Il pensiero come “salto”: educazione, soggetto ed esperienza in John Dewey

Abstract

In this paper, I analyse the Deweyan account of thinking and subject and discuss the educational consequences that follow from such an account. Specifically, I argue that despite the grouping of thinking and reflective thought that has largely appeared in the interpretation of Deweyan work, Dewey conceived of thinking as an activity that largely escapes the light of reflective thought. Dewey, in a sense, makes the upsetting point that a lack of awareness and control are the very heart of thought. Such an understanding is not without consequences on the account of the subject he gives. Dewey clearly dismantled the understanding of the subject as a coherent centre of agency and conceived of it rather as an “event” occurring in the ongoing flow of experience. This weakening of thinking and subject has far-reaching consequences for education, which must be conceived not so much as the attempt to understand experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience by putting new points of interactions into our relationship with the environment, changing our being-embedded-in-the-world.