Thread by @shengokai

As I promised, I'm going to drop Dewey's theory of aesthetic personhood on my timeline with citations. Some abbreviations for a couple of works:

UPMP: Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy
AAE: Art as Experience
E&N: Experience and Nature
QT: Qualitative Thought

For background, Dewey rarely talks about "persons" in his work: he mostly focuses on organisms and how organisms are individuated from one another. However, for Dewey, the concept of personhood, is an essentially social concept that emerges within human society. (1/n)

Where Dewey does do deep dives into persons, it is usually in association with how persons (or the category of person) emerges from within a social context. Thus, the meaning of "personhood" changes as it is tested out in experience against the problem of "who is a person." (2/n)

"Personhood" is a kind of tool, a technology, for Dewey, and like any tool, it needs to be refined through testing against the material of experience. As we expand our concept of "person," the ways that we make actual possibilities of nature as "persons" also expands. (3/n)

This is how a Deweyan framework can accomodate multiple kinds of "person" as distinct. "Personhood" is therefore never going to be a static category, but something defined through the way we understand experience through culture. Which is kind of important in light of this: (4/n)

"The recognition that all normal human beings are persons potentially is itself the product and mark of a great moral advance in the constitution of human society."

UPMP, 199. (5/n)

Above, because personhood is a socially organized way of understanding how an organism transacts with nature through culture, understanding all humans as potentially persons is to understand that all humans, regardless of their constitution, are potentially persons. (6/n)

"Potentially," here, shouldn't be taken as a negative: it should be taken as an understanding that an encounter with other ways of being in the world should force us to revise our concept of person such that we see them as the actualization of the possibility of personhood. (7/n)

It is the recognition that our ways of understanding "persons" are limited by the kinds of experiences we have in the world through culture. On the use of "persons," as an expression of potentialities, Dewey says the following: (8/n)

"...the word is used to designate a potentiality, rather than something as yet actualized. The same thing is true of infants in the legal sense of the word."

How persons become actualized as such is related to the organization of culture, how we take habits from culture. (9/n)

This is connected to Dewey's understanding of "offices," which are roles performed to a community in exchange for support from that community. These "offices" come with a collection of habitual actions that serve to structure how one embodies the office. (10/n)

"Personhood," in this context, is a super-ordinate office. For Dewey, in order to be gendered, raced, or anything else-ed, you needed to be recognized AS a person. You need to take up the collection of habits that are associated with persons. Habits defined socially. (11/n)

Offices, for Dewey, initially used the biological functions of the body as their prototypes. By this, Dewey is pointing to the ways that our biophysical activities are elevated through cultural organization to essential traits, which results in all kinds of problems. (12/n)

If you use biology as the prototype for the office of "womanhood," and organize the habits that come with the assignment of the office in line with the prototype, then individuals who are unable to engage in the habits that align with the prototype can't fill the office. (13/n)

Again, "offices" are socially organized and are continuous with their prototypes but not identical. The issue becomes the assumption of identity of the office assigned with the prototype of the office which assumes a particular necessity to fill the office. (14/n)

This is not what Dewey's on about, and much of this emerges in E&N when he's talking about continuity versus identity. Dewey uses the examples of the continuity of childhood and adulthood and the continuity of seeds and trees to make this point clear. (15/n)

No one says that a tree is "identical" with the seed that it grew from, but we do acknowledge the continuity of the seed with the tree. We also recognize the continuity of the child with the adult (or we should), without arguing for the identity of the child and the adult. (16/n)

So, the biological prototype of an office like "womanhood" is not identical with the office as assigned by culture and the collection of habits within that office. This becomes especially true when we understand how we tell apart different persons and different offices. (17/n)

Which, Dewey says, is on the basis of the "emotional attributes" of the object or individual encountered. To be clear here: Dewey's use of "emotional" is grounded in his understanding of "emotions" as the overarching quality of a situation, or object, that gives it form. (18/n)

Now, experience is defined in E&N in the following:

(19/n)

Insofar as experience includes "processes of experiencing," these processes are structured by and aligned with, an overarching qualitative unity that makes an experience what it is. As he says in AAE:

(20/n)

To wit, when we talk about "that meal" or "that storm" or "that person," we're talking about something encountered in experience that is dominated by an overarching pervasive quality that distinguishes it from other object of a similar sort. (21/n)

So, we experience persons as persons as unified through a pervasive quality that we identify as organizing them into a person. How we recognize the quality of "personhood" is the result of the ways that our processes of experiencing and percieving are structured socially. (22/n)

"Perception" for Dewey, involves the reconstruction of qualities of experience in line with the dominant overarching quality such that the thing perceived is intelligible. Habits of perception are structured through culture, so we can only "see" people through culture. (23/n)

And our habits of perception are themselves -creative- insofar as we construct a person in line with the habits we have taken from culture such that they are seen as a person, but not simply "seen" vis a vis the visual faculty, but felt qualitatively as a person. (24/n)

They are creative because they remake the raw materials of experience to make present the actuality of a person in line with the possibilities we view as implicit in the situation through our cultural positioned. How we "see" is how we are in nature through culture. (25/n)

These "emotional" materials that Dewey is saying we use as the raw material for identifying persons are the qualitative unities of behaviors that emerge through an organisms' transaction with an environment and they are continuous with our biophysical organization. (26/n)

AGAIN: continuity is not identity here. Dewey is saying that how an organism transacts with its environment is a product of how that organism is physically organized, and thus the meanings that the organism takes from that transaction are continuous with its body. (27/n)

Society takes up the qualitative unity of these behaviors and use them as the raw materials out of which different social roles, Dewey's offices above, are made. Hence, all offices take as their material the qualities of our transactions with the environment. (28/n)

Dewey isn't actually unclear about this, a point he makes at length in Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy: (29/n)

Recall that the emotional nature of an experience is a quality that is denoted within the experience. It might rise to sufficiently dominate the experience such that forms the overarching quality of the experience, but it is still just a quality of experience. (30/n)

And, insofar as qualities emerge through human transaction with an environment, the qualities themselves are not distinct in essence from one another, but only in how they are organized and experienced through our bodies. To be clear, our perception of persons is embodied. (31/n)

Here I'm going to editorialize Dewey: a better way for Dewey to put this would be to replace "emotional" with "aesthetic" vis a vis AAE wherein what Dewey articulates as the "emotional" qualities of experience are the affective qualities of experience intensified by art. (32/n)

In AAE and QT, the processes of art are prefigured in experience: the selection of qualities and raw materials, emotional or otherwise, that are taken up and organized so that one quality emerges to dominate, is the same process we engage in when understanding persons. (33/n)

These is the same process that goes on in Science and Law, as Dewey notes in QT specifically. Put simply, the aesthetic processes of creating a fully realized and believable character in art is also the same processes we engage in when we perceive a person as a person. (34/n)

This becomes more important when we consider how we know other people: In QT, Dewey says that the following:

Put simply, we know other people as the total integration of their ongoing habits, which results in a quality of that person as perceived as the personal quality, or the quality of their personhood, which makes the person who and what they are. (35/n)

To wit, when we mistake one person for another, realizing the mistake is a realization of how we miss take the qualitative unity of one person for another, and realizing that quality changes the overall structure of the experience in which they are involved. (36/n)

However, what is important is the recognition that the quality of the person is a a quality that emerges from their behavior through their transactions with us and the environment such that they become perceived as the quality of that person as unique from others. (37/n)

Moreover, when this quality is reintegrated into the broader web of social meanings that is culture, it becomes intelligible as "character," which is the way that the conduct of a person takes on a moral quality through its integration into culture. (38/n)

Even when this quality is called "character" or "personality," this quality is still primarily affective: a felt sense of the person as a person, or as moral through the quality that dominates their behavior and their transactions with the environment through culture. (39/n)

To bring this back, "personhood," or "personality" as the total integration of behaviors that give rise to our capacity to call some things "persons" and other things "animals" is a result of our cultural habits of perception which see some things (and people) as persons. (40/n)

To call someone a "person" is not simply an intellectual judgment, but a judgment based on the qualitative unity of their behaviors as perceived through our cultural habits, such that we can say people are more or less "people," or we can transform them into "people." (41/n)

Which is why the recognition that all humans are potentially persons marks a great moral advance: to recognize the potential for personhood in another person, for Dewey, entails allowing them to develop that personhood and our concept of person through transaction. (42/n)

The potentiality of persons to be persons is thus the potential for us to expand out habits of perception to expand the ways that "personhood" is the actualization of the possibilities of what it is to be a "person," just as art expands with culture. (43/n)

This becomes a mark of a moral advance because it indicates the maturity of the culture in question to be able to expand and incorporate multiple ways of being a person into its overall meaning of "personhood" such that we may all be persons in different ways. (44/n)

And, given Dewey's theory of democracy, this is one of the more hopeful understandings of "personhood" I've come across.

Congrats if you've managed to stick it out through all 45 tweets.