John Dewey

A distinctive way of behaving in conjunction and connection with other distinctive ways of acting, not a self-enclosed way of acting, independent of everything else, is that toward which we are pointed.

But it may at least render us wary of any definition of an individual which operates in terms of separateness.

If so, an individual, whatever else it is or is not, is not just the spatially isolated thing our imagination inclines to take it to be.

We are compelled to say that for some purposes, for some results, the tree is the individual, for others the cell, and for a third, the forest or the landscape.

We have to consider not only its connections and ties, but the consequences with respect to which it acts and moves.

From another point of view, we have to qualify our approximate notion of an individual as being that which acts and moves as a unitary thing.

The tree stands only when rooted in the soil; it lives or dies in the mode of its connections with sunlight, air and water.

In fact, both words, individual and social, are hopelessly ambiguous, and the ambiguity will never cease as long as we think in terms of an antithesis.

One of the obstructions in the path is the seemingly engrained notion that the first and the last problem which must be solved is the relation of the individual and the social:--or that the outstanding question is to determine the relative…

It is enough for present purposes if the problem has been clarified:--if we have seen that the outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself, and if we have succeeded, in however groping a manner, in…

It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.

Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion.