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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter XI Section 3.2 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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III. JOHN DEWEY

2. Instrumentalism

What distinguishes Dewey is the undisguised completeness with which he accepts the evolution theory. Mind as well as body is to him an organ evolved, in the struggle for existence, from lower forms. His starting-point in every field is Darwinian.

When Descartes said, “The nature of physical things IS much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state,” the modern world became self-conscious of the logic that was henceforth to control it, the logic of which Darwin’s Origin of Species, is the latest scientific achievement. … When Darwin said of species what Galileo had said of the earth, e pur si muove [and yet it moves], he emancipated, once for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations.

What distinguishes Dewey is the undisguised completeness with which he accepts the evolution theory. Mind as well as body is to him an organ evolved, in the struggle for existence, from lower forms. His starting-point in every field is Darwinian.

Things are to be explained, then, not by supernatural causation, but by their place and function in the environment. Dewey is frankly naturalistic; he protests that “to idealize and rationalize the universe at large is a confession of inability to master the courses of things that specifically concern us.” He distrusts, too, the Schopenhauerian Will and the Bergsonian élan; these may exist, but there is no need to worship them; for these world-forces are as often as not destructive of everything that man creates and reverences. Divinity is within us, not in these neutral cosmic powers. “Intelligence has descended from its lonely isolation at the remote edge of things, whence it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good, to take its seat in the moving affairs of men.” We must be faithful to the earth.

Things are to be explained, then, not by supernatural causation, but by their place and function in the environment. We need to master the courses of things that specifically concern us. Divinity is within us, not in these neutral cosmic powers.

Like a good positivist, scion of the stock of Bacon and Hobbes and Spencer and Mill, Dewey rejects metaphysics as the echo and disguise of theology. The trouble with philosophy has always been that its problems were confused with those of religion. “As I read Plato, philosophy began with some sense of its essentially political basis and mission—a recognition that its problems were those of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in dreams of another world.” In German philosophy the interest in religious problems deflected the course of philosophic development; in English philosophy the social interest outweighed the supernatural. For two centuries the war raged between an idealism that reflected authoritarian religion and feudal aristocracy, and a sensationalism that reflected the liberal faith of a progressive democracy.

The trouble with philosophy has always been that its problems were confused with those of religion. Philosophy began with the problem of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in dreams of another world.

This war is not yet ended; and therefore we have not quite emerged from the Middle Ages. The modern era will begin only when the naturalist point of view shall be adopted in every field. This does not mean that mind is reduced to matter, but only that mind and life are to be understood not in theological but in biological terms, as an organ or an organism in an environment, acted upon and reacting, moulded and moulding. We must study not “states of consciousness” but modes of response. “The brain is primarily an organ of a certain kind of behavior, not of knowing the world.” Thought is an instrument of re-adaptation; it is an organ as much as limbs and teeth. Ideas are imagined contacts, experiments in adjustment. But this is no passive adjustment, no merely Spencerian adaptation. “Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control the environment.” The problem of philosophy is not how we can come to know an external world, but how we can learn to control it and remake it, and for what goals. Philosophy is not the analysis of sensation and knowledge (for that is psychology), but the synthesis and coordination of knowledge and desire.

The problem of philosophy is not how we can come to know an external world, but how we can learn to control it and remake it, and for what goals. Philosophy is not the analysis of sensation and knowledge, but the synthesis and coordination of knowledge and desire.

To understand thought we must watch it arise in specific situations. Reasoning, we perceive, begins not with premises, but with difficulties; then it conceives an hypothesis which becomes the conclusion for which it seeks the premises; finally it puts the hypothesis to the test of observation or experiment. “The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts—inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation.” There is small comfort for mysticism here.

The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts—inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation.

And then again, thinking is social; it occurs not only in specific situations, but in a given cultural milieu. The individual is as much a product of society as society is a product of the individual; a vast network of customs, manners, conventions, language, and traditional ideas lies ready to pounce upon every new-born child, to mould it into the image of the people among whom it has appeared. So rapid and thorough is the operation of this social heredity that it is often mistaken for physical or biological heredity. Even Spencer believed that the Kantian categories, or habits and forms of thought, were native to tne individual, whereas in all probability they are merely the product of the social transmission of mental habits from adults to chlIdren. In general the role of instinct has been exaggerated, and that of early training under-rated; the most powerful instincts, such as sex and pugnacity, have been considerably modified and controlled by social training; and there is no reason why other instincts, like those of acquisition and mastery, should not be similarly modified by social influence and education. We must unlearn our ideas about an unchangeable human nature and an omnipotent environment. There is no knowable limit to change or growth; and perhaps there is nothing impossible but thinking makes it so.

The individual is as much a product of society as society is a product of the individual. So rapid and thorough is the operation of this social heredity that it is often mistaken for physical or biological heredity. We must unlearn our ideas about an unchangeable human nature and an omnipotent environment.

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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter XI Section 3.1 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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III. JOHN DEWEY

1. Education

After all, pragmatism was “not quite” an American philosophy; it did not catch the spirit of the greater America that lay south and west of the New England states. It was a highly moralistic philosophy, and betrayed the Puritanic origins of its author. It talked in one breath of practical results and matters of fact, and in the next it leaped, with the speed of hope, from earth to heaven. It began with a healthy reaction against metaphysics and epistemology, and one expected from it a philosophy of nature and of society; but it ended as an almost apologetic plea for the intellectual respectability of every dear belief. When would philosophy learn to leave to religion these perplexing problems of another life, and to psychology these subtle difficulties of the knowledge-process, and give itself with all its strength to the illumination of human purposes and the coordination and elevation of human life?

Pragmatism was “not quite” an American philosophy. It betrayed the Puritanic origins of its author. It did not give itself with all its strength to the illumination of human purposes and the coordination and elevation of human life.

Circumstances left nothing undone to prepare John Dewey to satisfy, this need, and to outline a philosophy that should express the spirit of an informed and conscious America. He was born in the “effete East” (in Burlington, Vermont, 1859), and had his schooling there, as if to absorb the old culture before adventuring into the new. But soon he took Greeley’s counsel and went west, teaching philosophy at the universities of Minnesota (1888-9), Michigan (1889-94), and Chicago (1894-1904). Only then did he return east, to join-and later to head-the department of philosophy at Columbia University. In his first twenty years the Vermont environment gave him that almost rustic simplicity which characterizes him even now that all the world acclaims him. And then, in his twenty years in the Middle West, he saw that vast America of which the Eastern mind is so proudly ignorant; he learned its limitations and its powers; and when he came to write his own philosophy he gave to his students and his readers an interpretation of the sound and simple naturalism which underlies the superficial superstitions of the “provinces” of America. He wrote the philosophy, as Whitman wrote the poetry, not of one New-English state, but of the continent. *

* The most important of Dewey’s books are: The School and Society (1900); Studies in Logical Theory (1903); Ethics (with Tufts, 1908); How We Think (1909); The influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910); Democracy and Education (1913); Schools of Tomorrow (with his daughter Evelyn, 1915); Essays in Experimental Logic (1916); Creative Intelligence (1917); Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920); Human Nature and Conduct (1922). The last two are the easiest approaches to his thought.

Dewey’ philosophy expresses the spirit of an informed and conscious America. It gives an interpretation of the sound and simple naturalism which underlies the superficial superstitions of the “provinces” of America. 

Dewey first caught the eyes of the world by his work in the School of Education at Chicago. It was in those years that he revealed the resolute experimental bent of his thought; and now, thirty years later, his mind is still open to every new move in education, and his interest in the “schools of tomorrow” never flags. Perhaps his greatest book is Democracy and Education; here he draws the varied lines of his philosophy to a point, and centres them all on the task of developing a better generation. All progressive teachers acknowledge his leadership; and there is hardly a school in America that has not felt his influence. We find him active everywhere in the task of remaking the schools of the world; he spent two years in China lecturing to teachers on the reform of education, and made a report to the Turkish Government on the reorganization of their national schools.

Dewey first caught the eyes of the world by his work in the School of Education at Chicago. His philosophy centers on the task of developing a better generation. There is hardly a school in America that has not felt his influence. 

Following up Spencer’s demand for more science, and less literature, in education, Dewey adds that even the science should not be book-learning, but should come to the pupil from the actual practice of useful occupations. He has no great regard for a “liberal” education; the term was used, originally, to denote the culture of a “free man,”—i. e., a man who never worked; and it was natural that such an education should be fitted rather to a leisure class in an aristocracy than to an industrial and democratic life. Now that we are nearly all of us caught up in the industrialization of Europe and America, the lessons we must learn are those that come through occupation rather than through books. Scholastic culture makes for snobbishness, but fellowship in occupations makes for democracy. In an industrial society the school should be a miniature workshop and a miniature community; it should teach through practice, and through trial and error, the arts and discipline necessary for economic and social order. And finally, education must be re-conceived, not as merely a preparation for maturity (whence our absurd idea that it should stop after adolescence), but as a continuous growth of the mind and a continuous illumination of life. In a sense, the schools can give us only the instrumentalities of mental growth; the rest depends upon our absorption and interpretation of experience. Real education comes after we leave school; and there is no reason why it should stop before our death.

In an industrial society the school should be a miniature workshop and a miniature community; it should teach through practice, and through trial and error, the arts and discipline necessary for economic and social order. Education must be re-conceived as a continuous growth of the mind and a continuous illumination of life.

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