Quote for the Day – We Are Our Habits, Especially the Bad Ones

It is a significant fact that in order to appreciate the peculiar place of habit in activity we have to betake ourselves to bad habits, foolish idling, gambling, addiction to liquor and drugs. When we think of such habits, the union of habit with desire and with propulsive power is forced upon us. When we think of habits in terms of walking, playing a musical instrument, typewriting, we are much given to thinking of habits as technical abilities existing apart from our likings and as lacking in urgent impulsion. We think of them as passive tools waiting to be called into action from without. A bad habit suggests an inherent tendency to action and also a hold, command over us. It makes us do things we are ashamed of, things which we tell ourselves we prefer not to do. It overrides our formal resolutions, our conscious decisions. When we are honest with ourselves we acknowledge that a habit has this power because it is so intimately a part of ourselves. It has a hold upon us because we are the habit.

~John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct

For what it’s worth, this quote is relevant to recent debates over Jason Stanley’s defense of intellectualism. Dewey would say Stanley’s arguments apply only to “technical” aspects of skill; the “propulsive power” at the heart of habits is surely not “intellectual” at its core.

Sunday Pragmatism: Dewey on Philosophy

We are here concerned with the fact that it is the intricate mixture of the stable and the precarious, the fixed and the unpredictably novel, the assured and the uncertain, in existence which sets mankind upon that love of wisdom which forms philosophy. Yet too commonly, although in a great variety of technical modes, the result of the search is converted into a metaphysics which denies or conceals from acknowledgement the very characters of existence which initiated it, and which give significance to its conclusions. The form assumed by the denial is, most frequently, that striking division into a superior true realm of being and lower illusory, insignificant or phenomenal realm which characterizes metaphysical systems as unlike as those of Plato and Democritus, St. Thomas and Spinoza, Aristotle and Kant, Descartes and Comte, Haeckel and Mrs. Eddy.

-Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 59

If only I could write like that! Having only recently rediscovered American pragmatism, I am now stunned by its power and scope in dealing with the big questions of philosophy. I now see that the Husserl-Heidegger line of intellectual growth was in many ways indebted to the James-Dewey one, implicitly if not explicitly. We see in the passage above a key Heideggerian principle. For Dewey, as for Heidegger, it makes no sense to produce a universal metaphysics that scorns the everyday experience of humanity by turning embodied meaning into something derivative, “secondary”, “mere”, or inferior. Doing so is paradoxical precisely because as Dewey and Heidegger are apt to emphasize, metaphysical questioning is itself dependent on the “inferior” lifeworld given that the very cognitive mechanisms which enable it are finite through and through (one cannot think without your brain). The futility  of claiming the physical as inferior to or derivative of the ideal is apparent when we consider that the significance of such speculations is relevant only insofar as we are embodied creatures capable of physically reacting to the awe and magnitude of metaphysical thought. The mind thinks and the body shudders. Without this emotional valence, reflective thought would never get off the ground for it could not affect our embodiment. So while reflective thought is apt to deny the primacy of facticity, the phenomenologist understands how the results of thought matter only through their affective significance. One cannot philosophize in a vacuum. There must be a medium through which the results of thinking are made significant. This medium is the lived body. Without it, philosophical conclusions would be meaningless. Hence, any philosophical system which inverts the primacy of lived experience is left dangling in the air.

Dewey on Naturalism

The naturalistic method, when it is consistently followed, destroys many things once cherished; but it destroys them by revealing their inconsistency with the nature of things — a flaw that always attended them and deprived them of efficacy for aught save emotional consolation. But its main purport is not destructive; empirical naturalism is rather a winnowing fan. Only chaff goes, though perhaps the chaff had once been treasured. An empirical method which remains true to nature does not “save”; it is not an insurance device nor a mechanical antiseptic. But it inspires the mind with courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world

– John Dewey, Experience and Nature