by Sharon Kaye
c A non-existing being
d A desire for pure being
4 Which of the following is an example of facticity?
a A sex change
b True love
c Music
d A big nose
5 Which of the following would Sartre consider a candidate for the fundamental project?
a Establishing a feminist co-operative
b Buying a pet
c Earning a college degree
d Starting a business
6 Authenticity involves which of the following for Sartre?
a Loving others as you love yourself
b Discovering your innate essence
c Following God’s plan
d Breaking out of social roles
7 Which of the following promotes bad faith, according to Sartre?
a Authenticity
b Art
c Atheism
d Social roles
8 Why does de Beauvoir say that one is not born a woman?
a Because being a woman is a vocation imposed by society
b Because babies are essentially asexual
c Because the distinction between male and female is arbitrary
d Because not all women deserve to be considered women
9 Which of the following could be an expression of nausea?
a I did this
b I want to do this
c I hope this will happen
d What happened?
10 Which of the following corrupted the history of philosophy, according to Sartre?
a Art
b Political activism
c Science
d Women
Dig deeper
N. Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (Columbia University Press, 2001)
A.C. Danto, Sartre (Fontana, 1991)
Adrian Van den Hoven and Andrew Leak, eds, Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration (Berghahn Books, 2005)
14
Dewey and truth
‘We think only when we are confronted with problems.’
John Dewey
In this chapter you will learn:
• the difference between aesthetic realism and expressionism
• the connection between beauty and truth, according to Dewey
• why Dewey sees language as a tool
• the meaning of the claim that truth is what works
• about the pragmatist view of knowledge
• how Hegel influenced Dewey and Marx in different ways
• about the progressive view of learning.
Thought experiment: the egg
You are taking a long walk along the beach at sunset. The ocean breeze plays mischievously with your hair. Waves crash against your feet. Pink and orange clouds glide across the horizon.
You walk for a long time – out to a majestic old pier and then back to where you left your picnic blanket. When you arrive, it’s dark, but the moon casts a silver light across the sand.
Startled, you catch sight of something you’ve never seen before sitting near your picnic blanket.
As you stare at it, chills run down your spine.
You approach slowly, glancing around to see whether someone else is on the beach. There’s no one as far as the eye can see.
You bend to pick up the object. It appears to be an elaborately carved piece of driftwood. It must have been a fat stump at one time, you conjecture, judging by the width of the wood, but it’s largely hollow inside and surprisingly light. Smooth tendrils wind around the surface to form an oval – like a giant Easter egg.
You look around again, wondering how it arrived at your blanket. Did it wash up in the tide? Did the wind blow it across the sand?
You hear a noise behind you and turn to see two large seagulls fighting over a dead fish. Could an animal have dragged the driftwood to this place?
Surely not. Surely someone made it and left it here.
But is it for you? Should you take it? After debating in your mind for a while and looking around again in vain for other people, you decide you can’t bear to leave such a beautiful object to its possible demise.
Still baffled the next day, you bring it to three different kinds of expert: a naturalist, a historian and an artist. Each comes to a different conclusion.
The naturalist pronounces that the object is the remains of a large nest made by gribbles – marine worms that decompose wood. A pattern of marks along the edges of the tendrils show the paths along which they burrowed into the wood and made ventilation holes.
The historian disagrees. In ancient times, Vikings threw wood into the sea to determine the best place to land their ships. The tiny holes in this ingenious buoy show where a craftsman used needle and thread to attach a flag to the wood so that it would be more visible from a distance.
The artist shakes her head at both of these proposals. The markings on the wood are deliberately arranged in a geometrical pattern suggestive of a neo-pagan nature motif. The sculpture is a very talented artist’s symbolic representation of new life.
You take your ‘egg’ back home and place it at the centre of the dining-room table. You enjoy looking at it. Everyone who sees it admires it. It doesn’t seem to matter who made it – gribbles, Vikings or a professional sculptor – it is an inspiration to you.
Then one day it disappears just as suddenly as it appeared.
The secret of learning
The above thought experiment was originally suggested by the American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). Dewey is considered the most influential American philosopher of the twentieth century because he developed a daringly original point of view and pursued its implications outside academia – in the political and social arena.
The driving concern of Dewey’s career was how people learn. He proposed educational reforms that reverberate today throughout schools worldwide.
Most people have had enough bad experiences with school to know that learning isn’t something that just magically happens when a teacher wants it to. In fact, for some people, the very word ‘learning’ means ‘suffering through infinite boredom while some tyrannical authority figure tries to get you to care about something stupid and irrelevant’. This attitude is all too common, and it worried Dewey.
Dewey was convinced that learning is not just about school – it’s a lifelong process, the only process through which human beings can truly grow and flourish. If you’ve ever had a positive learning experience – at school or elsewhere – then you know that there is nothing quite so satisfying and rewarding. What’s the secret of these experiences? Dewey was determined to figure it out. His investigation begins with art.
Spotlight
Dewey was the classic absent-minded professor. He is reported to have walked to the post office with his infant son in a pushchair. Upon receiving an interesting-looking envelope, he left the child in his pushchair and read the letter all the way home.
Art
What is art? You know it when you see it, but it’s not an easy thing to define.
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of art. There are many different aesthetic theories. Dewey’s is best understood against the most traditional theory, which is known as aesthetic realism.
According to realists, the purpose of art is to create an accurate representation of reality. A good painting, on this view, is one that looks like a photograph. A good play is one that recreates a series of events that actually happened or could have happened, without relying on artificial or imaginary devices.
Aesthetic realism is commonly assumed to be the only standard by which art can be judged. When you compliment a child for placing two eyes in the right place on his self-portrait, you’re assuming that the child’s goal is (or should be) to make the picture look as similar to himself as possible. Likewise, when you complain that a novel had an ‘implausible ending’, you’re assuming that a good story should mimic real life.
Dewey would challenge
your realist assumption in each case, advancing an expressionist alternative. According to expressionism, art is an outpouring of inner experience. A child may draw his self-portrait without eyes because he is thinking about some things he saw recently that scared him. Likewise, if a novel is really about what the author was thinking and feeling, then it is appropriate for it to have an imaginative rather than a realistic ending.
For Dewey, art originates with the need to communicate our deepest thoughts and feelings, many of which are subconscious – meaning that that we are not directly aware of them. Everyone has this need, and hence everyone is potentially an artist. In fact, Dewey asserts that a great deal of unhappiness in the world results from pent-up emotions.
But not just any emotional discharge makes for a successful work of art. A successful work of art releases inner meaning through a medium in a way that restores harmony and can be appreciated by others. While professional artists may be especially admired, everyone should strive for an artistic outlet, and art should be a regular omnipresent aspect of life, rather than a dusty old thing in a museum.
For Dewey, the ‘egg’ you found in the thought experiment at the opening of this chapter is especially intriguing because you don’t know whether it even has a meaning, much less what that meaning is. Aesthetic appreciation of the object would involve positing an artist and speculating on their intentions – relating to them based on one’s own inner experience.
But what if you found out that the object was a Viking buoy?
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way … things I had no words for.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Technology
Tools, machines and other things humans invent to solve problems are called technology, from the Greek word for ‘craft’. Dewey doesn’t want to make much of a distinction between art and technology insofar as each is the solution to a problem.
While art solves an internal problem, technology solves an external one. Vikings made buoys because they needed to know where to land their ships. Driftwood laced with a flag creates a visible marker along the path of least resistance. Human beings have invented countless technologies like this, from the simplest wheel to the most advanced computer.
If technologies are tools for solving problems, however, then they need not always be physical objects. A simple pencil is technology because it is a tool for communicating. And if a pencil is a technology, then so is a spoken word. Dewey argues that language is the ultimate tool of tools, because it has the power to co-ordinate the efforts of many people in solving problems.
Hence, words and pictures can equally be considered art or technology – the distinction becomes arbitrary by virtue of the common problem-solving nature of each. In fact, Dewey warns against strict categories that make distinctions where none exist. He is especially critical of the dualist’s distinction between mind and body, as proposed by Descartes, whom we met in Chapter 5.
Dewey goes so far as to assert that the institutions created by words and pictures – including religion, science and politics – are technologies. We can admire or despise them just like any work of art. The most important thing to keep in mind is that they are human inventions, created, like a buoy, to solve particular problems.
If an institution creates more problems than it solves, then it has outlived its usefulness and must be replaced, according to Dewey. He is especially critical of religion on the grounds that it creates divisions among people, to the point of war in many cases. He argues that the ‘spiritual’ experiences that religion celebrates can be accepted as real without being designated ‘supernatural’. For Dewey, nature is rich and deep enough to account for even the most transcendent phenomena.
Nature
Dewey was a strong supporter of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which we discussed in Chapter 4. He was also a great defender of science in general. But his view of science is much broader than the traditional view criticized by Sartre in Chapter 13.
Go back to the ‘egg’ you found in our thought experiment. Suppose it turns out to be the product of marine worms after all. Then it isn’t art and it isn’t technology, but it is still a valuable source of inspiration. Dewey argues that science has not solved all the mysteries in nature. Although the empirical method enables us to measure and predict many things, it also discovers intangible beauty and the goodness it implies.
If experience actually presents aesthetic and moral traits, then these traits may also be supposed to reach down into nature, and to testify to something that belongs to nature as truly as does the mechanical structure attributed to it in physical science. To rule out that possibility by some general reasoning is to forget that the very meaning and purport of empirical method is that things are to be studied on their own account, so as to find out what is revealed when they are experienced. The traits possessed by the subject-matters of experience are as genuine as the characteristics of sun and electron. They are found, experienced, and are not to be shoved out of being by some trick of logic.
John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925) (http://www.scienzepostmoderne.org/OpereComplete/Dewey.John..Experience%20and%20Nature%20%281925,%201929%29.pdf)
Beauty is not a figment of our imagination – an interpretation we arbitrarily impose on the world. It is a type of experience just as real as any other truth. The catch, according to Dewey, is that, just as there is no absolute beauty, there is no absolute truth.
Truth
Recall that, according to aesthetic realism, the purpose of art is to create an accurate representation of reality. A picture is good insofar as it reflects its subject matter like a photograph. Although this view is commonly assumed, we have seen why Dewey rejects it.
As it turns out, realism is also the most common theory of the nature of truth. Realism about truth (also called correspondence theory) holds that a statement can be called ‘true’ precisely insofar as it accurately represents reality.
At first, this view seems so obvious that it must be indisputable. There is a cat on the mat. I assert: ‘The cat is on the mat.’ My statement is true because it mirrors exactly what is the case. How could anyone think truth is anything different?
On closer examination, however, we see that this question is like asking, ‘How could anyone think it OK for someone with eyes to draw a self-portrait without eyes? Such a picture does not correspond to the reality, and so it must be wrong.’
We’ve seen how expressionism challenges this way of thinking. If the purpose of art is to solve an emotional problem, then a self-portrait without eyes might be exactly right. It might even be beautiful if it is experienced as such by the artist and the viewer. While this beauty may be a real experience for the people involved, it isn’t absolute because it may not affect other people the same way. The portrait is a tool that is emotionally effective for certain people at certain times.
In a parallel way, factual statements are tools used to solve intellectual problems. To the extent that they are successful, we call them ‘true’. If I assert that the cat is on the mat, and someone else finds evidence indicating that the cat is not on the mat, then my statement is still problematic. Its truth is in doubt. If, on the other hand, my statement enables me to accomplish something – let’s say my telling you where the cat is enables you to catch it in order to remove it from the house – then it worked for our purposes, and we may call it true.
To suppose there is something more to truth than what works is to suppose there is some godlike figure who can compare bare statements to bare reality without any purposes in mind. But there is no such objective point of view. Every point of view has a purpose and truths are statements that help to carry them out.
Pragmatism
Dewey was one of the founders of the school of thought known as pragmatism (from the Greek word for ‘practical’), a naturalistic epistemology that views knowledge as the solution to practical problems. This view is ‘naturalistic’ because it conc
eives of human beings as biological organisms struggling to survive.
If you moved through the world effortlessly, accomplishing all your goals without a single challenge, you would never acquire knowledge. Picture a ball of tumbleweed tumbling across the desert. It goes wherever the wind blows – it stops, it changes course, it tumbles on. Because it has no goals, it has no problems; because it has no problems, it doesn’t need to know anything.
You, however, are a very different story. You have a lot of goals, from the simplest desire to eat food to the most sophisticated plan to save the planet. You constantly encounter obstacles. To get food, you need to get money; to get money, you need to hold down a job; to hold down a job, you need to arrive on time. But heavy traffic during morning rush hour keeps making you late regardless of which roads you drive. So you learn to take the train.
You learn.
According to Dewey, knowledge is something you learn through experience as opposed to just repeating or nodding agreement.
Suppose your parents had always tried to teach you that the train is a superior mode of transport. This information is meaningless to you until you find out for yourself. And it may not hold true for everyone all the time.
According to pragmatists, knowledge arises from a process that starts with an obstacle to successful human action, proceeds to active manipulation of the environment to test hypotheses, and issues in a change that allows for the action to proceed once again.
Scepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
John Dewey
Realists object that pragmatists mistake one type of knowledge – practical knowledge – for knowledge itself. Surely, there are many kinds of knowledge that don’t fit the pragmatist formula. For example: the Nazis killed millions of Jews during World War II. This is a historical claim. It seems important to know whether it corresponds to reality.