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Zen and American Philosophy(4)

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   The differences now are not so much between one side of the globe and the other as between having and not having science, especially between having and not having the benefit or science, the good of it more than the evil, the promise more than the threat. The world is split by the half use of science. To live with it, to build, produce, travel, and make war with it, yet try to believe without it, is to be fatally divided.

   We might get our thoughts and ourselves together if we could blend science with Zen. Being pre-scientific, pre-industrial, Zen assumes the rural


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13. Ibid., pp. 43-44.

 

 

p. 311

simplicities. Being out of date seems to make it timeless, makes it attractive in contrast to the fever of modernity. Can we keep complexity and overcome distraction? Zen puts that question to us. But we cannot seriously consider Zen except in connection with what Dewey represents: a chance to have the Zen attitude along with scientific thought and technological advance.

   The Psychology of James enabled Dewey to get rid of dualism, which Zen had done long before. When that is thoroughly done, a whole and happy life is on the way. Then it should not be necessary to take to the woods or a monastery to have sanity. With science, society may become man's natural habitat, as Aristotle thought it was. If it ever was, it cannot again be without an unprecedented development and use of intelligence. Darwin empowered James and Dewey to realize how human abilities evolve. What some men long had thought, without enough evidence, could at last be established: that mind goes with an animal body, not as the shadow or ghost of it but as the way it goes, when it hits difficulties and hunts for the means of getting through or around. Peirce showed how the means are found and refined in the sign process. Dewey said: "The only excuse for reciting such commonplaces is that traditional theories have separated life from nature, mind from organic life, and thereby created mysteries."[14]

   To separate things from nature fakes them and scales them down to make-believe. Dewey stands by James in seeing what it is hard for many people to see in our medieval-modern world: that we are not split and spliced, as if mind were severed from body and glued back, to make a man of shape and shadow. We do not ask how walking can belong to a body which would be immobile if it did not move. With James and Peirce, Dewey saw that thinking is just as natural a process as walking, and as much part of being a man. If a man had to have a ghost to make him go, he might need a soul to think for him. But if a ghost made him go, the ghost would need another ghost to make it go, and so on. Going would become such a ghostly business there would not be a ghost of a chance to get going. Man must pick up his bed and leave the weakness of the infinite regress to take any steps.

   For Dewey, as for James and Peirce, thinking is seeing connections in the environment, and guessing what can be done with them, then going to work to test the guessing, as every man in a garage or studio picks up what he needs for what he wants and gets busy. He does not think inside himself any more than he walks inside himself, even if he works at a desk. if he gets anywhere. Intelligent functioning can be separated from interaction with


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14. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1925), p. 278.

 

 

p. 312

environment as little as any functioning of an organism can. To be, to breathe, to think, takes place, takes give-and-take with many things -- a world. A man cannot take a step without stepping out. A sage said that for one who wears sandals all the world is paved with leather. For one who carries the organs and marks of man, the world is father and mother, wife, brother, child. Having a born body, man is made to mate, to be intimate with others, not to be alone for long.

   The human body is as biological as anything alive, and as much bound to other lives. But man is less fixed by his original body and group. Because better able to communicate than non-human forms, he can plan on a grand scale. He not only can have more complex habits but can also develop the habit of changing habits. This opens unlimited possibilities, but it has taken man a long time to realize it. Knowing himself less than the world around him, he has had a profound sense of dependence and insufficiency. While language has been adding cubits to his stature he has been using his growth to exaggerate his inadequacy. He has been afraid that the scientific development of signs, in lengthening his leverage, was somehow weakening his hold on his situation, while it was freeing him to control it. He has resented being weaned from the familiar.