YESTERDAY'S PHILOSOPHER OF TOMORROW

...It merely means that we cannot work our way through Dewey's famously murky prose without noticing all the things he has used that prose to mask...

...But for Dewey, democracy properly understood is nothing more than "the idea of community life itself," the human need for association brought to its fullest expression, while science is nothing more than the process by which intelligence is socialized...

...The experience of art can play a critical educative role by giving us a tantalizing taste of what a complete integration of experience might feel like...

...Dewey resigned from the Chicago faculty in 1904 and moved to Columbia University, where he spent the remainder of his career churning out books and articles and engaging in vigorous, highly visible political commentary...

...In fact, his versatility was even required by his own mature philosophy, which rejected a distant "intellectual-ism" in favor of an approach to ideas that led to action in the world...

...The historian Henry Steele Commager gushed that Dewey was "the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people," adding, "it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation no major issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken...

...He established the famed Laboratory School in 1896 as a vehicle for these explorations...

...In, for example, his balanced and thoughtful analysis of what has become in our time a rather sterile and overwrought debate between individualism and communitarianism, Dewey's allergy to dualisms serves him well...

...The important thing to be achieved, in Dewey's view, is the detachment of "religious values" from the "creeds and cults of religions," which only add "irrelevant encumbrances," such as beliefs in God, sacred scriptures, ecclesiastical organizations, and the like...

...Richard Rorty and other recent enthusiastic embracers of Dewey have claimed that the philosopher's pragmatism is best understood as a form of postmodernism...

...But there was another, more practical outlook stirring in him, one that would eventually lead him to throw off his youthful Hegelianism and embrace the anti-idealist pragmatism of William James...

...Postmodernism is generally disdainful of the authority of science, seeing it as just another myth perpetrated upon the gullible people by white male elites...

...Perhaps this sounds rather postmodern, but in one crucial sense, it isn't...

...But other recent examinations by such prominent figures as Alan Ryan, John Patrick Diggins, Cornel West, Hilary Putnam, Charles Anderson, and Richard Rorty all attest to Dewey's return...

...Among Dewey's admirers nowadays, it is a common complaint that both his acolytes and his critics have oversimplified and misconstrued this heir of the distinctly American tradition of philosophical pragmatism, the third in the triumvirate of great American philosophers with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James...

...It has been the element responsive to appeals for the square deal and more nearly equal opportunities for all...

...Deconstruction was great fun when deployed against the texts of the privileged, but there is no reason to believe its logic and its effects will stop there...

...Indeed, not only science, but education finds its ultimate meaning in the great project of democracy...

...Burlington was not merely a bucolic American small town, but a growing city, with all the typical dislocations and social problems...

...Since "any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles . . . is religious in quality," even sports fans could qualify...

...There are several reasons for this development, but chief among them is the growing interest in pragmatism (or, as Dewey preferred to say, "instrumen-talism") among academics...

...So, he asserted in his 1934A Common Faith, we hold the mistaken idea that religion necessarily involves belief in the supernatural...

...Whatever small treasures we may mine from him, we cannot read Dewey today without thinking how much more there is in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in his philosophy...

...Receiving his Ph.D...

...One of Dewey's most exasperating tendencies is his propensity to define problems out of existence by claiming that they stem merely from improper understandings: Our difficulties are always our own fault, because we have stupidly mis-formulated things and imposed our clumsy dualisms on the world...

...Consider this characteristic sentence from 1931: Wherever purposes are employed deliberately and systematically for the sake of certain desired social results, there it is possible, within limits, to determine the connection between the human factor and the actual occurrence, and thus to get a complete social fact, namely, the actual external occurrence in its human relationships...

...In all his works, it remains inconceivable that everything could not be ultimately harmonizable, even if merely in a theoretical harmony rarely glimpsed and approachable only slowly and tentatively...

...Belief in the supernatural was merely an unnecessary superstition...

...But there is at least one way in which even they ought to find his example admirable...

...This was Dewey's own view in his younger days, and he gave impeccable expression to it in the closing words of his 1897 essay, "My Pedagogic Creed": I believe that every teacher...

...At Chicago, Dewey could devote himself to his growing interest in school reform, which he increasingly saw as the key to the problem of social reconstruction...

...But neither understand that what we call "religion" is something different from "the religious...

...Education, the central task of civilized life, is merely a process of adaptation by which experience is incorporated into the individual's habits, ideas, perceptions, and emotions...

...Of course, in seeking out the thin commonality of the "religious," Dewey was repackaging the liberal Protestant platitudes of his day and aiming them toward a high, secular universal in which all human conflict and disagreement finds a resolution...

...In John Dewey: America's Philosopher of Democracy, David Fott points out the thrust in Dewey toward abstract universalism—his belief that it is reasonable to hope for the possibility of "complete unity or integration between individual and society...

...Much of this interest has frankly political roots...

...How is it that a philosophy claiming the name of "pragmatism" ends up asserting that the religious disposition is separable, and ought to be separated, from the objects toward which it is actually directed...

...All too often, he expends fifty stilted and colorless words to say—well, what exactly he is saying remains the question...

...This thought Dewey found impossible and inadmissible...

...Because our individual and collective situations alter over time, truth is fluid and changeable, frankly relative to the needs of the agent-mind in a shifting environment...

...Even those now trying to resurrect Dewey only half-believe, at best, in what the Progressives held with all their hearts: that the mastery of the terms of our existence will surely bring us happiness and peace and joy and fulfillment...

...And their militant secularist enemies affirm that once we have succeeded in discrediting the supernatural, "everything religious must . . . also go...

...To read page after murky page in the two volumes of The Essential D^'w^^ recently edited by Larry Hick-man and Thomas M. Alexander—and to consider the philosopher's influence on American socialism, secular humanism, epistemological uncertainty, and permissive anti-traditional education—is to be forced to a single conclusion: An author who is pervasively misunderstood and misused has probably not really been misunderstood and misused...

...This transformation from Protestantism to secularism had two characteristic forms—the ethics of the Social Gospel movement and the politics of Progressivism—which effortlessly fused social religion with the social sciences to create a crusading, uplifting, ethically charged social analysis...

...once discarded, "for the first time, the religious aspect of experience will be free to develop freely on its own account...

...In fact, nearly the only people who can't be religious are actual followers of religion...

...degree, extolled him as "the most profound and complete expression of the American genius...

...The religious problem, as he saw it, was thus that both the proponents and opponents of religion had—of course!—misunderstood the nature of the problem, and forced it into a false dualism...

...He advocated American entry into the First World War, for instance, on the grounds that the sense of solidarity induced by war would be a stimulus to progressive social reform...

...With educational institutions working properly, all the chronic frictions that bedevil and cripple modern social life are ultimately harmonizable, so that the interests of the individual, as well as of the public, will be fully expressed and realized...

...And yet, the Bryan conflict showed that there was something Dewey simply could not cope with: the horrifying possibility that two of his non-negotiable ideals, democracy and science, might ultimately be at war with one another...

...is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth____ [and] that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God...

...His championing of scientific naturalism, educational reform, activist government, civil liberties, academic freedom, and democratic socialism led the New York Times to enthrone the grandfatherly Dewey as "America's Philosopher...

...So too art becomes explicable only in relation to democracy, as Philip W. Jackson shows in his new study of Dewey's aesthetic theory, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art...

...One can hardly think of a subject, whether in technical philosophy or workaday politics, on which Dewey did not weigh in during his long, productive career...

...If nothing else, the life of a philosopher who addressed, in a fairly systematic way, just about every important philosophical question suggests that something more than a "freeing up" was going on...

...Mencken...

...Probably the most valuable of recent work on the philosopher is the historian Robert B. Westbrook's outstanding 1991 John Dewey and American Democracy, which reminded readers of Dewey's radicalism...

...We should be careful not to exaggerate this tendency, imagining the philosopher as a utopian or foolish Pollyanna who hoped for a world without conflict or difficulty...

...But a simmering dispute with the university over Alice's involvement in the Laboratory School cut short this phase of his career and seemed also to temper some of his enthusiasm for the messianic possibilities of education...

...There could be no doubt where Dewey's sympathies lay, but he pointedly refused to disparage those who followed William Jennings Bryan: The church-going classes, those who have come under the influence of evangelical Christianity . . . form the backbone of philanthropic social interest, of social reform through political action, of pacifism, of popular education...

...But they can still find good reasons to reflect on the philosopher's work...

...Surely there was a misunderstanding...

...But more sober thinkers have come to understand that the circus-like atmosphere of postmodern hermeneutics actually makes life difficult for radical politics...

...And without some independent basis for sustaining truth claims, how can a reform movement be mounted...

...How different the history of modern liberalism might have been, had his fellow intellectuals followed the dignified generosity of Dewey rather than the mocking puerility of H.L...

...Properly understood, the scientific standard of truth is not objectivity, in the sense of strict correspondence between an object and our knowledge of it, but consensus within a community of inquirers...

...His own thinking had lost none of its Hegelian zest for synthesis, however, and it became invigorated by the idea that the transformation of America's schools could be the model for the transformation of the entire society, from the industrial workplace to the legislative chambers to the home...

...The nub of the problem is the philosopher's legendary prose, an ever-babbling brook of abstract, bureaucratic, latinate words...

...The collapse of Marxism created a theoretical vacuum on the political and cultural left, one that has been only partly, and inadequately, filled by the programmatic skepticism of postmodernism...

...Dewey seems to have had a positive dislike of metaphors, images, stories, and concrete examples, and his relentlessly bland and textureless verbiage quickly loses even the most determined reader...

...But it nevertheless establishes a way that we can talk about truth without sounding unforgivably old-fashioned...

...Since "faith in intelligence" counts as a religious disposition, even scientists could be included...

...Indeed, it is haunting to read his 1922 "The American Intellectual Frontier," which touched upon the religious crusade against evolutionary theory that would culminate so catastrophically in the Scopes trial three years later...

...This modern Deweyan way of putting things makes proper obeisance to the postmodern requirement that all truth be understood as "socially constructed...

...What Dewey's career actually presents us with is the final stage of liberal Protestantism's thinning down into a peculiarly American form of morally infused secularism...

...His cosmic optimism, his conviction that all things were har-monizable (a conviction he owed to the liberal Protestantism he had discarded) would not permit him to entertain such tragic thoughts...

...Surely this could all be cleared up tomorrow, as education improved, old habits of thought receded, and humankind more firmly established its control over existence...

...Dewey Rides Again" declared the title of a 1996 review essay in the New York Review of Books that was, if anything, an understatement: The 1990s have become Dewey's decade...

...The University of Paris, in conferring an honorary Wilfred M. McClay is sSunTrust professor of humanities at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America...

...Is this an argument for romantic schooling—or the truism that people work better in jobs they like...

...And it adds a nice communitarian flourish in the bargain, by casting science as a form of human solidarity...

...The precipitating agent was his marriage to Alice Chipman, whose passion for education and social problems would eventually lead the Deweys to depart Ann Arbor for the newly founded University of Chicago...

...The huge resulting body of work brought him a good deal of veneration in the years before his death...

...But pragmatism endorses science, understanding it as simply a more systematic and socialized version of the process we all follow individually in ascertaining what William James called the "cash value" of our ideas...

...Rorty is simply wrong when he asserts that "Dewey thought of himself as freeing us up for practice, not as providing theoretical foundations for practice...

...Dewey's conservative critics are right to see in all this something profoundly opposed to their view of the world—^just as they are right to see in the 1990s revival of Dewey the post-Marxist, post-postmodern Left's casting around for a new philosophical foundation...

...That's how we know they are true...

...Pragmatism understands the human mind as a Darwinian adaptive tool...

...Is Dewey here saying something incredibly complex—or something of almost tautological simplicity...

...But it's worth asking why the mis-readings of Dewey, both those of the progressive followers who worshipped him and those of the conservative opponents who despised him, are more interesting than the truisms that may have been his actual intent...

...What this means in practice turns out to be quite banal...

...When Dewey went off to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, however, he gravitated to the neo-Hegelian idealist George S. Morris...

...The tension between the fading rural life of America and emerging industrializa-tion—and the hope of finding ways to reconstruct the essential elements of community in the impersonality of the machine age—became central concerns in Dewey's social and political thought...

...But Dewey remains, in a sense, the complete public intellectual: a first-rate philosopher who also addressed himself to contemporary affairs...

...It was an appalling position, more naive than cynical, that has earned him the contempt of social critics from Randolph Bourne to Christopher Lasch and demonstrated the enduring moral vulnerability of pragmatism...

...The religionists affirm that "nothing worthy of being called religious is possible apart from the supernatural...

...So too, we should remember that Dewey's vision of democracy was his most fundamental idea, and that vision was generous and humane, utterly free of the snobbishness and veiled contempt for the common man that lurks beneath so much of our age's putative liberalism...

...Or consider this from 1916: Social efficiency is attained not by negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in occupations having a social meaning...

...There is something remarkable about a chain of reasoning by which Dewey may conclude that an ideal expression of "the religious" is more genuine than its historical expression in actually existing religions...

...But Dewey himself eliminated any doubt when he wrote in 1939 that "any theory of activity in social and moral matters, liberal or otherwise, which is not grounded in a comprehensive philosophy seems to me to be only a projection of arbitrary personal preference...

...But it is true that Dewey was unwilling to accept that the basis of human conflict might be fundamental and irremediable...

...Dewey was easily the most prominent American philosopher of his time, and over the course of an enormously long life— from 1859 to 1952—he showed a breadth of interest, a seriousness, and a systematic thrust that reminds us of a time when philosophy was something more than the arid pastime of jargon-mongers or the handmaiden of identity politics...

...It may be this that has fueled the spectacular revival of Dewey in recent years...

...It is this that finally marks Dewey as a period piece, a figure frozen in amber: Yesterday's Philosopher of Tomorrow...

...in 1884 for a dissertation on Kant's psychology, Dewey followed his mentor to the University of Michigan, where he devoted his attention to the effort to meld liberal Protestantism to Hegelianism and combine experimental psychology with idealist metaphysics...

...An aesthetically wanting style of writing that lends itself to constant misinterpretation must reflect at last the deep and disturbing intellectual intention of its creator...

...Or, as Dewey himself puts it in his inimitable prose, In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection...

...Dewey's practical judgment was not always wise...

...The fittest ideas, like the fittest species, are the ones that survive and get us what we want...

...Our modern failure to hold this progressive faith doesn't make us enemies of the future...

...We should take to heart his insistence that "the individual and associative aspects of the unitary human being" cannot possibly be separated from one another...

...What makes this possible is Dewey's belief in the intrinsic connection between science and democracy, as David Fott stresses in his useful study of Dewey's political thought, John Dewey: America's Philosopher of Democracy...

...Of course, the problem for these thinkers is that once they let considerations of truth back in, they need some way to ensure that truth will support the "correct" social agenda of boundless social transformation and personal liberation, rather than the conservatism of those who used the notion of truth to oppose postmodernism in the first place...

...Dewey was born two years before the Civil War, the son of a storekeeper in Burlington, Vermont...

...They embody and express the spirit of kindly goodwill towards classes which are at an economic disadvantage and towards other nations...

...Here's where the revivified John Dewey comes in, for the new, 1990s style of pragmatism allows us to invoke only as much truth as we need to obtain a desired social result...

...But, as Fott rightly argues, Dewey's commitments to historicism and Darwinian evolution—as well as, one might add, his commitments to scientific method and social democracy— were absolute, dogmatic, and nonnego-tiable...

...Much of the postmodern hostility to science stems from the authoritative status that science has staked out for itself in modern society...

...Such language might appear to place Dewey on the side of religion, but the situation is more complicated than that...

...In fact, what many of those currently involved in restoring Dewey's reputation seem to miss is that his thought can be accurately understood only when placed very strictly in its historical context...

...Of course, such testimony is open to question—if only because it remains uncertain how well those who poured honors upon Dewey actually understood him...

...To be sure, postmodernism has done the main job that many academics want a new academic theory to do, providing them fresh grist for the mills of publication...