John Dewey
Michael Eldridge
UNC Charlotte
Spring 2004
The following article was prepared for the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophy to be published by Thoemmes Press.
John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859. The son of a grocer, Archibald, who served as a quartermaster in the Union Army during the civil war, Dewey spent his youth and college years in Burlington. His mother, Lucina, was an evangelical Christian who encouraged her sons to have a personal relationship with Jesus. But she also insisted that they be educated. Dewey was increasingly uneasy with the first expectation but readily embraced the second. While at the University of Vermont Dewey was introduced to a constrained form of philosophy, but he also read widely on his own in intellectual and literary journals. Upon graduation, he taught high school in Pennsylvania and Vermont for three years, continuing his philosophical reading with his college teacher, H. A. P. Torrey, upon his return to Vermont. He then entered the newly established Johns Hopkins University in 1882 to pursue graduate work in philosophy. There he encountered Charles S. Peirce, who was teaching logic, and G. Stanley Hall, the experimental psychologist. The former would be recognized much later as the originator of pragmatism, and the latter was a student of William James, the philosopher who publicly introduced the term “pragmatism” and who developed an alternative version to Peirce’s. But the philosopher who influenced Dewey the most during his graduate study was the historically oriented neo-Hegelian George Sylvester Morris. Upon completing the Ph.D. in 1884, Dewey joined Morris at the University of Michigan, where Morris was then teaching full time, after having split the academic year between Hopkins and Michigan for several years.
After four years Dewey moved to the University of Wisconsin, staying for one year. But upon Morris’ death he returned to Michigan as the chair of the philosophy department. In 1894 he moved to the newly formed University of Chicago as the head of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology and Pedagogy. It was during these years--from the late 1880s on--that he was drifting away from Hegelianism, as he later described it, and began to formulate his instrumentalist version of pragmatism. The process was mostly complete by the time he left Chicago in 1904, although some interpreters persist in regarding him as having remained an idealist. Dewey conceded that a “Hegelian deposit” remained with him throughout, but thought that he had contributed to the development of a pragmatism, or instrumentalism, as he came to regard his version of pragmatism, that had moved beyond Hegelian idealism. The years at Chicago were productive ones and two of his colleagues, George Herbert Mead and James H. Tufts, with whom he been associated prior to his coming to Chicago, became life-long friends and collaborators. The occasion of the departure from Chicago, however, was not a happy one. Dewey and the University president, William Rainey Harper, had an unpleasant disagreement over Harper’s handling of an institutional restructuring of the experimental school that Dewey had founded, a restructuring that resulted in the dismissal of Dewey’s wife, Alice, as principal of the “Dewey School,” as it was informally known.
Although he did not have a position when he resigned, he was soon recruited by Columbia University to be a central member of their philosophical department. This began a long association that saw him become a world-renowned figure and America’s best known philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century. It was during the almost fifty years that he lived in New York City that he published his major books and was in much demand as a teacher, lecturer, writer, and public figure.
Dewey had long been involved in public affairs—he was on the first board of Jane Addams’s Hull House--as an advocate for various liberal causes and writer for the New Republic and other intellectual journals. In 1909 he played a minor role in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was more involved in the founding of the American Association of University Professors, serving as its first president in 1915. Dewey was initially opposed to American involvement in World War I, but finally decided on pragmatic grounds to support Woodrow Wilson’s War policy. This strained his relationship with Jane Addams and other pacifists, notably the passionate and articulate young writer, Randolph Bourne. Dewey was disappointed in his support of Wilson but later said he would have made the same decision again, given what he knew at the time. Nevertheless he became the principal intellectual supporter of the Outlawry of War movement in the 1920s. Dewey was convinced that social intelligence was possible even with regard to the momentous and emotionally charged issues of war and peace.
But in the 1930s he became even more involved in public affairs. He was active in the League for Independent Political Action’s efforts to form a third political party. This placed him in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic Party and the New Deal, which he considered too much a trial-and-error effort. He favored a more explicitly experimental and socialist approach. He also chaired the commission that examined the charges brought against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. In the highly charged ideological battles of the time, this was no small or casually assumed task. Still another fray which he entered with a calm but passionate commitment to cooperative intelligence was one involving the grievances of the Communist Party insurgents within the New York City Teachers Union. Dewey patiently chaired the Grievance Committee, providing a working example of his faith in democracy and inquiry. Any understanding of Dewey as a philosopher must take into account this devotion to intelligized practice.
He retired from Columbia in 1929, shortly after the death of Alice, but remained at the university until 1939 in an emeritus capacity. He drew his full salary and advised doctoral students but taught no courses. Dewey remarried in 1946 and died in 1952.
Dewey was a prolific writer. The critical edition published by Southern Illinois Press has five volumes in the Early Works (EW), fifteen volumes in the Middle Works (MW), and seventeen volumes in the Later Works (LW). One article of continuing interest in the EW is "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (5.96-109; 1996), in which Dewey provided an integrated understanding of psycho-physical action. Dewey moved easily between philosophy, psychology and education. Philosophy and psychology were just separating into distinct disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century, so it was not unusual for one to be engaged in what are now considered distinct fields. What distinguished Dewey, particularly in the Chicago years, was his interest in education and his intellectual leadership of the "Dewey School." This singular experience provided the basis for his early book. School and Society (MW 1; 1899), bringing him to the attention not only of philosophers but also the educated public. Dewey was also interested in logic and he and his colleagues at Chicago published a volume of essays, Studies in Logical Theory (Dewey’s contributions are reprinted in MW 2; 1903). Dewey’s four essays would later be revised and augmented by others and published as Essays in Experimental Logic (1916; new material in MW 10; and some reprinted material is in other volumes of the MW).
Another collaborative volume was the widely used ethics textbook, jointly authored by Dewey and Tufts (MW 5; 1908). A book that was at once concerned with logic and education and reflected Dewey’s interest in promoting a critical and experimental intelligence was How We Think (MW 6; 1910), which Dewey later revised (LW 8; 1933). But the book that Dewey himself thought for many years best captured his thinking was Democracy and Education (MW 9; 1916). Dewey understood the desired form of schooling (and education generally) to be a democratic practice. It was not just that education reflected society. Rather a democratic society was enhanced by schools (and other educational activities) that were democratic in character. This continuity of means and ends, as we shall see below, is one of the most distinctive features of Dewey's thinking. Hence the designation of “instrumentalism” for his version of pragmatism.
But perhaps the book that best serves as a programmatic statement for his later work is Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW 12; 1920). Originally delivered as lectures at the Imperial University in Tokyo in 1919, Reconstruction anticipates many of the major books of the 1920s and 30s. The first of these is Human Nature and Conduct (MW 14; 1922), which Dewey presented as a social psychology. So it is. But given the character of his naturalistic approach to ethics, it provides the intellectual understanding of human conduct that makes his ethical proposals feasible. Moreover the 1908 Ethics and the 1932 revision (LW 7) were written as textbooks; they were only secondarily directed to a professional philosophical audience. But HN&C is a careful--one hesitates to use the term "systematic" in reference to Dewey--working out of his understanding of the social individual who engages in the moral life.
The one book that many point to as Dewey's major book is Experience and Nature (LW 1; 1925). A comprehensive treatment of the way in which we interact with one another and with and within nature, E&N is read by many as being Dewey's metaphysics, despite the fact that he was often sharply critical of metaphysics. At best it is a new sort of metaphysics, a naturalistic one, one that describes the "generic features" of our existence without any recourse to the supernatural or a reality behind the appearances. A review by George Santayana of E&N accused Dewey of a “half-hearted naturalism” because it allowed the foreground of human experience to dominate the rest of existence. Hence it was no true naturalism, for “in nature there is no foreground or background, no here, no now, no moral cathedra, no centre so really central as to reduce all other things to mere margins and mere perspectives” (LW 3.373). Dewey, of course, denied that he had compromised his naturalism by privileging human experience. Rather he had given an accurate account of the place of experience within nature (see LW 3.73.81).
E&N was followed a few years later by The Quest for Certainty (MW 4; 1929), which deals with another core concern of philosophy as it is usually practiced--epistemology or the theory of knowledge. But to understand it as Dewey's epistemology is to misunderstand it. Certainly Dewey deals with our ways of knowing, but he subtitled the book, A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, thus connecting it to his ongoing concern with intelligent action. Moreover, much of the book is an attack on traditional essentialist and foundationalist theories of knowledge. Thus some have quipped that a better title would be The Quest Against Certainty. It is clearly an account of how we can live (and know) without certainty. Indeed, it is a profound mistake to seek security in certainty; security is to be found in a fallibilist, probabilistic way of knowing-acting.
Between these two books that challenge the traditional concerns of philosophy is The Public and Its Problems (LW 3; 1927). Walter Lippmann, the well regarded public intellectual and Dewey's fellow contributor to the New Republic, had published two books that called into the question the feasibility of democracy. In Lippmann's view the public was not competent to govern. At best it can choose between competing groups of insiders to serve as their elected representatives. Dewey took up the challenge in P&IP, laying out in general the way in which a mass society could be a democratic one. Some take this book to be Dewey's political philosophy, but this is to make the same mistake as those who easily classify E&N and QC as Dewey's metaphysics and epistemology. There is a sense in which the three books can be understood as Dewey's political theory, metaphysics and epistemology. But this is reductionistic and misses the character of Dewey's approach. Dewey thought that the task of philosophy was to enable people to solve their problems by improving their methods of inquiry. Thus what he was trying to do in P&IP was to answer the questions that Lippmann had raised, thus enabling the changing society of the 1920s to be a richly democratic one by becoming more adept at exercising social intelligence.
Dewey continued to speak to political, educational, and ethical issues in the thirties in Individualism Old and New (LW 5; 1930), Liberalism and Social Action (LW 11; 1935), Freedom and Culture (LW 13; 1939), Experience and Education (LW 13; 1938), and Theory of Valuation (LW 13). But the more remarkable books in terms of the reaction they received were A Common Faith (LW 9; 1934), Art as Experience (LW 10; 1934), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (LW 12; 1938). ACF is interesting because Dewey was perceived as being a secular humanist with little or no interest in religion. It is true that he had prior to this displayed little interest in religion as a philosophical problem, but in three brief chapters, which had been delivered as the Terry Lectures at Yale University, Dewey recast his pragmatic naturalism as a religious way of life. Making a distinction between “religion” and “the religious,” he proposed that one could, without reference to or dependence upon the supernatural, develop a meaningful life of passionate intelligence. Also catching some by surprise were his Harvard University William James Lectures on art and aesthetic experience. Building on what he had written in Experience and Nature Dewey put forward an original contribution to the philosophy of art. He was concerned to show that a work of art originates in experience—hence the title, Art as Experience—but also that experience, the interaction of an organism with its environment, can be something other than routine or desultory. It can be artfully done. As elsewhere in his writings, Dewey was concerned to show that we can intelligently transform our lives, making them more satisfactory than they would otherwise be. Thus AE is not just Dewey turning his attention to aesthetics. It, like ACF and many other works, is a contextual articulation of his thinking in reference to a particular subject-matter. Less well received was the 1938 Logic. As the subtitle suggests Dewey sought to understand logic as a theory of inquiry. As such it would be the culmination of his continuing effort to devise intellectual tools for dealing with human problems. But mainstream philosophy was not interested in this approach. Most philosophers found more promising the developments in formal logic and its promise of an ideal language that could clearly represent reality. Not content to understand reality and let it go at that, Dewey thought that logic should be an instrument of social change. The reception of Dewey’s big book on logic was not helped by Bertrand Russell’s highly negative reaction and Dewey’s reply. Their interchanges over the years show how different were their orientations. At the time Russell appeared to get the better of Dewey, but Tom Burke has argued that Dewey’s views deserved a better hearing then and may get it now in a philosophical climate that is more receptive to Dewey’s broader view: “Dewey’s views are more timely these days than ever before, whereas Russell’s way of thinking about logic is now passé” (1994, p. xi). But Burke does think that Dewey’s approach needs to be reconstructed to take into account significant developments in logic in the intervening decades. This, of course, would not surprise Dewey, who continually argued for the need for reconstruction in a continually changing world.
As can be readily seen by this review of his major writings, the scope of Dewey’s thinking is considerable. Most interpreters have chosen to understand his work from a particular vantage point, such as politics, art, ethics or religion. It is difficult to hold together all that he sought to treat over his long philosophical career. But we can identify some pervasive themes. One way to do this is start with a story he once told, his attempt to buy appropriate desks for the University [of Chicago] Elementary School. In The School and Society, which was originally published in 1899, Dewey recalled that a “few years ago” when he was “trying to find desks and chairs” that would be “suitable . . . to the needs of the children,” he was having “a great deal of difficulty in finding” what was “needed.” Then one dealer, whom Dewey significantly describes as being “more intelligent than the rest,” put his finger on the problem: “I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which the children may work; these are all for listening” (MW 1.21). This is an intelligent observation because it correctly identifies the purpose of the desks and chairs designed to meet the needs of traditional education and the character of the means available to realize that purpose. Students were regarded as passive absorbers of information whether they were listening to the teacher or reading from a textbook. Dewey had a different purpose (or end) in mind. In his school students were to be active learners, pursuing their interests within the limits established by the teacher and curriculum. As he observed a few years later, in traditional education “the tendency is to reduce the activity of mind to a docile or passive taking in of the material presented—in short to memorizing, with simply incidental use of judgment and of active research. As is frequently stated, acquiring takes the place of inquiring” (“Democracy in Education,” MW 3.236). Thus he needed a different sort of desk, a different means, to accomplish his end-in-view.
Elementary school children could not be expected to educate themselves, but this was the ideal toward which Dewey wished to work. Increasingly, as children developed into adults, he hoped that each one would become an active learner--an inquirer. The model he had in mind was that of experimental science. Dewey thought that an important change had occurred in recent centuries. Before the development of modern science, people had stumbled upon the goods of life somewhat accidentally. Knowledge of these goods was then passed on within societies, with the new members of the community acquiring this wisdom from their elders. But now an important cultural revolution had taken place. We could learn intentionally from experience. If there was dissatisfaction with an existing practice, such as students being reduced to listeners, one could remake it to suit one’s needs. Intelligent action, in the sense of means actually leading to the desired ends, could be instituted. To use desks made for listening in a school where active learning was the end-in-view would be a mismatch. It would be stupid to do so. A new type of desk was needed.
Intelligence for Dewey is the use of indirect action (or means) to accomplish that (the end) which cannot be seized directly (see LW 4.164 and 179). This Dewey thinks is natural. Science, or directed, experimental inquiry, is an intensification of a natural process. He wrote: “The organism is a part of the natural world; its interactions with it are genuine additive phenomena. When, with the development of symbols, also a natural occurrence, these interactions are directed towards anticipated consequences, they gain the quality of intelligence, . . . (LW 4.186f). Thus Dewey was not just a pragmatist; he was a pragmatic naturalist. His instrumentalism was set within a naturalistic (as opposed to supernaturalistic context). So he valued science not only for what it could teach us about inquiry but also for its results. The world described by science, both physical and social, was world enough for the secular Dewey, where “secular” means “having to do with this world” and not “anti-religious.”
This understanding of learning and orientation toward science led Dewey not only into conflicts with traditionalists generally but with philosophy as traditionally understood. It was no longer philosophy’s task to describe reality and to access that reality by reason. Rather philosophy, as he famously noted in 1917, should become “a method, cultivated by philosophers for dealing with” human problems (MW 10.46). The story that best captures this shift is the one told by Charles Frankel, the Columbia University philosopher, who as a graduate student at Columbia attended the 1939 American Philosophical Association dinner that honored Dewey’s eightieth birthday. Here is what Frankel remembered: “When Dewey was eighty, he engaged in a debate, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, with his old friend and Columbia colleague, William Pepperell Montague, in the course of which Montague complimented him for his life-long effort to practicalize intelligence. Dewey replied quietly but firmly that Montague was taking a narrow, inbred view—a philosopher’s trade-union view, he implied—of what he, Dewey had tried to accomplish. His effort had not been to practicalize intelligence but to intellectualize practice” (quoted in Eldridge, p. 5).
We are engaged in practices, or ongoing activities. These activities, what Dewey elsewhere terms “habits,” came about to meet some need. Overtime they likely will cease to be appropriate to our changing needs. Thus we need to rethink what we are doing, to make sure that there is a match between means and ends. The method whereby we make our practices more intelligent is inquiry. The philosopher’s task is not to take reason and try to figure out how to apply it—the practicalizing intelligence approach rejected by Dewey. Rather the philosopher’s job is to identify the significant disjunctions between our needs, habits, and objectives and to help us rethink what we are doing. She is to assist in the intelligizing of practice.
This is no easy task, for the cultural deposits in our thinking are deeply buried and not easily recovered, examined and changed. Oftentimes they are firmly embedded in our moralities and religions and imbued with an absoluteness and sacredness that elicits a do-not-touch attitude. But Dewey thought that nothing was beyond a possibly transforming investigation. And it was the task of philosophy to identify these tensions in society where a no longer fully effective practice was in need of transformation. This was the tension between ideal and actual that Dewey took to be central to philosophy (see LW 1.310 and 4.239f). But “ideal” did not mean for Dewey something that was perfect or timeless. Rather, something was ideal if it was a “generalized end-in-view” (LW 13.226). It arises naturally and is cultivated by us. It is our making desirable that which naturally occurs (see LW 9.32-35).
A third Deweyan ideal, in addition to science and intelligence, is democracy, or, as he refers to it in “Creative Democracy—The Task before Us,” “ordered richness” (LW 14.229). By this phrase he meant the sort of social structure that enables individuals to flourish—not just for the sake of the individuals but for the group as well. He was willing to consider many different procedures as being democratic provided they were inclusive of people’s interests and they enabled the group and its members to flourish. He did think that open and free communication was important, as was the explicit embrace of the method of inquiry that he championed. Indeed democracy for him was a social instantiation of intelligence, for an ideally democratic group would be engaged in the deliberate reconstruction of its experience.
Although Dewey’s ideas have enjoyed interest in recent decades, thanks in no small part to Richard Rorty, they continue to be questioned, not least of all by Rorty. What Rorty finds valuable is Dewey’s anti-essentialism, anti-foundationalism and frank constructivism. Dewey’s “pragmatism,” writes Rorty, “was, as Hilary Putnam [another prominent neo-pragmatist] has said, an ‘insistence on the supremacy of the agent point of view’” (1999, p. 88). Or, as he himself says, pragmatism is “a doctrine of the relativity of normative judgments to purposes served” (Saatkamp, p. 15). Thus he stands with Dewey against the traditionalist critics. But what Rorty questions is the attention to method—he thinks Dewey’s idea of method is “vacuous” (Saatkamp, p. 92)--and the tying together of naturalism and pragmatism, which makes the mistake of doing metaphysics, that is, trying to describe reality as such. In “Dewey’s Metaphysics” Rorty concludes, “Dewey’s mistake . . . was the notion that criticism of culture had to take the form of a redescription of ‘nature’ or ‘experience’ or both” (1982, p. 85). For Rorty, such descriptions are attempts to speak from a neutral vantage point about what is, whereas pragmatism requires that one speak from a particular perspective.
More damaging to Dewey’s effort to transform experience is the charge that a Deweyan democracy requires citizens who are more capable of critical thinking than what Dewey’s critics think is possible. One does not have to subscribe to the doctrine of original sin or be cynical about human potential to be skeptical about the possibilities of social intelligence, for we have much evidence of people everyday not matching up ends and means and suffering as a result. But Dewey was not the optimist that he is sometimes portrayed as. It is true that he was hopeful that we could improve our practices, as his continuing attention to education suggests. But his hope was one that recognized the stupidity of which we are capable. Here is what he had to say at the end of his autobiographical essay, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism”: “I do not expect to see in my day a genuine, as distinct from a forced and artificial, integration of thought. But a mind that is not too egotistically impatient can have faith that this unification will issue in its season. Meantime a chief task of those who call themselves philosophers is to help get rid of the useless lumber that blocks our highways of thought, and strive to make straight and open the paths that lead to the future. Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate—unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land” (LW 5. 159f). Taken for what Dewey thought life was, Dewey found it full of possibilities as well as perils. He chose to overcome the difficulties and exploit the possibilities and recommended that we do the same.
Bibliography
The Early Works, 1882-1898. 5 vols. (Carbondale, Illinois, 1967-72).
The Middle Works, 1899-1924. 15 vols. (Carbondale, Illinois 1976-83).
The Later Works, 1925-1953. 17 vols. (Carbondale, Illinois, 1981-90).
Further Reading
Alexander, Thomas M. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany, New York, 1987).
Tom Burke, Dewey’s New Logic: A Reply to Russell (Chicago, 1994).
Dykhuizen, George. The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale, 1973).
Edel, Abraham. Ethical Theory & Social Change: The Evolution of John Dewey’s Ethics, 1908-1932 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2001).
Eldridge, Michael. Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Nashville, 1998)
Hickman, Larry A. John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington, 1990).
Hook, Sidney. John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait (New York, 1939).
Rockefeller, Steven C. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York, 1991).
Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982).
Rorty. Philosophy and Social Hope (London, 1999).
Ryan, Alan. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York, 1995).
Saatkamp, Herman J., Jr. Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics (Nashville, 1995)
Shook, John R. Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (Nashville, 2000)
Sleeper, R. W. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy (New Haven, 1986).
Tiles, J. E. Dewey (London, 1988).
Welchman, Jennifer. Dewey’s Ethical Thought (Ithaca, 1995).
Welchman. [chapter on Dewey from Blackwell’s volume on phil. of ed.]
Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, New York, 1991).