John Dewey's Naturalistic Pragmatism
Most recent (very minor) alteration: October 16, 2003
Draft (for Introduction to Philosophy students only)
Please send comments and suggestions to Dr. Jan Garrett * Human beings are entirely natural beings, a form of life as it has evolved on earth under changing earthly conditions.
For John Dewey (1859-1952), the primary fact about nature and reality is dynamic change. In his view, there are no unchanging realities. (Apparently unchanging mathematical rules are for Dewey humanly produced tools that have proven successful for dealing with changing nature. As humanly produced tools, they belong to history and are not eternal.)* All living organisms are problem-solvers and satisfaction-seekers, but humans are especially interesting because they have developed not only physical devices but mental activities and ideas as tools for solving problems.Darwin's explanation of the origin of species is an important part of the intellectual and cultural background of John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy. But Dewey did not draw the conclusion from Darwinism that was drawn by some of his contemporaries (the Social Darwinists): that human life is essentially competitive and not cooperative.
The statement that humans are entirely natural, of course, excludes any commitment to the idea of an immortal soul. For Dewey, this life is all there is. (Not all pragmatists drew this conclusion: William James argued that belief in an immortal soul might be justified from the pragmatic perspective if it helped human beings face life's adversities more successfully.)
Once again, Dewey, like Darwin, sees continuity between nonhuman life forms and human life forms. Like most supporters of evolutionary theory, however, Dewey also wants to recognize what is especially important in human life.* The industrial arts, medical arts, and basic mathematics are tools to help solve problems of survival, comfort, health, etc.Nonhuman living organisms are problem solvers in the sense that they have capacities for coping with a range of changes in their environment, and they respond to such change as it occurs. Occasionally, organisms have capacity to respond satisfactorily to radical changes in their environment. The ones that do not respond satisfactorily, of course, perish. The ones that do respond satisfactorily survive and sometimes flourish.
The mental and linguistic capacities of human beings allow their response to be a social response. Human beings face problems as groups as well as individuals. Language and ideas are at the heart of the human response to problem situations.
* Natural sciences, along with higher mathematics, discover regularities ("natural laws") that let us better organize our ideas about nature and better manage nature for solution of human problems.
My use of the word "discover" above is a pedagogic oversimplification. Strictly speaking, Dewey's view is that scientific research actively creates the laws that we seem to discover in nature. His point seems to be that we have no experience of these laws until we have interacted experimentally with nature. Thus, in a sense the laws that we become aware of are partly the creation of the scientists themselves. Dewey does not wish to deny that nature itself is potentially knowable before we actually know natural "laws." It is, however, actually knowable only when we do know it.* The ideas of ethics and social science are tools for promoting understanding and solving social problems that would otherwise cause serious conflicts in society.One reason that Dewey compares ethical ideas to other kinds of tools is his belief that, like our tools, our ethical ideas should not be frozen into one pattern for all time. We should review them occasionally to see whether they have outlived their usefulness, all things considered. The point is not that all ethical ideas should be constantly revised, but particular ethical ideas (such as those attached, for instance, to an outdated idea of family structure; or those adapted to a preindustrial social environment) should be altered when changed circumstances show that continued adherence to those ideas will produce increasing misery or social discontent.* The ideas, techniques, products, and activities of the (fine) arts solve a special type of problem and provide some of the highest satisfactions in life.Dewey devoted a major work to the understanding of art. Focusing on the activity of the artist, he perceived the artist as a problem-solver who addressed a particular kind of problem, the kind we might call aesthetic. Like other problem solving activities, a solution to an artistic problem brings satisfactions not only to the problem-solver but to others who may encounter the solution. Because of the special enjoyments characteristic of successes at solving artistic problems, art is for Dewey one of the most important aspects of human life.* The religious impulse is natural and must be respected but traditional (Western) theologies depend on prescientific views that mistakenly equate reality (and divinity) with the unchanging and the eternal.Dewey was highly critical of philosophies like Plato's because they equated reality with what was unchanging and eternal, the Platonic Forms or Ideas, and insisted that the world of experience was at best only partly real. He also realized that traditional Christian theology had absorbed Platonic views, so that God was described by Christian philosophers and theologians as an eternal immaterial mind that contains eternal Ideas (much the same as Plato's Ideas). Much of theology and philosophy of religion is devoted to trying to solve puzzles created by the conception of God as an eternal knower. For Dewey, to abandon the philosophical commitment to eternal objects is to abandon institutionalized religion. Religious experience, he thought, was real enough and important, but attempts to give it institutional permanence, especially in doctrines about an eternal God, tended to distort and destroy what was valuable about religious experience.