The roles of habit and environment in Dewey's concepts of alienation and agency

Alexander W Anderson, Purdue University

Abstract

We live in a suburban society. In my thesis, I argue that suburbanism reflects a state of alienation that John Dewey became concerned with in the first half of the 20th Century, and persists to this day. My work begins by investigating the relationship John Dewey established between habits and the environment in his work on ethics. I draw attention to Dewey's claim that habits - that is to say the various ways we actually conduct ourselves - are the best representation of our notions of right and wrong and what we value. I also explicate the role Dewey ascribed to the environment in either abetting or hindering the development of new habits, and hence new modes of ethical conduct. What I demonstrate is that for Dewey, changing our moral conduct (again, best understood as habits) is far more difficult than most philosophers recognize because in order to change habits, it is also necessary to physically change the environment in which those habits occur. But my investigation revealed two important themes in Dewey's work that had largely gone unnoticed. First, in establishing a strong link between habits and the environment, Dewey was in fact articulating a theory of alienation. Specifically, it became clear to me that Dewey believed that when our habits were rooted in an environment (best understood as both the natural environment and what has come to be termed the `built environment') that no longer existed, we were alienated. This notion of alienation reflects Dewey's commitment to a naturalistic approach to philosophical concepts. In particular, Dewey's theory of alienation can be likened to Darwinian concepts, most notably the role adaptation plays in evolution. I concluded that Dewey recognized that because we continuously transform our environment, thereby rendering various habits obsolete, we periodically become alienated. My conclusion that Dewey recognized that we periodically alienate ourselves by rendering old modes of conduct ill-suited to the environment, revealed a second feature of Dewey's work that had been under researched. Namely, when we are alienated, human agency is called into question. Through a detailed analysis of several of Dewey's works (Human Nature and Conduct, Individualism Old and New, and Art as Experience) I showed that Dewey was deeply concerned with the possibility that when old habits persisted, even when radical transformations had taken place in the environment, that directing the way the environment changes becomes difficult, and human agency becomes limited. My work indicated that Dewey thought that for agency to be possible, it had to be rooted - and therefore reactive to - lived experience. But when old habits, rather than actual experience determine how we react to the world around us, experience and hence agency become impossible. In my work I showed that Dewey felt that the Industrial Revolution had indeed created a deep schism between old habits and the way the environment actually existed, and thus he was deeply worried that we were losing our ability to shape the world and human agency was indeed being lost. I conclude my dissertation by investigating whether the conditions Dewey identified have changed, either for better or for worse. My work suggests that the conditions of alienation, and hence loss of human agency have in fact worsened since Dewey first raised his concerns. I argue that rather than changing the environment to create conditions in which new habits could emerge, we have changed the environment in an effort to accommodate old habits. The primary change we have made is that we have become a sprawling suburban society, rather than a densely populated urban society. This was done to satisfy old habits rooted in notions of rugged individualism. But these changes have been superficial, because they deny the collaborative and collective nature of post- Industrial Revolution life. And so alienation and lack of agency not only persist, they have become more pronounced. A corollary to my claim is that the changes we have made in order to satisfy old habits (again, modes of conduct) have damaged both the built-environment and the natural environment. I conclude by arguing that only a return to urban living can create an environment in which new habits can emerge.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Seigfried, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American studies|Environmental philosophy|Philosophy

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