As I continue to work my way through John Dewey's Art as Experience, I found myself confronting a sentence that embodied an interesting reflection back to the early nineteenth century:
As the writer composes in his medium of words what he wants to say, his idea takes on for himself perceptible form.
This is very much the spirit in which I launched this blog in the first place. While language may not be the embodiment of ideas, ideas only achieve functional value when they are made sharable; and they can only be made sharable once they are rendered in some "perceptible form." That perceptible form may not necessarily involve language (which is one of the key points that Dewey develops in Art as Experience); but, at least in the history of Western civilization (such as it is), text has probably become the most popular of perceptible forms when it comes to sharing ideas. Hence the motivation behind the title of this blog: a place where I can "rehearse" ideas by composing them in the medium of words. This "rehearsal" is not just for the benefit of those who choose to read my words; it is also for my own benefit, as I wrestle with the process of composition to bring the idea to a point where it is as perceptible to me as it is to others, after which my attention can shift from wrestling with the text to wrestling with the idea.
When I first introduced this motivation, I made no mention of Dewey. His books were occupying a rather modest portion of shelf space; and they were all in the to-be-read-sooner-or-later category, always being pushed back into the "later" category by other books. The source I did cite was the essay, "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking," by Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist predated Dewey by roughly a century; but, while he would later be a major influence on Nietzsche and Kafka, he was probably virtually unknown in Dewey's America. Kleist was also sufficiently eccentric that, as I cited in introducing this blog, it is unlikely that any of us will ever know how seriously Kleist took the thesis of this essay; he could just as easily have been playing with the style of the expository essay to explore a proposition that he felt was absurd, just as Jorge Luis Borges would later play with the style of the book review by applying it to non-existent texts. Nevertheless, Dewey's proposition deserves to be "haunted" by Kleist's essay, since thoughts that are "gradually fabricated" "while speaking" are no different from those that assume "perceptible form" as they are composed in written text. Indeed, Kleist's proposition predates Dewey's, since it taps into the question of how knowledge had been made sharable in the earlier generations of oral cultures.
Note that I have used the verb "haunt," rather than "influence," to reinforce my assumption that Kleist probably had no explicit influence on Dewey when he was preparing to give those William James lectures at Harvard in 1931. Kleist's "ghost" is present only to those of us who have read him, which is why I have tried to connote a "spectral" relationship between these two minds, one of which may have been "just messin' with us," while the other was preparing for the august and critical audience one would expect among those attending a lecture at Harvard University. These are radically different "realms of being," to invoke a phrase coined by another great Harvard lecturer, George Santayana (part of Dewey's audience for all we know); but, as I have previously discussed, the authors of the Upanishads believed that knowledge resided in the connections that bound together elements from similarly unrelated realms. We are capable of making connections that would have been beyond the realm of conception for Dewey's Harvard audiences, but that means that we are also capable of understanding Dewey better than his original audiences did. Indeed, at the risk of sounding a bit too arrogant, we are capable of understanding Dewey better than he did himself, simply because we can do so much more with the "perceptible forms" of his ideas.
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