Dewey and the Existential Matrix, pt 2

In my last post, I gave a brief summarization of John Dewey’s paper concerning the existential matrix of culture. In this post, I’d like to relate Dewey’s ideas to the imminent 20th century philosophers Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

Dewey’s pragmatic approach to philosophy is closely related to the philosophical enterprise of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, in which Wittgenstein analyzes language in terms of use. Dewey and Wittgenstein both see language as stemming from cultural activity. Both philosophers attempt to step aside from the traditional picture of language as a correspondence of words with objects. Instead of directly arguing against such a conception, they instead take the time to actually look at how language is used in order to give an existential analysis of the phenomena. Some might say this is merely a crude form of sociology or anthropology, but both Dewey and Wittgenstein see their work as therapeutic for philosophers who are caught in conceptual muddles.

Wittgenstein famously analyzes language use in terms of different language games, a concept that “brings into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” Wittgenstein uses this term in order to emphasize that the meaning of words is dependent on how they are used in a particular cultural context, or game. The great German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his seminal world Being and Time, also helped the 20^th century appreciate the importance of context. Heidegger, like Dewey, uses the example of equipment to illustrate the fact that the significance or meaning of the human world is not dependent on one-to-one correspondence, but instead depends on a “referential totality” that is “disclosed” upon the world by communal activity. For example, a hammer is not just the physical conglomeration of a wood-block with a metal-block, but rather, an object that has a particular mode of being, or significance, imbued upon it by the fact hammers are existentially related to an entire “matrix” of nails and other equipment. In other words, like Dewey, Heidegger thinks it is a drastic philosophical mistake to separate hammering, and almost every other human activity, from the totality of meaning given to it by the community of language-users.

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Dewey and the Existential Matrix

…[Dewey’s aim] is to edify – to help [his] readers, or society as whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than provide “grounding” for the intuitions and customs of the present.( Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature)

In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, John Dewey wrote an essay called The Existential Matrix of Inquiry: Cultural.

In this essay Dewey attempts to break free from a philosophic framework that has a long tradition of ignoring the cultural environment in which human beings are immersed. Since Descartes, this tradition tended to look at humans as complicated physical mechanisms with separate “minds” capable of mental representation. Dewey wants to instead look at humans from an existential perspective- a perspective of humans coping with the world. Dewey begins this existential analysis by discussing how human behavior is “saturated” by conditional factors that are cultural in origin, with language being an especially “significant function in the complex that forms the cultural environment.”

By abandoning this conception of language as “merely” representational, Dewey is able to give a full account to the phenomena at hand, namely that meanings are “liberated with respect to [their] representative function.” As the title implies, words are tied into an “existential matrix”, or in Heidegerrian terms, a referential totality. The totality is what gives significance to signs and meaning to symbols and gives humans a distinct mode of being. This picture of language is incompatible with the traditional philosophical attempt to establish a “direct one-to-one correspondence of names with existential objects.” Using this holistic framework, Dewey answers the question of whether relational meaning in everyday discourse stems from the “significance-connections in existence”. Dewey’s answer is that it is language, as a “medium of communication” between coping individuals immersed in conjoint activity, which confers upon the existential their significance.

In my next post I will discuss how Dewey’s paper on the existential matrix given by pragmatic language use is a common theme to Wittgenstein and Heidegger as well.

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