Philosophy of John Dewey

Life and Works

John Dewey (1859-1952) (picture) was a philosopher, psychologist, and educator. As an educator he is famous for his system of teaching through experimental observation (progressive system in education); as a philosopher he is known for the new development which he gave to James's Pragmatism. Dewey and his colleagues formed a strong pragmatic center at the University of Chicago, and when Dewey moved to Columbia University, he created a strong pragmatic center there. In these two universities many philosophers received their training.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859, the son of a grocer. Since early in childhood, Dewey had chores to do around the house and learned to regard them as a natural part of life. When he had to go to school, however, he did not show much enthusiasm. He preferred to learn from direct contacts with life, finding them much more exciting than the school work regarded by him, as by most of his boyhood friends, as boring and of little practical value. This experience impressed him deeply and determined all his subsequent views on the function of education.

Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879 and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1884. One of his teachers was G. Stanley Hall, a founder of experimental psychology; another was Charles Sanders Peirce. Dewey, however, was particularly disposed to German philosophic thought, especially the unifying, organic character of the Idealism of Hegel, in contrast to British Empiricism. Dewey first taught philosophy at the University of Michigan (1884-88), and then at the University of Minnesota (1888), and subsequently returned to Michigan (1889-94). In 1894 he became chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago.

In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association, and in 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He taught at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930 and was professor emeritus from 1930 to 1939. Dewey lectured in Japan and China from 1919 to 1921, and visited schools in the USSR in 1928. He wrote for the general public on social problems and critical issues confronting American industrial democracy. He was a participant and leader in many liberal causes, in civic organizations, and in national affairs and was a founder of the New School for Social Research (1919) in New York City.

The range and diversity of Dewey's writings and his influence on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, education, legal and political theory, and the social sciences, place him among those philosophers who have had a great influence on contemporary thought. His principal works of philosophical interest are: How We Think; Essays in Experimental Logic; Reconstruction in Philosophy; and Experience and Nature. Dewey also wrote: The School and Society; Human Nature and Conduct; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry: Ethics; Theory of Valuation; Art as Experience; Studies in Logical Theory; Democracy and Education; and The Quest for Certainty.

Instrumentalism

The philosophical teaching of Dewey is known as instrumentalism in its theoretical aspect, and as meliorism in its ethical aspect. According to him, nature is a continuously flowing stream. It uses thought as an instrument or tool to pass from a given situation, full of ambiguities and disharmonies, to a new and better situation. Although this new situation contains elements implied in the former, it is richer and better because of its new meaning and greater complexity.

In addition to the experimental method of verification stressed by Charles Sanders Peirce, and the popular version of Pragmatism given by William James, Dewey contributes two additional factors to Pragmatism: the psychological, and the logical. Psychology with its biological drift greatly influenced Pragmatism; and logic was turned into the assumption that positive science is true.

Dewey's "instrumentalism" affirms that cognition consists in forging ideal tools or instruments with which to cope with a given situation. Like James, Dewey maintains that the mind is an instrument for realizing purposes. Ideas are teleological weapons of mind. Ideas are plastic and adaptable. They owe their stability to the vital functions which they serve.

The Structure of Reality

The structure of reality is not fixed and immutable but dependent upon human action, which may modify the data of experience; and human action is not directed by fixed and immutable ideas, as the traditional philosophy held, but by the memory of past experience: "Given data which locate the nature of the problem, there is evoked a thought (memory) of an operation which, if put into execution, may eventuate in a situation in which the trouble or doubt evoked in the inquiry will be resolved." (The Quest for Certainty)

In other words, the intelligence, profiting from past experiences, adapts them as means to new experiments in order to test their value. The successful consequences of this new event will demonstrate to us the value of these means (ideas). For Dewey, an idea is the memory of past experience (Empiricism), and the value of an idea may be known only "experimentally...in the course of actual inquiries."

Ideas emerge in thought under the stimulus of the difficulties which are found within every situation. These ideas serve as a point of reference for action in a determined direction toward a better situation. Ideas are thus instruments of action. They are true if they succeed in producing a new and better situation. Morality consists in the consciousness of responsibility in this progressive reorganization of reality. Initiative and inventiveness in the use of one's intelligence constitute personality.

Knowledge and morality are two sides of one and the same reality: the former actuates the latter progressively on ever higher levels. Knowledge consists in a continual broadening of the human powers over nature. Through knowledge there are formed ever wider spheres of social life endowed with a democratic spirit. All this implies the collaboration of individuals and peoples in a work in which each one affirms ever more decisively the value of his personal initiative and sense of responsibility.

Since the only reality is the process of nature, Dewey scorns all classical philosophies, including Classical Realism. According to him, these philosophies are responsible for the splitting of reality into the mutable and the immutable, into the perfect and the imperfect. The classical philosophies, Dewey claimed, created a metaphysical world which served as an impasse to the development of the sciences and the improvement of society. Such an impasse must be removed and all attempts to construct a metaphysics must be abandoned: "To abandon the search for absolute and immutable reality and value may seem like a sacrifice. But this renunciation is the condition of entering upon a vocation of greater vitality." (The Quest for Certainty)

Dewey is a decided anti-metaphysicist for whom the only reality is nature in its serial process of events without any metaphysical implication. Likewise, the only true knowledge is that which results from scientific research applied to the datum of experience, and the only purpose of scientific research is the determination of the "structure" of reality.

CRITICAL NOTE: It is worthy of note that the abandonment of metaphysics results in a wrong evaluation of the "everyday experience" so dear to Dewey. A clear example of everyday experience can be found in a seed which develops into a tree. The denial of any fixed metaphysical rule in the process of nature is in contradiction to such everyday experiences, for oak generates oak. The factors or causes which make possible such a constant passage from non-being to this particular being are not perceived by the senses and can be discovered only the the intellect. Now it is these factors, which are part of the act of generation and which cannot be grasped by the senses, that constitute the basis of metaphysics.

Metaphysics does not form an obstacle to scientific knowledge, as Dewey believes; but, on the contrary, it completes science by giving an explanation of a fact of everyday experience which science is unable to justify.

In studying the philosophy of Dewey, it is important to observe that throughout his works he shows a superficial knowledge of Aristotelio-Scholastic philosophy and Classical Realism. More often, he confuses it with the tenets of Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza and even with Idealism.

For example, the criticism so often repeated of the Aristotelian "species" -- that is, that they are fixed and immutable reality -- should have been directed against Platonic Ideas or against the exaggerated realism of the Middle Ages. In Aristotelian philosophy and Classical Realism individuals alone are real entities. Species and ideas are not realities, but ways of understanding reality and, as such, they exist only in the intellect.

Likewise, when Dewey argues that the idea of God as an immutable and perfect Being is contradictory (because the physical world is mutable and imperfect and therefore cannot exist in God), he evidently confuses the God of traditional philosophy with the "One" of Plotinus or with the Substance of Spinoza, or even with the Hegelian Being. God, however, is far from these pantheistic conceptions for, according to Scholastic philosophy, God -- the plenitude of all perfections -- by an act of creation put into existence all finite beings distinct from Himself.

By the same act of creation, finite beings are endowed with the power of acting. In irrational beings this power is determined by the act of creation itself (oak generates oak), while in man it is freely developed through the action of the intellect. This intelligent and free activity is responsible for the birth of the sciences and civilization. Such a philosophy does not create an impasse for the progress of science and the development of social conditions, but, rather, permits all the achievements possible to an intelligent and free creature.

Social and Educational Applications

Dewey regarded philosophy as the criticism of those socially important beliefs which are part and parcel of the social and cultural life of human communities. This criticism involves an examination of the way in which ideas, taken as solutions of specific problems, function within a wider context. It is in this way that a theory of knowledge -- logic, ethics, psychology, aesthetics, and metaphysics becomes necessary and explainable. These are not to be derived from the assumption of an abstract truth, that is, a higher reality or a reality different from that within which we live and act, nor from everlasting values.

Dewey objects to transcendental philosophers, because they ignore the kind of empirical situations to which their themes pertain; even the most transcendental philosophers use empirical subject matter, if they philosophize at all. But they become nonempirical because they fail to supply directions for experimentation. The supply of such directions is the core of Dewey's philosophy. His standard of belief and conduct claims to lie within, rather than outside of, a situation of life, that can be shared. Idealists, in contradistinction to Dewey's search for a guide to the beliefs of a shareable situation, deny to common life the faculty of forming its own regulative methods; they claim to have private access to truth. In Dewey's democratic philosophy, common life is the reality of a dignity equivalent to that of nature or the individual.

Dewey devoted his studies not only to the conditions but also to the consequences of knowledge. He never made philosophy subservient to the vested interests of any class or nation; nor was he afraid to hurt any sensibility. He insisted that philosophy, in contrast to all other human activities, must be allowed to remain outside and above the public domain in order to maintain sound relations with these other human activities and to whose progress it must contribute. Dewey was opposed to any isolation of cognitive experience and its subject matter from other modes of experience and their subject matter.

He attempted to integrate spiritual life into the precise framework of natural phenomena, and, for the sake of all-embracing experience, tried to do away with the distinction between the objective and the subjective, and the psychical and the physical. He denied that the characteristic object of knowledge has a privileged position of correspondence with an allegedly ultimate reality; he insisted that action is involved in knowledge and that knowledge is not subordinate to action or practice; that it is in experimental knowing that genuine intellectual integrity is found.

Dewey did not accept any alternative between knowledge or intelligence and action. To him it is "intelligent action" that matters. The failure of human intelligence in social areas has made Dewey strongly emphasize the social aspects of his philosophy. Throughout his long life he tried not only to apply his experimental methods to social philosophy, but he also actively participated in disputes and struggles of political, social, and cultural relevance. Political, social, cultural, and theoretical motives have enhanced Dewey's interest in education. He recognized the important role education plays in the survival of democracy, and the importance of democratic thought and action in the improvement of education.

Dewey discards the metaphysical and substitutes the love of society and advocates a positivistic pragmatism which gives account of all sides of experience. Pragmatism is presented as the philosophic counterpart of democracy. For the pragmatist, it is a religion!

After the World War, Pragmatism grew into a social philosophy. Pragmatists have applied their doctrine to every phase of social theory. Dewey made theory and living identical and applied his philosophy to economic, political, and pedagogical questions. Reality is declared to be changing, growing, developing in things. A real philosophy, according to Dewey, must abandon absolute origins and finalities and explore specific values in practical, moral, and social life. Man continues to change his ideas until they work. Fixities (atoms, God) have existence and import only in the problems, needs, struggles and instrumentalities of conscious agents.

CRITICAL NOTE: Dewey's philosophy is an immanentist philosophy of humanity itself in its progressive evolution toward ever better forms. But Since Dewey denies that we can know the absolute -- God or First Cause -- the attempt to establish the morally organized democratic society so vaguely pictured by him, lacks rational foundation.