PAMELA PILBEAM DEWEY, JOHN (1859–1952)

PAMELA PILBEAM DEWEY, JOHN (1859–1952)

John Dewey is one of the best-known philosophers of the twentieth century. A central figure in the philosophy of US Pragmatism, he was also a well-known public intellectual. He travelled around the world speaking on topics such as education reform, women’s suffrage, labour issues, and war. His publications, which appeared in both academic and popular forums, come to more than forty volumes in the Collected Works of Dewey published by Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey’s philosophy is as relevant today as when he was writing. Dewey’s philosophical perspective is one that acknowledges that we live in a constantly changing world. Rather than fear or seek to avoid such change, Dewey focuses on the idea that increased understanding will allow us to go with and/or direct change more intelligently. Dewey’s perspective was influenced by the work of CHARLES DARWIN. Darwin’s theory draws a picture of a world in flux. Adaptations are a constantly evolving phenomenon. What works in one time or place may not work in another. Being flexible becomes a key notion. Dewey suggests that taking this perspective with regard to social

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concerns will result in the creation of flexible individuals who can critically reflect on a problematic situation, with an open mind, and arrive at workable solutions. These solutions will eventually become problematic themselves and require further reflection and change. This ongoing process of deliberation guiding action is the adaptability of the human species. This experimental method is the process of democracy. To fail to approach problems in this way will, Dewey believes, result in recourse to violence. He championed critical inquiry over reactionary patriotism in the face of the violence of two world wars. The twenty-first century, with its increased globalization, needs such critical and reflective citizens if peace is to be an option.

It is difficult to identify a single topic as central for Dewey, or to pick the few central texts from his life’s work. However, there are consistent themes in his writing. Dewey’s pluralistic approach results in his view being one that is open and attentive to marginalized perspectives. For instance, during his lifetime he was an active supporter of the NAACP, women’s suffrage, birth control and immigrant rights. His philosophy is one that has appeal to liberatory groups. During his years at the University of Chicago (1894– 1905) Dewey was involved with Jane Addams and her work at Hull House, and with the lab school run by his wife Alice Chipman Dewey. He credits such experience as teaching him about life and informing his philosophy in important ways. For example, the women of Hull House were dealing daily with the realities of poverty, racism, sexism and the struggles of the labour class. Long before the feminist theory of the 1960s and 1970s Dewey saw the problem of divorcing theory and practice. As a result, he took on the issues of his day and argued that philosophy had a public role to play, especially with regard to education.

With regard to education, we have yet to take Dewey seriously and implement his suggestions. Dewey is often blamed for a perceived failure of public education, but since his philosophy of education, properly understood, has never been widely implemented this seems unfair. While Dewey advocated taking the interests of children seriously, and finding ways to engage their native curiosity and active minds, he was not an advocate of

a child-centred approach. Far from letting individual interests be the primary guide or goal, he sought to bring about a heightened awareness of our social embeddedness. It is the realization of our interconnectedness that, for him, motivates the desire to employ critical reflection that includes multiple viewpoints in order to solve problems and sustain community. Only when the citizenry develops the habit of critical and flexible reflection can democracy be sustained.

Dewey’s notion of democracy is not that of a specific political organization. Democracy is a type of faith. For Dewey:

Democracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness…. Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process.

(LW 14:229)

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He sees democracy as a way of life; it is a condition and habit of participation joined with corresponding responsibilities. We are responsible for the social conditions under which we live. These conditions also set boundaries on what is possible for us. Since there is this interplay between humans and their social environments, it is very important for us to continually critique and modify our social environments so these environments expand rather than limit our possibilities. It is an open-ended process, capable of being reformed and redirected. Democracy is the experimental method (what Dewey calls the method of intelligence) applied to social concerns. It is a method for directing the future and enriching experience so that one sees the interconnectedness of all things. This is what Dewey call the aesthetic experience.

In Art as Experience, Dewey speaks of aesthetic experience in the following way: ‘[I]ts varied parts are linked to one another, and do not merely succeed one another. And the parts through their experienced linkage move toward a consummation and close, not merely to cessation in time’ (LW 10:61). Such experience enables us to act with intelligent foresight and apply the method of intelligence to how we live. This is lived experience. In contrast anaesthetic or ordinary experience lacks this cohesiveness, this unity, this consummation. Dewey says:

For in much of our experience we are not concerned with the connection of one incident with what went before and what comes after. There is no interest that controls attentive rejection or selection of what shall be organized into the developing experience. Things happen, but they are neither definitely included nor decisively excluded, we drift.

(LW 10:46–7) Dewey also calls this received experience. With received (as opposed to lived)

experience we remain passive spectators who are not prepared to act with intelligent foresight or to apply critical intelligence to how we live. Dewey seeks to move people from accepting a life of received experience to seeking lived experience. In other words, aesthetic experience needs to become more common.

Aesthetic or lived experience can also be described as religious experience, though clearly distinguished from religion for Dewey. In A Common Faith he says if the religious:

were rescued through emancipation from dependence upon specific types of beliefs and practices, from those elements that constitute a religion, many individuals would find that experiences having the force of bringing about a better, deeper and enduring adjustment in life are not so rare and infrequent as they are commonly supposed to be. They occur frequently in connection with many significant moments of living.

(LW 9:11) Dewey finds the religious in everyday experience just as he finds the aesthetic in

everyday objects and experience. He warns us not to elevate the religious and aesthetic to the rare and untouchable, but to understand that much of our everyday lives can be

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experienced in these ways and that we should try to have this level of integration, awareness and unity as much as possible.

In the aesthetic (or religious) experience things hold together in a way that they do not in the anaesthetic experience. There is an integrity and unity to the aesthetic experience that moves the live creature to understand that experience, and life in general, in a more intense way. It is this kind of deep or lived experience that makes intelligence possible and democracy desirable. In contrast, anaesthetic experience does not organize experience in this cohesive way. For Dewey anaesthetic experience and specific religions tend to encourage rigid habits of mind, unthinking obedience, reverence and worship. For Dewey, we need to embrace and seek to have experiences on the level of the religious and the aesthetic. Such experiences encourage critical engagement with, and transformation of, the world and ourselves. Such experiences encourage democracy.

Democracy requires that we see beyond our limited self-interest. It requires that we see the interconnectedness and unity of live creatures and their environments. Ideal democracy is a method of living in the present with regard to the future. Democracy tries out institutions and modifies them as needs and interests change, not expecting a final form of society to eventually emerge, but embracing the potentiality of intentionally controlled change. Democracy’s focus on the process of improving the future through intelligent guidance both necessitates and results in a deeper appreciation of the interconnectedness of live creatures and their environments. It necessitates and makes possible a deeper experience of life. This understanding is dynamic and changing. Without this sense of connectedness it is much more likely that society will splinter into mere associations. It is this understanding of social embeddedness and interconnectedness that makes a functioning democracy possible and it is democracy that demands us to move beyond the rigid habits of either/or thinking.

This habit of thinking is not easy to change. Given a world of flux many people seek certainty by creating fixed and transcendent metaphysical, epistemological, ethical and political systems. Dualistic thinking is simple and clear, and can be quite comforting (see Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty). However, it reinforces false dichotomies and promotes a rigid and oppositional way of thinking. It is not a productive approach for solving real problems of socially embedded people. To do that we need to encourage people to have experiences that involve creating and sustaining an awareness of the interconnectedness of the fluid, dynamic and processive universe. Awareness of our interdependence makes us aware of our dependence on things beyond our control. Again, this vulnerability spawns a variety of responses. We fear this dependence. We seek control. We become obedient to a ‘superior’ power. We become fatalistic and passive. Alternatively, Dewey suggests we embrace a natural piety that begins with a:

sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable…. It trusts that the natural interactions between man and his environment will breed more intelligence and generate more knowledge…. There is such a thing as faith in intelligence becoming religious in quality.

(LW 9:18–19)

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Faith in intelligence is central to Dewey’s theory of democracy. Democracy is not, for Dewey, about institutions or hard and fast rules or methods. It is best understood as an attitude toward life; it is an attitude that forms the foundation for critical intelligence. Dewey is often accused of being naïve and/or overly optimistic. One of the common charges is that he is overly optimistic about the average person’s intelligence and willingness to see beyond themselves and their ‘individual’ interests. However, Dewey was very aware of this danger. This is why so much of what he writes is aimed at bringing us to understand the nature and importance of the ethical, democratic, aesthetic and religious attitudes toward life. Without these attitudes towards, and understanding of, the processive nature of life and society democracy is at best a dream and at worst a nightmare. Education is his main means of transforming and sustaining democracy.

For Dewey, education is what prepares people for social and political participation. He promotes a process of education that will develop what he calls the method of intelligence. The method of intelligence begins when something is encountered as a problem. Old habits are no longer working. The problematic situation is examined and alternative approaches are imagined and tried out. Each ‘solution’ is only temporary and generates new problematic situations that require the same kind of examination and thoughtful inquiry. The process is an ongoing one. The method of intelligence needs to become the one habit on which we rely. We are free only when we act with knowledge and foresight so his education will encourage observation, reflection, flexible judgement and vision.

As with his view of democracy, Dewey’s views on education are not endorsements of specific kinds of institutions or curricula. These will vary with time, place and the emerging needs of communities. Education needs to help promote flexible and open habits of mind (see Dewey’s Democracy and Education). Education is to build on natural curiosity to retain and develop the capacity of self-reflection, rather than replace that with

a reliance on authority. Dewey says:

(w)hen the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self- direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.

(MW 1:19–20) For education to prepare people to govern themselves, to help people learn to form and

voice their own judgements, to enable them to think experimentally, to encourage them to co-operate socially it must educate the ‘mass of citizens…for intellectual participation in the political, economic, and cultural growth of the country and not simply certain leaders’ (MW 15:275).

Dewey is clear that democracy is not a viable option if people are educated into a reliance on authority. He believed that reliance on political and/or religious authorities has, throughout history, resulted in oppression, stagnation and loss of individuality. It is important to note that while Dewey rejects the atomistic and antagonistic notion of the individual that emerges from classical liberal theory and embraces instead a notion of a socially embedded individual, he does not subordinate the individual to social concerns.

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The individual and individuality are essential to a real community and working democracy. What distinguishes a community from mere association is effective participation by a diverse range of people, a mutual recognition of individual needs and desires, and the development of conjoint activity (see Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems). Community, and democracy, requires individuals and groups with flexible habits of mind and an awareness of their social embeddedness and inter-connectedness.

Humans are born dependent beings, and remain social and interdependent throughout their lives of growth and change (see Dewey’s Experience and Nature). Education must prepare people to deal with this connectedness, growth and change by means of providing intelligent direction rather than falling back on authority and/or dualistic thinking. Dewey views education as the best means for encouraging the kind of independent and critical thought that will make democracy both possible and desirable. This makes philosophy, as understood by the pragmatist tradition, key to social activism and public discourse:

Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large task for our philosophy.

(MW 10:48) In sum, Dewey’s theory of democracy uses education to encourage people to see their

inter-connectedness with other beings and their environment. This sense of connectedness allows for a deeper, richer experience of life (an aesthetic and/ or religious) experience. Only when such ‘lived experience’, rather than a more passive ‘received experience’, becomes the guiding experience of life, are people prepared to handle the diversity and complexity of our increasingly global and constantly changing world. With ‘lived experience’ as a guide people can apply Dewey’s method of critical intelligence and productively engage in democratic discourse and action. Only then will we be prepared to address the causes of social, political, economic and environmental problems.