Our Most Influential Philosopher

...But what he really wished was to make practice intelligent, and he saw that this could not be done unless children and adults lived their lives under conditions that generated ideas out of their vital experience...

...But it is hard to deny that Dewey's emphasis on the process of education as a shared and cooperative experience seems to come at the expense of an emphasis on the mastering of definite and necessary skills...

...To remake our educational practices and social institutions in the light of this conception of how intelligence is generated out of human experience was his abiding concern...

...Much of this goes back to Dewey's, seminal vision...

...On one side, it was a vision of the place of thinking in human experience...

...But the difficulties which both laymen and professional philosophers have had in understanding him--not to mention the ease with which it has been possible to misunderstand him--have not been due only to his literary style or lack of style...

...he wrote on logic, but either largely ignored, or was suspicious of, the revolutionary achievements in contemporary mathematical logic...

...Reviewed by Charles Frankel Philosophy Department, Columbia University: editor, "The Uses of Philosophy: An Irwin Edman Reader" This felicitously edited anthology succeeds in making John Dewey's ideas clearer than he himself usually succeeded in making them...

...The result is to suggest Dewey's place in the American tradition, to bring out the special character of his contribution to it, and to place his ideas in the context in which they are most intelligible...

...The virtue of democracy, for Dewey, was its unprecedented power to provide indiviuals with an educative environment, to give them meaningful experience...

...In his social philosophy, he repeatedly fell into the Hegelian habit of stating a social ideal in what looks like purely descriptive language: his logical theory is full of Hegelian hang-overs...

...Dewey thought that the function of philosophy was essentially imaginative--to project the possibilities of an age so that men might move intelligently to desired goals...

...Dewey has been criticized most often, and most unfairly, for wanting to limit intelligence to purely "practical" concerns...

...and his philosophy of eductaion makes so much of the point that the object of education is growth and the ability to keep on learning that the question of what will be learned seems somehow to disappear, and very little is said about the specific values in terms of which we can measure growth...

...The philosophy that is taught and practiced in our universities is less irresponsibly dogmatic and speculative, and more clearly oriented toward the solution of definite problems...

...It is no longer as easy as it once was to solve social problems by taking refuge in abstractions about unchanging natural rights...

...One cannot avoid the feeling, of course, that his interest in providing school children with vital experiences that would help them see the practical significance of what they were learning went too far...

...Dewey was not a tight or a subtle thinker...

...Our schools, for all our complaints about them, are happier and freer places to send our children, less boring, less routinized, more responsive to individual needs and differences...

...In the last half century, no one has a better claim to have done this job for American democracy than Dewey himself...

...And in our approach to the problems of democracy, we are at least aware that the issues are not purely formal and legalistic, but involve the institutions that form men's intimate habits and the quality of their everyday experience...

...In their application in the classroom, Dewey's repeated denigration of "theory" at the expense of "experience," and his concern with devices that would show the relation of what is learned in the classroom to what goes on in the world outside, have distracted the attention of teachers and students from ideas themselves, and underestimate (it seems to me) the vital experience that can be found, even by children, in mastering intellectual skills and in dealing with ideas directly...

...As Professor Edman observes, he did not write well...

...But Dewey in a deep sense is the voice of a persistent central hard core of practical sense and humane hope and courage in this country...

...Indeed, the degree to which the defects in Dewey's thought have become the problems with which we are preoccupied suggests how successful he was in dealing with his problems...

...There is also a systematic vagueness in Dewey's thought...

...I do not think that Dewey can be relieved of all responsibility for the artificial, cultist, and almost ritualistic preoccupation with pedagogical gadgetry--"projects," "field trips,'' and all the rest--that now weigh down our teaching methods...

...The appearance of this book gives us a chance to reappraise his influence and to understand some of its whys and wherefores...

...But what counts in Dewey is his vision...

...indeed, despite his criticism of the classic tradition in philosophy, Dewey did as much as anyone to revive the large, classic vision of philosophy as the discipline that deals with problems of passionate concern to men at large...

...And while Dewey repeatedly emphasized the need for the concrete reconstruction of our social institutions, he offered very little in the way of concrete proposals as to how we should proceed...

...And he succeeded with this vision in affecting the fundamental context of our thinking about philosophy and science, morals and politics, education and democracy, so that things can never be quite the same as they were before he appeared...

...His view of science, for all the light it throws on the origins and incidence of science in everyday experience, is essentially an outsider's view, and fails to give sufficient emphasis to the significant differences, and the peculiar delights...

...John Dewey, by common consent, is the most influential philosopher America has produced...

...His was a voice for reasonableness and for imagination...

...He will be listened to again and long...

...These defects in Dewey's thinking must legitimately temper our admiration of his achievement...

...Dewey's philosophy has gone into a mild eclipse since the war...

...On the basis of a clear and definite picture of the central impulses and intentions in Dewey's thought, Professor Edman has organized Dewey's ideas--his conception of philosophy, his approach to logic, his ideas on the relation of reason to experience and theory to practice, and his interpretation of freedom--around two central themes, education and democracy...

...It was a radical vision, he knew it was radical, and he applied it relentlessly to almost every major field of human interest...

...He helped us to see that the problems that beset democracy can be solved only by carrying the democratic revolution forward, only by happily accepting the values and the intrinsic quality of experience for which democracy stands, and by progressively extending them into our work and play, our schools and factories, and our associated living...

...The truth, it seems to me, is that Dewey began as an Hegelian, and that, despite all his efforts and all his repeated and trenchant criticisms of Hegel, he never quite got over it...

...And this provided him not only with a reason for believing in democracy, but with a criterion for judging its actual operations...

...He wrote on psychology, but had very little to say about major psychological theories such as Freud's...

...And Professor Edman's introductory essay, which is the last bit of philosophical writing that came from his pen before his untimely death, is, as we might expect, a model of lucidity and discernment...

...And despite all his concern to criticize abstractions in the light of concrete experience, his turn of mind was as abstract as that of most philosophers, and more abstract than many...

...There can be no doubt that the jargon of teachers' colleges and the extreme forms of progressive education are, as Professor Edman says, virtual parodies of Dewey's ideas...

...Dewey helped change our thinking about the nature of thinking itself, giving human intelligence a natural and social environment, and cutting it loose from traditional absolutistic ideals and from untenable dualisms that separated theory from practice and reason from experience...

...But as the pages Professor Edman has included from Dewey's Democracy and Education make plain, his object was not to limit education to what is "useful," but to create a school environment, and, more generally, a social environment, in which ideas were used and therefore genuinely mastered...

...And yet, as this creatively edited anthology helps us to see, such criticisms are somehow not quite to the central point...

...Devotees of the irrationalist philosophies that are in the public eye have made him a major target of their criticisms...

...that set off refined theoretical inquiry from ordinary reflections on practical issues...

...His object was to explore the conditions which might give practical experience this sustained intellectual aspect...

...Professor Edman's judiciously edited book may help us to recover at least some of the sanity and courage for which Dewey stood...

...With the exception of Sidney Hook's book on Dewey, I know of no volume which offers a quicker and surer path to the heart of Dewey's philosophy...

...But even philosophers whose basic attitudes and philosophic purpose are close to Dewey: have been stressing the defects in his thinking...

...As Professor Edman says: "John Dewey was the voice of liberal intelligence when the prospects of good will and intelligence seemed better than they do at this brutal moment of modern history...

...And he provided an image of the difference that thought makes in human affairs, and of the larger difference it could make if the resources now at our disposal were systematically marshaled...

...And Dewey's vision, on the other side, was a vision of the revolutionary nature of democracy in human affairs, and of the revolutionary new values it had brought on the human scene...