John Dewey

Science for a Changing World

Svend Brinkmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351510639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

John Dewey was an American psychologist, philosopher, educator, social critic, and political activist. John Dewey: Science for a Changing World addresses Dewey's contemporary relevance; his life and intellectual trajectory; his basic philosophical ideas, with an emphasis on his philosophy of nature; and his educational theory, which has often been misunderstood. In addition, Dewey's pragmatism and pragmatist ethics are discussed, as are some of the criticisms that can be directed at them. Throughout the book, Dewey's ideas are related to the general history of ideas, but there is also a constant focus on how Dewey may assist us in solving some of the problems that face us in a so-called postmodern era. This book is the first to offer an interpretation of John Dewey's works with particular emphasis on his contribution to psychology. John Dewey distinguished himself by combining a culturalist approach to human life with a naturalistic one. He was an avowed naturalist and follower of Darwin, and Brinkmann shows how his non-reductionist, naturalist psychology can serve as a much-needed correction to contemporary forms of "evolutionary psychology." Dewey's psychology, however, is not an isolated element in his thinking as a whole, so the author also provides an introduction to the philosophical, ethical, and educational ideas that go hand-in-hand with his psychology. In the past couple of decades, there has been a renaissance of pragmatist ideas in philosophy, political theory, and education. Scholars are returning to the writings of William James, Charles Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey. This book continues the fine tradition of Transaction's History and Theory of Psychology series.

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Why Read Dewey Today?

The American philosopher, educationalist, psychologist, and theorist of art, religion, and democracy, John Dewey (1859–1952), has experienced quite a renaissance in recent years. There are no books, however, that approach Dewey primarily as a psychologist. This is what I shall do in the present text, although his psychology is intertwined with his philosophical, ethical, and educational ideas. These four areas of Dewey’s work are treated in the four main chapters of this book. It will soon become clear to the reader that this represents an analytical approach that is somewhat artificial but which hopefully provides some order to the huge production of Dewey. In reality, Dewey’s thinking always crisscrosses between philosophical, psychological, ethical, and democratic themes.

My main reason for writing this book is that I believe that Dewey has much to teach us today. First and foremost, he tells us that the modern—or postmodern—experience of the world, and human existence within it, as precarious, shaky, and ever-changing, should not leave us hopeless but rather calls for courage and a belief in our capacities for coping with this world to the best of our abilities. Coping with the world, Dewey stresses, is a collective affair; it is something that depends on human communities, as human beings are social animals through and through. Dewey claimed that the only way to cope with a changing world is through the establishment of adequate social forms and institutions that enable humans to respond in reasonable ways to challenges and changes. Such social forms should be democratic, Dewey argued, because democracy as a form of life gives humans the best chance to participate intelligently in the changing social and natural world. Dewey is famous for his theory of democracy as a form of life, and some might wonder why I have not included a chapter on democracy in this book. I have chosen not to do so because, on my reading, Dewey’s theory of democracy is the one major aspect of his work that it makes least sense to isolate and treat as a separate subject matter. Regardless of the theme—theory of science, psychology, ethics, education, and so forth—the idea of democracy always plays a crucial role for Dewey. This is why I have chosen to treat his theory of democracy in a way that is distributed among the different chapters of the book, in relation to the given theme.

The fundamental assumption of the book is that Dewey’s philosophy, in addition to being highly original and insightful as such, is also therapeutic in a sense. The reader of Dewey will learn that although Darwin has taught us that nothing is stable and permanent in the natural world and that human beings belong to a species of animal that is part of nature; and even though Hegel and others following in his footsteps have pointed out that human reason is constituted historically and socially and that we can therefore never find a fixed and ahistorical ground on which to stand by leaping out of our cultural situation and looking at it from the outside; and even if modern physics have taught us that reality is not a fixed, deterministic system and scientific practice is partly responsible for how the phenomena studied appear, there is still, Dewey maintains, no reason for despair. The sciences do not become illegitimate; morality does not become subjective; and human existence does not become meaningless, in spite of the ways that Darwin, Hegel, and Bohr undermined our beliefs in a stable world that is created once and for all by an almighty God or an ahistorical reason. Dewey’s way of thinking is reconstructive rather than deconstructive. It urges us to reconstruct our concepts, sciences, and practices in ways that make them more useful and fruitful, and it does not end by a simple recognition of their contingency and historicity. I thus find that Dewey’s thinking is optimistic and full of hope.

Dewey’s Picture of Human Beings in the World

Dewey offers his readers a cosmology—a picture of the world—and as part of that picture, he offers an understanding of the human being. Dewey’s cosmology depicts reality as a place without foundations, as a place of development and change, and as a place with no certain truths or permanent scientific, ethical, or political goals. But it is a place in which humans have evolved and developed tools with which to participate in the processes of reality in reasonable ways. Dewey’s picture of the world thus rejects permanent foundations of knowledge, society, and ethics. But unlike different postmodern thinkers, who also invoke a metaphysics of flux, Dewey’s reconstructive goal is to give his readers conceptual tools with which to live and orient themselves in worthwhile ways in the changing world.

Another way to put this is to say that Dewey’s picture of the human being depicts us as participants. We are not primarily patients or observers, that is, passive recipients of information from the world or pieces of cork that drift aimlessly around at sea. Rather, we are creatures of action who participate actively in the developmental processes of nature and culture. As participants, we can make a difference and codetermine how the changing world should unfold in the future. It is certainly not uniquely up to us to decide the development of nature and culture. There is no omnipotent constructivism in Dewey’s philosophy. There is no idealism in the sense that the human mind creates reality. But Dewey puts emphasis on the fact that it is our task, as the creatures that we are: to stabilize the changing reality in helpful ways (chiefly achieved through science), to evaluate how this is most fruitfully done in light of the needs of communities (ethics), to create societies that further democratic discussions of common goals (politics), and to ensure that our tools of coping with the world are maintained and renewed (education).

When one reads and studies a scholar—especially if the person in question has produced an enormous corpus of work—it is important to find the guiding and sometimes implicit question that the texts of the scholar seek an answer to. I will interpret the work of Dewey as providing answers to the fundamental question: How can we live together in a world that constantly changes? From this follows the other questions that structure this book: How can science help us (chapter 4)? How can human psychology—our existence as thinking, feeling, and acting creatures—be understood in a changing world (chapter 5)? Can we have ethics without fixed ethical principles (chapter 6)? And how should we arrange educational processes in a changing world (chapter 7)?

By giving pride of place to the changing world, I seek to tease out the unity in Dewey’s thinking. While Dewey was not a traditional builder of philosophical systems, as exemplified by Kant and Hegel, there are nevertheless a number of constants within his body of writing. Besides repeatedly engaging with the challenges the changing world presents us with, Dewey crucially understands humans as natural beings. People are not simple victims of circumstance who passively permit themselves to be changed along with their environments; rather, they are capable of changing their environments for their own benefit. Dewey’s philosophy may be thoroughly naturalistic, but this is no reductionist naturalism that attempts to explain away all of the problems of existence with the methods and terminology of the natural sciences. The world that we experience and in which we live—which phenomenological philosophers call the lifeworld and which Dewey calls the ordinary qualitative world—is rich in meaning, purpose, and value. For Dewey, the world of human experience is not an illusion that must inevitably yield to a scientific worldview. Our lifeworld is real, and it belongs to all-encompassing nature.

As far as Dewey is concerned, we should not seek to exorcise all reference to meaning, purpose, and value from our worldview on the basis of a misunderstood scientific model. To the contrary, it is necessary to understand that even the sciences must be approached on the basis of the particular values they possess within our lifeworld. Morality, meaning, value, purpose, and so forth are themselves part of the natural world and are no less real than any other real phenomena such as water molecules or mountain chains. Dewey, like Darwin, regarded humans as wholly natural beings, as part of nature’s processes, and he was optimistic about science’s potential to improve our existence. This is not to say, however, that he wished to replace our ordinary experience of the world with so-called cold scientific rationalization. Instead, he regarded science as a tool to be used in our daily lives; in other words, our everyday life provides the context in which science acquires justification, meaning, and value. Dewey’s thinking represents a passionate defense of the world of human experience, including aspects such as beauty and goodness, in opposition to this world’s being subjugated by and subjected to scientific testing. At the same time, Dewey is passionate about science’s potential to improve and enrich the world of human experience.

This is, in fact, an important element of Dewey’s originality, for philosophers often feel compelled to choose sides. Either we accept science’s conclusions as objectively valid, thereby forsaking our faith in the world of ordinary experience, including our experience of meaning and value, or we view things exclusively through the lens of our world of ordinary experience and its historical and social determinations, thereby regarding scientific conclusions as no different from any other social constructions. British and American analytic philosophers in particular have often opted for the former, science-friendly option in this dilemma, privileging logicality and precision, whereas Continental phenomenological, hermeneutical, and postmodern philosophers have tended to choose the latter option, engaging in more literary and interpretative formulations. Dewey refuses to take sides. He argues that the dilemma—which has existed since the dual birth of science and philosophy in Ancient Greece—is built upon a false dichotomy and that its proposed mutual exclusivities (e.g., theory-practice, thought-action, goals-resources, facts-values) should be subjected to criticism and ultimately overcome.

Dewey and Postmodernism

My presentation of Dewey in this book is, of course, an interpretation of his writings. It is both unavoidable and hopefully welcome that such an interpretation diverges from the other prominent current interpretations. Where I emphasize Dewey’s worldview (his metaphysics) and regard him as a naturalistic and ecological thinker, others stress his interest in language and see him as part of postmodern philosophy and, more generally, as part of the linguistic turn in philosophy and the social sciences. The revival of interest in Dewey stems primarily from the influential American philosopher Richard Rorty, who read Dewey as a postmodern philosopher. In his philosophical bestseller Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1980), Rorty asserts that Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger represent the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century. It becomes clear in Rorty’s later writings that he places Dewey as absolutely the key philosopher of the twentieth century and perhaps of any century. In his book on the consequences of pragmatism, Rorty describes Dewey as waiting at the end of the road along which Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze had then embarked (Rorty 1982, p. xviii). Rorty felt that these French postmodern philosophers would someday—once they had finished unmasking and deconstructing the concepts of knowledge and truth—come to the same conclusions as Dewey had promoted in his less demonstrative manner in the first half of the twentieth century.

Since Dewey can thus be regarded as a sort of grand old man of postmodernism, it is worth briefly considering his relationship with this tradition. This will also serve to accentuate his relevance to today’s society, which many label as postmodern. Postmodernism is a multifaceted stance to thinking and acting, which Lyotard regards as concomitant with a suspicion of legitimating metanarratives (Lyotard 1984). According to postmodernism, our convictions and lifestyles can no longer be legitimized by the grand narratives of God, scientific truth, or human liberation (as found in Marx’s writings). Postmodernism is particularly associated with French philosophers such as Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault as well as with Rorty. In his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty 1989), Rorty considers the contemporary sense of contingency; that is, that there are no universal necessities of human existence. Rorty grants special attention to the contingency of language, self, and community. Language, which permits us to express truths and falsehoods, is contingent in the sense that it holds no obligations to anything but itself. Our vocabulary could be different, for, according to Rorty, there exists no prelinguistic consciousness with which language must comply. As a result, truths and falsehoods are contingent too. Language is metaphorically, historically, and culturally determined and cannot help us communicate with any unchangeable reality or eternal truths beyond itself. The self is contingent inasmuch as it is merely a story that can be told and retold in different ways, depending on the needs and desires of the teller. Community is contingent inasmuch as it is justifiable neither by human nature nor by universal norms of justice. Science itself is contingent since, for Rorty, it is nothing but a metaphysical description resembling poetry. History is contingent since it is not controlled by a rational developmental logic; culture is similarly contingent, as illustrated by ethnographic descriptions of other cultures, some of which are very different.

The experience of contingency was a leitmotif in twentieth-century philosophy. Martin Heidegger (1927), whose thinking is reminiscent of Dewey’s on a number of points, holds that this experience is linked with angst as a fundamental existential category, yet Rorty argues that it should actually be linked with irony. The ironist is Rorty’s term for the person who continually doubts his or her own ultimate vocabulary, that is, his or her own reading of the world. The ironist has thus recognized the contingency of language and is aware that there can be no atonement: Our doubt regarding language is a doubt unto death. Like Rorty, I feel that Dewey anticipates many aspects of the postmodern critique of modernity’s grand narratives and the modern, ahistorical notion of rationality. He does so without descending into either intellectual paralysis (“What can we do, now that we’ve seen through the changeability and contingency of all things?”) or a rejection of concepts such as reason and objectivity. This point, however, goes unread in Rorty’s reading.

While Dewey may not share the postmodernists’ enthusiasm for deconstructionism and is thus not a postmodernist, I nevertheless feel that he is among postmodernity’s most significant and relevant thinkers; he can teach us to respond wisely to contingency. Dewey would say that the correct response to contingency is to be found in reflections on our practical reason. He recognized those who he called “the philosophers of flux” (e.g., Heraclitus and Bergson), yet, unlike many postmodernists of our time, he did not feel that it was proper to sanctify or cultivate worldly contingency or the flux-like nature of reality. We should accept and make the best of contingency, but we need not consequently do it any particular honor. We need neither respond with angst (as Heidegger suggests) nor with irony (a la Rorty); the correct response from a Deweyan perspective is to have courage and a social stance. We should not follow the philosophers of modernity (e.g., Descartes, Locke, and Kant) in denying contingency by creating universal, rational, and necessary laws and principles. After all, the universe was not designed for human comfort on the basis of a permanent, rational structure that we can acknowledge once and for all with the assistance of universal scientific methods. We should also not, however, react by simply accepting contingency and slinking off toward resignation or religious dogmatism (“God has willed it thus”). We should, rather, seek to create unity and stability, to maintain patterns, and to clarify problematic elements of our lives and relationships with one another as well as to work constructively on these problems with the assistance of science in its broadest possible sense.

Postmodern philosophers are preoccupied with demonstrating that modernity’s faith in enlightenment and the concept of liberation through reason and ever-increasing quantities of knowledge are just blind alleys. They hold that there is no universal human reason that can save us from contingency, no ahistoric “pure reason,” as Kant and countless other modernist thinkers sought to describe it. Although Dewey was skeptical of the abstract and ahistorical conceptualization of reason, he teaches us the lesson—one that has, unfortunately, gone unlearned by many postmodernists—that this skepticism need not imply a rejection of reason and progress. Instead of modernity’s pure, abstract, formal, and theoretical reasons (as exemplified by Kant’s philosophy), Dewey wishes to direct us to another type of reason, namely our practical, concrete, informal, and—in the words of Allan Janik—“impure” reason (Janik 2003).

Stephen Toulmin, another present-day philosopher inspired by Dewey, has distinguished between the concepts of rationality (to designate modernity’s pure and abstract reason) and reasonableness (for our “impure” practical reason). Toulmin’s (2001) Deweyan project aims to show that practical reason is no less reasonable than the theoretical variant and that the former is, in fact, the only type of reason that can support us in our encounters with science, ethics, and politics. Toulmin finds that practical reason in particular was an object of inquiry not just for Dewey but also for the Renaissance humanists of the sixteenth century, who lived and wrote prior to the great modern breakthrough that was heralded by the Galilean, Cartesian, and Newtonian elevation of general, eternal, and theoretical truths. In contrast, humanist writers like Montaigne, Erasmus, and Shakespeare possess a philosophy of life that promotes concrete, temporal, and practical truths. For Toulmin, in a postmodern world, we should try “to recapture the practical modesty of the humanists, which let them live free of anxiety, despite uncertainty, ambiguity, and pluralism” (Toulmin 1990, p. 105). This could be quite a precise description of Dewey’s project. Dewey teaches us to live without angst in an uncertain, ambiguous, and pluralistic world. His humanism, like that of his Renaissance predecessors, points the way to the concrete, temporal, and practical dimensions as an incubator of human certainty, knowledge, and ethics.

Dewey, as presented in this book, is not postmodernist, even if he is extremely relevant in a postmodern age. Hilary Putnam—whose neopragmatism diverges significantly from that of Rorty—is, in my view, perhaps correct in reading Dewey as an Enlightenment thinker rather than as a postmodernist (Putnam 2004). When Putnam asserts this, it is not because he wishes to place Dewey inside a French, German, and British Enlightenment niche. Putnam calls these enlightenments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “the second enlightenment” (the “first enlightenment” being the Greek one, involving Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). For Putnam, Dewey augurs a “third enlightenment,” which has not yet occurred but which Putnam hopes is on the way. Dewey’s third enlightenment differs from the second enlightenment on at least two points. For one thing, Dewey has no patience with a priori thought. That is, with thought that seeks knowledge without having its basis or conclusion in the world of human experience (p. 100). Dewey sees experience as the starting point for thought and knowledge and as the touchstone for testing a thought’s validity. Before we can declare our knowledge valid, we must first test it in practice. A second difference is that Dewey rebels against the enlightenment philosophers’ individualistic psychology, which presents humans fundamentally as autonomous social atoms (p. 100). In contrast, Dewey’s third enlightenment heralds an era in which we recognize that knowledge and science are not linked with illusory private selves but are instead linked with social processes, and knowledge and science are ideally constructed within democratic social frameworks.

Dewey’s third ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor Foreword by Jaan Valsiner
• Preface
• 1 Why Read Dewey Today?
• 2 Dewey’s Life and Intellectual Trajectory
• 3 Dewey and Pragmatism
• 4 Philosophical Themes
• 5 Dewey’s Forgotten Psychology Reactualized
• 6 Ethical Pragmatism and a Pragmatist Ethics
• 7 Education as Life
• 8 Dewey Challenged
• References
• Index