Words&Dirt

“[John] Dewey invests enormously in the centrality of language and other modes of communicative discourse (including signs, symbols, gestures, and social institutions) in explaining how the community grows its persons:

Through speech a person dramatically identifies himself with potential acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stage of life but in a contemporaneously enacted drama.  Thus mind emerges.

For Dewey, mind is ‘an added property assumed by a feeling creature, when it reaches that organized interaction with other living creatures which is language, communication.’  For Dewey, then, what we might call ‘heartmind’ is created in the process of realizing a world.  Heartmind, like world, is becoming rather than being, and the question is how productive and enjoyably are we able to make this creative process.  The way in which heartmind and world are changed is not simply in terms of human attitude, but in real growth and productivity, and in the efficiency and pleasure that attends this process.  The alternative––for a community to fail to communicate effectively––is for the community to wither, leaving it vulnerable to the ‘mindless’ violence and ‘heartless’ atrocities of creatures that have failed to become human.

In Confucianism, as in Deweyan pragmatism, the process of personal and communal development is driven by effective communication.  To cite Dewey:

Everything which is distinctively human is learned, not native, even though it could not be learned without native structures which mark man off from other animals.  To learn is a human way and to human effect is not just to acquire added skill through refinement of original capacities.  To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community; one who understands its beliefs, desires, and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of organic powers into human resources and values.

Dewey’s position expressed here might on the surface seem to contradict that voiced in the Mencius when the latter claims:

The capacities that people have without having learned them are the root of their capacities; the wisdom that people have without having reflected upon it is the root of their wisdom.  There are no young children who do not know to love their parents, and on coming of age, there are none who do not know to respect their elders.  Loving one’s parents is being consummate; respecting one’s elders is being appropriate.  There is no other reason that these habits can prevail in the world.

But neither Dewey nor Mencius would dispute the fact that all activity is a collaboration between person and their environments, and this being so, that persons bring significant capacities with them in their various activities that are a function of their initial conditions.  Dewey is focusing on the transactional nature of all human conduct that invariably entails a ‘doing and an undergoing,’ while Mencius is insisting that all action invariably has a subjective dimension to it, and that becoming moral is not entirely derived from some external source.  The key lies in understanding that when Mencius rejects the claims that virtuosic conduct is derived from something ‘external’ (wai), he is not alternatively claiming that such conduct is entirely a matter of actualizing and manifesting some internal nature independent of that external circumstances of one’s roles and relations.  Rather, he is asserting, like Dewey after him, that person and personal growth are both a collaboration between an emerging subject and a more-or-less objective world.”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 151-2

“I walk, to see myself walking, with firm steps, free even of myself, in the middle of the street, exactly in the middle.  The flying monsters bark at me.  They spit out their fire, but I’m indifferent.  I hear only the rhythm of my footsteps on the cratered asphalt.  And I see no one.  What am I searching for?  Nothing.  Maybe what takes hold of my footsteps and strikes them against the sleeping streets is an unyielding resistance that hides the fear of loneliness, or the fear of death in the rubble.  Never before have I seen Beirut in such profound morning slumber.  For the first time, I’m seeing the sidewalks: clear sidewalks.  For the first time I’m seeing the trees, visible trees with trunks, branches, and perennially green leaves.  Is Beirut beautiful in itself?

Movements, arguments, crowds, and the hubbub of commerce used to hide this perception, transforming Beirut from a city to a concept, a meaning, an expression, a sign.  This city printed books, distributed newspapers, and held seminars and conferences to solve the world’s problems, but paid no attention to itself.  It was busy sticking out a mocking tongue at the sand and the repression on all sides of it.  It was a workshop for freedom.  Its walls carried an encyclopedia of the modern world: it was a factory for making posters.

It was no doubt the first city in the world to upgrade the making of posters to a level of the daily paper.  Perhaps its expressive powers, formed from the mixture of death, chaos, freedom, alienation, migration, and peoples, had become so full and had so overflown the known forms of utterance that it found only the poster capable of making room for powers of expression that went beyond the merely quotidian.  Thus the poster became a recurrent term; in poems and stories it was used to convey the sense of something special.  Faces on the walls––martyrs freshly emerging from life and the printing presses, a death which is a remake of itself.  One martyr replacing the face of another, taking his place on the wall, until displaced by yet another, or by rain.  Slogans that change place with other slogans, or wipe them out.  Slogans that classify national priorities and the daily duties of states.  Everything that passed in the world also passed through here, sometimes reflecting what went on outside, sometimes setting a pattern for it.  If two intellectuals got into an argument in Paris, their dispute could turn into an armed encounter here.  Because Beirut had to be in solidarity and up-to-date with everything new, with every old thing that renewed itself, and with each new movement or theory.  A cinema of revolutions in speeded-up motion.  Video for instant application.  The new leader or new star in any field was nominated as Beirut’s leader or star.  Its walls were teeming with pictures and words, and passersby had to catch their breath from an experience that kept shifting.

Therefore, the reign of stars and leaders was short here, not because the audience was easily bored––the audience in fact was not here––but because the race was run on the American pattern even if its goals were anti-American.  What we had were permanent representatives of every new consciousness, every new tune, and every new trend: the girl in jeans with a cigarette lighter dangling from a chain around her neck to project an immoderate leftism, the veil covering face and hands to indicate authenticity, or the seizing upon any sign that made an Orientalist out of Karl Marx to prove that the winds of the East were now blowing.  This was Beirut: the global transformer station that converted every deviation from the norm into a program of action for a public busy securing water and bread, and burying the dead.”

––Memory for Forgetfulness, by Mahmoud Darwish, pg. 52-4