Journal of Philosophy of Education

INTRODUCTION

From The Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism (Dewey, 1882) to Knowing and the Known (Dewey and Bentley, 1949), the question of thinking is pivotal to Dewey's work. It is not only the focus of several Deweyan works but also at the intersection of Dewey's conception of experience, education and inquiry. Nevertheless, according to Johnston (2002) and Rømer (2012), a Deweyan understanding of thinking has been the victim of several simplifications. One type of reduction involves considering Dewey a positivist or an advocate of individualistic approaches to education, which is ironic given that the very question of education in Dewey is grounded on sharing and communication (Dewey, 1930, pp. 6–7, 101–115). There is also another type of reduction of Deweyan thought that is perhaps less evident but likewise misleading. This reduction works by equating the broad question of thinking to the questions of ‘inquiry’ and ‘reflective thought’, thus reducing the ‘mind’ to the production of knowledge, experience to ‘intellectual experience’ and human beings to inquirers. Of course, inquiry and reflective thought are central issues to Deweyan thought, and only by means of intelligent action can human beings grow and gain a meaningful existence.

However, when analysing these issues, we must ask about the ground on which inquiry and reflective thought lies and the office they attend to. Such ‘genealogical work’ is important to remain faithful to the Deweyan aim, namely, to understand and leave intact ‘the cord that binds experience and nature’ without taking intellectual experience as primary (Dewey, 1929a, p. 23).

Through Dewey, we come to see that on one hand, ‘when there is possibility of control, knowledge is the sole agency of its realization’ (ibid., p. 22), and on the other hand, we have to bear in mind that ‘the power of thought … opens to us the possibility of failures to which the animal, limited to instinct, cannot sink’ (Dewey, 1910, p. 19). In Deweyan understanding, thinking involves both the possibility to intelligently interact with the environment, and to risk failure. We may even say that it is precisely this possibility of intelligently interacting with the environment that simultaneously engenders both the possibility of growth and new and unknown risks.

I wish to make it clear from the outset that I do not intend to deny the power of the subject to intelligently interact with her/his environment—which is the core of Deweyan educational philosophy and transactional realism (Biesta and Burbules, 2003; Hickman, 1990; Sleeper, 1986). Instead, my point is that along with and as part of this understanding of knowledge and reflective thought, Dewey's work discloses an inescapable uncertainty at the core of human thinking. In a sense, it is precisely Dewey's firm faith in the power of intelligence and education as the means by which human beings grow and create a meaningful existence, which gives to such an uncertainty an even greater challenging power. Thus, by analysing the role uncertainty plays in Deweyan work, I wish to re‐position inquiry, and intentional agency against the background of the openness and growth of meaning that Dewey calls for.

In several passages of his work Dewey highlighted the risk and uncertainty entailed in thinking and knowing; in Deweyan transactionalism, knowledge bears witness to the unpredictability that characterises action. In Dewey's words, ‘Uncertainty is primarily a practical matter. It signifies uncertainty of the issue of present experiences; these are fraught with future peril as well as inherently objectionable. Action to get rid of the objectionable has no warrant of success and is itself perilous’ (Dewey, 1929b, p. 223). According to Dewey, action is simultaneously the means by which we are connected with the world and produce knowledge, and the means by which we are put at risk: ‘The distinctive characteristic of practical activity … is the uncertainty which attends it. Of it we are compelled to say: Act, but act at your peril’ (Dewey, 1929b, p. 6).

This is because inquiry, action—and education—work to expand and create meaning and growth, to challenge given forms of life, and to point towards the future. By means of thinking, we actively produce new meanings and possibilities, and, as a result, new risks and uncertainty (Garrison, 2005). According to the Deweyan conception, growth, meaningful existence and uncertainty come into the world together.

Of course, as quoted above, such an uncertainty did not go unnoticed. Works by authors such as Biesta (1994, 2010), Biesta and Burbules (2003), Farfield (2010), Garrison (1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2005) and Wilshire (1993) have dismantled the ‘apparently optimistic worldview’ (Saito, 2002, p. 249) that some take from Dewey's work. The work by these scholars allows us to see how Deweyan radical challenge to Descartes’ epistemology entails dismantling the ‘Modern theories of knowledge’ (Dewey, 1929a, p. 157) that reduce experience to what rationality establishes as experience. Indeed, Biesta and Burbules (2003), as well as Glassman (2004) and Higgins (2010), note that Deweyan transactional turn challenges at its very basis the longstanding predominance of intellectual knowledge over experience. Moreover, since the 1990s, Garrison's interpretation of Deweyan thought as a ‘hermeneutics of bottomless being’ (Garrison, 1998, p. 128) shows that Dewey regarded thinking as a process without any safe ground.

Here, we understand that there is no linearity in such a process but a thorough coordination between intelligence and experience, and consciousness dynamically interacts with experience (Dewey, 1927, pp. 74–75). Thus, faithful to the pragmatist approach, I seek to address the Deweyan challenge to the understanding of thinking and subject as detached and self‐assured centres of agency, and to analyse the educational import of such challenge.

The paper is organised into three further sections. In the next section, I will argue that, despite the grouping of thinking and reflective thought that has largely appeared in the interpretation of Dewey's work, Dewey is fully aware of how uncertainty and unpredictability are constitutive elements of thinking. Simultaneously with Heidegger,¹ Dewey shows that we are always already embedded in the world and that such an embeddedness precedes knowledge and conscious control because knowledge and consciousness—and, thus, the very possibility of inquiry—are grounded in the wider field of experience. In the following section I then address the question of the subject. I wish to show that we can hardly conceive of a Deweyan subject as a detached and disengaged centre of agency. Finally, in the last section, I wish to address the educational consequences of the frame I have attempted to present. Through Deweyan challenge to Plato's and Descartes’ ‘theoretical gaze’, we must conceive of education not so much as the attempt to master experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience by creating new points of interactions in our relationship with the environment.

THE ESSENTIAL UNCERTAINTY OF THINKING

Let me begin with a Deweyan statement taken from Chapter II of Democracy and Education. Here, when analysing the relationship between inquiry and what ‘lie[s] below the level of reflection’, Dewey states: ‘We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worthwhile and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. However, in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions’ (Dewey, 1930, p. 22).

In this statement, Dewey notes that the basic appreciation of the world is due to standards that partially escape our awareness. Moreover, ‘our conscious thinking’ as well as ‘our conclusions’ stand on a ground that is ‘below the level of reflection’. Because Dewey states that such a ground consists of ‘the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection’, we could conclude that Dewey's aim is to put it under the lens of reflection to clarify it. The point, as I wish to argue, is more articulated, because although Dewey's aim was also to foster inquiry into such an implicit ground—and in this respect the question is to what extent inquiry can fully grasp such a ground—the point to be considered first is how we must conceive of the office of inquiry and reflective thought.

Here, we must bear in mind that throughout his work, Dewey challenged the theory by which ‘consciousness is like the eye running over a field of ready‐made objects, or a light which illuminates now this and now that portion of a given field’ (Dewey, 1929a, p. 308). Indeed, such a conception of consciousness ‘postulates, even though only implicitly, a pre‐established harmony of the knower and things known, passing over the fact that such harmony is always an attained outcome of prior inferences and investigations’ (ibid., pp. 308–309).

Thus, to the extent that we understand the office of inquiry as one only of discovering such an implicit ground, we are precisely within the paradigm challenged by Dewey, because the aim of inquiry is not to unearth preceding conditions, to find a ground or to discover the ‘first beginning’ of perceived objects and situations. Instead, the office of inquiry is future‐oriented and prospective: ‘The ultimate need for the inquiry is found in the necessity of discovering what is to be done, or of developing a response suitably adapted to the requirements of a situation’ (ibid., p. 338) We begin to understand what a problem or a situation is in finding and testing the possible solutions to the problems encountered, which is one of the consequences of Dewey's shift from philosophy as analytic thinking to philosophising as pragmatic transactionalism. Then, inquiry is not so much about discovering but about pushing knowledge—and learning—forward.

Against this background, in this section, I wish to re‐position the role played by uncertainty in Deweyan thought. I wish to make my point in three steps: a) In the first step, I argue that the very ground on which reflective thought lies is, in part, out of its boundaries because it is to be found in our being‐embedded‐in‐the‐world. Of course, reflective thought interacts with this embeddedness, evolving it and putting it forward, but a substantial amount of uncertainty will always remain; b) In the second step, I argue that the push, the ‘directive source’ (Dewey, 1980, p. 97) that engenders knowledge and reflective thought, is, in a sense, anything but ‘reflective’, in being situated in interest, imagination and what we may call the first expression of the ‘hermeneutic circle’; and c) In the third step, I will argue that inquiry and reflective thought in themselves are crossed by and directed toward uncertainty; in a sense, they also produce risk and uncertainty.

DEWEYAN SUBJECT

Let us pay attention to the following statement: ‘Experience, a serial course of affairs with their own characteristic properties and relationships, occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves. In some specifiable respects and for some specifiable consequences, these selves, capable of objective denotation just as are sticks, stones, and stars, assume the care and administration of certain objects and acts in experience’ (Dewey, 1929a, p. 232).

An analysis of this passage reveals that selves are ‘occurrences’ of experience and not its underlying substratum. In other words, selves are occurrences that emerge in the on‐going flow of experience that can sink just as easily as they emerge. Moreover, as well as we cannot step outside of the inquiry process to look at it from above, the event that the self is does not have an all‐encompassing perspective over experience because we are always embedded within experience. In a sense, Dewey is careful to delimit the area of the ‘administration’ of the self. If I am allowed to paraphrase Dewey, ‘selves … assume the care and administration of certain objects and acts in experience’ (emphasis added) only ‘in some specifiable respects and for some specifiable consequences’ (emphasis added). By remaining within experience, the self has no access to the whole of experience. Thus, the problem remains with respect to the limits and possibilities regarding the interaction between experience and the self.

Another claim about the occurrence of consciousness may clarify our understanding: ‘Consciousness, an idea, is that phase of a system of meanings which at a given time is undergoing re‐direction, transitive transformation. … Consciousness is the meaning of events in course of remaking; its “cause” is only the fact that this is one of the ways in which nature goes on’ (ibid., p. 308) In defining consciousness as a ‘phase of a system’, Dewey highlights that consciousness is located in the temporal dimension of experience: It is an instant in the continuum of experience, a temporal part within a whole.

Through Deweyan understanding, we can see that Descartes’ original sin was not only to place his Cogito out of experience, as a place by which experience could be managed, but also to place consciousness outside of time. Dewey relocates consciousness in nature and time because ‘human affairs, associative and personal, are projections, continuations, complications, of the nature which exists in the physical and pre‐human world’ (Dewey, 1927, pp. 74–75). The import of consciousness springs from the on‐going flux of experience as our being‐embedded‐in‐the‐world; however, if ‘experience is much more than consciousness and reach[es] down into [its] background’, consciousness ‘reaches up into experience’ (ibid., p. 78).

We find an additional foothold for such an understanding in the definition of consciousness that Dewey provides in Experience and Nature: ‘The immediately precarious, the point of greatest immediate need, defines the apex of consciousness, its intense or focal mode. And this is the point of re‐direction, of re‐adaptation, re‐organisation. … Consciousness is, literally, the difference in process of making’ (Dewey, 1929a, pp. 312–316, emphasis in original). Here, Dewey posits that consciousness is simultaneously ‘the point of re‐direction, of re‐adaptation, re‐organisation’ of experience and ‘the difference in [the] process of making’. Thus, on the one hand, as ‘the difference in [the] process of making’, consciousness springs from experience. On the other hand, consciousness is the point at which experience can be re‐framed and, in a sense, re‐established. The ‘apex of consciousness’ is the point at which we can define a new beginning of experience. I believe that this is the meaning of our ‘liv[ing] forward’ (Dewey, 1917, p. 12) and the reason why ‘experience … is a future implicated in a present’ (ibid.). Consciousness emerges from experience, giving new direction to experience. It is important to note that in claiming that consciousness springs from ‘the process of making’, Dewey simultaneously dismantles the Cartesian subject and frees that subject from the monopoly of a knowledge ‘set over against the world to be known’ (Dewey, 1917, p. 30). In being freed from such knowledge, the (educational) subject is also freed for a broader concept of education—incidentally, I wish to highlight that this challenge is something Heidegger only began to develop 10 years later in Being and Time (1996) and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1992), in which human beings’ ‘standing‐over‐against’ the world (ibid., p. 177) is comprehensively analysed and challenged.

The questions of the weakening of the subject (Boisvert, 1998; Semetsky, 2008) as a detached centre of agency strongly suggest a pivotal educational question: What is the possibility of intentional/intelligent action? A foothold for the question lies in Dewey's definition of mind in The Quest for Certainty: ‘The old center was mind knowing by means of an equipment of powers complete within itself. … The new center is indefinite interactions taking place within a course of nature which is not fixed and complete, but which is capable of direction to new and different results through the mediation of intentional operations. Neither self nor world, neither soul nor nature … is the center. … There is a moving whole of interacting parts; a center emerges wherever there is effort to change them in a particular direction’ (Dewey, 1929b, pp. 290–291). Defining mind as ‘indefinite interactions taking place within a course of nature’ Dewey undermines the basis for a consistent account of the subject as the place by which to encompass our relationship with the world and nature. Indeed, mind emerges by the ‘effort to change’, and the subject too is such an ‘effort to change’. Using the term ‘indefinite’, Dewey posited two things: a) the range of interactions of the mind is potentially infinite, and b) whereas the mind has the power to locate such interactions, it does not have the power to fully control them, because they are future‐oriented and prospective—in a sense, such interactions put ourselves beyond ourselves, that is the core of Deweyan conception of education.

EDUCATION AS THE GENERATION OF EXPERIENCE

In this section, I wish to argue for the educational import of my account, and why the Deweyan conception of thinking and subject works as a broadening of educational agency and responsibility. I begin my attempt by analysing how Dewey's understanding of the subject works to dissolve the alienation produced by Descartes’ dualism, thus re‐establishing scopes and possibilities of educational agency. This alienation is twofold: the alienation of the world from the human being and the alienation of the human being from her/himself.

To the extent in which mind is ‘primarily a verb’ (Dewey, 1980, p. 263), we have to conceive of the—educational—subject as something that continually emerges from the on‐going flow of our exchange with the environment; the ‘power’ that a subject possesses is to create new interactions within the course of nature, and education is exactly such a creation. If my frame makes sense, education is the point by which experience and subject are engendered. In a sense, we can conceive of education as provoking what is not yet by an interruption of the on‐going flow of experience (English, 2013).

Bearing in mind that ‘while consciousness is foreground in a preeminent sense, experience is much more than consciousness and reaches down into the background as that reaches up into experience’ (Dewey, 1927, p. 78) we should conceive of education not so much as the attempt to encompass and to master experience, but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience, thus putting forward our relationship with environment.

This putting forward, in line with Deweyan educational philosophy, is to be understood not as a narrowing of educational responsibility or as a narrowing of intentional agency. To the contrary, such an understanding of the subject is simultaneously the freeing of the subject from what we may call a totalitarian concept of knowledge, and thus, in a way, it is an enlargement of the subject. Dewey's rejection of both ‘reification of all sorts’ (Hickman, 1990, p. 10), and ‘fixed essences’ (Garrison, 2003, p. 359) works towards the expansion of education and intentional agency; the question is how such an agency is to be understood. Dewey repositions educational, intentional agency away from control and mastery and in the direction of growth and openness. Thus, Deweyan educational thought is also a call against every possible totalitarian thought, and his point is at once an educational, existential, epistemological and ethico‐political one.

That is why Dewey states that there is no separation between life and developing and that ‘the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end’ (Dewey, 1930, p. 59). This is also why he says that growth is something that human beings—children, in his passage—‘do’ (Dewey, 1930, p. 50). This doing consists of putting new interactions in on‐going contact with the world, projecting our possibilities in the world, ‘free[ing] experience from routine and from caprice’ (Dewey, 1917, p. 63). For this reason, the challenge to the understanding of thinking and subject as detached and self‐assured centres of agency by which to master experience corresponds to a reinforcement of education; education is the way in which the emerging subject that we are puts forth new points of interactions within the environment, engendering new experience. Thus, Dewey conceives of education as ‘an emancipation and enlargement of experience’ (Dewey, 1910, p. 156). As Dewey states, ‘Personality, selfhood, subjectivity are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organised interactions, organic and social’ (Dewey, 1929a, p. 208). Education is, at the same time, the way such interactions are reconstructed and newly projected and the way new forms of subjectivity are able to emerge. Experience, as our always‐being‐embedded‐in‐the‐world, precedes knowledge, and the subject, too, emerges within experience and through education.

A further consequence of Dewey's challenge to the concept of knowledge as the means by which to master experience is that we cannot predict what will follow from the creation of experience that occurs through education. To the extent that we engender new experiences by education, such experiences, in being future‐oriented and prospective, are by definition unpredictable—which is why we cannot encompass experience. Therefore, if we could predict in advance the outcomes of experience, we would not have newness, and, thus, we would not have education—which is why uncertainty is essential for education to happen.

Importantly, this uncertainty does not work to undermine educators’ responsibility. To the contrary, according to Deweyan understanding, we are simultaneously involved in and intentionally producing experiences, contents and knowledge of all kinds. This perspective does not deny teachers’ and educators’ commitment and responsibility; rather, it is a relocation—and, perhaps, a broadening of their function: Teachers and educators are one of the starting points for the meaningful growth of students. Moreover, because what such starting points will bring about is fundamentally unpredictable, teachers and educators must carefully think where, how, when and whether to place new points of interaction.

For Dewey, what experience as a whole means is a senseless question because it relates to something as the ‘essence’ and the ‘ultimate telos’ of life and experience, and essence and ultimate telos are the means by which knowledge, posing as an ‘extra‐natural’ power that is ‘over against the world’ (Dewey, 1917, pp. 30–31), establishes itself as the measure of experience. Faithful to the Deweyan approach, teachers’ and educators’ actions come to be relocated within students’ experience, not above it; therefore, educators must be sensitive to ‘what can be called “the space between”. This space resides between the self‐that‐was and the self‐in‐formation; … between the way of life that had been treated as given and the way of life now seen as art‐full’ (Hansen, 2009, p. 128).

Perhaps one of the more interesting elements of Deweyan educational philosophy is that while undermining at its very basis the possibility of finding a linear causality between educators’ actions and students’ experience (Biesta, 2007), he reinforced both educational endeavour and educational agency. In Deweyan educational thought, we are continuously called upon to remake our existence, and thus, we are continuously called towards the educational work required for such a remaking. If one were to look for a possible ‘starting point’ in Deweyan educational thought, one should perhaps look to Dewey's attention and care to preserve the openness and the uncertainty of the educational endeavour itself and the ever‐open realm of possibilities that education engenders. With Dewey, we come to see that human beings are, in a sense, always beyond themselves and beyond their own understanding because their understanding remains always on‐going. To remain faithful to Deweyan educational philosophy, ‘project[ing] new and more complex ends’ (Dewey, 1917, p. 63) entails facing and—in a sense—pursuing this risk and radical uncertainty of thinking. If ‘any object that is overt is charged with possible consequences that are hidden’ (Dewey, 1929a, p. 21), then remaining in the presence of such a hiddenness and openness facing the ‘bearing of the occurrence’ (Dewey, 1929b, pp. 171–172)is, according to Deweyan thought, one of the aims of education.

However, in this hiddenness, there is nothing mystical; the hiddenness simply involves the fact that as we continue to ‘liberate and expand the potential meanings of things’ (Granger, 2006, p. 7), we move closer to growth and uncertainty—and to education.

Then, by the work of the occurrence and by the loss of her/his—supposed—power over experience, a human being also recovers the alliance with nature: ‘A mind that has opened itself to experience knows … that the belief, and the effort of thought and struggle which it inspires are also the doing of the universe, and they in some way, however slight, carry the universe forward’ (Dewey, 1929a, p. 420).

Thus, as human beings, we are compelled to ‘the effort of thought’ as a spring of the universe, but at the same time, we are aware that such an effort entails the possibility of sinking. We experience something, but we recognise that experience in its entirety is ungraspable. We need education and find our end in education because ‘the educational process … is its own end’ (Dewey, 1930, p. 59) but we cannot predict what will come to us through education. In his work, Dewey makes an ethic of finiteness, which shows how our educational effort is grounded on, moved by and directed towards uncertainty.⁴