Dewey's Concept Of Experience

Experience is one of Dewey's important conceptions . It is strictly related to the core of Dewey's philosophy. The Dualism of western traditional philosophy takes experience and nature as two opposed conceptions. So experience is primarily regarded as a knowledge-affair and a pure mental affair, and it represents a theoretical premise that self and man's life is separate. Dewey firmly objects this idea. Experience, according to Dewey, is not only a cognitive affair, and its connotation is far wider than cognition and it includes the whole life and history. In Dewey's thought, experience and life have equal meaning. Experience means life activity, and the premier condition of the life activity is integration of life with its environment. The interdependent relations between life and his environment become the ontological base of Dewey's philosophy of experience. Dewey intends to dispel the sharper separation between experience and nature. So we may grasp how Dewey's conception of experience transcends the traditional epistemology by starting from life itself.This dissertation is a study on Dewey's concept of experience. It comprises eight parts.The introduction discusses the reason why I select Dewey's conception of experience as my subject, and introduces the condition of the study on this subject and my new method and thought.The first chapter discusses the threes main theoretical sources of Dewey's philosophy of experience. It expounds the transition of Dewey's philosophy of experience from absolutism to experimentalism, the process of accepting Hegel's philosophic method and then Darwin's theory of evolution and James's biological theory.The second and third chapters are reconstruction of experience.The second chapter discusses how Dewey gives an empirical survey of empiricisms and exhibits the history of the concept of experience. Dewey holds that there are three typical concepts of experience . The Greek conception of experience is limited to sensation which makes us only arrive at phenomenon. But we cannot arrive at the nature of thing and also cannot reach the realm of idea through experience, and only reason can make us arrive at the reality. Greek philosophy identifies experience with belief and skill that due to custom, so it is inevitably enslaved to the past. Great Britain modern empiricism admits that there is connection between nature and experience, and knowledge originates from experience . But it holds that experience is only passive and isolate, and connections are supposed to be foreign to experience. It in consequence falls into the phenomenalism and the skepticism. The third typical concept of experience comes from Dewey's thought. Experience is not primarily a knowledge-affair. It appears as an affair of the intercourse of a living being with its environment. Experience is not a psychical thing; what experience suggests about itself is a genuinely objective world . Experience and thought are not antithetical terms; conscious experience is full of inference. Experience is not a registration of what has taken place, and in its vital form it is experimental, an effort to change the given; it is characteristic by reaching forward into the future and the unknown.The third chapter discusses the definition, classification, scope and nature of Dewey's experience. Based on the fundamental modality of the life action, the definition of Dewey's experience is a transaction of a living being with its environment, what Dewey called "doing and experiencing." It includes the thing that is experienced and the process of experience. Experience penetrates deeply into the nature and exposes nature on two levels, primary experience and reflective experience.In the fourth chapter, I expound the relation of experience to the nature, self, education and democracy in Dewey's thought. Dewey gives a naturalism interpretation of experience. According to Dewey, experience is a life style, which relates to the process of life. Self and self-consciousness has different meaning in Dewey's view. The activity of mind is important for experience, and it is not only change but organic and living change. Experience is the final philosophic basis to which human appeal . Dewey emphasizes the connection between experience and education. Education must be based on experience. Dewey thinks that the opposition of individual and society is an artificial hypothesis in traditional philosophy. In fact, the real distinction is not the distinction between the individual and society, but the one among different communities. So we should pay close attention to the issue that how the individual constitutes the community which has more individual conditions. The democratic community is the criterion and ideal form of human community.The fifth chapter expounds further Dewey's experience and philosophic method. In Dewey's idea, the differentiation of empirical method and no-empirical method depends on the different attitudes to experience. The former starts from the whole, but the latter from the reflective production and regards it as a primary thing or the given. The former provides us more opportunity of investigation, but the latter leads to the separation of subject and object, experience and nature .Contrast to the traditional philosophy, Dewey holds that philosophy is an inquiry, one function of which is social criticism. Criticism concerns both fact and value, and the moral and social elements that embody value ideas are rooted in the life experience. Dewey also emphasizes scientific method or experimental method because it is based on daily life; it starts from primary experience to find problem, and searches for the solution of problem, and then returns the consequence to primary experience to examine it.The sixth chapter discusses the relations of Dewey's philosophy of experience to contemporary philosophy. I discuss the relation between Dewey's concept of experience and the one in analytic philosophy. I also expound the influence of Dewey on neo-pragmatism and the difference between them. There is some natural relevance between Dewey's philosophy of experience and ontological phenomenalism which embodies on the conception of experience. In Dewey's thought there are many analyses of human experience and it is a phenomenalism description of experience.In the end of this dissertation I expound the theoretical contribution and the dilemma of Dewey's philosophy of experience.