John Dewey and Fragility

Last week I quoted the philosopher John Dewey on the difference between life and non-living matter.

"The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered. While the living thing may easily be crushed by a superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence."

A friend asked why I considered that profound. I'll reproduce here my response, with some very slight re-working.

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One obvious example of what Dewey has in mind is the immune system in humans and in just about all other creatures with blood coursing through veins.

There is a wide range of infections which cause various nasty diseases in humans, whence most of those struck can and do recover, and which can only strike any of us once. Why? Because the immune system adapts to that particular germ in the course of fighting off the infection, and adapts so well there won't be a "next time." Smallpox of course is the classic example. Survive it once and you're forever free from such danger.

In such a case, the living system, the human body, has successfully 'turned the energies which acted upon it into the means of its own further existence,' to adapt Dewey's language.

Another simple example, still at the physiological level: muscle tone. When life is too easy, when you get into no fights and never have to carry heavy things around, your muscles are in danger of atrophy. The flip side of that is that muscles develop and remain strong under conditions of challenge. Since we don't live in caves, civilized folk have to develop exercise regimens to simulate the conditions of regular challenge for which muscles evolved. Still, the principle is the same as it is for immunology. The human body is turning its challenges to its own advantage.

This Deweyite observation struck me as profound in part because it anticipated by decades a theme in the recent writings of Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese financial trader turned philosopher whose latest book is aptly titled Anti-Fragile.

Taleb's point is that our usual focus on the distinction between the fragile and the robust is too narrow. A robust stone (to go back to Dewey's example) would be a very dense one that would survive the collision with some likely other object. But non-living matter of that sort can't aspire to the superior condition of anti-fragility. That ought to be the goal for living creatures and the social systems they create.

The phrase "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger" is so often used as a vain boast that we may ignore what is important there. The fact that vain people make that particular boast is an indication of a real and valuable ideal. It is possible in many respects to "gain from disorder," as Taleb puts it.

A Review of Taleb

The stewards of an economic system in which some banks are considered "too big to fail" have by that admission conceded its fragility, and they plainly seek at best to make it more robust by shoring up those banks.

The ideal, surely, would be an economic system where the failure of particular institutions would prove a good thing for the broader system, one that would gain from disorder.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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