John Dewey
From Philosopedia
Dewey, John (20 October 1859 - 1 June 1952)
Dewey, philosophic instrumentalist, psychologist, educator at Columbia University, and author of The Quest for Certainty, Freedom and Culture (1929), is one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century. In The Revival of Pragmatism (1998), Richard Rorty is cited as calling Dewey one of the three most important philosophers of the century, along with Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
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Interest in Humanism
When in 1950 Humanist Clubs were being established at universities, Dewey wrote,
- I am much interested in learning of the plans for the formation of a Humanist Group among Harvard and Columbia students. The drift away from religious institutions founded on supernaturalism is marked among the intellectually-minded well-informed persons in every country. Even among those who remain nominally connected with institutions professing doctrines of a supernatural sort, there is a growing spirit of indifference to the kind of devotion to ideals which once marked these institutions. The enduring element in religion is genuine and ardent devotion to the cause of promoting the knowledge and practice of the highest moral aims of which man is possible. It is my firm belief that the Humanist Movement is based upon acknowledgment of the importance of beliefs and movements ardently concerned with this aim. It is particularly important that university men and women, who should influence popular sentiment and ideas in the future, realize the increasing inability of doctrines and institutions that in the past have been the carriers of inspiring ideals to meet the demands of the modern world, and should be active in furtherance of a substitute that possesses the required vitality.
Along with his statement, Dewey also sent a $1 check to Warren Allen Smith for membership in the Humanist Club at Columbia University, which later became a chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Also in the 1950s, Dewey was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.
Dewey was a member of and financial contributor to the American Humanist Association. Also, he was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association, which in 1899 had been founded by Charles Watts. Although attacked by religionists on the right and by some on the left who felt he did not understand the nature of evil, Dewey’s naturalistic approach to religious experience is considered by many today to be precisely that which is of paramount importance if mankind hopes to resolve the problems which organized religion presents. His approach was neither that of the melancholy atheist nor that of the otherworldly supernaturalist.
View of Atheism
James Gouinlock makes the point that Dewey had no use for what he called militant atheism, of which Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship is typical. Dewey insisted that a valid philosophy had to be evaluative, that one should be neither blind to the goods of nature and life nor adopt a position of wholesale acceptance. To Dewey, this is the religious quality of life. He was the sole philosopher to sign Humanist Manifesto I. In fact, according to Edwin H. Wilson, Dewey signed the draft without change or comment. Dewey later explained in a letter to Corliss Lamont why he had signed the work:
- There is a great difference between different kinds of “Humanism” as you know; there is that of Paul Elmer More for example. I signed the humanist manifesto precisely because of the point to which you [Corliss Lamont] seem to object, namely because it had a religious context, and my signature was a sign of sympathy on that score, and not a commitment to every clause in it. “Humanism” as a technical philosophic term is associated with [F.C.S.] Schiller and while I have great regard for his writings, it seems to me that he gave Humanism an unduly subjectivistic turn—he was so interested in bringing out the elements of human desire and purpose neglected in traditional philosophy that he tends it seems to me to a virtual isolation of man from the rest of nature. I have come to think of my own position as cultural or humanistic Naturalism—Naturalism, properly interpreted seems to me a more adequate term than Humanism. Of course I have always limited my use of “instrumentalism” to my theory of thinking and knowledge; the word pragmatism I have used very little, and then with reserves.
Use of "God"
In The Influence of Darwinism in Philosophy (1910), Dewey stated that he was not interested in “an intelligence that shaped things once for all but the intelligence which things are even now shaping” and that,
- Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.
However, although he honored the important role that religious institutions and practices play in human life, Dewey rejected belief in any static ideal, such as a theistic God. For Dewey, God was the method of intelligence in human life: that is to say, rigorous inquiry, or, very broadly conceived, science. Strictly speaking, although it is not a label he would approve, Dewey was an atheist philosopher.
Joseph McCabe, however, holds that Dewey made a mistake in using any theistic references whatsoever. “In recent years,” McCabe wrote,
- [Dewey] has advised a new sort of theistic formula: not that God is an objective reality but the relation of man to the ideal. He seems to have fallen into the common fallacy of philosophic moralists that most men need a God, but most men will not even understand what he means by God.
Works
Some of his works are Education: The School and Society (1899); How We Think (1910); Democracy and Education (1916); Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920); A Common Faith (1934); Logic (1938); Experience and Education (1938); and, with Arthur Bentley, Knowing and the Known (1949). These writings show his rejection of authoritarian teaching methods, for he held education in a democracy is a tool to enable different people with different cultures to integrate their lives and vocations in progressive, constructive, democratic ways. For Dewey, truth was not an absolute. To solve problems, individuals searched for truths, not Truth, and these truths changed as their problems changed. His philosophic instrumentalism had no need for transcendental or eternal reality, and his educational philosophy known as “progressive education” made him the foremost educator of his day.
One Manhattan wag, while at Teachers College, Columbia University, observed that everyone spouted Dewey but no one could bear to wade through his prose.
His Impact
His view of a “renascent liberalism” included a three-step strategy: first, it must develop historical perspective; second, it must reconstruct traditional liberal values; and third, it must inform, guide, and actively reconstruct social institutions and their practices.
Richard Shusterman of Temple University has called Dewey “probably the greatest of American pragmatist philosophers and certainly the most influential for cultural criticism and aesthetics.” He adds that “Pragmatism has recently been revived in literary theory through the writings of Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. But neither of them pays attention to Dewey’s aesthetics, and indeed they present theories that are un-Deweyan in their disembodied ‘textualism’ and elitist professionalism.
Though some of Dewey’s aesthetic ideas and judgments may be dated, his work still represents the best point of departure for progressive pragmatist literary theory and aesthetics.” For Richard Rorty, Dewey was a philosophic giant, an anti-Communist social democrat who thought of pragmatism as a tool to expand human freedom.
Like Sidney Hook, Dewey witnessed what Alan Ryan has described as “the high tide of American liberalism,” and Rorty thinks of both as “hard to match among present-day American philosophers—or, for that matter, American intellectuals. Both men resemble such heroic nineteenth-century figures as John Stuart Mill in the sheer quantity of work they managed to get done, in the range of their curiosity, and in their ability to switch back and forth between abstract philosophy and concrete social issues with no sense of strain, and no diminution in intensity.”
John E. Smith of Hamden, Connecticut, is of the opinion that Ryan made a mistake in reviewing Rorty’s book about Dewey, thinking that Dewey urged his philosophical readers to turn away from “the problems of philosophy” to “the problems of men.” Not so, Smith claimed (The New York Times Book Review, 14 June 1998), adding, “Dewey’s advice was to turn away from ‘the problems of philosophers,’ by which he meant the puzzles (such as, How do I know that my neighbor has a mind?) that are so dear to professional philosophers, and deal instead with “questions which actually arise in the vicissitudes of life.” Otherwise, to oppose “the problems of philosophy” to “the problems of men” would have been counter to Dewey’s entire outlook.
Currently, The John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture publishes Education and Culture: The Journal of the John Dewey Society (1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, Georgia 30118). The journal, published twice a year by the John Dewey Society and the University of Iowa, is edited by Peter S. Hlebowitsh. Alan Ryan, in John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995), argues that the thought of John Dewey is more relevant today than ever before, that a revival of his ideas is needed. Richard Wightman Fox of Boston University has commended Ryan for his description of Dewey’s teacher-centered viewpoint, one which helped talented instructors to bring children to new levels of understanding by enlisting their innate interest in solving real problems, not only practical problems but intellectual and artistic ones.
(See reviews about Dewey by Philip Ebersole.)
{CE; CL; EU, James Gouinlock; EW; Free Inquiry, Winter 1994, devoted an entire issue to Dewey; FUS; HM1; HNS; HNS2; Richard Rorty, “Remembering John Dewey and Sidney Hook,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996; TRI; TYD; WAS, 11 September 1950}
Dewey's Funeral
Roberta Dewey was some forty-five years younger than her husband and upon his death late at 11 P.M. had telephoned Donald Szantho Harrington, minister of the Community (Unitarian) Church in New York City. Although Dewey was not a member of the church, he had once told his wife that if he died she should call Harrington, that he would know what to do. Upon arriving before midnight, Harrington recalled in an article for Religious Humanism (Summer 1994), he found that Mrs. Dewey fainted right after opening the door. The two adopted children, Belgian war orphans John and Adrienne, sensibly found some ammonia to revive her, after which it was decided that cremation should be the following morning at Fresh Pond Crematory in Queens.
Dewey’s body was covered with a sheet and blanket, the children were put to bed, and Harrington left by 2 A.M. The following morning, Harrington and Mrs. Dewey watched the coffin go into the tort for cremation. Although David Dubinsky and William Heard Kilpatrick volunteered to speak at a memorial, Mrs. Dewey did not want a long, drawn-out affair, saying Dewey hated those things, and she suggested that Max Otto of the University of Wisconsin in Madison should be the speaker.
At Dewey’s memorial service, held 4 June 1952, Harrington spoke of Dewey’s influence on American world life and thought, of his ability as a teacher to get others to speak, and of his personal memories of having driven Dewey from Chicago to Madison and back. “I thought I would get a lot of wisdom. Instead, he . . . kept me talking. All I can remember his saying was ‘Possibly,’ and ‘You may be right!’”
Harrington then read passages from the Bible, which surprised many in the audience, along with Matthew Arnold’s “Rugby Chapel,” George Eliot’s “The Choir Invisible,” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Ode on Dejection.”
George Kykhuizen recalls in The Life and Mind of John Dewey (1973) that Harrington referred to Dewey as “one of the intellectual and moral giants” of all time, declaring that “when the full impact of his revolutionary thought reaches the heart of our society, some generations hence, scarcely a single social institution will remain as it is today.”
Norman Thomas was present, as was William Heard Kilpatrick, both with their distinctively white hair. Of the several speakers, Max Otto was the one with the most amusing recollection. He had stopped Dr. Dewey on the campus one day and had asked him a question pertaining to philosophy. Dewey had looked down, cogitated, looked up, had looked around, and he had not said anything for minutes and minutes . . . and yet more minutes . . . and more. Just as Dr. Otto was about to interrupt, thinking maybe Dewey was suffering some illness, there ensued a long, complex response which was uttered slowly and distinctively, one so complete Otto could scarcely believe it had not been written down beforehand. A good question deserves a good answer, Dewey was showing. But, said Otto to much laughter, “I was very, very careful after that whenever I questioned Dr. Dewey about anything.”
Otto also said that Dewey’s philosophy was like that of a mountain climber who climbs in order to see farther, and who, once he has climbed one mountain, presses on to a higher one simply to see farther yet. It was the continual quest for new vision and new vistas that marked the greatness of Dewey’s mind. And what is man’s purpose if he climbs all the mountains and there are no more to see, Dewey was once asked. Then, he responded, there would be no purpose in living.
A soloist sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “The Balm of Gilead,” the latter said to have been a favorite of Dewey’s. At the end, Harrington took Mrs. Dewey with one hand and carried what appeared to be a water pitcher with the other, and the two led the audience out of the room.
It was only then that some realized the cremains had been present throughout the service, that atop the altar had been a bronze urn, not a water pitcher. Although Columbia University had wanted the ashes, Dewey’s Alma Mater, the University of Vermont, received them as well as, later, Roberta Dewey’s ashes. Harrington recalled that at the ceremony he had met for the first time Dewey’s four children from his first marriage (one of whom was adopted), that they seemed upset and angry that they had not been consulted and involved in the funeral arrangements. Harrington, however, had left all the announcements and notifications to Roberta for completion, and, although it now was too late, Harrington became aware that the children had not approved of their father’s remarriage and were critical of their having adopted the two young children.
Miscellaneous
Following is a draft to Free Inquiry Editor Timothy Madigan of an article by Warren Allen Smith about Dewey's funeral:
Dewey's check and postcard about becoming a member of Smith's Humanist Club.
Presumably, Dewey had a child help address the back of an envelope to Smith
A letter to Dewey from Smith, telling that George Axtelle had talked to his group and that he would keep him informed about future news concerning the humanistic chapter.
{WAS}
