§85. Experience Reconstructed
The problems of modernity, whether social or philosophical, arise from an inconsistent reconstruction of experience. The point of reconstruction is to make practice more artful and experience more consistently consummate.
Obviously that is not the same program as Carnap's “rational reconstruction.” Carnap said his Aufbau system is “intended to give... a rational reconstruction of the actual process of the formation of concepts... i.e., a schematized description of an imaginary procedure, consisting of rationally prescribed steps, which would lead to essentially the same results as the actual psychological process.” If we ask about the value of that, I am unsure how Carnap would reply, it not being the kind of question he was good with. Perhaps the value seemed obvious. How could logical reconstruction not be a boon to rationality and a good thing—whatever that means? Unlike the logical positivist, Dewey is not tongue-tied discussing ends and values, and has a definite end in mind for the work he calls reconstruction. It is to make life, social life no less than private, aesthetically more satisfying, and everybody's experience more consistently consummate.20He was not always entirely clear about that, which is why the pages on art in Experience and Nature and the whole argument of Art as Experience are an important elaboration of his philosophy. Dewey sometimes wrote as if the good of making a practice more scientific did not require explanation. For instance, in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), he says, “The reconstruction to be undertaken is... to carry over into any inquiry into human and moral subjects the kind of method (the method of observation, theory as hypothesis, and experimental test) by which understanding of physical nature has been brought to its present pitch.” If we took that passage as definitive, Dewey would seem more of a positivist than he is.
But he is eager for the question Carnap evades. Why strive to make human and moral subjects more scientific? Because that is how to make them more imaginative, more liberally consequential, more consistently consummate, and aesthetically satisfying, and not for a privileged few but for all. Science, meaning the reflective conclusions of competent methods, “is not a final thing. The final thing is apprehension and use of things of direct experience.”21In earlier writing Dewey tended to cast a negative light on “aesthetic” value, which connoted contemplative beholding and passive rapture. For instance, the categories with which Greek philosophy describes and explains nature “were esthetic in character,” being valued for “their immediate qualitative traits.” Aristotelian science “aimed at constituting out of nature, as observed, an artistic whole for the eye of the soul to behold,” which is a bad thing, an extended childhood. Dewey congratulates modern Europeans for shifting their interest “from the esthetic to the practical; from an interest in beholding a harmonious and complete scene to an interest in transforming an inharmonious one.” The problem with ancient theory is not aestheticism per se, but rather the artlessness of it. The desultory quality of emperia needs discipline by techne’s proven methods, so that experience can become a more consistently artful instrument of the aesthetic consummations with which inquiry ideally culminates.22
Classical philosophy commended science as the apprehension of being in itself. When from the seventeenth century it appeared that the objects of science are mathematical and mechanical it seemed to follow that nature is mathematical and mechanical too and bereft of consummatory qualities, leading to problems of subjectivism, relativism, and nihilism. The mistake in all of this is to assume that science ever, or as a goal, grasps “reality in its final, self-sufficing form.” To relieve ourselves of practically the whole syllabus of textbook “problems of philosophy” we need but disavow the cataleptic phantasy of the Stoics, reborn in the clear and distinct ideas of Descartes, and acknowledge that “the objects of science, like the direct objects of the arts, are an order of relations which serve as tools to effect immediate havings and beings” and thereby prompting aesthetic consummation.23
The sciences are arts, instruments mediating between current conditions and conditions preferred. They do not reveal the ontological truth of things in themselves—they do not concern things in themselves at all. They concern things in relation, relations that include us. That is “application”—in science, philosophy, anywhere; namely, to achieve a more extensive interaction of events with one another, overcoming distance, discovering continuity, revealing unsuspected potential, new means to new ends.