5 - Adverbs: Dewey on the Qualities of Existence

Summary

The preceding chapter presented Deleuze's discussion of verbs both as expressing the potentiality of existence (in the infinitive mode) and as inhering in the contemporary world (in the present tense). This chapter argues that John Dewey (1859–1952) likewise develops a philosophical approach that avoids thinking in terms of nouns and adjectives, in terms of objects and their properties. Dewey focuses on how things are done. This links to what Deleuze called the ‘manner of being’. It is a mistake to build a gap between human experience (or language) and the world. Not only is activity inherent to the world, but the manner in which such activity occurs needs to be understood, as this too is integral to the world, not an addition to the world. Things always happen in a certain way: quality suffuses existence. For Dewey, such qualities are best described through adverbs which convey the manner of such activity. Adverbs relate when and, more importantly, how things happen. They are linked to verbs and add to them by modifying them. We eat well or badly; we drive slowly or recklessly; the plant grows quickly or poorly. Things never simply eat, drive or grow.

An important element of Dewey's thought is his notion of ‘possession’. For Dewey, possession is not about ownership; it is not a question of one thing having, grasping or capturing another. Words do not grasp or possess the world or, to put it another way, the mind does not gain possession of the world through knowing the meaning of certain words. Rather, existence is the coming together of living things and some part of the world into an active experience. Existence is a form of co-belonging.1

Dewey on Possession and Knowledge

The word ‘possession’ carries a range of meanings. In the active sense, as a verb, ‘to possess’ implies the ownership of something by another individual (or subject). Taken as a noun, possession suggests the thing that is owned. A third meaning reverses the polarity of the first and describes the taking over of an individual by some external force – when a person is possessed by jealousy or demons, or a crowd is possessed by anger.