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John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859, the third of four sons born to Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemesia Rich of Burlington, Vermont. The eldest sibling died in infancy, but the three surviving brothers attended the public school and the University of Vermont in Burlington with John. While at the University of Vermont, Dewey was exposed to evolutionary theory through the teaching of G.H. Perkins and Lessons in Elementary Physiology, a text by T.H. Huxley, the famous English evolutionist. The theory of natural selection continued to have a life-long impact upon Dewey's thought, suggesting the barrenness of static models of nature, and the importance of focusing on the interaction between the human organism and its environment when considering questions of psychology and the theory of knowledge. The formal teaching in philosophy at the University of Vermont was confined for the most part to the school of Scottish realism, a school of thought that Dewey soon rejected, but his close contact both before and after graduation with his teacher of philosophy, H.A.P. Torrey, a learned scholar with broader philosophical interests and sympathies, was later accounted by Dewey himself as "decisive" to his philosophical development.
After graduation in 1879, Dewey taught high school for two years, during which the idea of pursuing a career in philosophy took hold. With this nascent ambition in mind, he sent a philosophical essay to W.T. Harris, then editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and the most prominent of the St. Louis Hegelians. Harris's acceptance of the essay gave Dewey the confirmation he needed of his promise as a philosopher. With this encouragement he traveled to Baltimore to enroll as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University.
At Johns Hopkins Dewey came under the tutelage of two powerful and engaging intellects who were to have a lasting influence on him. George Sylvester Morris, a German-trained Hegelian philosopher, exposed Dewey to the organic model of nature characteristic of German idealism. G. Stanley Hall, one of the most prominent American experimental psychologists at the time, provided Dewey with an appreciation of the power of scientific methodology as applied to the human sciences. The confluence of these viewpoints propelled Dewey's early thought, and established the general tenor of his ideas throughout his philosophical career.
Upon obtaining his doctorate in 1884, Dewey accepted a teaching post at the University of Michigan, a post he was to hold for ten years, with the exception of a year at the University of Minnesota in 1888. While at Michigan Dewey wrote his first two books: Psychology (1887), and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888). Both works expressed Dewey's early committment to Hegelian idealism, while the Psychology explored the synthesis between this idealism and experimental science that Dewey was then attempting to effect. At Michigan Dewey also met one of his important philosophical collaborators, James Hayden Tufts, with whom he would later author Ethics (1908; revised ed. 1932).
In 1894, Dewey followed Tufts to the recently founded University of Chicago. It was during his years at Chicago that Dewey's early idealism gave way to an empirically based theory of knowledge that was in concert with the then developing American school of thought known as pragmatism. This change in view finally coalesced into a series of four essays entitled collectively "Thought and its Subject-Matter," which was published along with a number of other essays by Dewey's colleagues and students at Chicago under the title Studies in Logical Theory (1903). Dewey also founded and directed a laboratory school at Chicago, where he was afforded an opportunity to apply directly his developing ideas on pedagogical method. This experience provided the material for his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899).
Disagreements with the administration over the status of the Laboratory School led to Dewey's resignation from his post at Chicago in 1904. His philosophical reputation now secured, he was quickly invited to join the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. Dewey spent the rest of his professional life at Columbia. Now in New York, located in the midst of the Northeastern universities that housed many of the brightest minds of American philosophy, Dewey developed close contacts with many philosophers working from divergent points of view, an intellectually stimulating atmosphere which served to nurture and enrich his thought.
During his first decade at Columbia Dewey wrote a great number of articles in the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, many of which were published in two important books: The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (1910) and Essays in Experimental Logic (1916). His interest in educational theory also continued during these years, fostered by his work at Teachers College at Columbia. This led to the publication of How We Think (1910; revised ed. 1933), an application of his theory of knowledge to education, and Democracy and Education (1916) perhaps his most important work in the field.
During his years at Columbia Dewey's reputation grew not only as a leading philosopher and educational theorist, but also in the public mind as an important commentator on contemporary issues, the latter due to his frequent contributions to popular magazines such as The New Republic and Nation as well as his ongoing political involvement in a variety of causes, such as women's suffrage and the unionization of teachers. One outcome of this fame was numerous invitations to lecture in both academic and popular venues. Many of his most significant writings during these years were the result of such lectures, including Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature (1925), The Public and its Problems (1927), and The Quest for Certainty (1929).
Dewey's retirement from active teaching in 1930 did not
curtail his activity either as a public figure or productive
philosopher. Of special note in his public life was his
participation in the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges
Against Leon Trotsky at the Moscow Trial, which exposed Stalin's
political machinations behind the Moscow trials of the mid-1930s,
and his defense of fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell against an
attempt by conservatives to remove him from his chair at the
College of the City of New York in 1940. A primary focus of
Dewey's philosophical pursuits during the 1930s was the
preparation of a final formulation of his logical theory,
published as Logic: The Theory of Inquiry in 1938.
Dewey's other significant works during his retirement years
include Art as Experience (1934), A Common Faith
(1934), Freedom and Culture (1939), Theory of
Valuation (1939), and Knowing and the Known (1949),
the last coauthored with Arthur F. Bentley. Dewey continued to
work vigorously throughout his retirement until his death on June
2, 1952, at the age of ninety-two.
Theory of Knowledge
The central focus of Dewey's philosophical interests
throughout his career was what has been traditionally called
"epistemology," or the "theory of knowledge." It is indicative,
however, of Dewey's critical stance toward past efforts in this
area that he expressly rejected the term "epistemology,"
preferring the "theory of inquiry" or "experimental logic" as
more representative of his own approach.
In Dewey's view, traditional epistemologies, whether
rationalist or empiricist, had drawn too stark a distinction
between thought, the domain of knowledge, and the world of fact
to which thought purportedly referred: thought was believed to
exist apart from the world, epistemically as the object of
immediate awareness, ontologically as the unique aspect of the
self. The committment of modern rationalism, stemming from
Descartes, to a doctrine of innate ideas, ideas constituted from
birth in the very nature of the mind itself, had effected this
dichotomy; but the modern empiricists, beginning with Locke, had
done the same just as markedly by their committment to an
introspective methodology and a representational theory of ideas.
The resulting view makes a mystery of the relevance of thought to
the world: if thought constitutes a domain that stands apart from
the world, how can its accuracy as an account of the world ever
be established? For Dewey a new model, rejecting traditional
presumptions, was wanting, a model that Dewey endeavored to
develop and refine throughout his years of writing and
reflection.
In his early writings on these issues, such as "Is Logic a
Dualistic Science?" (1890) and "The Present Position of Logical
Theory" (1891), Dewey offered a solution to epistemological
issues mainly along the lines of his early acceptance of Hegelian
idealism: the world of fact does not stand apart from thought,
but is itself defined within thought as its objective
manifestation. But during the succeeding decade Dewey gradually
came to reject this solution as confused and inadequate.
A number of influences have bearing on Dewey's change of
view. For one, Hegelian idealism was not conducive to
accommodating the methodologies and results of experimental
science which he accepted and admired. Dewey himself had
attempted to effect such an accommodation between experimental
psychology and idealism in his early Psychology (1887),
but the publication of William James' Principles of
Psychology (1891), written from a more thoroughgoing
naturalistic stance, suggested the superfluity of idealist
principles in the treatment of the subject.
Second, Darwin's theory of natural selection suggested in a
more particular way the form which a naturalistic approach to the
theory of knowledge should take. Darwin's theory had renounced
supernatural explanations of the origins of species by accounting
for the morphology of living organisms as a product of a natural,
temporal process of the adaptation of lineages of organisms to
their environments, environments which, Darwin understood, were
significantly determined by the organisms that occupied them.
The key to the naturalistic account of species was a
consideration of the complex interrelationships between organisms
and environments. In a similar way, Dewey came to believe that a
productive, naturalistic approach to the theory of knowledge must
begin with a consideration of the development of knowledge as an
adaptive human response to environing conditions aimed at an
active restructuring of these conditions. Unlike traditional
approaches in the theory of knowledge, which saw thought as a
subjective primitive out of which knowledge was composed, Dewey's
approach understood thought genetically, as the product of the
interaction between organism and environment, and knowledge as
having practical instrumentality in the guidance and control of
that interaction. Thus Dewey adopted the term "instrumentalism"
as a descriptive appellation for his new approach.
Dewey's first significant application of this new
naturalistic understanding was offered in his seminal article
"The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896). In this article,
Dewey argued that the dominant conception of the reflex arc in
the psychology of his day, which was thought to begin with the
passive stimulation of the organism, causing a conscious act of
awareness eventuating in a response, was a carry-over of the old,
and errant, mind-body dualism. Dewey argued for an alternative
view: the organism interacts with the world through self-guided
activity that coordinates and integrates sensory and motor
responses. The implication for the theory of knowledge was
clear: the world is not passively perceived and thereby known;
active manipulation of the environment is involved integrally in
the process of learning from the start.
Dewey first applied this interactive naturalism in an
explicit manner to the theory of knowledge in his four
introductory essays in Studies in Logical Theory. Dewey
identified the view expressed in Studies with the school
of pragmatism, crediting William James as its progenitor. James,
for his part, in an article appearing in the Psychological
Bulletin, proclaimed the work as the expression of a new
school of thought, acknowledging its originality.
A detailed genetic analysis of the process of inquiry was
Dewey's signal contribution to Studies. Dewey
distinguished three phases of the process. It begins with the
problematic situation, a situation where instinctive or
habitual responses of the human organism to the environment are
inadequate for the continuation of ongoing activity in pursuit of
the fulfillment of needs and desires. Dewey stressed in
Studies and subsequent writings that the uncertainty of
the problematic situation is not inherently cognitive, but
practical and existential. Cognitive elements enter into the
process as a response to precognitive maladjustment.
The second phase of the process involves the isolation of the
data or subject matter which defines the parameters within which
the reconstruction of the initiating situation must be addressed.
In the third, reflective phase of the process, the cognitive
elements of inquiry (ideas, suppositions, theories, etc.) are
entertained as hypothetical solutions to the originating
impediment of the problematic situation, the implications of
which are pursued in the abstract. The final test of the
adequacy of these solutions comes with their employment in
action. If a reconstruction of the antecedent situation
conducive to fluid activity is achieved, then the solution no
longer retains the character of the hypothetical that marks
cognitive thought; rather, it becomes a part of the existential
circumstances of human life.
The error of modern epistemologists, as Dewey saw it, was
that they isolated the reflective stages of this process, and
hypostatized the elements of those stages (sensations, ideas,
etc.) into pre-existing constituents of a subjective mind in
their search for an incorrigible foundation of knowledge. For
Dewey, the hypostatization was as groundless as the search for
incorrigibility was barren. Rejecting foundationalism, Dewey
accepted the fallibilism that was characteristic of the school of
pragmatism: the view that any proposition accepted as an item of
knowledge has this status only provisionally, contingent upon its
adequacy in providing a coherent understanding of the world as
the basis for human action.
Dewey defended this general outline of the process of inquiry
throughout his long career, insisting that it was the only proper
way to understand the means by which we attain knowledge, whether
it be the commonsense knowledge that guides the ordinary affairs
of our lives, or the sophisticated knowledge arising from
scientific inquiry. The latter is only distinguished from the
former by the precision of its methods for controlling data, and
the refinement of its hypotheses. In his writings in the theory
of inquiry subsequent to Studies, Dewey endeavored to
develop and deepen instrumentalism by considering a number of
central issues of traditional epistemology from its perspective,
and responding to some of the more trenchant criticisms of the
view.
One traditional question that Dewey addressed in a series of
essays between 1906 and 1909 was that of the meaning of truth.
Dewey at that time considered the pragmatic theory of truth as
central to the pragmatic school of thought, and vigorously
defended its viability. Both Dewey and William James, in his
book Pragmatism (1907), argued that the traditional
correspondence theory of truth, according to which the true idea
is one that agrees or corresponds to reality, only begs the
question of what the "agreement" or "correspondence" of idea with
reality is. Dewey and James maintained that an idea agrees with
reality, and is therefore true, if and only if it is successfully
employed in human action in pursuit of human goals and interests,
that is, if it leads to the resolution of a problematic situation
in Dewey's terms. The pragmatic theory of truth met with strong
opposition among its critics, perhaps most notably from the
British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Dewey later
began to suspect that the issues surrounding the conditions of
truth, as well as knowledge, were hopelessly obscured by the
accretion of traditional, and in his view misguided, meanings to
the terms, resulting in confusing ambiguity. He later abandoned
these terms in favor of "warranted assertiblity" to describe the
distinctive property of ideas that results from successful
inquiry.
One of the most important developments of his later writings
in the theory of knowledge was the application of the principles
of instrumentalism to the traditional conceptions and formal
apparatus of logical theory. Dewey made significant headway in
this endeavor in his lengthy introduction to Essays in
Experimental Logic, but the project reached full fruition in
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
The basis of Dewey's discussion in the Logic is the
continuity of intelligent inquiry with the adaptive responses of
prehuman organisms to their environments in circumstances that
check efficient activity in the fulfillment of organic needs.
What is distinctive about intelligent inquiry is that it is
facilitated by the use of language, which allows, by its symbolic
meanings and implicatory relationships, the hypothetical
rehearsal of adaptive behaviors before their employment under
actual, prevailing conditions for the purpose of resolving
problematic situations. Logical form, the specialized subject
matter of traditional logic, owes its genesis not to rational
intuition, as had often been assumed by logicians, but due to its
functional value in (1) managing factual evidence pertaining to
the problematic situation that elicits inquiry, and (2)
controlling the procedures involved in the conceptualized
entertainment of hypothetical solutions. As Dewey puts it,
"logical forms accrue to subject-matter when the latter is
subjected to controlled inquiry."
From this new perspective, Dewey reconsiders many of the
topics of traditional logic, such as the distinction between
deductive and inductive inference, propositional form, and the
nature of logical necessity. One important outcome of this work
was a new theory of propositions. Traditional views in logic had
held that the logical import of propositions is defined wholly by
their syntactical form (e.g., "All As are Bs," "Some Bs are Cs").
In contrast, Dewey maintained that statements of identical
propositional form can play significantly different functional
roles in the process of inquiry. Thus in keeping with his
distinction between the factual and conceptual elements of
inquiry, he replaced the accepted distinctions between universal,
particular, and singular propositions based on syntactical
meaning with a distinction between existential and ideational
propositions, a distinction that largely cuts across traditional
classifications. The same general approach is taken throughout
the work: the aim is to offer functional analyses of logical
principles and techniques that exhibit their operative utility in
the process of inquiry as Dewey understood it.
The breadth of topics treated and the depth and continuity of
the discussion of these topics mark the Logic as Dewey's
decisive statement in logical theory. The recognition of the
work's importance within the philosophical community of the time
can be gauged by the fact that the Journal of Philosophy,
the most prominent American journal in the field, dedicated an
entire issue to a discussion of the work, including contributions
by such philosophical luminaries as C. I. Lewis of Harvard
University, and Ernest Nagel, Dewey's colleague at Columbia
University. Although many of his critics did question, and
continue to question, the assumptions of his approach, one that
is certainly unique in the development of twentieth century
logical theory, there is no doubt that the work was and continues
to be an important contribution to the field.
Metaphysics
Dewey's naturalistic metaphysics first took shape in articles
that he wrote during the decade after the publication of
Studies in Logical Theory, a period when he was attempting
to elucidate the implications of instrumentalism. Dewey
disagreed with William James's assessment that pragmatic
principles were metaphysically neutral. (He discusses this
disagreement in "What Does Pragmatism Mean by Practical,"
published in 1908.) Dewey's view was based in part on an
assessment of the motivations behind traditional metaphysics: a
central aim of the metaphysical tradition had been the discovery
of an immutable cognitive object that could serve as a foundation
for knowledge. The pragmatic theory, by showing that knowledge
is a product of an activity directed to the fulfillment of human
purposes, and that a true (or warranted) belief is known to be
such by the consequences of its employment rather than by any
psychological or ontological foundations, rendered this
longstanding aim of metaphysics, in Dewey's view, moot, and
opened the door to renewed metaphysical discussion grounded
firmly on an empirical basis.
Dewey begins to define the general form that an empirical
metaphysics should take in a number of articles, including "The
Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (1905) and "Does Reality
Possess Practical Character?" (1908). In the former article,
Dewey asserts that things experienced empirically "are what they
are experienced as." Dewey uses as an example a noise heard in a
darkened room that is initially experienced as fearsome.
Subsequent inquiry (e.g., turning on the lights and looking
about) reveals that the noise was caused by a shade tapping
against a window, and thus innocuous. But the subsequent
inquiry, Dewey argues, does not change the initial status of the
noise: it was experienced as fearsome, and in fact was
fearsome. The point stems from the naturalistic roots of Dewey's
logic. Our experience of the world is constituted by our
interrelationship with it, a relationship that is imbued with
practical import. The initial fearsomeness of the noise is the
experiential correlate of the uncertain, problematic character of
the situation, an uncertainty that is not merely subjective or
mental, but a product of the potential inadequacy of previously
established modes of behavior to deal effectively with the
pragmatic demands of present circumstances. The subsequent
inquiry does not, therefore, uncover a reality (the innocuousness
of the noise) underlying a mere appearance (its fearsomeness),
but by settling the demands of the situation, it effects a change
in the interdynamics of the organism-environment relationship of
the initial situation--a change in reality.
There are two important implications of this line of thought
that distinguish it from the metaphysical tradition. First,
although inquiry is aimed at resolving the precarious and
confusing aspects of experience to provide a stable basis for
action, this does not imply the unreality of the unstable and
contingent, nor justify its relegation to the status of mere
appearance. Thus, for example, the usefulness and reliability of
utilizing certain stable features of things encountered in our
experience as a basis for classification does not justify
according ultimate reality to essences or Platonic forms any more
than, as rationalist metaphysicians in the modern era have
thought, the similar usefulness of mathematical reasoning in
understanding natural processes justifies the conclusion that the
world can be exhaustively defined mathematically.
Second, the fact that the meanings we attribute to natural
events might change in any particular in the future as renewed
inquiries lead to more adequate understandings of natural events
(as was implied by Dewey's fallibilism) does not entail that our
experience of the world at any given time may as a whole be
errant. Thus the implicit scepticism that underlies the
representational theory of ideas and raises questions concerning
the veracity of perceptual experience as such is unwarranted.
Dewey stresses the point that sensations, hypotheses, ideas,
etc., come into play to mediate our encounter with the world only
in the context of active inquiry. Once inquiry is successful in
resolving a problematic situation, mediatory sensations and
ideas, as Dewey says, "drop out; and things are present to the
agent in the most naively realistic fashion."
These contentions positioned Dewey's metaphysics within the
territory of a naive realism, and in a number of his articles,
such as "The Realism of Pragmatism" (1905), "Brief Studies in
Realism" (1911), and "The Existence of the World as a Logical
Problem" (1915), it is this view that Dewey expressly avows (a
view that he carefully distinguishes from what he calls
"presentational realism," which he attributes to a number of the
other realists of his day). Opposing narrowminded positions that
would accord full ontological status only to certain, typically
the most stable or reliable, aspects of experience, Dewey argues
for a position that recognizes the real significance of the
multifarious richness of human experience.
Dewey offered a fuller statement of his metaphysics in 1925,
with the publication of one of his most significant philosophical
works, Experience and Nature. In the introductory
chapter, Dewey stresses a familiar theme from his earlier
writings: that previous metaphysicians, guided by unavowed biases
for those aspects of experience that are relatively stable and
secure, have illicitly reified these biases into narrow
ontological presumptions, such as the temporal identity of
substance, or the ultimate reality of forms or essences. Dewey
finds this procedure so pervasive in the history of thought that
he calls it simply the philosophic fallacy, and signals
his intention to eschew the disastrous consequences of this
approach by offering a descriptive account of all of the various
generic features of human experience, whatever their character.
Dewey begins with the observation that the world as we
experience it both individually and collectively is an admixture
of the precarious, the transitory and contingent aspect of
things, and the stable, the patterned regularity of natural
processes that allows for prediction and human intervention.
Honest metaphysical description must take into account both of
these elements of experience. Dewey endeavors to do this by an
event ontology. The world, rather than being comprised of things
or, in more traditional terms, substances, is comprised of
happenings or occurrences that admit of both episodic uniqueness
and general, structured order. Intrinsically events have an
ineffable qualitative character by which they are immediately
enjoyed or suffered, thus providing the basis for experienced
value and aesthetic appreciation. Extrinsically events are
connected to one another by patterns of change and development;
any given event arises out of determinant prior conditions and
leads to probable consequences. The patterns of these temporal
processes is the proper subject matter of human knowledge--we
know the world in terms of causal laws and mathematical
relationships--but the instrumental value of understanding and
controlling them should not blind us to the immediate,
qualitative aspect of events; indeed, the value of scientific
understanding is most significantly realized in the facility it
affords for controlling the circumstances under which immediate
enjoyments may be realized.
It is in terms of the distinction between qualitative
immediacy and the structured order of events that Dewey
understands the general pattern of human life and action. This
understanding is captured by James' suggestive metaphor that
human experience consists of an alternation of flights and
perchings, an alternation of concentrated effort directed toward
the achievement of foreseen aims, what Dewey calls "ends-in-
view," with the fruition of effort in the immediate satisfaction
of "consummatory experience." Dewey's insistence that human life
follows the patterns of nature, as a part of nature, is the core
tenet of his naturalistic outlook.
Dewey also addresses the social aspect of human experience
facilitated by symbolic activity, particularly that of language.
For Dewey the question of the nature of social relationships is a
significant matter not only for social theory, but metaphysics as
well, for it is from collective human activity, and specifically
the development of shared meanings that govern this activity,
that the mind arises. Thus rather than understanding the mind as
a primitive and individual human endowment, and a precondition of
conscious and intentional action, as was typical in the
philosophical tradition since Descartes, Dewey offers a genetic
analysis of mind as an emerging aspect of cooperative activity
mediated by linguistic communication. Consciousness, in turn, is
not to be understood as a domain of private awareness, but rather
as the fulcrum point of the organism's readjustment to the
challenge of novel conditions where the meanings and attitudes
that formulate habitual behavioral responses to the environment
fail to be adequate. Thus Dewey offers in the better part of a
number of chapters of Experience and Nature a response to
the traditional mind-body problem of the metaphysical tradition,
a response that understands the mind as an emergent issue of
natural processes, more particularly the web of interactive
relationships between human beings and the world in which they
live.
Ethical and Social Theory
Dewey's mature thought in ethics and social theory is not
only intimately linked to the theory of knowledge in its founding
conceptual framework and naturalistic standpoint, but also
complementary to it in its emphasis on the social dimension of
inquiry both in its processes and its consequences. In fact, it
would be reasonable to claim that Dewey's theory of inquiry
cannot be fully understood either in the meaning of its central
tenets or the significance of its originality without considering
how it applies to social aims and values, the central concern of
his ethical and social theory.
Dewey rejected the atomistic understanding of society of the
Hobbesian social contract theory, according to which the social,
cooperative aspect of human life was grounded in the logically
prior and fully articulated rational interests of individuals.
Dewey's claim in Experience and Nature that the collection
of meanings that constitute the mind have a social origin
expresses the basic contention, one that he maintained throughout
his career, that the human individual is a social being from the
start, and that individual satisfaction and achievement can be
realized only within the context of social habits and
institutions that promote it.
Moral and social problems, for Dewey, are concerned with the
guidance of human action to the achievement of socially defined
ends that are productive of a satisfying life for individuals
within the social context. Regarding the nature of what
constitutes a satisfying life, Dewey was intentionally vague, out
of his conviction that specific ends or goods can be defined only
in particular socio-historical contexts. In the Ethics
(1932) he speaks of the ends simply as the cultivation of
interests in goods that recommend themselves in the light of calm
reflection. In other works, such as Human Nature and
Conduct and Art as Experience, he speaks of (1) the
harmonizing of experience (the resolution of conflicts of habit
and interest both within the individual and within society), (2)
the release from tedium in favor of the enjoyment of variety and
creative action, and (3) the expansion of meaning (the enrichment
of the individual's appreciation of his or her circumstances
within human culture and the world at large). The attunement of
individual efforts to the promotion of these social ends
constitutes, for Dewey, the central issue of ethical concern of
the individual; the collective means for their realization is the
paramount question of political policy.
Conceived in this manner, the appropriate method for solving
moral and social questions is the same as that required for
solving questions concerning matters of fact: an empirical method
that is tied to an examination of problematic situations, the
gathering of relevant facts, and the imaginative consideration of
possible solutions that, when utilized, bring about a
reconstruction and resolution of the original situations. Dewey,
throughout his ethical and social writings, stressed the need for
an open-ended, flexible, and experimental approach to problems of
practice aimed at the determination of the conditions for the
attainment of human goods and a critical examination of the
consequences of means adopted to promote them, an approach that
he called the "method of intelligence."
The central focus of Dewey's criticism of the tradition of
ethical thought is its tendency to seek solutions to moral and
social problems in dogmatic principles and simplistic criteria
which in his view were incapable of dealing effectively with the
changing requirements of human events. In Reconstruction of
Philosophy and The Quest for Certainty, Dewey located
the motivation of traditional dogmatic approaches in philosophy
in the forlorn hope for security in an uncertain world, forlorn
because the conservatism of these approaches has the effect of
inhibiting the intelligent adaptation of human practice to the
ineluctable changes in the physical and social environment.
Ideals and values must be evaluated with respect to their social
consequences, either as inhibitors or as valuable instruments for
social progress, and Dewey argues that philosophy, because of the
breadth of its concern and its critical approach, can play a
crucial role in this evaluation.
In large part, then, Dewey's ideas in ethics and social
theory were programmatic rather than substantive, defining the
direction that he believed human thought and action must take in
order to identify the conditions that promote the human good in
its fullest sense, rather than specifying particular formulae or
principles for individual and social action. He studiously
avoided participating in what he regarded as the unfortunate
practice of previous moral philosophers of offering general rules
that legislate universal standards of conduct. But there are
strong suggestions in a number of his works of basic ethical and
social positions. In Human Nature and Conduct Dewey
approaches ethical inquiry through an analysis of human character
informed by the principles of scientific psychology. The
analysis is reminiscent of Aristotelian ethics, concentrating on
the central role of habit in formulating the dispositions of
action that comprise character, and the importance of reflective
intelligence as a means of modifying habits and controlling
disruptive desires and impulses in the pursuit of worthwhile
ends.
The social condition for the flexible adaptation that Dewey
believed was crucial for human advancement is a democratic form
of life, not instituted merely by democratic forms of governance,
but by the inculcation of democratic habits of cooperation and
public spiritedness, productive of an organized, self-conscious
community of individuals responding to society's needs by
experimental and inventive, rather than dogmatic, means. The
development of these democratic habits, Dewey argues in School
and Society and Democracy and Education, must begin in
the earliest years of a child's educational experience. Dewey
rejected the notion that a child's education should be viewed as
merely a preparation for civil life, during which disjoint facts
and ideas are conveyed by the teacher and memorized by the
student only to be utilized later on. The school should rather
be viewed as an extension of civil society and continuous with
it, and the student encouraged to operate as a member of a
community, actively pursuing interests in cooperation with
others. It is by a process of self-directed learning, guided by
the cultural resources provided by teachers, that Dewey believed
a child is best prepared for the demands of responsible
membership within the democratic community.
Aesthetics
Dewey's one significant treatment of aesthetic theory is
offered in Art as Experience, a book that was based on the
William James Lectures that he delivered at Harvard University in
1931. The book stands out as a diversion into uncommon
philosophical territory for Dewey, adumbrated only by a somewhat
sketchy and tangential treatment of art in one chapter of
Experience and Nature. The unique status of the work in
Dewey's corpus evoked some criticism from Dewey's followers, most
notably Stephen Pepper, who believed that it marked an
unfortunate departure from the naturalistic standpoint of his
instrumentalism, and a return to the idealistic viewpoints of his
youth. On close reading, however, Art as Experience
reveals a considerable continuity of Dewey's views on art with
the main themes of his previous philosophical work, while
offering an important and useful extension of those themes.
Dewey had always stressed the importance of recognizing the
significance and integrity of all aspects of human experience.
His repeated complaint against the partiality and bias of the
philosophical tradition expresses this theme. Consistent with
this theme, Dewey took account of qualitative immediacy in
Experience and Nature, and incorporated it into his view
of the developmental nature of experience, for it is in the
enjoyment of the immediacy of an integration and harmonization of
meanings, in the "consummatory phase" of experience that, in
Dewey's view, the fruition of the readaptation of the individual
with environment is realized. These central themes are enriched
and deepened in Art as Experience, making it one of
Dewey's most significant works.
The roots of aesthetic experience lie, Dewey argues, in
commonplace experience, in the consummatory experiences that are
ubiquitous in the course of human life. There is no legitimacy
to the conceit cherished by some art enthusiasts that aesthetic
enjoyment is the privileged endowment of the few. Whenever there
is a coalesence into an immediately enjoyed qualitative unity of
meanings and values drawn from previous experience and present
circumstances, life then takes on an aesthetic quality--what
Dewey called having "an experience." Nor is the creative
work of the artist, in its broad parameters, unique. The process
of intelligent use of materials and the imaginative development
of possible solutions to problems issuing in a reconstruction of
experience that affords immediate satisfaction, the process found
in the creative work of artists, is also to be found in all
intelligent and creative human activity. What distinguishes
artistic creation is the relative stress laid upon the immediate
enjoyment of unified qualitative complexity as the rationalizing
aim of the activity itself, and the ability of the artist to
achieve this aim by marshalling and refining the massive
resources of human life, meanings, and values.
The senses play a key role in artistic creation and aesthetic
appreciation. Dewey, however, argues against the view, stemming
historically from the sensationalistic empiricism of David Hume,
that interprets the content of sense experience simply in terms
of the traditionally codified list of sense qualities, such as
color, odor, texture, etc., divorced from the funded meanings of
past experience. It is not only the sensible qualities present
in the physical media the artist uses, but the wealth of meaning
that attaches to these qualities, that constitute the material
that is refined and unified in the process of artistic
expression. The artist concentrates, clarifies, and vivifies
these meanings in the artwork. The unifying element in this
process is emotion--not the emotion of raw passion and outburst,
but emotion that is reflected upon and used as a guide to the
overall character of the artwork. Although Dewey insisted that
emotion is not the significant content of the work of art, he
clearly understands it to be the crucial tool of the artist's
creative activity.
Dewey repeatedly returns in Art as Experience to a
familiar theme of his critical reflections upon the history of
ideas, namely that a distinction too strongly drawn too often
sacrifices accuracy of account for a misguided simplicity. Two
applications of this theme are worth mentioning here. Dewey
rejects the sharp distinction often made in aesthetics between
the matter and the form of an artwork. What Dewey objected to
was the implicit suggestion that matter and form stand side by
side, as it were, in the artwork as distinct and precisely
distinguishable elements. For Dewey, form is better understood
in a dynamic sense as the coordination and adjustment of the
qualities and associated meanings that are integrated within the
artwork.
A second misguided distinction that Dewey rejects is that
between the artist as the active creator and the audience as the
passive recipient of art. This distinction artificially
truncates the artistic process by in effect suggesting that the
process ends with the final artifact of the artist's creativity.
Dewey argues that, to the contrary, the process is barren without
the agency of the appreciator, whose active assimilation of the
artist's work requires a recapitulation of many of the same
processes of discrimination, comparison, and integration that are
present in the artist's initial work, but now guided by the
artist's perception and skill. Dewey underscores the point by
distinguishing between the "art product," the painting,
sculpture, etc., created by the artist, and the "work of art"
proper, which is only realized through the active engagement of
an astute audience.
Ever concerned with the interrelationships between the
various domains of human activity and concern, Dewey ends Art
as Experience with a chapter devoted to the social
implications of the arts. Art is a product of culture, and it is through art that the people
of a given culture express the significance of their lives, as well as
their hopes and ideals.
Because art has its roots in the consummatory values experienced
in the course of human life, its values have an affinity to
commonplace values, an affinity that accords to art a critical
office in relation to prevailing social conditions. Insofar as
the possibility for a meaningful and satisfying life disclosed in
the values embodied in art are not realized in the lives of the
members of a society, the social relationships that preclude this
realization are condemned. Dewey's specific target in this
chapter was the conditions of workers in industrialized society,
conditions which force upon the worker the performance of
repetitive tasks that are devoid of personal interest and afford
no satisfaction in personal accomplishment. The degree to which
this critical function of art is ignored is a further indication
of what Dewey regarded as the unfortunate distancing of the arts
from the common pursuits and interests of ordinary life. The
realization of art's social function requires the closure of this
bifurcation.
Critical Reception and Influence
Dewey's philosophical work received varied responses from his
philosophical colleagues during his lifetime. There were many
philosophers who saw his work, as Dewey himself understood it, as
a genuine attempt to apply the principles of an empirical
naturalism to the perennial questions of philosophy, providing a
beneficial clarification of issues and the concepts used to
address them. Dewey's critics, however, often expressed the
opinion that his views were more confusing than clarifying, and
that they appeared to be more akin to idealism than the
scientifically based naturalism Dewey expressly avowed. Notable
in this connection are Dewey's disputes concerning the relation
of the knowing subject to known objects with the realists
Bertrand Russell, A. O. Lovejoy, and Evander Bradley McGilvery.
Whereas these philosophers argued that the object of knowledge
must be understood as existing apart from the knowing subject,
setting the truth conditions for propositions, Dewey defended the
view that things understood as isolated from any relationship
with the human organism could not be objects of knowledge at all.
Dewey was sensitive and responsive to the criticisms brought
against his views. He often attributed them to
misinterpretations based on the traditional, philosophical
connotations that some of his readers would attach to his
terminology. This was clearly a fair assessment with respect to
some of his critics. To take one example, Dewey used the term
"experience," found throughout his philosophical writings, to
denote the broad context of the human organism's
interrelationship with its environment, not the domain of human
thought alone, as some of his critics read him to mean. Dewey's
concern for clarity of expression motivated efforts in his later
writings to revise his terminology. Thus, for example, he later
substituted "transaction" for his earlier "interaction" to denote
the relationship between organism and environment, since the
former better suggested a dynamic interdependence between the
two, and in a new introduction to Experience and Nature,
never published during his lifetime, he offered the term
"culture" as an alternative to "experience." Late in his career
he attempted a more sweeping revision of philosophical
terminology in Knowing and the Known, written in
collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley.
The influence of Dewey's work, along with that of the
pragmatic school of thought itself, although considerable in the
first few decades of the twentieth century, was gradually
eclipsed during the middle part of the century as other
philosophical methods, such as those of the analytic school in
England and America and phenomenology in continental Europe, grew
to ascendency. Recent trends in philosophy, however, leading to
the dissolution of these rigid paradigms, have led to approaches
that continue and expand on the themes of Dewey's work. W. V. O.
Quine's project of naturalizing epistemology works upon
naturalistic presumptions anticipated in Dewey's own naturalistic
theory of inquiry. The social dimension and function of belief
systems, explored by Dewey and other pragmatists, has received
renewed attention by such writers as Richard Rorty and Jrgen
Habermas. American phenomenologists such as Sandra Rosenthal and
James Edie have considered the affinities of phenomenology and
pragmatism. The renewed openness and pluralism of recent
philosophical discussion has meant a renewed interest in Dewey's
philosophy, an interest that promises to continue for some time
to come.