"Marx, Dewey and Lincoln"

...This has no more relevance to the truth or falsity of the proposition than "People are unhappy who believe in him...

...He judged rival principles in any situation by the modes of behavior to which they led and by their impact upon values which had been previously tested...

...This theory may be called pragmatism...

...Secondly, not any consequence is relevant to the truth or falsity of the ideas tested, but only those consequences which follow from the meaning of the idea and are relevant to the problem at hand...

...At any rate, Eastman was right in attacking the system of Marxism-Leninism, which became the orthodox theology of the Soviet Union, independently of the question of Marx's relation to it...

...Eastman is convinced that pragmatism is really a defense of the genteel or spiritual tradition in American life...

...And now for some quotations from Dewey himself: "No misconception of the instrumental logic has been more persistent than the belief that it makes knowledge merely a means to a practical end, or to the satisfaction of practical needs—practical being taken to signify some quite definite utilities of a material or bread-and-butter type...

...From the time he first formulated his experimentalist position down almost to the very year he died, Dewey ceaselessly criticized misconceptions of pragmatism...

...After all, Dewey was around for a long time and had plenty of opportunities to repudiate my reading of him or his conception of pragmatism...

...I had been a student of John Dewey, but I had also read Marx carefully before studying with Dewey...

...In the logical version of pragmatism termed instrumentalism, action or practice does indeed play a fundamental role...

...Incidentally, Bertrand Russell now seems to believe that pragmatism as a theory of knowledge was first promulgated by Marx...

...And I agree with Socrates and John Dewey that intelligence is the chief, if not the only, key to virtue or moral integrity...

...But all of them are variations of the notion that, if believing an idea has effects which are good, these effects constitute evidence for the truth of the idea...

...It means that knowing is literally something we do...

...By "practical," Dewey means that all knowledge involves some directed activity, and that the relevant consequences of that activity test the truth or falsity of the ideas entertained as candidates for truth...

...According to him, Dewey's philosophy, especially his conception of truth, infects the life of mind with a "flavor of wishful thinking...

...To use a contrast Dewey borrows from Peirce, Eastman's account of thought is closer to the "seminary" type of thinking than to the "laboratory" habit of thinking...

...One final quote: "All judgments of fact have reference to a determination of courses of action to be tried and to the discovery of means for their realization...

...He told me that if my interpretation were correct there was undoubtedly an intellectual kinship between Marx and himself...

...that analysis is ultimately physical and active...

...When I referred to Lincoln's pragmatism (NL, March 18), I had in mind the fact that he took his social and political principles not as pious commitments to traditions but as guides to action in a complex historical situation...

...This is part of the process of inquiry...

...The consequence of the statement "Santa Claus exists" is not "People are happy who believe in him...

...I confess it frankly: As I understand pragmatism, it purports to be the theory of sound intelligence wherever and whenever applied...

...What he says is true only of the preliminary elaboration of the hypothesis...

...Where I interpreted Marx's determining laws as necessary or limiting conditions which socialists must take note of if they were to act intelligently in achieving socialist goals, he interpreted Marx as reading his wishes into the determining forces of history...

...It was reprinted in Essays in Experimental Logic in 1916 with an appendix, "An Added Note As to the Practical...

...And, if I recall correctly, our polemic which ran so long that it was called by editors on account of darkness—and lightning...

...I am proud to say that I had some modest influence in bringing Dewey to the position he took in this book...

...All I am saying is that, valid or invalid, Dewey's theory of meaning and truth is utterly different from the one Eastman attributes to him...

...Pragmatism was always regarded by Dewey as a systematic interpretation of the logic of scientific method...

...My Marx is not the Marx of the Kremlin and I regard it as unfortunate that, despite the fact that Marx's bones are buried in London, the West has lost almost by default to the Communist vandals the name of one of the great fighters for human freedom...

...No truth can ever be certified by logic alone...

...Although it will shock Eastman, I am prepared to show that this pragmatic approach is also found to some extent in Jefferson and Franklin...

...But these are qualities which are not as common in our experience as they should be...

...There are many technical difficulties which it faces, particularly those stemming from the semantic theory of truth...

...He believed that moral judgments are cognitive in character, that therefore some are better grounded than others, and that, given the situation, the needs and interests of the human beings involved, in principle we should be able to reach objective conclusions about what is better or worse...

...But it concerns not the nature of consequences but the nature of knowing...

...This misconception takes different forms...

...On that point, there never was any issue between us...

...When I subsequently returned to my earlier interest and traced Marx's intellectual development, particularly in relation to Feuerbach, I was struck by certain pragmatic elements in his thought...

...Pragmatism is really one variation of the logic of the argument from Missouri...

...What is wrong with this conception of pragmatism is that it confuses "practical" with "useful" or "desirable...

...Dewey and Marx, apparently, have something in common after all...

...that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behaving toward facts, and that active experimentalism is essential to verification...

...It is getting hard to know who's who...

...Replying to Max Eastman's criticisms, a noted disciple of pragmatism calls it 'the theory of sound intelligence' Marx, Dewey and Lincoln By Sidney Hook More than a quarter of a century ago, Max Eastman somewhere reviewed one of my books on Marx under the title, "What Karl Marx Would Have Said If He Had Been a Student of John Dewey's...

...He was particularly outraged by my attempt to present Marx as an embryonic pragmatic or experimental thinker...

...all propositions which state discoveries and ascertainments would be hypothetical, and their truth would coincide with their tested consequences effected by intelligent action...

...To use a term which is now more fashionable—instrumentalism means a behavioral theory of thinking and knowing...

...Eastman claims that I have actually ignored the "precise tenets" of Dewey's philosophy and presented pragmatism in words which merely summarize the meaning of moral integrity and sound intelligence...

...The interpretation I presented seemed to me the only plausible one which made sense of the apparent conflicts in his doctrine and especially of the role assigned to human activity and human ideals, as expressed in class struggles, in changing society...

...It is another to imply that I am reading Hook into Dewey, as Max Eastman has done in his guest column in The New Leader of September 23...

...What has this to do with subjectivism, impressionism, or wishful or useful believing...

...Whatever one may say about his theory of value and judgments of value, far from being an exercise in wishful thinking it tries to develop a method by which we can discover when our wishes are wise or foolish...

...I gave specific illustrations of Lincoln's pragmatic approach...

...his Human Knowledge, p. 422...

...All genuine knowledge for Dewey was validated by the pattern of scientific thinking, which is not the same as the techniques of physics...

...For Dewey, all thinking about matters of fact is ultimately experimental...

...I affirm that the term 'pragmatic' means only the rule of referring all thinking, all reflective considerations, to consequences for final meaning and test...

...It is quite true that Dewey has always been interested in discovering the scientific rationale of moral judgments...

...I meant that his theory of meaning was thoroughly pragmatic in that he expected every fruitful distinction to make a difference in practice—beg pardon, in behavior...

...Marx's term "Praxis" is freer of this connotation...

...But such a pragmatism is completely foreign to Dewey's pragmatic, experimental naturalism, with its rejection of all absolutes except intelligence, its this-worldliness, its humanism and democratic socialism...

...All of them assume that by "practice" pragmatism means "useful" rather than "behavioral...

...This was a palpable hit...

...In order to escape the charge that I am palming my own ideas off as Dewey's, I shall quote extensively from him in support of my statement...

...It is one thing to be charged with reading Dewey into Marx...

...Conversely, if I drink a glass of liquid (in an experiment) to test whether it is a poison, my death is a relevant consequence which bears on the truth of the hypothesis but the consequences are hardly useful or pleasant...

...That is why he chides his conservative friends, who cling fast to Christian mythology because of the beneficent effects of believing it as contrasted with the effects of disbelief, with being pragmatists despite themselves...

...That is why he assimilates Dewey's views to James's notion that, as Eastman puts it, "if it works to believe that God exists, then it is true that God exists...

...As every student of philosophy knows, the term "pragmatism" is a family name for a variety of doctrines associated with the names of Peirce, James, Dewey and Schiller...

...Eastman considered Marxism a secular substitute for religion—a sort of progressive Sunday school doctrine with cosmic sanction behind it...

...He thought it absurd even to imply that Marx had anticipated Dewey's theory of meaning or truth...

...He did not act blindly from case to case but with an eye on the consequences of the policies he proposed for the wider prospects of union and freedom...

...Eastman scoffs at my characterization of it and asserts it is nothing more than what we mean by moral integrity and sound intelligence...

...James did not write with precision, and, although Dewey felt that au fond their ideas were quite similar, he deplored some unhappy formulations in James's statement of the pragmatic theory of truth...

...He did not think it absurd, however, to insist that Marx had anticipated Freud...

...And now to be also charged with reading Dewey into Lincoln...

...began with a piece of mine, criticizing Eastman's interpretation of Marx, entitled "Marx and Freud: Oil and Water...

...The title of his review is "What Does Pragmatism Mean by Practical...

...Only in that sense would I accept the characterization of it as an expression of American hard-headed practicality...

...Eastman writes: "If pragmatism were, as so many think, an ideological glorification of America's hard-headed practicality, one might plausibly maintain that Abraham Lincoln would have been sympathetic to it...

...Dewey was never fond of the term...

...It can never give us tested truth...

...He preferred to call his own version "instrumentalism" or "experi-mentalism...

...If believing in Santa Claus makes people happy, the consequences are relevant only to the question whether belief in Santa Claus makes people happy...

...I am sorry Eastman ignored them...

...It has no relevance to the question whether Santa Claus exists...

...Lincoln did not make fetishes of his abstractions...

...Although he was devoted to James and owed to his Principles of Psychology the inspiration of his theory of ideas as plans of action, he was rather unhappy about James's Pragmatism...

...All experiments are literally "practical" in the sense that they involve some transformation of the physical environment, even if it is no more than some change in the position of the organism or the use of our sense organs as in observation...

...I am not saying here that Dewey's pragmatic theory of ideas and truth is valid...

...When Eastman says that expert thinking involves "the suspense of action" and that it is "the expansion of that moment of suspense that gives us science," he is leaving guided behavior out of reflective thinking, and experiment out of science...

...The misconception which he regarded as the most blatant and vicious of all was the view that, according to pragmatism, an idea is true if it leads to useful or successful consequences...

...This misconception is expressed in Eastman's conception of pragmatism...

...Max Eastman objected strenuously to this conception...

...If an idea leads to consequences which are good in the one respect only of fulfilling the intent of the idea (as when one drinks a liquid to test the idea that it is a poison), does the badness of the consequences in every other respect detract from the verifying force of consequences...

...See his Liberalism and Social Action...

...When James's Pragmatism was published, Dewey reviewed it in the Journal of Philosophy early in 1908 and clearly indicated his difficulties...

...Dewey was rather amused by our exchange and, unaccustomed to the traditions of the socialist movement, a little appalled by the savagery of the polemical tone...

...As for the correctness of my interpretation today, I am prepared to leave that to the judgment of a subsequent generation of scholars—scholars working, I hope, in a free world after the cold war is over...

...I shall first state Dewey's theory of truth, then consider Eastman's criticism of it, and finally the validity of my reference to Lincoln...

...Apparently I share my horrendous mistake with many others...