Andrew Cohen’s spiritual life began at the age of 16 when he experienced a spiritual experience spontaneously during a conversation with his mother. He later described that during this experience he was “completely overwhelmed and intoxicated by Love and struck by a sense of awe and wonder that was impossible to describe.” From that revelation he “suddenly knew without any doubt that there was no such thing as death and that life itself had no beginning and no end… life was intimately connected and inseparable. It became clear that there was no such thing as individuality separate from that one Self that was all of life. The glory and majesty in the cosmic unity that was revealing itself to me was completely overwhelming”
After this experience the young Andrew Cohen asked everyone he could about the experience that had occurred to him and no one he found seemed to be able to help him. In his autobiography Cohen states that at the time of his spontaneous spiritual awakening as a teenager he was reading his first spiritual book, William James’ classic of comparative religious study “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” and it was only this book that gave him “some understanding” of his experience.
As I stated in my last post I don’t believe that James was the most directly influential force on the development of Andrew Cohen’s evolutionary philosophy, although I do think James might have had some influence on Cohen’s evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary philosophy is the explicit and implicit context of James’ work and the American character has certainly been predisposed to the idea of evolution for many reasons that we have explored here. Still, James’ Varieties of Religious Experience has minimal direct reference to evolution, so how might that book have influenced Andrew Cohen?
My desire to understand how the ideas of William James might have had shaped the development of Andrew Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment has been partially fueling my own interest in American Philosophy for the past few years. I have come to believe that there are several critical influences that Cohen could have received directly from James at a vulnerable moment in his spiritual life. One of these was certainly an exposure to the idea that spiritual awakening is part of a cosmic process of evolution. In particular Andrew Cohen may have been exposed to the idea of “cosmic consciousness” through James’ book.
Cosmic Consciousness is a term that was coined by the Canadian Doctor Richard Maurice Bucke in his 1901 book entitled Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. In that book Bucke proposes that experiences of this type represent the next stage in human consciousness. He contends that the occurrence of them is increasing with time showing that this new possibility is becoming closer at hand.
In his book, Bucke describes this state of consciousness as follows.
“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is… a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe…Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination… To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense… With these come, what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”
Bucke was an adventurous soul in more ways than one. As a young man he left the backwoods of Canada and spent 5 years living in and traveling through the wilderness of the American northwest. It became a death defying ordeal on several occasions and in the end resulted in the amputation of one of his feet completely and the other one partially due to frostbite.
Later after having finished his education to become a doctor Bucke claimed to have been brought to an experience of Cosmic Consciousness himself after reading poetry by the English Romantics and the American poet Walt Whitman. After that Bucke became what you could call a spiritual devotee of Whitman (although Whitman was reluctant about the role of spiritual teacher). He eventually met Whitman in person, spent a summer with the great poet and wrote Whitman’s biography.
Cohen’s description of his own experience certainly matches the description that Bucke provides and Cohen’s exposure to Bucke would have come through the reading of James at the time of his awakening. I wonder if reading James’ powerful book, full of rich and detailed descriptions of experiences of deep spiritual awakening, catalyzed Cohen’s experience as well as helped him to interpret it afterward.
Categories: Continuity and the Nature of the Self · The Significance of Philosophy and The Character of American Philosophy
Tagged: Andrew Cohen, Cosmic Consciousness, Richard Maurice Bucke, William James
Evolutionary Enlightenment is the spiritual teaching that has been developed by Andrew Cohen over more than two decades. That teaching has grown to include an evolutionary cosmology that very closely resembles that held collectively by the American Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Did Andrew Cohen get his evolutionary view from these great thinkers? Not directly.
Cohen, similar to Peirce, describes the evolution of the universe as beginning from a state of pure emptiness, perfect potentiality prior to manifestation. He goes on to outline a possibility for personal and cultural conscious evolution that is in many ways reminiscent of Peirce, James and Dewey. Cohen wasn’t aware of the work of Peirce or Dewey during the majority of the time that he was outlining and teaching Evolutionary Enlightenment. He was familiar with William James’ work on religious experience, but I don’t believe that Cohen’s evolutionary cosmology would have come from James, although reading James might have helped predispose him to such a perspective.
Cohen’s teaching has had some overt evolutionary perspective from the very start of his teaching career. “Self-realization is evolution” was a statement that he made in some of his earliest writing. One of Cohen’s early influences that did bring an evolutionary perspective to him was the Indian Spiritual Master, Gopi Krishna. Gopi Krishna was a Hindu teacher who taught the awakening of inner human energies known as Kundalini. Gopi Krishna’s teaching was unconventional in that he taught Kundalini in an evolutionary context and claimed that these energies were the energy of evolution. As a young seeker Andrew Cohen was very inspired by Gopi Krishna and his evolutionary view.
Gopi Krishna certainly planted an evolutionary seed in Andrew Cohen’s mind, and yet it is unlikely that he was the source of what was to become a cosmologically based evolutionary spirituality. The influences that brought that out in Andrew Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment came later in his teaching career in the form of three American teachers that all had a strong evolutionary perspective.
The first of these teachers was Michael Murphy. Murphy had been a disciple of the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo and his wife and spiritual successor, The Mother. Aurobindo and the Mother taught in India and developed a profound Evolutionary Spirituality that is one of the most important precursors to the Evolutionary Spirituality that is growing in popularity today. Michael Murphy brought this evolutionary perspective back with him to the United States and, as one of the most prominent figures in the human potential movement, co-founded Esalen a Spiritual center in California known for its blend of Eastern and Western practices.
Another of Andrew Cohen’s evolutionary influences was cosmologist Brian Swimme. Swimme’s view of cosmic evolution was very influenced by the writings of Catholic Priest and Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. De Chardin, like Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, is one of the most significant early pioneers of Evolutionary Spirituality. He is perhaps best known for his use of the phrase “Noosphere” to describe the thinking layer of the Earth. His description of the evolution of the cosmos towards some final “Omega Point” is a breathtaking vision of spiritual cosmic evolution.
The last, and perhaps most important, evolutionary influence on Andrew Cohen was his close association with Ken Wilber. It is with Ken Wilber that some connection to the evolutionary perspective of the American Pragmatists can be seen. Wilber was influenced in his work to some degree by all three of the founding Pragmatists, although he praises Charles Sanders Peirce most strongly. The evolutionary philosophy that Andrew Cohen created as part of his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment reflects many of the evolutionary ideas of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, and these ideas in turn reflect many of the ideas of the early Pragmatists.
Categories: The Fall and Rebirth of Pragmatism · The Truth of Pragmatism
Tagged: Andrew Cohen, Brian Swimme, Gopi Krishna, Ken Wilber, Kundalini, Michael Murphy, Sri Aurobindo, The Mother
In this blog I have attempted to create a snapshot of the American philosophy of Pragmatism. In doing this I have emphasized how ideas are developed as part of, and in response to, larger cultural currents. Pragmatism emerged and developed during the height of what is known as the modern era which began with the European Enlightenment and grew to become the uncontested champion worldview in western thought until the midpoint of the twentieth century. The economic, political and moral failures of two world wars, a great depression and then the lingering cold war, were seen as the failures of the overly progressive modernist spirit.
The disillusionment from these events accelerated the already growing introspective mood of 20th Century America. In the Beatniks of the 1950’s became the Hippies of the 1960’s and a popular infusion of Eastern Spiritual teachings and practices swept through the counter culture. Simultaneously interest in psychology, particularly the psychoanalytic methods pioneered by Sigmund Freud, was growing rapidly. This interest in psychological processing led to the growth of a plethora of therapeutic modalities and theories of human development that multiplied through the course of the 1960’s and 1970’s in America.
Any seeker after truth and development during this time found at their disposal a dizzying array of approaches, methods, systems, practices, philosophies and communities – east and west – to choose from. Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian Mysticism, Judaism, Psychoanalysis, Psychosynthesis, The Human Potential Movement, Meditation, Martial Arts and so on. With so many different paths to human development popularly available it was probably inevitably that someone would come along and try to sort them all out.
One young American was confused by all of the diversity represented in these human development systems and wanted to learn how to effectively compare such seemingly different systems based on such a wide array of different philosophical and intellectual principles. His name was, Ken Wilber, and his answer to the puzzle of how these different methods of development were related was his first book, “The Spectrum of Consciousness.”
The fundamental thesis of that book is simple and elegant and arguably not entirely original, but it was described with an elegance and breadth of scope that made it enormously compelling. Wilber was describing a theory that recognized that consciousness had different aspects, different functions, and that these aspects or functions could be seen as existing as part of a continuum that he was calling “the spectrum of consciousness.”
The different psychological methods and spiritual practices that had become so popular in the two decades since the midpoint of the century were all aimed at the development of consciousness, but they were not all aimed at the same aspect or function of consciousness. In Wilber’s book he describes in detail how the different aspects of consciousness lie within a spectrum that has an inherently hierarchal structure. Some aspects of consciousness are higher than others. He then proceeded to match different psychological approaches, spiritual practices and systems of human development with the aspects of consciousness that they address.
This book captured the attention of many people and sparked what became called the “Transpersonal Revolution” and what Wilber would eventually develop into his conception of Integral Theory. As his theory grew he would eventually describe the universe as a single evolving continuum. Aspects of his theory closely resemble and were in part inspired by, the thinking of the American Pragmatists.
The firstness, secondness, and thirdness of Charles Sanders Peirce in particular bear a striking resemblance to Wilber’s conception that reality can be mapped into four quadrants. Like Peirce, Wilber starts with the three perspectives represented by the first, second and third person points of view. In Wilber’s construction, however, reality is divided in half twice. For those who might not be familiar with these quadrants I will attempt the simplest possible explanation. The first time reality is vertically split into the inner dimension of existence and the outer dimension of existence – what I see inside myself and what I see outside myself. These halves are again split into individual and collective aspects. So the inner dimension is split into what I see in me, and what we share together in the form of inner ideas and values. The outer dimension is split into an external view of me or another and an external view of the world that we exist within.
And so Wilber in an attempt to understand the diverse forms developmental approaches that emerged after the fall of Pragmatism gave birth to Integral Theory.
Categories: The Fall and Rebirth of Pragmatism
Tagged: Integral Theory, Ken Wilber
It was almost exactly one year ago today that I started this blog so I guess this is my first anniversary post. I started the blog because I wanted to explore the relationship between classical American Philosophy and the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment which I have been involved with for 18 years. What I found was that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism had many resemblances to Evolutionary Enlightenment and that the American Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey had developed between them a profound evolutionary philosophy.
I have been both stunned and humbled to learn that so many ideas that I have devoted myself to and had thought were new actually had a long and rich history in American Philosophy. I also have had the benefit of outstanding comments from so many of my readers and have refined developed and even (gasp) altered my thinking all along the way. The path over the year was not exactly what I expected. We took a few long detours into very critical and important philosophical questions. One of these was the question of freewill vs. determinism. With the help of our friend Carl we were able to take a long look at this perennial philosophical question and to get help by drawing on Carl’s college professor B. F. Skinner a truly original and brilliant American thinker. I also took us on a related excursion into the possible limits of science and certain rigidities that can arise in scientific thinking. We also had many changes to explore the sweeping movements of history that have so much impact on how thought develops through time.
For me the big revelation over this past year was seeing how Peirce, James and Dewey had constructed the beginnings of a comprehensive philosophy that attempted to explain the evolution of cosmos, consciousness and culture. Although the ideas of each of these thinkers includes some of each of these three elements, it is also true that they can fairly neatly be categorized based on the emphasis in their work as follows. Peirce emphasized an exploration of the cosmos. James emphasized the evolution of human consciousness. And Dewey emphasized the evolution of culture.
Peirce was convinced that a fully encompassing theory of evolution would have to explain not only the evolution of life, but the evolution of the universe as a whole including the development of time and space, life and consciousness, and all of the natural and physical laws that currently exist. Peirce explained how the right combination of spontaneity, continuity and the tendency to form habits was enough to explain the evolution of everything else.
James taught that the human experience of consciousness flows forward in ever emerging “drops” of awareness. He described “The Will to Believe” as the mechanism that controls the unfolding of our destiny. We each are free to chose what we believe in and what we believe in will determine the choices that we make and the future that we create.
Dewey recognized that objects that are named always have as part of their meaning a sign that points toward some possible future. Objects such as these, that can be either physical or mental objects, make up culture, and the energy and activity of people that live in any particular culture will tend to flow in whatever direction the objects of that culture are pointing. Changing the objects in a culture becomes the mechanism through which culture can be changed.
Together these three thinkers outlined the broad contours of an American Evolutionary Philosophy. Over the course of this year it seemed more and more obvious that the contemporary ideas contained in Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment have deep roots in the intellectual development of American Philosophy. So where do we go from here? With a year’s worth of foundation set I want to turn now to a more detailed look at just what Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment have inherited, directly and indirectly, from the great tradition of American Philosophy.
Categories: The Fall and Rebirth of Pragmatism · The Significance of Philosophy and The Character of American Philosophy
Tagged: American Philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Integral Theory, John Dewey, Pragmatism, William James
What I see in John Dewey’s Instrumentalism is a compelling theory of how the evolution of culture can be consciously guided. Dewey’s ideas about directing the further development of culture rest squarely on his understanding of objects as things with meaning and his understanding of meaning as always pointing to some future utility. For Dewey a thing, be it physical or mental, was meaningful when it was understood that it could be used to achieve some future outcome. A baseball, for example, is for playing the game of baseball. The object, in this case a baseball, can be seen as an instrument that could be used to bring about a specific end, in this case a game of baseball. Another way to understand this is that an object is a sign that points toward a possible future, a base ball points toward the possibility of a baseball game.
When a group of people share the same understanding of the meaning of an object, which means they share the same understanding of the future the object is pointing toward, then the presence of that object among those people will tend to make the future the object is pointing toward more likely to come into being. (Try reading that 10 times fast.) Using our example of a baseball one more time, imagine a playground full of children. If there is a baseball on the ground in that playground the possibility of a baseball game being played will be greater.
Culture is the collection of understood objects, or signs, that are shared by a group of people. The existence of these objects will tend to direct the flow of human energy and activity toward the possible futures that the objects point toward. This means that the people within a given culture will tend to act in ways that follow in the general direction that the objects (signs) of that culture are pointing.
Cultures are exceedingly complex and contain many physical and mental signs that all point toward different possible ends. Baseballs toward ball games. Chairs toward sitting. Democracy towards forms of governance. Capitalism towards ways of regulating commerce. etc. Some objects are physical and some are mental, some are small with minimal influence in the overall direction of a culture, some are huge with massive influence over the general direction that a culture will develop in.
To guide culture in this model you need to be able to do two things. You need to educate people to be able to correctly interpret the meaning of objects, and you need to strategically place objects, physical and mental, in the culture so that they will guide the development of culture in the direction you want culture to go. Dewey spent his professional career as a philosopher studying education theory and the big ideas, institutions and social structures that have the largest impact in directing the flow of human energy and activity in society.
There is of course one huge hole in this theory of conscious cultural evolution: how do you decide what direction cultural should follow. Think of Adolf Hitler. He was masterful at educating a population toward a shared understanding of the meaning of objects, and at filling his culture with the objects that would direct the flow of energy and activity of people in the direction that he wanted to manifest. Unfortunately the results of his efforts were monstrous. The lack of a clear moral foundation for Pragmatic thinking was a problem that occupied all of the three founders of Pragmatism.
Charles Sanders Peirce came to believe that morality was an inherent part of the universe in the form of a force he called Agapism or “Evolutionary Love.” This force was a pull and preference for that which was most evolutionary and it dictated the direction of highest moral good. Of the three founding Pragmatists William James was perhaps most preoccupied with the question of morality and he developed an updated version of John Stuart Mills Utilitarianism stating that moral goodness was always in the direction that brought the most good to the most people. John Dewey, as I have written about in previous posts, realized that the process of evolution only rewards the potential for still greater evolution. Progress in any other direction would ultimatly become an evolutionary dead end and so Dewey believed that the moral good was in whatever direction led to the greatest possibility for further growth and evolution.
Categories: Freewill and Human Choice and Conscious Evolution
Tagged: Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, Pragmatism, William James
Now back to John Dewey who felt that his instrumental view of reality did away with the philosophical problem of mind and matter. Prior to communication reality is an unending stream of events that are embedded in the circumstances that gave rise to them. With language these events can be named and they become objects, which Dewey defined as events with meaning. The meaning attributed to the objects generally had to do with the possible consequences of that event. As an example let’s go back to the sound of rushing water from my last post. That sound when you name it “water” becomes a symbol for a something that now means the substance which will have the consequence of quenching my thirst if I drink it.
Empiricists and Idealists had been disagreeing for centuries over which was more real thought or the physical world. Empiricists defined reality by sensible characteristics – the fact that you can see, hear, touch and measure things. Idealists tended to define what was most real by some notion of an ideal essence of a thing that existed beyond the sensible character in the mind. In both cases the problem of mind and matter existed. Which was real? To empiricists matter was real and mind gave us a representation of that reality. To idealists the essence was real and matter was an inferior manifestation of the essence in time and space. Dewey felt that Instrumentalism catapulted beyond this duality. Something is real if its being has consequence, in other words if circumstances or other people have to somehow accommodate and adjust to its existence. If something is supposed to exist and yet nothing happens as a result of its existence then in what sense is it real?
In this way Dewey said both mind and matter are real, both ideas and physical objects are real because both lead to consequences. If you put a large rock in the middle of the road it is not real because you can see it, you can feel it or you can measure its weight. It is real because cars have to drive around it. It is real because it leads to consequences. An idea is real because ideas force us to adjust to them. If I am rushing to the airport and I hear that the airport has closed due to bad weather, my actions will have to adjust to accommodate this idea.
In his book “Experience and Nature” Dewey illustrates this point with the example of the founding of America. We commonly think of America as a place that was discovered, but what was discovered? A continent was discovered upon which America would be developed, but what is America? America to Dewey was an idea, an idea of a place that leads to consequences in terms of human activity. America was not limited to the North American continent. During the centuries it has existed America as an idea has lived as an idea in the mind of Europeans as well as Americans. People make choice and base behavior on this idea and therefore the idea is real. America is an idea that leads to consequences in the action of people. In the river of activity and affairs that is life an idea, like the idea of America, is a metaphorical rock in the road and the further flow of life will be influenced by this idea in many different ways.
Dewey, reminiscent of Martin Heidegger, recognized that naming an experience gave meaning to that experience and create an object that would have the meaning as an inherent part of it for anyone who could understand the language. Using language the meaning could then be communicated and shared to others. Ideas were the tool or vehicle for guiding the relentless rush of nature forward into the future. Nature as he saw it was an “affair of affairs,” a string of events that begin and end. The ending of every event is the beginning of the next. All of the events have consequences that affect future events. Reality is a connected stream of being that is constantly being guided by what has already happened. And the beginnings and endings became the world of the future.
Dewey saw that the ability to see instrumentally, to see not only things as they currently are and where they have come from, but also where they could go, would allow humanity to control the development of the future. The creation and communication of ideas create new objects that future human activity has to adapt to. These mental objects are the rocks in the paths of mental highways and can be used to direct the traffic of human activity that will build the future. Dewey saw the world as interconnected consequential events and was compelled to learn how to guide the further development of events through generating new ideas and spreading them as shared experience in the field of mind. This was his version of conscious evolution and he elected to devote his efforts largely to developing educational systems because that is where he felt he could make the biggest impact on the development of the future.
Categories: The Truth of Pragmatism
Tagged: John Dewey, Martin Heidegger
I wanted to tell my readers that I am planning to bring the discussions that we have been having on this blog to a course at a local community college in Western Massachusetts. If any of you are local I would love to see you there. And if you know anyone who might want to come please let them know about it. You can read my course description right here at: http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/courses/
Categories: Uncategorized
I want to post one more time before getting back to a few last words on John Dewey and conscious evolution. I have been doing a little research into the development of modern physics because I think there is a useful analogy to be found there and applied to the discussion we have been having about whether anything called a mind actually exists or not.
Isaac Newton is perhaps most famous for the discovery of gravity and his laws of motion. His ground breaking work gave rise to two competing schools of thought both initiated by mathematical astronomers. One is most closely associated with the Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736 –1813) and the other with Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827).
Laplace’s physics emphasized trying to understand the nature of the forces that work on objects and the nature of the objects that they work on. Laplace advocated examining situations and trying to determine the characteristics of the elements and forces involved. He tried to imagine why things were happening. This leaning toward speculation led him to speculate that there might be tiny invisible particles that could account for the motion that we see in the world, or unseen forces responsible for moving matter around.
Lagrange took a completely different approach in his mechanics which is generally called Rational Mechanics. He advocated giving up speculation about the nature of things. Why invent invisible particles or unseen forces to describe what we see he would say. Instead he felt that we should simply fit accurate mathematical descriptions to what we see and use those mathematical descriptions to predict and control future events.
Laplace wanted to understand the nature of things and then be able to predict and explain why they behaved the way they did. LaGrange wanted to simply study and model the behavior of things and not worry about their nature. Laplace dove into our ignorance, LaGrange avoided it. I can see this distinction in my own history. Initially I studied Engineering as an undergraduate, but I switched to physics because I felt that I was more interested in why things work than how they work. Physics, at least in its most theoretical sense follows Laplace. Engineering, in its most applied sense, follows LaGrange. Both of these streams of thought have persisted in science for the past few centuries and what is fascinating is that neither has proven superior to the other. Both approaches work better in some circumstances than the other does.
In our discussion of mind I would say that B. F. Skinner is applying the approach of LaGrange to human behavior. As has been true in the physical sciences this approach will probably work better in some circumstances than alternatives. I don’t believe that this means we should advocate that everyone stop speculating about what the nature of mind might be. Imagine if we had stopped all scientists in the 18th century from searching for unseen particles and forces.
This also brings me back to a few things that we have discussed in the past having to do with individual preference and temperament. William James believed that some people were temperamentally more “tough-minded” and others more “tender-minded.” The tough-minded tend to believe in things based on proof and evidence. They are driven by results and tend to trust in calculation and direct deduction. The tender-minded are more inclined to believe based on intuitions, feelings and hunches. They are more likely to be religious believers and spiritually inclined. This difference in temperament James believed was why some of us become empiricists and others idealists, why some would follow Laplace and others LaGrange. Why some would be Religious and others not.
Back again for a moment to the 18th century to end on a note of interest, the English Romantics whom we have talked about before very much picked up on the language of forces from Laplace. You can see illusions to the unseen forces of nature in writers like Coleridge and Wordsworth, and as we have previously discussed you will not find a more tender-minded bunch.
Categories: Continuity and the Nature of the Self
Tagged: B. F. Skinner, Isaac Newton, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, William James
I still have a few more posts on Dewey that I want to put up that lead to an exciting model of cultural evolution, but Carl’s comment to my last post inspired me to write something more about the mind. Carl pointed out how metaphorical my description was, presumably he is making the point that the reason such heavily metaphorical language is needed to describe the mind is because there is no such thing.
The concept of mind is a fascinating one. What is it? Where is it? In the commonest terms we often simply equate mind with brain, or at least speak as if the mind is some function of the brain. In fact, no one knows what the mind is. The word itself is really a metaphor for the collection of experiences of thought, memory, feeling, will, choice etc. that we experience as our “inner world.” Carl’s teacher B. F. Skinner didn’t believe there was such a thing as a mind. With his conception of Radical Behaviorism he believed that he could describe human behavior in relationship to the environment without needing to resort to something called a mind.
I won’t go back into Behaviorism now, because we have covered that in some detail in earlier posts, but I did want to say a few words about the relationship between Behaviorism and the psychology of William James James was not a Behaviorist but he did help set the stage for Behaviorism. Philosophically James also questioned the nature of consciousness. In an important paper of his called, Does Consciousness Exist? James wrote the following:
During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness… But they were not quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For twenty years past I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.
James’ pragmatic equivalent was to recognize that everything in the end is “pure experience.” I suppose he was thinking that by doing away with the problem of trying to figure out “what consciousness is” we could put our energy to finding out how human beings actually work. This is certainly aligned with Sinner’s view and it inspired one of James’ students, Edward Lee Thorndike, to do behavior studies on chicks in James’ own basement.
In these experiments Thorndike observed the behavior of insects and baby chicks as he put them through different trials. What he observed led him to believe that animal behavior developed through trial and error and the tendency to form habits by repeating behaviors that had been tried and successful in the past. Thorndike concluded that nothing about animal behavior led him to believe that any kind of mental activity or thought processing was going on behind the scenes. This negation of “mentalism” would be developed by later American Behaviorists including B.F. Skinner, who would develop an alternative to the original Russian conception.
So, is there such a thing as a mind? And if there is a mind, what is it?
People who tend toward empiricism, behaviorism and materialism in general will believe that if you can explain human behavior without needing to resort to some assumption about a thinking entity called mind then you should not make that assumption. To that extend I can go along, but I find that many people with inclinations in this direction will go one step further and say that in fact you should assume there is no such thing. I think it is accurate to say we just don’t know and therefore we need to have an open inquiry as to the existence of mind.
We can’t see a mind, or measure a mind, or even conceive of what it is. So maybe there just isn’t one, but then again maybe there is and we just haven’t conceived of it accurately yet. To use another metaphor, think of leaves blowing in the wind. We can’t see the wind, so it might be helpful to study the motion of leaves without assuming the existence of wind, but that doesn’t mean that the wind isn’t there and it might be a good idea to assume of some wind-like entity until we figure out what is really going on.
Categories: Continuity and the Nature of the Self
Tagged: B. F. Skinner, Behaviorism, Consciousness, Edward Lee Thorndike, William James
I can describe the beautiful image that built in my mind as I read John Dewey’s book “Experience and Nature” by describing a vision of reality as currents in the ocean of mind. Think of mind as an ocean and within that ocean there are currents. Now imagine that there are objects floating on the surface of the ocean. The objects represent people and the direction that the objects will float in over the surface of the ocean will be determined by which current they get caught in.
The objects get swept into one current and get carried along for a while in one direction. Then another current picks them up and sweeps them off in a different direction. You might see different objects get swept along by different currents in different directions and as the currents change direction the movement of the objects also changes direction.
You can’t really see an ocean current. (Let’s for the moment not count waves and ripples and assume the currents are very slow and not really visible.) When you see the patterns that get traced out by the objects floating on the surface of the water you know the currents are there. This is very similar to the magnetic field that surrounds a magnet. You can’t see a magnetic field, but if you pour out iron filings around the magnet the iron filings will arrange themselves along the lines of force of the magnetic field. The movement of the iron filings allows you to “see” the magnetic field.
This is how I believe John Dewey saw the mind. It is not something that exists in people’s heads. It is an ocean with currents in it or a magnetic field with lines of force. We only see the currents in the ocean of mind by seeing the direction that people’s actions take them. When you see someone going to work every day you realize that “going-to-work-every-day” is a current in the ocean of mind and that many people are caught in that current. (I don’t intend to place a value judgment on working it just happens to be an obvious current that we are all familiar with.)
As I began to describe in my last few posts, the currents of mind take the form of ideas (mental objects) that have meaning associated with them. Ideas act as signs or pointers that direct us towards certain possible outcomes. The idea “job” points to the possibility of working for a living. The idea “responsibility” might also point in the same direction and reinforce the idea of “job.” The ideas that we hold are all pointers, they are currents in the ocean of mind. We all know that if you hold onto an idea that idea can easily sweep you up and lead you to actions and possible futures.
I believe that John Dewey saw ideas as currents in mind that carry us in different directions. In this he is very much following in the footsteps of one of his mentors and friends William James. Look at all of the ideas that are always swimming around in your head (I am using the phrase figuratively not literally) and notice how they have an energy to them that point towards and even compel you towards different possible actions that will lead to different possible futures. If you were not aware of any ideas at all, what would happen to you? How would you behave?
Allow yourself to get a sense of the fluid liquid ocean of ideas that we are all swimming in. Get a sense of how it is sweeping you along, pushing you in this direction, carrying you in that one. We are like objects floating on an ocean of ideas, but we are not passive. We create the ideas and adjust the ideas. We change our minds; we have some ideas that tell us to do one thing, some ideas that tell us to do the opposite and still other ideas that decide between the two. We float on the ocean currents and get swept away by them and we create and alter the currents in the ocean that we float on. By changing our ideas, we can change the direction that our energy and our actions will take us in. Changing our ideas will change the future.
Categories: Continuity and the Nature of the Self
Tagged: John Dewey, William James
