about ways of be-ing, as ways of be-ing constitute our lives. But how to teach like this? Education through occupations is not simply vocational education as preparation for a pre-determined adult future. Rather, it is education for the ways of be-ing that are significant for and genuine to a young person, a group of young people, in the here and now. Dewey highlights how teachers must discover such occupations by way of their understanding of young people. An experienced teacher does not just know subject matter and activities, he or she knows young people and their interests. These interests, as phenomenological occupations, can then be developed pragmatically. All occupations involve doing and knowing; these are instrumental within an occupation. Such pragmatic development Dewey refers to as arranging. Educating through occupations involves (1) discovering ways of be-ing, and (2) arranging ways of doing and ways of knowing. Occupations therefore span the ontological difference as be-ing (phenomenological), doing and knowing (pragmatic). In other words, occupation is a term that embraces a coherent theory of experience. Be-ing, doing and knowing align with Dewey’s sense of the trinity of the school, as (1) the life of the school, (2) the methods, and (3) the subject matter. It

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is common for educational investigations to focus on issues concerning method and subject matter, pedagogy and curriculum. However, these only engage with arranging; discovering is overlooked, and yet discovering involves the various ways of be-ing that constitute the life of the school. Without discovering, the life of the school is left to administrators, to be organized around disciplines (knowing) or actions (doing). By proxy, then, the life of the school consists primarily of the generic occupation of being-a-student, that occupation geared towards acquiring knowledge as preparation for a remote future. However, education can be much more than this.

Epilogue

This book has been all about finding coherence amid confusion, particularly in education but also, of necessity, in philosophy. Dewey embraced this confusion, which spurred him to seek coherence in both philosophy and education. Without a coherent theory of experience a coherent theory of education is not possible, and without a coherent theory of education, Dewey’s professed way out of educational confusion itself remains unclear. Such a quest embraces a philosophical challenge, to which Dewey responded with a theory of inquiry. However, while Dewey’s logical version of pragmatism is in itself a coherent understanding of reflective experience, it does not manage to clearly develop the association between aesthetic and reflective experience so important to inquiry. With the support of Peirce and Heidegger, this aesthetic side is more adequately positioned and elucidated in a coherent theory of experience. This coherent theory of experience brings together the twofold of existence identified by Dewey via Peirce’s three categories of experience, a twofold that is further exemplified in Heidegger’s four-part schema. This twofold highlights the differing emphases within existence of hermeneutic phenomenology and logical pragmatism around the ontological difference. However, it is more fully expressed in the threefold of occupation as be-ing, doing and knowing. This threefold of occupation embraces “a level deeper and more inclusive” (Dewey 1938a: 5) than the confusion involving child and curriculum, individual nature and social culture, the four ideological interest groups or goal areas of education that seem to only offer conflict. This deeper level is be-ing: beingin-the-world as being-a-possibility. Here the four are the fourfold opening the place of be-ing as way of be-ing, occupation as interest. In educational terms occupations form the life of the school as a democratic social institution. Thus schools contribute to a democratic society not merely by involving young people in their governance (although this possible strategy is often tokenistic), but by way of the many and various occupations discovered and arranged by teachers, each characterized by shared personal interest and continuing intercourse with other occupations, thereby continually challenging be-ing, doing and knowing. Education that serves democracy must be both phenomenological and pragmatic, aesthetic and scientific.

Epilogue 197 Dewey considers the trinity of education to be (1) the life of the school as a social institution, (2) the methods of learning and of doing work, and (3) the school studies or curriculum. This trinity of education is analogous to a trinity of occupation as a coherent theory of experience: (1) be-ing, (2) doing, and (3) knowing. This threefold is different to that suggested by Peirce, but Dewey’s engagement with Peirce’s firstness, secondness and thirdness opens the way to further development of a truly experiential philosophy that can reshape education. Dewey recognized that occupation, as a way of comprehending experience, is the factor connecting philosophy and education, but he struggled to express its aesthetic character. Heidegger’s important contribution is on this aesthetic and phenomenological side.Via Heidegger, it can be more clearly seen that occupations are not simply pragmatic, they also describe ways of be-ing. It is occupations, as ways of be-ing, as interests, that circumscribe the various aspects of our lives; they are the answer to who we are (phenomenologically understood), how we do things and what we know. Educationally they are the life of the school, the methods of learning and the subject matter. However, there is no finite list of occupations that teachers can draw from, no taxonomy of occupations that provides some final answer to curriculum, broadly conceived. Rather, occupations, as be-ing, doing and knowing, are always shifting and changing; new occupations are always on the horizon, old ones are fading away. The teacher’s tasks of discovering and arranging are never-ending. The important thing for being-a-teacher is to embrace this as the character of human be-ing (we are constantly developing new occupations) and to continue to discover and arrange occupations in ways which adequately acknowledge the care of those whose care is in our care. Being-a-teacher is a praise-worthy occupation, not because the teacher holds all the knowledge, but because the teacher is the one whose interest, purpose and knowledge lie in learning how to let them learn, in their be-ing, doing and knowing.

Notes

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Original references are used when citing Dewey’s work, rather than referring directly to the volumes of Dewey’s Collected Works. However, reference to volumes of Dewey’s Early Works (EW), Middle Works (MW) and Later Works (LW) is made for each of Dewey’s publications in the reference list, where the series designations are followed by volume and page number. Please see references for J. A. Boydston, the General Editor of these volumes, for further information on each series. Dewey’s original works have been cited so as to acknowledge the true dates of publication, thereby enabling Dewey’s ideas to be positioned historically alongside those of Peirce and Heidegger in particular. With this same aim in mind, the year of origin has been included when citing the works of Heidegger and Peirce. Dewey’s use of child does not imply reference to a particular age group that may be contrasted with, for example, youths or adolescents. Rather, Dewey uses the term to mean the growing person more generally. This interpretation builds on Dewey’s desire “to bring all things educational together; to break down the barriers that divide the education of the little child from the instruction of the maturing youth; to identify the lower and the higher education, so that it shall be demonstrated to the eye that there is no lower and higher, but simply education” (1900: 108). “Curriculum” is commonly used by Dewey to refer to “subject-matter” (1897a: 356) in contrast to method. This designation is different to the contemporary understanding of curriculum in the area of curriculum theory, which is broader. However, Dewey (1911a: 219) does foreshadow this difference when distinguishing the “practical point of view” of “the course of study” (which is concerned with the conduct and arrangement of the particular studies) from the “philosophical theory of the course of study,” which “does not grow out of accepting the currently established curriculum and asking how it may be perfected in efficiency, but centers about the ground and justification of any body of subject matter, and the reason for being of each constituent ingredient as a special means, or division of labor, for fulfilling the function of subject matter as a whole.” All italics used in quotations throughout this book are those of the original authors, unless otherwise indicated. Material in square brackets inside quotations has been inserted by the current author. However, in a limited number of cases these square brackets have been added to text penned by Heidegger by the translator of Heidegger’s work. Connections between the philosophies of Dewey and Peirce and those of Dewey and Heidegger, have, of course, been made by others concerned with education. Associations between Dewey and Peirce can be readily found in Dewey’s works (these are mentioned throughout this book) as well as in correspondence between

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6.

7.

8.

them. Discussion of this relationship in educational discourse has recently been presented by Prawat (1999, 2001, 2003). See note 11. Among the earliest to deal with the connection between Dewey and Heidegger in educational discourse was Troutner (1969: 125), who penned what he described as “a comparison of Heidegger’s and Dewey’s conceptions of man and an exploration of what these contrasting conceptions mean in terms of education,” although Troutner admitted that “almost all the biases that creep into this discussion are in Heidegger’s favor.” In a response to Troutner, Kestenbaum (1972: 105) took issue with his fairly one sided view, claiming that Troutner’s “talk of ‘synthesis’ and acknowledgement of Dewey’s importance are clearly nothing more than polite respect for the Grand Old Man of American Philosophy.” In contrast, Kestenbaum developed a much clearer exposition of Dewey’s method, thereby suggesting similarities with Heidegger’s phenomenology. Vandenberg (1971: 41) also promoted synergies between Dewey and Heidegger at this time, and continues to do so. In philosophical circles, Rorty (1976, 1979) and Zimmerman (1978) were among the earliest to discuss the connections between Dewey and Heidegger, suggesting similarity but also much in the way of difference. A great deal of the contention surrounding the relationship revolves around whether Dewey was a phenomenologist, like Heidegger, or whether Heidegger was a pragmatist, like Dewey. Okrent (1988) is perhaps the most well known author to have argued for Heidegger’s pragmatism, but his position is heartily contested. Blattner (1991, 1992, 2000, 2008) offers a well-developed précis of the difference, but also of the connection. See note 29. These connections have also been explored by Margolis (1998, 2010). Considerations of the connections between Peirce and Heidegger are much rarer. See notes 23 and 25. Dewey was well aware of the ambiguity surrounding the term progressive education and the confusion that it caused.“The phrase ‘progressive education’ has been and is frequently used to signify almost any kind of school theory and practice that departs from previously established scholastic methods” (Dewey 1951: vii). However, while “many of these procedures, when they are examined, are found to be innovations, … there seems to be no sound basis for regarding them as progressive” (p. vii). Dewey did not consider all educational reforms to be progressive education, for some remained beholden to forms of tradition. I shall use the term progressive education more simply (and more broadly) to collectively refer to the newer forms of education which aimed to reform traditional education. Like Dewey, Kliebard did not see any coordination amongst these various reform movements. “In no sense … do they add up to one progressive education movement,” Kliebard (2004: 287) stressed. It is problematic that many of the authors quoted “use masculine expressions when speaking about human beings in general” (Bernstein 2002: x). Bernstein acknowledges this difficulty in his use of philosophical texts written prior to the positive impact of the feminist movement. I apologize for maintaining this sexist language in these quotes, but I could not come up with a way of removing it without making the text seem clumsy. I have avoided this type of language use when the words are my own. Schiro (2008: 10) draws a comparison between a number of curriculum classification schemes, including that of Kliebard (2004), and determines that “almost all theorists have identified positions similar to the Scholar Academic, Social Efficiency, Learner Centered, and Social Reconstruction positions.”

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9. Dewey’s “was not a theory in the received meaning of the term. Its aim was not to explain and provide settled ‘understanding’ but to persuade its readers to embark on a practice” (Schwab 1959: 142). 10. Peirce does not claim to have been the originator of the idea of a triad. “Nobody will suppose that I wish to claim any originality in reckoning the triad important in philosophy. Since Hegel, almost every fanciful thinker has done the same,” Peirce points out (1931/1980: 192). Hence, “originality is the last of recommendations for fundamental conceptions. On the contrary, the fact that the minds of men have ever been inclined to threefold divisions is one of the considerations in favor of them” (p. 192). 11. It may be noted that my references to Dewey’s ideas on a particular issue often span a considerable period of his life. In this sense, much of Dewey’s work exhibits continuity across his career. Thus my position is in disagreement with Prawat (2001 2003), who argues for a discontinuity in Dewey’s work after an uptake of Peirce’s ideas in the middle of his career, around 1915. I suggest that Dewey embraced Peirce’s work much earlier. One possible piece of evidence for this is the correspondence between Dewey and Peirce during the years 1904 and 1905 (Peirce 1958/1904) concerning Dewey’s papers in Studies in Logical Theory, edited by Dewey (1903), which reveal his emerging pragmatism. 12. It is extremely important to the interpretation of this book that the term individual is comprehended in its phenomenological meaning. This note is intended to further emphasize this point. Here, individual does not mean an individual person, thing, or idea separate from other individual persons, things, or ideas. Phenomenologically, the term individual conveys the individual, unique, aesthetic, qualitative, direct, immediate whole of experience. It is the individual unity of existence, expressed by Peirce (1902: 734) as “individuality.” Individuality, as the individual unity of existence, is not opposed to any sense of the social or communal, for it includes others in a phenomenological way. The phenomenon of the individual whole of our existence always includes others and things, but not as a totality or multiplicity; instead it is unity as simplicity, as one. Dewey attempts to convey this with his understandings of aesthetic experience, and affective and qualitative thinking. 13. Two-sidedness as used here by Dewey and James does not refer to the two sides of secondness, i.e. individuality and interaction, but to the two-sidedness of interaction itself, in terms of organism and environment. 14. This understanding of facts and ideas as primary and secondary respectively can be traced to Dewey’s understanding of Locke (cf. Dewey 1926b). 15. The term being is used here by Dewey to denote a universal class of objects.This usage is very different to that of Heidegger, for whom being is the experiential be-ing. 16. When referring to pragmatism in general I have in mind Dewey’s logical version of pragmatism, which is confined to reflective thinking. While always being connected to non-reflective thought via the broader sense of inquiry, it does not directly address non-reflective thinking. 17. Dewey is here highlighting how there is no separate distinction in involvement of an I, a position akin to Heidegger’s sense of mineness, as who. 18. This difficulty Dewey experiences with making the foreground of context an explicit object of reflection is a function of his understanding of time. 19. Dewey used both esthetic and aesthetic spelling options.When not in direct quotes I shall use aesthetic. 20. Dewey’s mention of pure experience draws, at least in part, on James’ (1904b: 478) discussion of “pure experience” in its connection with his radical empiricism. According to Dewey (1912, June 9: 357), James “propounds the radical, almost revolutionary, doctrine of pure experience which is prior to the distinction of

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21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

mental and physical and wholly neutral as to the distinction.” For example, “this room, as directly experienced … is not in itself either physical or mental; it is just what it is as experienced; it is an experience” (p. 357). Dewey (1905b) titles his version of radical empiricism “immediate empiricism.” I consider Dewey’s sense of an experience as an aesthetic whole, rounded out over time to be a product of his pragmatic understanding of time as temporal continuity. Bernstein (1961) also notes Dewey’s difficulty in this area of quality. Anderson (1986: 119) acknowledges the “common ground” between Peirce and Heidegger, although they never collaborated. Gray (1977: 77) notes that Heidegger, later in his career, “never ceased to question me about new developments in America and was reading the works of Charles Peirce, newly translated, until the end.” While Dewey and Heidegger never met or spoke directly, Hook (1974: 103), a close colleague of Dewey’s, describes Dewey as “sympathetic to Heidegger, whom he knew only from secondary accounts.” One source of these secondary accounts is Hook himself. “After listening to my account of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] when I returned from Germany in 1929, he [Dewey] remarked:‘It sounds like a description of “the situation” in transcendental German’” (p. 103). Such a remark highlights the difficulty surrounding the twofold character of secondness as both interaction and individuality. A possible connection exists between Heidegger’s phenomenology and Peirce’s phenomenology through the phenomenological work of Husserl. Heidegger was enamored with Husserl’s phenomenology, but he struggled at first to comprehend it. “My perplexity decreased slowly, my confusion dissolved laboriously, only after I met Husserl personally in his workshop” (Heidegger 1972/1963: 78). The connection between Husserl and Peirce in relation to phenomenology has been investigated by Spiegelberg (1956) and Dougherty (1980). While it is beyond the scope of this study to engage directly with the difficult issue of the connection between Heidegger’s nazism and his philosophy, I believe that the phenomenological sense of the formal that characterizes Heidegger’s phenomenological concepts must be able to accommodate Dasein as evil as well as good (in a concrete existentiell sense, and as perceived from within a particular being-here). In addition I suggest that if one emphasizes the phenomenological side to the neglect of the pragmatic side as Heidegger was apt to do, then a nondemocratic position may be the result. Shades of such an argument are apparent in Rorty (1976: 304). In this vein Peirce (1958/1904: 222) emphasizes “the naïveté of Firstness.” Dewey (1929a: 12) concurs in his description of “naïve experience.” It is in this sense, I believe, that Heidegger (1968/1951–52: 159) speaks of how phenomenological thinking “does not bring knowledge as do the sciences,” “does not produce usable practical wisdom,” “solves no cosmic riddles,” and “does not endow us directly with the power to act.” The functional connection between phenomenological and pragmatic standpoints via inquiry is necessary to a democratic education. Heidegger’s use of the term Dasein is well analyzed by Hofstadter. “In the constitution of the verb ‘dasein’ and the correlative noun ‘Dasein’ the da suggests, first of all, the here or the there, the somewhere as a definite location; dasein is to be here or to be there; Dasein is being-here or being-there. There are also overtones of being at some more or less definite time: being-then, being-when, being-at-thetime. These temporal connotations fit into Heidegger’s usage” (Hofstadter 1982: 334–335). Heidegger (1999/1936–38: 307) “writes being [Sein] as ‘be-ing’ [Seyn]” in order to “indicate that being is here no longer thought metaphysically.” Be-ing conveys

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29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

Notes a more experiential sense of being-here than the traditional metaphysical sense which, for Heidegger, is primarily concerned with beings. This convention, be-ing for Seyn, is not always followed in translations of Heidegger’s work into English. This difference between Dewey’s pragmatism and Heidegger’s phenomenology is taken up by Blattner. “Dewey … conceives ideas and assertions biologistically, that is, in terms of their functional role in the overall economy of the human organism’s interaction with its environment” (Blattner 2000: 248), whereas “Heidegger is not a biologistic thinker. He conceives of assertions and ideas as ‘existential derivatives’ of originary disclosure” (pp. 248–289). Blattner (2008: 75) speaks of a “marriage” between Dewey’s pragmatism and Heidegger’s phenomenology. Importantly, such a marriage remains between two partners (a twofold); there is no conflation here. The it is “the mystery of enownment” (Heidegger 1999/1936–38: 287), the mystery of “the last god” which “is not enowning itself; rather, it needs enowning as that to which the founder of the t/here belongs” (p. 288). The last god is not a being, but be-ing. I have made this bracketed addition to Heidegger’s words in light of the difficulty he acknowledges with his early use of the term Dasein as both a being and beinghere. Heidegger’s use of the term structure in conjunction with construction is problematic as it is very open to misinterpretation in the direction of thirdness. It is most important to recognize that these structures are not related as cause and effect on the calculative side of the ontological difference. Rather, they are analogous ways (analogous paths) by way of which to understand the qualitative aesthetic whole. The phenomenological sense of his use of the term concept is also easily misunderstood. The sense of here and there is understood phenomenologically and so a different comprehension of spatiality is invoked. “We are accustomed to taking nearness and remoteness always only calculatively, and from the viewpoint of distance, and retrorelated to the ‘body’ when it is taken as corporeal,” Heidegger notes (2006/1938– 39: 96). Then, “straightaway we carry the spatial that is grasped in this manner over to the ‘temporal’” (p. 96). However, phenomenologically, it is the temporal that is more originary, and this is carried over to the spatial. The phenomenological sense of here/there is understood temporally and therefore more adequately via meaning (the question of the meaning of be-ing). What is near (here/there) is not what is closest by distance, but by meaning. Interestingly Dewey also speaks in this phenomenological way when he describes his understanding of environment. “Some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him” (Dewey 1916b: 13). If t/here offers a choice in the English translation of Da, then I prefer here, rather than there, because being-here communicates Heidegger’s standpoint better in English than being-there, which can seem (to a calculative interpretation) to be more distant. A connection can be seen between the existentiell real Heidegger refers to here and what Dewey (1905b: 393) describes as “immediate empiricism.” Dewey (pp. 393–394) argues that “if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being. If it is a horse that is to be described, or the equus that is to be defined, then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the timid family man who wants a ‘safe driver,’ or the zoologist or the paleontologist tell us what the horse is which is experienced. If these accounts turn out different in some respects, as well as congruous in others, this is no reason for assuming the content of one to be exclusively ‘real,’ and that of others to be ‘phenomenal’; for each account of

Notes 203

36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

what is experienced will manifest that it is the account of the horse-dealer, or of the zoologist, and hence will give the conditions requisite for understanding the differences as well as the agreements of the various accounts. And the principle varies not a whit if we bring in the psychologist’s horse, the logician’s horse or the metaphysician’s horse.”These modes of experience are akin to occupations, offering a contrast “not between a Reality, and various approximations to, or phenomenal representations of Reality, but between different reals of experience” (p. 394). An insight into Heidegger’s sense of phenomenological destruction may be gleaned from Kuhn’s (1962: 67) use of the phrase “paradigm destruction.” For Heidegger the paradigm being destructed is that of calculative thinking with beings. Apel (1996: 260) suggests that “to Kuhn’s normative paradigm there corresponds Heidegger’s clearing.” Also relevant to this understanding of destruction is Garrison’s (1999b) recognition of the difference between “Heidegger’s destruction” (p. 346) and “Derrida’s deconstruction” (p. 352). Meaningfulness does not have to equate to a pragmatic sense of knowing. Not knowing what something is, and therefore this something appearing as strange or unknown, is also meaning. Heidegger conveys this by referring to someone who may not know what a lectern is. For this person a lectern may be a range of things, but it remains strange and unknown. Thus “the meaningful character of ‘instrumental strangeness,’ and the meaningful character of the ‘lectern,’ are in their essence absolutely identical” (2000/1919: 61). The confusion surrounding Heidegger’s turning, as well as the issue of the relation between Heidegger I (the question of the meaning of being) and Heidegger II (the question of the truth of being), as labelled by Richardson (1967), are also further discussed by Emad (1995) and Hemming (1998), amongst others. Movement and movedness are central phenomenological concepts for Heidegger. While English translations do not follow a set way of interpretation that clearly distinguishes between them, I use movement as concrete (existentiell) and movedness as formal (existential). Potentiality-of-being and potentiality-for-being are different English translations of the same German word: seinkönnen. The they is a translation of the German das Man. It is also translated as “the One” (Heidegger 2009/1924: 44) and “the Anyone” (Heidegger 1985/1925: 243). “Logos” means in “Greek, ‘word,’ ‘speech,’ ‘reason’” (Crisp 1999: 518), but it has a much broader phenomenological sense concerned with the showing character of language. “Physis” is a “Greek term for nature, primarily used to refer to the nature or essence of a living thing”; it “is defined by Aristotle … as a source of movement and rest that belongs to something in virtue of itself ” (Prior 1999: 707). Heidegger interprets physis phenomenologically. Knoll (2009: 381) points out that “social efficiency … was not a unified, homogeneous concept”, and therefore defining the notion of social efficiency with complete clarity is problematic. Knoll also identifies Dewey’s positive use of the term as meaning “‘social empowerment’ and the capability of the child to solve problems and put insights into effect” (p. 382), thereby conveying, I believe, a position sitting between individual and social. In Dewey’s words, “the doctrine is rendered adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in occupations having a social meaning” (1916b: 139). In the same breath Dewey acknowledges that he is battling here against others in his attempts to define the term. Knoll (1997) has researched the origins of the project notion in education, tracing this back much further than Kilpatrick.

204

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46. Here the problematic issue of connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and politics can, perhaps, be addressed. While Heidegger (1985/1925: 295) acknowledges “various ways of being” in an existentiell sense – a variety that must inevitably lead to concrete confrontation between different meaningful ways of being, different meaningful worlds – his choices amongst the variety available to him, and his decisions in regard to the juxtapositions and confrontations that arise, reveal the whos he is and the meaningful worlds in which he dwells. Dewey’s sense of democracy in education as it pertains to the shared personal intercourse between occupations is not present in Heidegger’s philosophy, where the focus is on the formal or existential of the existentiell, rather than the existentiell itself. This lacuna in Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology does not detract from his formal concepts, which must be able to accommodate all varieties of ways of existentiell being, but it does highlight the need for a connection with logical pragmatism via the passageway of the ontological difference. Alone, each is a onetrack way of thinking.

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Index

abstract reflection 25, 27–8 abstraction 43, 45, 51, 54, 65; causes of confusion 159, 163; non-reflective experience 68; occupations 177–8; phenomenology 115, 121 academic goals 9–10 action plans 27 administration 11, 13 , 186, 195 aesthetics/aesthetic experience 16–18, 52–73, 76–81, 83, 91; causes of confusion 168, 171; o ccupations 178, 181–3, 190–1; ontological difference 78–81; phenomenology 105, 108, 112–13, 118, 124, 126; temporality 132 affective thinking 63–4, 69 analogy 119–22, 126, 128, 130–2, 137–8, 149, 153, 185 anthropology 89, 140, 149 Aristotle 120, 146, 150–3, 157–8, 160–1, 171 arranging 187–90, 193–5 art 59, 61–3, 76, 116, 175, 189 artificial signs 32, 36, 40, 50–1, 112, 114 attunement 133–4, 141 authenticity 79–80 autonomous logic 25–6 autonomy 57 background 52–8, 66, 68 be-ing 104–7, 127–54, 157, 171–95 Being and Time 128 belief 44–5 Bell, J. 168 bifurcation 170 biologism 88 biology 16, 55, 57, 88 building 127, 148–50, 175–9, 188 calculative thinking 91–8, 103, 106–7, 111, 123, 186, 191

capitalism 165 care 132–8, 140–1, 144, 153, 172; occupations 176, 181, 184, 186, 189, 194 careers 168 Cartesianism 136 cause and effect 47, 62, 66, 74, 106; be-ing 149, 151, 153; causes of confusion 168; ontological difference 103; phenomenology 111, 125; temporality 136 characteristics 39, 42 Chicago University 174, 183 Child Study 10 child-centered approaches 157–61, 171 child-purposing 173–4, 189 citizenship 169 civic goals 9 class 163 cognition 27, 32 cognitional mode of experience 16, 18 coherent theory of education 21–2, 155, 157–95 coherent theory of experience 3, 16, 22–3, 25–154, 186, 191, 193–4 common sense 40–2, 45, 51 compromise 6–11, 21–2 concept types 117–27, 140, 149, 153, 158, 177–8 concrete reflection 25, 27–8, 51, 54–5, 57–9; ontological difference 76, 79–81, 92; phenomenology 116–18, 121; role 68 confusion 3–4, 6–11, 21–2, 26, 36–7; be-ing 151–4; causes 157–71; nonreflective experience 61; occupations 173, 175, 186, 191–4 conjectural anticipation 27 consciousness 17 consequences 47–8

220

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construction 104, 107–9, 117, 123–4, 126 content 34, 185, 192 contexts of inquiry 52–8 continuity 45–51 critical thinking 40–1 Cuban, L. 3, 6–8, 21, 157 culture 53–4, 58, 66, 76, 108; causes of confusion 158, 160, 163, 168; occupations 175, 186 curriculum 3, 7–11, 21, 151, 157; causes of confusion 157–69, 171; occupations 172, 174–5, 186, 188, 193, 195 Dasein 77–81, 83, 85–6, 89–90, 95; being 128; occupations 177, 181, 192; ontological difference 98–100, 102–3; phenomenology 104, 106, 110–11, 117, 119–22, 124; temporality 130–41, 143–4 death 143–4 deconstruction 124, 168 democracy 14, 169, 187, 189, 196 Democracy and Education 14 designation 124 destruction 104, 122–5, 133, 146, 150, 152, 157 developmentalism 9, 165–7, 171, 173, 189 Dewey, J. 3–6, 8, 11–18, 21–2, 52–5; be-ing 149–53; causes of confusion 157–63, 166–71; non-reflective experience 57–69; occupations 172–88, 190–1, 193–4; ontological difference 70–6, 81, 83, 86–8, 91–2, 94, 97–8, 102; phenomenology 105–10, 112–13, 115, 118; reflective experience 25–51; temporality 130, 132–4, 143 disciplines 176–7, 179, 184, 192–3, 195 discourse 112–13, 123, 141, 187 discovering 187–90, 193, 195 distantiality 135 divinities 140–4, 147, 181 division in education 3–6 doing 184–6, 190–5 Donnelly, J. 168 double-barrelledness 30, 32 doubt 26 dualism 4–5, 14–15, 54, 159 Duns Scotus, J. 71, 76–7, 102 earth 144–8 education 3–22, 151–4; confusion 157–71; definitions 12–13, 32, 190; difficulties 172–5; future preparation 175–8; occupations 168–95

efficient causes 160–4, 166, 171, 181 effort 180–6, 189–90 emotion 59, 62–3, 65, 68, 92, 132–3 empiricism 55, 57 enactment 185–6 enframing 95–6, 103, 186 English language 39 environment 29–32, 76, 149, 153 epistemology 18, 25 epos 143 Ereignis 81–3, 85–6, 99, 107–8, 147; be-ing 128–9, 152; occupations 191; phenomenology 110–11, 116, 118–19, 121–2, 126; temporality 130, 140, 144–5 examinations 177, 192 existence 3–22, 25 existential matrices 52–5, 62, 86 existentiality 16, 19, 117–19 existentiell 117–19, 137, 139–40, 178 experience, definition 30 experiential philosophy 16–18, 22, 70–3 facts/facticity 34–7, 42, 45, 54, 78–81; occupations 180, 184; ontological difference 83, 98, 102–3; phenomenology 106–7, 110, 115, 119 feelings 59, 62–3, 133 final causes 160–2, 164–6, 168, 171, 181 firstness 16–17, 19–20, 22, 63–4, 66–8; ontological difference 71–5, 80–3, 86, 97, 99, 102; phenomenology 106, 114, 116, 118, 123 fore-structure 110 foreground 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 64, 69 forgetting 98–103 formal causes 158–60, 162–5, 168, 171, 176, 181 formal indications 117–23 four causes 146, 150–3, 157–71 fourfold mirroring 146–8 fundamental ontology 86–9 future preparation 175–8, 188–9, 192–5 Garrison, J. 63 generalization 36–8, 44 generic propositions 36–40, 42–3, 51 German language 78, 81, 102 goal areas 9–10, 21, 151–2, 157–8, 168, 176 gods see divinities Goodlad, J. 3, 9, 21, 157–8, 171 grades 11 Greek language 141–4, 148

Index habits 48–54, 56–7, 72, 150, 174, 186–7, 189–90 habitus 97 haecceitas/haecceity 71–2, 76–8, 102–3, 125, 130 Harvard University 14 heaven 144–7 Heidegger, M. 20, 67–70, 73–93, 95–103, 127–54; causes of confusion 160, 171; occupations 172, 175–6, 178–81, 185–6, 191–2, 194; phenomenology 104–9, 111–14, 116–20, 122–6 hermeneutics 76, 78, 89, 109–12, 117; be-ing 131, 151; phenomenology 120–1, 125; temporality 140 Higgins, C. 182 historicity 90 Hölderlin, F. 116 holism 3, 15, 21–2, 58–9, 62; causes of confusion 160; non-reflective experience 68; ontological difference 76; phenomenology 113 Homer 143 humanism 9, 54, 163–4, 167, 169, 171, 173 Husserl, E. 78, 104, 109, 121, 130 hybridization 6–11, 21, 157, 167 hypotheses 27 icons 123 ideas 34–7, 41, 115 ideology 8–12, 21, 151, 153, 157–8; causes of confusion 161–8; occupations 172, 176, 178–9 if-then propositions 37–40, 42, 47, 49 implication 35–7, 41–2, 51 inceptual thinking 107, 111 incidental reflective experience 25–9, 51 individuality 3, 5–7, 9, 18–20, 157–63; causes of confusion 165–6, 171; occupations 175, 181, 186, 188 induction 41 ineffability 112 inference 35–8, 40, 42, 51 inquiry 36, 45–7, 50–1, 91, 128; causes of confusion 161; contexts 52–8; definitions 26, 150; matrices 68; occupations 190 instinct 174 instrumentalism 25, 42–5, 50, 56–8, 61, 192–4 intelligence 58 intentionality 130, 160

221

interaction 18–20, 22, 25, 28–32, 47; logical difference 50; non-reflective experience 56–7, 59–62, 66, 68; occupations 186–90; ontological difference 70, 72, 74, 76–7, 79, 81–3, 93, 102–3; phenomenology 105, 116, 118; temporality 130, 134 interest 180–6 interest groups 8–12, 21, 151–3, 157–8, 168, 173, 175 interpretation 109–11, 117–18, 125–6, 140, 151 intuition 63–4, 78 involvement 35–7, 51–2 James, W. 30, 32, 45–8, 51, 65 Kant, I. 71–2 Kilpatrick, W.H. 172–5, 180, 189 Klein, J. 7 Kliebard, H. 3, 8–10, 21, 157–8, 161; causes of confusion 163–4, 167–8, 170–1; occupations 172, 176 knowledge 42–5, 184–6, 190–5 Laboratory School 174, 183 language 112–17, 121–3, 126, 141–3, 147–8, 153, 159 law, definition 48–50 leap 20, 36, 87, 97–8, 127; leap in for 172, 175–178; leap ahead of 172, 178–80, 189, 194 learner-centered approaches 157, 165–6, 171, 189 life histories 10 literacy 7 logical difference 25, 36–40, 51, 118–19, 184–5, 191 logos 81, 127, 140–8, 153 McGrath, S.J. 78 machination 95–6, 103, 106–7, 114, 186 material causes 158–60, 162, 165–6, 171, 181 mathematics 94, 106, 192–3 meaning 127–40, 146, 152–3 mediation 16, 28 meditative thinking 96–8, 103, 106–9, 111, 123; be-ing 151; phenomenology 125; temporality 140 meliorism 9, 166–7 metaphysics 16–18, 25, 56, 87–9, 142, 159 mind 56–8 mindful thinking 107

222

Index

mis-educative experience 187, 190 modernism 4, 6, 157 modes of being 120 modes of concern 175–6 modes of experience 16–18, 31, 76–7, 191 modes of relation 32–6, 51, 57 modes of self 135–6 mortals 140–4, 147, 181 movedness 140–6 movement of meaning 130–40 multiple existence 73–8, 103 mythos 142–3 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) 7 naturalism 32–3, 49–51, 54, 57, 112 Nietzsche, F. 116 non-reflective experience 52–69 norms 166 numeracy 7 objectives, definition 35 objects, definition 35 occupation 48, 154, 157, 168–95 ontology/ontological difference 18, 70–105, 109, 112, 117–19; be-ing 127–8, 130, 148–53; causes of confusion 157, 168, 171; definitions 86–7; occupations 180, 184–5, 189, 194; phenomenology 106, 114–16, 119–20, 122–6; temporality 135, 141–2, 145 organism 29–32, 149, 153 others 135, 139, 172, 175–81, 189, 194 Parmenides 144 path 107–8, 122, 125 pedagogy 7–8, 158, 195 Peirce, C.S. 3, 16–19, 22, 28, 45–51; be-ing 153; non-reflective experience 63, 65–8; occupations 185; ontological difference 70–6, 80–2, 93, 102–3; phenomenology 112, 115, 123; temporality 130 perplexity 26 personal goals 9–10 phenomenology 66, 68–9, 74, 76–83, 86–7; be-ing 127–9, 147–8, 152–4; causes of confusion 157, 168, 171; occupations 172, 175, 179–82, 184–5, 188, 191, 193–4; ontological difference 89–90, 92, 96–101, 103; role 104–26; temporality 130–1, 133–42, 144 Phillips, D.C. 13–14 philosophy 3–22, 46, 48

physics 16 physis 144–8, 153 poesy 116–17, 120, 126, 143 poetry 116–17, 148–50, 189 poiesis 148, 150, 189 post-reflective situations 25–7 power relations 11 practical mode of experience 16 pragmatism 25, 45–50, 57, 60–1, 65–8; be-ing 127, 148–9; causes of confusion 157–9, 161, 168, 171; nonreflective experience 52–8; occupations 172, 174–5, 179–81, 185, 188, 191, 193–4; ontological difference 70, 73, 75, 77, 81, 83–4, 89, 91, 93–4, 97, 103; phenomenology 104–7, 109, 112–16, 122–6; temporality 130, 136 pre-hension 109–10 pre-possession 109–10 pre-reflective situations 25–7 presencing 96–8, 100–1, 111, 117, 121; be-ing 132, 146–8; occupations 176, 194; phenomenology 124 preview 109–10 progressive education 4–5, 7–8, 12, 21, 157–8, 160, 166–7, 179 Progressive Education Association 167 project method 172–5, 180–6, 189 psychology 16–17, 19, 26, 48, 84; be-ing 140; causes of confusion 161, 163, 166; occupations 191 qualitative thinking 63–4, 69, 97, 103, 113, 117 quality-conditioned existence 66–8 question of be-ing 127–54 question of meaning 140 ratiocination 36, 111 reasoning 36, 51 reduction 104–7, 110, 117, 120–3, 125–7 Reese, W.J. 4 reference, definition 34 reflective experience 25–51, 97, 103, 112, 168; occupations 182, 188, 190–1, 194 regulated reflection 25–9, 36, 41, 51, 172, 184 relation 185; definition 33–4 remembrance 104–8, 117, 122 Richardson, W.J. 129 rigor 105–6 rules of thumb 27 scaffolding 123

Index

223

Schiro, M. 3, 10–11, 21, 157–8, 163; causes of confusion 165, 171; occupations 179 scholar academic ideology 10, 157, 162–4, 166, 169; causes of confusion 171; occupations 176, 178–9 science 40–2, 51, 54–7, 61, 64; causes of confusion 164; occupations 177, 193; ontological difference 84–6, 88, 90–1, 93–5, 97; phenomenology 105–8, 111–13, 122, 124 secondness 16–18, 20, 22, 25, 29; logical difference 37, 50; non-reflective experience 51, 56, 66; ontological difference 70–1, 73–8, 80–6, 89, 98, 103; phenomenology 105, 118; temporality 130 self 79–81, 92, 98–9, 124, 130, 135–7, 140, 149, 180, 190; authentic self 135– 6, 140, 142–4, 181; selfhood 79, 81, 92, 99, 124, 138, 140, 144; selfishness 153; they-self 135, 140, 142–4, 181 self-obstruction 124 significance 137–9, 153, 191, 193 signs 32–6, 40, 50–1, 112, 114, 123 simple existence 73–8, 103 situations 31, 62 social efficiency ideology 9–10, 157, 162, 164–7, 169; causes of confusion 168, 171; occupations 173, 176 social goals 9–10 social life 187 social reconstructionist ideology 9–10, 157, 165–7, 171 social relations 157–61, 171, 181, 186 socialization 9, 174 sociology 16, 19 solipsism 135, 153, 181 standardization 43–4 strife 145 structure 18 surveys 27 symbols 32–7, 40, 50–1, 65, 112–14 synechism 75

techne 148, 150 temporality 130–46 theology 16 theory of inquiry 25 thirdness 16, 18–20, 22, 25, 37; non-reflective experience 51, 63, 66; ontological difference 70–5, 81–2, 93, 97, 103; phenomenology 117, 119; reflective experience 46 thrownness 133 time 90–6, 100–1, 103, 112, 117; be-ing 129–40, 153; occupations 182, 188, 194 Time and Being 129 time-space 130–2, 136–7, 146 Tonner, P. 76–7 topos 147 trade education 164, 168–70, 173 traditional education 4–7, 9, 21, 157–60, 166–7; occupations 173, 186, 188, 193 transaction 20, 31, 56–7 trial and error 27–9, 32, 36, 40, 172, 184 truth 115–17, 123, 126–9, 140–7, 152–3 twofold existence 18–20, 50, 70, 73–8, 85, 89–91, 103

Tanner, L. 174 Tao 81 teachers 5, 7–11, 21, 157, 164; causes of confusion 168; occupations 172–80, 186–90, 193–4, 196–7; role 196–7 Teachers College Bureau of Publications 172 teaching practices 6–8

warranted assertibility 45 The Way Out of Educational Confusion 14 Westbury, I. 3 who 92, 124, 127, 132–7, 139–40, 144, 149, 153, 181, 185, 197 who-world 140, 149, 185 world 118–19, 127, 130–2, 136–40, 147–8; be-ing 153; occupations 172, 185

understanding 50, 56, 58, 111–12, 114–16; be-ing 128, 132–4; causes of confusion 157–8, 166, 170; occupations 172, 179, 185, 188; phenomenology 118, 121–2, 124; temporality 141 United States (US) 6, 8, 11 unity 3–4, 14–16, 19, 59, 70–3; analogy 119–22, 130, 132, 137; causes of confusion 170; occupations 180; ontological difference 82, 96; temporality 144–5 universal propositions 36–40, 42–3, 49–51 University Primary School 161 verification 42–3 vocationalism 9–10, 164–5, 168–71, 182, 184, 194 volitional mode of experience 17–18

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