This consisted in abandoning the search for causes and forces and turning to the analysis of what is going on and how it goes on.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
Political philosophy has still in large measure to take to heart this lesson.
We have asserted that all deliberate choices and plans are finally the work of single human beings.
By thinking still in terms of causal forces, the conclusion has been drawn from this fact that the state, the public, is a fiction, a mask for private desires for power and position.
Not only the state but society itself has been pulverized into an aggregate of unrelated wants and wills.
Thus the state appears either a monster to be destroyed or as a Leviathan to be cherished.
Wants, choices and purposes have their locus in single beings; behavior which manifests desire, intent and resolution proceeds from them in their singularity.
But only intellectual laziness leads us to conclude that since the form of thought and decision is individual, their content, their subject-matter, is also something purely personal.
Even if “consciousness” were the wholly private matter that the individualistic tradition in philosophy and psychology supposes it to be, it would still be true that consciousness is of objects, not of itself.
Nothing has been discovered which acts in entire isolation.
The “along with” is of such a kind that the behavior of each is modified by its connection with others.
If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.