From John Dewey - 11-25-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 4/23/2025]

I want to put down here a few more extracts from John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916; The Free Press/MacMillan Company, 1966), which struck me as interesting thoughts regardless of the context. That context being "An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education".

To identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to show its value—its function in experience. We are only too given to making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness." We forget that it comes from the adjective "conscious." To be conscious is to be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of an activity, for the fact that it is directed by an aim. Put the other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent.

pp. 103 - 04; Chapter 8: Aims in Edcucation

My memory gets flakier every day - still, I seem to recall conversations about consciousness in light of artificial intelligence not much different than what John Dewey writes.

... Every means is a temporary end until we have attained it. Every end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is achieved. We call it end when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off the present direction. Every divorce of end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could....

p. 106; Chapter 8

This one I need to think on - the first two sentences I take as describing a dynamic universe. The remaining sentence I agree with in ascending enthusiasm.

And this describes me, explains me, and why I rejected George W. Bush in 2000:

...Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition. Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while. Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and energy in use of means to achieve the end. The really executive man is a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as clear and full as possible. The people we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts. They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances. When they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to show themselves. They are discouraged, or complain of being thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action. That the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought out, cannot be over-emphasized.

p. 128; Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline

What a difference 100 years make! We think a blowhard like Donald J. Trump is a strong character - that he has a firmness. Which he has for his own profit.

sch 

[And from today's headlines: Trump reversals on Fed chair, China tariffs send markets higher (Los Angeles Times). Ah, the man with the backbone of jelly! sch 4/23/2019]