The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking: Education and Subject in John Dewey

Transcription

1 Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2017 The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking: Education and Subject in John Dewey VASCO D AGNESE In this paper, I analyse the Deweyan account of thinking and subject and discuss the educational consequences that follow from such an account. I argue that despite the grouping of thinking and reflective thought that has largely appeared in the interpretation of Deweyan work, Dewey discloses an inescapable uncertainty at the core of human thinking. This move is even more challenging given Dewey s firm faith in the power of intelligent action, and in education as the means by which human beings grow and create meaningful existence. I argue that throughout his work, Dewey dismantled the understanding of the subject as a detached and self-assured centre of agency. In Deweyan understanding, on one hand, the subject is empowered to reflect on experience and to use this reflection to evolve new ways of acting, thus pushing experience forward. On the other hand, by acting, the subject can create new points of interaction within experience. This understanding of thinking and subject has far-reaching consequences for education, which must be conceived not so much as the attempt to master and control experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience by putting new points of interactions into our relationship with the environment, changing our being-embedded-in-the-world. Dewey repositions educational, intentional agency away from control and mastery and in the direction of growth and openness. 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 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

2 74 V. D Agnese is ironic given that the very question of education in Dewey is grounded on sharing and communication (Dewey, 1930, pp. 6 7, ). 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

3 The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking 75 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 ). 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.

4 76 V. D Agnese 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 ). 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

5 The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking 77 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. The Ground of Reflective Thought According to Biesta and Burbules, one of the most important implications of Dewey s transactional approach is that it tries to account for the point of contact between the human organism and the world. For Dewey the human organism is always already in touch with reality (Biesta and Burbules, 2003, p. 10, emphasis in original). Biesta s and Burbules analysis shows that being in touch with reality is the standpoint from which we have to conceive of knowledge. Thus, faithful to a Deweyan pragmatist approach, the question is as follows: what are the consequences that follow from thinking of knowledge as starting from such a standpoint? With my end in view, the very question is to what extent the subject can master and control his relationship with the environment. We find a foothold to address the question in a passage from Experience and Nature, which works to reposition the relationship between knowledge, awareness and action: Apart from language, from imputed and inferred meaning, we continually engage in an immense multitude of immediate organic selections, rejections, welcomings, expulsions, appropriations, withdrawals, shrinkings, expansions, relations and dejections, attacks, wardings off, of the most minute, vibratingly delicate nature. We are not aware of the qualities of many or most of these acts; we do not objectively distinguish and identify them. However, they exist as feeling qualities, and have an enormous directive effect on our behaviour. Even our most highly intellectualised operations depend upon them as a fringe by which to guide our inferential movements (Dewey, 1929a, pp ). In this passage, Dewey states that our behaviour depends on an immense multitude of immediate organic selections... [which] we do not objectively distinguish and identify. This means that our interaction with the environment is grounded in something that we cannot control, if control is understood as mastery. Stated otherwise, it is even difficult to know what we make in our interaction with the environment. We know only, and only to a certain extent, the consequences of such making and indeed, in Deweyan thought, knowledge springs from action. Moreover, such unknown and unknowable making has an enormous directive effect on our behaviour. To the extent that behaviour is the combination of our actions and that reflective thought depends on our actions, to say that behaviour depends on something that we do not objectively distinguish and identify is to say that reflective thought depends on something that we do not objectively distinguish and identify.

6 78 V. D Agnese If a foundationalist approach were employed, it might be said that the very roots of reflective thought are out of the sight of reflective thought. Stated in terms closer to Dewey s approach, we can say that the issue at stake is not control as mastery. Our being-embedded-in-the-world cannot be thought of in terms of control over the world or in terms of standing over against the world to be known (Dewey, 1917, p. 59). Through Deweyan shift, we come to see how the dependency of our awareness on such an immense multitude of immediate organic selections in which we continually engage is a transactional one. We may only imagine and feel such a multitude, which escapes clear identification. We feel that something happens in us by contact with the environment. Such somethings are described by Dewey in terms of an indistinct and pugnacious bulk of activities that oppose, overlap, annul, and reinforce one another. Thus, if a linear approach were employed, one might be forced to conclude that the results of such magma can be witnessed only when it exerts a strong influence on behaviour by boiling over. However, faithful to Dewey s approach, with consciousness being the point of re-direction, of re-adaptation, re-organization (Dewey, 1929a, p. 312) of our relationship with the environment, the multitude of immediate organic selections is also the result of our choice regarding where to put the point of reorganisation and re-direction; as human beings, we can choose the point at which our interaction takes place and evaluate the consequences of such interactions, including deciding to choose new ways to intelligently interact. However, what the interaction will bring about and what comes to us from this interaction is not under our control. Therefore, the relationship between consciousness and immediate organic selections is circular. This circularity must be understood not in terms of discovery but of evolution and growth. Incidentally, in this statement, I wish to highlight that Dewey also accomplishes the naturalisation of unconscious that is simultaneously the naturalisation of mind and the weakening of rationality as mastery a naturalisation that can be connected to what Shook identified as Deweyan thoroughgoing naturalism (Shook, 2000, p. 7). Our unawareness of the whole, which happens in our contact with the world, has nothing to do with something that is set down in our mind; it has to do, simply, with living because where there is life, there are already eager and impassioned activities (Dewey, 1930, p. 50). Such an understanding is reinforced by a Deweyan account of knowledge, whose import also depends on conditions that are, in a sense, anything but cognitive. In Experience and Nature, Dewey states that it is literally impossible to exclude that context of non-cognitive but experienced subjectmatter which gives what is known its import (Dewey, 1929a, p. 23). Thus, to the extent that knowledge must be knowledge of the world and experience and not knowledge that fuels the industry of epistemology (Dewey, 1917, p. 32), we must consider its fundamental uncertainty. Interest, Bias and Imagination Thus far, I have argued that Deweyan transactionalism places uncertainty and growth of meanings at the core of thinking. In what follows, I wish

7 The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking 79 to argue that the moving force that engenders knowledge and reflective thought is also anything but reflective. I will make my point by examining three issues: interest, imagination and what we may call the first expression of the hermeneutic circle, 2 namely, the previously evolved meanings... from which meanings may be educed (Dewey, 1910, p. 106). Let us pay attention to the following statement: The directive source of selection is interest; an unconscious but organic bias toward certain aspects and values of the complex and variegated universe in which we live (Dewey, 1980, p. 97). The statement, quoted from Art as Experience,ispart of a broader question about the materials that constitute the products of mind. Dewey, asking what the moving force is that selects such materials, responds that this force is the interest, the dynamic force in selection and assemblage of materials. This is why products of mind are marked by individuality, just as products of mechanism are marked by uniformity (Dewey, 1980, p. 266). It is important to note that Dewey states that such a force is unconscious but organic ; there is nothing hidden in it that knowledge must discover. Placing the unconscious 3 on the ground of our vital tendencies, Dewey puts it firmly out of the boundaries of knowledge and refers to knowledge as something grounded on such vital tendencies. Interest, which is behind reflection, gives the contents of its own activity to reflection. However, this is not the only question. In focusing attention on our conscious understanding of the world, we meet that which, from Heidegger onward, is called the hermeneutic circle. Dewey furnished a clear and unmistakable formulation of such a fundamental structure of our understanding in 1910, 17 years before Heidegger s masterpiece, Being and Time (1996). In How We Think, Dewey states: We do not approach any problem with a wholly naïve or virgin mind; 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. If the circumstances are such that a habitual response is called directly into play, there is an immediate grasp of meaning. If the habit is checked, and inhibited from easy application, a possible meaning for the facts in question presents itself (Dewey, 1910, p. 106). Here, Dewey states that every issue of experience and every problem of life is approached by certain acquired habitual modes of understanding and by a certain store of previously evolved meanings. We experience the world starting with evolved... experiences from which meanings may be educed. There is no pure meaning in our understanding of the world or nature. Specifically, we do not have a basic ground on which we conceive of the world and nature. Our understanding, and thus our reflective thought, gains its import by moving into the circle of previous evolved meanings, which engenders new meanings. Such new meanings, in turn, become the basis on which further meanings evolve. The process is continuous. As we know, this means that we cannot stop the activity of understanding by putting it under the lens of reflection because, on one hand, the lens of reflection is involved in such an activity as an output of the on-going circle

8 80 V. D Agnese of the generation of meaning, and, on the other hand, such an activity is continuous; when we reflect on it, the activity has already gone forward. We find such a question also in examining the logic of understanding, namely, the logic of inquiry: Logic as inquiry into inquiry is, if you please, a circular process; it does not depend upon anything extraneous to inquiry. The force of this proposition may perhaps be most readily understood by noting what it precludes. It precludes the determination and selection of logical first principles by an a priori intuitional act, even when the intuition in question is said to be that of Intellectus Purus (Dewey, 1938, p. 20). Here, Dewey emphasises that logic is not a meta-reflection on the principles of inquiry; logic is situated on the same level as inquiry. In this statement, Dewey challenges the very possibility of presenting something as a privileged point by which to manage knowledge and experience. We are always within our experience, and by no means can we look at our experience from above. In examining the logic of reflective thought, there is also another question: the medium by which reflection reaches the world and constructs its own contents. Such a medium, which connects previous meanings with the meanings we are going to make, is imagination, as the medium of appreciation in every field (Dewey, 1930, p. 276). It is very important that Dewey conceives of imagination as a) something that belongs to every field, and b) something that makes us able to appreciate the world, namely, to perceive the world we live in. I quote the entire sentence, and then I provide an additional comment: Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure facts. The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical (Dewey, 1930, p. 276). The point I wish to highlight is that Dewey conceives of imagination as the junction at which meanings are established as such. Only through imagination are we able to project our ends into the future. This is why Dewey defines imagination as a normal and integral part of human activity as is muscular movement (Dewey, 1930, p. 277). Imagination is the very means by which to conceive of reality. Imagination has a basic cognitive and vital function. I believe that the latter part of the statement above also has to be understood by considering such a cognitive function. In saying that The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical, Dewey does not mean that imagination adds something subjective or creative to our activity. Instead, Dewey means that only by imagination can we perform activities that involve judgement and reflection. If we were deprived of imagination, we would be reduced to an animal state without meanings to conceive of. However, imagination, by its own nature, is peculiarly exposed to mistakes and failures: No hard and fast rules decide whether a meaning suggested is the right and proper meaning to follow up (Dewey, 1910, p. 106). That is, we cannot put a clear line between fantasy and reality or between failures and warranted assertibility (Dewey, 1938, p. 9) because the means by which to conceive of both reality and fantasy are the same.

9 Thinking as a Leap The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking 81 Thus far, I have attempted to formulate arguments regarding the relationship between reflective thought, its moving force and its wider context. Next, I wish to address reflective thought in itself, arguing that it is conceived by Dewey as crossed by uncertainty. Let us pay attention to the following statement: All thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure (Dewey, 1930, p. 174). The statement is clear enough in itself. I wish only to linger on the word adventure because there are far-reaching consequences beyond the surface understanding of the word. Indeed, we have to ask what the unique characteristic of an adventure is. An adventure is not only something that is not guaranteed in advance; rather, an adventure is something that gains its sense by being not guaranteed in advance. To put it roughly, if I am able to predict the end, I am not experiencing an adventure. Thus, following the Deweyan metaphor, if I am able to predict in advance how something ends, I am probably not thinking at all because in thinking we cannot be sure in advance (ibid.) In other words, through Dewey, we see that at the core of even the more self-assured thought lies risk and uncertainty. Such an understanding of the Deweyan account of thinking is even reinforced in the following pages of the work: The data arouse suggestions.... However, the suggestions run beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience. They forecast possible results, things to do, not facts (things already done). Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known. In this sense... thought... is creative (Dewey, 1930, p. 186, emphasis in original). Several aspects of this pivotal passage should be highlighted. Above all, we should note that data as such do not represent or produce evidence; they arouse suggestions..., forecast possible results, things to do, not facts. Thus, data are functional for forecasting, which is by definition uncertain. Forecasting, or inference, is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known. Here, I believe that we must carefully interpret the terms invasion and leap. The former refers to something that we must undergo. When we are invaded by something, it is not within our power to decide what to do with this something; instead, the something decides what to do with us. The latter is perhaps less evident in terms of its radical meaning but works similarly; indeed, the leap involves the very possibility of not knowing the point of landing and, importantly, the very uncertainty of the landing. In other words, when leaping, we may not know where, how or if we will land. Therefore, the two terms combined provide the impression that the very means of reasoning and inquiry, i.e. inference, is anything but certain. Not only is its state always tentative, but inference also involves danger and undergoing. However, faithful to Deweyan educational philosophy, such undergoing and danger are also the door to creativity and the future: Thought... is creative an incursion into the novel (ibid.). Again, creativity is not something added to thinking but a hallmark of thinking. This happens above all because While the content of knowledge is

10 82 V. D Agnese what has happened, what is taken as finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of knowledge is future or prospective. Imagination, in Deweyan understanding, gives a thinking being the possibility [to] act on the basis of the absent and the future (Dewey, 1910, p. 14). This is why the exercise of thought... involves a jump, a leap, a going beyond what is surely known to something else accepted on its warrant (Dewey, 1910, p. 26). Such an understanding of thought, as I wish to argue in the final section, has far-reaching consequences in education: Without the uncertainty entailed in jumping and leaping, we would not have the new, and we would therefore not have growth or education. In what follows, I present an account of the Deweyan subject. 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 andactsinexperience (emphasisadded) only insome 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.

11 The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking 83 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 ). 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 redirection, of re-adaptation, re-organisation.... Consciousness is, literally, the difference in process of making (Dewey, 1929a, pp , 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 ). 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

12 84 V. D Agnese 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;

13 The Essential Uncertainty of Thinking 85 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 ), 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-information;... 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).

14 86 V. D Agnese 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 )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 Correspondence: Vasco d Agnese, Second University of Naples, Department of Psychology, viale Ellittico 31, 81100, Caserta, Italy. vasco.dagnese@unina2.it NOTES 1. For the comparison between Dewey and Heidegger, see Margolis, 2010; Rorty, 1976; Toulmin, 1984; Troutner, 1969, 1972.

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