Excellence: A Liberal View
Sketches of Excellence
Book 1's Table of Contents
Contents 3
Opening Quotes 4
Introduction 7
Part 1: A New Inner World
Page 1, Sections 1-5
1. Are There Just Pictures of Excellence? 21
2. Playful Results from Experimental Learning 30
3. Psychological Excellence: How Playful Are You? 41
4. What Is Learning Excellence? 48
5. More About Habits 55
Page 1.1, Sections 6-10
6. Consciousness and Its Uses 66
7. Creativity 78
8. How Much Are You Testing? 83
9. From Academic to Organic Art 93
10. More About Psychological Models 103
Page 1.2, Sections 11-15
11. Psyching Ourselves 115
12. Conservative Experiments with Faith 126
13. Liberal Experiments with Faith 134
14. What Is Desire-ABLE? 143
15. Early Christian Models of Truth 155
Page 1.3, Sections 16-20
16. Scientific Models of Truth 163
17. Dewey’s Pragmatic Model of Truth, Part 1 167
18. Dewey’s Pragmatic Model of Truth, Part 2 175
19. Feelings Within Experimental Learning 183
20. Experimental Learning’s Major Weakness 190
Part 2: A New Ethical World
Page 1.4
1. More Results from Intelligent Actions 191
2. Ancient Models of Ethical Excellence 201
3. Dewey’s Liberal Model of Ethical Excellence 210
4. Some On-Going Ethical Conflicts 218
5. Ethical Audacity, 101 229
Page 1.5
6. Some Small Ethical Choices 241
7. Excellent Sex: Foreplay 242
8. Excellent Sex: Going Deeper 250
9. Games of Freedom: Basic Rules and History 261
10. Games of Freedom: Players and Winning 269
Page 1.6
11. Joyfulness: 101 281
12. Joyfulness: 102 289
13. Happiness, 101 299
14. Happiness, 102 308
Part 3: A New Outer World
Page 1.7
1. New Liberal Models of Life and Nature 314
2. More About Native Models of Life and Nature 320
3. More About Animistic Arts 333
4. Ancient Liberal Models of Excellence 338
5. Ancient Psychological Models of Excellence 350
Page 1.8
6. Plato’s Models of Excellence 356
7. Aristotle’s Models of Excellence 363
8. Dewey’s Models of Excellence, 101 370
9. Dewey’s Models of Excellence, 102 378
10. Dewey’s Models of Excellence, 103 383
Page 1.9
11. Reincarnation: A Few Recurring Thoughts 393
12. Modern Economic, Political, and Educational Ideas, 101 403
13. Economic Challenges, 101 407
14. Economic Assumptions, Economic Reality 414
15. Economic Challenges, 102 426
Page 1.10
16. Dewey's Education Model, 101(still re-writing) 438
17. Dewey's Education Model, 102
18. Dewey's Education Model, 103
19. Is Nothing Sacred?
20. Who Wants to Test Themselves?
Opening Quotes
Lewis Carroll: The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things
of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax,
of cabbages—and Kings.
And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings.
Francis Bacon: Natural abilities are like plants they need pruning by study.
John Dewey: Only when science and philosophy are one with literature are they liberal in effect. .... the free working of mind is one of the greatest joys open to man.... the ends of liberalism are liberty and the opportunity of individuals to secure full realization of their potentialities
William McCord: ... a respect for the scientific (experimental) method (of learning) is the hallmark of the modern human being.
John Dewey: The more one appreciates the intrinsic esthetic, immediate value of thought and of science, the more one takes into account what intelligence itself adds to the joy and dignity of life, the more one should feel grieved at a situation in which the exercise and joy of reason are limited to a narrow, closed and technical social group. And the more one should ask how it is possible to make all men participators in this inestimable wealth.
Cicero: By doubting we come at the truth.
Lucretius: Then withdraw from cares and apply your cunning mind
To hear the truth of reasoned theory
Seeking choice words, the songs by which at last
I can open to your mind
That you may see deep into hidden things.
Pliny the Elder: The only certainty is nothing’s certain!
Chinese Proverb: The superior physician helps before the real budding of disease.
Andrew Carnegie: He that cannot reason is a fool
He that will not a bigot
He that dare not a slave
Proverb: Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.
Epicurus: Let no one when young delay to study philosophy, for no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of their psyche (or character).
Aristotle: The effect which lectures produce on a hearer depends on his habits; for we demand the language we are accustomed to. ...as we are philosophers...truth has the first call upon our respect.
John's Gospel: If you love me you will obey my commands.
Marcus Aurelius: Live every day as if your last.
George Hegel: Only one man understands me and even he doesn't.
Mark Twain: Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
Jerry Falwell: Americans are sick and tired of the way the liberals are trying to corrupt our nation.
Michel de Montaigne: I tell the truth, not as much as I would but as much as I dare—and I dare more and more as I grow older.
Oscar Wilde: If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
Samuel Butler: Truth is like the use of words, it depends greatly on custom.
Lincoln Steffens: But men do not seek the truth. It is the truth that pursues men who run away and will not look around.
Francis H. Bradley: There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
Sir Henry Wotton: Tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound your adversaries.
Charles Lamb: My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. ... Supposing truth is a woman—what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about woman? That the gruesome seriousness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won—and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged.
....philosophy wishes to render the greatest possible depth and meaning to life and activity.
....we philosophers and “free spirits” feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an open sea exist.
..we, however, want to be the poets of our life, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters.....Every art and every philosophy may be regarded as a healing and helping appliance in the service of growing, struggling life
John Dewey: ...philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education... conflict of ideas is a necessary condition of advance in understanding. Every act has potential moral significance; it is, through its consequences, part of a larger whole of behavior. Every choice reveals the existing self and it forms the future self making it, in some sense, a new self. Till the Great Society is converted into the Great Community the public will remain (shadowy and) in eclipse. Communication alone can create a community.
Robert Ingersoll: The holiest day is the happiest day. .Education is the most radical thing in the world. ...It is noble to seek for truth, to be intellectually honest, to give to others a true transcript of your mind, a photograph of your thoughts in honest work. Men do as they must with the light they have, and so I say—More light!
Euripides of Athens: Wise indeed was the lesson of him who taught mankind to hear the arguments on both sides. Wisdom outweighs any wealth; wonders there are many, but none more wonderful.
T.V. Smith: the modern philosopher must count as part of his role that of emancipator.
Edward de Vere (aka William Shakespeare): This above all: to your own self be true.
Author: This above all else--make your own self more excellent!
Hindu Proverb: Scholarship is less than sense,
Therefore seek intelligence.
Philosophic Question: What is intelligence?
J.S. Mill: What would a Prometheanized religion be like?
F.C.S Schiller: In all knowing the personal equation always plays a part. This discovery means more than a radical reform of logic. It means a (philosophic) end to every form of logical bullying and intolerance. The phantom of absolute truth, which every bigot of every kind (can) never substantiate (evaporates) in the brilliance of a new (philosophic) day.
Bob Hope: If you haven’t got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
Spencer Tracy: Helping others is the highest good.
Heraclitus: The greatest excellence is self-control.
Aristotle: Human good (is) the active exercise of the psyche in conformance with excellence or virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche: The will to truth is the will to power.
John Keynes (economist): Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the (undereducated). (additions my own)
Author: the will to excellence is the will to EMpower!
There once was a man in search of a mate
Who walked through the world and felt its hate,
So with all his might
He decided to write,
Thinkin’ there’s gotta be a few I can educate.
He knew there were others with plenty to say
Who battled the hate with traps to lay.
He held his tongue
As the traps were sprung,
Writing gems like, Hey stupid, hate ain’t the way!
Irrational hate, he knew, was at best very crass
Though it may feel like gold and shine like brass.
But to clean yer head
Try respect instead,
It just might work to save yer ass!
Rene Descartes: I think, therefore I am.
John Dewey: I own, therefore I am.
Author: I help others, therefore I am.
...and so another quest for excellence begins...
1. DIFFERENT MODELS OF LEARNING EXCELLENCE
Sketches of Excellence is the first book in a series of 5 about John Dewey’s liberal models of excellence. It may best be pictured as a playful little stroll through his liberal philosophic gallery of ideas. It's a general survey of many of his ideas, featuring not only his liberal ideas of life and nature, but it’s also more than that. It also compares his ideas with conservative and moderate ones, especially those of Plato and Aristotle, probably the 2 best representatives of those traditions.
To simplify the description, the subjects of Book 1 have been divided into five main topics: 1. Experimental Learning, 2. Anthropology, 3. Psychology, 4. Ethics, and 5. Education. Those, plus of course some information on Dewey’s liberal politics and economics, form the core of his liberal models of excellence. In Book 4’s Modern Pictures of Excellence there’s much more information about his liberal models of political and economic excellence.
We begin Book 1 by looking at Dewey’s liberal model of learning excellence, also known as science’s experimental method. After all, if one’s learning model is weak or unreliable, then one’s knowledge becomes weak and unreliable. Ancient Greek thinkers were the first ones in Western civilization to realize how important the subject is, and it’s remained at philosophy’s core ever since. Indeed, one of life’s and philosophy’s most important questions are about knowledge, like what do you know; how do you know it; what is the most reliable and productive method of learning, and what kinds of knowledge does it produce – absolute certainty or varying degrees of probable knowledge?
Native Ancestors Experimented...
Remember when you were a kid, after getting your weekly allowance you told yourself you would get some of your favorite ice cream today, only to discover the ice cream shop had moved or gone out of business?
Remember as a teenager telling yourself you would finally get a call from your sweetheart and get a date for Saturday night, only to learn the family’s gone on vacation for 2 weeks?
Remember going to college or a job and telling yourself this will be easy, only to find out it was more difficult than you thought?
Remember finally getting a home and thinking you finally made it in life, only to see both your job and your home disappear in a matter of months? All of these common events are examples of experimental learning, and of learning how ideas need to be tested for their reliability. In fact, much of the time our always moving nature teaches us our ideas are all just experimental feelings rather than eternal reflections of nature. As we’ll see, however, only a few people have been smart enough to draw such general conclusions from individual examples in life. In the 400s BCE a few Greek thinkers began make such liberal generalizations about all natural knowledge. For tens of thousands of years before that, however, our native ancestors created a magical way of learning about spirit-ideas.
Around 1900 Dewey made the following general observation: all our actions are merely experiments in learning. Since then, biologists and anthropologists have learned much more about how experimental learning had been practiced by both non-human animals and our native human ancestors. For example, during the last 50,000 years of human evolution many of those ancestors began experimenting much with a spirit-model of nature. The following description relies much on the study of modern native peoples, but it’s also based on some archeological evidence at grave sites too. Some objects left by those ancestors leads us to believe around that time, during what's called the Middle Paleolithic period (100,000-35,000 years ago), our Neandertal ‘cousins’ thought excellent knowledge included spirit-objects; they sometimes built graves for people they hoped would continue living on after death. Almost certainly the items they left in many graves, like weapons, food, and medicines suggest they were experimenting with the idea of life continuing on after death. That ideas lies at the core of most every religion today.
Most anthropologists today agree with those ideas, and it was more confirmed as they continued learning about the life-styles of modern native peoples. In fact, even today many native peoples still feel spirit-ideas are even MORE REAL than any natural object! It turns out spirit-ideas were useful for describing what to them were mysterious dream experiences; in other words, their dream-feelings were experimentally pictured as seeing spirits. Today, around the world, native peoples still see their dreams as evidence for some part of a person living on after death, and the best way to control such objects is with magical rituals.
Many thousands of years ago Neandertals began leaving objective evidence for such ideas. They began artfully burying some of their people AS IF something about them would live on in some way, as a spirit object. That idea eventually evolved into conservative philosophy’s soul-idea, as pictured by Plato, and to this day remains the basis for many religions. For us liberals, however, the idea began evolving long ago because it was useful in caring and thoughtful Neandertal tribes, and probably our African San ancestors too. Sometimes Neandertals put healing plants like Yarrow and Horsetail in a grave AS IF they would help care for a person’s spirit after death. Even after Neandertals became extinct soon after 30,000 years ago, our own sapien ancestors almost certainly continued experimenting with spirit-ideas; they too had burial arts, cave paintings, art work, and even fertility sculptures. Such were the first conservative models of excellent knowledge, all built experimentally with intelligent trial-and-error thinking. A problem for them was to explain their dream experiences; to some they felt threatening, just like people today have nightmares, but to others they seemed helpful. Spirits thus became a way of talking about dream experiences.
What’s more, if natural spirits really existed and caused events like dreams to happen, then perhaps we could learn how to help them and make them more friendly. They in turn might make life less fearful, sorrowful, worrisome, and more satisfying; in short, more excellent. Obviously no one knows exactly when such ideas began to be experimented with, but eventually it became obvious to many natives peoples, spirits were definitely excellent objects worth knowing and controlling; after all, sometimes after a shaman’s magical healing dance or spirit extraction a sick person got well, and after a magical hunting ritual sometimes more food was found. Thus, experimenting with spirit-rituals became important work in the native world; after all, who wouldn't like to know how to make life better and more rewarding with the help of spirits? Long before modern science evolved and began producing our most reliable knowledge, our native ancestors used spirits in the eternal quest to make life better and more enjoyable.
Armed with such ideas our native ancestors continued experimenting with spirit ideas: Exactly HOW can spirits be best controlled, with gifts, good actions, or shaman dances? Much later obedience and respect to rulers was also thought to help spirits make life more peaceful and prosperous. Today many call such learning habit-arts ritual magic and naturally the more they were practiced the stronger and more powerful they were felt. For example, dressing like a deer or lion and feeling like you were in fact such an animal, just might convince deer or lion spirits to help make the hunt easier, bring more food, raise more children, scare away evil spirits, and keep people healthy and strong.
For we Deweyan liberals, however, what's most important here is to see the growth of such habits as the results of intelligent experimentation! There was a problem, some solutions were thought about, and then they tested their ideas. Often the results weren’t very helpful, but even in the prehistoric world there were skeptical feelings about such ideas. Similar feelings would eventually lead a few liberal ancient Greek skeptics to realize in an always changing world learning anything is always experimental; some ideas may no longer be true.
Eventually, over many thousands of years, native cultures around the world were slowly reconstructed to include spirit ideas and magical habit-arts. They were used for solving the very same kinds of practical challenges we have today, like food, health, children, fear of death, and others. What an amazing world it must have been, both hopeful and yet in so many ways frustrating too. After all, magical rituals often didn’t work. Still, they needed all the help they could get trying to kill a 5 ton wholly mammoth who wants nothing more than to stomp them into the ground. Naturally, when their spirit-magic didn't work they felt frustrated; no doubt some even became skeptical and doubtful, but as both research and history shows, many others kept experimenting with such rituals. And the more such habits were practiced, the more difficult it became to think of better ways of learning how to live more intelligently. In fact, only about 10,000 years ago were more intelligent animal-taming arts experimented with, all learned with intelligent trial-and-error experimentation.
Over many thousands of years in the native world, a great variety of spirit ideas and habits have evolved. It's difficult to feel such habits now because they're rapidly changing in our present age of science, but as we’ll see, such ideas continued on into conservative philosophies and religions in the ancient and medieval worlds. Daily priests claim their prayers change wine and bread into the body and blood of their savior, and if eaten will have spirit results. In fact, one similar native habit today still involves people dressing up at sporting events like their team totem animals -- bears, lions, giants, and so on. Many want to identify with team members, but again, the liberal point Dewey makes is this: our conservative and moderate philosophic and religious traditions are really much older than most people have thought. Many conservatives today still believe our entire world and nature was created just a few thousand years ago, but to liberals like Dewey and myself that idea is no longer excellent. Based on the testing of ideas, experimental learning has found much objective evidence to the contrary. To believe our earth is now over 4 billion years old is now rather common knowledge.
There’s also another important idea we should note and remember. Such ideas have continued on for so long because they were useful. Mere practice and habits create the feelings for certainty and truth. Spirit-habits sometimes seemed to work, and what seems to work is reason enough to keep practicing such ideas, especially when no other more excellent learning arts and knowledge was available.
Behavioral psychologists today call it reinforcement. As parents soon discover, satisfying events like food help children keep experimenting to keep such food coming, mostly by crying. And in the native world, sometimes mammoths were killed after a magical hunting ceremony; that would have been a very satisfying and reinforcing result to our native ancestors, and the more satisfying the food was, the stronger became the habit and willpower to keep experimenting with such spirit rituals. In short, rewarded experimental actions help grow a person’s willpower for those actions! In such hunting situations it was natural for native peoples to feel the hunt was successful because some animal-spirits liked their magic. If so, then why not try the same magical ritual again later. In any case, however, they didn’t know what the results would be before the hunt began, and so those habits too were all experimental. Who knows? Maybe evil and harmful spirits would prevent success later, but useful results often encouraged such habits to keep growing.
Ancient Peoples Experimented With Ideas
As we’ll see in more detail in Book 3, Ancient Models of Excellence, a few centuries before Jesus lived a few ancient conservative and moderate Greeks began experimenting with another way to learn about eternal and unchanging objects – not spirit-rituals and magical actions, but with logical reasoning. Thus was created the first great Age of Reason in Western civilization. To those Greeks there seemed to be some kind of logic, or logos, built right into nature itself, helping give nature its regular cycles and repetitions; both conservative Plato and moderate Aristotle thought so. Plato called them Spirit-Ideas, and Aristotle called them Forms. To them it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume such eternal and unchanging objects existed, but more importantly, could be known merely by reasoning about them; mere reasoning, not magical rituals, could reveal nature’s eternal truths, and thus help make life more enjoyable and rewarding. After all, mathematicians like Pythagoras made a few general math assumptions about lines and circles and then reasoned out what felt like many more absolutely certain math facts. In fact, with some Greeks like Plato such reasonable thinking became a new religion. Heavenly movements too seemed to keep changing in more or less reasonable ways, and so there must be some reasoning causes for such regular movements. Many conservatives and moderates thus assumed there must be some eternally powerful and reasoning objects causing such eternally repetitious movements. Plato would experiment with the idea of spirit-objects and Aristotle with Form-objects.
Just as native people used the idea of spirits to explain their dreams, so Plato and Aristotle used their ideas to explain nature’s regularities, like stars, seasons, and animal regularities too. To them it was reasonable to assume such objects existed and more reasoning could thus build accurate models of life and nature; what were spirit-objects like, and how did they work. In fact, both of them experimented with reasoning out the results of such assumptions and questions, just like mathematicians reasoned out new math facts. Even decades before them, late in the 500s BCE, a few robust and confident 'free-thinking' Greeks were experimenting with reasoning with geometrical ideas, still studied by high school students today. To early mathematicians like Pythagoras they seemed perfectly reasonable, and conservative Plato would eventually picture math ideas like triangles and cubes as forming everything in nature and having a spirit-life of their own. If nothing else, then, those ancient Greeks in fact created a very different model of learning from the ones native people often practiced, thus added the new art of logical reasoning as the best model of learning, and eternal objects as the best objects to learn about. To this day such reasoning habits remain an important part of Western civilization. To many Greek liberals, however, it soon became merely only one part of the best learning model. Unless ideas were physically tested for their results, one could reason about anything and claim it was true!
Obviously the Greek world had its own evolution, quite different from Israel's, but for Dewey they both still used experimental thinking; the more they continued learning about life and nature, the more it became necessary. For example, while they were in their Babylonian captivity in the 500s BCE, basically nomadic Mosaic tribes began learning more civilized Babylonian arts, like writing. Then, when many returned to Israel, they began experimenting with writing down their oral traditions, creating an alphabet, and thus building what’s known today as the Old Testament. The book of Isaiah is generally believed to be the work of 2 authors who had different ideas they wanted to express.
Probably more than any other ancient peoples, however, Greeks experimented with a great many new skills and ideas; they were far less god-fearing than the Israelis. For example, the more colonies the Greeks built around the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the more they learned practical habits about living in an always changing nature, and the less they needed to rely on spirit-habits for help. For hundreds of years after 800 BCE bold and confident Greeks built hundreds of such colonies, and the new skills and confidence they learned allowed a few to begin experimenting with more liberal ideas about life and nature, namely, that its knowledge could be learning without the help of spirit-ideas and merely with the art of reasoning. Rather quickly, then, such rational experimentation began building Western civilization's traditional 3 models of excellence, all evolving experimentally for conservatives, moderates, and liberals. Their very talkative and questioning habit-arts -- their reasoning skills -- helped liberate many people from the spirit-habits native peoples had been practicing for tens of thousands of years. After all, the first burial sites have been dated at around 50,000 years ago, in what is now northern Iraq. A few liberal Greeks began feeling reasoning experiments without spirit assumptions produced much more excellent results about life and nature, rather than mere religious habit-arts. Perhaps no finer example of that experimental reasoning habit was the pious conservative philosopher Socrates. He would spend his mature years experimenting with ideas by asking others to state the universal meanings behind ideas like friendship or courage, and when their definitions proved unacceptable, other ideas would be tried. If one idea produced contradictory results, then he simply asked the person to experiment with another one. His most famous student Plato would continue such experimentation too.
Plato Experimented
Socrates’s conservative and pious student Plato continued experimenting all through his life and writings with the idea of Spirit-Objects. He too hoped his mere reasoning could eventually allow him to see, grasp, and behold the true universal meanings in such objects, and thus discover nature’s absolute Truth. In fact, he felt so strongly about them he eventually became convinced excellent knowledge should focus ONLY on them; experimenting with learning about natural objects could only produce inferior kinds of knowledge. Furthermore,, he also assumed such spirit-objects were eternal and unchanging, always and forever existing in an entirely different spirit-world. For him merely reasoning about such objects was the only way to know what their eternal meanings were; he even felt he knew all about them even before he was born. For him, only such Spirit-Objects could produce Absolute Truth, and thus defeat those pesky human-oriented liberal sophists and Atomists who had the audacity to either deny they existed or could be known!
From where did he get such ideas? Almost certainly he was encouraged to build his feelings for such objects in childhood, while practicing religious habits. In ancient Athens both the secular and religious state were one; there was no separation of church and state as there is in many modern democracies. No doubt, his math studies too also helped make such ideas feel real; after all, 2 + 2 is always and eternally 4, so again mere reasoning discovered such eternal truth. Plato would spend about 50 years experimentally reasoning about spirit-objects, without very much success I might add. Again, however, Dewey’s point is simply this: such ideas too were merely mental tools to experiment with, rather than reflecting the objects in a spirit-world. In fact, spirit objects couldn’t be sensed at all; they were completely non-material?
Today it’s fairly easy to picture Plato daily offering some little sacrifice to a spirit object on a home altar, perhaps asking the god Apollo's help to know more about such objects; Apollo was thought to be a god of wisdom, and in fact his priests at Delphi had already named his teacher Socrates as the wisest Greek. After all, they too, like Socrates, wanted people to believe such objects existed; if not people would stop asking them to predict the future.
In fact in Greece many different conservative ideas were experimented with. Some said excellent knowledge came from only one god. Others said there were many gods and spirits; Pythagoras said the air was full of spirits. Others felt some books were Holy Writings and were inspired by a spirit-cause; still others experimented with ideas like Timeless Forms, Cosmic Mind, the Muse goddesses, the Great Spirit, and many others. And after them such ideas would be imaginatively experimented with for thousands of years. In the 1500s Protestant Christians experimented with a number of different religious models of life and nature, none exactly the same but also having no way to objectively test any of them for their truthfulness. People either accepted or rejected them. Such human-based events no doubt caused liberals to reasonably ask, if different people were reasoning so differently, and producing such different results, then how excellent of a learning tool can mere reasoning be? There is only one nature and thus can be only one model of truth about it! So, besides reasoning, shouldn’t the best learning model have a way of objectively testing ideas to see how reliable they are? That was the great liberal addition to the new reasoning art.
More Greek Experiments
Mentally vibrant and physically energetic Greek men and women were often encouraged to build good talking and questioning habit-arts; such skills made experimentation much easier and thus more productive. With such learning skills they continued reconstructing and improving many of the habits and skills of both themselves and other peoples. As a result, however, reasoning became merely one excellent step in a reliable learning process. For example, the more Plato’s spirit-ideas were tested for their results, he eventually found out his early reasoning and assumptions about spirit-objects produced some truly puzzling results; they in fact helped him question learning about spirit-objects altogether! No doubt, that result couldn’t have been more distressing to him. To a devout Christian it was probably like suddenly feeling there was no god!
What did he do? Well, he began experimenting with more naturalistic ideas. His later writings almost completely ignore spirit-ideas altogether, and focus more on the natural world. Still, it must have been quite a shock to him. After all, experiments with mathematical reasoning already seemed to produce Absolute Truth, eternal and unchanging, and thus reasoning felt like the most excellent learning method. 4 x 4 is always and forever 16. Wasn't the sum of 2 plane right angles always and forever exactly 180 degrees? And if simple mathematical reasoning could produce such absolutely certain knowledge in our always changing world, then why shouldn’t simple reasoning also discover what spirit-objects are really like. After all, mustn't there be some unchanging, eternal, constant, and forever-the-same objects governing all natural movements? For years those questions seemed to Plato like very reasonable ones, at least until he found they produced some very strange results. We’ll see much more of Plato’s mental evolution in Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence.
Aristotle Experimented
More modest assumptions about life and nature were experimented with by Plato’s greatest student Aristotle. Plato called his student of 20 years The Reader, but soon after Plato died Aristotle began experimenting with a somewhat different model of life and nature. With many ideas he stayed faithful to Plato. He too felt some eternally constant and unchanging objects exist and can be known with mere reasoning; they’re just not spirit-objects, they’re natural objects. Also, because Aristotle said such objects were natural and embedded within objects, he said both the senses and reasoning are needed to produce excellent knowledge. Thus, it was much easier for moderate Aristotle to begin experimentally studying natural objects, like plants and animals, rather than spirit-objects. In short, he was a much greater lover and explorer of our natural world than Plato, and thus helped encourage the liberal Atomists who were also saying the natural world is the best object of knowledge. For Aristotle, like Plato, some knowledge could thus become absolutely certain, but only if our senses AND reasoning were put together and used harmoniously. Incidentally, Aristotle was a very careful reader to the liberal Atomist Democritus, upon whom rests Western civilization’s entire liberal scientific and democratic traditions!
Like Democritus had done decades earlier, Aristotle too continued improving the conservative reasoning model of learning. Both said our senses and reasoning were needed to learn more about nature’s truth. However, Aristotle still agreed with Plato that the best objects to study were always unchanging and eternal; he called them Forms. He said excellent learning is always the result of using our senses and reasoning to help us learn what nature’s eternal Forms are and how they work. What could be more logical than that? Thus, with such ideas Western civilization’s ancient moderate model of life and nature was experimentally built. He felt confident in saying if a person first absorbed nature’s forms through the senses, and then merely reasoned properly, the results MUST be absolutely certain, no ifs, ands, or experimental buts! He experimented with assuming most all objects have eternal Forms within them, and knowing them produces Absolute Truth. Why do fire and smoke always float upwards? Well they were part of our heavenly fires and airs, so their natural movements were towards them. Centuries later, however, only after people actually experimented with them did they discover all warm gases move towards cooler areas. As a result of such experimental learning scientists became more liberated from even Aristotle’s moderate assumptions about nature and began seeing nature as many see it today, as having no such eternal Forms within it! In fact, Galileo’s rejecting that idea was the beginning of modern experimental learning itself, experimenting with the same kinds of material objects liberal Democritus had described before Plato and Aristotle were even born – atoms!
Plato and Aristotle also experimented differently with the idea of god. In true native fashion Plato believed spirits controlled everything and thus all people were merely puppets of the gods, including himself. The knowledge people had was only the knowledge the gods wanted them to have. Aristotle’s experimental reasoning came to build a very different picture of god; his was more like the liberal Atomist Democritus. For them both god was best pictured as a solitary creature caring not at all for earthly events. For Aristotle his solitary god existed beyond the stars and didn’t even know the earth existed, much less people existed. It became known as a Deistic model of god; the Bible's Book of Job experimented with a similar idea, as did many US Founders in the 1700s.
Greek Liberals Experimented Too
Finally, we come to the cause of much of Plato’s and Aristotle’s work -- ancient Greek liberals like Democritus, one of the most important thinkers in Western civilization. Liberals like him said atoms were the only eternal and unchanging objects, and their combining and breaking apart build everything in nature. Also, there were another group of humanist liberals called Sophists. They were men like Protagoras who freely admitted he knew nothing about any such spirit or unchanging objects. A few years before Plato was born liberal Democritus was probably experimenting with a model of nature pictured as an infinite number of atoms moving in an infinitely large space! Amazingly, that’s basically the modern model too. For imaginative Democritus merely the combining and breaking apart of atoms built and ended everything in nature, including people. Only recently has modern science begun testing that idea, and has been improving on that idea of unchanging atoms, but it’s still a very useful idea. Today, modern medicine and chemistry, and thus health itself all depend on Democritus’s liberal ideas. Because of their obviously useful results, it’s been worthwhile to keep experimenting with them. Today, the idea of energy has replaced his idea of even atoms being eternal and unchanging, but energetic wave-particles are constantly changing and moving. Though ancient liberal Sophists, Skeptics, and Atomists experimented with a number of different ideas, theirs have proved the most useful for continuing to make life less dangerous and more enjoyable.
Again, for Dewey, the point about learning is this: all thinking is and can only be experimental in an always energetically moving and changing nature. In such a nature there’s always some chance even the ideas we feel are absolutely certain might change; sometimes the ice cream shop closes or moves away. After all, if results helped Plato feel how illogical his experimental reasoning was, then it can happen to anyone, right? Also, a random kind of mental experimentation can be felt daily with all the ideas and feelings popping into and out of consciousness. So, the challenge for people today is to give some order and patterns to our thinking, so that it becomes easier to think and work to produce the results we want, rather than the results we don’t want. It remains the great challenge of life itself.
Logical reasoning and constructive work help order our mental lives, making it more controlled, but as liberal ancient Greek Skeptics saw, even that control has its limits; we need some kind of objective testing to see how reliable our ideas are. If they’re not, then there’s no need to keep believing in them. Thus, liberal Skeptics, Sophists, and Atomists reasoned they could keep learning more and more about our world just by experimenting INTELLIGENTLY with it, and testing their ideas to see their actual results.
What’s more, respectful and helpful reasoning also helped build Western civilization’s first liberal ethical models of excellence too. Democritus too helped with that project. Because life keeps changing and moving, the most reasonable ethical idea was to see all people as deserving of the same rights and freedoms as anyone else; that idea remains the basis of liberal democracy to this day simply because of the results produced when it was tested. How else can we learn how to keep improving our world unless we keep testing our ideas? With the new reasoning habits and some different assumptions about life and nature, Greek liberals thus began building Western civilization's first naturalistic models of excellence. For them too, all actions, whether physical or mental, are experimental in nature and should be felt as such. If not, it could easily make life much more dangerous and frustrating than it already is. Why not aim to see if the ice cream shop is still there, rather than just assume it is? And why not work to make some honest money to buy the ice cream, rather than break the law and earn bad money?
As ancient liberal Greek thinkers continued experimenting with such ideas, they too began feeling all ideas are merely more or less probable. Thus, no set of ideas could reflect any model of Absolute Truth; they was always a probability things could change tomorrow. The result, then was to become much less arrogant about their assumptions and knowledge! After all, what else but experimental could any idea be in an ever changing world? Constant change was simply the way our natural world worked, so why not just accept it and keep trying to make our experimental actions as intelligent as possible, rather than merely routine. Liberal medical doctor Hippocrates also said pretty much the same thing while Socrates was questioning other people in the quest for eternal Truth. For Hippocrates medicine and healing were always experimental; who could know before a medicine is taken what results would happen in actual people until it was actually taken? To Plato and Aristotle, however, such knowledge and learning method was much less than excellent. They felt some objects must be eternal and unchanging, thus causing the seemingly eternal natural rhythms we keep seeing in nature, like the seasons, animal actions, star movements, and so on.
No doubt such ancient liberals would be at home in our modern era -- 1600 to the present. Our strongest scientific knowledge is based on such experimental testing, and those who neglect that idea merely increase life’s dangers for themselves. The more modern scientists experimented with some of Plato's and Aristotle's ideas, the more they slowly realized how weak their results were for actually discovering useful knowledge. For example, the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, and of course the great Italian Leonardo Da Vinci, showed what creatively experimental excellence should look like. They took the time to experimentally test old traditional ideas on their own. Both of their experimental learning methods helped anchor people to our natural world, and keep learning more about it. Leonardo experimentally tested ideas all his life, studied how the human body was built and connected, so his art would look more naturalistic. On the other hand, however, conservative religious leaders were against all such experimental reasoning; their livelihood depended on people believing and acting as they said was best, and not on what people themselves said was best for them.
Spirit Variety
Again, the great variety of spirit-habits in the native, ancient, medieval, and modern worlds is solid evidence for how experimental such ideas really are. As we’ve begun seeing, native peoples built many different magical learning habit-arts, all built experimentally -- that is, with trial and error actions. Spirit ideas certainly weren't the only ideas experimented with, but their many useful results have remained important to many people. For example, when Europeans came to America after 1500 they quickly noticed how superstitious the natives were. Many in Mexico thought the new peoples were gods because of their canons and horses, and so were to be feared and obeyed. Who wants to have angry gods around with their 'thunder sticks' making life even more dangerous than it already is?
Again, the point is, such feelings and habits were all grown experimentally; if one idea didn’t work, then a different one was experimented with. In truth native peoples really didn’t know, say, BEFORE their mammoth hunt if their magical rituals would work, or it they would win their battles. As Dewey might say, they felt how precarious and dangerous nature and life could be even with their spirit-rituals; those results kept encouraging them to keep experimenting to learn more useful kinds of knowledge. The histories of both philosophy and religion too are more evidence for such experimental learning.
If all this is fairly accurate, then just like us today our native ancestors too tried their best and saw the results of their experimental actions; sometimes they stomped on the mammoth or cave bear, and sometimes they got stomped on! In either case, however, we today can begin feeling why liberal philosophers like Dewey began building what many would call a very revolutionary model of life and nature. For him all ideas need to be experimentally tested, and the results range from almost impossible to almost certain! No doubt, some ideas are more certain than others, like Ben Franklin’s death and taxes, but even that doesn't keep people from experimenting with them; greedy people always want lower taxes, don’t they? After all, what else can they, or anyone, do except try their best and see the results; even today's ultra-scientific space flights, built with the most exact knowledge under the cleanest of conditions, are still merely more experiments, but who knows what’ll happen out there in space or when they try to land?
Liberal Dewey, however, wasn’t afraid to say one result of all routine learning habits was simply to make it more difficult to think of better ways for solving daily challenges. For millions of years routine hunting habits, for example, made it almost impossible to think more creatively about better ways to grow more food, or even raise tame animals for food. Those kinds of routine learning habits are the main reason why human progress has been so slow. Eventually more creative and experimental habits did evolve, but it sometimes took thousands of years to improve old habits. Seeing beyond one's routine habits to what actions might actions might produce better results is often difficult, if not impossible; our own learning habits often keep us from seeing what might work better, but if we already know intelligent experimental learning is our strongest knowledge, then it’s easier for creative thinking to help make all our ideas and habits more flexible and easier to experiment with.
Not realizing how important experimental learning is helped keep spirit-habits powerful for many thousands of years. In native societies around the world shaman medicine people became spirit-specialists. Sometimes they alone experimented to heal people by exorcising sickness-causing demon-spirits. Sometimes a shaman would go into a deep trance and try to pull an unfriendly spirit out of a sick person’s body. Others experimented with 'traveling' to where animal spirits lived, to get their help hunting those animals. Eskimo shamans, for example, sometimes played that role, and sometimes tribal chanting and dancing rituals were experimented with too. In fact such habits remained so strong, even into Jesus' time, the gospels tell how he himself experimented with healing people by driving away evil spirits; it also records how sometimes it seemed to work and sometimes it didn’t. Such were some of the experimental healing habits evolving in what today we Deweyans call a conservative model of life and nature. And of course by Jesus' time people had been experimenting with acts of righteousness to get spirit-help; certain actions would please god who would then answer one’s prayers.
To millions of people today, however, nature has become the ‘clay’ for eternally making our natural world better and more satisfying. We can best keep improving life if we keep focusing on learning about the natural events making it difficult, tense, and stressful, and then working intelligently to improve them. Recently excessive greed on the part of a few thousand people, and using money to keep the status quo in place, seem to be doing exactly the opposite, namely making millions of people worse off than before. And only when medical science began experimenting differently with its routine habit-arts like bleeding people, was better health possible; even George Washington was bled by his doctor to cure his ailments, even though it was based on unreliable ideas.
It should now be clear, ALL of our feelings of excellent learning should be tested, rather than merely assuming such ideas are always true. It’s certainly not a new idea. Modern science's experimental learning and testing skills are pretty much the same experimental skills used by those ancient liberal Greek Sophists, Atomists, and Skeptics. In fact, as we’ll see later, such experimental learning skills go all the way back to our African habilis ancestors millions of years ago, and even to the first life forms on earth, some 4 billion years ago! The simple stone tools H. habilis built experimentally also tested their feelings to make life better. Indeed, all the many marvelous inventions and reliable knowledge we have today is the result of such testing habits.
Thus, an educational challenge faces most everyone, namely to make such experimental habits and skills a strong and powerful habit. The more experimental learning is consciously practiced, the stronger it becomes. Building such learning skills into our muscles builds the all-important feelings for those excellent learning ideas, feelings which compose at least half of our mental life and consciousness. Only active practice builds such feelings, making it that much easier to keep challenging all our conservative book-centered schools to become more oriented towards teaching more useful skills and knowledge experimentally. Only with such intelligent testing actions can any idea become better learned and remembered.
Dewey's liberal model of experimental learning is the same as modern science's experimental testing! For him ALL excellent knowledge in our ever-changing world can ONLY be experimental; thus all knowledge can be only probable -- some highly probable but probable none the less. Feel certain the sun will rise tomorrow. Such ideas about learning, however, help make us more humble about what we think we know.
Also, merely with experimental science’s learning model Dewey helped reconstruct the entire ancient and medieval quest for Absolute Certainty. If he’s right, if all knowledge is really only experimental, then the only absolutely certain idea becomes nothing is absolutely certain! For Dewey even Plato merely experimentally played with the idea of Spirit-Objects, rather than seeing and beholding nature’s eternal Truth. Such results can thus bring up some interesting questions: Can Dewey really prove all our knowledge is experimental in nature? Isn’t there a chance he too might be wrong? Can anyone possibly prove experimental learning is our ONLY learning art, as he claimed it was? And if it can't be proved, then isn't Dewey's learning model too just as experimental as Plato's and Aristotle's? If you’re smiling now, then you’re beginning to feel how playful philosophy can be!
2. PLAYFUL RESULTS FROM EXPERIMENTAL LEARNING
Even before Plato one of philosophy's 5 main challenges has been the study of excellent learning. What is it, how does it work and what are the best objects to study? Is it using just reason to know spirit-objects like conservative Plato said, reason and the senses to know eternal Forms like moderate Aristotle, or reason and the senses to know how ordinary objects and people act in the natural world, like liberal Democritus and Protagoras said? As we saw in the last section many ancient conservative Greeks believed reasoning alone was the best learning art, and the best objects to know were already existing, eternal, and unchanging. In this section, however, we continue playing with liberal Dewey’s idea of experimental testing as the best knowledge art, and the results of such testing as the best objects of knowledge to know. For Dewey such future results were the best objects of knowledge, to make such they haven’t changed and are still reliable.
Why such an experimental learning art? In a word, results! Since 1600 modern science has been using an experimental method of learning, and it's helped increase the human control of nature more than it’s ever been, giving us more power and control of our world. We now have very useful medicines, tools, and industries making life much more enjoyable and rewarding, however, we also many new challenges. For example, one challenge is to see that power and control is not overly concentrated in the hands of just a few obscenely wealthy people, as well as using new knowledge for the common good, rather than for the good of a few. What should we do about greedy people who want to keep making as much money as possible, or those industries who’re building more and more destructive weapons, or who’re putting more and more dangerous carbon into the air, thus threatening to disrupt life for millions of others? Also, our new knowledge about weapon’s making continues to make life more dangerous than ever. Our world today is still full of very dangerous nuclear weapons, capable of destroying great amounts of life, and so how intelligent is it to keep so many around? For millions of people, merely one such weapon can ruin the whole day, give or take a city or 50!
Also, let’s not forget even philosophy can be fun as well as educational; it needn’t be all dull, boring, and scary descriptions. To prove my point I offer the philosophic limerick.
Once a young chemist from Khartoum
While experimenting in his room,
Carefully mixed his stash
Then lit a match,
And the last thing he heard was KA-BOOM!
Now, after you stop smiling perhaps you’d like to take our first philosophic fill-in-the-blank pop quiz: Please state the limerick’s moral. ____________________. Hint: Resist the impulse to write, the author is an idiot. For Dewey what makes experimental learning excellent is whether it’s intelligent or not. For that Khartoumian it definitely wasn’t intelligent.
In this section, then, we’ll look mainly at 2 questions 1.) Was Dewey right; is experimental testing really our ONLY way of learning, and if so, then 2.) What are some more important results of that learning idea?
What is experimental learning?
Dewey eventually thought experimental testing of our feelings and ideas was the only way anyone learns anything; on a behavioral level it’s called trial-and-error learning, but with the evolution of talking habits experimental learning could become more intelligent. However, was he right? Is experimental learning really our only learning art, and if so how can such a universal statement like that possibly be proved?
Other interesting questions too come to mind. For example, what exactly is experimental testing -- is it a science, an art, or both a science and an art, and if so what is science and what is art? Also, what are experimental learning’s limits? Can it be used to know eternal and unchanging Spirit-Objects, universal Laws of Nature, or merely reliable ideas for making life better in our natural world, here and now? Then, if the best objects to know are the future results of our present actions, then can we ever be sure those actions are best? How can creative experimental learning help solve our everyday challenges to make both our self and our little corner of the world better? How difficult of an art is it to master? If it is our strongest learning art, then is there only one set and well-defined way experimental testing should be practiced, or will everyone use that liberal art of learning a little differently, and thus become their own learning artist? Not to worry. Such questions needn’t all be answered right now, but they’ll help prepare us for seeing more ideas later.
We begin with this question: Is an experimental testing art our ONLY learning art? In the last section we saw how it was consciously alive and well even among liberal ancient Greeks, and subconsciously alive even for people like Plato and Aristotle. As Western civilization was emerging from its old and long spirit-dominated prehistoric period, a few liberal practical-minded Greeks focused only on learning about our ever-changing natural world, to make life in it more satisfying and productive. But more recently, science has began describing a nature almost completely different from the one conservatives had been describing for thousands of years. Liberals often said such new knowledge was in fact the best evidence to believing experimental learning is our only learning art.
What’s more, the more animals studies were done, the more it seemed that learning method too stretched back billions of years into the past, rather than merely a few thousand years in human history. The more animals were studied and learning about, the more non-animals too practice experimental trial-and-error learning, almost certainly since life began on earth some 4 billion years ago. What evidence was there for it? Merely observing animal behavior. Such studies seemed to confirm Dewey’s idea – experimental learning is our ONLY learning art? What might some examples be for such a statement? So, we can play philosophic detective and see if the idea is reliable. After all, if he’s wrong or his argument is weak, then there might really be a way of learning about, say, spirit-objects or eternal natural Laws. In a sense then, the entire history of our earth and life on it becomes a scene for study and inquiry, much like homicide detectives study local crime scenes.
Looking for Evidence
No doubt, the best place to start looking for evidence is what’s going on here and now in the animal world, and the more that happens, the easier it is to find evidence of their trial-and-error experimental actions. If we see examples of it here and now, then it becomes highly probably their ancestors too practiced the art of trial-and-error learning.
What evidence is there for believing experimental testing is the only way anything learns anything? Well let's see, would you believe all animal life gives some evidence for it? Our biological world has a tremendous number of animals and as many people know they use trial-and-error learning to satisfy their needs and wants. If they don’t find food or a mate in one place, they simply keep looking for them in another place, in a trial-and-error fashion; what’s more, sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don’t. So, if that’s true, then it’s again highly probable their ancestors acted similarly, for at least the last 600 million years, give or take a Nigerian night or 2!
It’s easy to imagine, for example, how our Devonian fish ancestors of some 350 million years ago experimentally searched for food every day, with simple trial-and-error actions, just as fish do today. If those Demonian fish didn’t find something to eat in one place they simply kept looking for it someplace else! If so, then an experimental trial-and-error learning art was almost certainly present in nature that long ago. The big difference between us modern humans and them was they merely felt such an art, whereas thanks to our talking habits we are now able to both feel and consciously know our actions are experimental.
In short, such a conscious verbal level of awareness has allowed us to make experimental learning into a science by describing how it works, and also an art, by telling people they can use it creatively in daily life! They can, say, experiment differently with different foods to eat, or clothes to wear, or helpful actions. Obviously fish today, and those back in the Devonian era, had no such level of awareness, but their actions and behavior can all be seen as simply trial-and-error experimentation. Fish simply wander about here and there and try to catch the food they find, whereas we humans can more intelligently make a plan to satisfy our food challenges, and then test its excellence by seeing its results. However, in both cases learning is still experimental; neither fish nor people know for certain what results their actions will produce. How can either life form know what results their actions will produce before they act? All we can do is increase the probability for success.
In fact, the biological world is absolutely full of experimental trial-and-error actions, from single celled amoeba to dinosaurs to people. Fish today experiment to find food almost certainly just like their Devonian ancestors did; amphibious frogs experiment to catch insects just like their 300 million year old Carboniferous amphibian ancestors; reptiles experimentally build their egg laying nests today almost certainly like their Cretaceous ancestors did 100 million years ago, and even our own lemur and monkey ancestors continue hunting for fruit and insect-kabobs like their African ancestors did 50 million years ago, all with experimental trial and error. Today we can still look at fish, reptiles, and primates and see how experimental their actions are.
With such evidence we can more deeply feel how right Dewey was about trial-and-error experimental learning. If so, then our own intelligent experiments actions become more productive, respectful, kind, and generous with those actions, but we can also feel how deeply anchored we all are to our own natural world. The more a child’s actions are rewarded for, say, practicing religious habits, the stronger those habits become and the more real they feel. Actions like that are in fact strong evidence to believing all such ideas are merely mental tools for building habits, rather than reflections of nature’s absolute Truth.
In any case, however, both natural history and biology can help us begin seeing how widespread experimental testing is in nature, and also how we all can feel connected to our 4 billion year old biological roots of learning! Obviously we can’t test every animal, and so Dewey’s general statement about experimental learning is really just an assumption, but one based on a great amount of evidence from the natural world. In any case, it can be treated as an idea to be tested! By testing it we can begin feeling how such experimental learning consciously feels and works in our daily lives, rather than just leaving on a sub-conscious non-verbal level. Also, consciously using experimental learning can help us feel better connected to our billions-of-years-old nature we suddenly find ourselves living in and depending on for our continuing existence. After all, without plants there would be no animal life for very long. We’re all linked and connected to nature in many ways never even dreamed of by almost everyone more than 200 years ago!
Evidence also exists for believing our own human ancestors practiced experimental testing too. In the last section, long before burial arts were invented, we began seeing how our own African H. habilis ancestors began experimenting with the art of making useful crude and simple stone tools. That art is well over 2 MILLION years old, give or take a Chinese New Year or so. How else could those early human ancestors have taught themselves that very useful art unless they intelligently experimented with it? Only experimenting with stone tool making can teach such an art, and ever since then many other ancestors accepted the challenge too. In fact, archeologists today have even discovered such tool-making areas they worked in, full of stone chips made during their tool-building experimental work!
Not only that, but after the tool was finished those ancestors also experimented to see the results of their work, and how well their tools worked to produce more food. Often they worked well and sometimes they didn't, but when they did it made eating easier and life more satisfying, and so they were encouraged to continue experimenting with such tools, as is now obvious from all the different stone tools already found since that time. Such tools helped cut more meat and also smash bones for the nutritious marrow inside. What’s more, the more animal protein they ate the easier it was to feed their larger brains.
Obviously there were no tool-making classes for almost all of human history, so again such skills and art were all learned simply by active trial-and-error experimentation. Most of the time they probably banged together more stones than fingers, but every once in a while ... Ouch! Damn stones! And what’s more, an excellent experimental tool making art has continued right through all of Paleolithic time, more than 2 million years of it, give or take the 12 days of Christmas or so! As our H. habilis ancestors evolved into H. erectus ones, then Neandertals and our own San ancestors, almost certainly they all continued experimenting with learning tool-making arts. Archeologists dig up their experiments to this day, and even the experiments that failed. Like every other animals, our ancestors too needed to eat, and better tools intelligently helped better satisfy that need. What’s more, it gave those ancestors the confidence to feel nature could be learned about and used to make like better. That feeling rests at the foundation of all sciences and arts today. In fact, for Dewey science itself is an art – the art of testing ideas. When is the last time you realized your ancestors of 2 million years ago began acting like scientists today?
Almost certainly, every tool our native ancestors built was built experimentally. Mere reasoning certainly couldn’t build such tools; actual experimentation could only help them feel such tools were possible, and the more they experimented, the more they opened up a whole new art for experimentation and development. They learned what kinds of stones were best for tool making, and where they could they be found? If some results with one kind of stone weren’t successful, then some experimented with different stone material. In such a trial-and-error way, then, they slowly discovered certain kinds of stone worked better than others to make hunting and working easier and more satisfy-able.
Thus a tool making tradition began growing as they kept experimenting. (Ouch!) The same thing happened in the late 1800s after plastic was discovered. Such learning was felt to our early ancestors, as it almost certainly is to all animals, the most excellent way to satisfy any need and test any meaning. Thus, such a learning method remains the foundation of our present scientific knowledge. Even from the graves they built, Neandertals left evidence of how they experimented with different ideas. Sometimes they tied the body's legs with rope and sometimes they put heavy stone slabs over the body. Why? It probably gave them the feeling they would be safe from frightening nightmares about the person; their spirit would be forced to stay in the grave and not wander around. And of course today anyone can read how even spirit-ideas have been experimented with all through religious history. As Dewey said we know only what we build, whether it’s a tool or a habit-art!
For Dewey, what’s important to see is how our best learning today is still basically an active, constructive, and intelligent experimental art! The more young folks experiment with helpful, law-abiding, and respectful actions, the more they become caring and respectful people. In fact, experimental learning makes each day a kind of adventure, sometimes full of drama and chance discoveries, and sometimes producing surprise humor and of course some (Ouch!) bloodied fingers. As we’ll see in later section on education, and in Book 5’s Educational Models of Excellence, such ideas about intelligent experimental learning will become the core of Dewey’s liberal model of education.
Slowly, ever so slowly, one baby-step at a time, our human ancestors built their useful inner feelings for experimental learning’s art. The challenge to keep practicing that kind of learning art involved their entire body-mind, not just their reasoning, logic, and thinking; it involved muscles and connective tissues used in constructive work, as well as nerves and brain cells to feel experimental excellence. In short, such learning was a holistic event, involving much more than mere feelings and ideas. If it wasn’t, then new feelings would easily be forgotten. Every idea Tom Edison ever thought of also had to be experimentally tested to see its usefulness, and some weren’t. What’s the sense of merely thinking an electric light can be built, and then not taking the time to build one experimentally, even if it took over a year of trial-and-error testing?
In short, today all scientists continue celebrating such excellent active, creative, testing, experimental learning arts! Ben Franklin, for example, didn’t know what results would happen when he put a key on a kite to test his lightning ideas; that too was an experimental test, full of danger and risk; he could've easily been turned into a Franklin-kabob. And as many people have already tragically seen, even space flight today is still highly experimental; space planes can break apart on both takeoffs and landings; no one knows for sure what’ll happen on any mission. In short, as bankers well know, risk can be reduced, but never eliminated.
Thus, with the help of such evidence philosophic detective Dewey began feeling experimental learning is our only learning art. Again, it’s an assumption, but one resting on a massive amount of evidence. If so, then teaching young folks how to keep intelligently experimenting with building helpful and constructive habits ON THEIR OWN becomes the ultimate goal of educational and learning excellence! Liberal educational excellence becomes a process of encouraging everyone to actively become their own best teachers by learning excellent constructive and testing skills and habits. In fact, one of life’s greatest challenges is to become our own best experimental learning artist, and to keep creating objects and services people can safely use to keep making life better. The more such experimentation helps build a more healthful and helpful world, the more excellent learning-artists we become!
What’re The Obvious Deductions, Watson?
So, is it too ‘radical’ and outrageous to say every art and skill our ancestors have built for millions of years, and that we continue building today, is the result of experimental testing? For Dewey not only was it not too radical, it was ‘elementary my dear Watson’! In fact, after seeing how animals and people actually learned what they knew, it made perfect sense, and so he said it was our only learning art. How could it be anything else? Don’t we all live in an ever-changing world, where every day presents us with different challenges to keep satisfying our needs and wants and make life better? And don’t such challenges become delightful only when we teach ourselves to feel them that way? So, if Dewey’s ideas are the best ones about learning, then we have some real evidence every habit-art, every new invention, and every new idea has been built experimentally, every art from stone tools, to native burial arts, to ancient ‘divinely’ inspired gospels, to philosophic models of life and nature. What gives them the feeling of truth is how much they’re practiced! No doubt, many may disagree, but we’ll see later much more evidence for even the Bible's present gospels having evolved experimentally. If so, then even our food, clothing, and sex habits have been learned experimentally, and thus challenging everyone to make them more respectful, safe, and enjoyable.
One major deduction from such a liberal learning model is to begin seeing the idea of truth in a much different way, and that includes all philosophic and religious models of truth as well. Dewey mentions one example from Aristotle’s philosophic work. The idea of animal and plant species were eternal events was very important to moderate thinkers like him; horses, cows, and people would always be horses, cows, and people. As a result, because he pictured them all as eternal and unchanging species, biological science to him was thought to be merely classifying them in their own group. To him no animal or plant Form ever changes or evolves; elephants have always been the way they are and they’ll always be the way they are! To him such ideas finally defeated the liberal sophists who believed both eternal objects and Truth were merely fanciful and wishful ideas. So, he experimented to show them his ideas made sense. He wanted to believe his biological studies helped put animals and plants in their eternal and unchanging places in natures; even slaves had their eternal place in nature. What’s more, such a model of science helped answer the challenge to describe how our world was created. It wasn’t! It too is eternal and will always exist as it now exists.
Those were some of the results of his experimental assumptions about Forms. However, in the 1800s such ideas have been experimentally tested, by men like Charles Darwin, and as a result today many see Aristotle was wrong; changing and evolving, not sameness, is our new modern model of biology, even our own human species, and there’s a great and growing amount of evidence for it, not only biological but genetic as well. Such a new evolving model also gives us hope for curing present disabilities and illnesses with better medical knowledge.
As a result of such experimental testing, millions today are beginning to feel nature as constantly evolving and therefore as both stable and dangerous; Dewey too described it like that. In fact, because everything constantly evolves it’s more intelligent to believe in a very real sense everyone is 'reborn' a little every day. The challenge of philosophic writers like me is merely to help people begin feeling such new deductions and ideas, and encourage them to keep deepening the feeling with their own intelligent experimental actions on a daily basis, like trying vegetable-kabobs instead of dead animal-kabobs.
Even Mr. Philosophic Conservative himself, Plato, has left us some solid evidence for experimental learning in his own dialogues; when one definition created absurd results, then he simply experimented with another one. And as for religious evolution, over 20 Roman Catholic Church councils of bishops have voted democratically on the Truth they wanted their church to teach; democratic might built their model of truth! What’s more, today the idea of allowing gay and lesbian people to have they equal civil and religious rights is yet another example of religious evolution.
No doubt, to some conservatives and moderates, such evolving ideas of truth may feel much too radical; they want their philosophic and religious models to include eternal and unchanging objects and thus feel there exists eternal Truth. However, facts are facts, and such ideas about truth can no longer be seen only in that way; in fact they lack any kind of objective evidence. Much new objective scientific evidence now supports liberal Dewey’s experimental ideas about truth. And if that's true, then isn't it also true for poets, historians, scientists, playwrights, and everyone else, even though many may still believe only one philosophic or religious model of life is right and everyone else is wrong!
Conservatives and moderates have a point about Dewey’s experimental assumption – it can’t be proved to be always true. Merely listing more and more examples of experimental learning can never prove, once and for all time, experimental learning is our strongest and ONLY learning art? No doubt, even the few examples I’ve just described merely helps build a STRONGER case for believing experimental learning is our only learning art; it doesn’t prove the idea absolutely? So what if our modern practices of law, medicine, all the sciences, and even theology itself can now regularly be seen as merely experimental practices! It still doesn’t prove all knowledge can only be experimental? Thus, all such examples only make Dewey’s experimental idea more probably, rather than absolutely True?
No doubt, those are important ideas to note. They can help us feel all such general ideas are really just assumptions. Because such general statements can never be proven completely, they are merely more or less likely, depending of course on how much evidence they have. For Dewey, however, that’s a very important point. There now exists a great deal of evidence for it, and that makes it highly probably! In any case, however, it’s a very useful idea; it helps us deduce many other useful ideas too, as well as judge other philosophic and religious assumptions. For example, spirits exist, and that assumption’s been used to build most all the religious models we have around the world today. However, what objective evidence is there for that assumption? We Deweyan liberals aren’t aware of any. Still, it’s certainly possible some even better learning art will evolve to better know such objects, but until that happens experimental learning remains our only learning art.
More Deductions Can Be Seen
No doubt, the more one talks and acts as if all learning is experimental, the more comfortable and creative the idea can become, and the better equipped one mentally becomes to live life in an always changing world. Creativity is a useful habit for dealing intelligently with life’s changes. For example, there are new ethical challenges best met with intelligent experimental actions. Dewey said what best endures is usually the good done for others, rather than merely focus on increasing one’s own fortune. Still, why merely accept that idea on faith, just because Dewey said it? Experimental learning says some form of verification is necessary if it’s to become more than just another idea. Thus, one result of experimental learning is feeling ALL IDEAS ARE MERELY MENTAL TOOLS TO CREATIVELY EXPERIMENT WITH, rather than being exact reflections of already-existing absolute Truth! Obviously that includes ethical, political, economic, and educational ideas as well! In short, with experimental learning the entire world opens up to any kind of experiment we want, as well as learning what intelligent and routine experimentation feel like.
No doubt, to many conservative and moderate people too that result is quite difficult to accept. Many such people already believe eternal objects exist and can be known with certainty. As Dewey said, the idea of truth as corresponding to something already existing is so built into many peoples’ body-minds, it's difficult to imagine another model of learning, much less practice it. In reality, however, such habits often help preserve useless and unintelligent ideas, like only Christians, Jews, and Muslims should have equal rights and freedoms, and non-Christians, Jews, and Muslims shouldn’t. For us liberals, however, we’re all just people, and so all deserve equal rights and freedoms. In effect, then, assuming such objects exist often prevents people from building a better more equal world for everyone. After all, we’re all just people, right? In short, the art of testing ideas experimentally helps people begin feeling how all people deserve the same rights and freedoms, and how we’re all just trying to get by in a very precarious world. No doubt, experimental learning hasn’t become a common habit for many people, but it’s growing and that’s what’s important.
Progress for equal rights might be difficult, especially in some places, but it’s very possible. For example, in the 1800s the Industrial Revolution often helped create very harsh, stressful, and even inhuman living conditions in many countries. Factory pollution wasn’t regulated and wages were kept as low as possible. But because such social challenges were naturalistic, better solutions could be built experimentally with the help of different idea-tools, like better working conditions, unionizing, and taxes on the wealthy! In other words, if idea-tools about equal rights and acting kinder towards people helped improve the lives of those less fortunate, then such ideas became truthful, and could be used later for solving similar problems in other places, just like a carpenter's hammer can be used for different jobs at different times. In any case, however, using experimental testing to overcome ordinary challenges helps grow the feeling all ideas are just mental tools to be used creatively, rather than merely accepted as eternal reflections of absolute Truth.
Perhaps the feeling that all ideas are mental tools will deepen if we see how dangerous life can be without it. Social intolerance and increased violence has often been the result of people believing only their ideas reflect nature’s eternal and unchanging Truth. To this day many people believe and act as if everyone who doesn’t believe as they believe and act must be wrong, and so shouldn’t be tolerated. As a result, life for many has become even more dangerous than normal! For example, conservative Plato became most intolerant of atheists and non-believers, and even recommended they convert or be killed! Many in the Middle Ages practiced that idea, and even today we see much undemocratic intolerance against gay and lesbian people having equal civil and political rights; far too many people still believe such ideas and habits are just wrong. Decades ago many also felt the same way about Africans and whites marrying; many states even passed laws against it, but today that situation has changed much. After all, we’re all just people, right?
Thus, for Dewey the very idea of absolute Truth is a dangerous idea; it keeps dividing people from feeling how we’re all just people and how all law-abiding people should share the same rights equally, even if they have different ideas and habits. As we’ve seen, people began experimenting with such democratic ideas in ancient Greece, and they caused conservatives like Plato, and moderates like Aristotle to react and build very different models of social excellence.
Today, however, liberal democratic experiments with political and civil rights are becoming more useful and thus more widespread. Dewey simply admitted what he saw: all ideas, whether philosophic or religious are experimental; how else could so many different models of each keep growing and evolving? In his book Human Nature and Conduct he described how such ideas of Truth grow and are energized from our own active habit-arts and actions. For him in fact human habits become what people normally call will-power! The more an idea is practiced, the stronger it becomes.
Another very important idea is deduced from the assumption about experimental learning: our own everyday actions help build all the ideas and feelings we have, even those about philosophic and religious Truth. We all build our characters with our daily actions; the more we practice feeling enjoyment and helpfulness, the more feel enjoyment and helpful. The more Nazis practiced feeling Germans were indeed a master race, the easier it became to begin acting as if it were true. And the more that happened, the more dangerous life became for much of the world. Peru's Inca Indians are another example. The more they acted as if their chief was really a god, the more obedient they became, the less they practiced more intelligent habit-arts, and the more vulnerable they became to being conquered. And of course many religions still practice similar intolerant habit-arts.
Such divisive power lies in our own daily actions, and again, that fact makes education one of the most important institutions of all. The more people are educated to feel all their ideas are merely creative tools useful for making life better, then the less likely they are to elevate, freeze, and fossilize any of them into absolute Truth, and the easier it becomes to keep experimenting with different ideas. In short, we Deweyan liberals are now offering a new and modern challenge to our old conservative and moderate thinking habits, namely to start teaching such creative habits to the next generation. Only within the past few decades have Dewey’s ideas about experimental learning begun painting much different pictures about peoples' ‘truth’, but the educational challenge is on-going. So, to us, what’s important about our philosophies and religions is not their ideas about absolute certainty, but their teaching their followers how to intelligently use experimental ways of learning, producing kind and helpful actions making life better in some way!
Another result from experimental learning is seeing life itself in a very different way. As we’ll see throughout this book, for many thousands of years people believed only their habits were in fact the Truth given to them by god; for centuries they were told such things by their religious and political rulers. No doubt, such ideas helped people feel more hopeful about life itself, but also act more obedient to those with social power and continue neglecting to learn more about the natural world. However, the more people began realizing the world is full of different religious and philosophic models of ‘truth’, the more they were challenged to understand why.
In the 1500s, for example, the more mankind built ships capable of crossing great oceans, the more they saw no one else had the same religious ‘truth’ they did? Many became puzzled? Why would all-powerful and all-loving god allow such a thing? Why would an all-good and true god not allow almost the entire world to become saved and get to heaven? Why wouldn’t an all-powerful god simply make everyone believe in the same ideas and act the same ways, and thus make the world a more peaceful place? Clearly, those became serious questions to many. Liberals like Dewey, however, who no longer practiced spirit-ideas, could simply accept the fact different tribes practice different religious habits, and so have different ideas of truth. As a result, then, their respectful and helpful actions became most important, rather than what they believed.
In other words, nature’s great cultural variety became a serious problem for many conservatives who believed only their truth was absolutely certain. For us Deweyan Experimentalists, however, such natural variety of religious and philosophic models is not even a small problem. For us such variety is completely natural! Why? Simply because all learning is experimental; people around the world have merely experimented with different idea-tools, and so have built a great variety of different habits! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals there should be a great many different models of truth around the world, just as there are a great variety of biological forms around the world! In fact, biologists have discovered variety has been a normal model of life for hundreds of millions of years! In fact, no two animals or people experiment exactly the same way.
Another result deduced from our experimental learning assumption is feeling all ideas are TO BE tested for their reliability and usefulness. In fact, testing ideas has been science’s main work since the 1600s; for Dewey experimental science itself is the art of testing ideas! It’s an art simply because it’s something else humans have created. As a result, modern scientists have kept learning many more reliable and useful naturalistic facts for improving life, rather than merely feeling, like Plato and Aristotle, the Truth already existed and could be known. Thus, we’re now able to safely send people into outer space and create life-saving new medicines. Thanks to our greatly improved liberal schools, homes, and churches, today's children of peasants and slaves are often more confident and better educated than most anyone else who’s ever lived! However, serious and important challenges remain, like, for one, making such educational opportunities available to everyone, and not just a small minority of children in a few countries. In so many ways life has just begun a new and exciting new period.
Another result of experimental learning helps keep us more humble about our own knowledge and beliefs. After all, even scientific laws of nature are not seen as absolute Truth! They’re merely highly reliable ideas. Science’s history itself shows us how true that idea is, even though it may sound too radical to many, but as we’ll see, many of science's ideas have proved to be hogwash -- pardon my un-Kosher pig-Latin! In fact, possibly most of science’s ideas have proved less than reliable and worthwhile. For example, for hundreds of years people were convinced they could turn lead into gold by simply mixing it with other chemicals. Only experimental testing showed how worthless the idea was, unless of course you happened to have some ‘gold-making machines’ you were selling and some people greedy enough to buy them.
Also, for us Deweyan liberals even spirit-ideas have lost their certainty. It’s not because they don’t exist; how can anyone prove a negative statement? Rather it’s because we have no objective evidence to them! How can such ideas become certain when they can’t be tested and thus produce no objective results? Thus, the growing common phrase is you never know. What’s more, we also have evidence of now-dead religions. Today many spirit-ideas like the Norse, Greek, or Roman gods are simply seen as myths. Simply because worshipping them isn’t practiced like it was, people have lost the will power to believe in such ideas. Even Christianity's founder Paul of Tarsus destroyed many 'sacred' ideas about spirits Jews believed were the absolute Truth, like Mosaic dietary and circumcision ‘laws.’ Socially stressful and brutal times like Paul lived in created the need to offer hope for a better life to as many as possible, and so those ideas became useless for salvation, just like buggy-whips became useless after cars were invented. As Paul continued building his new Christian church network he regularly told his growing gentile congregations neither idea was necessary for salvation, and so to Christians those 2 old absolutely certain Jewish ideas became useless myths.
Another deduction from our experimental assumption is feeling how ideas about the best objects to know have changed. For example, for thousands of years conservative philosophers and theologians said the best objects to know are eternal, already existing, and unchanging spirit-objects. Experimental learning challenges us to make a complete 1800 turn and begin seeing the FUTURE RESULTS of our actions as the best objects to know, rather than what merely may or may not already exist. Again, conservative religions and philosophies are famous for studying such objects.
Focusing on future results is another natural result of using experimental learning arts. It helps us keep building better tools and institutions to make life better for everyone, not just a few already obscenely wealthy people. In short, future experimental results are what energize and power an idea’s truth and value; if an idea truly helps us overcome a challenge, then it gains some truth and reliability. In short, truth is something each of us creates with our own experimental actions. The results of actually helping others, for example, like working for equal rights, are what give such actions their meaning and value. Also, producing destructive and brutal results for innocent people are what make those actions dangerous, unintelligent, and unacceptable. After all, even people like Hitler and Stalin were experimental, but the brutal and harmful results of their experiments are what condemn those actions. In short, intelligent experimental learning teaches us to aim for positive and life-affirming future results, helping us become kinder and more helpful here and now! Sometimes the results of our actions are good, sometimes not so good, but in either case results have become our new object of knowledge. No doubt, the idea will take some practice to grow and develop into stronger feelings and will power, but then again, what idea doesn’t?
Another result sees all people as the creators of ALL their ARTS, including scientific, philosophic, ethical, artistic, and religious arts! No doubt, for many that idea is also too radical, but again history itself is full of objective evidence for it, namely all the different habits people have around the world. Not everyone normally sees all truth as a kind of ART people merely create, like an artist creates a painting or sculpture; many still feel their own habits really reflect absolute Truth. Today, however, that’s become yet another great difference between liberal and conservative models of life and learning. Since prehistoric and ancient times people have wanted to believe only their habits reflected absolute Truth, but those ideas are now slowly being re-formed and reconstructed, thanks to modern science and Dewey’s work too. Such work says we are the creators of our knowledge, habits, and will power, and if they’re intelligent then they’re more helpful than destructive.
Kinder Social Results Are Important
As millions are now beginning to feel, since the 1600s the growth of modern science’s experimental learning art has continued discovering more useful and reliable ideas, and creative ways for improving life. As a result, however, learning about spirit-objects has begun growing weaker and weaker. Thus, ideas of religious excellence too are slowly shifting from seeing non-believers as people to conquer, to helping others less fortunate build more intelligent habit-arts. In short, our religions today are becoming more humane and human centered. And the more that excellent habit grows, the larger common ground there is between us liberal Deweyan and all conservative people. After all, we’re all just people, right?
Yet another result is feeling all ethical, political, religious, educational, and economic ideas are subject to testing and experimentation. Even today many conservative followers of Ayn Rand believe unrestricted capitalism is the absolute best economic system, and it must not be challenged by anyone. Based on the very stressful and destructive results of such ideas, we liberals now say all ideas are now subject to testing and experimentation if they don’t contribute to the common good! Unregulated capitalism has been celebrated as the best economic system on earth, and yet its history is full of stressful and feudalistic results, like creating a small obscenely wealthy upper class who often uses its power to make life better for themselves. Thus, it too has been undergoing some experimentation, at least since the early 1900s. No doubt, lately conservatives have had way too much control of the testing, and have thus greatly increased economic stress, but we liberals have certainly not blindly accepted their ideas as absolute truth.
In any case, however, the more all ideas are seen as experimental tools to creatively help build a better world for everyone, the easier it become to keep testing different ethical and political ideas, like building kind habits for helping those less fortunate than ourselves, and sharing our democratic rights equally! The more such idea-tools are intelligently experimented with, the more excellent social results they tend to produce. We’re all just people, right
What The Hell Took So Long? ?
No doubt, conservative habits are not on the side of progress. For thousands of years a feudalistic status quo was to be maintained come hell or high water, and no matter who gets killed. To many conservatives social excellence aimed at dominating other people, even against their will, and justifying their actions with ideas like absolute Truth. However, such ideas are growing weaker these days as more people become better educated and more focused on improving life for everyone.
So, if experimental learning is our only learning art, then what took liberal philosophers, scientists, and theologians so long to realize it? The short answer is that religious and political leaders kept experimenting with routine ideas and habits, telling people they were absolute truth. Both Plato and Aristotle were part of that status quo. Dewey would probably say their own desires to discover nature’s absolute and unchanging truths prevented them from thinking and feeling more democratic ideas like equality and freedom. Obviously they saw how experimental learning is useful for overcoming many daily challenges, but they also wanted to discover what they assumed were nature’s eternal truths; they wanted absolute Truth rather than relative truths, and so they simply dismissed experimental learning as capable of producing the strongest knowledge. And when their ideas were institutionalized by religions like Christianity, then they became widespread all during the Middle Ages. Also, Dewey believed the widespread institution of slavery also helped convince people such truths really existed and could be known by their leaders. In fact, both Plato and Aristotle believed only the lowest level of people, like slaves and artisans, practiced experimental learning.
As a result, most everyone continued believing there were more important things to know merely with the religious learning art of faith – the acceptance of an idea even though there was no objective evidence for it! Even for very educated people like Plato it was almost instinctive to reject experimental learning as the only learning art. After all, contemplative and deductive mathematical reasoning had discovered many seemingly absolutely certain math facts, so why not just keep using such reasoning to learn about spirit-objects? He simply didn’t want to admit even his own reasoning too was experimental, even when that basic assumption began producing many contradictory results. In short, our habits give us only limited freedom, and as long as they keep working, they remain in place. Dewey said it like this: Habits are propulsive; they keep working until a more useful habit is learned. As a result, our habits teach us to see what we want to see, right? Christians, Jews, and Muslims want to keep hearing Christian, Jewish, and Islamic ideas. And so the more people used spirit-ideas to feel a better awaited them, the more they kept ignoring experimentally learning about our natural world, and the more life remained the same.
Down through the centuries mankind has paid a terrible price for maintaining a status quo and consciously neglecting experimental learning arts. For thousands of years most everyone continued living with poverty, ignorance, and disease. Many religious leaders kept encouraged people to believe our world is absolutely true our world is demon-infested and evil, instead of seeing it as a challenge to keep making it better with experimental learning. Since ancient times people normally believed demons lived underground and even in the air; they were often pictured as disease-causing too. And when there were no secular public schools to teach experimental learning and naturalistic ideas, how could such ideas be learned? Again, the result was to keep experimental learning arts as weak and lifeless as a newborn babe. People were encouraged to believe spirits controlled life itself, so why bother trying to improve it? Life itself thus remained an often painful, disease ridden, intolerant, violent, brutal, and deadly place. Such is much of Western civilization’s history under the spell of their ideas reflected the absolute truth about life and nature.
That world began changing after 1600. Today, with all our new experimental tools for answering life's many challenges, and our much better knowledge of history, it’s become much easier to see experimental learning and testing as our strongest and only learning art. It's useful for not only improving our outer world, but our own inner personal habit-arts as well, and to feel life can be intelligently reborn and expanded a little each day. Today even a growing political democratic idea helps people feel our nations themselves are something TO BE MOLDED by citizens, not by the gods, cosmic Fate or Karma, or just power-hungry wealth-seeking politicians and corporate CEOs. In short, today experimental learning has given us many more useful idea-tools to test, and with its help it’s become much easier to see life and its improvement as a continuing and growing challenge, and to keep experimenting intelligently with that challenge.
Thanks to Dewey’s work we liberals can now see a modern liberal model of life has really begun blossoming; perhaps these books too will help speed that process. The more people see and feel such important new challenges, and experimental ways of meeting them, the easier it becomes for each of us to make life even better in some small ways. For example, today more and more people can begin feeling every law-abiding person's rights and freedoms should be equalized. Even throughout ancient democratic Greece that idea was often felt as outright political heresy; slavery helped both Plato and Aristotle reject such democratic equality; both benefitted greatly from the institution. No doubt, some liberal folks began feeling how important such equality was, but they were only a small minority. Liberal Democritus, for example, asked why treat people as slaves and inferiors when we’re all members of the same species? We’re all just people, right?
With these few introductory sketches about learning, then, we can begin seeing and feeling some of the differences between conservative, moderate, and liberal philosophic models of life and nature. Throughout Book 1 we'll continue seeing more about experimental learning, modern anthropology, Behavioral psychology, liberal ethics, and education. Hopefully now the reader has begun feeling a little more comfortable with Dewey’s liberal learning ideas. If such feelings have begun growing, then my goal has been accomplished. However, the challenge to continue that growth continues. For example, what ideas should we experiment with for learning how liberal excellence feels and what its intelligent results should be? It's another modern challenge intelligent people face daily ... and even playfully. How should be use our newfound freedom, and what is psychological excellence itself?
3. PSYCHOLOGICAL EXCELLENCE: HOW PLAYFUL ARE YOU?
From learning excellence we go to our first section on psychological excellence. In reality, of course, all learning is to some degree affected by one’s psychological habits, only logically can they be talked about separately. Why bother? Well, for one thing, psychology has been a philosophic topic since the ancient Greeks. The more conservatives like Plato and moderates like Aristotle wanted to justify their feelings about absolutely certain knowledge, the more they needed to build a model of human psychology capable of learning such knowledge.
More importantly, however, since the early 1900s there’s been another major liberal revolution in psychology with the building of Behavioral models of it. Dewey lived at the beginning of that revolution, and so learning some basics about his model was the main goal in his book Human Nature and Conduct, published in 1921. How may we liberals now look at our body-mind and its excellent actions? With such questions one may also see how psychology leads to ethical questions as well. What really controls many of our actions and ideas, and more importantly, how can we best keep building the psyche we want? Not surprisingly one of Dewey’s most important ideas is building a habit of enjoyable playfulness; about that we Deweyan liberals are quite serious.
Some Serious History About Playfulness
In Paleolithic or Old Stone Age times, more than 100,000 years ago, playfulness's art probably wasn't practiced much by adults; as usual young children kept their monopoly over it. After all, who had time for playfulness when the local saber-toothed tigers and cave bears were mainly looking for another little human-kabob snack? And how playful could you be when another Ice Age storm was helping turn everyone's toes and fingers to a colorful shade of numbing blue? It’s highly doubtful our Neandertal cousins built many snowmen or snowwomen.
About 10,000 years ago, however, with the building of villages, towns, and cities playfulness probably started growing stronger, both as a learning tool and a stress-relieving tool. Healing dances, for example, had helped relieve stress and tension in prehistoric times, becoming more secular oriented in ancient times. After all, human suffering, especially among the lower classes, was a lot more widespread, so humor and playfulness were useful. The great Greek poet Homer describes how peasants' lives were lived in almost continual fear, and slavery too helped justify such fears for both slaves and owners. Slaves really didn’t know who might kill them at any time, and owners didn’t know when the next rebellion would break out. Add to that the fact war was much more common in those days, and it’s easy to see how life remained somber, serious, and fearful. How playful could a person be who was just sold into slavery for not paying debts and then worked to death in, perhaps, some dark and dank mine shaft somewhere, or put to work as a prostitute for 'religious' duties -- which actually happened in some places. Boy, religions sure have evolved haven’t they? Still, even the gospels record how Jesus playfully named 2 of his apostles the Sons of Thunder. However, with the growth of specialized crafts, like weaving, farming, carpentry, and governing it became easier to make one’s work more playful and enjoyable.
In general, however, the mood of the times was generally negative and not playful for most everyone. Even some philosophers could be very negative and depressive. Before Socrates lived one named Heraclitus was called the Weeping Philosopher. He was probably the last person you’d want to play a little racket ball with. Later, in Greece’s Golden Age of the 400s BCE, some liberals like Democritus supposedly said it was better if some people were never even born! Still, he apparently taught himself to playfully enjoy much of life; his nickname was the Laughing Philosopher.
No doubt, in Greece much of life centered around war and training for war, especially in military-dominated Sparta and similar conservative city-states. And of course vicious and brutal warfare between Athens and Sparta helped even Socrates slowly lose his youthful philosophic optimism and playfulness. Before the Peloponnesian War he liked to playfully question others who thought they actually knew something, but as he grew older he saw such teaching just wasn’t working the way he had hoped. People often continued acting selfishly and unintelligently, sometimes even his own close students. In fact, he seemed almost relieved when his last day dawned, judging by Plato's poignant dialogue called Phaedo. In it his last words seem to say he felt all of life itself was a kind of sickness and the god of health should be rewarded when one dies.
No doubt, such feelings were understandable. The last 30 years of Socrates’s life, life in his beloved war-torn Athens had become just too brutal, murderous, and unbearable. Greeks killing Greeks was for many the greatest sin of all, and years before he died political leaders were passing around hemlock to their enemies like Perrier at a Hollywood party. Almost certain Socrates felt death was the best cure for the brutal sickness Athenian life had become.
What’s more, after him his conservative student Plato too recorded some rather contemptuous feelings about playfulness and amusement. For him even the gods shouldn't be pictured as laughing too much; it might inspire people to start enjoying themselves and thus become less religious. Indeed, ancient warfare helped keep playfulness rather weak and rare. Playwright Aristophanes’ work was probably the best example of someone who taught himself to laugh and mock much of life in spite of its horrors; in his play The Clouds he even mocked Socrates. And of course, after him Roman satirists kept that playful art alive and well.
Medieval times too were often just as serious and somber, especially in the religious orders; penance for one’s sins or even thinking about sin could mean something as drastic as disrobing even in winter and throwing oneself onto the nearest thorn bush! Also, if it wasn’t Bubonic plague-carrying rats unloading more infecting fleas onto people, then it might be more witch-burning folks out for another little afternoon human bonfire! Who can be playful when such mobs are gathering wood to burn defenseless men, women, and children at any time? Simply because people lacked reliable and useful knowledge about most everything -- scientific knowledge -- despair and fear were much more common than playfulness and enjoyment; most people outside the aristocracy felt they were at the mercy of just about everything and everyone. Many royal courts had their own dwarf jesters.
Even early modern times in the 1600s and 1700s, most everyone had little encouragement for playfulness; lower classes and slaves were expected to obey those higher up and pain was often the reward if they didn’t. Thus, not only did life itself remain very serious business, but not even many philosophers and theologians helped much. For thousands of years, in fact, they too justified somber, serious, and stoic ethical actions of acceptance, made all the more serious with their grand pronouncements about Eternal Truth. I, for one, would have probably chosen to nap rather than talk with serious and somber people like Jean Rousseau, George Hegel, or Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. Even the German philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer was labeled the Great Pessimist. In short, even in the 1800s life for most everyone, even in the more advanced countries, was often downright depressing, boring, and not playful; imagine the foul odors while even taking a daily walk in any city before modern sewage systems were built, and with factory pollution fouling everyone’s air and endangering their health, not to mention the seriousness of losing one's job and home when economic depressions hit every few decades. What’s there to be playful about in such a world? Meanwhile, upper class folks lived, dressed, and ate well, made much more money than others, and would often relax and play shuffleboard and shuffle-bed on cruises to Europe to buy more paintings and sculptures for their collections.
In short, the upper classes had more opportunities to playfully relieve their stress and tensions, with both better food and more sex. And, of course, natural and normal child playfulness was often rewarded at school with a brisk whipping or knock on the head, then perhaps followed with being called a dolt, dullard, and dunce. Even in the late 1800s, serious, solemn, and depressing religious ideas and rituals remained strong just about everywhere; many couldn’t go through one day without feeling they had sinned in some way. Thus praying for spirit-help was often the only tool they had to lessen their stressfully tense fears. Thank goodness many such habits have been greatly improved in the last century, thanks to the growth of scientific knowledge and a much more humane Behavioral psychology, in which playfulness become a very useful habit-art. Dewey’s work thus helped create a wider field for playfulness and enjoyment to grow in. Eventually he realized such playfulness can make learning anything easier and more enjoyable. The more enjoyable a new habit is made to feel, the sooner it starts working. With his help in building a Behavioral psychological model, people became more educated about playfulness’s importance!
Intelligent Playfulness: A New Modern Challenge
Why hasn’t the habit become more widespread? Our overly conservative public schools no doubt share some of the blame. As they continued growing in the US, playful kinds of learning were almost always ignored; students sat at wooden desks and worked silently learning academic trivia for hours each day, and were still often wacked by the teacher when they stopped even to daydream for a few minutes. As a result, such educational habits kept constructive and enjoyable playfulness to an absolute minimum. Still, parks and recreation spaces for the masses grew tremendously in modern times, so people could take a little vacation on Sundays, maybe drink some wine, laugh a little, enjoy life, watch the children play, and let go of their stressful tensions; in schools, however, playfulness was still largely neglected on a formal level.
No doubt, with the growth of our electronic media like TV in the 1950s, movies, newspapers commix, and the growth of sports, it’s become even easier for parents to practice a little playfulness and encourage more laughter in their children. It was helped by liberal people like Dewey and the Behavioral psychologists. For them playfulness is a very important tool for good health, both physical and mental. As normal children soon learn, playfulness is a great way to let go of useless and frustrating stress-tensions. Often it's either that or grab the nearest hammer and start swinging away until you're too tired to lift it. In his Human Nature and Conduct Dewey says the 2 basic ways of relieving stressful tension is with playfulness or destructive actions. Obviously, based on their much more intelligent results, playfulness has become yet another intelligent sign of psychological excellence.
Dewey’s new active behavioral psychological model of excellence celebrated playfulness as both a useful learning and stress-relieving habit-art. Playfulness makes learning any new habit a more enjoyable event. In fact, the more one can playfully act while starting to break a harmful habit, the faster that habit is weakened. For example, the more fun and play one can act during those times when one usually smokes, the weaker that habit becomes. Thus, child-like play helps make it easier to improve any harmful habit one day at a time. Such playfulness teaches us how to un-learn a habit, even a strong one; the more one plays with it, the weaker it becomes, and the more playfully enjoyable the practice is, the more one wants to practice.
For Behaviorists like Dewey, all our habits can be divided into 4 basic kinds: weak, excessive, unhealthful, and healthful. What’s more, all of them can be improved with playful practice. After all, as healthy children teach us, it’s much more enjoyable to learn anything playfully, and to make a game of learning. Parents often tell their children to go out and play, but often don’t realize how seriously they take the playful actions; they’re educational too, often teaching social and organizational skills. So, a rather modern challenge for parents is to keep encouraging such playfulness all through the pre-teen and teenage years, so the habit becomes a strong part of their will-power. It becomes easier to playfully learn new idea-tools, and how they can be used in their daily lives. Is there any better kind of education than that?
In short, playfulness's habit-art has become another important sign of psychological excellence. Playfulness, even if it’s making funny faces and thinking of a new joke, can help us keep enjoying our work here and now, rather than slowly becoming so tense we literally start aching all over. And the habit-art can be brought to a verbal level of awareness when children are told they’re being taught how to make learning fun and enjoyable. In fact, playfulness is a great way to see what a child’s natural abilities and desires are; many healthy children under 10 or 11 haven’t yet learned to fear being tricked by adults, and so normally just say what they’re thinking.
Such ideas about playfulness help encourage those who want to know about liberal psychological kinds of learning excellence, and they can be easily tested on a daily basis. For example, how many students learn to playfully reward themselves after they take a break from studying; even a healthful candy bar or relaxing game of ping pong can act like a refreshing and enjoyable reward. Who can’t set aside 10 or 15 minutes every day just for a little playfulness, both mental and physical playfulness? And then, when that time becomes comfortable and well-used, a person can start lengthening the time and keep it growing, eventually even making study itself a playful event. Merely building the habit of smiling and feeling how lucky we still are to be alive is a good first step; over the years it's slowly become much more important in my life too. In short, we Deweyan liberals say learning to make one’s work playfully enjoyable is definitely worth the effort.
Here’s another simple example of limerick playfulness I wrote while writing this book; it’s from what I call my gonzo-limerick file.
A man with a problem and no sense of sin
Wondered how to act for playfulness to win,
His ignorance he masked,
Then he finally asked
Why not just let the experiment begin?
Sounds like it came from our Ben Franklin files. In the 1700s America’s first great liberal realized how important it was to experiment with having a little fun in life, rather than taking everything so seriously, like many religious Puritans did in his day; to them devils were everywhere. Writing his Poor Richard's Almanac was for him a chance to play with many kinds of different ideas, just like our comic writers do today. Such habits can in fact be a great help to those who want to make their lives more enjoyable and less stressful. At any rate, experimenting with the art of playfulness, and then slowly building it into a will-power strong habit-art, might produce some interesting and even unexpected results, both in and outside our self. After all, playfulness is an art useful on a daily basis, wherever you are and whatever work you have. For example, US history can become more playfully enjoyable with a little playful humor.
Have you ever noticed how much better life has become for more Americans these days? During the Great Depression in the 1930s millions of homeless people often used newspapers for blankets at night; today, however, many people actually read newspapers! That’s progress, right? Those Depression times were certainly tough for most everyone. Imagine billionaire John Rockefeller struggling to use the same car 2 weeks in a row! Once a car’s ashtray gets soiled it’s just not the same, is it? And who can forget what those wild and crazy Russians did in the 1950s? They were the first to send a dog into space. I heard radically conservative anti-Communist Sen. Joe McCarthy applied for the job but was turned down; the dog had more respect, tolerance, and better manners.
Besides making it easier to keep learning about creatively overcoming our daily challenges, playfulness can also help build some other useful habit-arts; as always, the power to build such habits lies in our own muscles! The more we practice and reward our self, the faster they’re learned. For one thing, playfulness can help people become more creatively playful about ourselves, and not take ourselves too seriously. In fact, such creativity itself is a kind of mental playfulness, as our great humorists teach us. One famous humorist calling himself Rodney Dangerfield once wrote “I’m not a sexy guy. I went to a hooker. I dropped my pants. She dropped her price.” In fact, taking our self too seriously is one of the most dangerous habits of all; the Bible says it like this – pride goes before the fall. What a shame church leaders often didn’t actually practice the habit.
Such playfulness, especially about our self, can also help us let go of our daily tensions and frustrations more easily and enjoyably. What’s more, perhaps a good time to practice such humor is just before we start working to solve some problem. For example, suppose we’re challenged to put on our socks in the morning, then before we start we can play as if they're a wild animal and we're stalking them, pretending they’re afraid to go over our feet and they’re trying to run away. Is there any better way to start building a playful habit for all our daily challenges than with playfulness like that? Clearly, the more we do, the more we become a creative artist in playfulness?
As our comedians and many children can teach us, playfulness involves one’s entire body-mind; while talking to your reluctant socks you can even pretend to strangle them. After all, strangling socks is much better than strangling someone else who doesn’t deserve it. In any case, such playfulness now and then is an excellent way to make life more enjoyable, creative, and educational. Is playfulness really that powerful? Again, the more we practice it, the stronger it becomes. For years I've been playing with Dewey's ideas and slowly they helped build this book. What’s more, such playfulness helped make my life much more meaningful, worthwhile, and educational as well. Playing with a writing art also made my life more fun and enjoyable. Who really knows what results will happen until you start playing with playfulness? The new Behavioral psychology says one’s actions are what form one’s body-mind; old conservative psychologies like Plato’s said we’re all just the puppets of the gods. We liberal Deweyans have liberated ourselves from all such psychological models.
The more playfully we act, the more life itself becomes a creative adventure, rather than the same old routine. And the more intelligent our playfulness is, the better chance we have of making life a little better for both our self and others. Helping others feel what the art of playful excellence is like just might help them become a little better prepared to go out into their world and enjoy it a little more, rather than getting stomped on by all those greedy saber-toothed ‘tigers’ still out there waiting to feast on others’ bank accounts! Stranger things have happened, haven't they?
Is playfulness really a necessary habit-art? It is if you want to test Dewey’s psychological ideas of excellence. Why not test the idea playfulness makes learning anything more enjoyable, even improving any weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. The more one, say, learns to play creatively with cigarettes, the less powerful their smoking habit can become. Considering mankind’s general history of kill or be killed, or how to avoid catching this week’s new fatal disease, creative playfulness just might make life a little more bearable and productive.
Today, we Deweyan liberals see intelligent and constructive playfulness as a sign of excellent mental health. Playfulness, especially when it’s helpful to others, is perhaps the best antidote to life’s stressfully frustrating and destructive poisons. No doubt today millions agree. Our world has become much more playful in the last 100 years alone, with the growth of recreation centers, parks, and exercise opportunities like marathons, as well as the growth of professional sports. Who even thought tiddlywinks would ever be as much fun as they can be?
Since ancient times Greek philosophers like Aristotle said happiness is an important part of personal excellence. The problem was he defined it so narrowly that almost no one could achieve it; for him a god-like contemplation was the highest form of happiness, and only philosophers could best feel it. Since the 1800s, however, such narrow models of excellence have been weakening and becoming more democratically available to everyone. As we'll see in Book 4's Modern Pictures of Excellence, a liberal British philosophic 'radical' movement called Utilitarianism said even governments should use social happiness as a natural test for their laws! If a law increases peoples’ happiness, then it’s a good law. A liberal do-gooder named Jeremy Bentham helped create the movement, even spending much of his personal fortune on making Britain’s prisons and mental hospitals much more humane and less painful. He wanted to show how enjoyment could be used to produce better personal, social, and political results. In fact, he was so playful he paid to have himself embalmed after he died so he could still be wheeled into his philosophy meetings! That's what I call being playful with the idea of death. Next time you're in London why not say hello for me, although the conversation may be just a bit one sided!
What’s more, even philosophy too may be seen as a creative art of word-playfulness. For example, have you noticed how easily some ordinary words can help us think wrongly? Consider the phrase 'mental health', but is 'mental health' ever separate from 'bodily health'? For Dewey of course the mental and physical are always organically intertwined and inseparable all through life. So, thinking they're really separate objects like minds and bodies is another trick our words can play on us! Keep using the word 'mind' or ‘mental’ long enough and you can easily be tricked into feeling it's a separate thing and object different from the body. In fact, both Plato and Aristotle felt at least some part of the human psyche was completely different from the body. Later on Christians called it the spirit-soul. But Dewey's naturalistic playfulness reminds us 'mental’ health is best demonstrated with body-mind playfulness! The more one acts playfully, the more one thinks playfully!
How about actively playing with some Zen Buddhist-kinds of questions? What's the sound of one healthy mind thinking? What were my BODY-MIND actions before I was born? What’s the taste of an imaginatively invented joke? Not knowing how to slowly relax and playfully answer such questions makes it more difficult to let go of our excessive muscle tension-frustrations, thus increasing the need for drugs like alcohol and tranquilizers, merely to feel more relaxed. Currently, old laws against using marijuana to relax are being overturned. To us Deweyans, however, building a playful habit helps free us from all such dependence, and any of their unhealthful side effects. It then becomes much easier to answer questions like what is the sound of one person dancing by actually dancing playfully! What’s the smell of one eye smiling? One eye smiling!
Teaching our self the habit of playfulness, one day at a time, is learning the art of playing constructively with our ideas and actions. What's the sound of one life playfully improving? What's the sound of seeing life’s funny side? I was so poor I couldn’t even get a loan from a church mouse. In fact, just like any habit-art, we can teach our self such playful arts with playful actions; all such power is in our own muscles. Then, once it begins growing we can keep refining, enhancing, and improving the art all through life! It will never be exactly the same 2 days in a row. Such new psychological results are yet more samples of Dewey's model of Behavioral excellence.
Again, it should be remembered, playfulness is also very useful as an educational tool, although you might get a negative reaction from many public school teachers who believe education means conditioning children as soon as possible to take their trivial book assignments seriously day after day, year after year, even though many already know most all of it is useless in the adult world.
Not only in school, but in the real world, playfulness makes learning to improve our character habits easier and more fun. Because we're social creatures we can keep learning about playfulness just by watching others, and then practicing ourselves. In short, don’t just tell me about playfulness, demonstrate it too! Playfulness is another natural antidote to all of life's somber seriousness and routine dullness? How many of our own institutions could act much more playfully civilized, like the business, educational, religious, home, and even military communities? Many people at sporting events already celebrate the art of intelligent playfulness. More and more on TV we see fans playing creatively and harmlessly with face painting and dressing up like the local team's totem -- Bears, Colts, Tigers, Angels and so on. Who knows where it'll all end? One day even 'crazy' soccer fans might learn how to playfully celebrate more intelligently rather than sometimes trampling others to death; hope springs eternally, doesn’t it? And when will our serious-looking business-suited community start encouraging their employees to dress like their favorite animal even one day a year? I mean is it really necessary for businesspeople to suffer on hot summer days while wearing those stuffy and uncomfortable dark business suits? Say, I wonder, is there really a deodorant and necktie conspiracy going on.
Folks, we Deweyan liberals say it’s high time for playful people of the world to UNITE, and throw off all the stifling forms of seriousness we still practice, especially trying to dominate others with weapons and killing! For us liberals it’s become a sign of adolescent bullying, and should be confronted wherever possible, and with force if necessary. One of the only things we should be more serious about is playfulness, sexual playfulness included with the partner or partners of our choice, as long as it’s safe and respectful! For example, I brought along my magnifying glass in case you’d like to see my little love muscle. No doubt, religious and military institutions too could help more people learn how constructively creative playfulness feels. In fact, the more seriously life is treated, the easier it becomes to keep killing and bombing people who are simply peacefully acting differently from us. The Vietnam War is perhaps the worst example of that idea.
In how many places around the world do millions of people still take seriously obeying those who order them to act brutally violent towards peaceful people? How much are those actions seriously equated with excellent manhood and patriotic love, when they mostly make it easier for already wealthy people to become obscenely wealthy? In what Fatherland or Motherland or Uncleland aren't the highest and most honorable feelings seriously still attached to preserving such destructive habits? Seriousness about such actions is one of the main reasons wars and petty discrimination still exist today. Such seriousness helps perpetuate personal numbness and perhaps even tragedy when they help motivate destructive actions. Would it hurt if our religions too encouraged more playfulness for helping others less fortunate? Indeed, many religious people around the world still seem welded and fused to violent habit-arts of defending their models of truth, rather than practicing constructive playfulness. September 11, 2001 is merely one modern example. It seems many of our religions and for-profit corporations too are still a long way from playfully celebrating the art of helping others improve their lives. Isn’t it time such playfulness was taken more seriously, especially in our schools and businesses, where young body-minds are still very much forming?
What's the problem with building such institutions? After all, playfully enjoying life without drugs is just like any other habit-art! All it takes is a little daily experimentally playful practice! Where are the public school classes studying humor and playfulness on a continuing basis all through public education? No doubt, such schools and institutions will evolve one small baby-step at a time, but that they should evolve is now beyond question to us Deweyan liberals. In fact, if you wish you may even call it a new psychological law of human nature – peaceful and harmless playfulness is healthy!
Within each of us already lives the natural power to play with and learn such healthy life-improving habit-arts. And if that’s true, then within the arts of excellent education itself lies the key for molding and forming such power in the next generation. Parents are no doubt important in that learning process, but so are our public schools. After all, won't intelligent playfulness produce much better results than old military habits like dominance-subservience, dull and routine business arts, and intolerant religious hatred against all of nature's peaceful ‘heretics and infidels’? Why not let the experiment begin? The world is becoming so over-populated, destructive actions will harm even greater numbers of people; stopping such people has also become one of modern life’s new challenges. In fact, playfully neutralizing such people is not only a part of character excellence, but also the way to a more highly civilized plateau called peace! You all know what peace is, don’t you? It’s when people become free to feel how life is working, and then start working to make it even better. In his 1916 book Democracy and Education, Dewey put the need for educational playfulness like this:
"If education does not afford opportunity for wholesome recreation and train the capacity for seeking and finding it, then suppressed instincts (and psychic impulses) find all sorts of illicit outlets, sometimes overt, sometimes confined to indulgence of the imagination. Education has no more serious responsibility than making adequate provision for enjoyment of re-creative leisure; not only for the sake of immediate health, but still more if possible for the sake of its lasting effects upon habits of mind. Art is again the answer to this demand." (213)
Each of us has their own way of playing with words, don't we? It should be noted, however, art to Dewey is any constructive building, including carpentry, clothes making, food prep, healthcare work, and police and fire prevention work. They, and many other activities like scientific research and computer programming, are all human arts capable of playfulness.
4. MORE ABOUT LEARNING EXCELLENCE
We’re back to experimental learning in this section to mention a few more of Dewey’s ideas about it, review some ideas of it, and thus color in his liberal picture of it. First of all, why is experimental learning our strongest learning art? In a nutshell, it’s forward-looking, and thus gives us more control of the present while focusing on future results; it thus gives us more power to keep improving our lives here and now. In short, experimental learning helps us answer all of life’s challenging frustrations with intelligent actions here and now. Experimental learning also makes it much easier to keep learning how nature actually works, including human nature, rather than merely accept life the way it is.
For example, one of life’s continuing challenges is to keep learning about the new invention-tools science is making possible, and especially the ones useful to us. Practicing intelligently with them promotes learning excellence. Learning how to use them intelligently for our own needs and wants requires new sets of coordinated muscles -- new habits -- and they’re best learned experimentally, one step at a time. Until those new habits are built, old ones may feel comfortable, but sometimes they’re unable to keep improving our lives. Without that freedom to learn intelligent kinds of practice and a new learning art, life can remain a series of tense frustrations, and perhaps lead to what's called a nervous breakdown -- an inability to accomplish even minor tasks. History has some examples of such events, often linked to forcing children to learn what they have little desire or interest in learning. Having the freedom to playfully experimental with different skills and knowledge can lessen those dangers, making relaxation easier and more tension-free, unless of course you really need another nervous breakdown? And so this section again focuses on how we can know when our learning is excellent and intelligent, and what’s the best way to teach our self the art? First, a little review.
If Dewey's right, we're certainly not the only creatures who act intelligently, that is, learn to satisfy our needs and wants. If we were we'd be the only creatures alive! So, perhaps the best place to start is coloring in the idea of intelligence. What does Dewey mean by acting intelligently? Examples are perhaps the best way to illustrate that idea.
Throughout these pages, we’ll see again and again how simple and practical many of Dewey's ideas are, and with them he also shows how simple and practical philosophy itself can be; it needn’t be overly wordy, logically complex, and difficult to understand, as most philosophers have made it down through history.
For example, every life-form needs to act intelligently; they need to teach themselves how to SATISFY their needs and wants experimentally, with trial-and-error actions; as that happens they act intelligently! What’s difficult to understand with that idea? Obviously that art has been around for billions of years already! When any animal or plant learns to satisfy its needs and wants it acts intelligently! When a plant moves to get more sunlight, it acts intelligently. When worms, insects, and people learn to satisfy their food needs with their actions, then they all act intelligently! And the same applies to their safety and reproductive needs. So, for Dewey, intelligent actions merely help satisfy biological-psychological needs and wants. If someone today uses spirit-ideas to satisfy a psychological need to believe in an afterlife, then they act intelligently, and when they test the idea for its helpful and constructive results, then such knowledge becomes excellent. After all, people like Hitler and Stalin acted intelligently, but who would say they also acted excellently?
The great advantage of we humans, however, is being able to better see the results of our own actions, and thus work to lessen their harmful and destructive results, and increase their healthful ones. Obviously anyone can test such ideas in their daily lives. After all, experimental learning remains basically a trial-and-error art of testing ideas for their healthful and constructive results; even the seemingly best plans need to be tested to see their actual results. Thus, it’s fairly easy to see how, if small children don’t get food they’ll keep trying as long as they can. Usually they’ll just keep crying if they’re very young, but if they’re older they might try solving the problem differently. If their food-needs don’t get satisfied in one place they’ll often act intelligently and look somewhere else. Is that any different than what doctors, lawyers, and even Indian chiefs do in their lives? Around the house folks will usually keep looking – experimentally -- in different places to find, say, their eyeglasses, sometimes even discovering they’re already on their head. How many times has someone looked for the evening paper, only to find out the dog is already sleeping on it?
What about such examples is difficult to understand? Where such actions become intelligent is first thinking before acting, so actions become less trial-and-error and more directed to consciously testing the best ideas. For example, someone doesn’t know where their keys are, so instead of just blindly searching here and there, they first try to remember where they put them, and then test that idea. Such healthful and constructive goal-directed actions are what we Deweyan liberals mean by intelligence. Beating a child or wife, or ignoring the problem by indulging in drugs simply because you can’t find your keys is definitely not what we mean by intelligent experimentation.
Thus, it’s fairly easy to see how to practice intelligent experimental learning, and even make it more excellent by practicing it with some enjoyment and humor: where are you keys; come out, come out wherever you are? Those useful learning skills and habits are useful in so many ways it’s practically impossible to list all of them.
In any case, however, what’s most important is to KEEP EXPERIMENTING with those learning skills; they help make learning more enjoyable and less frustrating. After all, we’re all in the same boat, so to speak; even kings and presidents can only experiment to overcome their challenges. For anyone who’s redd about the Vietnam War tragedy, President Lyndon Johnson kept experimenting with ideas to end the war, but none of them worked the way he wanted them to work; all of their results proved unsatisfying to him or the Vietnamese. Dewey might say he simply didn’t act intelligently enough! He could have said he made a big mistake in judging the Vietnamese will-to-independence, but he felt that just wasn’t an option for him; its possible results weren’t acceptable. Thus, he accepted the results of his ideas and refused to run for president again. Liberals like myself were greatly relieved, at least until we learned President Nixon was even more hard-hearted than Johnson. The results of his actions produced even more death and destruction than before.
Social Results Count Too
Such examples show excellent learning does more than merely satisfy one's personal needs and wants. Social results are important too while practicing experimental learning. As a result, learning becomes excellent when its results are not only personally useful, but helpful to others as well. For example, when termites satisfy their food-needs by eating away someone’s house, they act intelligently. But the results to others are also important. When the house is fumigated, it’s obvious their intelligence wasn’t very deep. They didn't see clearly some of the future social results and how dangerous their actions were. So again, the ability to see the future helpful and constructive results of our actions can make our intelligent actions more excellent than any other creature. If we didn’t, global warming would probably be fatal to most people. German Nazis too weren’t very far-sighted. They simply kept taking over other countries to satisfy its need for conquest, control, and more land, but how excellent were those actions when the social results of their actions y helped destroy much of their own country and its people? In short, excellent experimental learning is much more constructive than destructive, and life-affirming rather than life-destroying. True, some life-form is destroyed to satisfy another creatures food needs, but learning to minimize such destruction is what civilization is all about, right?
Poetically, those who teach themselves experimental excellence learn the art of dancing intelligently with their desires. As we grow older and see how others around us react to our actions, we become better at what’s called harmonizing our self-centered desires. Young folks may desire to party with their friends, but also pass tomorrow’s math test, so intelligent folks may have a math party first, and then perhaps a dance party afterwards. Other people will desire that mouth-watering piece of chocolate cake here and now, but also desire to stay on their low-calorie diet, so they’ll intelligently eat a piece of fat-free cake or just a bite of cake, thus harmonizing their often opposing desires. In fact, that harmonizing art is one of life continuing challenges. In fact, the idea goes back to Plato in ancient Athens. For him too, intelligent ethical actions involve the art of harmonizing our conflicting and opposed desires. However, the problem for us Deweyan liberals is his idea of excellent desires helped produce rather destructive social results. Being a pious conservative he felt people should learn about spirit-ideas most of all, and thus not desire to learn experimentally about our natural world – the best source of real improvement here and now. In fact, the social results of such conservative experimental learning helped encourage the building of Western civilization’s entire medieval period, lasting thousands of years! Such results to us are what condemn those ideas, and they began weakening when the best object of knowledge shifted from desiring to know about spirit-objects to desiring to know about our natural world, a world Plato said could produce on probable knowledge, not absolute certainty! That social transformation continues to this day, as more people are educated to rely on their own skills and knowledge rather than spirit-knowledge. We might think chocolate cake is a great way to keep satisfying our food needs, but the long-range results of such comfort-foods will eventually make them less excellent than a more nourishing salad or soup. After all, some 60 million years of primate evolution, often during times of food scarcity, has helped build human digestive systems capable of living on not much food. To feel that natural fact, respect it, and learn to act accordingly is yet another sign of intelligence. Like every other animal on our earth, humans too have their natural limits.
Said simply, for us Deweyan liberals continued healthy growth, both personal and social, is the ultimate aim of learning excellence! It doesn’t mean being friendly with everyone, but it does mean respecting others’ peaceful and constructive actions, no matter what they might look like physically. And so, what helps determine health is, you guessed it, the intelligently constructive results of our experimental actions; are we harmonizing our desires intelligently?
Having some reliable knowledge about such results helps us make better choices here and now, and thus better harmonize our desires with our natural limits -- the ultimate goal of intelligent experimentation. Thus, perhaps the best news is this: the more we keep playfully making such intelligent choices, the stronger and more healthful we become. Exercise is another important human need; the less we exercise, the more helpless we become. For millions of years our primate ancestors were active creatures; they actively used their muscles on a daily basis, and so become more healthful. But just because we have better tools than any other animals doesn’t mean we still don’t need to exercise on a daily basis. In fact, muscle health is necessary for body-mind health. Daily exercise is a human need, and the more we neglect to practice it, the more unhealthful life becomes, especially when eating unhealthful foods becomes a habit too.
In short, the more we learn about our human nature itself, and how to harmonize its needs with our other desires, the easier it becomes to stay healthy, rather than merely act the way our parents acted and practicing their unhealthful habits as well. The more we feel a love for our self as part of the human species, as though it’s the most important possession we have, then the easier it becomes to pass through row after row of so-called 'junk' food in the grocery store until we get to those marvelously nutritious fruits, vegetables, whole grain foods, and seeds and nuts. Their results often promote a healthy body-mind.
Building Excellent Habit-Arts Takes Some Time
That idea too has already been mentioned earlier, so what else is new? However, it’s one of life’s most important ideas, and so it bears expanding. For example, do you realize how many years it took you to build your present diet or exercise habits? Five, ten, twenty years? If so, then why feel such powerful habits can be reconstructed and reformed in a day or even a year? Such unrealistic and overly optimistic ideas show a lack of real human nature. HABITS ARE PROPULSIVE! That’s Dewey’s phrase about a very important part of human nature. How many times have you done the same ol’ thing even when you wanted to do something else? It’s commonly called the force of habit. Have many times have you tried to quit smoking or drinking alcohol and failed? No doubt, all habits can be improved, but it’s best to go about the job intelligently, right? To expect any habit can be improved all at once, in a matter of days, is simply unrealistic and naïve. So-called New Year’s Resolutions are perhaps a modern result of prehistoric and ancient magical thinking.
So, how can we intelligently start improving the habits we want changed and improved? Well, like all intelligent actions, building a plan of action can be useful! How will we attack, say, an unhealthful diet habit? Where will we start? Is it best to try changing all our eating habits at once, or rather one meal at a time, say, breakfast? What kinds of healthful foods will you have this morning, how much will you enjoy them, how playful can you make eating those different goods, how many calories should there be, how will you reward yourself if you accomplish your goal, and perhaps most important of all, how fast can you relax when you’re tense and want more unhealthful foods? Aren’t such questions an important part of any intelligent diet plan? How much encouragement will I need from others, or can I feel good about accomplishing my goal on my own? Can I really keep having my cake and eating it too, or should I have some alligator kabobs instead? Now who says liberal philosophy can’t be fun and enjoyable, I mean besides all those conservatives and moderates out there?
No doubt, many people may feel such ideas have nothing to do with philosophy; they’re just commonsense thinking. After all, philosophy is only about answering life’s grand questions, like does god exist, is there an afterlife, and other unanswerable questions like how many angels can sit on the head of a pin and are there devils? For centuries conservative Christian philosophers like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas said such questions were important. For us Deweyan liberals, however, it’s more intelligent to ask how much chocolate, fried food, and sugar is too much, and when’s the best time to spend five minutes with healthy exercise? In short, to us liberals such conservative questions are merely a distraction from building more healthful habits here and now, and not believing only our ideas are absolute Truth. Because everyone will build their own healthy habits, philosophy remains one of life’s living arts.
As we’ll see a little later, even in ancient Greece liberal-minded practical Sophists used their philosophic ideas to help people focus on their daily challenges as excellently as they could. They helped people practice useful new skills like talking intelligently in courts of law, so they could better defend themselves and also participate intelligently in voting and politics. New democratic systems of government created the need for such new habits. Many liberal sophists realized life’s so-called grand questions can only be answered after death, if they can be answered at all, and so why not teach others to act as excellently as they can here and now, and answer those others questions when they get there? As long as we live in our ever-changing natural world, those kinds of useful challenges are the most important to playfully experiment with. Dewey just simply kept that liberal tradition as alive and growing as he possibly could; perhaps his greatest weakness, however, was to use many of philosophy’s technical and abstract ideas, and thus make it difficult for ordinary people to understand what he was saying. His abstract vocabulary was large indeed. Despite that, however, once a challenge is accepted, then what’s important is attacking it as intelligently as possible; if one plan of attack doesn’t work, then simply make another plan and test its ideas too. At first some people may plan to improve an excessive habit by themselves, and then when that plan doesn’t work they may include the idea of a support group. Such practical kinds of plan-making helped Dewey realize life in an always changing world is itself a series of experiments, so why not learn how to making them as intelligent as possible? Either that or keep eating more deep-fried alligator-kabobs. Now who says philosophy isn’t fun?
A Little Ancient Philosophy Review
As we’ve already begun seeing, such liberal practical models of learning-excellence are quite different from those built by conservative people like Plato, and even from moderates like Aristotle. No doubt, the most important differences center around both the learning method and the objects studied. Both of them felt only a relatively small class of people had the ability for learning excellence, that is, to contemplate eternal objects and thus learn nature’s absolute Truth. For Plato and Aristotle, only contemplative kinds of reasoning were excellent; only it could reveal what nature’s eternally unchanging objects were like! How could absolutely certain mathematical or biological Truths be known with mere experimentation? Only with our reasoning could we mentally behold and grasp such Truth in all its glory and power. For liberal Dewey, however, such models of learning excellence are based on assumptions no longer acceptable in an always-changing nature. As a result, for liberal Dewey who celebrated democracy and equal rights, all law-abiding people should be educated to practice such experimental learning; for un-democratic Plato and Aristotle only a small educated minority should have political power.
Secondly, the objects of learning for both Plato and Aristotle differed radically from liberals like Dewey and the Sophists. As we’ve already seen, Plato and Aristotle merely assumed eternal and unchanging objects existed, and so speaking poetically again, they wanted to have their ‘certainty’ cake and eat it too. To make such a cake Plato, for example, assumed completely unchanging spirit-objects already existed, like the idea of Beauty, for example. Only knowing it could produce excellence beauty, rather than merely trial-and-error experimentation to reveal everyone’s potential beauty.
What’s more, once you really knew such objects, then you could automatically become beautiful or know what an animal’s eternal nature was. For Plato if someone used their reason to learn the eternal Spirit-Idea of Beauty, then their knowledge was excellent. No doubt, today such ideas sound strange, but millions of people today continue believing such ideas of learning excellence. Millions today believe only by knowing Spirit-Objects can we lead excellent lives and thus prepare our self for the life after this. For Dewey, however, it’s yet another example of how much will-power there was in Plato and Aristotle’s own habit-arts, and in the millions who still practice those habits.
In some ways Plato’s moderate student Aristotle baked a different kind of learning cake; he experimented with adding our senses to the batter as well as making the eternal objects of knowledge more naturalistic. For him excellent knowing was based not on spirit-ideas, but on eternal and unchanging natural Forms within most everything. If we’ve contemplated what he called mankind’s Final Form, and grasped what it is, then we can know what true human excellence was and merely go about practicing it; for him that excellence was again contemplating nature’s eternally unchanging objects. To him it was the most god-like form of learning. After so many sense-experiences such Forms begin growing in us. In short, each of us is a very competent spectator of such Forms, and so Dewey called his model of learning excellence a ‘spectator model of learning’.
In any case, however, to make such learning possible Aristotle also assumed within each of us is an unerring mental faculty he called intuition. It sees and beholds Forms with absolutely certainty. For example, when he sees a red apple on a table it tells him it’s certain that’s a red apple; there’s no need to experiment any more with the idea. And because such Forms like red and apple are unchanging and eternally the same, his absolutely certain knowledge ‘cake’ not only could be known, but eaten too. As we’ll see, since ancient times it was basically such conservative and moderate philosophers whose grand and complex theories about learning excellence continued justifying a religious status quo; it’s ideas were absolutely certain and so everyone should believe them. In reality, however, all such models continued deflecting peoples’ all-important attention away from studying everyday events, learning their causes, and using the knowledge to keep making life better for everyone, not just a few at the economic ladder’s top. Such habits thus continued convincing people such objects existed and they were the best objects to know. For liberals like Dewey, however, such models of learning excellence were merely 2 examples of philosophic art, rather than useful and reliable ways of learning to keep improving life for all law-abiding people, whether they’re rich or poor. After all, there was no objective evidence for such objects or learning faculties, so why believe them? In general, then, for us liberal Deweyans both Plato and Aristotle gave us merely their own models of learning, and they were often used to make people feel their obedience and acceptance were right, rather than being merely 2 models of philosophic art.
Dewey’s Model of Learning Excellence
Both those models of learning excellence became more easily challenged with the growth of modern experimental science, and its much more reliable and useful ideas and knowledge. Eventually, for Dewey what’s excellent knowledge is not telling our self we’re absolutely certain that’s a red apple on the table, but teaching our self experimentally how to grow better apples and more of them without poisoning our earth and keeping as many people in poverty as we can while selling our apples! In short, experimental learning opened up an entirely new universe of humane possibilities and options, including better business practices.
Liberal learning excellence thus became the art of testing new ideas, to make sure they were useful and reliable to as many people as possible. In such a more democratic learning model is always capable of growing and expanding its meanings of objects by looking at the possible results of our actions before acting. Serious acts of law breaking, for example, can cause us to lose control of our freedom, like losing time and money paying for them. Also, the more we break the law, the more we endanger our freedom and corrupt our character by building such habits. Such RESULTS are what make the idea of disrespecting just laws far from excellent, unless of course innocent human life is endangered or justice is needed. Socrates too respected Athens' laws and refused to break them, but he thought they came from the gods rather than from people, and so for him breaking the law made us vulnerable to revenge from the gods.
Thus, Dewey’s new liberal model of learning excellence offers us many new learning challenges. For example, what’s the best way to test our plan to make life better here and now? How will it help myself and others? What habit-arts are best to practice? How good is my testing plan for learning them, and if it isn’t, how can I make it better? What constructive and enjoyable results might such habits produce? How can I better arrange my present living conditions to help encourage what I want to learn about? Which model of learning excellence feels best, conservative, moderate, or liberal? Am I merely aiming to satisfy myself, or am I also aiming to help others? How helpful to others will my testing plan be? Should I just relax and skip the caloric cake and have some more oranges and papaya?
Such practical and useful kinds of questions are, no doubt, much older than ancient times. As we’ll see more clearly in Book 2: Native Models of Excellence, such constructively excellent habit-arts have almost certainly been growing over the last 100,000 years of human evolution. No doubt, the arts of talking and asking such questions grew slowly at first, but as our more advanced San ancestors continued spreading out over the earth about 60,000 years ago, they advanced such practical kinds of learning aiming to keep making life better; what else is liberal learning excellence besides that? For example, their intelligent questions helped guide and focus their practical actions onto experimentally building a vast number of more helpful natural tools, both physical and mental. And for the events they couldn’t control they also built a vast number of spirit-habits to magically control them. In turn, they continued deepening the meanings of their lives as they learned to accept the challenges life was offering. Inventing the simple sewing needle, for example, allowed all their clothes-making women to become more productive and make life itself more satisfying than ever before. The more such work was tiresome, the easier it became to imagine such a tool, experimentally build one, and then test it to see its results. And the more toes and fingers froze, turned blue, and then fell off, the easier it was to make more mammoth-kabobs than ever before. In fact, eventually such practical experimental learning habits became so powerful in ancient Greece they began challenging all the more conservative spirit-models of life with more practical and naturalistic ideas. For Dewey, building those 2 very different models of life became the main psychic engines helping create ancient philosophy’s 3 main philosophic traditions.
Also, building constructively creative work habits is another important result of experimental learning. For Greek aristocrats like Plato and Aristotle such creativity was mainly confined to their writing work; they both felt physically experimental work was beneath them; such work was fit only for slaves and the artisan classes. As a result, much of their activity was basically passive and inactive, talking, writing, and contemplating different ideas. But more active and engaged people weren’t afraid to build their creative work habits; they were the heirs of all the practical arts and habits their native ancestors had practiced for tens of thousands of years. As we’ll see in Book 2, for such creative work habits we can thank our native ancestors; they experimented with active and creative work for well over 2 million years! Even though for our early ancestors like H. habilis and H. erectus their work wasn’t very imaginative or creative, and often used brute force and muscle-power rather than brain-power, they often did practice some creative thinking and acting. As those ancestors learned to talk and ask more questions, more creative and intelligent work habits have increased greatly. At any rate, such creativity remains another important challenge even today, like learning how to make our own work habits as relaxed, fluid, creative, and tension-free as possible. For many today it’s much easier said than done, as sales of tranquillizers show us; such relaxing drugs are a billion dollar industry, both legal and illegal. Even coffee helps us relax and focus our attention.
In short, learning such practical and active experimental habit-arts continues challenging most everyone today; life can always be improved in some way. What’s more, because practical-minded liberals like Dewey saw how important intelligent experimental work was for learning excellence, he naturally encouraged more active kinds of learning in both our public and vocational schools; Booker Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama is a good example of that learning model. There Washington encouraged recently freed African slaves to teach themselves how to read and write, but also learn some practical work skills as well, so they would be better prepared for life in the real world as soon as they left school. It’s an educational model most of our public schools continue ignoring to this day! Washington’s own son eventually learned a brick-making skill, and others learned carpentry and clothes-making skills. For Dewey those kinds of schools were most excellent; they taught much more than merely being able to read more book-facts and write answers to test questions. Believe it or not, there’re not many good paying jobs for test takers in the real world!
Ancient Roman philosophers called any excellence habit a virtue; anyone who taught themselves any kind of excellence skill taught themselves a virtue. But, the more they did, the more the idea of excellence was ignored and obscured. In truth, however, all virtues are excellent habits learned with intelligent practice! When it helped make learning easier patience too became a virtue, but it’s simply more evidence of how even ancient peoples accepted the possibility learning excellence could be achieved if learning was actively practiced, rather than ignored.
In short, many Roman educators too sensed what helps make a habit-art excellent is the useful result of improving BOTH a person's inner character AND their outer world! Then later, when Christians built monasteries to help care for the sick, they continued practicing important and useful character habits, even if such care was very limited and aimed mainly at relieving peoples’ pains. What useful medical tools could they build when experimental learning was all but ignored?
In any case, however, such learning ideas naturally are useful for building one of civilization’s most important institutions – our public schools! For Dewey the more our public schools help students playfully and creatively work at building both personal and social kinds of excellence, both inner and outer habits of excellence, the more democratically excellent those schools become. After all, doesn’t the world need more honest, creative, and caring blue collar plumbers, auto mechanics, and intelligent voters to make life more satisfying for everyone, just as much as it needs honest, creative, and caring doctors, lawyers, and politicians? Thus, it seemed obvious to liberals like Dewey; excellent public schools should also teach students not only how to playfully improve their useful character habit-arts, but also their own neighborhoods and schools as well! Such inner and outer results were the best model of educational excellence in all healthy democracies. After all, what’s the alternative, joining a violent and dangerous gang and selling dangerous drugs? If those results are to be avoided, then why shouldn't young students and parents too start playfully experimenting with the goal of building more liberal schools in their own neighborhoods, where wisely and intelligently helping others is the best way to build excellent character habits?
5. MORE ABOUT HABITS
In a very real sense this sections is one of the most important in the book. Without a sound and useful naturalistic psychology, like Dewey’s for example, people will remain vulnerable to destructive and unrealistic conservative and moderate ideas and actions. So, in this and the next 3 sections we color in 4 more of Dewey’s important psychological ideas: habit-arts, psychological spice and consciousness, creativity, and psychological excellence.
Why bother? Again, real knowledge about how we all work and learn – human nature and psychology – is useful throughout life. After all, we all need to learn different habits all through life, and so knowing what they are and how best to build new ones is a very useful art. So, the more we learn about our self, the less mysterious we remain, and the easier it becomes to keep becoming the masters of our lives, rather than the slaves to our own habits.
What’s more, only recently has psychology liberated itself from the grip of conservative and moderate philosophic models, and since the 1890s it’s become an experimental science in its own right. Knowing something about Dewey’s liberal Functional Behavorism model may be useful. In short, the more we know about such new naturalistic psychological models, the easier it becomes to test them with our own actions, and see if they’re at all useful in keeping life safe, productive, creative, and interesting. If knowledge is power, then excellent psychological knowledge is excellent psychological power. Isn’t practical logic wonderful?
More Basic Ideas
One of Dewey’s most important psychological ideas is habit. Like anything else, many young folks may feel psychology too is too great a challenge, and often frustrating at that. Furthermore, when psychology is taught in our public schools and universities it normally focus on teaching all the different psychological models, conservative Jungian, moderate Freudian, and all the different Behavioral models. Such knowledge can be more confusing than liberating and clarifying. In the next 4 sections there will be more information about those other models, but the main focus will be on Dewey’s Behavioral model.
The main questions might be described like this: what do the 3 main psychological models look like; how are modern Behaviorist ideas, like Dewey's, more useful than, say, Jungian, Gestalt, Freudian, or existential models, and if so what makes them better; can a liberal Behavioral model really help us keep learning how to relax our own tense and worrisome habits and feelings more easily than spending a night on a dance floor somewhere, or a few hours exercising; and how do they work?
Like some ancient liberal philosophers, modern psychologists today continue trying to help others reduce and resolve their frustrating problems by suggesting different ways of attacking them, and then ask people to experiment on their own. Conservative and moderate psychologists typically like people to talk about their feelings; they’re called Jungian and Freudian methods. They often operate on the same principle Socrates and Plato suggested: mere knowledge about our self will automatically make us better people. However, more active Behavioral models of therapy like Dewey’s are more action oriented, and so focus more on how best to practice improving our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. Other models may want to help people feel some emotional connection to a therapist, so they're more attracted to Humanist kinds of therapy for learning how to relax and focus on building new habits. In fact, within the past century there have evolved a number of different psychological models of human nature, consciousness, creativity, psychological excellence, and mental health. Incidentally, I think there’s a little conspiracy going on about that idea of mental health; why is it nobody seems to talk about what a mentally healthy person thinks and does? Why does so much psychology focus on talking about mental illness, rather than mental health? Is it because if more people had an idea of what a mentally healthy person is and does, then it would make practicing those habits much easier, and thus have less need of a therapist, and thus be less profitable for psychologists? So, defining what a psychologically healthy person is and does becomes another challenge for we liberal Deweyans.
In that vein maybe a little humor gets us off on the right foot, so to speak. After all, what’s so special about the right foot; it’s just a useful as the left one, right? Hint, hint: for many people humor is one sign of mental health. So why not first answer all our questions once and for all, and what better way is there other than another lame and bogus limerick? After all, when frustrated and tense, why not take a few minutes to have some fun!
There once was a man on a quest,
So for knowledge he was sent out west.
But books were a strain,
And smoke filled his brain,
For learning which habits are best.
Human Nature and Conduct
Now that certainly clears up a lot of questions and uncertainties, doesn’t it? If not, then please read on. Maybe a little psychological history of habits would help. And if not, perhaps those who like to read should get a copy of Dewey’s great psychology book Human Nature and Conduct; it began clarifying and simplifying a lot of psychological questions I had when I was in my 20s. With its help I began feeling how really practical and down-to-earth psychology and philosophy could be, rather than mythical, other-worldly, confusing, and unreliable. For him excellent psychological health was basically a process of building a few useful habits, like, for example, an experimental problem-solving habit-art, as well as habits of joy, enjoyable talking, and of course social helpfulness. Such ideas just seemed to feel right and best. The more I redd the book, the more encouraged I became to feel the power for building such healthy habits in my own muscles and actions, and to feel what he meant by practicing intelligently to build such habit-arts. With Dewey, such creative habits were much better than merely routine ones offered by many conservative and moderate models of psychology. I should warn you though; if you do read it don't be in a hurry; like all of Dewey’s books it's like a fine wine packed with all kinds of ideas, and so should be sipped and savored slowly, rather than gulped. Each time I redd it, it seemed to expand my psychological consciousness; like all his books, it too is that kind of book.
Again, one of his most important psychological ideas is habit, or as I like to say habit-art. In fact, intelligent habits have been active and evolving for at least the last 600 million years, give or take a Tasmanian Tuesday or two, and they’ve remained useful ever since. Animals alive in Cambrian seas taught themselves usefully experimental eating habits with intelligent trial-and-error actions; if food wasn’t found in one place, they looked to it someplace else. Of course, those who learned quicker and caught more food were able to reproduce more and so nature encouraged more satisfying INTELLIGENT habits. Six hundred million years later Dewey's Behavioral psychology is still completely grounded in learning similar kinds of experimental habits, but of course in more intelligent ways. In both cases, however, what’s important are the results of actions and habits; how health-producing and life-extending are they?
Today, what sets us humans apart from every other animal is our larger range of habits, as well as our greater creativity – imagining what actions might make life better, and then testing those ideas. If, for example, we have an out of control drinking problem, then learning to relax and make a game of avoiding liquor stores on our way home would be an intelligently creative and healthful habit. They might be playfully seen as, say, a great destructive swamp, or dangerous animal to avoid. For us Dewey liberals, the great playfulness of childhood is all too soon unlearned and forgotten.
Also, the more we can enjoy our self and life without liquor, the less we’ll need alcohol to relax and get more enjoyment out of life. That habit-art is too often neglected in other models of psychological health. In any case, however, such intelligent kinds of habits can now be pictured as growing more powerful when our native ancestors began talking and then sharing their feelings with each other, only about 100,000 years ago, give or take many a Moosejaw Mondays. Such creative and enjoyable forward-looking habits of thinking and talking have helped us humans become more and more intelligent. However, a basic and on-going challenge remains, which is, to keep our habits and our institutions fluid and easily changed, rather than routine, addictive, and uncontrollable. The military-industrial institutions the US built during World War 2 have continued making life around the world more dangerous and unstable.
Ancient Greeks Were Psyched Too
Even for many ancient Greek thinkers habits, practice, and active training played a very important role in becoming what they defined was an excellent person. Conservatives like Plato, moderates like Aristotle, and liberals like Democritus each celebrated the idea of learning habits, but each painted their own models of what those habits should be. Even centuries before Plato a famous motto celebrating one such kind of psychological excellence was inscribed in stone at Apollo’s Delphic shrine -- Know Yourself; more ascetic and playful Zen Buddhists have since changed it a little -- No Yourself. In short, free yourself from many of the gadgets and routine habits producing tension and frustrating feelings. And of course the other famous Greek motto was an ethical one -- Nothing In Excess. As a result, many Greeks like Socrates felt the more they knew about themselves and nature, the easier it became to keep becoming excellent and wiser; for him such knowledge was excellence. To many ancient conservative and moderate Greeks like him, knowledge automatically would produce psychological excellence. Even then, however, liberals were far more action oriented.
So far so good; what else is new? As we’ve already seen, such a variety of models continues to this day, and thus continues creating not only the challenge to decide which one is best for each of us, but also the art of respecting those who choose different models. For many religious fundamentalists today, ignoring that last challenge and accepting old conservative ideas of excellence continues making life more dangerous and unstable than ever.
For liberal Dewey, conservative and moderate thinkers like Plato and Aristotle created too many useless psychological problems for themselves when they described what the human psyche was, how it worked, and why it's so difficult sometimes to keep improving our own weak and excessive actions. As we’ve seen already, conservative Plato probably practiced religious spirit-habits all through his life, and so felt strongly such objects existed and were the best objects to know. Knowing what, say, the Spirit-Object of Goodness was would automatically help one become good. And so his early psychological model described in his Republic suggested a plan for how political leaders could learn such knowledge. In removing excellence to knowledge about spirit-objects, however, he created a number of unsolvable and frustrating problems for himself and every other conservative since then. How many such objects are there, what are their natures, are they related to each other singly or in a hierarchy, and most difficult of all, how can we possibly know anything about objects completely removed from our natural realm? Until such questions were answered, how could his psychological model be accepted?
Moderates like Aristotle felt they could eliminate such bothersome psychological questions by simply changing a few of Plato’s ideas, especially the idea such objects existed in a completely different spirit-realm. If such objects were merely pictured as natural objects existing in this world, then building a useful psychological model would be much easier, or so he assumed. No doubt, that was a major improvement in both psychology and philosophy. After that Aristotle was freer to build a more naturalistic model of psychology, like the liberals Democritus and Protagoras had already done. Still, he continued Plato’s search for eternally unchanging kinds of knowledge, and so focused on mental faculties like intuition and active reasoning. They would allow people like himself to learn about nature’s eternal and unchanging Forms, and thus feel they knew why life was arranged the way it is and the way it will always be, and thus merely accept the social status quo. All people were destined to be what they are by nature’s eternal forms. Thus, even for moderate Aristotle, liberal ideas about making life more democratic and equal for everyone simply wasn’t a social option.
Still, one important result of his model, as it was for liberals, was to make the idea of habits much more important. He clearly saw how physical practice was the way most people learned all their practical skills and knowledge. Even though he judged them much less than the highest knowledge, he still found a place for habits in his psychological model. For most people they were the way to feel what practical kinds of excellence were like. Knowledge about excellent shoes or plays could be learned with practice, even though they could never reveal nature’s highest goods and excellence. Agreeing with Plato, he said such knowledge could be learned only with the art of contemplative thinking, and thus only philosophers could really learn what’s truly excellent. No doubt, here one can easily feel the effect of Aristotle’s own aristocratic habits. With them he naturally saw most everyone was simply a lower form of human nature, and nature had made them that way even as young children. In all fairness, however, he also freely admitted psychology was the most challenging subject of all, and so at least felt he too was merely experimenting with different ideas.
Why did Plato and Aristotle bother building their psychological models at all? They were both reacting to a growing liberal Greek tradition. Decades before Plato was born, liberal humanist sophists like Protagoras were building a vastly different model of psychology, one that Dewey would identify with most of all. Gone from them was the idea of knowing any kinds of eternal and unchanging objects, and thus focusing on building more humane democratic habits of tolerance and equal rights for all. To Plato and Aristotle such ideas were almost totally unacceptable.
Such liberals were, in fact, the true democrats of the times. To them psychological healthy meant saying most everyone is capable of learning to intelligently govern themselves and their city-states, merely with some practice and experience. Thus, everyone should have the same rights and freedoms as anyone else. That was the inevitable result of their ideas. In fact, as a rule liberals like the Atomist Democritus, and sophists like Protagoras were much more democratic, and so welcomed anyone to their classes who could afford the fees, and sometimes even if they couldn’t afford them. For them, psychological excellence meant seeing what skills were most useful, and then practicing such skills, so life could become more satisfying and productive. Thus, a system of public schools would have been much more useful than either Plato or Aristotle felt. Their kinds of psychological excellence depended most of all on intelligent experimentation, and most everyone was capable of learning such skills, and idea both Plato and Aristotle rejected. Such skills were the same kind of learning and practice that had produced better metal products, for example, and were in turn helping make life even more satisfying than before.
In short, for ancient Greek liberals psychological excellence was greatly simplified to an active, practical, and intelligent practice; only human actions could improve any weak, excessive, or unhealthful habit! Their motto might be described like this: Why make learning and human psychology any more complicated than it need be? What bother trying to figure out how natural creatures like us can ever know completely unnatural objects like spirits, or unchanging Forms? In an always changing world such models of excellence led down a blind alley, so to speak. Such models of excellence were merely useless distractions from making life better for most everyone. Often liberal thinkers probably saw how such conservative and moderate ideas kept people fearing what life would be like after death, when in fact no one knew for sure. Would it be like the great poet Homer described, as a rather boring, dull, and lifeless existence for who knows how long -- a kind of purgatory, or would it be even worse, like being made to roll a heavy rock uphill and then let it roll down again, for all eternity? Conservative Christians, it seemed, were even more pain oriented; for them hell was an eternally painful fire.
In any case, long before Christianity even evolved, liberal Greeks saw psychological excellence as being liberated from all such ideas; why fear what no one really knows anything about? For them life’s practical challenges were enough, like how to keep from catching a fatal disease, how best to bring a healthy children into the world and keep encouraging them to build their own excellent habits, so they could more easily control their actions, tensions, frustrations, joys and enjoyments, and help others learn such skills as well. How else could people keep making their own little corner of the world safer and more satisfying, and how else could they help others become more intelligent too? Not knowing about such intelligently practical psychological habits, how best to build them, and how best to use them, would continue encouraging a greatly divided social world, making life much less satisfying and stressful for most everyone. Hopefully, with the building of more liberal public schools over the next hundred years, many more people will become just as wise and intelligent.
Psychology’s Early Days
Since a few Greeks began building their philosophic models in the 500s BCE, psychological questions too began growing about what people are and how we got here. There were many questions about human nature itself. Eventually 2 kinds of models evolved, one conservative and one liberal. For thousands of years before that a conservative spirit-based model remained firmly in place; people saw spirits existing both in them and nature, and controlling most everything that happened. Then, in the 500s BCE, a much more liberal model began evolving within philosophy’s first ‘school’ -- the Milesian. Miletus was a Greek colony across the Aegean in western Turkey, and so more secular Greeks had lived there for centuries. In time, however, such habits helped them begin seeing life in more practical and secular way than many conservative spirit-oriented Greeks on the mainland. In fact, such practical habits helped one Milesian, named Anaximander, build a quite modern-looking naturalistic biology and psychology. Evidently he had studied some fossils and then concluded all people have evolved from fish-like creatures, which is essentially what modern biologists are saying, give or take a few hundred million years. What’s more, because Miletus was a great port city, and many people with different habits were a common sight, it was easy to see people learn all their different habits with practice; they thus began feeling knowledge too lives in peoples muscles, not just their minds. Psychological health thus became a question of what healthful skills have you built for yourself, and improving any unhealthful skills someone does have.
Another one my favorite early ancient philosopher-psychologists was a rather robust Sicilian poet-character named Xenophanes (Ken-af’-anees). Evidently life in the new Greek colonies could produce habits of honesty not as easily found on the religious-oriented mainland. Energetic, confident, daring, practical, and adventurous Greeks had already built colony cities all over the Mediterranean and even into the Black Sea, and so by the 500s practical habits had reached a very high energy level. For Xenophanes people are basically self-centered and habitual, as all creatures are, and so we too simply paint the pictures of life our habits encourage us to feel. On his travels he saw for himself how different cultures encouraged their people to picture different kinds of gods, and he also noticed how each seemed to resemble the local people themselves. That fact alone told him quite a bit about human psychology and religion, and so mockingly said if lions and horses could build statues of gods they too would look like lions and horses. In short, religious habits too are all a product of social actions and practices. The more people didn’t practice such ideas, the less powerful they were. Thus, he realized no one can really know anything for sure about gods out there or spirits in us. How could you prove such ideas one way or the other? People all seemed to be locked into practicing their own local habits and customs, and so those feelings were the result of their actively built habits! Such was the new secular thinking helping build ancient Greece’s liberal models of excellence.
About a century later, in the 400s BCE, such liberal psychological ideas became even bolder with the work of Democritus (460? BCE-370? BCE) – the ancient world’s greatest liberal thinker, and of course with the great Sophist-teacher Protagoras. Like the Milesians they too were born far to the north of Athens in another colony city, as was moderate Aristotle. As a result, their habits were much more practical, rather than religious-oriented and contemplative like Plato’s. Both Protagoras and Democritus traveled to many other countries and saw how different people had taught themselves different habit-arts, and what's more, everyone seemed to feel only their own were true! Such observations helped them see human psychology naturalistically, as merely the result of active and practical habit-arts, rather than any kinds of Spirit-Truth. For them, all the ideas and feelings anyone sees as the Truth merely reflected their own habits and actions. Habits were thus seen as active and projective, rather than merely passive faculties in us. What’s more, our habits helped select what we want to learn more about, and no doubt they too saw such naturalistic ideas even while conservative Socrates lived. For such liberals an important psychological truth was obvious: the more different people worship different gods, for example, the more they feel only those gods are true and real. In short, different childhood training in different societies helped build different habits, ideas, and feelings about life and nature. Where the environment is different, different habits are encouraged.
Eventually the secular humanist Protagoras described his psychology with his most famous idea: Mankind is the measure of all things! ‘Shakespeare’ too echoed the same idea – Nothing is either right or wrong, but thinking makes it so. Of course for Dewey he was wrong, but you get the idea. Thinking is merely a verbal habit, but the results of our actions make them right or wrong. If the results of our actions break some law, then our actions become unlawful, regardless of what anyone thinks.
It’s certainly not difficult to see how Protagoras reached that liberal conclusion about human psychology. If, for example, we all actively build our habits with our own daily actions, and we know only what we build, then we know only the feelings, meanings, and ideas of our own habits! For example, Egyptians celebrated the idea of brother-sister love while Babylonians didn’t. The more an Egyptian brother and sister practiced sexual intercourse the more it became their habit-truth. And even before Democritus, history’s Greek ‘father’ Herodotus (c.485-425 BCE) also seems to have traveled a great deal and wrote about such habitual social varieties; his work too helped build a more liberal and secular model of human nature, helping explain naturalistically why there were so many ethical and religious varieties in the world; it was all based on teaching children local tribal habits, which were in turn based on their daily actions. And so Herodotus too helped a more liberal model of psychology to keep growing, and begin challenging all conservative spirit-based models, even Plato’s. For Plato, people were merely the puppets of the gods. Socrates and everyone else became the people they were simply because the gods had made them so. Centuries later the idea became a part of Christian doctrine with the idea of god’s plan and its knowing all things, past, present, and future.
Conservative Models Too Were Growing Even Before Plato
Of course such conservative psychological spirit-models of human nature kept evolving in Greece as well. It was part of an aristocratic religious tradition. For example, from a religion called Orphism, to Pythagoras, and then into Socrates and Plato came the idea something inside us lives on after death, something immortal and which can therefore be born again and again; in fact our word psychology comes from 2 Greek words, psyche and logos – the study of human nature. Following Plato, Christians translated the word psyche as soul.
Both Orphics and Pythagoreans felt reincarnation was the best model of human psychology. There’s a little story showing how seriously Pythagoras himself took the idea. One day it seems he saw a man beating a dog, and he told the man to stop because the animal had been a friend of his before he became a dog. And with Socrates and Plato such ideas about the psyche became the foundation of Western civilization’s conservative philosophic and religious traditions.
Socrates’ living habits was very social oriented, like his mid-wife mother’s, and so it was difficult for him to sit and write down his thoughts; he liked talking with people much more. His student Plato, however, was a much more private person, and so writing for him came much easier. He was serious about his teacher’s advice to ‘know yourself’ and so, like the Orphics and Pythagoreans he too wanted to celebrate their conservative psychological model, rather than the model practical-minded democratic liberals had already built; in fact, arguing for such ideas became his life’s work.
As a result, his writings are a record of his experimental thoughts. For example, at different times he said the human psyche has 3 powers or faculties; later he added a 4th, a divine faculty. To him such ideas were necessary simply because they could be used to build the conservative political and ethical models he thought were excellent. His great political desire for Greek cities was to become as eternally stable and unchanging as the Egyptian state had been for thousands of years. During his 30s and 40s such political stability would depend on Greek rulers first learning about nature’s eternal and unchanging Spirit-Objects, like the supreme Idea of the Good. After that people could best be placed into their natural social classes, and when that happened people would be happiest and thus make social peace and stability that much easier. In short, ruling should be left to the aristocratic classes who had the wealth and leisure to learn about nature’s highest spirit-objects.
In his book Republic he pictured the human psyche as having 3 inbuilt faculties, roughly described as growing, desiring, and reasoning; not surprisingly of the 3 reasoning was the most excellent and god-like. Thus, most of Plato’s own days were probably spent sitting and talking with his friends about philosophic ideas, and of course contemplating his beloved Spirit-Objects. One time he poetically pictured the human reasoning faculty as a charioteer driving and controlling his 2 other psychic companions, sexual pleasure and emotions. At a different time he said the human reasoning faculty was like a ship’s captain steering the body’s boat. No doubt, both images were part of the Orphic religious tradition.
In any case, however, Plato too saw the necessity of building habits into his rulers with practice and training, again later inspiring Christians to build schools of their own and close all other schools too. If nothing else, it shows how important a social role education and schooling play in any political or religious system. For religious conservatives the mental faculty of desire was often pictured as an evil spirit always tempting one to excessive rebellion and sin, and even until the 1700s the idea of god choosing all the rulers on earth was a common political idea, turning fate into a force making people do whatever they do. If nothing else, however, it was a little deceptive to ignore the role their schools were playing in teaching such ideas. For such reasons it becomes obvious why a more liberal psychology and democratic political model are still relatively new movements in our modern era. Only, yesterday, so to speak, has a more scientific, and hence more democratic Behavioral psychology evolved, thanks again to people like William James, John Watson, and John Dewey.
Habits At Work
Habits and training are thus certainly not new or unimportant psychological ideas, but they are still relatively ignored on a formal teaching level in our public schools. Thus, children often enter adult life with little knowledge about psychological excellence and how to achieve it. That situation went back to ancient Greece where most everyone’s schooling ended at the teen years. For Plato and Aristotle, the more people were taught conservative and moderate ideas and habits, the better it would be for everyone. To them liberal ideas like equal rights and democratic habits of governing simply weren’t excellent, whereas for liberals they were the most important ideas and habits to teach. Only popular power could better control concentrated forms of social, religious, and political power from dominating other people, with force if necessary. In fact, currently we’re seeing Islamic sects still practicing those conservative ideas today! Either convert or die.
Still, Plato’s most famous book Republic may be the first in Western civilization to celebrate the environment’s importance for forming habits. In many ways it’s a plan for how best to arrange an environment so a few young people can become conservative political rulers after they’re 50, and keep their city-states stable and under control with a tight censorship of what people know and do. His plan controls their educational environment for some 50 years before they’re given political power, all of course based on his conservative psychological model of human nature – ultimately the gods control everything! We’ll see a little later what kind of a totalitarian closed society he wanted to build, but even for him one’s educational environment and habits remained a very important part of his psychological model.
Again, the main difference between the 3 traditions centered on what habits should be taught to children; habits of obedience to the status quo versus habits of free choice and equal rights; they were, perhaps, the most important difference. For Dewey, the more our public schools teach such democratic habits, the stronger our democracy will become. And for conservatives, the more children are taught to love and respect their country, and obey its leaders, the more stable life will become. US economic and political history throughout the 1900s, however, shows that idea is grossly harmful to millions of people while mainly benefiting the richest few.
A habit both Plato and Aristotle practiced was maintaining the Greek social status quo. For example, both believed the Greeks were racially superior to all other cultures; they felt they were the world’s best learners. They were what can be called Greek chauvinists; thus, naturally their psychological models helped justify saying some people are just born slaves and so should be treated as slaves. Greek blood too should remain as pure and unmixed as possible. It’s yet another good example of how our own inner habits can help produce very important social ideas and actions. For them peoples’ characters -- their inner psychology -- were essentially set and determined at birth. For Aristotle something he called a Final Human Form helped destine people to be what they are; thus there’s no reason to pity anyone, even slaves; they are slaves by nature and nothing should try to change that status quo. Much the same ideas and habits have been practiced in India for thousands of years. For liberal Atomists like Democritus, however, their psychological models merely reflected their own aristocratic habits; after all, we’re all just humans.
Perhaps from liberal Democritus moderate Aristotle also learned about how useful habits and training are; they help people learn the skills they have. Even though such common habits could never reveal mankind's highest happiness --contemplative reasoning -- they helped people learn many different kinds of useful excellence, from cooking to shoe making to carpentry. As a result his Nichomachian Ethics celebrates such secular psychological ideas; he respected practical Democritus much more than Plato did. Every city needs such habits if they're to stay stable and safe and it’s why his psychological model can be called moderate. But as we’ve been seeing, they were quite different from liberal psychological models, and their celebrating most everyone’s ability to learn most anything, even how to govern themselves democratically.
Comparing and Contrasting
So what do we see when we start comparing Dewey’s modern psychological model about habits to both Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas. Basically Dewey’s whole model is naturalistic – it’s an active organic body-mind model based on intelligent practice. Like ancient sophists and Atomists his model is completely naturalistic and evolutionary, whereas both Plato and Aristotle’s may be described as obsessed with studying eternally unchanging objects and anti-evolutionary. For them habits are merely an unfolding of a person’s already existing character, whereas for Dewey most everyone has the same human nature at birth, and begins learning its habits from day 1. Thus, most everyone is capable of learning excellent psychological habits, including democratic forms of government.
Also, both Plato and Aristotle trained themselves to see something in us as different and 'higher' than not only plants and animals, but from other people as well, whereas Dewey saw many similarities between human psychology and animal psychology. For him both are the result of completely naturally evolving forces; we’re all shaped by the objects in our world, and imprinted with their habits. In fact, today such a model continues growing around the world; millions now see mankind as completely and totally a part of the natural world and its animal life; all through life all our habits and ideas are the result of a growing and organic kind of art! If, say, a habit is anything an animal builds, then in a very real sense animals and humans are psychological artists. All habits are the expression of psychological art! Thus, to a degree all animals and plants, including humans, are all psychological artists; we all build our own set of habits. When plants conserve their water and turn towards the sun they’re practicing healthful habits. What’s more, how good or bad their actions are depends on the results they produce. If the results of human actions are healthful, helpful, and respectful of others and our just laws, then they’re excellent habits.
For Dewey, building any new habit is an artistic creation; it requires work, practice, and some intelligence. What makes building a habit an art? Again, his answer shows how simple liberal philosophic thinking can be. Art isn't just something painters and poets create. Because all habits are built, they too can be seen as a form of art; they require people to make choices and practice as they think best about their own daily actions. In short, habits are a unique form of human art, whether we build a cooking habit, a tailoring habit, or a thoughtful reading habit!
What’s more, as our knowledge of evolution has grown, it’s not at all strange to say such artful building has been going on for billions of years within both animals and plants. When dinosaurs learned a nest-building habit they practiced psychological excellence. And more recently our own human ancestors began building one of the most important habits of all -- talking habits. No doubt, with their help we’ve built a greater variety of habits than any other creature, but all such habits are still a form of biological art! Such talking habits have also helped us become more self-conscious and aware of what we’re doing, but they’re all still a form of art; they’re all something we build, just like painters build paintings and poets build poems. That kind of liberal psychology can help liberate all of us to become the artist of our own lives, rather than feeling fate or spirits are controlling anything. What’s more, feeling such ideas and learning to make them more intelligent, helpful, and healthful, is the best first step to becoming the master of our self. If it is, then what’s psychologically excellent is to keep such habit-arts growing with daily practice.
For Dewey, then, most every animal and plant is, to some degree, also an intelligent habit-artist; if they weren't they couldn't keep satisfying their needs and wants in an always changing nature. Even plants show some intelligent flexibility; many learn how to conserve their water and use solar energies as best as they can, again with simple trial and error practice. What looks like merely a plant is in fact another intelligent creature, obviously limited in many ways compared to animals and humans, but more accomplished in other ways; we still don't know how photosynthesis works.
More complex animals too build their own flexible habit-arts to keep satisfying their needs! Even on a feeling level of consciousness non-human animals too are intelligent artists. They can feel when their actions are useful and so they artfully build their own set of habits; how many house cats go through the same routine around feeding time? Besides their habits-arts of collecting pollen, for example, beehives too are works of art -- they’re something bees artfully build, as are bird’s nests and even termite mounds. As works of art are they any different from human character-habits children start building in childhood? Aren’t their character habits too organic works of art? Isn’t the habit of truthfulness and honesty a work of behavioral art?
The main difference between such works of art might be described like this: unlike plants and non-human animals, we humans can consciously know and think of our habits as arts; our talking habits help make us self-conscious, whereas plants and non-human animals simply feel their habit-arts, like collecting pollen and rubbing up against us at feeding time. For that psychological art we can all thank our native prehistoric ancestors who practiced new talking habit-arts during the last 100,000 years. Dewey called that art the most important habit-invention of all time! Why? It did nothing less than add another dimension to the human psyche. To feelings shared by all other life forms only we began building ideas as well! Such habit-arts helped make us the most creative and inventive animals of all, helping liberate us to build many other habit-arts, like science and philosophy to mention just 2. But again, what makes some feelings and ideas more excellence than others are their results, that is, do they help satisfy the needs of ourselves and others. The more they help increase our freedom, and help others become more intelligent, the more excellent our habit-arts are. Moreover, building such intelligent habits from our routine ones is the key to all psychological progress, both personal and social. In short, the more flexible our habit-arts are in an always changing nature, the more useful they can be.
To say the very least, mankind's habit-arts have grown tremendously since Plato’s day. In those days only a few of the more confident and bold liberals bothered to teach themselves to enjoy studying nature and human nature; in Greece they were called Atomists, Skeptics, and Sophists. Today, however, millions around the world have become much more confident with such liberal model of psychology; experimental habits of modern science, for example, has helped liberate many of us from the daily search for food, shelter, and disease, and so allowed us to build many other useful habit-arts. No doubt, experimental science and its most powerful knowledge have greatly helped create such new and liberating habits, but they’re still not free from natural forces, as we’re seeing with the recent event of global warming. New habits also create different results, and thus different challenges.
Even so, millions of people today feel they’re no longer a mere leaf blown around by nature’s uncaring winds; to us Deweyan liberals that’s a sign of psychological progress. As a result, psychology models have become much more naturalistic, especially the idea of habit-arts. Psychological excellence has become much easier to see as a fluid, organic, interconnected, dynamic, growing, helpful, and evolving set of habit-arts, rather than merely practicing the same habits in the same way; after all, who isn't capable of teaching themselves what a little creativity feels like? Even healthy are natural dynamos of creative experimentation.
Such habit-arts have recently become the most important part of psychological health and excellence, and as a result childhood studies have recently become much more important. When exactly can children begin learning such habits? For much of history childhood habits centered around learning religious ideas and actions; children were normally to be seen and not heard. As a result, people were mainly conditioned to simply obey their social and religious leaders without question; rebelling in any way might easily result in a person’s death. Even Jesus’ childhood and early adulthood were almost completely ignored in the gospels, as if they were completely meaningless and irrelevant; they record mainly his short public life. With the growth of Behavioral psychology, however, we now know those years were the most important in his education; his environment helped shape the habit-arts he taught himself. Like everyone else, starting from birth his habits too were encouraged by his surroundings and parents. The Jewish custom was to give the eldest child 'to god,' so they in turn could teach younger brothers and sisters, of which there were many. No doubt, such habit-arts helped him gather a group of simple disciples so he could teach them too about his mission.
Only recently has the new science of psychology begun taking childhood learning more seriously, helping psychologists see how important those early years were to building one’s adult habits, and thus build more helpful schools for children. Dewey saw how conservative our public schools still were, and how they continued focusing on passively learning book facts rather than actively experimenting and learning practical habits. For Dewey knowing some general facts about child development was absolutely necessary for building schools where children would be free to take advantage of their own natural abilities during those years. The alternative was to continue forcing children into schools where books, teachers, and academic trivia were the center of attention, rather than the needs of the child.
Important Behavioral Ideas
One such need was positive rewards. The more childhood was studied experimentally, the more scientific habit-study became. For example, psychologists began feeling how important rewards were in the process of artfully building a new habit-art. The more rewards a person felt from their practice, the faster they learned a new habit-art. That was an important idea still largely ignored today as a good learning tool. The fact is children are encouraged and conditioned to build certain habit-arts and feelings by their parents or guardians from the day they’re born; they begin learning what to love and what to hate. In fact, such conditioning can begin even before they're born. These days many parents pipe music into mom’s womb?
In any case, however, the whole field of modern Behavioral psychology has become, much like every other subject, more liberal, secular and naturalistic. Old conservative religious ideas like Fate and Destiny shaping a person's habit-arts are out, and intelligent, creative, helpful, healthful, and enjoyable practice are in. Obviously some people are born with more learning potential than others, as Plato saw, but almost everyone can build excellent psychological habit-arts if they’re rewarded for practicing such habits. What’s more, that idea applies just as much to children as to adults. The more adults will reward themselves for their intelligent practice, the sooner they’ll learn such habits.
Another important idea is practice time. For best results it seems limiting practice to small time intervals at first is best. It helps people get the feel of a new habit-art. Then, as a person gets comfortable with those short times, they can be expanded on a regular basis, until the new habit starts working on its own, so to speak. For example, the useful and healthful habit-art of working in a relaxed way can begin growing during such short periods of time.
For Dewey such ideas as rewards and small practice times, as well as making one’s practice playful and enjoyable, helps make all learning more intelligent. They’re useful ideas for building any new habit-art, especially healthful ones so as to become more the master of our actions rather than remaining a slave to our old propulsive routine and excessive habits. Excellent habits help create excellent will-power. For example, wishing people well, even when they’re doing better than you, is another way to express psychological excellence; after all, wouldn't you like others to wish you well too? In short, the people who are psychologically flexible can teach themselves whatever habit-art they wish, even the art of asking what would be psychologically excellent in this particular situation here and now, and of course test their ideas too. Is there any better psychological art to feel than that?
Actually Dewey’s psychology -- Functional Behaviorism -- is still in the early stages of growth within our human community; it's another reason I wanted to write this book. Only within the last 100 years have such psychological models been growing mostly at the university level, to help train psychologists. And with the help of our popular media many of its ideas have been growing, like what goes around comes around. What’s so revolutionary about it? It’s secular and democratic! It’s thus useful to everyone, even in daily life, not just to the educated.
Modern daily life is often stressful, helping make people much more tense than normal. With its focus on how we’re feeling and acting, Dewey’s Behavioral psychology helps people more easily feel their stressful tensions, and can thus help them to relax more, feel more comfortable, and even creative in their daily lives. In short, intelligent experimentation has also become the new psychological learning tool -- feel problems, create solutions, and then test those ideas. If some muscles are tense and irritating, then learn to stretch them out; if an evening meal is boring, think of some ways to make it more tasty, and then test the ideas. What about such ideas is really too difficult to understand? However, such a liberal Behavioral model is different from the more moderate models Sigmund Freud and conservative Carl Jung built, and also from religious models of prayer and worship. For Behaviorists like Dewey it really doesn't matter where you get a better psychological idea; what's most important is actively and intelligently testing the idea to see if it works and brings a greater depth and range of feeling, as well as more self-control. You may agree with Freud that sex is an important idea, but unless you practice the art of intelligent and respectful sex, it can become a dangerous idea too.
Just as experimental testing began creating our strongest scientific ideas, the same kind of testing can also be used to build any excellent habit. Why should learning about viruses be any different from learning about habits of helpfulness? That too is another part of Behavioral psychology's new revolution. People are discovering the power to become better masters of their own habits by experimenting with their own intelligent muscular actions. In that way more and more people are learning to feel more confident about their own self, and slowly sorting out useful facts about human nature from old conservative ideas.
So, at this point the reader may feel the importance of the word ‘functional’ in Dewey’s Functional Behaviorism; the word point to how important one’s daily actions have become to psychological health and excellence, everything from creativity in daily life to playfulness. It’s the key to any kind of real improvement; how are we functioning, or working? By helping raise several children, and also from decades of teaching, Dewey saw how important active testing is to keep deepening the subconscious feelings and habits we all have. Those habits producing harmful results can be changed, beginning with a little intelligent practice, and then expanding them. In that process we become habit-artists.
Since its beginnings in the late 1800s in Germany, experimental Behavioral psychology has grown greatly simply because it best helps people improve their weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. It works! 'We are the habits we build and practice’ is its most important idea. In short, the key to psychological health is first having an idea of excellent habits, making a plan to build them slowly, and then testing the ideas. Today many, if not most, professional psychologists are clearly behaviorally oriented, and so for many it’s become more useful than Jungian, Freudian, Gestalt, and even existential models of human nature, even though they all have some useful ideas for improving our habit-arts, as we’ll see later. And, Behavioral therapy has also become a recurring theme in many Hollywood movies. Great movies like What About Bob? and Anything Else celebrate the idea of becoming more powerful by acting more independently. Often the problem for many young folks is they don't know what excellent psychological habits are, and so their old routine fears and habits prevent them from becoming what they want to become – more independent, intelligent, self-controlled, and able to enjoy life.
In a sense it's a little amazing more people don't realize how merely obeying the law, acting honestly, kindly, sympathetically, and helping those less fortunate are mostly what psychological health is about. With a little smile on my face I think there's a psychological conspiracy going on out there? I mean if more people practiced such excellent habits, the less they'd need professional psychologists encouraging them to improve their own habits. Women, who still raise the children most everywhere, probably become better psychologists than some professionals, but in too many places around the world children still aren't encouraged to practice such habits, as well as respect those with different habits.
No doubt, economics is playing its part too; many people around the world are so busy looking for their next meal instead of their next psychology class, or visiting their local psychologist. Even in the US, Behavioral ways of improving our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits are still not normally taught in public schools, so how can we expect psychological health to keep growing? Of course Behavioral psychology is taught at the college level and sometimes at the high school level, but still, only a small number of people go to college, and an even smaller percentage major in psychology.
Obviously, the more psychological excellence is ignored in our public schools, the more vulnerable our young folks remain to failing some of the social testing games going on every day in the real world, like breaking the law and disrespecting others. For example, the less people teach themselves how important it is to feel a respect for others and just laws, the more vulnerable they become to endangering their own freedom and limiting their options. So, again, the more we demand our public schools start teaching more useful subjects like Behavioral psychology, the stronger its important democratic feelings grow in us. Such feelings are habits on the inside, but if they aren’t practiced they remain merely immature and shallow academic ideas.
Again, Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct helped me begin feeling how really practical psychology can be. Its whole focus is actively learning more excellent habits, and it felt much less confusing and fanciful than, say, Freudian and Jungian models; how can Freudian ideas like Id, Ego, and Superego ever be tested, or abstract poetic Jungian ideas of a collective unconscious? As a result, many see them both as modern examples of moderate Aristotle and conservative Plato respectively. What's most important are the habits within one's 'Ego' or 'Superego', rather than the structures themselves, and nurturing their growth with playfully enjoyable practice. In short, an important idea is this: intelligent and joyfully playful actions and practice help people best teach themselves to become psychologically excellent! Only active practice turns mere ideas into a forceful and powerful will power!
Book 1's Table of Contents
Contents 3
Opening Quotes 4
Introduction 7
Part 1: A New Inner World
Page 1, Sections 1-5
1. Are There Just Pictures of Excellence? 21
2. Playful Results from Experimental Learning 30
3. Psychological Excellence: How Playful Are You? 41
4. What Is Learning Excellence? 48
5. More About Habits 55
Page 1.1, Sections 6-10
6. Consciousness and Its Uses 66
7. Creativity 78
8. How Much Are You Testing? 83
9. From Academic to Organic Art 93
10. More About Psychological Models 103
Page 1.2, Sections 11-15
11. Psyching Ourselves 115
12. Conservative Experiments with Faith 126
13. Liberal Experiments with Faith 134
14. What Is Desire-ABLE? 143
15. Early Christian Models of Truth 155
Page 1.3, Sections 16-20
16. Scientific Models of Truth 163
17. Dewey’s Pragmatic Model of Truth, Part 1 167
18. Dewey’s Pragmatic Model of Truth, Part 2 175
19. Feelings Within Experimental Learning 183
20. Experimental Learning’s Major Weakness 190
Part 2: A New Ethical World
Page 1.4
1. More Results from Intelligent Actions 191
2. Ancient Models of Ethical Excellence 201
3. Dewey’s Liberal Model of Ethical Excellence 210
4. Some On-Going Ethical Conflicts 218
5. Ethical Audacity, 101 229
Page 1.5
6. Some Small Ethical Choices 241
7. Excellent Sex: Foreplay 242
8. Excellent Sex: Going Deeper 250
9. Games of Freedom: Basic Rules and History 261
10. Games of Freedom: Players and Winning 269
Page 1.6
11. Joyfulness: 101 281
12. Joyfulness: 102 289
13. Happiness, 101 299
14. Happiness, 102 308
Part 3: A New Outer World
Page 1.7
1. New Liberal Models of Life and Nature 314
2. More About Native Models of Life and Nature 320
3. More About Animistic Arts 333
4. Ancient Liberal Models of Excellence 338
5. Ancient Psychological Models of Excellence 350
Page 1.8
6. Plato’s Models of Excellence 356
7. Aristotle’s Models of Excellence 363
8. Dewey’s Models of Excellence, 101 370
9. Dewey’s Models of Excellence, 102 378
10. Dewey’s Models of Excellence, 103 383
Page 1.9
11. Reincarnation: A Few Recurring Thoughts 393
12. Modern Economic, Political, and Educational Ideas, 101 403
13. Economic Challenges, 101 407
14. Economic Assumptions, Economic Reality 414
15. Economic Challenges, 102 426
Page 1.10
16. Dewey's Education Model, 101(still re-writing) 438
17. Dewey's Education Model, 102
18. Dewey's Education Model, 103
19. Is Nothing Sacred?
20. Who Wants to Test Themselves?
Opening Quotes
Lewis Carroll: The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things
of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax,
of cabbages—and Kings.
And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings.
Francis Bacon: Natural abilities are like plants they need pruning by study.
John Dewey: Only when science and philosophy are one with literature are they liberal in effect. .... the free working of mind is one of the greatest joys open to man.... the ends of liberalism are liberty and the opportunity of individuals to secure full realization of their potentialities
William McCord: ... a respect for the scientific (experimental) method (of learning) is the hallmark of the modern human being.
John Dewey: The more one appreciates the intrinsic esthetic, immediate value of thought and of science, the more one takes into account what intelligence itself adds to the joy and dignity of life, the more one should feel grieved at a situation in which the exercise and joy of reason are limited to a narrow, closed and technical social group. And the more one should ask how it is possible to make all men participators in this inestimable wealth.
Cicero: By doubting we come at the truth.
Lucretius: Then withdraw from cares and apply your cunning mind
To hear the truth of reasoned theory
Seeking choice words, the songs by which at last
I can open to your mind
That you may see deep into hidden things.
Pliny the Elder: The only certainty is nothing’s certain!
Chinese Proverb: The superior physician helps before the real budding of disease.
Andrew Carnegie: He that cannot reason is a fool
He that will not a bigot
He that dare not a slave
Proverb: Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.
Epicurus: Let no one when young delay to study philosophy, for no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of their psyche (or character).
Aristotle: The effect which lectures produce on a hearer depends on his habits; for we demand the language we are accustomed to. ...as we are philosophers...truth has the first call upon our respect.
John's Gospel: If you love me you will obey my commands.
Marcus Aurelius: Live every day as if your last.
George Hegel: Only one man understands me and even he doesn't.
Mark Twain: Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
Jerry Falwell: Americans are sick and tired of the way the liberals are trying to corrupt our nation.
Michel de Montaigne: I tell the truth, not as much as I would but as much as I dare—and I dare more and more as I grow older.
Oscar Wilde: If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
Samuel Butler: Truth is like the use of words, it depends greatly on custom.
Lincoln Steffens: But men do not seek the truth. It is the truth that pursues men who run away and will not look around.
Francis H. Bradley: There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
Sir Henry Wotton: Tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound your adversaries.
Charles Lamb: My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. ... Supposing truth is a woman—what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about woman? That the gruesome seriousness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won—and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged.
....philosophy wishes to render the greatest possible depth and meaning to life and activity.
....we philosophers and “free spirits” feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an open sea exist.
..we, however, want to be the poets of our life, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters.....Every art and every philosophy may be regarded as a healing and helping appliance in the service of growing, struggling life
John Dewey: ...philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education... conflict of ideas is a necessary condition of advance in understanding. Every act has potential moral significance; it is, through its consequences, part of a larger whole of behavior. Every choice reveals the existing self and it forms the future self making it, in some sense, a new self. Till the Great Society is converted into the Great Community the public will remain (shadowy and) in eclipse. Communication alone can create a community.
Robert Ingersoll: The holiest day is the happiest day. .Education is the most radical thing in the world. ...It is noble to seek for truth, to be intellectually honest, to give to others a true transcript of your mind, a photograph of your thoughts in honest work. Men do as they must with the light they have, and so I say—More light!
Euripides of Athens: Wise indeed was the lesson of him who taught mankind to hear the arguments on both sides. Wisdom outweighs any wealth; wonders there are many, but none more wonderful.
T.V. Smith: the modern philosopher must count as part of his role that of emancipator.
Edward de Vere (aka William Shakespeare): This above all: to your own self be true.
Author: This above all else--make your own self more excellent!
Hindu Proverb: Scholarship is less than sense,
Therefore seek intelligence.
Philosophic Question: What is intelligence?
J.S. Mill: What would a Prometheanized religion be like?
F.C.S Schiller: In all knowing the personal equation always plays a part. This discovery means more than a radical reform of logic. It means a (philosophic) end to every form of logical bullying and intolerance. The phantom of absolute truth, which every bigot of every kind (can) never substantiate (evaporates) in the brilliance of a new (philosophic) day.
Bob Hope: If you haven’t got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
Spencer Tracy: Helping others is the highest good.
Heraclitus: The greatest excellence is self-control.
Aristotle: Human good (is) the active exercise of the psyche in conformance with excellence or virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche: The will to truth is the will to power.
John Keynes (economist): Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the (undereducated). (additions my own)
Author: the will to excellence is the will to EMpower!
There once was a man in search of a mate
Who walked through the world and felt its hate,
So with all his might
He decided to write,
Thinkin’ there’s gotta be a few I can educate.
He knew there were others with plenty to say
Who battled the hate with traps to lay.
He held his tongue
As the traps were sprung,
Writing gems like, Hey stupid, hate ain’t the way!
Irrational hate, he knew, was at best very crass
Though it may feel like gold and shine like brass.
But to clean yer head
Try respect instead,
It just might work to save yer ass!
Rene Descartes: I think, therefore I am.
John Dewey: I own, therefore I am.
Author: I help others, therefore I am.
...and so another quest for excellence begins...
1. DIFFERENT MODELS OF LEARNING EXCELLENCE
Sketches of Excellence is the first book in a series of 5 about John Dewey’s liberal models of excellence. It may best be pictured as a playful little stroll through his liberal philosophic gallery of ideas. It's a general survey of many of his ideas, featuring not only his liberal ideas of life and nature, but it’s also more than that. It also compares his ideas with conservative and moderate ones, especially those of Plato and Aristotle, probably the 2 best representatives of those traditions.
To simplify the description, the subjects of Book 1 have been divided into five main topics: 1. Experimental Learning, 2. Anthropology, 3. Psychology, 4. Ethics, and 5. Education. Those, plus of course some information on Dewey’s liberal politics and economics, form the core of his liberal models of excellence. In Book 4’s Modern Pictures of Excellence there’s much more information about his liberal models of political and economic excellence.
We begin Book 1 by looking at Dewey’s liberal model of learning excellence, also known as science’s experimental method. After all, if one’s learning model is weak or unreliable, then one’s knowledge becomes weak and unreliable. Ancient Greek thinkers were the first ones in Western civilization to realize how important the subject is, and it’s remained at philosophy’s core ever since. Indeed, one of life’s and philosophy’s most important questions are about knowledge, like what do you know; how do you know it; what is the most reliable and productive method of learning, and what kinds of knowledge does it produce – absolute certainty or varying degrees of probable knowledge?
Native Ancestors Experimented...
Remember when you were a kid, after getting your weekly allowance you told yourself you would get some of your favorite ice cream today, only to discover the ice cream shop had moved or gone out of business?
Remember as a teenager telling yourself you would finally get a call from your sweetheart and get a date for Saturday night, only to learn the family’s gone on vacation for 2 weeks?
Remember going to college or a job and telling yourself this will be easy, only to find out it was more difficult than you thought?
Remember finally getting a home and thinking you finally made it in life, only to see both your job and your home disappear in a matter of months? All of these common events are examples of experimental learning, and of learning how ideas need to be tested for their reliability. In fact, much of the time our always moving nature teaches us our ideas are all just experimental feelings rather than eternal reflections of nature. As we’ll see, however, only a few people have been smart enough to draw such general conclusions from individual examples in life. In the 400s BCE a few Greek thinkers began make such liberal generalizations about all natural knowledge. For tens of thousands of years before that, however, our native ancestors created a magical way of learning about spirit-ideas.
Around 1900 Dewey made the following general observation: all our actions are merely experiments in learning. Since then, biologists and anthropologists have learned much more about how experimental learning had been practiced by both non-human animals and our native human ancestors. For example, during the last 50,000 years of human evolution many of those ancestors began experimenting much with a spirit-model of nature. The following description relies much on the study of modern native peoples, but it’s also based on some archeological evidence at grave sites too. Some objects left by those ancestors leads us to believe around that time, during what's called the Middle Paleolithic period (100,000-35,000 years ago), our Neandertal ‘cousins’ thought excellent knowledge included spirit-objects; they sometimes built graves for people they hoped would continue living on after death. Almost certainly the items they left in many graves, like weapons, food, and medicines suggest they were experimenting with the idea of life continuing on after death. That ideas lies at the core of most every religion today.
Most anthropologists today agree with those ideas, and it was more confirmed as they continued learning about the life-styles of modern native peoples. In fact, even today many native peoples still feel spirit-ideas are even MORE REAL than any natural object! It turns out spirit-ideas were useful for describing what to them were mysterious dream experiences; in other words, their dream-feelings were experimentally pictured as seeing spirits. Today, around the world, native peoples still see their dreams as evidence for some part of a person living on after death, and the best way to control such objects is with magical rituals.
Many thousands of years ago Neandertals began leaving objective evidence for such ideas. They began artfully burying some of their people AS IF something about them would live on in some way, as a spirit object. That idea eventually evolved into conservative philosophy’s soul-idea, as pictured by Plato, and to this day remains the basis for many religions. For us liberals, however, the idea began evolving long ago because it was useful in caring and thoughtful Neandertal tribes, and probably our African San ancestors too. Sometimes Neandertals put healing plants like Yarrow and Horsetail in a grave AS IF they would help care for a person’s spirit after death. Even after Neandertals became extinct soon after 30,000 years ago, our own sapien ancestors almost certainly continued experimenting with spirit-ideas; they too had burial arts, cave paintings, art work, and even fertility sculptures. Such were the first conservative models of excellent knowledge, all built experimentally with intelligent trial-and-error thinking. A problem for them was to explain their dream experiences; to some they felt threatening, just like people today have nightmares, but to others they seemed helpful. Spirits thus became a way of talking about dream experiences.
What’s more, if natural spirits really existed and caused events like dreams to happen, then perhaps we could learn how to help them and make them more friendly. They in turn might make life less fearful, sorrowful, worrisome, and more satisfying; in short, more excellent. Obviously no one knows exactly when such ideas began to be experimented with, but eventually it became obvious to many natives peoples, spirits were definitely excellent objects worth knowing and controlling; after all, sometimes after a shaman’s magical healing dance or spirit extraction a sick person got well, and after a magical hunting ritual sometimes more food was found. Thus, experimenting with spirit-rituals became important work in the native world; after all, who wouldn't like to know how to make life better and more rewarding with the help of spirits? Long before modern science evolved and began producing our most reliable knowledge, our native ancestors used spirits in the eternal quest to make life better and more enjoyable.
Armed with such ideas our native ancestors continued experimenting with spirit ideas: Exactly HOW can spirits be best controlled, with gifts, good actions, or shaman dances? Much later obedience and respect to rulers was also thought to help spirits make life more peaceful and prosperous. Today many call such learning habit-arts ritual magic and naturally the more they were practiced the stronger and more powerful they were felt. For example, dressing like a deer or lion and feeling like you were in fact such an animal, just might convince deer or lion spirits to help make the hunt easier, bring more food, raise more children, scare away evil spirits, and keep people healthy and strong.
For we Deweyan liberals, however, what's most important here is to see the growth of such habits as the results of intelligent experimentation! There was a problem, some solutions were thought about, and then they tested their ideas. Often the results weren’t very helpful, but even in the prehistoric world there were skeptical feelings about such ideas. Similar feelings would eventually lead a few liberal ancient Greek skeptics to realize in an always changing world learning anything is always experimental; some ideas may no longer be true.
Eventually, over many thousands of years, native cultures around the world were slowly reconstructed to include spirit ideas and magical habit-arts. They were used for solving the very same kinds of practical challenges we have today, like food, health, children, fear of death, and others. What an amazing world it must have been, both hopeful and yet in so many ways frustrating too. After all, magical rituals often didn’t work. Still, they needed all the help they could get trying to kill a 5 ton wholly mammoth who wants nothing more than to stomp them into the ground. Naturally, when their spirit-magic didn't work they felt frustrated; no doubt some even became skeptical and doubtful, but as both research and history shows, many others kept experimenting with such rituals. And the more such habits were practiced, the more difficult it became to think of better ways of learning how to live more intelligently. In fact, only about 10,000 years ago were more intelligent animal-taming arts experimented with, all learned with intelligent trial-and-error experimentation.
Over many thousands of years in the native world, a great variety of spirit ideas and habits have evolved. It's difficult to feel such habits now because they're rapidly changing in our present age of science, but as we’ll see, such ideas continued on into conservative philosophies and religions in the ancient and medieval worlds. Daily priests claim their prayers change wine and bread into the body and blood of their savior, and if eaten will have spirit results. In fact, one similar native habit today still involves people dressing up at sporting events like their team totem animals -- bears, lions, giants, and so on. Many want to identify with team members, but again, the liberal point Dewey makes is this: our conservative and moderate philosophic and religious traditions are really much older than most people have thought. Many conservatives today still believe our entire world and nature was created just a few thousand years ago, but to liberals like Dewey and myself that idea is no longer excellent. Based on the testing of ideas, experimental learning has found much objective evidence to the contrary. To believe our earth is now over 4 billion years old is now rather common knowledge.
There’s also another important idea we should note and remember. Such ideas have continued on for so long because they were useful. Mere practice and habits create the feelings for certainty and truth. Spirit-habits sometimes seemed to work, and what seems to work is reason enough to keep practicing such ideas, especially when no other more excellent learning arts and knowledge was available.
Behavioral psychologists today call it reinforcement. As parents soon discover, satisfying events like food help children keep experimenting to keep such food coming, mostly by crying. And in the native world, sometimes mammoths were killed after a magical hunting ceremony; that would have been a very satisfying and reinforcing result to our native ancestors, and the more satisfying the food was, the stronger became the habit and willpower to keep experimenting with such spirit rituals. In short, rewarded experimental actions help grow a person’s willpower for those actions! In such hunting situations it was natural for native peoples to feel the hunt was successful because some animal-spirits liked their magic. If so, then why not try the same magical ritual again later. In any case, however, they didn’t know what the results would be before the hunt began, and so those habits too were all experimental. Who knows? Maybe evil and harmful spirits would prevent success later, but useful results often encouraged such habits to keep growing.
Ancient Peoples Experimented With Ideas
As we’ll see in more detail in Book 3, Ancient Models of Excellence, a few centuries before Jesus lived a few ancient conservative and moderate Greeks began experimenting with another way to learn about eternal and unchanging objects – not spirit-rituals and magical actions, but with logical reasoning. Thus was created the first great Age of Reason in Western civilization. To those Greeks there seemed to be some kind of logic, or logos, built right into nature itself, helping give nature its regular cycles and repetitions; both conservative Plato and moderate Aristotle thought so. Plato called them Spirit-Ideas, and Aristotle called them Forms. To them it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume such eternal and unchanging objects existed, but more importantly, could be known merely by reasoning about them; mere reasoning, not magical rituals, could reveal nature’s eternal truths, and thus help make life more enjoyable and rewarding. After all, mathematicians like Pythagoras made a few general math assumptions about lines and circles and then reasoned out what felt like many more absolutely certain math facts. In fact, with some Greeks like Plato such reasonable thinking became a new religion. Heavenly movements too seemed to keep changing in more or less reasonable ways, and so there must be some reasoning causes for such regular movements. Many conservatives and moderates thus assumed there must be some eternally powerful and reasoning objects causing such eternally repetitious movements. Plato would experiment with the idea of spirit-objects and Aristotle with Form-objects.
Just as native people used the idea of spirits to explain their dreams, so Plato and Aristotle used their ideas to explain nature’s regularities, like stars, seasons, and animal regularities too. To them it was reasonable to assume such objects existed and more reasoning could thus build accurate models of life and nature; what were spirit-objects like, and how did they work. In fact, both of them experimented with reasoning out the results of such assumptions and questions, just like mathematicians reasoned out new math facts. Even decades before them, late in the 500s BCE, a few robust and confident 'free-thinking' Greeks were experimenting with reasoning with geometrical ideas, still studied by high school students today. To early mathematicians like Pythagoras they seemed perfectly reasonable, and conservative Plato would eventually picture math ideas like triangles and cubes as forming everything in nature and having a spirit-life of their own. If nothing else, then, those ancient Greeks in fact created a very different model of learning from the ones native people often practiced, thus added the new art of logical reasoning as the best model of learning, and eternal objects as the best objects to learn about. To this day such reasoning habits remain an important part of Western civilization. To many Greek liberals, however, it soon became merely only one part of the best learning model. Unless ideas were physically tested for their results, one could reason about anything and claim it was true!
Obviously the Greek world had its own evolution, quite different from Israel's, but for Dewey they both still used experimental thinking; the more they continued learning about life and nature, the more it became necessary. For example, while they were in their Babylonian captivity in the 500s BCE, basically nomadic Mosaic tribes began learning more civilized Babylonian arts, like writing. Then, when many returned to Israel, they began experimenting with writing down their oral traditions, creating an alphabet, and thus building what’s known today as the Old Testament. The book of Isaiah is generally believed to be the work of 2 authors who had different ideas they wanted to express.
Probably more than any other ancient peoples, however, Greeks experimented with a great many new skills and ideas; they were far less god-fearing than the Israelis. For example, the more colonies the Greeks built around the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the more they learned practical habits about living in an always changing nature, and the less they needed to rely on spirit-habits for help. For hundreds of years after 800 BCE bold and confident Greeks built hundreds of such colonies, and the new skills and confidence they learned allowed a few to begin experimenting with more liberal ideas about life and nature, namely, that its knowledge could be learning without the help of spirit-ideas and merely with the art of reasoning. Rather quickly, then, such rational experimentation began building Western civilization's traditional 3 models of excellence, all evolving experimentally for conservatives, moderates, and liberals. Their very talkative and questioning habit-arts -- their reasoning skills -- helped liberate many people from the spirit-habits native peoples had been practicing for tens of thousands of years. After all, the first burial sites have been dated at around 50,000 years ago, in what is now northern Iraq. A few liberal Greeks began feeling reasoning experiments without spirit assumptions produced much more excellent results about life and nature, rather than mere religious habit-arts. Perhaps no finer example of that experimental reasoning habit was the pious conservative philosopher Socrates. He would spend his mature years experimenting with ideas by asking others to state the universal meanings behind ideas like friendship or courage, and when their definitions proved unacceptable, other ideas would be tried. If one idea produced contradictory results, then he simply asked the person to experiment with another one. His most famous student Plato would continue such experimentation too.
Plato Experimented
Socrates’s conservative and pious student Plato continued experimenting all through his life and writings with the idea of Spirit-Objects. He too hoped his mere reasoning could eventually allow him to see, grasp, and behold the true universal meanings in such objects, and thus discover nature’s absolute Truth. In fact, he felt so strongly about them he eventually became convinced excellent knowledge should focus ONLY on them; experimenting with learning about natural objects could only produce inferior kinds of knowledge. Furthermore,, he also assumed such spirit-objects were eternal and unchanging, always and forever existing in an entirely different spirit-world. For him merely reasoning about such objects was the only way to know what their eternal meanings were; he even felt he knew all about them even before he was born. For him, only such Spirit-Objects could produce Absolute Truth, and thus defeat those pesky human-oriented liberal sophists and Atomists who had the audacity to either deny they existed or could be known!
From where did he get such ideas? Almost certainly he was encouraged to build his feelings for such objects in childhood, while practicing religious habits. In ancient Athens both the secular and religious state were one; there was no separation of church and state as there is in many modern democracies. No doubt, his math studies too also helped make such ideas feel real; after all, 2 + 2 is always and eternally 4, so again mere reasoning discovered such eternal truth. Plato would spend about 50 years experimentally reasoning about spirit-objects, without very much success I might add. Again, however, Dewey’s point is simply this: such ideas too were merely mental tools to experiment with, rather than reflecting the objects in a spirit-world. In fact, spirit objects couldn’t be sensed at all; they were completely non-material?
Today it’s fairly easy to picture Plato daily offering some little sacrifice to a spirit object on a home altar, perhaps asking the god Apollo's help to know more about such objects; Apollo was thought to be a god of wisdom, and in fact his priests at Delphi had already named his teacher Socrates as the wisest Greek. After all, they too, like Socrates, wanted people to believe such objects existed; if not people would stop asking them to predict the future.
In fact in Greece many different conservative ideas were experimented with. Some said excellent knowledge came from only one god. Others said there were many gods and spirits; Pythagoras said the air was full of spirits. Others felt some books were Holy Writings and were inspired by a spirit-cause; still others experimented with ideas like Timeless Forms, Cosmic Mind, the Muse goddesses, the Great Spirit, and many others. And after them such ideas would be imaginatively experimented with for thousands of years. In the 1500s Protestant Christians experimented with a number of different religious models of life and nature, none exactly the same but also having no way to objectively test any of them for their truthfulness. People either accepted or rejected them. Such human-based events no doubt caused liberals to reasonably ask, if different people were reasoning so differently, and producing such different results, then how excellent of a learning tool can mere reasoning be? There is only one nature and thus can be only one model of truth about it! So, besides reasoning, shouldn’t the best learning model have a way of objectively testing ideas to see how reliable they are? That was the great liberal addition to the new reasoning art.
More Greek Experiments
Mentally vibrant and physically energetic Greek men and women were often encouraged to build good talking and questioning habit-arts; such skills made experimentation much easier and thus more productive. With such learning skills they continued reconstructing and improving many of the habits and skills of both themselves and other peoples. As a result, however, reasoning became merely one excellent step in a reliable learning process. For example, the more Plato’s spirit-ideas were tested for their results, he eventually found out his early reasoning and assumptions about spirit-objects produced some truly puzzling results; they in fact helped him question learning about spirit-objects altogether! No doubt, that result couldn’t have been more distressing to him. To a devout Christian it was probably like suddenly feeling there was no god!
What did he do? Well, he began experimenting with more naturalistic ideas. His later writings almost completely ignore spirit-ideas altogether, and focus more on the natural world. Still, it must have been quite a shock to him. After all, experiments with mathematical reasoning already seemed to produce Absolute Truth, eternal and unchanging, and thus reasoning felt like the most excellent learning method. 4 x 4 is always and forever 16. Wasn't the sum of 2 plane right angles always and forever exactly 180 degrees? And if simple mathematical reasoning could produce such absolutely certain knowledge in our always changing world, then why shouldn’t simple reasoning also discover what spirit-objects are really like. After all, mustn't there be some unchanging, eternal, constant, and forever-the-same objects governing all natural movements? For years those questions seemed to Plato like very reasonable ones, at least until he found they produced some very strange results. We’ll see much more of Plato’s mental evolution in Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence.
Aristotle Experimented
More modest assumptions about life and nature were experimented with by Plato’s greatest student Aristotle. Plato called his student of 20 years The Reader, but soon after Plato died Aristotle began experimenting with a somewhat different model of life and nature. With many ideas he stayed faithful to Plato. He too felt some eternally constant and unchanging objects exist and can be known with mere reasoning; they’re just not spirit-objects, they’re natural objects. Also, because Aristotle said such objects were natural and embedded within objects, he said both the senses and reasoning are needed to produce excellent knowledge. Thus, it was much easier for moderate Aristotle to begin experimentally studying natural objects, like plants and animals, rather than spirit-objects. In short, he was a much greater lover and explorer of our natural world than Plato, and thus helped encourage the liberal Atomists who were also saying the natural world is the best object of knowledge. For Aristotle, like Plato, some knowledge could thus become absolutely certain, but only if our senses AND reasoning were put together and used harmoniously. Incidentally, Aristotle was a very careful reader to the liberal Atomist Democritus, upon whom rests Western civilization’s entire liberal scientific and democratic traditions!
Like Democritus had done decades earlier, Aristotle too continued improving the conservative reasoning model of learning. Both said our senses and reasoning were needed to learn more about nature’s truth. However, Aristotle still agreed with Plato that the best objects to study were always unchanging and eternal; he called them Forms. He said excellent learning is always the result of using our senses and reasoning to help us learn what nature’s eternal Forms are and how they work. What could be more logical than that? Thus, with such ideas Western civilization’s ancient moderate model of life and nature was experimentally built. He felt confident in saying if a person first absorbed nature’s forms through the senses, and then merely reasoned properly, the results MUST be absolutely certain, no ifs, ands, or experimental buts! He experimented with assuming most all objects have eternal Forms within them, and knowing them produces Absolute Truth. Why do fire and smoke always float upwards? Well they were part of our heavenly fires and airs, so their natural movements were towards them. Centuries later, however, only after people actually experimented with them did they discover all warm gases move towards cooler areas. As a result of such experimental learning scientists became more liberated from even Aristotle’s moderate assumptions about nature and began seeing nature as many see it today, as having no such eternal Forms within it! In fact, Galileo’s rejecting that idea was the beginning of modern experimental learning itself, experimenting with the same kinds of material objects liberal Democritus had described before Plato and Aristotle were even born – atoms!
Plato and Aristotle also experimented differently with the idea of god. In true native fashion Plato believed spirits controlled everything and thus all people were merely puppets of the gods, including himself. The knowledge people had was only the knowledge the gods wanted them to have. Aristotle’s experimental reasoning came to build a very different picture of god; his was more like the liberal Atomist Democritus. For them both god was best pictured as a solitary creature caring not at all for earthly events. For Aristotle his solitary god existed beyond the stars and didn’t even know the earth existed, much less people existed. It became known as a Deistic model of god; the Bible's Book of Job experimented with a similar idea, as did many US Founders in the 1700s.
Greek Liberals Experimented Too
Finally, we come to the cause of much of Plato’s and Aristotle’s work -- ancient Greek liberals like Democritus, one of the most important thinkers in Western civilization. Liberals like him said atoms were the only eternal and unchanging objects, and their combining and breaking apart build everything in nature. Also, there were another group of humanist liberals called Sophists. They were men like Protagoras who freely admitted he knew nothing about any such spirit or unchanging objects. A few years before Plato was born liberal Democritus was probably experimenting with a model of nature pictured as an infinite number of atoms moving in an infinitely large space! Amazingly, that’s basically the modern model too. For imaginative Democritus merely the combining and breaking apart of atoms built and ended everything in nature, including people. Only recently has modern science begun testing that idea, and has been improving on that idea of unchanging atoms, but it’s still a very useful idea. Today, modern medicine and chemistry, and thus health itself all depend on Democritus’s liberal ideas. Because of their obviously useful results, it’s been worthwhile to keep experimenting with them. Today, the idea of energy has replaced his idea of even atoms being eternal and unchanging, but energetic wave-particles are constantly changing and moving. Though ancient liberal Sophists, Skeptics, and Atomists experimented with a number of different ideas, theirs have proved the most useful for continuing to make life less dangerous and more enjoyable.
Again, for Dewey, the point about learning is this: all thinking is and can only be experimental in an always energetically moving and changing nature. In such a nature there’s always some chance even the ideas we feel are absolutely certain might change; sometimes the ice cream shop closes or moves away. After all, if results helped Plato feel how illogical his experimental reasoning was, then it can happen to anyone, right? Also, a random kind of mental experimentation can be felt daily with all the ideas and feelings popping into and out of consciousness. So, the challenge for people today is to give some order and patterns to our thinking, so that it becomes easier to think and work to produce the results we want, rather than the results we don’t want. It remains the great challenge of life itself.
Logical reasoning and constructive work help order our mental lives, making it more controlled, but as liberal ancient Greek Skeptics saw, even that control has its limits; we need some kind of objective testing to see how reliable our ideas are. If they’re not, then there’s no need to keep believing in them. Thus, liberal Skeptics, Sophists, and Atomists reasoned they could keep learning more and more about our world just by experimenting INTELLIGENTLY with it, and testing their ideas to see their actual results.
What’s more, respectful and helpful reasoning also helped build Western civilization’s first liberal ethical models of excellence too. Democritus too helped with that project. Because life keeps changing and moving, the most reasonable ethical idea was to see all people as deserving of the same rights and freedoms as anyone else; that idea remains the basis of liberal democracy to this day simply because of the results produced when it was tested. How else can we learn how to keep improving our world unless we keep testing our ideas? With the new reasoning habits and some different assumptions about life and nature, Greek liberals thus began building Western civilization's first naturalistic models of excellence. For them too, all actions, whether physical or mental, are experimental in nature and should be felt as such. If not, it could easily make life much more dangerous and frustrating than it already is. Why not aim to see if the ice cream shop is still there, rather than just assume it is? And why not work to make some honest money to buy the ice cream, rather than break the law and earn bad money?
As ancient liberal Greek thinkers continued experimenting with such ideas, they too began feeling all ideas are merely more or less probable. Thus, no set of ideas could reflect any model of Absolute Truth; they was always a probability things could change tomorrow. The result, then was to become much less arrogant about their assumptions and knowledge! After all, what else but experimental could any idea be in an ever changing world? Constant change was simply the way our natural world worked, so why not just accept it and keep trying to make our experimental actions as intelligent as possible, rather than merely routine. Liberal medical doctor Hippocrates also said pretty much the same thing while Socrates was questioning other people in the quest for eternal Truth. For Hippocrates medicine and healing were always experimental; who could know before a medicine is taken what results would happen in actual people until it was actually taken? To Plato and Aristotle, however, such knowledge and learning method was much less than excellent. They felt some objects must be eternal and unchanging, thus causing the seemingly eternal natural rhythms we keep seeing in nature, like the seasons, animal actions, star movements, and so on.
No doubt such ancient liberals would be at home in our modern era -- 1600 to the present. Our strongest scientific knowledge is based on such experimental testing, and those who neglect that idea merely increase life’s dangers for themselves. The more modern scientists experimented with some of Plato's and Aristotle's ideas, the more they slowly realized how weak their results were for actually discovering useful knowledge. For example, the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, and of course the great Italian Leonardo Da Vinci, showed what creatively experimental excellence should look like. They took the time to experimentally test old traditional ideas on their own. Both of their experimental learning methods helped anchor people to our natural world, and keep learning more about it. Leonardo experimentally tested ideas all his life, studied how the human body was built and connected, so his art would look more naturalistic. On the other hand, however, conservative religious leaders were against all such experimental reasoning; their livelihood depended on people believing and acting as they said was best, and not on what people themselves said was best for them.
Spirit Variety
Again, the great variety of spirit-habits in the native, ancient, medieval, and modern worlds is solid evidence for how experimental such ideas really are. As we’ve begun seeing, native peoples built many different magical learning habit-arts, all built experimentally -- that is, with trial and error actions. Spirit ideas certainly weren't the only ideas experimented with, but their many useful results have remained important to many people. For example, when Europeans came to America after 1500 they quickly noticed how superstitious the natives were. Many in Mexico thought the new peoples were gods because of their canons and horses, and so were to be feared and obeyed. Who wants to have angry gods around with their 'thunder sticks' making life even more dangerous than it already is?
Again, the point is, such feelings and habits were all grown experimentally; if one idea didn’t work, then a different one was experimented with. In truth native peoples really didn’t know, say, BEFORE their mammoth hunt if their magical rituals would work, or it they would win their battles. As Dewey might say, they felt how precarious and dangerous nature and life could be even with their spirit-rituals; those results kept encouraging them to keep experimenting to learn more useful kinds of knowledge. The histories of both philosophy and religion too are more evidence for such experimental learning.
If all this is fairly accurate, then just like us today our native ancestors too tried their best and saw the results of their experimental actions; sometimes they stomped on the mammoth or cave bear, and sometimes they got stomped on! In either case, however, we today can begin feeling why liberal philosophers like Dewey began building what many would call a very revolutionary model of life and nature. For him all ideas need to be experimentally tested, and the results range from almost impossible to almost certain! No doubt, some ideas are more certain than others, like Ben Franklin’s death and taxes, but even that doesn't keep people from experimenting with them; greedy people always want lower taxes, don’t they? After all, what else can they, or anyone, do except try their best and see the results; even today's ultra-scientific space flights, built with the most exact knowledge under the cleanest of conditions, are still merely more experiments, but who knows what’ll happen out there in space or when they try to land?
Liberal Dewey, however, wasn’t afraid to say one result of all routine learning habits was simply to make it more difficult to think of better ways for solving daily challenges. For millions of years routine hunting habits, for example, made it almost impossible to think more creatively about better ways to grow more food, or even raise tame animals for food. Those kinds of routine learning habits are the main reason why human progress has been so slow. Eventually more creative and experimental habits did evolve, but it sometimes took thousands of years to improve old habits. Seeing beyond one's routine habits to what actions might actions might produce better results is often difficult, if not impossible; our own learning habits often keep us from seeing what might work better, but if we already know intelligent experimental learning is our strongest knowledge, then it’s easier for creative thinking to help make all our ideas and habits more flexible and easier to experiment with.
Not realizing how important experimental learning is helped keep spirit-habits powerful for many thousands of years. In native societies around the world shaman medicine people became spirit-specialists. Sometimes they alone experimented to heal people by exorcising sickness-causing demon-spirits. Sometimes a shaman would go into a deep trance and try to pull an unfriendly spirit out of a sick person’s body. Others experimented with 'traveling' to where animal spirits lived, to get their help hunting those animals. Eskimo shamans, for example, sometimes played that role, and sometimes tribal chanting and dancing rituals were experimented with too. In fact such habits remained so strong, even into Jesus' time, the gospels tell how he himself experimented with healing people by driving away evil spirits; it also records how sometimes it seemed to work and sometimes it didn’t. Such were some of the experimental healing habits evolving in what today we Deweyans call a conservative model of life and nature. And of course by Jesus' time people had been experimenting with acts of righteousness to get spirit-help; certain actions would please god who would then answer one’s prayers.
To millions of people today, however, nature has become the ‘clay’ for eternally making our natural world better and more satisfying. We can best keep improving life if we keep focusing on learning about the natural events making it difficult, tense, and stressful, and then working intelligently to improve them. Recently excessive greed on the part of a few thousand people, and using money to keep the status quo in place, seem to be doing exactly the opposite, namely making millions of people worse off than before. And only when medical science began experimenting differently with its routine habit-arts like bleeding people, was better health possible; even George Washington was bled by his doctor to cure his ailments, even though it was based on unreliable ideas.
It should now be clear, ALL of our feelings of excellent learning should be tested, rather than merely assuming such ideas are always true. It’s certainly not a new idea. Modern science's experimental learning and testing skills are pretty much the same experimental skills used by those ancient liberal Greek Sophists, Atomists, and Skeptics. In fact, as we’ll see later, such experimental learning skills go all the way back to our African habilis ancestors millions of years ago, and even to the first life forms on earth, some 4 billion years ago! The simple stone tools H. habilis built experimentally also tested their feelings to make life better. Indeed, all the many marvelous inventions and reliable knowledge we have today is the result of such testing habits.
Thus, an educational challenge faces most everyone, namely to make such experimental habits and skills a strong and powerful habit. The more experimental learning is consciously practiced, the stronger it becomes. Building such learning skills into our muscles builds the all-important feelings for those excellent learning ideas, feelings which compose at least half of our mental life and consciousness. Only active practice builds such feelings, making it that much easier to keep challenging all our conservative book-centered schools to become more oriented towards teaching more useful skills and knowledge experimentally. Only with such intelligent testing actions can any idea become better learned and remembered.
Dewey's liberal model of experimental learning is the same as modern science's experimental testing! For him ALL excellent knowledge in our ever-changing world can ONLY be experimental; thus all knowledge can be only probable -- some highly probable but probable none the less. Feel certain the sun will rise tomorrow. Such ideas about learning, however, help make us more humble about what we think we know.
Also, merely with experimental science’s learning model Dewey helped reconstruct the entire ancient and medieval quest for Absolute Certainty. If he’s right, if all knowledge is really only experimental, then the only absolutely certain idea becomes nothing is absolutely certain! For Dewey even Plato merely experimentally played with the idea of Spirit-Objects, rather than seeing and beholding nature’s eternal Truth. Such results can thus bring up some interesting questions: Can Dewey really prove all our knowledge is experimental in nature? Isn’t there a chance he too might be wrong? Can anyone possibly prove experimental learning is our ONLY learning art, as he claimed it was? And if it can't be proved, then isn't Dewey's learning model too just as experimental as Plato's and Aristotle's? If you’re smiling now, then you’re beginning to feel how playful philosophy can be!
2. PLAYFUL RESULTS FROM EXPERIMENTAL LEARNING
Even before Plato one of philosophy's 5 main challenges has been the study of excellent learning. What is it, how does it work and what are the best objects to study? Is it using just reason to know spirit-objects like conservative Plato said, reason and the senses to know eternal Forms like moderate Aristotle, or reason and the senses to know how ordinary objects and people act in the natural world, like liberal Democritus and Protagoras said? As we saw in the last section many ancient conservative Greeks believed reasoning alone was the best learning art, and the best objects to know were already existing, eternal, and unchanging. In this section, however, we continue playing with liberal Dewey’s idea of experimental testing as the best knowledge art, and the results of such testing as the best objects of knowledge to know. For Dewey such future results were the best objects of knowledge, to make such they haven’t changed and are still reliable.
Why such an experimental learning art? In a word, results! Since 1600 modern science has been using an experimental method of learning, and it's helped increase the human control of nature more than it’s ever been, giving us more power and control of our world. We now have very useful medicines, tools, and industries making life much more enjoyable and rewarding, however, we also many new challenges. For example, one challenge is to see that power and control is not overly concentrated in the hands of just a few obscenely wealthy people, as well as using new knowledge for the common good, rather than for the good of a few. What should we do about greedy people who want to keep making as much money as possible, or those industries who’re building more and more destructive weapons, or who’re putting more and more dangerous carbon into the air, thus threatening to disrupt life for millions of others? Also, our new knowledge about weapon’s making continues to make life more dangerous than ever. Our world today is still full of very dangerous nuclear weapons, capable of destroying great amounts of life, and so how intelligent is it to keep so many around? For millions of people, merely one such weapon can ruin the whole day, give or take a city or 50!
Also, let’s not forget even philosophy can be fun as well as educational; it needn’t be all dull, boring, and scary descriptions. To prove my point I offer the philosophic limerick.
Once a young chemist from Khartoum
While experimenting in his room,
Carefully mixed his stash
Then lit a match,
And the last thing he heard was KA-BOOM!
Now, after you stop smiling perhaps you’d like to take our first philosophic fill-in-the-blank pop quiz: Please state the limerick’s moral. ____________________. Hint: Resist the impulse to write, the author is an idiot. For Dewey what makes experimental learning excellent is whether it’s intelligent or not. For that Khartoumian it definitely wasn’t intelligent.
In this section, then, we’ll look mainly at 2 questions 1.) Was Dewey right; is experimental testing really our ONLY way of learning, and if so, then 2.) What are some more important results of that learning idea?
What is experimental learning?
Dewey eventually thought experimental testing of our feelings and ideas was the only way anyone learns anything; on a behavioral level it’s called trial-and-error learning, but with the evolution of talking habits experimental learning could become more intelligent. However, was he right? Is experimental learning really our only learning art, and if so how can such a universal statement like that possibly be proved?
Other interesting questions too come to mind. For example, what exactly is experimental testing -- is it a science, an art, or both a science and an art, and if so what is science and what is art? Also, what are experimental learning’s limits? Can it be used to know eternal and unchanging Spirit-Objects, universal Laws of Nature, or merely reliable ideas for making life better in our natural world, here and now? Then, if the best objects to know are the future results of our present actions, then can we ever be sure those actions are best? How can creative experimental learning help solve our everyday challenges to make both our self and our little corner of the world better? How difficult of an art is it to master? If it is our strongest learning art, then is there only one set and well-defined way experimental testing should be practiced, or will everyone use that liberal art of learning a little differently, and thus become their own learning artist? Not to worry. Such questions needn’t all be answered right now, but they’ll help prepare us for seeing more ideas later.
We begin with this question: Is an experimental testing art our ONLY learning art? In the last section we saw how it was consciously alive and well even among liberal ancient Greeks, and subconsciously alive even for people like Plato and Aristotle. As Western civilization was emerging from its old and long spirit-dominated prehistoric period, a few liberal practical-minded Greeks focused only on learning about our ever-changing natural world, to make life in it more satisfying and productive. But more recently, science has began describing a nature almost completely different from the one conservatives had been describing for thousands of years. Liberals often said such new knowledge was in fact the best evidence to believing experimental learning is our only learning art.
What’s more, the more animals studies were done, the more it seemed that learning method too stretched back billions of years into the past, rather than merely a few thousand years in human history. The more animals were studied and learning about, the more non-animals too practice experimental trial-and-error learning, almost certainly since life began on earth some 4 billion years ago. What evidence was there for it? Merely observing animal behavior. Such studies seemed to confirm Dewey’s idea – experimental learning is our ONLY learning art? What might some examples be for such a statement? So, we can play philosophic detective and see if the idea is reliable. After all, if he’s wrong or his argument is weak, then there might really be a way of learning about, say, spirit-objects or eternal natural Laws. In a sense then, the entire history of our earth and life on it becomes a scene for study and inquiry, much like homicide detectives study local crime scenes.
Looking for Evidence
No doubt, the best place to start looking for evidence is what’s going on here and now in the animal world, and the more that happens, the easier it is to find evidence of their trial-and-error experimental actions. If we see examples of it here and now, then it becomes highly probably their ancestors too practiced the art of trial-and-error learning.
What evidence is there for believing experimental testing is the only way anything learns anything? Well let's see, would you believe all animal life gives some evidence for it? Our biological world has a tremendous number of animals and as many people know they use trial-and-error learning to satisfy their needs and wants. If they don’t find food or a mate in one place, they simply keep looking for them in another place, in a trial-and-error fashion; what’s more, sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don’t. So, if that’s true, then it’s again highly probable their ancestors acted similarly, for at least the last 600 million years, give or take a Nigerian night or 2!
It’s easy to imagine, for example, how our Devonian fish ancestors of some 350 million years ago experimentally searched for food every day, with simple trial-and-error actions, just as fish do today. If those Demonian fish didn’t find something to eat in one place they simply kept looking for it someplace else! If so, then an experimental trial-and-error learning art was almost certainly present in nature that long ago. The big difference between us modern humans and them was they merely felt such an art, whereas thanks to our talking habits we are now able to both feel and consciously know our actions are experimental.
In short, such a conscious verbal level of awareness has allowed us to make experimental learning into a science by describing how it works, and also an art, by telling people they can use it creatively in daily life! They can, say, experiment differently with different foods to eat, or clothes to wear, or helpful actions. Obviously fish today, and those back in the Devonian era, had no such level of awareness, but their actions and behavior can all be seen as simply trial-and-error experimentation. Fish simply wander about here and there and try to catch the food they find, whereas we humans can more intelligently make a plan to satisfy our food challenges, and then test its excellence by seeing its results. However, in both cases learning is still experimental; neither fish nor people know for certain what results their actions will produce. How can either life form know what results their actions will produce before they act? All we can do is increase the probability for success.
In fact, the biological world is absolutely full of experimental trial-and-error actions, from single celled amoeba to dinosaurs to people. Fish today experiment to find food almost certainly just like their Devonian ancestors did; amphibious frogs experiment to catch insects just like their 300 million year old Carboniferous amphibian ancestors; reptiles experimentally build their egg laying nests today almost certainly like their Cretaceous ancestors did 100 million years ago, and even our own lemur and monkey ancestors continue hunting for fruit and insect-kabobs like their African ancestors did 50 million years ago, all with experimental trial and error. Today we can still look at fish, reptiles, and primates and see how experimental their actions are.
With such evidence we can more deeply feel how right Dewey was about trial-and-error experimental learning. If so, then our own intelligent experiments actions become more productive, respectful, kind, and generous with those actions, but we can also feel how deeply anchored we all are to our own natural world. The more a child’s actions are rewarded for, say, practicing religious habits, the stronger those habits become and the more real they feel. Actions like that are in fact strong evidence to believing all such ideas are merely mental tools for building habits, rather than reflections of nature’s absolute Truth.
In any case, however, both natural history and biology can help us begin seeing how widespread experimental testing is in nature, and also how we all can feel connected to our 4 billion year old biological roots of learning! Obviously we can’t test every animal, and so Dewey’s general statement about experimental learning is really just an assumption, but one based on a great amount of evidence from the natural world. In any case, it can be treated as an idea to be tested! By testing it we can begin feeling how such experimental learning consciously feels and works in our daily lives, rather than just leaving on a sub-conscious non-verbal level. Also, consciously using experimental learning can help us feel better connected to our billions-of-years-old nature we suddenly find ourselves living in and depending on for our continuing existence. After all, without plants there would be no animal life for very long. We’re all linked and connected to nature in many ways never even dreamed of by almost everyone more than 200 years ago!
Evidence also exists for believing our own human ancestors practiced experimental testing too. In the last section, long before burial arts were invented, we began seeing how our own African H. habilis ancestors began experimenting with the art of making useful crude and simple stone tools. That art is well over 2 MILLION years old, give or take a Chinese New Year or so. How else could those early human ancestors have taught themselves that very useful art unless they intelligently experimented with it? Only experimenting with stone tool making can teach such an art, and ever since then many other ancestors accepted the challenge too. In fact, archeologists today have even discovered such tool-making areas they worked in, full of stone chips made during their tool-building experimental work!
Not only that, but after the tool was finished those ancestors also experimented to see the results of their work, and how well their tools worked to produce more food. Often they worked well and sometimes they didn't, but when they did it made eating easier and life more satisfying, and so they were encouraged to continue experimenting with such tools, as is now obvious from all the different stone tools already found since that time. Such tools helped cut more meat and also smash bones for the nutritious marrow inside. What’s more, the more animal protein they ate the easier it was to feed their larger brains.
Obviously there were no tool-making classes for almost all of human history, so again such skills and art were all learned simply by active trial-and-error experimentation. Most of the time they probably banged together more stones than fingers, but every once in a while ... Ouch! Damn stones! And what’s more, an excellent experimental tool making art has continued right through all of Paleolithic time, more than 2 million years of it, give or take the 12 days of Christmas or so! As our H. habilis ancestors evolved into H. erectus ones, then Neandertals and our own San ancestors, almost certainly they all continued experimenting with learning tool-making arts. Archeologists dig up their experiments to this day, and even the experiments that failed. Like every other animals, our ancestors too needed to eat, and better tools intelligently helped better satisfy that need. What’s more, it gave those ancestors the confidence to feel nature could be learned about and used to make like better. That feeling rests at the foundation of all sciences and arts today. In fact, for Dewey science itself is an art – the art of testing ideas. When is the last time you realized your ancestors of 2 million years ago began acting like scientists today?
Almost certainly, every tool our native ancestors built was built experimentally. Mere reasoning certainly couldn’t build such tools; actual experimentation could only help them feel such tools were possible, and the more they experimented, the more they opened up a whole new art for experimentation and development. They learned what kinds of stones were best for tool making, and where they could they be found? If some results with one kind of stone weren’t successful, then some experimented with different stone material. In such a trial-and-error way, then, they slowly discovered certain kinds of stone worked better than others to make hunting and working easier and more satisfy-able.
Thus a tool making tradition began growing as they kept experimenting. (Ouch!) The same thing happened in the late 1800s after plastic was discovered. Such learning was felt to our early ancestors, as it almost certainly is to all animals, the most excellent way to satisfy any need and test any meaning. Thus, such a learning method remains the foundation of our present scientific knowledge. Even from the graves they built, Neandertals left evidence of how they experimented with different ideas. Sometimes they tied the body's legs with rope and sometimes they put heavy stone slabs over the body. Why? It probably gave them the feeling they would be safe from frightening nightmares about the person; their spirit would be forced to stay in the grave and not wander around. And of course today anyone can read how even spirit-ideas have been experimented with all through religious history. As Dewey said we know only what we build, whether it’s a tool or a habit-art!
For Dewey, what’s important to see is how our best learning today is still basically an active, constructive, and intelligent experimental art! The more young folks experiment with helpful, law-abiding, and respectful actions, the more they become caring and respectful people. In fact, experimental learning makes each day a kind of adventure, sometimes full of drama and chance discoveries, and sometimes producing surprise humor and of course some (Ouch!) bloodied fingers. As we’ll see in later section on education, and in Book 5’s Educational Models of Excellence, such ideas about intelligent experimental learning will become the core of Dewey’s liberal model of education.
Slowly, ever so slowly, one baby-step at a time, our human ancestors built their useful inner feelings for experimental learning’s art. The challenge to keep practicing that kind of learning art involved their entire body-mind, not just their reasoning, logic, and thinking; it involved muscles and connective tissues used in constructive work, as well as nerves and brain cells to feel experimental excellence. In short, such learning was a holistic event, involving much more than mere feelings and ideas. If it wasn’t, then new feelings would easily be forgotten. Every idea Tom Edison ever thought of also had to be experimentally tested to see its usefulness, and some weren’t. What’s the sense of merely thinking an electric light can be built, and then not taking the time to build one experimentally, even if it took over a year of trial-and-error testing?
In short, today all scientists continue celebrating such excellent active, creative, testing, experimental learning arts! Ben Franklin, for example, didn’t know what results would happen when he put a key on a kite to test his lightning ideas; that too was an experimental test, full of danger and risk; he could've easily been turned into a Franklin-kabob. And as many people have already tragically seen, even space flight today is still highly experimental; space planes can break apart on both takeoffs and landings; no one knows for sure what’ll happen on any mission. In short, as bankers well know, risk can be reduced, but never eliminated.
Thus, with the help of such evidence philosophic detective Dewey began feeling experimental learning is our only learning art. Again, it’s an assumption, but one resting on a massive amount of evidence. If so, then teaching young folks how to keep intelligently experimenting with building helpful and constructive habits ON THEIR OWN becomes the ultimate goal of educational and learning excellence! Liberal educational excellence becomes a process of encouraging everyone to actively become their own best teachers by learning excellent constructive and testing skills and habits. In fact, one of life’s greatest challenges is to become our own best experimental learning artist, and to keep creating objects and services people can safely use to keep making life better. The more such experimentation helps build a more healthful and helpful world, the more excellent learning-artists we become!
What’re The Obvious Deductions, Watson?
So, is it too ‘radical’ and outrageous to say every art and skill our ancestors have built for millions of years, and that we continue building today, is the result of experimental testing? For Dewey not only was it not too radical, it was ‘elementary my dear Watson’! In fact, after seeing how animals and people actually learned what they knew, it made perfect sense, and so he said it was our only learning art. How could it be anything else? Don’t we all live in an ever-changing world, where every day presents us with different challenges to keep satisfying our needs and wants and make life better? And don’t such challenges become delightful only when we teach ourselves to feel them that way? So, if Dewey’s ideas are the best ones about learning, then we have some real evidence every habit-art, every new invention, and every new idea has been built experimentally, every art from stone tools, to native burial arts, to ancient ‘divinely’ inspired gospels, to philosophic models of life and nature. What gives them the feeling of truth is how much they’re practiced! No doubt, many may disagree, but we’ll see later much more evidence for even the Bible's present gospels having evolved experimentally. If so, then even our food, clothing, and sex habits have been learned experimentally, and thus challenging everyone to make them more respectful, safe, and enjoyable.
One major deduction from such a liberal learning model is to begin seeing the idea of truth in a much different way, and that includes all philosophic and religious models of truth as well. Dewey mentions one example from Aristotle’s philosophic work. The idea of animal and plant species were eternal events was very important to moderate thinkers like him; horses, cows, and people would always be horses, cows, and people. As a result, because he pictured them all as eternal and unchanging species, biological science to him was thought to be merely classifying them in their own group. To him no animal or plant Form ever changes or evolves; elephants have always been the way they are and they’ll always be the way they are! To him such ideas finally defeated the liberal sophists who believed both eternal objects and Truth were merely fanciful and wishful ideas. So, he experimented to show them his ideas made sense. He wanted to believe his biological studies helped put animals and plants in their eternal and unchanging places in natures; even slaves had their eternal place in nature. What’s more, such a model of science helped answer the challenge to describe how our world was created. It wasn’t! It too is eternal and will always exist as it now exists.
Those were some of the results of his experimental assumptions about Forms. However, in the 1800s such ideas have been experimentally tested, by men like Charles Darwin, and as a result today many see Aristotle was wrong; changing and evolving, not sameness, is our new modern model of biology, even our own human species, and there’s a great and growing amount of evidence for it, not only biological but genetic as well. Such a new evolving model also gives us hope for curing present disabilities and illnesses with better medical knowledge.
As a result of such experimental testing, millions today are beginning to feel nature as constantly evolving and therefore as both stable and dangerous; Dewey too described it like that. In fact, because everything constantly evolves it’s more intelligent to believe in a very real sense everyone is 'reborn' a little every day. The challenge of philosophic writers like me is merely to help people begin feeling such new deductions and ideas, and encourage them to keep deepening the feeling with their own intelligent experimental actions on a daily basis, like trying vegetable-kabobs instead of dead animal-kabobs.
Even Mr. Philosophic Conservative himself, Plato, has left us some solid evidence for experimental learning in his own dialogues; when one definition created absurd results, then he simply experimented with another one. And as for religious evolution, over 20 Roman Catholic Church councils of bishops have voted democratically on the Truth they wanted their church to teach; democratic might built their model of truth! What’s more, today the idea of allowing gay and lesbian people to have they equal civil and religious rights is yet another example of religious evolution.
No doubt, to some conservatives and moderates, such evolving ideas of truth may feel much too radical; they want their philosophic and religious models to include eternal and unchanging objects and thus feel there exists eternal Truth. However, facts are facts, and such ideas about truth can no longer be seen only in that way; in fact they lack any kind of objective evidence. Much new objective scientific evidence now supports liberal Dewey’s experimental ideas about truth. And if that's true, then isn't it also true for poets, historians, scientists, playwrights, and everyone else, even though many may still believe only one philosophic or religious model of life is right and everyone else is wrong!
Conservatives and moderates have a point about Dewey’s experimental assumption – it can’t be proved to be always true. Merely listing more and more examples of experimental learning can never prove, once and for all time, experimental learning is our strongest and ONLY learning art? No doubt, even the few examples I’ve just described merely helps build a STRONGER case for believing experimental learning is our only learning art; it doesn’t prove the idea absolutely? So what if our modern practices of law, medicine, all the sciences, and even theology itself can now regularly be seen as merely experimental practices! It still doesn’t prove all knowledge can only be experimental? Thus, all such examples only make Dewey’s experimental idea more probably, rather than absolutely True?
No doubt, those are important ideas to note. They can help us feel all such general ideas are really just assumptions. Because such general statements can never be proven completely, they are merely more or less likely, depending of course on how much evidence they have. For Dewey, however, that’s a very important point. There now exists a great deal of evidence for it, and that makes it highly probably! In any case, however, it’s a very useful idea; it helps us deduce many other useful ideas too, as well as judge other philosophic and religious assumptions. For example, spirits exist, and that assumption’s been used to build most all the religious models we have around the world today. However, what objective evidence is there for that assumption? We Deweyan liberals aren’t aware of any. Still, it’s certainly possible some even better learning art will evolve to better know such objects, but until that happens experimental learning remains our only learning art.
More Deductions Can Be Seen
No doubt, the more one talks and acts as if all learning is experimental, the more comfortable and creative the idea can become, and the better equipped one mentally becomes to live life in an always changing world. Creativity is a useful habit for dealing intelligently with life’s changes. For example, there are new ethical challenges best met with intelligent experimental actions. Dewey said what best endures is usually the good done for others, rather than merely focus on increasing one’s own fortune. Still, why merely accept that idea on faith, just because Dewey said it? Experimental learning says some form of verification is necessary if it’s to become more than just another idea. Thus, one result of experimental learning is feeling ALL IDEAS ARE MERELY MENTAL TOOLS TO CREATIVELY EXPERIMENT WITH, rather than being exact reflections of already-existing absolute Truth! Obviously that includes ethical, political, economic, and educational ideas as well! In short, with experimental learning the entire world opens up to any kind of experiment we want, as well as learning what intelligent and routine experimentation feel like.
No doubt, to many conservative and moderate people too that result is quite difficult to accept. Many such people already believe eternal objects exist and can be known with certainty. As Dewey said, the idea of truth as corresponding to something already existing is so built into many peoples’ body-minds, it's difficult to imagine another model of learning, much less practice it. In reality, however, such habits often help preserve useless and unintelligent ideas, like only Christians, Jews, and Muslims should have equal rights and freedoms, and non-Christians, Jews, and Muslims shouldn’t. For us liberals, however, we’re all just people, and so all deserve equal rights and freedoms. In effect, then, assuming such objects exist often prevents people from building a better more equal world for everyone. After all, we’re all just people, right? In short, the art of testing ideas experimentally helps people begin feeling how all people deserve the same rights and freedoms, and how we’re all just trying to get by in a very precarious world. No doubt, experimental learning hasn’t become a common habit for many people, but it’s growing and that’s what’s important.
Progress for equal rights might be difficult, especially in some places, but it’s very possible. For example, in the 1800s the Industrial Revolution often helped create very harsh, stressful, and even inhuman living conditions in many countries. Factory pollution wasn’t regulated and wages were kept as low as possible. But because such social challenges were naturalistic, better solutions could be built experimentally with the help of different idea-tools, like better working conditions, unionizing, and taxes on the wealthy! In other words, if idea-tools about equal rights and acting kinder towards people helped improve the lives of those less fortunate, then such ideas became truthful, and could be used later for solving similar problems in other places, just like a carpenter's hammer can be used for different jobs at different times. In any case, however, using experimental testing to overcome ordinary challenges helps grow the feeling all ideas are just mental tools to be used creatively, rather than merely accepted as eternal reflections of absolute Truth.
Perhaps the feeling that all ideas are mental tools will deepen if we see how dangerous life can be without it. Social intolerance and increased violence has often been the result of people believing only their ideas reflect nature’s eternal and unchanging Truth. To this day many people believe and act as if everyone who doesn’t believe as they believe and act must be wrong, and so shouldn’t be tolerated. As a result, life for many has become even more dangerous than normal! For example, conservative Plato became most intolerant of atheists and non-believers, and even recommended they convert or be killed! Many in the Middle Ages practiced that idea, and even today we see much undemocratic intolerance against gay and lesbian people having equal civil and political rights; far too many people still believe such ideas and habits are just wrong. Decades ago many also felt the same way about Africans and whites marrying; many states even passed laws against it, but today that situation has changed much. After all, we’re all just people, right?
Thus, for Dewey the very idea of absolute Truth is a dangerous idea; it keeps dividing people from feeling how we’re all just people and how all law-abiding people should share the same rights equally, even if they have different ideas and habits. As we’ve seen, people began experimenting with such democratic ideas in ancient Greece, and they caused conservatives like Plato, and moderates like Aristotle to react and build very different models of social excellence.
Today, however, liberal democratic experiments with political and civil rights are becoming more useful and thus more widespread. Dewey simply admitted what he saw: all ideas, whether philosophic or religious are experimental; how else could so many different models of each keep growing and evolving? In his book Human Nature and Conduct he described how such ideas of Truth grow and are energized from our own active habit-arts and actions. For him in fact human habits become what people normally call will-power! The more an idea is practiced, the stronger it becomes.
Another very important idea is deduced from the assumption about experimental learning: our own everyday actions help build all the ideas and feelings we have, even those about philosophic and religious Truth. We all build our characters with our daily actions; the more we practice feeling enjoyment and helpfulness, the more feel enjoyment and helpful. The more Nazis practiced feeling Germans were indeed a master race, the easier it became to begin acting as if it were true. And the more that happened, the more dangerous life became for much of the world. Peru's Inca Indians are another example. The more they acted as if their chief was really a god, the more obedient they became, the less they practiced more intelligent habit-arts, and the more vulnerable they became to being conquered. And of course many religions still practice similar intolerant habit-arts.
Such divisive power lies in our own daily actions, and again, that fact makes education one of the most important institutions of all. The more people are educated to feel all their ideas are merely creative tools useful for making life better, then the less likely they are to elevate, freeze, and fossilize any of them into absolute Truth, and the easier it becomes to keep experimenting with different ideas. In short, we Deweyan liberals are now offering a new and modern challenge to our old conservative and moderate thinking habits, namely to start teaching such creative habits to the next generation. Only within the past few decades have Dewey’s ideas about experimental learning begun painting much different pictures about peoples' ‘truth’, but the educational challenge is on-going. So, to us, what’s important about our philosophies and religions is not their ideas about absolute certainty, but their teaching their followers how to intelligently use experimental ways of learning, producing kind and helpful actions making life better in some way!
Another result from experimental learning is seeing life itself in a very different way. As we’ll see throughout this book, for many thousands of years people believed only their habits were in fact the Truth given to them by god; for centuries they were told such things by their religious and political rulers. No doubt, such ideas helped people feel more hopeful about life itself, but also act more obedient to those with social power and continue neglecting to learn more about the natural world. However, the more people began realizing the world is full of different religious and philosophic models of ‘truth’, the more they were challenged to understand why.
In the 1500s, for example, the more mankind built ships capable of crossing great oceans, the more they saw no one else had the same religious ‘truth’ they did? Many became puzzled? Why would all-powerful and all-loving god allow such a thing? Why would an all-good and true god not allow almost the entire world to become saved and get to heaven? Why wouldn’t an all-powerful god simply make everyone believe in the same ideas and act the same ways, and thus make the world a more peaceful place? Clearly, those became serious questions to many. Liberals like Dewey, however, who no longer practiced spirit-ideas, could simply accept the fact different tribes practice different religious habits, and so have different ideas of truth. As a result, then, their respectful and helpful actions became most important, rather than what they believed.
In other words, nature’s great cultural variety became a serious problem for many conservatives who believed only their truth was absolutely certain. For us Deweyan Experimentalists, however, such natural variety of religious and philosophic models is not even a small problem. For us such variety is completely natural! Why? Simply because all learning is experimental; people around the world have merely experimented with different idea-tools, and so have built a great variety of different habits! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals there should be a great many different models of truth around the world, just as there are a great variety of biological forms around the world! In fact, biologists have discovered variety has been a normal model of life for hundreds of millions of years! In fact, no two animals or people experiment exactly the same way.
Another result deduced from our experimental learning assumption is feeling all ideas are TO BE tested for their reliability and usefulness. In fact, testing ideas has been science’s main work since the 1600s; for Dewey experimental science itself is the art of testing ideas! It’s an art simply because it’s something else humans have created. As a result, modern scientists have kept learning many more reliable and useful naturalistic facts for improving life, rather than merely feeling, like Plato and Aristotle, the Truth already existed and could be known. Thus, we’re now able to safely send people into outer space and create life-saving new medicines. Thanks to our greatly improved liberal schools, homes, and churches, today's children of peasants and slaves are often more confident and better educated than most anyone else who’s ever lived! However, serious and important challenges remain, like, for one, making such educational opportunities available to everyone, and not just a small minority of children in a few countries. In so many ways life has just begun a new and exciting new period.
Another result of experimental learning helps keep us more humble about our own knowledge and beliefs. After all, even scientific laws of nature are not seen as absolute Truth! They’re merely highly reliable ideas. Science’s history itself shows us how true that idea is, even though it may sound too radical to many, but as we’ll see, many of science's ideas have proved to be hogwash -- pardon my un-Kosher pig-Latin! In fact, possibly most of science’s ideas have proved less than reliable and worthwhile. For example, for hundreds of years people were convinced they could turn lead into gold by simply mixing it with other chemicals. Only experimental testing showed how worthless the idea was, unless of course you happened to have some ‘gold-making machines’ you were selling and some people greedy enough to buy them.
Also, for us Deweyan liberals even spirit-ideas have lost their certainty. It’s not because they don’t exist; how can anyone prove a negative statement? Rather it’s because we have no objective evidence to them! How can such ideas become certain when they can’t be tested and thus produce no objective results? Thus, the growing common phrase is you never know. What’s more, we also have evidence of now-dead religions. Today many spirit-ideas like the Norse, Greek, or Roman gods are simply seen as myths. Simply because worshipping them isn’t practiced like it was, people have lost the will power to believe in such ideas. Even Christianity's founder Paul of Tarsus destroyed many 'sacred' ideas about spirits Jews believed were the absolute Truth, like Mosaic dietary and circumcision ‘laws.’ Socially stressful and brutal times like Paul lived in created the need to offer hope for a better life to as many as possible, and so those ideas became useless for salvation, just like buggy-whips became useless after cars were invented. As Paul continued building his new Christian church network he regularly told his growing gentile congregations neither idea was necessary for salvation, and so to Christians those 2 old absolutely certain Jewish ideas became useless myths.
Another deduction from our experimental assumption is feeling how ideas about the best objects to know have changed. For example, for thousands of years conservative philosophers and theologians said the best objects to know are eternal, already existing, and unchanging spirit-objects. Experimental learning challenges us to make a complete 1800 turn and begin seeing the FUTURE RESULTS of our actions as the best objects to know, rather than what merely may or may not already exist. Again, conservative religions and philosophies are famous for studying such objects.
Focusing on future results is another natural result of using experimental learning arts. It helps us keep building better tools and institutions to make life better for everyone, not just a few already obscenely wealthy people. In short, future experimental results are what energize and power an idea’s truth and value; if an idea truly helps us overcome a challenge, then it gains some truth and reliability. In short, truth is something each of us creates with our own experimental actions. The results of actually helping others, for example, like working for equal rights, are what give such actions their meaning and value. Also, producing destructive and brutal results for innocent people are what make those actions dangerous, unintelligent, and unacceptable. After all, even people like Hitler and Stalin were experimental, but the brutal and harmful results of their experiments are what condemn those actions. In short, intelligent experimental learning teaches us to aim for positive and life-affirming future results, helping us become kinder and more helpful here and now! Sometimes the results of our actions are good, sometimes not so good, but in either case results have become our new object of knowledge. No doubt, the idea will take some practice to grow and develop into stronger feelings and will power, but then again, what idea doesn’t?
Another result sees all people as the creators of ALL their ARTS, including scientific, philosophic, ethical, artistic, and religious arts! No doubt, for many that idea is also too radical, but again history itself is full of objective evidence for it, namely all the different habits people have around the world. Not everyone normally sees all truth as a kind of ART people merely create, like an artist creates a painting or sculpture; many still feel their own habits really reflect absolute Truth. Today, however, that’s become yet another great difference between liberal and conservative models of life and learning. Since prehistoric and ancient times people have wanted to believe only their habits reflected absolute Truth, but those ideas are now slowly being re-formed and reconstructed, thanks to modern science and Dewey’s work too. Such work says we are the creators of our knowledge, habits, and will power, and if they’re intelligent then they’re more helpful than destructive.
Kinder Social Results Are Important
As millions are now beginning to feel, since the 1600s the growth of modern science’s experimental learning art has continued discovering more useful and reliable ideas, and creative ways for improving life. As a result, however, learning about spirit-objects has begun growing weaker and weaker. Thus, ideas of religious excellence too are slowly shifting from seeing non-believers as people to conquer, to helping others less fortunate build more intelligent habit-arts. In short, our religions today are becoming more humane and human centered. And the more that excellent habit grows, the larger common ground there is between us liberal Deweyan and all conservative people. After all, we’re all just people, right?
Yet another result is feeling all ethical, political, religious, educational, and economic ideas are subject to testing and experimentation. Even today many conservative followers of Ayn Rand believe unrestricted capitalism is the absolute best economic system, and it must not be challenged by anyone. Based on the very stressful and destructive results of such ideas, we liberals now say all ideas are now subject to testing and experimentation if they don’t contribute to the common good! Unregulated capitalism has been celebrated as the best economic system on earth, and yet its history is full of stressful and feudalistic results, like creating a small obscenely wealthy upper class who often uses its power to make life better for themselves. Thus, it too has been undergoing some experimentation, at least since the early 1900s. No doubt, lately conservatives have had way too much control of the testing, and have thus greatly increased economic stress, but we liberals have certainly not blindly accepted their ideas as absolute truth.
In any case, however, the more all ideas are seen as experimental tools to creatively help build a better world for everyone, the easier it become to keep testing different ethical and political ideas, like building kind habits for helping those less fortunate than ourselves, and sharing our democratic rights equally! The more such idea-tools are intelligently experimented with, the more excellent social results they tend to produce. We’re all just people, right
What The Hell Took So Long? ?
No doubt, conservative habits are not on the side of progress. For thousands of years a feudalistic status quo was to be maintained come hell or high water, and no matter who gets killed. To many conservatives social excellence aimed at dominating other people, even against their will, and justifying their actions with ideas like absolute Truth. However, such ideas are growing weaker these days as more people become better educated and more focused on improving life for everyone.
So, if experimental learning is our only learning art, then what took liberal philosophers, scientists, and theologians so long to realize it? The short answer is that religious and political leaders kept experimenting with routine ideas and habits, telling people they were absolute truth. Both Plato and Aristotle were part of that status quo. Dewey would probably say their own desires to discover nature’s absolute and unchanging truths prevented them from thinking and feeling more democratic ideas like equality and freedom. Obviously they saw how experimental learning is useful for overcoming many daily challenges, but they also wanted to discover what they assumed were nature’s eternal truths; they wanted absolute Truth rather than relative truths, and so they simply dismissed experimental learning as capable of producing the strongest knowledge. And when their ideas were institutionalized by religions like Christianity, then they became widespread all during the Middle Ages. Also, Dewey believed the widespread institution of slavery also helped convince people such truths really existed and could be known by their leaders. In fact, both Plato and Aristotle believed only the lowest level of people, like slaves and artisans, practiced experimental learning.
As a result, most everyone continued believing there were more important things to know merely with the religious learning art of faith – the acceptance of an idea even though there was no objective evidence for it! Even for very educated people like Plato it was almost instinctive to reject experimental learning as the only learning art. After all, contemplative and deductive mathematical reasoning had discovered many seemingly absolutely certain math facts, so why not just keep using such reasoning to learn about spirit-objects? He simply didn’t want to admit even his own reasoning too was experimental, even when that basic assumption began producing many contradictory results. In short, our habits give us only limited freedom, and as long as they keep working, they remain in place. Dewey said it like this: Habits are propulsive; they keep working until a more useful habit is learned. As a result, our habits teach us to see what we want to see, right? Christians, Jews, and Muslims want to keep hearing Christian, Jewish, and Islamic ideas. And so the more people used spirit-ideas to feel a better awaited them, the more they kept ignoring experimentally learning about our natural world, and the more life remained the same.
Down through the centuries mankind has paid a terrible price for maintaining a status quo and consciously neglecting experimental learning arts. For thousands of years most everyone continued living with poverty, ignorance, and disease. Many religious leaders kept encouraged people to believe our world is absolutely true our world is demon-infested and evil, instead of seeing it as a challenge to keep making it better with experimental learning. Since ancient times people normally believed demons lived underground and even in the air; they were often pictured as disease-causing too. And when there were no secular public schools to teach experimental learning and naturalistic ideas, how could such ideas be learned? Again, the result was to keep experimental learning arts as weak and lifeless as a newborn babe. People were encouraged to believe spirits controlled life itself, so why bother trying to improve it? Life itself thus remained an often painful, disease ridden, intolerant, violent, brutal, and deadly place. Such is much of Western civilization’s history under the spell of their ideas reflected the absolute truth about life and nature.
That world began changing after 1600. Today, with all our new experimental tools for answering life's many challenges, and our much better knowledge of history, it’s become much easier to see experimental learning and testing as our strongest and only learning art. It's useful for not only improving our outer world, but our own inner personal habit-arts as well, and to feel life can be intelligently reborn and expanded a little each day. Today even a growing political democratic idea helps people feel our nations themselves are something TO BE MOLDED by citizens, not by the gods, cosmic Fate or Karma, or just power-hungry wealth-seeking politicians and corporate CEOs. In short, today experimental learning has given us many more useful idea-tools to test, and with its help it’s become much easier to see life and its improvement as a continuing and growing challenge, and to keep experimenting intelligently with that challenge.
Thanks to Dewey’s work we liberals can now see a modern liberal model of life has really begun blossoming; perhaps these books too will help speed that process. The more people see and feel such important new challenges, and experimental ways of meeting them, the easier it becomes for each of us to make life even better in some small ways. For example, today more and more people can begin feeling every law-abiding person's rights and freedoms should be equalized. Even throughout ancient democratic Greece that idea was often felt as outright political heresy; slavery helped both Plato and Aristotle reject such democratic equality; both benefitted greatly from the institution. No doubt, some liberal folks began feeling how important such equality was, but they were only a small minority. Liberal Democritus, for example, asked why treat people as slaves and inferiors when we’re all members of the same species? We’re all just people, right?
With these few introductory sketches about learning, then, we can begin seeing and feeling some of the differences between conservative, moderate, and liberal philosophic models of life and nature. Throughout Book 1 we'll continue seeing more about experimental learning, modern anthropology, Behavioral psychology, liberal ethics, and education. Hopefully now the reader has begun feeling a little more comfortable with Dewey’s liberal learning ideas. If such feelings have begun growing, then my goal has been accomplished. However, the challenge to continue that growth continues. For example, what ideas should we experiment with for learning how liberal excellence feels and what its intelligent results should be? It's another modern challenge intelligent people face daily ... and even playfully. How should be use our newfound freedom, and what is psychological excellence itself?
3. PSYCHOLOGICAL EXCELLENCE: HOW PLAYFUL ARE YOU?
From learning excellence we go to our first section on psychological excellence. In reality, of course, all learning is to some degree affected by one’s psychological habits, only logically can they be talked about separately. Why bother? Well, for one thing, psychology has been a philosophic topic since the ancient Greeks. The more conservatives like Plato and moderates like Aristotle wanted to justify their feelings about absolutely certain knowledge, the more they needed to build a model of human psychology capable of learning such knowledge.
More importantly, however, since the early 1900s there’s been another major liberal revolution in psychology with the building of Behavioral models of it. Dewey lived at the beginning of that revolution, and so learning some basics about his model was the main goal in his book Human Nature and Conduct, published in 1921. How may we liberals now look at our body-mind and its excellent actions? With such questions one may also see how psychology leads to ethical questions as well. What really controls many of our actions and ideas, and more importantly, how can we best keep building the psyche we want? Not surprisingly one of Dewey’s most important ideas is building a habit of enjoyable playfulness; about that we Deweyan liberals are quite serious.
Some Serious History About Playfulness
In Paleolithic or Old Stone Age times, more than 100,000 years ago, playfulness's art probably wasn't practiced much by adults; as usual young children kept their monopoly over it. After all, who had time for playfulness when the local saber-toothed tigers and cave bears were mainly looking for another little human-kabob snack? And how playful could you be when another Ice Age storm was helping turn everyone's toes and fingers to a colorful shade of numbing blue? It’s highly doubtful our Neandertal cousins built many snowmen or snowwomen.
About 10,000 years ago, however, with the building of villages, towns, and cities playfulness probably started growing stronger, both as a learning tool and a stress-relieving tool. Healing dances, for example, had helped relieve stress and tension in prehistoric times, becoming more secular oriented in ancient times. After all, human suffering, especially among the lower classes, was a lot more widespread, so humor and playfulness were useful. The great Greek poet Homer describes how peasants' lives were lived in almost continual fear, and slavery too helped justify such fears for both slaves and owners. Slaves really didn’t know who might kill them at any time, and owners didn’t know when the next rebellion would break out. Add to that the fact war was much more common in those days, and it’s easy to see how life remained somber, serious, and fearful. How playful could a person be who was just sold into slavery for not paying debts and then worked to death in, perhaps, some dark and dank mine shaft somewhere, or put to work as a prostitute for 'religious' duties -- which actually happened in some places. Boy, religions sure have evolved haven’t they? Still, even the gospels record how Jesus playfully named 2 of his apostles the Sons of Thunder. However, with the growth of specialized crafts, like weaving, farming, carpentry, and governing it became easier to make one’s work more playful and enjoyable.
In general, however, the mood of the times was generally negative and not playful for most everyone. Even some philosophers could be very negative and depressive. Before Socrates lived one named Heraclitus was called the Weeping Philosopher. He was probably the last person you’d want to play a little racket ball with. Later, in Greece’s Golden Age of the 400s BCE, some liberals like Democritus supposedly said it was better if some people were never even born! Still, he apparently taught himself to playfully enjoy much of life; his nickname was the Laughing Philosopher.
No doubt, in Greece much of life centered around war and training for war, especially in military-dominated Sparta and similar conservative city-states. And of course vicious and brutal warfare between Athens and Sparta helped even Socrates slowly lose his youthful philosophic optimism and playfulness. Before the Peloponnesian War he liked to playfully question others who thought they actually knew something, but as he grew older he saw such teaching just wasn’t working the way he had hoped. People often continued acting selfishly and unintelligently, sometimes even his own close students. In fact, he seemed almost relieved when his last day dawned, judging by Plato's poignant dialogue called Phaedo. In it his last words seem to say he felt all of life itself was a kind of sickness and the god of health should be rewarded when one dies.
No doubt, such feelings were understandable. The last 30 years of Socrates’s life, life in his beloved war-torn Athens had become just too brutal, murderous, and unbearable. Greeks killing Greeks was for many the greatest sin of all, and years before he died political leaders were passing around hemlock to their enemies like Perrier at a Hollywood party. Almost certain Socrates felt death was the best cure for the brutal sickness Athenian life had become.
What’s more, after him his conservative student Plato too recorded some rather contemptuous feelings about playfulness and amusement. For him even the gods shouldn't be pictured as laughing too much; it might inspire people to start enjoying themselves and thus become less religious. Indeed, ancient warfare helped keep playfulness rather weak and rare. Playwright Aristophanes’ work was probably the best example of someone who taught himself to laugh and mock much of life in spite of its horrors; in his play The Clouds he even mocked Socrates. And of course, after him Roman satirists kept that playful art alive and well.
Medieval times too were often just as serious and somber, especially in the religious orders; penance for one’s sins or even thinking about sin could mean something as drastic as disrobing even in winter and throwing oneself onto the nearest thorn bush! Also, if it wasn’t Bubonic plague-carrying rats unloading more infecting fleas onto people, then it might be more witch-burning folks out for another little afternoon human bonfire! Who can be playful when such mobs are gathering wood to burn defenseless men, women, and children at any time? Simply because people lacked reliable and useful knowledge about most everything -- scientific knowledge -- despair and fear were much more common than playfulness and enjoyment; most people outside the aristocracy felt they were at the mercy of just about everything and everyone. Many royal courts had their own dwarf jesters.
Even early modern times in the 1600s and 1700s, most everyone had little encouragement for playfulness; lower classes and slaves were expected to obey those higher up and pain was often the reward if they didn’t. Thus, not only did life itself remain very serious business, but not even many philosophers and theologians helped much. For thousands of years, in fact, they too justified somber, serious, and stoic ethical actions of acceptance, made all the more serious with their grand pronouncements about Eternal Truth. I, for one, would have probably chosen to nap rather than talk with serious and somber people like Jean Rousseau, George Hegel, or Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. Even the German philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer was labeled the Great Pessimist. In short, even in the 1800s life for most everyone, even in the more advanced countries, was often downright depressing, boring, and not playful; imagine the foul odors while even taking a daily walk in any city before modern sewage systems were built, and with factory pollution fouling everyone’s air and endangering their health, not to mention the seriousness of losing one's job and home when economic depressions hit every few decades. What’s there to be playful about in such a world? Meanwhile, upper class folks lived, dressed, and ate well, made much more money than others, and would often relax and play shuffleboard and shuffle-bed on cruises to Europe to buy more paintings and sculptures for their collections.
In short, the upper classes had more opportunities to playfully relieve their stress and tensions, with both better food and more sex. And, of course, natural and normal child playfulness was often rewarded at school with a brisk whipping or knock on the head, then perhaps followed with being called a dolt, dullard, and dunce. Even in the late 1800s, serious, solemn, and depressing religious ideas and rituals remained strong just about everywhere; many couldn’t go through one day without feeling they had sinned in some way. Thus praying for spirit-help was often the only tool they had to lessen their stressfully tense fears. Thank goodness many such habits have been greatly improved in the last century, thanks to the growth of scientific knowledge and a much more humane Behavioral psychology, in which playfulness become a very useful habit-art. Dewey’s work thus helped create a wider field for playfulness and enjoyment to grow in. Eventually he realized such playfulness can make learning anything easier and more enjoyable. The more enjoyable a new habit is made to feel, the sooner it starts working. With his help in building a Behavioral psychological model, people became more educated about playfulness’s importance!
Intelligent Playfulness: A New Modern Challenge
Why hasn’t the habit become more widespread? Our overly conservative public schools no doubt share some of the blame. As they continued growing in the US, playful kinds of learning were almost always ignored; students sat at wooden desks and worked silently learning academic trivia for hours each day, and were still often wacked by the teacher when they stopped even to daydream for a few minutes. As a result, such educational habits kept constructive and enjoyable playfulness to an absolute minimum. Still, parks and recreation spaces for the masses grew tremendously in modern times, so people could take a little vacation on Sundays, maybe drink some wine, laugh a little, enjoy life, watch the children play, and let go of their stressful tensions; in schools, however, playfulness was still largely neglected on a formal level.
No doubt, with the growth of our electronic media like TV in the 1950s, movies, newspapers commix, and the growth of sports, it’s become even easier for parents to practice a little playfulness and encourage more laughter in their children. It was helped by liberal people like Dewey and the Behavioral psychologists. For them playfulness is a very important tool for good health, both physical and mental. As normal children soon learn, playfulness is a great way to let go of useless and frustrating stress-tensions. Often it's either that or grab the nearest hammer and start swinging away until you're too tired to lift it. In his Human Nature and Conduct Dewey says the 2 basic ways of relieving stressful tension is with playfulness or destructive actions. Obviously, based on their much more intelligent results, playfulness has become yet another intelligent sign of psychological excellence.
Dewey’s new active behavioral psychological model of excellence celebrated playfulness as both a useful learning and stress-relieving habit-art. Playfulness makes learning any new habit a more enjoyable event. In fact, the more one can playfully act while starting to break a harmful habit, the faster that habit is weakened. For example, the more fun and play one can act during those times when one usually smokes, the weaker that habit becomes. Thus, child-like play helps make it easier to improve any harmful habit one day at a time. Such playfulness teaches us how to un-learn a habit, even a strong one; the more one plays with it, the weaker it becomes, and the more playfully enjoyable the practice is, the more one wants to practice.
For Behaviorists like Dewey, all our habits can be divided into 4 basic kinds: weak, excessive, unhealthful, and healthful. What’s more, all of them can be improved with playful practice. After all, as healthy children teach us, it’s much more enjoyable to learn anything playfully, and to make a game of learning. Parents often tell their children to go out and play, but often don’t realize how seriously they take the playful actions; they’re educational too, often teaching social and organizational skills. So, a rather modern challenge for parents is to keep encouraging such playfulness all through the pre-teen and teenage years, so the habit becomes a strong part of their will-power. It becomes easier to playfully learn new idea-tools, and how they can be used in their daily lives. Is there any better kind of education than that?
In short, playfulness's habit-art has become another important sign of psychological excellence. Playfulness, even if it’s making funny faces and thinking of a new joke, can help us keep enjoying our work here and now, rather than slowly becoming so tense we literally start aching all over. And the habit-art can be brought to a verbal level of awareness when children are told they’re being taught how to make learning fun and enjoyable. In fact, playfulness is a great way to see what a child’s natural abilities and desires are; many healthy children under 10 or 11 haven’t yet learned to fear being tricked by adults, and so normally just say what they’re thinking.
Such ideas about playfulness help encourage those who want to know about liberal psychological kinds of learning excellence, and they can be easily tested on a daily basis. For example, how many students learn to playfully reward themselves after they take a break from studying; even a healthful candy bar or relaxing game of ping pong can act like a refreshing and enjoyable reward. Who can’t set aside 10 or 15 minutes every day just for a little playfulness, both mental and physical playfulness? And then, when that time becomes comfortable and well-used, a person can start lengthening the time and keep it growing, eventually even making study itself a playful event. Merely building the habit of smiling and feeling how lucky we still are to be alive is a good first step; over the years it's slowly become much more important in my life too. In short, we Deweyan liberals say learning to make one’s work playfully enjoyable is definitely worth the effort.
Here’s another simple example of limerick playfulness I wrote while writing this book; it’s from what I call my gonzo-limerick file.
A man with a problem and no sense of sin
Wondered how to act for playfulness to win,
His ignorance he masked,
Then he finally asked
Why not just let the experiment begin?
Sounds like it came from our Ben Franklin files. In the 1700s America’s first great liberal realized how important it was to experiment with having a little fun in life, rather than taking everything so seriously, like many religious Puritans did in his day; to them devils were everywhere. Writing his Poor Richard's Almanac was for him a chance to play with many kinds of different ideas, just like our comic writers do today. Such habits can in fact be a great help to those who want to make their lives more enjoyable and less stressful. At any rate, experimenting with the art of playfulness, and then slowly building it into a will-power strong habit-art, might produce some interesting and even unexpected results, both in and outside our self. After all, playfulness is an art useful on a daily basis, wherever you are and whatever work you have. For example, US history can become more playfully enjoyable with a little playful humor.
Have you ever noticed how much better life has become for more Americans these days? During the Great Depression in the 1930s millions of homeless people often used newspapers for blankets at night; today, however, many people actually read newspapers! That’s progress, right? Those Depression times were certainly tough for most everyone. Imagine billionaire John Rockefeller struggling to use the same car 2 weeks in a row! Once a car’s ashtray gets soiled it’s just not the same, is it? And who can forget what those wild and crazy Russians did in the 1950s? They were the first to send a dog into space. I heard radically conservative anti-Communist Sen. Joe McCarthy applied for the job but was turned down; the dog had more respect, tolerance, and better manners.
Besides making it easier to keep learning about creatively overcoming our daily challenges, playfulness can also help build some other useful habit-arts; as always, the power to build such habits lies in our own muscles! The more we practice and reward our self, the faster they’re learned. For one thing, playfulness can help people become more creatively playful about ourselves, and not take ourselves too seriously. In fact, such creativity itself is a kind of mental playfulness, as our great humorists teach us. One famous humorist calling himself Rodney Dangerfield once wrote “I’m not a sexy guy. I went to a hooker. I dropped my pants. She dropped her price.” In fact, taking our self too seriously is one of the most dangerous habits of all; the Bible says it like this – pride goes before the fall. What a shame church leaders often didn’t actually practice the habit.
Such playfulness, especially about our self, can also help us let go of our daily tensions and frustrations more easily and enjoyably. What’s more, perhaps a good time to practice such humor is just before we start working to solve some problem. For example, suppose we’re challenged to put on our socks in the morning, then before we start we can play as if they're a wild animal and we're stalking them, pretending they’re afraid to go over our feet and they’re trying to run away. Is there any better way to start building a playful habit for all our daily challenges than with playfulness like that? Clearly, the more we do, the more we become a creative artist in playfulness?
As our comedians and many children can teach us, playfulness involves one’s entire body-mind; while talking to your reluctant socks you can even pretend to strangle them. After all, strangling socks is much better than strangling someone else who doesn’t deserve it. In any case, such playfulness now and then is an excellent way to make life more enjoyable, creative, and educational. Is playfulness really that powerful? Again, the more we practice it, the stronger it becomes. For years I've been playing with Dewey's ideas and slowly they helped build this book. What’s more, such playfulness helped make my life much more meaningful, worthwhile, and educational as well. Playing with a writing art also made my life more fun and enjoyable. Who really knows what results will happen until you start playing with playfulness? The new Behavioral psychology says one’s actions are what form one’s body-mind; old conservative psychologies like Plato’s said we’re all just the puppets of the gods. We liberal Deweyans have liberated ourselves from all such psychological models.
The more playfully we act, the more life itself becomes a creative adventure, rather than the same old routine. And the more intelligent our playfulness is, the better chance we have of making life a little better for both our self and others. Helping others feel what the art of playful excellence is like just might help them become a little better prepared to go out into their world and enjoy it a little more, rather than getting stomped on by all those greedy saber-toothed ‘tigers’ still out there waiting to feast on others’ bank accounts! Stranger things have happened, haven't they?
Is playfulness really a necessary habit-art? It is if you want to test Dewey’s psychological ideas of excellence. Why not test the idea playfulness makes learning anything more enjoyable, even improving any weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. The more one, say, learns to play creatively with cigarettes, the less powerful their smoking habit can become. Considering mankind’s general history of kill or be killed, or how to avoid catching this week’s new fatal disease, creative playfulness just might make life a little more bearable and productive.
Today, we Deweyan liberals see intelligent and constructive playfulness as a sign of excellent mental health. Playfulness, especially when it’s helpful to others, is perhaps the best antidote to life’s stressfully frustrating and destructive poisons. No doubt today millions agree. Our world has become much more playful in the last 100 years alone, with the growth of recreation centers, parks, and exercise opportunities like marathons, as well as the growth of professional sports. Who even thought tiddlywinks would ever be as much fun as they can be?
Since ancient times Greek philosophers like Aristotle said happiness is an important part of personal excellence. The problem was he defined it so narrowly that almost no one could achieve it; for him a god-like contemplation was the highest form of happiness, and only philosophers could best feel it. Since the 1800s, however, such narrow models of excellence have been weakening and becoming more democratically available to everyone. As we'll see in Book 4's Modern Pictures of Excellence, a liberal British philosophic 'radical' movement called Utilitarianism said even governments should use social happiness as a natural test for their laws! If a law increases peoples’ happiness, then it’s a good law. A liberal do-gooder named Jeremy Bentham helped create the movement, even spending much of his personal fortune on making Britain’s prisons and mental hospitals much more humane and less painful. He wanted to show how enjoyment could be used to produce better personal, social, and political results. In fact, he was so playful he paid to have himself embalmed after he died so he could still be wheeled into his philosophy meetings! That's what I call being playful with the idea of death. Next time you're in London why not say hello for me, although the conversation may be just a bit one sided!
What’s more, even philosophy too may be seen as a creative art of word-playfulness. For example, have you noticed how easily some ordinary words can help us think wrongly? Consider the phrase 'mental health', but is 'mental health' ever separate from 'bodily health'? For Dewey of course the mental and physical are always organically intertwined and inseparable all through life. So, thinking they're really separate objects like minds and bodies is another trick our words can play on us! Keep using the word 'mind' or ‘mental’ long enough and you can easily be tricked into feeling it's a separate thing and object different from the body. In fact, both Plato and Aristotle felt at least some part of the human psyche was completely different from the body. Later on Christians called it the spirit-soul. But Dewey's naturalistic playfulness reminds us 'mental’ health is best demonstrated with body-mind playfulness! The more one acts playfully, the more one thinks playfully!
How about actively playing with some Zen Buddhist-kinds of questions? What's the sound of one healthy mind thinking? What were my BODY-MIND actions before I was born? What’s the taste of an imaginatively invented joke? Not knowing how to slowly relax and playfully answer such questions makes it more difficult to let go of our excessive muscle tension-frustrations, thus increasing the need for drugs like alcohol and tranquilizers, merely to feel more relaxed. Currently, old laws against using marijuana to relax are being overturned. To us Deweyans, however, building a playful habit helps free us from all such dependence, and any of their unhealthful side effects. It then becomes much easier to answer questions like what is the sound of one person dancing by actually dancing playfully! What’s the smell of one eye smiling? One eye smiling!
Teaching our self the habit of playfulness, one day at a time, is learning the art of playing constructively with our ideas and actions. What's the sound of one life playfully improving? What's the sound of seeing life’s funny side? I was so poor I couldn’t even get a loan from a church mouse. In fact, just like any habit-art, we can teach our self such playful arts with playful actions; all such power is in our own muscles. Then, once it begins growing we can keep refining, enhancing, and improving the art all through life! It will never be exactly the same 2 days in a row. Such new psychological results are yet more samples of Dewey's model of Behavioral excellence.
Again, it should be remembered, playfulness is also very useful as an educational tool, although you might get a negative reaction from many public school teachers who believe education means conditioning children as soon as possible to take their trivial book assignments seriously day after day, year after year, even though many already know most all of it is useless in the adult world.
Not only in school, but in the real world, playfulness makes learning to improve our character habits easier and more fun. Because we're social creatures we can keep learning about playfulness just by watching others, and then practicing ourselves. In short, don’t just tell me about playfulness, demonstrate it too! Playfulness is another natural antidote to all of life's somber seriousness and routine dullness? How many of our own institutions could act much more playfully civilized, like the business, educational, religious, home, and even military communities? Many people at sporting events already celebrate the art of intelligent playfulness. More and more on TV we see fans playing creatively and harmlessly with face painting and dressing up like the local team's totem -- Bears, Colts, Tigers, Angels and so on. Who knows where it'll all end? One day even 'crazy' soccer fans might learn how to playfully celebrate more intelligently rather than sometimes trampling others to death; hope springs eternally, doesn’t it? And when will our serious-looking business-suited community start encouraging their employees to dress like their favorite animal even one day a year? I mean is it really necessary for businesspeople to suffer on hot summer days while wearing those stuffy and uncomfortable dark business suits? Say, I wonder, is there really a deodorant and necktie conspiracy going on.
Folks, we Deweyan liberals say it’s high time for playful people of the world to UNITE, and throw off all the stifling forms of seriousness we still practice, especially trying to dominate others with weapons and killing! For us liberals it’s become a sign of adolescent bullying, and should be confronted wherever possible, and with force if necessary. One of the only things we should be more serious about is playfulness, sexual playfulness included with the partner or partners of our choice, as long as it’s safe and respectful! For example, I brought along my magnifying glass in case you’d like to see my little love muscle. No doubt, religious and military institutions too could help more people learn how constructively creative playfulness feels. In fact, the more seriously life is treated, the easier it becomes to keep killing and bombing people who are simply peacefully acting differently from us. The Vietnam War is perhaps the worst example of that idea.
In how many places around the world do millions of people still take seriously obeying those who order them to act brutally violent towards peaceful people? How much are those actions seriously equated with excellent manhood and patriotic love, when they mostly make it easier for already wealthy people to become obscenely wealthy? In what Fatherland or Motherland or Uncleland aren't the highest and most honorable feelings seriously still attached to preserving such destructive habits? Seriousness about such actions is one of the main reasons wars and petty discrimination still exist today. Such seriousness helps perpetuate personal numbness and perhaps even tragedy when they help motivate destructive actions. Would it hurt if our religions too encouraged more playfulness for helping others less fortunate? Indeed, many religious people around the world still seem welded and fused to violent habit-arts of defending their models of truth, rather than practicing constructive playfulness. September 11, 2001 is merely one modern example. It seems many of our religions and for-profit corporations too are still a long way from playfully celebrating the art of helping others improve their lives. Isn’t it time such playfulness was taken more seriously, especially in our schools and businesses, where young body-minds are still very much forming?
What's the problem with building such institutions? After all, playfully enjoying life without drugs is just like any other habit-art! All it takes is a little daily experimentally playful practice! Where are the public school classes studying humor and playfulness on a continuing basis all through public education? No doubt, such schools and institutions will evolve one small baby-step at a time, but that they should evolve is now beyond question to us Deweyan liberals. In fact, if you wish you may even call it a new psychological law of human nature – peaceful and harmless playfulness is healthy!
Within each of us already lives the natural power to play with and learn such healthy life-improving habit-arts. And if that’s true, then within the arts of excellent education itself lies the key for molding and forming such power in the next generation. Parents are no doubt important in that learning process, but so are our public schools. After all, won't intelligent playfulness produce much better results than old military habits like dominance-subservience, dull and routine business arts, and intolerant religious hatred against all of nature's peaceful ‘heretics and infidels’? Why not let the experiment begin? The world is becoming so over-populated, destructive actions will harm even greater numbers of people; stopping such people has also become one of modern life’s new challenges. In fact, playfully neutralizing such people is not only a part of character excellence, but also the way to a more highly civilized plateau called peace! You all know what peace is, don’t you? It’s when people become free to feel how life is working, and then start working to make it even better. In his 1916 book Democracy and Education, Dewey put the need for educational playfulness like this:
"If education does not afford opportunity for wholesome recreation and train the capacity for seeking and finding it, then suppressed instincts (and psychic impulses) find all sorts of illicit outlets, sometimes overt, sometimes confined to indulgence of the imagination. Education has no more serious responsibility than making adequate provision for enjoyment of re-creative leisure; not only for the sake of immediate health, but still more if possible for the sake of its lasting effects upon habits of mind. Art is again the answer to this demand." (213)
Each of us has their own way of playing with words, don't we? It should be noted, however, art to Dewey is any constructive building, including carpentry, clothes making, food prep, healthcare work, and police and fire prevention work. They, and many other activities like scientific research and computer programming, are all human arts capable of playfulness.
4. MORE ABOUT LEARNING EXCELLENCE
We’re back to experimental learning in this section to mention a few more of Dewey’s ideas about it, review some ideas of it, and thus color in his liberal picture of it. First of all, why is experimental learning our strongest learning art? In a nutshell, it’s forward-looking, and thus gives us more control of the present while focusing on future results; it thus gives us more power to keep improving our lives here and now. In short, experimental learning helps us answer all of life’s challenging frustrations with intelligent actions here and now. Experimental learning also makes it much easier to keep learning how nature actually works, including human nature, rather than merely accept life the way it is.
For example, one of life’s continuing challenges is to keep learning about the new invention-tools science is making possible, and especially the ones useful to us. Practicing intelligently with them promotes learning excellence. Learning how to use them intelligently for our own needs and wants requires new sets of coordinated muscles -- new habits -- and they’re best learned experimentally, one step at a time. Until those new habits are built, old ones may feel comfortable, but sometimes they’re unable to keep improving our lives. Without that freedom to learn intelligent kinds of practice and a new learning art, life can remain a series of tense frustrations, and perhaps lead to what's called a nervous breakdown -- an inability to accomplish even minor tasks. History has some examples of such events, often linked to forcing children to learn what they have little desire or interest in learning. Having the freedom to playfully experimental with different skills and knowledge can lessen those dangers, making relaxation easier and more tension-free, unless of course you really need another nervous breakdown? And so this section again focuses on how we can know when our learning is excellent and intelligent, and what’s the best way to teach our self the art? First, a little review.
If Dewey's right, we're certainly not the only creatures who act intelligently, that is, learn to satisfy our needs and wants. If we were we'd be the only creatures alive! So, perhaps the best place to start is coloring in the idea of intelligence. What does Dewey mean by acting intelligently? Examples are perhaps the best way to illustrate that idea.
Throughout these pages, we’ll see again and again how simple and practical many of Dewey's ideas are, and with them he also shows how simple and practical philosophy itself can be; it needn’t be overly wordy, logically complex, and difficult to understand, as most philosophers have made it down through history.
For example, every life-form needs to act intelligently; they need to teach themselves how to SATISFY their needs and wants experimentally, with trial-and-error actions; as that happens they act intelligently! What’s difficult to understand with that idea? Obviously that art has been around for billions of years already! When any animal or plant learns to satisfy its needs and wants it acts intelligently! When a plant moves to get more sunlight, it acts intelligently. When worms, insects, and people learn to satisfy their food needs with their actions, then they all act intelligently! And the same applies to their safety and reproductive needs. So, for Dewey, intelligent actions merely help satisfy biological-psychological needs and wants. If someone today uses spirit-ideas to satisfy a psychological need to believe in an afterlife, then they act intelligently, and when they test the idea for its helpful and constructive results, then such knowledge becomes excellent. After all, people like Hitler and Stalin acted intelligently, but who would say they also acted excellently?
The great advantage of we humans, however, is being able to better see the results of our own actions, and thus work to lessen their harmful and destructive results, and increase their healthful ones. Obviously anyone can test such ideas in their daily lives. After all, experimental learning remains basically a trial-and-error art of testing ideas for their healthful and constructive results; even the seemingly best plans need to be tested to see their actual results. Thus, it’s fairly easy to see how, if small children don’t get food they’ll keep trying as long as they can. Usually they’ll just keep crying if they’re very young, but if they’re older they might try solving the problem differently. If their food-needs don’t get satisfied in one place they’ll often act intelligently and look somewhere else. Is that any different than what doctors, lawyers, and even Indian chiefs do in their lives? Around the house folks will usually keep looking – experimentally -- in different places to find, say, their eyeglasses, sometimes even discovering they’re already on their head. How many times has someone looked for the evening paper, only to find out the dog is already sleeping on it?
What about such examples is difficult to understand? Where such actions become intelligent is first thinking before acting, so actions become less trial-and-error and more directed to consciously testing the best ideas. For example, someone doesn’t know where their keys are, so instead of just blindly searching here and there, they first try to remember where they put them, and then test that idea. Such healthful and constructive goal-directed actions are what we Deweyan liberals mean by intelligence. Beating a child or wife, or ignoring the problem by indulging in drugs simply because you can’t find your keys is definitely not what we mean by intelligent experimentation.
Thus, it’s fairly easy to see how to practice intelligent experimental learning, and even make it more excellent by practicing it with some enjoyment and humor: where are you keys; come out, come out wherever you are? Those useful learning skills and habits are useful in so many ways it’s practically impossible to list all of them.
In any case, however, what’s most important is to KEEP EXPERIMENTING with those learning skills; they help make learning more enjoyable and less frustrating. After all, we’re all in the same boat, so to speak; even kings and presidents can only experiment to overcome their challenges. For anyone who’s redd about the Vietnam War tragedy, President Lyndon Johnson kept experimenting with ideas to end the war, but none of them worked the way he wanted them to work; all of their results proved unsatisfying to him or the Vietnamese. Dewey might say he simply didn’t act intelligently enough! He could have said he made a big mistake in judging the Vietnamese will-to-independence, but he felt that just wasn’t an option for him; its possible results weren’t acceptable. Thus, he accepted the results of his ideas and refused to run for president again. Liberals like myself were greatly relieved, at least until we learned President Nixon was even more hard-hearted than Johnson. The results of his actions produced even more death and destruction than before.
Social Results Count Too
Such examples show excellent learning does more than merely satisfy one's personal needs and wants. Social results are important too while practicing experimental learning. As a result, learning becomes excellent when its results are not only personally useful, but helpful to others as well. For example, when termites satisfy their food-needs by eating away someone’s house, they act intelligently. But the results to others are also important. When the house is fumigated, it’s obvious their intelligence wasn’t very deep. They didn't see clearly some of the future social results and how dangerous their actions were. So again, the ability to see the future helpful and constructive results of our actions can make our intelligent actions more excellent than any other creature. If we didn’t, global warming would probably be fatal to most people. German Nazis too weren’t very far-sighted. They simply kept taking over other countries to satisfy its need for conquest, control, and more land, but how excellent were those actions when the social results of their actions y helped destroy much of their own country and its people? In short, excellent experimental learning is much more constructive than destructive, and life-affirming rather than life-destroying. True, some life-form is destroyed to satisfy another creatures food needs, but learning to minimize such destruction is what civilization is all about, right?
Poetically, those who teach themselves experimental excellence learn the art of dancing intelligently with their desires. As we grow older and see how others around us react to our actions, we become better at what’s called harmonizing our self-centered desires. Young folks may desire to party with their friends, but also pass tomorrow’s math test, so intelligent folks may have a math party first, and then perhaps a dance party afterwards. Other people will desire that mouth-watering piece of chocolate cake here and now, but also desire to stay on their low-calorie diet, so they’ll intelligently eat a piece of fat-free cake or just a bite of cake, thus harmonizing their often opposing desires. In fact, that harmonizing art is one of life continuing challenges. In fact, the idea goes back to Plato in ancient Athens. For him too, intelligent ethical actions involve the art of harmonizing our conflicting and opposed desires. However, the problem for us Deweyan liberals is his idea of excellent desires helped produce rather destructive social results. Being a pious conservative he felt people should learn about spirit-ideas most of all, and thus not desire to learn experimentally about our natural world – the best source of real improvement here and now. In fact, the social results of such conservative experimental learning helped encourage the building of Western civilization’s entire medieval period, lasting thousands of years! Such results to us are what condemn those ideas, and they began weakening when the best object of knowledge shifted from desiring to know about spirit-objects to desiring to know about our natural world, a world Plato said could produce on probable knowledge, not absolute certainty! That social transformation continues to this day, as more people are educated to rely on their own skills and knowledge rather than spirit-knowledge. We might think chocolate cake is a great way to keep satisfying our food needs, but the long-range results of such comfort-foods will eventually make them less excellent than a more nourishing salad or soup. After all, some 60 million years of primate evolution, often during times of food scarcity, has helped build human digestive systems capable of living on not much food. To feel that natural fact, respect it, and learn to act accordingly is yet another sign of intelligence. Like every other animal on our earth, humans too have their natural limits.
Said simply, for us Deweyan liberals continued healthy growth, both personal and social, is the ultimate aim of learning excellence! It doesn’t mean being friendly with everyone, but it does mean respecting others’ peaceful and constructive actions, no matter what they might look like physically. And so, what helps determine health is, you guessed it, the intelligently constructive results of our experimental actions; are we harmonizing our desires intelligently?
Having some reliable knowledge about such results helps us make better choices here and now, and thus better harmonize our desires with our natural limits -- the ultimate goal of intelligent experimentation. Thus, perhaps the best news is this: the more we keep playfully making such intelligent choices, the stronger and more healthful we become. Exercise is another important human need; the less we exercise, the more helpless we become. For millions of years our primate ancestors were active creatures; they actively used their muscles on a daily basis, and so become more healthful. But just because we have better tools than any other animals doesn’t mean we still don’t need to exercise on a daily basis. In fact, muscle health is necessary for body-mind health. Daily exercise is a human need, and the more we neglect to practice it, the more unhealthful life becomes, especially when eating unhealthful foods becomes a habit too.
In short, the more we learn about our human nature itself, and how to harmonize its needs with our other desires, the easier it becomes to stay healthy, rather than merely act the way our parents acted and practicing their unhealthful habits as well. The more we feel a love for our self as part of the human species, as though it’s the most important possession we have, then the easier it becomes to pass through row after row of so-called 'junk' food in the grocery store until we get to those marvelously nutritious fruits, vegetables, whole grain foods, and seeds and nuts. Their results often promote a healthy body-mind.
Building Excellent Habit-Arts Takes Some Time
That idea too has already been mentioned earlier, so what else is new? However, it’s one of life’s most important ideas, and so it bears expanding. For example, do you realize how many years it took you to build your present diet or exercise habits? Five, ten, twenty years? If so, then why feel such powerful habits can be reconstructed and reformed in a day or even a year? Such unrealistic and overly optimistic ideas show a lack of real human nature. HABITS ARE PROPULSIVE! That’s Dewey’s phrase about a very important part of human nature. How many times have you done the same ol’ thing even when you wanted to do something else? It’s commonly called the force of habit. Have many times have you tried to quit smoking or drinking alcohol and failed? No doubt, all habits can be improved, but it’s best to go about the job intelligently, right? To expect any habit can be improved all at once, in a matter of days, is simply unrealistic and naïve. So-called New Year’s Resolutions are perhaps a modern result of prehistoric and ancient magical thinking.
So, how can we intelligently start improving the habits we want changed and improved? Well, like all intelligent actions, building a plan of action can be useful! How will we attack, say, an unhealthful diet habit? Where will we start? Is it best to try changing all our eating habits at once, or rather one meal at a time, say, breakfast? What kinds of healthful foods will you have this morning, how much will you enjoy them, how playful can you make eating those different goods, how many calories should there be, how will you reward yourself if you accomplish your goal, and perhaps most important of all, how fast can you relax when you’re tense and want more unhealthful foods? Aren’t such questions an important part of any intelligent diet plan? How much encouragement will I need from others, or can I feel good about accomplishing my goal on my own? Can I really keep having my cake and eating it too, or should I have some alligator kabobs instead? Now who says liberal philosophy can’t be fun and enjoyable, I mean besides all those conservatives and moderates out there?
No doubt, many people may feel such ideas have nothing to do with philosophy; they’re just commonsense thinking. After all, philosophy is only about answering life’s grand questions, like does god exist, is there an afterlife, and other unanswerable questions like how many angels can sit on the head of a pin and are there devils? For centuries conservative Christian philosophers like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas said such questions were important. For us Deweyan liberals, however, it’s more intelligent to ask how much chocolate, fried food, and sugar is too much, and when’s the best time to spend five minutes with healthy exercise? In short, to us liberals such conservative questions are merely a distraction from building more healthful habits here and now, and not believing only our ideas are absolute Truth. Because everyone will build their own healthy habits, philosophy remains one of life’s living arts.
As we’ll see a little later, even in ancient Greece liberal-minded practical Sophists used their philosophic ideas to help people focus on their daily challenges as excellently as they could. They helped people practice useful new skills like talking intelligently in courts of law, so they could better defend themselves and also participate intelligently in voting and politics. New democratic systems of government created the need for such new habits. Many liberal sophists realized life’s so-called grand questions can only be answered after death, if they can be answered at all, and so why not teach others to act as excellently as they can here and now, and answer those others questions when they get there? As long as we live in our ever-changing natural world, those kinds of useful challenges are the most important to playfully experiment with. Dewey just simply kept that liberal tradition as alive and growing as he possibly could; perhaps his greatest weakness, however, was to use many of philosophy’s technical and abstract ideas, and thus make it difficult for ordinary people to understand what he was saying. His abstract vocabulary was large indeed. Despite that, however, once a challenge is accepted, then what’s important is attacking it as intelligently as possible; if one plan of attack doesn’t work, then simply make another plan and test its ideas too. At first some people may plan to improve an excessive habit by themselves, and then when that plan doesn’t work they may include the idea of a support group. Such practical kinds of plan-making helped Dewey realize life in an always changing world is itself a series of experiments, so why not learn how to making them as intelligent as possible? Either that or keep eating more deep-fried alligator-kabobs. Now who says philosophy isn’t fun?
A Little Ancient Philosophy Review
As we’ve already begun seeing, such liberal practical models of learning-excellence are quite different from those built by conservative people like Plato, and even from moderates like Aristotle. No doubt, the most important differences center around both the learning method and the objects studied. Both of them felt only a relatively small class of people had the ability for learning excellence, that is, to contemplate eternal objects and thus learn nature’s absolute Truth. For Plato and Aristotle, only contemplative kinds of reasoning were excellent; only it could reveal what nature’s eternally unchanging objects were like! How could absolutely certain mathematical or biological Truths be known with mere experimentation? Only with our reasoning could we mentally behold and grasp such Truth in all its glory and power. For liberal Dewey, however, such models of learning excellence are based on assumptions no longer acceptable in an always-changing nature. As a result, for liberal Dewey who celebrated democracy and equal rights, all law-abiding people should be educated to practice such experimental learning; for un-democratic Plato and Aristotle only a small educated minority should have political power.
Secondly, the objects of learning for both Plato and Aristotle differed radically from liberals like Dewey and the Sophists. As we’ve already seen, Plato and Aristotle merely assumed eternal and unchanging objects existed, and so speaking poetically again, they wanted to have their ‘certainty’ cake and eat it too. To make such a cake Plato, for example, assumed completely unchanging spirit-objects already existed, like the idea of Beauty, for example. Only knowing it could produce excellence beauty, rather than merely trial-and-error experimentation to reveal everyone’s potential beauty.
What’s more, once you really knew such objects, then you could automatically become beautiful or know what an animal’s eternal nature was. For Plato if someone used their reason to learn the eternal Spirit-Idea of Beauty, then their knowledge was excellent. No doubt, today such ideas sound strange, but millions of people today continue believing such ideas of learning excellence. Millions today believe only by knowing Spirit-Objects can we lead excellent lives and thus prepare our self for the life after this. For Dewey, however, it’s yet another example of how much will-power there was in Plato and Aristotle’s own habit-arts, and in the millions who still practice those habits.
In some ways Plato’s moderate student Aristotle baked a different kind of learning cake; he experimented with adding our senses to the batter as well as making the eternal objects of knowledge more naturalistic. For him excellent knowing was based not on spirit-ideas, but on eternal and unchanging natural Forms within most everything. If we’ve contemplated what he called mankind’s Final Form, and grasped what it is, then we can know what true human excellence was and merely go about practicing it; for him that excellence was again contemplating nature’s eternally unchanging objects. To him it was the most god-like form of learning. After so many sense-experiences such Forms begin growing in us. In short, each of us is a very competent spectator of such Forms, and so Dewey called his model of learning excellence a ‘spectator model of learning’.
In any case, however, to make such learning possible Aristotle also assumed within each of us is an unerring mental faculty he called intuition. It sees and beholds Forms with absolutely certainty. For example, when he sees a red apple on a table it tells him it’s certain that’s a red apple; there’s no need to experiment any more with the idea. And because such Forms like red and apple are unchanging and eternally the same, his absolutely certain knowledge ‘cake’ not only could be known, but eaten too. As we’ll see, since ancient times it was basically such conservative and moderate philosophers whose grand and complex theories about learning excellence continued justifying a religious status quo; it’s ideas were absolutely certain and so everyone should believe them. In reality, however, all such models continued deflecting peoples’ all-important attention away from studying everyday events, learning their causes, and using the knowledge to keep making life better for everyone, not just a few at the economic ladder’s top. Such habits thus continued convincing people such objects existed and they were the best objects to know. For liberals like Dewey, however, such models of learning excellence were merely 2 examples of philosophic art, rather than useful and reliable ways of learning to keep improving life for all law-abiding people, whether they’re rich or poor. After all, there was no objective evidence for such objects or learning faculties, so why believe them? In general, then, for us liberal Deweyans both Plato and Aristotle gave us merely their own models of learning, and they were often used to make people feel their obedience and acceptance were right, rather than being merely 2 models of philosophic art.
Dewey’s Model of Learning Excellence
Both those models of learning excellence became more easily challenged with the growth of modern experimental science, and its much more reliable and useful ideas and knowledge. Eventually, for Dewey what’s excellent knowledge is not telling our self we’re absolutely certain that’s a red apple on the table, but teaching our self experimentally how to grow better apples and more of them without poisoning our earth and keeping as many people in poverty as we can while selling our apples! In short, experimental learning opened up an entirely new universe of humane possibilities and options, including better business practices.
Liberal learning excellence thus became the art of testing new ideas, to make sure they were useful and reliable to as many people as possible. In such a more democratic learning model is always capable of growing and expanding its meanings of objects by looking at the possible results of our actions before acting. Serious acts of law breaking, for example, can cause us to lose control of our freedom, like losing time and money paying for them. Also, the more we break the law, the more we endanger our freedom and corrupt our character by building such habits. Such RESULTS are what make the idea of disrespecting just laws far from excellent, unless of course innocent human life is endangered or justice is needed. Socrates too respected Athens' laws and refused to break them, but he thought they came from the gods rather than from people, and so for him breaking the law made us vulnerable to revenge from the gods.
Thus, Dewey’s new liberal model of learning excellence offers us many new learning challenges. For example, what’s the best way to test our plan to make life better here and now? How will it help myself and others? What habit-arts are best to practice? How good is my testing plan for learning them, and if it isn’t, how can I make it better? What constructive and enjoyable results might such habits produce? How can I better arrange my present living conditions to help encourage what I want to learn about? Which model of learning excellence feels best, conservative, moderate, or liberal? Am I merely aiming to satisfy myself, or am I also aiming to help others? How helpful to others will my testing plan be? Should I just relax and skip the caloric cake and have some more oranges and papaya?
Such practical and useful kinds of questions are, no doubt, much older than ancient times. As we’ll see more clearly in Book 2: Native Models of Excellence, such constructively excellent habit-arts have almost certainly been growing over the last 100,000 years of human evolution. No doubt, the arts of talking and asking such questions grew slowly at first, but as our more advanced San ancestors continued spreading out over the earth about 60,000 years ago, they advanced such practical kinds of learning aiming to keep making life better; what else is liberal learning excellence besides that? For example, their intelligent questions helped guide and focus their practical actions onto experimentally building a vast number of more helpful natural tools, both physical and mental. And for the events they couldn’t control they also built a vast number of spirit-habits to magically control them. In turn, they continued deepening the meanings of their lives as they learned to accept the challenges life was offering. Inventing the simple sewing needle, for example, allowed all their clothes-making women to become more productive and make life itself more satisfying than ever before. The more such work was tiresome, the easier it became to imagine such a tool, experimentally build one, and then test it to see its results. And the more toes and fingers froze, turned blue, and then fell off, the easier it was to make more mammoth-kabobs than ever before. In fact, eventually such practical experimental learning habits became so powerful in ancient Greece they began challenging all the more conservative spirit-models of life with more practical and naturalistic ideas. For Dewey, building those 2 very different models of life became the main psychic engines helping create ancient philosophy’s 3 main philosophic traditions.
Also, building constructively creative work habits is another important result of experimental learning. For Greek aristocrats like Plato and Aristotle such creativity was mainly confined to their writing work; they both felt physically experimental work was beneath them; such work was fit only for slaves and the artisan classes. As a result, much of their activity was basically passive and inactive, talking, writing, and contemplating different ideas. But more active and engaged people weren’t afraid to build their creative work habits; they were the heirs of all the practical arts and habits their native ancestors had practiced for tens of thousands of years. As we’ll see in Book 2, for such creative work habits we can thank our native ancestors; they experimented with active and creative work for well over 2 million years! Even though for our early ancestors like H. habilis and H. erectus their work wasn’t very imaginative or creative, and often used brute force and muscle-power rather than brain-power, they often did practice some creative thinking and acting. As those ancestors learned to talk and ask more questions, more creative and intelligent work habits have increased greatly. At any rate, such creativity remains another important challenge even today, like learning how to make our own work habits as relaxed, fluid, creative, and tension-free as possible. For many today it’s much easier said than done, as sales of tranquillizers show us; such relaxing drugs are a billion dollar industry, both legal and illegal. Even coffee helps us relax and focus our attention.
In short, learning such practical and active experimental habit-arts continues challenging most everyone today; life can always be improved in some way. What’s more, because practical-minded liberals like Dewey saw how important intelligent experimental work was for learning excellence, he naturally encouraged more active kinds of learning in both our public and vocational schools; Booker Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama is a good example of that learning model. There Washington encouraged recently freed African slaves to teach themselves how to read and write, but also learn some practical work skills as well, so they would be better prepared for life in the real world as soon as they left school. It’s an educational model most of our public schools continue ignoring to this day! Washington’s own son eventually learned a brick-making skill, and others learned carpentry and clothes-making skills. For Dewey those kinds of schools were most excellent; they taught much more than merely being able to read more book-facts and write answers to test questions. Believe it or not, there’re not many good paying jobs for test takers in the real world!
Ancient Roman philosophers called any excellence habit a virtue; anyone who taught themselves any kind of excellence skill taught themselves a virtue. But, the more they did, the more the idea of excellence was ignored and obscured. In truth, however, all virtues are excellent habits learned with intelligent practice! When it helped make learning easier patience too became a virtue, but it’s simply more evidence of how even ancient peoples accepted the possibility learning excellence could be achieved if learning was actively practiced, rather than ignored.
In short, many Roman educators too sensed what helps make a habit-art excellent is the useful result of improving BOTH a person's inner character AND their outer world! Then later, when Christians built monasteries to help care for the sick, they continued practicing important and useful character habits, even if such care was very limited and aimed mainly at relieving peoples’ pains. What useful medical tools could they build when experimental learning was all but ignored?
In any case, however, such learning ideas naturally are useful for building one of civilization’s most important institutions – our public schools! For Dewey the more our public schools help students playfully and creatively work at building both personal and social kinds of excellence, both inner and outer habits of excellence, the more democratically excellent those schools become. After all, doesn’t the world need more honest, creative, and caring blue collar plumbers, auto mechanics, and intelligent voters to make life more satisfying for everyone, just as much as it needs honest, creative, and caring doctors, lawyers, and politicians? Thus, it seemed obvious to liberals like Dewey; excellent public schools should also teach students not only how to playfully improve their useful character habit-arts, but also their own neighborhoods and schools as well! Such inner and outer results were the best model of educational excellence in all healthy democracies. After all, what’s the alternative, joining a violent and dangerous gang and selling dangerous drugs? If those results are to be avoided, then why shouldn't young students and parents too start playfully experimenting with the goal of building more liberal schools in their own neighborhoods, where wisely and intelligently helping others is the best way to build excellent character habits?
5. MORE ABOUT HABITS
In a very real sense this sections is one of the most important in the book. Without a sound and useful naturalistic psychology, like Dewey’s for example, people will remain vulnerable to destructive and unrealistic conservative and moderate ideas and actions. So, in this and the next 3 sections we color in 4 more of Dewey’s important psychological ideas: habit-arts, psychological spice and consciousness, creativity, and psychological excellence.
Why bother? Again, real knowledge about how we all work and learn – human nature and psychology – is useful throughout life. After all, we all need to learn different habits all through life, and so knowing what they are and how best to build new ones is a very useful art. So, the more we learn about our self, the less mysterious we remain, and the easier it becomes to keep becoming the masters of our lives, rather than the slaves to our own habits.
What’s more, only recently has psychology liberated itself from the grip of conservative and moderate philosophic models, and since the 1890s it’s become an experimental science in its own right. Knowing something about Dewey’s liberal Functional Behavorism model may be useful. In short, the more we know about such new naturalistic psychological models, the easier it becomes to test them with our own actions, and see if they’re at all useful in keeping life safe, productive, creative, and interesting. If knowledge is power, then excellent psychological knowledge is excellent psychological power. Isn’t practical logic wonderful?
More Basic Ideas
One of Dewey’s most important psychological ideas is habit. Like anything else, many young folks may feel psychology too is too great a challenge, and often frustrating at that. Furthermore, when psychology is taught in our public schools and universities it normally focus on teaching all the different psychological models, conservative Jungian, moderate Freudian, and all the different Behavioral models. Such knowledge can be more confusing than liberating and clarifying. In the next 4 sections there will be more information about those other models, but the main focus will be on Dewey’s Behavioral model.
The main questions might be described like this: what do the 3 main psychological models look like; how are modern Behaviorist ideas, like Dewey's, more useful than, say, Jungian, Gestalt, Freudian, or existential models, and if so what makes them better; can a liberal Behavioral model really help us keep learning how to relax our own tense and worrisome habits and feelings more easily than spending a night on a dance floor somewhere, or a few hours exercising; and how do they work?
Like some ancient liberal philosophers, modern psychologists today continue trying to help others reduce and resolve their frustrating problems by suggesting different ways of attacking them, and then ask people to experiment on their own. Conservative and moderate psychologists typically like people to talk about their feelings; they’re called Jungian and Freudian methods. They often operate on the same principle Socrates and Plato suggested: mere knowledge about our self will automatically make us better people. However, more active Behavioral models of therapy like Dewey’s are more action oriented, and so focus more on how best to practice improving our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. Other models may want to help people feel some emotional connection to a therapist, so they're more attracted to Humanist kinds of therapy for learning how to relax and focus on building new habits. In fact, within the past century there have evolved a number of different psychological models of human nature, consciousness, creativity, psychological excellence, and mental health. Incidentally, I think there’s a little conspiracy going on about that idea of mental health; why is it nobody seems to talk about what a mentally healthy person thinks and does? Why does so much psychology focus on talking about mental illness, rather than mental health? Is it because if more people had an idea of what a mentally healthy person is and does, then it would make practicing those habits much easier, and thus have less need of a therapist, and thus be less profitable for psychologists? So, defining what a psychologically healthy person is and does becomes another challenge for we liberal Deweyans.
In that vein maybe a little humor gets us off on the right foot, so to speak. After all, what’s so special about the right foot; it’s just a useful as the left one, right? Hint, hint: for many people humor is one sign of mental health. So why not first answer all our questions once and for all, and what better way is there other than another lame and bogus limerick? After all, when frustrated and tense, why not take a few minutes to have some fun!
There once was a man on a quest,
So for knowledge he was sent out west.
But books were a strain,
And smoke filled his brain,
For learning which habits are best.
Human Nature and Conduct
Now that certainly clears up a lot of questions and uncertainties, doesn’t it? If not, then please read on. Maybe a little psychological history of habits would help. And if not, perhaps those who like to read should get a copy of Dewey’s great psychology book Human Nature and Conduct; it began clarifying and simplifying a lot of psychological questions I had when I was in my 20s. With its help I began feeling how really practical and down-to-earth psychology and philosophy could be, rather than mythical, other-worldly, confusing, and unreliable. For him excellent psychological health was basically a process of building a few useful habits, like, for example, an experimental problem-solving habit-art, as well as habits of joy, enjoyable talking, and of course social helpfulness. Such ideas just seemed to feel right and best. The more I redd the book, the more encouraged I became to feel the power for building such healthy habits in my own muscles and actions, and to feel what he meant by practicing intelligently to build such habit-arts. With Dewey, such creative habits were much better than merely routine ones offered by many conservative and moderate models of psychology. I should warn you though; if you do read it don't be in a hurry; like all of Dewey’s books it's like a fine wine packed with all kinds of ideas, and so should be sipped and savored slowly, rather than gulped. Each time I redd it, it seemed to expand my psychological consciousness; like all his books, it too is that kind of book.
Again, one of his most important psychological ideas is habit, or as I like to say habit-art. In fact, intelligent habits have been active and evolving for at least the last 600 million years, give or take a Tasmanian Tuesday or two, and they’ve remained useful ever since. Animals alive in Cambrian seas taught themselves usefully experimental eating habits with intelligent trial-and-error actions; if food wasn’t found in one place, they looked to it someplace else. Of course, those who learned quicker and caught more food were able to reproduce more and so nature encouraged more satisfying INTELLIGENT habits. Six hundred million years later Dewey's Behavioral psychology is still completely grounded in learning similar kinds of experimental habits, but of course in more intelligent ways. In both cases, however, what’s important are the results of actions and habits; how health-producing and life-extending are they?
Today, what sets us humans apart from every other animal is our larger range of habits, as well as our greater creativity – imagining what actions might make life better, and then testing those ideas. If, for example, we have an out of control drinking problem, then learning to relax and make a game of avoiding liquor stores on our way home would be an intelligently creative and healthful habit. They might be playfully seen as, say, a great destructive swamp, or dangerous animal to avoid. For us Dewey liberals, the great playfulness of childhood is all too soon unlearned and forgotten.
Also, the more we can enjoy our self and life without liquor, the less we’ll need alcohol to relax and get more enjoyment out of life. That habit-art is too often neglected in other models of psychological health. In any case, however, such intelligent kinds of habits can now be pictured as growing more powerful when our native ancestors began talking and then sharing their feelings with each other, only about 100,000 years ago, give or take many a Moosejaw Mondays. Such creative and enjoyable forward-looking habits of thinking and talking have helped us humans become more and more intelligent. However, a basic and on-going challenge remains, which is, to keep our habits and our institutions fluid and easily changed, rather than routine, addictive, and uncontrollable. The military-industrial institutions the US built during World War 2 have continued making life around the world more dangerous and unstable.
Ancient Greeks Were Psyched Too
Even for many ancient Greek thinkers habits, practice, and active training played a very important role in becoming what they defined was an excellent person. Conservatives like Plato, moderates like Aristotle, and liberals like Democritus each celebrated the idea of learning habits, but each painted their own models of what those habits should be. Even centuries before Plato a famous motto celebrating one such kind of psychological excellence was inscribed in stone at Apollo’s Delphic shrine -- Know Yourself; more ascetic and playful Zen Buddhists have since changed it a little -- No Yourself. In short, free yourself from many of the gadgets and routine habits producing tension and frustrating feelings. And of course the other famous Greek motto was an ethical one -- Nothing In Excess. As a result, many Greeks like Socrates felt the more they knew about themselves and nature, the easier it became to keep becoming excellent and wiser; for him such knowledge was excellence. To many ancient conservative and moderate Greeks like him, knowledge automatically would produce psychological excellence. Even then, however, liberals were far more action oriented.
So far so good; what else is new? As we’ve already seen, such a variety of models continues to this day, and thus continues creating not only the challenge to decide which one is best for each of us, but also the art of respecting those who choose different models. For many religious fundamentalists today, ignoring that last challenge and accepting old conservative ideas of excellence continues making life more dangerous and unstable than ever.
For liberal Dewey, conservative and moderate thinkers like Plato and Aristotle created too many useless psychological problems for themselves when they described what the human psyche was, how it worked, and why it's so difficult sometimes to keep improving our own weak and excessive actions. As we’ve seen already, conservative Plato probably practiced religious spirit-habits all through his life, and so felt strongly such objects existed and were the best objects to know. Knowing what, say, the Spirit-Object of Goodness was would automatically help one become good. And so his early psychological model described in his Republic suggested a plan for how political leaders could learn such knowledge. In removing excellence to knowledge about spirit-objects, however, he created a number of unsolvable and frustrating problems for himself and every other conservative since then. How many such objects are there, what are their natures, are they related to each other singly or in a hierarchy, and most difficult of all, how can we possibly know anything about objects completely removed from our natural realm? Until such questions were answered, how could his psychological model be accepted?
Moderates like Aristotle felt they could eliminate such bothersome psychological questions by simply changing a few of Plato’s ideas, especially the idea such objects existed in a completely different spirit-realm. If such objects were merely pictured as natural objects existing in this world, then building a useful psychological model would be much easier, or so he assumed. No doubt, that was a major improvement in both psychology and philosophy. After that Aristotle was freer to build a more naturalistic model of psychology, like the liberals Democritus and Protagoras had already done. Still, he continued Plato’s search for eternally unchanging kinds of knowledge, and so focused on mental faculties like intuition and active reasoning. They would allow people like himself to learn about nature’s eternal and unchanging Forms, and thus feel they knew why life was arranged the way it is and the way it will always be, and thus merely accept the social status quo. All people were destined to be what they are by nature’s eternal forms. Thus, even for moderate Aristotle, liberal ideas about making life more democratic and equal for everyone simply wasn’t a social option.
Still, one important result of his model, as it was for liberals, was to make the idea of habits much more important. He clearly saw how physical practice was the way most people learned all their practical skills and knowledge. Even though he judged them much less than the highest knowledge, he still found a place for habits in his psychological model. For most people they were the way to feel what practical kinds of excellence were like. Knowledge about excellent shoes or plays could be learned with practice, even though they could never reveal nature’s highest goods and excellence. Agreeing with Plato, he said such knowledge could be learned only with the art of contemplative thinking, and thus only philosophers could really learn what’s truly excellent. No doubt, here one can easily feel the effect of Aristotle’s own aristocratic habits. With them he naturally saw most everyone was simply a lower form of human nature, and nature had made them that way even as young children. In all fairness, however, he also freely admitted psychology was the most challenging subject of all, and so at least felt he too was merely experimenting with different ideas.
Why did Plato and Aristotle bother building their psychological models at all? They were both reacting to a growing liberal Greek tradition. Decades before Plato was born, liberal humanist sophists like Protagoras were building a vastly different model of psychology, one that Dewey would identify with most of all. Gone from them was the idea of knowing any kinds of eternal and unchanging objects, and thus focusing on building more humane democratic habits of tolerance and equal rights for all. To Plato and Aristotle such ideas were almost totally unacceptable.
Such liberals were, in fact, the true democrats of the times. To them psychological healthy meant saying most everyone is capable of learning to intelligently govern themselves and their city-states, merely with some practice and experience. Thus, everyone should have the same rights and freedoms as anyone else. That was the inevitable result of their ideas. In fact, as a rule liberals like the Atomist Democritus, and sophists like Protagoras were much more democratic, and so welcomed anyone to their classes who could afford the fees, and sometimes even if they couldn’t afford them. For them, psychological excellence meant seeing what skills were most useful, and then practicing such skills, so life could become more satisfying and productive. Thus, a system of public schools would have been much more useful than either Plato or Aristotle felt. Their kinds of psychological excellence depended most of all on intelligent experimentation, and most everyone was capable of learning such skills, and idea both Plato and Aristotle rejected. Such skills were the same kind of learning and practice that had produced better metal products, for example, and were in turn helping make life even more satisfying than before.
In short, for ancient Greek liberals psychological excellence was greatly simplified to an active, practical, and intelligent practice; only human actions could improve any weak, excessive, or unhealthful habit! Their motto might be described like this: Why make learning and human psychology any more complicated than it need be? What bother trying to figure out how natural creatures like us can ever know completely unnatural objects like spirits, or unchanging Forms? In an always changing world such models of excellence led down a blind alley, so to speak. Such models of excellence were merely useless distractions from making life better for most everyone. Often liberal thinkers probably saw how such conservative and moderate ideas kept people fearing what life would be like after death, when in fact no one knew for sure. Would it be like the great poet Homer described, as a rather boring, dull, and lifeless existence for who knows how long -- a kind of purgatory, or would it be even worse, like being made to roll a heavy rock uphill and then let it roll down again, for all eternity? Conservative Christians, it seemed, were even more pain oriented; for them hell was an eternally painful fire.
In any case, long before Christianity even evolved, liberal Greeks saw psychological excellence as being liberated from all such ideas; why fear what no one really knows anything about? For them life’s practical challenges were enough, like how to keep from catching a fatal disease, how best to bring a healthy children into the world and keep encouraging them to build their own excellent habits, so they could more easily control their actions, tensions, frustrations, joys and enjoyments, and help others learn such skills as well. How else could people keep making their own little corner of the world safer and more satisfying, and how else could they help others become more intelligent too? Not knowing about such intelligently practical psychological habits, how best to build them, and how best to use them, would continue encouraging a greatly divided social world, making life much less satisfying and stressful for most everyone. Hopefully, with the building of more liberal public schools over the next hundred years, many more people will become just as wise and intelligent.
Psychology’s Early Days
Since a few Greeks began building their philosophic models in the 500s BCE, psychological questions too began growing about what people are and how we got here. There were many questions about human nature itself. Eventually 2 kinds of models evolved, one conservative and one liberal. For thousands of years before that a conservative spirit-based model remained firmly in place; people saw spirits existing both in them and nature, and controlling most everything that happened. Then, in the 500s BCE, a much more liberal model began evolving within philosophy’s first ‘school’ -- the Milesian. Miletus was a Greek colony across the Aegean in western Turkey, and so more secular Greeks had lived there for centuries. In time, however, such habits helped them begin seeing life in more practical and secular way than many conservative spirit-oriented Greeks on the mainland. In fact, such practical habits helped one Milesian, named Anaximander, build a quite modern-looking naturalistic biology and psychology. Evidently he had studied some fossils and then concluded all people have evolved from fish-like creatures, which is essentially what modern biologists are saying, give or take a few hundred million years. What’s more, because Miletus was a great port city, and many people with different habits were a common sight, it was easy to see people learn all their different habits with practice; they thus began feeling knowledge too lives in peoples muscles, not just their minds. Psychological health thus became a question of what healthful skills have you built for yourself, and improving any unhealthful skills someone does have.
Another one my favorite early ancient philosopher-psychologists was a rather robust Sicilian poet-character named Xenophanes (Ken-af’-anees). Evidently life in the new Greek colonies could produce habits of honesty not as easily found on the religious-oriented mainland. Energetic, confident, daring, practical, and adventurous Greeks had already built colony cities all over the Mediterranean and even into the Black Sea, and so by the 500s practical habits had reached a very high energy level. For Xenophanes people are basically self-centered and habitual, as all creatures are, and so we too simply paint the pictures of life our habits encourage us to feel. On his travels he saw for himself how different cultures encouraged their people to picture different kinds of gods, and he also noticed how each seemed to resemble the local people themselves. That fact alone told him quite a bit about human psychology and religion, and so mockingly said if lions and horses could build statues of gods they too would look like lions and horses. In short, religious habits too are all a product of social actions and practices. The more people didn’t practice such ideas, the less powerful they were. Thus, he realized no one can really know anything for sure about gods out there or spirits in us. How could you prove such ideas one way or the other? People all seemed to be locked into practicing their own local habits and customs, and so those feelings were the result of their actively built habits! Such was the new secular thinking helping build ancient Greece’s liberal models of excellence.
About a century later, in the 400s BCE, such liberal psychological ideas became even bolder with the work of Democritus (460? BCE-370? BCE) – the ancient world’s greatest liberal thinker, and of course with the great Sophist-teacher Protagoras. Like the Milesians they too were born far to the north of Athens in another colony city, as was moderate Aristotle. As a result, their habits were much more practical, rather than religious-oriented and contemplative like Plato’s. Both Protagoras and Democritus traveled to many other countries and saw how different people had taught themselves different habit-arts, and what's more, everyone seemed to feel only their own were true! Such observations helped them see human psychology naturalistically, as merely the result of active and practical habit-arts, rather than any kinds of Spirit-Truth. For them, all the ideas and feelings anyone sees as the Truth merely reflected their own habits and actions. Habits were thus seen as active and projective, rather than merely passive faculties in us. What’s more, our habits helped select what we want to learn more about, and no doubt they too saw such naturalistic ideas even while conservative Socrates lived. For such liberals an important psychological truth was obvious: the more different people worship different gods, for example, the more they feel only those gods are true and real. In short, different childhood training in different societies helped build different habits, ideas, and feelings about life and nature. Where the environment is different, different habits are encouraged.
Eventually the secular humanist Protagoras described his psychology with his most famous idea: Mankind is the measure of all things! ‘Shakespeare’ too echoed the same idea – Nothing is either right or wrong, but thinking makes it so. Of course for Dewey he was wrong, but you get the idea. Thinking is merely a verbal habit, but the results of our actions make them right or wrong. If the results of our actions break some law, then our actions become unlawful, regardless of what anyone thinks.
It’s certainly not difficult to see how Protagoras reached that liberal conclusion about human psychology. If, for example, we all actively build our habits with our own daily actions, and we know only what we build, then we know only the feelings, meanings, and ideas of our own habits! For example, Egyptians celebrated the idea of brother-sister love while Babylonians didn’t. The more an Egyptian brother and sister practiced sexual intercourse the more it became their habit-truth. And even before Democritus, history’s Greek ‘father’ Herodotus (c.485-425 BCE) also seems to have traveled a great deal and wrote about such habitual social varieties; his work too helped build a more liberal and secular model of human nature, helping explain naturalistically why there were so many ethical and religious varieties in the world; it was all based on teaching children local tribal habits, which were in turn based on their daily actions. And so Herodotus too helped a more liberal model of psychology to keep growing, and begin challenging all conservative spirit-based models, even Plato’s. For Plato, people were merely the puppets of the gods. Socrates and everyone else became the people they were simply because the gods had made them so. Centuries later the idea became a part of Christian doctrine with the idea of god’s plan and its knowing all things, past, present, and future.
Conservative Models Too Were Growing Even Before Plato
Of course such conservative psychological spirit-models of human nature kept evolving in Greece as well. It was part of an aristocratic religious tradition. For example, from a religion called Orphism, to Pythagoras, and then into Socrates and Plato came the idea something inside us lives on after death, something immortal and which can therefore be born again and again; in fact our word psychology comes from 2 Greek words, psyche and logos – the study of human nature. Following Plato, Christians translated the word psyche as soul.
Both Orphics and Pythagoreans felt reincarnation was the best model of human psychology. There’s a little story showing how seriously Pythagoras himself took the idea. One day it seems he saw a man beating a dog, and he told the man to stop because the animal had been a friend of his before he became a dog. And with Socrates and Plato such ideas about the psyche became the foundation of Western civilization’s conservative philosophic and religious traditions.
Socrates’ living habits was very social oriented, like his mid-wife mother’s, and so it was difficult for him to sit and write down his thoughts; he liked talking with people much more. His student Plato, however, was a much more private person, and so writing for him came much easier. He was serious about his teacher’s advice to ‘know yourself’ and so, like the Orphics and Pythagoreans he too wanted to celebrate their conservative psychological model, rather than the model practical-minded democratic liberals had already built; in fact, arguing for such ideas became his life’s work.
As a result, his writings are a record of his experimental thoughts. For example, at different times he said the human psyche has 3 powers or faculties; later he added a 4th, a divine faculty. To him such ideas were necessary simply because they could be used to build the conservative political and ethical models he thought were excellent. His great political desire for Greek cities was to become as eternally stable and unchanging as the Egyptian state had been for thousands of years. During his 30s and 40s such political stability would depend on Greek rulers first learning about nature’s eternal and unchanging Spirit-Objects, like the supreme Idea of the Good. After that people could best be placed into their natural social classes, and when that happened people would be happiest and thus make social peace and stability that much easier. In short, ruling should be left to the aristocratic classes who had the wealth and leisure to learn about nature’s highest spirit-objects.
In his book Republic he pictured the human psyche as having 3 inbuilt faculties, roughly described as growing, desiring, and reasoning; not surprisingly of the 3 reasoning was the most excellent and god-like. Thus, most of Plato’s own days were probably spent sitting and talking with his friends about philosophic ideas, and of course contemplating his beloved Spirit-Objects. One time he poetically pictured the human reasoning faculty as a charioteer driving and controlling his 2 other psychic companions, sexual pleasure and emotions. At a different time he said the human reasoning faculty was like a ship’s captain steering the body’s boat. No doubt, both images were part of the Orphic religious tradition.
In any case, however, Plato too saw the necessity of building habits into his rulers with practice and training, again later inspiring Christians to build schools of their own and close all other schools too. If nothing else, it shows how important a social role education and schooling play in any political or religious system. For religious conservatives the mental faculty of desire was often pictured as an evil spirit always tempting one to excessive rebellion and sin, and even until the 1700s the idea of god choosing all the rulers on earth was a common political idea, turning fate into a force making people do whatever they do. If nothing else, however, it was a little deceptive to ignore the role their schools were playing in teaching such ideas. For such reasons it becomes obvious why a more liberal psychology and democratic political model are still relatively new movements in our modern era. Only, yesterday, so to speak, has a more scientific, and hence more democratic Behavioral psychology evolved, thanks again to people like William James, John Watson, and John Dewey.
Habits At Work
Habits and training are thus certainly not new or unimportant psychological ideas, but they are still relatively ignored on a formal teaching level in our public schools. Thus, children often enter adult life with little knowledge about psychological excellence and how to achieve it. That situation went back to ancient Greece where most everyone’s schooling ended at the teen years. For Plato and Aristotle, the more people were taught conservative and moderate ideas and habits, the better it would be for everyone. To them liberal ideas like equal rights and democratic habits of governing simply weren’t excellent, whereas for liberals they were the most important ideas and habits to teach. Only popular power could better control concentrated forms of social, religious, and political power from dominating other people, with force if necessary. In fact, currently we’re seeing Islamic sects still practicing those conservative ideas today! Either convert or die.
Still, Plato’s most famous book Republic may be the first in Western civilization to celebrate the environment’s importance for forming habits. In many ways it’s a plan for how best to arrange an environment so a few young people can become conservative political rulers after they’re 50, and keep their city-states stable and under control with a tight censorship of what people know and do. His plan controls their educational environment for some 50 years before they’re given political power, all of course based on his conservative psychological model of human nature – ultimately the gods control everything! We’ll see a little later what kind of a totalitarian closed society he wanted to build, but even for him one’s educational environment and habits remained a very important part of his psychological model.
Again, the main difference between the 3 traditions centered on what habits should be taught to children; habits of obedience to the status quo versus habits of free choice and equal rights; they were, perhaps, the most important difference. For Dewey, the more our public schools teach such democratic habits, the stronger our democracy will become. And for conservatives, the more children are taught to love and respect their country, and obey its leaders, the more stable life will become. US economic and political history throughout the 1900s, however, shows that idea is grossly harmful to millions of people while mainly benefiting the richest few.
A habit both Plato and Aristotle practiced was maintaining the Greek social status quo. For example, both believed the Greeks were racially superior to all other cultures; they felt they were the world’s best learners. They were what can be called Greek chauvinists; thus, naturally their psychological models helped justify saying some people are just born slaves and so should be treated as slaves. Greek blood too should remain as pure and unmixed as possible. It’s yet another good example of how our own inner habits can help produce very important social ideas and actions. For them peoples’ characters -- their inner psychology -- were essentially set and determined at birth. For Aristotle something he called a Final Human Form helped destine people to be what they are; thus there’s no reason to pity anyone, even slaves; they are slaves by nature and nothing should try to change that status quo. Much the same ideas and habits have been practiced in India for thousands of years. For liberal Atomists like Democritus, however, their psychological models merely reflected their own aristocratic habits; after all, we’re all just humans.
Perhaps from liberal Democritus moderate Aristotle also learned about how useful habits and training are; they help people learn the skills they have. Even though such common habits could never reveal mankind's highest happiness --contemplative reasoning -- they helped people learn many different kinds of useful excellence, from cooking to shoe making to carpentry. As a result his Nichomachian Ethics celebrates such secular psychological ideas; he respected practical Democritus much more than Plato did. Every city needs such habits if they're to stay stable and safe and it’s why his psychological model can be called moderate. But as we’ve been seeing, they were quite different from liberal psychological models, and their celebrating most everyone’s ability to learn most anything, even how to govern themselves democratically.
Comparing and Contrasting
So what do we see when we start comparing Dewey’s modern psychological model about habits to both Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas. Basically Dewey’s whole model is naturalistic – it’s an active organic body-mind model based on intelligent practice. Like ancient sophists and Atomists his model is completely naturalistic and evolutionary, whereas both Plato and Aristotle’s may be described as obsessed with studying eternally unchanging objects and anti-evolutionary. For them habits are merely an unfolding of a person’s already existing character, whereas for Dewey most everyone has the same human nature at birth, and begins learning its habits from day 1. Thus, most everyone is capable of learning excellent psychological habits, including democratic forms of government.
Also, both Plato and Aristotle trained themselves to see something in us as different and 'higher' than not only plants and animals, but from other people as well, whereas Dewey saw many similarities between human psychology and animal psychology. For him both are the result of completely naturally evolving forces; we’re all shaped by the objects in our world, and imprinted with their habits. In fact, today such a model continues growing around the world; millions now see mankind as completely and totally a part of the natural world and its animal life; all through life all our habits and ideas are the result of a growing and organic kind of art! If, say, a habit is anything an animal builds, then in a very real sense animals and humans are psychological artists. All habits are the expression of psychological art! Thus, to a degree all animals and plants, including humans, are all psychological artists; we all build our own set of habits. When plants conserve their water and turn towards the sun they’re practicing healthful habits. What’s more, how good or bad their actions are depends on the results they produce. If the results of human actions are healthful, helpful, and respectful of others and our just laws, then they’re excellent habits.
For Dewey, building any new habit is an artistic creation; it requires work, practice, and some intelligence. What makes building a habit an art? Again, his answer shows how simple liberal philosophic thinking can be. Art isn't just something painters and poets create. Because all habits are built, they too can be seen as a form of art; they require people to make choices and practice as they think best about their own daily actions. In short, habits are a unique form of human art, whether we build a cooking habit, a tailoring habit, or a thoughtful reading habit!
What’s more, as our knowledge of evolution has grown, it’s not at all strange to say such artful building has been going on for billions of years within both animals and plants. When dinosaurs learned a nest-building habit they practiced psychological excellence. And more recently our own human ancestors began building one of the most important habits of all -- talking habits. No doubt, with their help we’ve built a greater variety of habits than any other creature, but all such habits are still a form of biological art! Such talking habits have also helped us become more self-conscious and aware of what we’re doing, but they’re all still a form of art; they’re all something we build, just like painters build paintings and poets build poems. That kind of liberal psychology can help liberate all of us to become the artist of our own lives, rather than feeling fate or spirits are controlling anything. What’s more, feeling such ideas and learning to make them more intelligent, helpful, and healthful, is the best first step to becoming the master of our self. If it is, then what’s psychologically excellent is to keep such habit-arts growing with daily practice.
For Dewey, then, most every animal and plant is, to some degree, also an intelligent habit-artist; if they weren't they couldn't keep satisfying their needs and wants in an always changing nature. Even plants show some intelligent flexibility; many learn how to conserve their water and use solar energies as best as they can, again with simple trial and error practice. What looks like merely a plant is in fact another intelligent creature, obviously limited in many ways compared to animals and humans, but more accomplished in other ways; we still don't know how photosynthesis works.
More complex animals too build their own flexible habit-arts to keep satisfying their needs! Even on a feeling level of consciousness non-human animals too are intelligent artists. They can feel when their actions are useful and so they artfully build their own set of habits; how many house cats go through the same routine around feeding time? Besides their habits-arts of collecting pollen, for example, beehives too are works of art -- they’re something bees artfully build, as are bird’s nests and even termite mounds. As works of art are they any different from human character-habits children start building in childhood? Aren’t their character habits too organic works of art? Isn’t the habit of truthfulness and honesty a work of behavioral art?
The main difference between such works of art might be described like this: unlike plants and non-human animals, we humans can consciously know and think of our habits as arts; our talking habits help make us self-conscious, whereas plants and non-human animals simply feel their habit-arts, like collecting pollen and rubbing up against us at feeding time. For that psychological art we can all thank our native prehistoric ancestors who practiced new talking habit-arts during the last 100,000 years. Dewey called that art the most important habit-invention of all time! Why? It did nothing less than add another dimension to the human psyche. To feelings shared by all other life forms only we began building ideas as well! Such habit-arts helped make us the most creative and inventive animals of all, helping liberate us to build many other habit-arts, like science and philosophy to mention just 2. But again, what makes some feelings and ideas more excellence than others are their results, that is, do they help satisfy the needs of ourselves and others. The more they help increase our freedom, and help others become more intelligent, the more excellent our habit-arts are. Moreover, building such intelligent habits from our routine ones is the key to all psychological progress, both personal and social. In short, the more flexible our habit-arts are in an always changing nature, the more useful they can be.
To say the very least, mankind's habit-arts have grown tremendously since Plato’s day. In those days only a few of the more confident and bold liberals bothered to teach themselves to enjoy studying nature and human nature; in Greece they were called Atomists, Skeptics, and Sophists. Today, however, millions around the world have become much more confident with such liberal model of psychology; experimental habits of modern science, for example, has helped liberate many of us from the daily search for food, shelter, and disease, and so allowed us to build many other useful habit-arts. No doubt, experimental science and its most powerful knowledge have greatly helped create such new and liberating habits, but they’re still not free from natural forces, as we’re seeing with the recent event of global warming. New habits also create different results, and thus different challenges.
Even so, millions of people today feel they’re no longer a mere leaf blown around by nature’s uncaring winds; to us Deweyan liberals that’s a sign of psychological progress. As a result, psychology models have become much more naturalistic, especially the idea of habit-arts. Psychological excellence has become much easier to see as a fluid, organic, interconnected, dynamic, growing, helpful, and evolving set of habit-arts, rather than merely practicing the same habits in the same way; after all, who isn't capable of teaching themselves what a little creativity feels like? Even healthy are natural dynamos of creative experimentation.
Such habit-arts have recently become the most important part of psychological health and excellence, and as a result childhood studies have recently become much more important. When exactly can children begin learning such habits? For much of history childhood habits centered around learning religious ideas and actions; children were normally to be seen and not heard. As a result, people were mainly conditioned to simply obey their social and religious leaders without question; rebelling in any way might easily result in a person’s death. Even Jesus’ childhood and early adulthood were almost completely ignored in the gospels, as if they were completely meaningless and irrelevant; they record mainly his short public life. With the growth of Behavioral psychology, however, we now know those years were the most important in his education; his environment helped shape the habit-arts he taught himself. Like everyone else, starting from birth his habits too were encouraged by his surroundings and parents. The Jewish custom was to give the eldest child 'to god,' so they in turn could teach younger brothers and sisters, of which there were many. No doubt, such habit-arts helped him gather a group of simple disciples so he could teach them too about his mission.
Only recently has the new science of psychology begun taking childhood learning more seriously, helping psychologists see how important those early years were to building one’s adult habits, and thus build more helpful schools for children. Dewey saw how conservative our public schools still were, and how they continued focusing on passively learning book facts rather than actively experimenting and learning practical habits. For Dewey knowing some general facts about child development was absolutely necessary for building schools where children would be free to take advantage of their own natural abilities during those years. The alternative was to continue forcing children into schools where books, teachers, and academic trivia were the center of attention, rather than the needs of the child.
Important Behavioral Ideas
One such need was positive rewards. The more childhood was studied experimentally, the more scientific habit-study became. For example, psychologists began feeling how important rewards were in the process of artfully building a new habit-art. The more rewards a person felt from their practice, the faster they learned a new habit-art. That was an important idea still largely ignored today as a good learning tool. The fact is children are encouraged and conditioned to build certain habit-arts and feelings by their parents or guardians from the day they’re born; they begin learning what to love and what to hate. In fact, such conditioning can begin even before they're born. These days many parents pipe music into mom’s womb?
In any case, however, the whole field of modern Behavioral psychology has become, much like every other subject, more liberal, secular and naturalistic. Old conservative religious ideas like Fate and Destiny shaping a person's habit-arts are out, and intelligent, creative, helpful, healthful, and enjoyable practice are in. Obviously some people are born with more learning potential than others, as Plato saw, but almost everyone can build excellent psychological habit-arts if they’re rewarded for practicing such habits. What’s more, that idea applies just as much to children as to adults. The more adults will reward themselves for their intelligent practice, the sooner they’ll learn such habits.
Another important idea is practice time. For best results it seems limiting practice to small time intervals at first is best. It helps people get the feel of a new habit-art. Then, as a person gets comfortable with those short times, they can be expanded on a regular basis, until the new habit starts working on its own, so to speak. For example, the useful and healthful habit-art of working in a relaxed way can begin growing during such short periods of time.
For Dewey such ideas as rewards and small practice times, as well as making one’s practice playful and enjoyable, helps make all learning more intelligent. They’re useful ideas for building any new habit-art, especially healthful ones so as to become more the master of our actions rather than remaining a slave to our old propulsive routine and excessive habits. Excellent habits help create excellent will-power. For example, wishing people well, even when they’re doing better than you, is another way to express psychological excellence; after all, wouldn't you like others to wish you well too? In short, the people who are psychologically flexible can teach themselves whatever habit-art they wish, even the art of asking what would be psychologically excellent in this particular situation here and now, and of course test their ideas too. Is there any better psychological art to feel than that?
Actually Dewey’s psychology -- Functional Behaviorism -- is still in the early stages of growth within our human community; it's another reason I wanted to write this book. Only within the last 100 years have such psychological models been growing mostly at the university level, to help train psychologists. And with the help of our popular media many of its ideas have been growing, like what goes around comes around. What’s so revolutionary about it? It’s secular and democratic! It’s thus useful to everyone, even in daily life, not just to the educated.
Modern daily life is often stressful, helping make people much more tense than normal. With its focus on how we’re feeling and acting, Dewey’s Behavioral psychology helps people more easily feel their stressful tensions, and can thus help them to relax more, feel more comfortable, and even creative in their daily lives. In short, intelligent experimentation has also become the new psychological learning tool -- feel problems, create solutions, and then test those ideas. If some muscles are tense and irritating, then learn to stretch them out; if an evening meal is boring, think of some ways to make it more tasty, and then test the ideas. What about such ideas is really too difficult to understand? However, such a liberal Behavioral model is different from the more moderate models Sigmund Freud and conservative Carl Jung built, and also from religious models of prayer and worship. For Behaviorists like Dewey it really doesn't matter where you get a better psychological idea; what's most important is actively and intelligently testing the idea to see if it works and brings a greater depth and range of feeling, as well as more self-control. You may agree with Freud that sex is an important idea, but unless you practice the art of intelligent and respectful sex, it can become a dangerous idea too.
Just as experimental testing began creating our strongest scientific ideas, the same kind of testing can also be used to build any excellent habit. Why should learning about viruses be any different from learning about habits of helpfulness? That too is another part of Behavioral psychology's new revolution. People are discovering the power to become better masters of their own habits by experimenting with their own intelligent muscular actions. In that way more and more people are learning to feel more confident about their own self, and slowly sorting out useful facts about human nature from old conservative ideas.
So, at this point the reader may feel the importance of the word ‘functional’ in Dewey’s Functional Behaviorism; the word point to how important one’s daily actions have become to psychological health and excellence, everything from creativity in daily life to playfulness. It’s the key to any kind of real improvement; how are we functioning, or working? By helping raise several children, and also from decades of teaching, Dewey saw how important active testing is to keep deepening the subconscious feelings and habits we all have. Those habits producing harmful results can be changed, beginning with a little intelligent practice, and then expanding them. In that process we become habit-artists.
Since its beginnings in the late 1800s in Germany, experimental Behavioral psychology has grown greatly simply because it best helps people improve their weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. It works! 'We are the habits we build and practice’ is its most important idea. In short, the key to psychological health is first having an idea of excellent habits, making a plan to build them slowly, and then testing the ideas. Today many, if not most, professional psychologists are clearly behaviorally oriented, and so for many it’s become more useful than Jungian, Freudian, Gestalt, and even existential models of human nature, even though they all have some useful ideas for improving our habit-arts, as we’ll see later. And, Behavioral therapy has also become a recurring theme in many Hollywood movies. Great movies like What About Bob? and Anything Else celebrate the idea of becoming more powerful by acting more independently. Often the problem for many young folks is they don't know what excellent psychological habits are, and so their old routine fears and habits prevent them from becoming what they want to become – more independent, intelligent, self-controlled, and able to enjoy life.
In a sense it's a little amazing more people don't realize how merely obeying the law, acting honestly, kindly, sympathetically, and helping those less fortunate are mostly what psychological health is about. With a little smile on my face I think there's a psychological conspiracy going on out there? I mean if more people practiced such excellent habits, the less they'd need professional psychologists encouraging them to improve their own habits. Women, who still raise the children most everywhere, probably become better psychologists than some professionals, but in too many places around the world children still aren't encouraged to practice such habits, as well as respect those with different habits.
No doubt, economics is playing its part too; many people around the world are so busy looking for their next meal instead of their next psychology class, or visiting their local psychologist. Even in the US, Behavioral ways of improving our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits are still not normally taught in public schools, so how can we expect psychological health to keep growing? Of course Behavioral psychology is taught at the college level and sometimes at the high school level, but still, only a small number of people go to college, and an even smaller percentage major in psychology.
Obviously, the more psychological excellence is ignored in our public schools, the more vulnerable our young folks remain to failing some of the social testing games going on every day in the real world, like breaking the law and disrespecting others. For example, the less people teach themselves how important it is to feel a respect for others and just laws, the more vulnerable they become to endangering their own freedom and limiting their options. So, again, the more we demand our public schools start teaching more useful subjects like Behavioral psychology, the stronger its important democratic feelings grow in us. Such feelings are habits on the inside, but if they aren’t practiced they remain merely immature and shallow academic ideas.
Again, Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct helped me begin feeling how really practical psychology can be. Its whole focus is actively learning more excellent habits, and it felt much less confusing and fanciful than, say, Freudian and Jungian models; how can Freudian ideas like Id, Ego, and Superego ever be tested, or abstract poetic Jungian ideas of a collective unconscious? As a result, many see them both as modern examples of moderate Aristotle and conservative Plato respectively. What's most important are the habits within one's 'Ego' or 'Superego', rather than the structures themselves, and nurturing their growth with playfully enjoyable practice. In short, an important idea is this: intelligent and joyfully playful actions and practice help people best teach themselves to become psychologically excellent! Only active practice turns mere ideas into a forceful and powerful will power!