[MD] Dewey's Zen

[david buchanan]

This might be fun but it's also a kind of experiment. I was reading a paper and saw many parallels to Pirsig, which wasn't very surprising because it's titled "Dewey's Zen". But I wonder if others read it the same way I do. In certain passages it seems like one could plug Pirsig's terms into the sentences and they'd still mean the same thing - almost exactly. Telling you more than that - like which terms I had in mind - it would ruin the experiment. How about if I just post a bit of it and let everyone take a shot at it? Maybe it would be fun to put in Pirsig's terms wherever you think they would fit. Take your pick or play with them all, but please be explicit enough to let me know if you're seeing the same thing that I'm seeing.


...experiences come whole, pervaded by unifying qualities that demarcate them within the flux of our lives. If we want to find meaning, or the basis for meaning, we must therefore start with the qualitative unity that Dewey describes. The demarcating pervasive quality is, at first, unanalyzed, but it is the basis for subsequent analysis, thought, and development. Thought starts from this experienced whole, and only then does it introduce distinctions that carry it forward as inquiry.
            It is not wrong to say that we experience objects, properties, and relations, but it is wrong to say that these are primary in experience. What are primary are pervasive qualities of situations, within which we subsequently discriminate objects, properties, and relations.

 Dewey took great pains to remind us that the primary locus of human experience is not atomistic sense impressions, but rather what he called a "situation," by which he meant, not just our physical setting, but the whole complex of physical, biological, social, and cultural conditions that constitute any given experience—experience taken in its fullest, deepest, richest, broadest sense.

Mind, on this view, is neither a willful creator of experience, nor is it a mere window to objective mind-independent reality. Mind is a functional aspect of experience that emerges when it becomes possible for us to share meanings, to inquire into the meaning of a situation, and to initiate action that transforms, or remakes, that situation.


The pervasive quality of a situation is not limited merely to sensible perception or motor interactions. Thinking is action, and so "acts of thought" also constitute situations that must have pervasive qualities. Even our best scientific thinking stems from the grasp of qualities. 

And perhaps my favorite....

            The crux of Dewey's entire argument is that what we call thinking, or reasoning, or logical inference could not even exist without the felt qualities of situations: "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."