§86. The Experience of a Problem
Dewey would not be attracted by the nominalism that Sellars and Rorty urge as the alternative to an exploded myth of the given. In a passage that might set Rorty's teeth on edge, Dewey writes, “A universe of experience is the precondition of a universe of discourse.
Without its controlling presence, there is no way to determine the relevance, weight or coherence of any designated distinction or relation. The universe of experience surrounds and regulates the universe of discourse but never appears as such within the latter.” Experience controls discourse by holding it to a problematic logic of inquiry in which experiences of obstacle, surprise, and aesthetic satisfaction are the beginning and end of knowledge. Philosophy is rationalistic in a way it has fallen to empiricism to criticize when the theory of knowledge turns from experience toward discourse. Exasperated, as James was, by Russell's obtuseness, Dewey writes, “Any one who refuses to go outside the universe of discourse—as Mr. Russell apparently does—has of course shut himself off from understanding what a situation, as directly experienced subject-matter, is.”24Inquiry and experimentation begin with feeling, immediate in the way any felt quality is. The feelings that prompt inquiry are provocations, not reasons, a lure to look into difficulty more felt than understood. Perceptions are problematic experiences, beginning as a response to problematic change. “Unless there were something problematic, undecided, still going-on and as yet unfinished and indeterminate in nature, there could be no such events as perceptions.” Difficulty has to be felt before it can be addressed, and inquiry is a response at once rational and natural, stirred into motion by the feeling of a problem. The given is not sensation or sense data; it is the obscure but distinct feeling of difficulty, something not right, not as it can and ought to be.
“The immediately given is always the dubious... it is a cry for something not given.” From this problematic given further felt qualities emerge as the result of experimental operations aimed at bringing the difficulty into focus and addressing it in a hypothesis. People with a good feeling for the problems are a requirement of prosperous inquiry. It takes experience. There's an art to it.25Consummation is an experience of connection, many phases coming together, consistently interpenetrating, expressing continuity. That would be impossible on nominalist principles, which disallow physical connection among absolute individuals and demote relations to conceptions, notions, ficta. So said Ockham, then Hobbes, Gassendi, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Mill. For a time the only alternative to this nominalism was idealistic rationalism (e.g., Malebranche, Leibniz, Hegel, Green), until James and Dewey (following Mach and Peirce) sought an alternative in a more consistent empiricism. Dewey’s idea is first to reconstruct experience, then use experience reconstructed to reconstruct everything else. Experience is reconstructed when it becomes consistently experimental, with experience everywhere organized on hypothetico-deductive lines. The fruition of Dewey’s theory of knowledge will be to institutionalize or habituate our culture to a consistently experimental approach to knowledge.
The art of empirical knowledge is the art of orchestrating experience as an instrument of inquiry, transforming experience from problematic to con- summatory. Not to feel problems can also be a kind of art, as anesthesiology is a kind of medicine. The ancient Pyrrhonists practiced an art of ataraxia, a tranquility no problem can stir. Something like that is also the art and aspiration of Rorty’s therapeutic philosophy and Wittgenstein’s philosophical grammar. To me, deflating and debunking are latently nihilistic. An alternative is to bring art to the problems one feels, to become good at selecting problems, selecting what to inquire into, and how to organize the experience. An empiricist should not want to eliminate problems, but instead to become better at feeling them. Life without problems may sound serene, but this serenity is a euphemism for death, hence the nihilism of therapeutic philosophy. For Dewey, the art of knowledge is the art of experience, the art of art, the art of life—to make experience everywhere disciplined, productive, and aesthetically consummate.