Dewey’s “transaction” and Gendlin’s “interaction first”
In “A Process Model (APM)” (Gendlin, 2018), Gendlin discusses the “interaction of body with its environment,” which seems to have been gradually developed into his philosophy from John Dewey and George H. Mead’s discussion of the “interaction of organism with its environment. The “organism” that interact with the environment refers to living things ranging from single-cell organism to plants, animals, and humans, and excludes non-living things such as stones and iron. In this respect, Dewey follows the traditional terminology, in contrast to Whitehead’s terminology in “Process and Reality” (Whitehead, 1929/1978), which extends the semantic range of an organism to non-living things such as stones. In terms of the semantic range of organisms, Dewey’s philosophy shares the same argumentative premise with APM, which takes living processes as the subject matter of consideration.
Let us look specifically at how classical pragmatists such as Dewey and Mead discussed the interaction between an organism and its environment.
From this passage, it is clear that the argument is based on the sequence that, before reflective analysis, there is first the life activity of breathing, ingesting, digesting, walking, etc., which is secondarily broken down into air and lungs, food and stomach, and ground and legs. What is being rejected here is the idea that external conditions and internal structures are independent and self-existent beforehand and then influence each other in both directions. Instead, as Mead succinctly states below, they are in a relationship of “interdependence” that cannot exist without each other:
This interactional perspective with the environment can be found in the paper “A process concept of relationship” (Gendlin, 1957), which Gendlin contributed to the Counseling Center Discussion Paper before the publication of “Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning” (Gendlin, 1962/1997):
Gendlin, at this time, called it an organism, not a body, that interacts with its environment. In this respect, he retained the terminology of Dewey and Mead.
As described above, “interaction” was the fundamental concept of Dewey’s philosophy. However, in his later years, Dewey became dissatisfied with the prefix “inter-” in the word “interaction” because he felt it did not say well what he wanted to say.
This dissatisfaction also is shared by later Gendlin:
In his later years, therefore, Dewey would use the word “transaction,” which means “transaction” in commerce, instead of interaction, to say what he wanted to say:
The idea is that there is first an activity called a transaction, which is secondarily assigned to a lender and a borrower or a buyer and a seller.,
Gendlin did not carry over this paraphrase in its original form. However, he did paraphrase “interaction” by adding “first.” In this way, the idea itself, which is different from the idea of two independent and self-existing persons interacting with each other in both directions, is inherited from Dewey in APM:
References
Dewey, J. (1925/1929). Experience and nature (2nd ed.). Open Court.
Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: the theory of inquiry. Henry Holt.
Dewey, J. & Bentley, A.F. (1949). Knowing and the known. Beacon Press.
Gendlin, E.T. (1957). A process concept of relationship. Counseling Center Discussion Paper (The University of Chicago), 3 (2), 22-32.
Gendlin, E. T. (1962/1997). Experiencing and the creation of meaning: a philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective (Paper ed.). Northwestern University Press.
Gendlin, E.T. (1993). Human nature and concepts. In J. Braun (Ed.), Psychological concepts of modernity, (pp. 3-16).
Gendlin, E. T. (1997/2018). A process model. Northwestern University Press.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society: from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. (edited by C.W. Morris). University of Chicago Press.
Schoeller, D. & Dunaetz, N. (2018). Thinking emergence as interaffecting: approaching and contextualizing Eugene Gendlin’s Process Model. Continental Philosophy Review, 51, 123–140.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929/1978). Process and reality: an essay in cosmology. Free Press.
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