Parts 2 & 3: (De)Liberation: John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct in the 21st Century

This is the second article in a three-part series. To start at the beginning, please go here.

Part Two: Deliberation and Intelligence

I. Deliberation

In order to see how Dewey’s ideas chart the path to (De)Liberation, we should begin with his description of what it means to deliberate. He describes deliberation as an unusual but vital mode of thinking, one that takes place when our habits become interrupted by some external impediment. This impediment cuts us off from our typical automated response, clearing the way for a deliberative process Dewey calls “dramatic rehearsal”:

Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action. It starts from the blocking of efficient overt action, due to that conflict of prior habit and newly released impulse to which reference has been made. Then each habit, each impulse, involved in the temporary suspense of overt action takes its turn in being tried out. Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experience in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon. But the trial is in imagination, not in overt fact. The experiment is carried on by tentative rehearsals in thought which do not affect physical facts outside the body. Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irretrievable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable. (190)

Simply put, dramatic rehearsal happens when we stop and think about our next move rather than using some previously-adopted habit to direct our action. It is the mental process by which our habits become the subject of active reflection and revision, as well as the imaginative arena in which new habits are born. As noted previously, impulses play an important role here as the energetic force driving habit reconstruction.

Dewey points out that deliberation itself can and should become a habit — an internal mechanism that routinely interrupts other habits and impulses the same way an external constraint might. This is necessary in order to develop an eclectic and adaptable array of options for action:

Variety of competing tendencies enlarges the world. It brings a diversity of considerations before the mind, and enables action to take place finally in view of an object generously conceived and delicately refined, composed by a long process of selections and combinations. In popular phrase, to be deliberate is to be slow, unhurried. It takes time to put things in order. (197)

Though he cautions against becoming “overinterested in the delights of reflection,” Dewey believes that individuals who cultivate strong deliberative habits will ultimately act more intelligently (197).

Deliberation helps us stay in touch with “what kind of person one is to become, what kind of a world is making” (217). Again we find the process of self-making inextricable from the process of world-making; since our personal development obtains from conditions and customs in the outside world, self-making efforts that are disconnected from efforts to transform our social and physical environments are likely to fail. Deliberation is how we imagine a better world for all humanity, one in which our better selves will have the opportunity to emerge.

Deliberation for its own sake is mere naval-gazing. “Deliberation has its beginning in troubled activity and its conclusion in choice of a course of action,” Dewey tells us (199). To get endlessly caught up in considerations of “troubled activity” that admit no practical course of action steals from deliberation its deserved conclusion. Rather, we must enlist the insights of deliberation in the service of intelligent action. This is how we approach (De)Liberation.

II. Intelligence

Intelligence for Dewey is found in the rational and ethical coordination of habit, impulse, and deliberative thought. “The genuine heart of reasonableness (and of goodness in conduct),” he writes, “lies in effective mastery of the conditions which now enter into action” (67, emphasis his). This insistence on the importance of the present moment is pervasive throughout Human Nature and Conduct, demonstrating Dewey’s preoccupation with the protean demands of existence and the future’s inherent unpredictability. Intelligence springs from a continual struggle to clearly observe present conditions, to deliberate honestly regarding how we should accept or seek to reshape those conditions, and to use the products of deliberation to fuel our activities.

Intelligence is difficult to realize, not in the least because it must navigate a constantly-fluctuating and often-conflicting plurality of desires and needs. Such desires and needs arise within and between individuals, as well as within and between communities. Regardless of the scale required to intelligently pursue our goals, Dewey argues that we must avoid treating reason, habit, and impulse as competing interests locked in a zero-sum game:

Rationality, once more, is not a force to evoke against impulse and habit. It is the attainment of a working harmony among diverse desires. “Reason” as a noun signifies the happy cooperation of a multitude of dispositions, such as sympathy, curiosity, exploration, experimentation, frankness, pursuit — to follow things through — circumspection, to look about at the context, etc…Reason, the rational attitude, is the resulting disposition, not a ready-made antecedent which can be invoked at will and set into movement. The man who would intelligently cultivate intelligence will widen, not narrow, his life of strong impulses while aiming at their happy coincidence in operation. (196)

As we widen our horizon of impulsive and habitual possibilities, intelligence is discovered through “continuous, vital readaptation” (240). The rational methods of inquiry that provide momentum here are never fixed, but are updating, upgrading, blending self-generated insights with environmental feedback.

Science is an indispensable servant of intelligence, providing the primary means by which environmental conditions are examined, standardized, and communicated. Further, scientific knowledge is the necessary launch pad for any technical or moral project that seeks to escape the mundanity of imagination and soar into the real world:

Every gain in natural science makes possible new aims. That is, the discovery of how things do occur makes it possible to conceive of their happening at will, and gives us a start on selecting and combining the conditions, the means, to command their happening. (235)

Recognition of humanity’s continuity with nature thus becomes also a recognition of the continuity of ethics with the scientific enterprise:

Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not “in” that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil. It is of them, continuous with their energies, dependent upon their support, capable of increase only as it utilizes them, and as it gradually rebuilds from their crude indifference an environment genially civilized. Hence physics, chemistry, history, statistics, engineering science, are a part of disciplined moral knowledge so far as they enable us to understand the conditions and agencies through which man lives, and on account of which he forms and executes his plans. Moral science is not something with a separate province. (296)

This assertion may seem commonplace or even passé to our modern sensibilities, but a century ago this was still a bold and unpopular position. The moral progress of the 20th and 21st centuries, propelled by a fruitful marriage between ethics and the sciences, owes at least a portion of its success to Dewey.

Progress through (De)Liberation has been and will continue to be achieved through the intelligent and ongoing application of efforts to analyze and improve the conditions of life. “The road to freedom,” Dewey writes, “may be found in that knowledge of facts which enables us to employ them in connection and desires and aims” (303). This is not a capricious or fleeting freedom, but a disciplined one, wrought from careful study, instructive experience, and hard-won mastery of knowledge.

Part Three: The Theory of Contemporary (De)Liberation

To define (De)Liberation in contemporary terms, we can start with Daniel Kahneman’s “System 2” thinking:

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 21)

System 2 provides evidence for the mechanisms by which Dewey’s processes of deliberation and intelligence can operate, but it doesn’t take us far enough. This is because one of System 2’s primary functions is to justify decisions made by unconscious processes, weaving a narrative that imbues automaticity with an (at least somewhat false) sense of identity and agency.

To get closer to true (De)Liberation, we should look to Mark Johnson, a philosopher and Dewey scholar. In Morality for Humans, Johnson posits an additional mode of cognition characterized by “reflective, critical, and imaginative moral deliberation” (2). Let’s call this “System 3” thinking:

Increasing complexity of organism-environment transactions can result in the emergence of new functional capacities of mind, thought, and language (including all forms of symbolic interaction, such as gesture, ritual, art, literature, architecture, music, and dance). The primary results of this increasing complexity are the multiple varieties of human well-being and flourishing. Flourishing is no longer merely bio-regulation, growth of the organism, and fluid action in a physical environment, bust also includes many forms of individual, interpersonal, and group flourishing and meaning-making.

The dramatic consequence of this increased complexity of experience is that success in living a life of well-being can no longer be handled entirely by intuitive, automated, nonconscious, unreflective cognitive processes. We need a more deliberative, critical, reflective track for assessing how things are going, grasping the fine textures of nuanced social interactions, proposing alternative solutions, and deciding what our best course of action might be within a problematic situation from our current perspective. We need this critical reflection because we need a way to evaluate competing values and courses of action in highly complex, indeterminate individual and social situations. (86–7, emphasis his)

Johnson’s System 3 is a contemporary rebirth of Dewey’s theories, one rooted in the soil of modern science but branching into the sky of ethical possibility. Johnson doesn’t reject the unpleasant reality that human thought is dominated by heuristics and biases, but he also doesn’t resign himself to thinking that’s all we are or could be. Neither did Dewey, and neither should we. Humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman agrees:

Even though many (perhaps most!) of our behaviors are influenced by automatic habits, and consciousness typically arrives late to the party, consciousness still has at least some capacity to select among behavioral possibilities…It’s hotly debated whether we literally have free will. I won’t settle the debate here, but I believe our most self-defining strivings or callings do give us free will in the sense that they allow us to intentionally cross the Rubicon from deliberation to commitment. If we’ve chosen our purpose wisely, we can intentionally shift our priorities and reorganize our strivings so that they help serve a common purpose, enabling us to transcend our current selves and move toward our best possible selves. (Transcend, 161–2)

The act of (De)Liberation is precisely Kaufman’s notion of what it means to “cross the Rubicon from deliberation to commitment.” This happens when System 3 thinking returns us to the social-political project of intelligently improving our environment. Without this step, progress falters. If ideas change but conditions remain static, entrenched habits will prevail and novel impulses will be unable to trigger needed adaptation. As Dewey argues, this ethical activity is not private but public, having everything to do with our families, friends, communities, and political coalitions. Neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell gives an updated interpretation:

We should remember that the most important thing in each person’s environment is other people. Those are the ones we can cooperate or compete with, those are the threats that pose the most danger and the sources of the most relevant opportunities. That means that the optimal profile of behavioral parameters for any individual depends on the profiles of everyone else around that person. Not in a simple way, however; it’s not the case that the best solution is to be like everyone else — sometimes quite the opposite. (Innate, 260)

This highlights the importance of creating, disseminating, and continually revising (De)Liberative structural norms. Fortunately, there are lots of practical ways we can begin to radically reimagine society in favor of (De)Liberation. Rutger Bregman puts forth several useful examples in his book Utopia for Realists, which calls for an end to fashionable cynicism and a return to sincere utopian aspirations:

We have to direct our minds to the future. To stop consuming our own discontent through polls and the relentlessly bad-news media. To consider alternatives and form new collectives. To transcend this confining zeitgeist and recognize our shared idealism.

Maybe then we’ll also be able to again look beyond ourselves and out at the world. There we’ll see that good old progress is still marching along on its merry way. We’ll see that we live in a marvelous age, a time of diminishing hunger and war and of surging prosperity and life expectancies. But we’ll also see just how much there is still left for us — the richest 10%, 5%, or 1% — to do. (20)

To summarize, we embody (De)Liberation by treating life as an ongoing, open-ended investigation into the true nature of our physical and social existence, striking a balance between reflection and action as we seek to increase well-being and autonomy.

This it the second article in a three-part series. To continue, please go here.

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