The Structure of Qualitative Thought
I offer an interpretation of John Dewey's "Qualitative Thought" that synthesizes
elements from Experience and Nature, Human Nature and Conduct, and Art as
Experience. Its purpose is to explain how the momentary structure of habit guides
the conversion of quality to sense, thought, and object through channeling the
flow of qualitative experience and informing its conversion conditions.
The
explanation exposes a limitation of the Deweyan model of inquiry based on the
problematic situation: the possibility of inquiry is dependent upon potentialities of
the situation.
The natural potentiality must exist prior to its experienced
possibility that leads to the question of how far we may push the limits of a
situation, e.g., how flexible are our habits?
INTRODUCTION
I offer an interpretation of John Dewey's "Qualitative Thought" that synthesizes
elements from Experience and Nature, Human Nature and Conduct, and Art as
Experience.
The inspiration for the project
is
Victor
Kestenbaum's
The
Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey and its analysis of the role of habit in
meaningful experience. He writes, "[m]eaning comes into being through the dialectic of
self and world, and man is a sense-giving being on the level of pre-objective experience,
that of habit."i The thrust of the inspiration is to articulate the structure or mechanism of
habit that orders qualitative experience as pre-objective becomes objective experience. In
other words, how objects coalesce from the background to the foreground of attentive
experience.
In "Qualitative Thought," Dewey aims to explain "the meaning of regulation by an
underlying and pervasive quality" (LW 5:246). This includes an explanation of the
constitution and relationality of objects as guided by the situation (LW 5:245). He claims
that an object is an element of the situation that is taken or "abstracted" from it; objects
are not prior to a situation or their taking. Rather, objects manifest from an "underlying
pervasive quality" that uniquely demarcates a situation and is the only "unqualifiably
given" (LW 5:254).
The present work is not to be taken as new historical scholarship, despite its emphasis
on historic texts, but as preparatory for an expansive interpretation and new work in
pragmatism. It evidences a deliberate choice between delineating and arbitrating past
historic scholarship, which it performs only implicitly, and advancing contemporary work
as part of a program that I call “phenomenological pragmatism.”ii
QUALITY
The study of quality and "Qualitative Thought" is the study of what and how
something can be consciously experienced for Dewey.
For present purposes,
"experience" will refer to "conscious experience," i.e., primary and secondary experience,
and all further discussion will assume this level of analysis. Note that this narrows the
denotation or meaning of some terms, e.g., “quality” per “qualitative experience” does
not have as far ranging a meaning as it would for C.S. Peirce, and “experience” is
provisionally narrowed from Dewey’s wider articulation in Experience and Nature.
Quality is "first directly and unreflectively experienced or had" (LW 5:254). We first
experience quality as that blazin' blooming confusion noted by James. This is "first" in
the sense that objects are discriminated or abstracted out of the situation, the context, and
are not prior to it. They are not experientially, phenomenally, or epistemically prior if
one prefers those terms.
Experience "exists as a dumb quality" until it is intellectualized or taken as an object
of thought (LW 5:254). As quality is the basis of conscious experience, "it forms that to
which all objects of thought refer … although … it is never part of the manifest subjectmatter of thought" (LW 5:254). One could say that it is most immediate in experience,
least mediated, if one recognizes that immediate means the first event of conscious
experience, but by no means the first event of a natural history. The latter is mediated by
brute physics, gushing biology, and the song and dance of society and culture. Hence,
the initial "dumbness" of quality appears so only relative to a perspective, whereas
intellectualizing quality mediates it to show its resonating relations in the environment,
both physical and symbolic.
Quality emerges out of the transaction of organism and environment as a functional
element of the situation. Its manifestation and characteristics are due to habit and the
habitual incorporation of the environment by the integral body of habits. That is, quality
becomes meaningful as it blossoms in conscious experience that is when habit becomes a
decisive factor rather than brute existence.
Habits "incorporate an environment within themselves. They are adjustments of the
environment, not merely to it" (MW 14:38; cf 142). Habits are a continual incorporating
or embodying of the environment and are continuous with it. They are how the organism
mediates experience so as to remain at home in its environment, and this includes the
symbolic environment of society and culture.
The term "situation" denotes the
fundamental unit of being at home in the world that the organism actively maintains; it is
homeostasis. Returning to the example, the frightful shade was part of a whole situation
that was frightening. The shade did not secretly murmur its dark intentions to us, but
rather we experienced the situation such, and identifying either the environment or the
organism as frightened/frightening is a discrimination that we make later.
It is an
additional act, a mediating of what was immediately frightening. Our implicit acts in the
situation lead to those qualities emerging from experience, the transaction of organism
and environment as situation, and such emergences betray a movement.
Quality "has as a part of its complex quality a moment or transition in some
direction" that allows it to be converted into thought (LW 5:254). Thomas Alexander
calls this the quality's dynamic telos; situations are teleological.iii Their momentary telos
is a matter of the drama of transaction prefigured by habit and the given context that is
creatively enacted at each moment. Habit is the memory of the organism that provides
pattern and form; a habit strives for a completion in deed. Habit anticipates its next move
as if following a script as negotiated with the environment, and the performance is acted
out in the situation. When there is some tension or disruption of the enactment, the
occasion spurs thought. Quality becomes intellectual, or is "taken" from merely being
"had." The conversion from dumb quality to thought is accomplished by "a statement of
limits and a direction of transition between them" (LW 5:254).
Experience is fundamentally anticipative, and I claim that this is a source of its
"movement." Aside from the dyadic rhythm of the alteration of precarious and stable,
conscious experience moves because habit continually acts in anticipation of its stimulus.
This is the "anticipatory" and "onward tendency of habit" (MW 14:21). Previously, it
was said that habit "mediates" its environment to incorporate the latter as a situation; it is
time to be more specific. A "habit" is the definite form of indefinite biological impulse(s)
that integrates them into unified activity. Impulses are always active and strive for the
realization of their definite form. Hence, habit gains the "onward tendency" of impulse
as integrated towards some definite "anticipation."
We become aware of the anticipatory nature of experience only when anticipation is
frustrated or resisted. Becoming aware is attending to the focal region of experience that
centers around highly tensive involvements to which we are sensitive. Sensitivity to the
environment is dynamic and dependent on the context, specific habituation, the current
ongoing activity, and so forth. A given region is in focus because of the frustration or
failure of habit to achieve its momentarily anticipated satisfaction.
Anticipation is
thereby directive of we might attend or the foreground of conscious experience.
In summary, quality is first unreflectively experienced or "had."
quality" until it is intellectualized of taken as an object.
It is a "dumb
Since quality is the
(phenomenal) basis of conscious experience, "all objects of thought" refer to it. Quality
emerges out of the transaction of organism and environment, as an element of a situation
characterized by the habitual incorporation of the environment as situation.
Victor
Kestenbaum calls this a "process of qualification" whereas Jim Garrison calls it
“mimesis.”iv Quality has a "movement of transition in some direction," or telos as
Thomas Alexander might say, that can be converted from "dumb quality" to "an object of
thought" through a "statement of limits and a direction of transition between them."
Conscious experience is fundamentally anticipatory, since habits are always such, and
they provide the definite character of experienced meaning and objects. "Anticipatory"
also includes the temporal futurity of the situation that constitutes the temporal and
imaginative horizon within what Alexander calls the "temporal teleological structure of
the situation."v
ORGANIZED QUALITY
From the previous discussion, I conclude the following. If quality has an emergent,
dynamic telos that allows for its conversion from ephemeral feltness to intellection and
object through limitation/resistance, then articulating these bounds is also describing the
functional limits of intellection and objection. "Limit" may be understood as either the
habitual bounds of an ongoing activity that provide a “structure” or order of transition, or
as an event of resistance to such activity that alters those limits and activity. Moreover, if
experiencing the meaning of a quality implicates its limit, then one can know something
about the nominal bounds of experienced meaning by knowing this limit.
There are two denotations of "limit" in my usage of the term. First, "limit" is the
range of habit, i.e., our capacities. We either know how to ride a bicycle or we do not,
although we can learn and thereby expand our habitual capacities. Second, "limit" is the
momentarily operative, functional range of habit given the situation. This denotation
primarily refers to the momentary organization of habitual activity as it meets resistance
in the form of environmental resistance or a conflict of habits. A limit always implies a
situation in which it is an element, although the present analysis emphasizes the
contribution of habit rather than the environment. As equilibrium is never perfect, habits
always meet resistance that contours the felt structure of what is called a tensive situation.
We feel and navigate by resistance felt as tension that pulls our attention to a focus of
attentive experience. For instance, alphabetic characters on a page were once
indecipherable oddities until years of habituation allow us to read the patterns of tension
productive of sense as written English. We might feel that way again upon first viewing
elaborate sanskrit, which it might appear as scrollwork art to untrained Western eyes and
habits. Limitation in this second sense will be the primary denotation in the present essay
with an emphasis on the habitual rather than environmental contribution.
Limitation as a constitutive condition for qualitative experience is an element in the
structure of experience that directs its flow. A limit does not "restrain" or "constrain"
meaningful experience, but is the "limiting function." It plays a role in the "construction"
and "reconstruction" of qualitative experience that Dewey ascribes to "structure," which
is "an arrangement of changing events such that properties which change slowly, limit
and direct a series of quick changes and give them an order which they would not
otherwise possess" (LW 1:64-65). Hence, the "arrangement" of limits directs the pattern
of experience and is also called a "structure." These structures are not permanent, but are
momentary. Dewey describes structure as "a character of events…. A set of traits is
called a structure because of its limiting function in relation to other traits of events" (LW
1:64).
A limit is an element of the structure of experience that gives form to its "movement."
Recall that quality has a "movement of transition in some direction" from which quality
becomes thought and object through being organized by limitation, or as I now indicate,
by order/structure/form. Given the current habitual and phenomenological analysis, the
structures in focus are habits, i.e., "energy organized in certain channels" (MW 14:54).
Habit is the organic basis for the limit structure in two senses. The particularity and
interpenetration of habit in both its biological stabilities and momentary operation
engenders a range of satisfactions or fulfillments of a telos.
This range of teloi
corresponds to the first denotation of "limit" and adds a directedness; experience flows
and blooms and certain directions given habit, its sedimentation, and its operation on the
environment to generate the situation in each moment. For the second sense, consider the
anticipatory nature of habit. Recall that habitual anticipation is ongoing activity in which
habituated impulses are either achieving continuous satisfaction (outlet) or are striving
for such. When anticipation is frustrated due to conflicting habits or environmental
resistance, the recoil of habit generates a tension. Experience becomes tensive, and since
the attentive region or foreground of experience is nominally the most tensive, the
habitual structure of anticipation is a dominant factor into what we may attend. Although
habitual sensitivity to the environment is dynamic and dependent on the context,
momentary habitual function is determinative.
This implicates the second sense of
"limit"; the anticipatory structure of habit and thereby of conscious experience is
nominally determinative of what, how, when, and whether something may appear as
meaningful, although at the moment the focus is on "when." In any case, the matter of
the experience, e.g., the sense, is correlative to but not determined by limitation.
Said simply, we reflect during a problematic situation.
Without a problematic
situation, we do not reflect and are carried by our extant habits navigating through the
environment. We may experience what we do, but we do not necessarily attend to,
reflect, or know it.
We may only reflect during a moment of hesitation, but the
conditions for this moment nominally implicate our habits of sensitivity. Something
arrests or limits us.
QUALITY INTO SENSE
For the next step, the leading clue is Dewey's account of the "association of ideas" in
"Qualitative Thought." Before entering into what Dewey says, I would offer a brief
interpretation of what I take him to mean by the phrase, because Dewey does not straightforwardly identify its source, and it appears that he is using a historic phrase within a
contemporary discussion with empiricists and idealists. I argue that Dewey intends the
phrase in a manner similar to Hume and subsequent empiricists insomuch as association
describes the stable patterns of the unfolding of ideas. Describing the stable patterns of
the "association of ideas" is describing the ordered manifestation of experiences.
Dewey identifies thinking as a controlled existential process of association.
For while the subject is usually treated as psychological in nature, thinking as an
existential process takes place through association; existentially, thinking is association
as far as the latter is controlled…. Thus, when association takes the form of thought, or is
controlled and not loose day-dreaming, association is a name for a connection of objects
or their elements in the total situation having a qualitative unity (LW 5:255-256).
Thinking is an existential process as the existent organism is transacting with existences
in the natural environment. The transactive process is "experience" that implicates the
homeostatic process of the organism that includes an ongoing habitual incorporation of
the environment as situation. Under certain conditions, experience enters the phase of
"mind" or conscious experience in which experience may become qualitative,
meaningful, and manifest objects. Since experience as a process maintains continuity
with all its phases, conscious experience is no less existential than bodies slamming into
each other.
Thinking is the controlled association of objects.
”Control" means ordered or
structured in a certain manner such as to provide a "functional limit" as previously
discussed. However, "thinking" indicates the active mediation of the flow of experience,
as opposed to the relatively passive sensitivity to the situation that includes attention,
intellection, and/or cognition. Enculturated or sedimented habit is the proximate basis of
controlled association as amendable by education or learning.
Association need not always be thought or "controlled"; intellection is a particular
event of association. Association is a "connection of objects or their elements in the total
situation having a qualitative unity" (LW 5:255-256). Hence, thinking is a controlled
"connection" of objects integrated by their qualitative unity. Association or connection is
our entry into how the pervasive quality of the situation "regulates" the emergence and
relation of objects.
Given that Dewey is using Hume's terms with a different denotation, what does he
mean? What "causes" association and how are objects associated? Hume thought that
the mind associated ideas (objects) per its faculties in accord with the three principles of
connection.
The particular associations were habitual, e.g., the instantiations of
convention. Let us focus on the habitual association of ideas/objects and their principle
of connection for Dewey.
Dewey argues that association is due to habit (LW 5:256). That is, the original
temporal or spatial contiguity, or similarity of two things in the world, is not the cause of
association. For example, he notes that thinking of a "chiffonier … does not call up that
of drawers as a distinct idea" although they are in fact spatially contiguous (LW 5:256).
Rather, habit produces an "immediate reaction" and not a distinct idea of an object.
Distinct objects were once part of "one situational object" (LW 5:257) that were
discriminated and the distinction may persist in the "organic attitude formed in
consequence of a responsive act to things once coexistent or sequential" (LW 5:256). It
is the distinction or "disassociation" of the two objects that must be explained. There
must be a "resistant or negative factor" that produces a "tension" to forestall a direct
response and produce the distinction (LW 5:257, emphasis added).
The distinction
comes out of the unity of the original act wherein "the quality attending it was spread
over and inclusive of the two things in question" (LW 5:256). Dewey concludes that the
"quality of a situation as a whole operates to produce a functional connection" (LW
5:257).
In sum, thinking is a controlled existential process of association.
The process is
existential as it is the result of the transaction of existential elements of the environment.
It is controlled per being ordered or structured by a dynamic configuration of limits that
mediate the flow of experience. What is distinctive of thought is that what is associated
are "objects." The association is due to habit that exists as the dynamic configuration of
limits that serve a homeostatic purpose. Objects arise as distinct due to prior habituation
that have sedimented a previous act of making a distinction. The prior habituation
produces a "tension" within the pervasive quality of the situation to make a "functional
connection" that may become an "intellectual connection."
CONCLUSION
The present essay explains how the momentary structure of habit guides the
conversion of quality to sense, thought, and object through channeling the flow of
qualitative experience and informing its conversion conditions. Its movement is partially
due to the forward impulse of habit as it is organized by limitation. Limitation is a
constitutive structural condition of qualitative experience that orders the "arrangement of
changing events" by being a "limiting function" of the movement of experience.
Limitation arises from the serial coordination or transaction of habitual activity and
environmental conditions that produce a network of felt tension within the situation.
Aside from directing ongoing activity, it also determines the field of focal tensive
experience, i.e., the foreground and background to what we may attend.
Since felt tension is a basis for the focusing of attentive experience, it carves a path
out of the potential experiences to be had in the situation. Felt tension is the felt selection
of the potential situations in which ongoing habitual activity has already implicated the
organism. This is the horizon of feeling. Thinking serves to mediate and determine the
path taken of all the potential situations that the organism may enact. However, thinking
and inquiry may only intellectually mediate what is already attentively felt. This presents
a circularity: we may inquire into what is wrong only if we already feel that it is wrong.
The freeing of imagined possibilities in experience or the opening of the imaginative
horizon, is always grounded and thereby limited by the situation. The situation is the
unity of ongoing habitual incorporation of the environment that is a process of qualifying
ongoing transactive experience to become conscious experience.
Consciously
experienced "possibilities" are grounded in part by past sedimented habit, present
creativity in reconstructing it, and futural anticipations of what each reconstruction might
mean, e.g., its consequences. The dilemma of the Deweyan model is that habit is the
organic basis of experienced possibilities and ends-in-view that are always already
limited by the momentary potentialities of habit.
Perhaps the best way to counter the charge of "optimism" and a lack of "tragic
sensibility" in Dewey scholarship is not to write refutations. I suggest expositing the
tragic, the inherent limitations of human being that we ignorantly or knowingly strive
against, such that human effort is seen on the precipice of falling back into the cave. This
is not a call to pessimism, but to the heroism of struggling against human finitude as
immanent transcendence.
NOTES
i
Victor Kestenbaum, The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and
Meaning (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977), 50.
ii
Dewey called such studies a psychological/historical/evolutionary method depending
upon the article. See his “Psychology and Philosophic Method,” “The Psychological
Method in Ethics,” “The Evolutionary Method in Morality I & II,” and so forth in the
Collected Works.
iii
Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The
Horizons of Feeling (Albany, SUNY Press, 1987), 76.
iv
Kestenbaum, Phenomenological Sense, 29. Jim Garrison, "The Role of Mimesis in
Dewey's Theory of Qualitative Thought,” The Transactions of the C.S. Pierce Society,
Vol. 35, No. 4 (Fall 1999): 678-696. Kestenbaum writes from the perspective of a
phenomenological analysis of pre-objective experience per habit, whereas Garrison
writes from a metaphysical-epistemic analysis heavily reliant on C.S. Peirce. I take them
to be focusing on the same event from different perspectives and levels of analysis that
correspond to emphases on different phases of the same natural process, e.g., how habit
informs conscious experience (Kestenbaum) or how existence is liberated in qualitative
thought for intellectual mediation of meaning (Garrison).
v
Alexander, Horizons of Feeling, 76.