Experience and Nature by John Dewey

Author:John Dewey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486121956
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

NATURE, LIFE AND BODY-MIND

A series of cultural experiences exhibits a series of diverging conceptions of the relation of mind to nature in general and to the organic body in particular. Greek experience included affairs that rewarded without want and struggle the contemplation of free men; they enjoyed a civic life full and rich with an equable adaptation to natural surroundings. Such a life seemed to be upon the whole for those in its full possession a gracious culmination of nature; the organic body was the medium through which the culmination took place. Since any created thing is subject to natural contingency, death was not a problem; a being who is generated shares while he may in mind and eternal forms, and then piously merges with the forces which generated him. But life does not always exist in this happy equilibrium: it is onerous and devastating, civil life corrupt and harsh. Under such circumstances, a spirit which believes that it was created in the image of a divine eternal spirit, in whose everlastingness it properly shares, finds itself an alien and pilgrim in a strange and fallen world. Its presence in that world and its residence in a material body which is a part of that world are an enigma. Again the scene shifts. Nature is conceived to be wholly mechanical. The existence within nature and as part of it of a body possessed of life, manifesting thought and enjoying consciousness is a mystery.

This series of experiences with their corresponding philosophies display characteristic factors in the problem of life and mind in relation to body. To the Greeks, all life was psyche, for it was self-movement and only soul moves itself. That there should be self-movement in a world in which movement was also up-and-down, to-and-fro, circular, was indeed interesting but not strange or untoward. Evidence of the fact of self-movement is directly had in perception; even plants exhibit it in a degree and hence have soul, which although only vegetative is a natural condition of animal soul and rational mind. Organic body occupies a distinctive position in the hierarchy of being; it is the highest actuality of nature’s physical potentialities, and it is in turn the potentiality of mind. Greek thought, as well as Greek religion, Greek sculpture and recreation, is piously attentive to the human body.

In Pauline Christianity and its successors, the body is earthly, fleshly, lustful and passionate; spirit is Godlike, everlasting; flesh is corruptible; spirit incorruptible. The body was conceived in terms of a moral disparagement colored by supernatural religion. Since the body is material, the dyslogy extends to all that is material; the metaphysical discount put upon matter by Plato and Aristotle becomes in ascetic thought a moral and essential discount. Sin roots in the will; but occasions for sin come from the lusts of the body; appetites and desires spring from the body, distract attention from spiritual things; concupiscence, anger, pride, love of money and luxury, worldly ambition, result. Technically, the framework of Aristotelian thought is retained by the scholastics; St.

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