Metaphysics is commonly regarded as an esoteric discipline, but in John Dewey’s hands it became directly pertinent to common life. I use metaphysics to refer to the systematic attempt to distinguish the most noteworthy characteristics of reality and to demonstrate the pertinence of such traits to human conduct and ideals. A metaphysics is developed in answer to the questions “What kind of world is it, really?” and “What manner of ideal goods does it offer, and what are its characteristic perils?”
Directly or indirectly, Dewey’s philosophy was addressed entirely to “problems of men.” He insisted that any philosophy that obscured such problems was not just an intellectual failure but was guilty of blocking pertinent inquiry into the conduct of life. Ultimately, such a philosophy impedes human effort and hence retards human growth and the realization of happiness. He observed, moreover, that the entire tradition of Western thought retains in its foundations the assumptions that guarantee just these futilities. Hence, Dewey examined the tradition body and soul, as it were, and supplanted it with one that was novel, comprehensive, and, I would argue, intellectually brilliant. We may say that his accomplishment was truly a new and powerful paradigm for addressing the generic problems of mortal existence.
The persistent ingredient in the metaphysics of the classic tradition is the assertion that being in itself constitutes an invariant standard of perfection for human conduct. Ultimate being, indeed, is the ordering principle of all lesser natures in an essentially static cosmos. Typically, these lesser natures are radically juxtaposed to the really real; they have a degraded reality, if you will, often called “becoming,” “mere appearance,” “the merely phenomenal,” and others. Change cannot be predicated of true being; it belongs only to the realm of becoming. To be sure, the many different characterizations of true being have produced different standards of moral conduct and different alleged perfections. Platonic forms, Christian theology, and Kantian reason—to bring up three of the greatest examples—prescribe clearly different modes of conduct. Any incarnation of the tradition prescribes its own eternal and invariable norms, which must be observed throughout the great variations in the actual conditions of human existence.
The differences between the classic tradition and Dewey’s naturalism are fateful for human self-understanding and the opportunities for a meaningful life. He was persuaded that the classical fixities were, more than anything else, needless constraints on human flourishing. He wished to liberate human conduct from such constraints and to show how we might thrive and prosperwithin the vicissitudes of the environment by learning how to function with nature’s processes of change—with becoming, in traditional terminology. He contends that there is no changeless being or hierarchy of being and that the natural world is the only world there is. The varieties of existence open to our observation, investigation, and inference are all of a piece regarding their ontological standing. Of crucial importance, however, different existing entities have different potentialities—radically different, in most instances.
The liabilities of classic philosophies are much exacerbated in modern thought, where Descartes is the principal perpetrator. Descartes, as we know, produced the perfect and utterly opaque dualism of experience and nature. He assumed, first, that clear and distinct ideas are true, and second, that the object of purely rational cognition is the really real. Equipped with these assumptions, he concluded that nature is nothing but extension in motion (that is, matter) and mind nothing but a thinking thing. It is not extended and is fully independent of matter. (Never mind that Descartes himself fudged this distinction.) These really real natures can have no potentialities. They are fully actual as cognized. Nature, as Descartes presents it, can have no qualitative properties (it is just extension), and material processes produce no qualitative change. We ordinary mortals, on the other hand, doggedly believe that we live in a world aswarm with qualities and marked by continual and persistent qualitative change. This is the world we try to live in and enjoy precisely by responding to such events, trying to adjust to them, evaluating and appreciating them, and even mastering them to some good end.
But nature, on Descartes’ reckoning, is without potentialities. Still, he is not so audacious that he will deny the very existence of the qualitative. He simply transports the entire swarming mass of qualitative life inside of an impenetrable subjective prison, the mind, which can have no access to whatever sort of business might be going on outside of itself. Accordingly, for example, not one of us can ascertain whether other persons—or any other sort of creature, for that matter—even exist, never mind what sorts of behavior they engage in. Descartes’ thinking makes practical life, including morality, unintelligible. It leads straight to Kant, whose categorical imperative is derived a priori and is applied a priori.
No philosophy, I believe, has left humankind so impotent. Dewey, in response, formulated his naturalistic metaphysics in deliberate contrast to the classic tradition, particularly Descartes. Dewey would develop a metaphysics that would provide us with a faithful understanding of the nature of things such that we might ally ourselves with it rather than be mystified and stymied by grossly mistaken assumptions.
It is the first task of Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics to establish the reality of qualities. They are not, in his argument, phantom beings or beings of dubious ontological standing. They are, like any other event, the outcome of specifiable and conjoint processes of nature. They are potentialities of natural events in discriminable interrelations. The fire is hot when it satisfies certain functions, including the infliction of peculiar feelings of pain on the epidermis. The heat is not an emergent property of the fire alone, nor is it nothing but a feeling on the skin. It is a consequence of many variables acting together, including the sense organs. When those conditions are satisfied, the fire is hot: It is the eventual function of this coalescence of processes that produces all these assignable qualitative results, including the searing pain. Withdraw the relevant conditions, and the functions we label as “heat” no longer exist. The point is that the properties of experience are properties of nature. Just as we learn how to produce and use heat, we may learn to contend with the entire variety of natural phenomena, including other creatures.
This is a massive and consequential change from the Cartesian worldview, and there is more. Dewey also discusses what he calls the “stable,” by which he means effectual and discernible relations between natural events, occurring in ascertainable structures and sustained in existence by natural conditions for varying periods of time. The idea of the stable is Dewey’s replacement for the belief that real forms in things can be assigned only to the highest levels of being. Accordingly, though nature is a flux, it clearly produces patterns and regularities, but they will undergo change when something novel is introduced into the process. Mind, for example, is not an original and changeless essence; neither is human nature fixed and unchanging, and neither are the things that we call goods, duties, and so on.
A further contradiction to the classic tradition is Dewey’s notion of the precarious, by which he refers to those events in experience that are disruptive, destructive, resistant, intrusive, and the like. The precarious is not a subjective existence; it is a public event that is genuinely problematic—like muggings, wars, floods, famines, natural disasters of all kinds, and good fortune as well. These are not “mere appearance,” not an inferior realm of being discontinuous with true being—that is, mere becoming, as the classic tradition would have it. They have full membership in natural existence.
We are constantly besieged by the precarious. It is essential to recognize that it is not an anomalous occurrence but belongs to a matrix of identifiable natural processes. If we become cognizant of the continuities organic to the precarious, we might contrive some remedy for its intrusions and even harness its powers. In the terms of Dewey’s metaphysics, we might engage the situation by means of discovering the continuities of the precarious and stable, followed by vigorous activity to reconstruct the situation. The classic tradition, Dewey charged, taught arts of acceptance, while his metaphysics teaches arts of control.
When we deliberately attempt to convert the precarious into a stable and welcome outcome, we have initiated what Dewey calls a “history.” A history is any process of qualitative change. Nature is abundant with them: beginnings, variations, additions, subtractions, incorporations combined into (sometimes) integrated processes with identifiable outcomes. When an acorn bonds with earth, water, nutrients, sunlight, seasons, and much else, it becomes an oak, and it participates in further functions, such as being host to insects, birds, and animals. A collaboration of many conditions is required, and any of these is subject to change and will change, most notably in human activity. Such delightful confluences and such basic media of conduct must remain metaphysically unreal to Descartes.
Histories are most noteworthy for Dewey when their outcome is deliberately foreseen and a plan of action is conceived and undertaken to achieve it. This outcome Dewey denominates an end, thereby identifying a still further trait that had been denied to nature in modern philosophy. In Dewey’s typical usage, goods are a subset of ends, but whether he speaks of ends or goods, they do not enjoy the status of absolutes. Indeed, the provisional idea of the outcome directs our inquiry, but this idea is itself modified in light of inquiry, which will disclose all kinds of resources and pitfalls in a proposed endeavor and prompt us to revise the choice of a particular end in view. The inauguration of such histories is a response to a problematic situation, the likes of which occur in every human endeavor; the history is successful if the problematic conditions are brought to a consummatory end. In many—perhaps most—situations, the problem is a shared predicament, and the inquiry, deliberation, and conduct are undertaken by individuals in concert. This, in germ, is what Dewey means by social intelligence.
Scientific inquiry—or some prototype of it—is essential to this process. We are undertaking to effect a reordering of natural phenomena so that they might become accomplices in our striving and achievement. Clearly, some manner of disciplined inquiry is required to know how nature’s processes are interrelated: actual and potential relations of dependence must be ascertained. This is especially true when social engineers propose sweeping changes in prevailing institutions. At the same time, nature imposes its own sort of discipline on us. Nature’s potentialities are not invariably beneficial, obviously. If our deliberations are in error (or are fatuous, for that matter) nature’s ways will disappoint and perhaps punish us. We are chastened, and perhaps we will know better next time.
Inseparable from Dewey’s analyses is his characterization of the nature of science, and, as we know, he had much to say about that. I will spare us a summary of his accounts of experimental method. I need remark only that inquiry is initiated within the contingencies of experience, with its troubles and opportunities; and to contend with them effectively we advance an experimental hypothesis. The hypothesis proposes that the introduction of specified changes in the situation will eliminate the trouble and bring about the desired changes. We undertake the conduct directed by the hypothesis, and inquiry terminates when the conduct succeeds as predicted or fails. If students are bored, for example, we hypothesize that the introduction of a more interactive mode of instruction would arouse them, and we try it out.
Experimental inquiry is not that of the passive spectator. It requires active engagement with nature, and what inquiry discloses is not static essence but the determination of how variations in a given process are correlated with variations in another. We might introduce our own variations. Dewey contrasts this understanding with the prevailing stance of the classic tradition. He repudiates the notion that scientific knowledge is a direct grasp (by reason?) of natures beyond the confines of Cartesian subjective mind. Once more, Dewey’s philosophy sets aside the arcane speculations of the tradition and substitutes an analysis of inquiry that exhibits its potentialities to empower experience. (In Dewey’s customary usage, the terms science and intelligence are all but conflated. Intelligence, if anything, has more generic connotations, so science might be denoted as “intelligent inquiry.”)
I have been offering a sketch of Dewey’s comprehensive critique of the classic tradition in philosophy. Organic to his critique is a generic theory of the nature of nature that discloses the availability of potent instruments of thought and conduct that hitherto have not been available to us. This integral activity of man and nature is Dewey’s new paradigm of conduct. It is in fateful contrast to that of the classic tradition. Recall that according to the latter, the end of conduct exists antecedently to any problematic situation, independently in fact of human aspiration and inquiry. Traditionally conceived moral inquiry, indeed, is more in the nature of a fool’s errand: it is innocent to the development of the experimental method that would enlighten and vitalize our conduct. Our nature as agents, moreover, (according to the variant offerings of the tradition) is also regarded as essentially given, and the ends appropriate to it are likewise pre-established in the wholly ordered cosmos. The proper function of females, for example, is given in their inherent and eternal nature. According to such thinking, as Dewey exposes it, there is a disjunction, a discontinuity, between the alleged antecedent good and the good that would arise from one’s analysis of the variables in a given situation. This discontinuity he commonly names “the dualism of ends and means.”
Inasmuch as the absolutes of the classic tradition are fictions, their supposed guidance is in truth some sort of prejudice and very likely, in Dewey’s view, an imposition on vital human potentialities. His opposition to all this is encapsulated in his expression “the construction of good”—the construction of good. The ends or goods that we seek are not already given as from the brow of Zeus but are put together from natural resources, where we must assess the peculiarities of our situation, take account of our own abilities and aspirations, consult our accumulated wisdom and the experience of others, and likewise acquaint ourselves with the real possibilities and variations of the conditions at hand. Thus, with overt exertion and art, we would construct our good. Dewey was confident that we then would do much better for ourselves, individually and collectively, than by adhering to the nostrums of tradition.
The construction of the good is the quintessence of Dewey’s new paradigm. As we have seen, this mode of conduct is literally inconceivable within the assumptions of the classic tradition. It becomes intelligible only with a radical reconstruction of the obfuscations of classical metaphysics. Dewey’s philosophy becomes, if you like, the champion of experience rather than its apologist, and it is one of the masterworks of philosophy. His philosophy is neither a mere assortment of insights nor a series of essentially unrelated analyses. It accomplishes, rather, the great philosophic task of articulating a full, comprehensive, and integrated vision of the nature of things—or, as we might also put it, of the full nature of the human condition. Its characterization is replete with an arsenal of human powers forged in concert with nature. The entire opus is coined with thoroughly humanistic intent. It is truly an epochal achievement.
Having made such an assessment, I might seem the inconstant student if I also suggest that I find significant gaps and weaknesses in his thought. Nietzsche says something to the effect that one does a disservice to his teacher if he remains always and only a pupil, and that is a view to which Dewey fully subscribed. So I proceed in good conscience.
Three points are pertinent here. First, Dewey could give the impression that he had an exaggerated view of the noxious effects of the classic tradition, and he evidently turned his back on many of its riches. In historical fact, many a culture has demonstrated an ability to change its institutions and practices in response to major threats to its survival or to newfound opportunities for prosperity and thriving, let their absolutes be what they may. Then, curiously, their previously fixed ends undergo change to be conformable to the new reality. The point here is that putative moral absolutes do not always prove immovable when cultural adaptation becomes imperative or patently helpful. Moral criticism, then, might be directed as much to cultural practice as to the reigning moral dogmas. Dewey in fact was rather gifted in this sort of analysis.
These comments are not a denial that the infliction of cruel and oppressive moral requirements is common, and a critique of the worldview that justifies or even sanctifies these requirements is necessary. It would be especially effective when conjoined with cultural criticism. It is likewise of great consequence in any case to investigate and discriminate the resources of conduct that are potential in the nature of things.
Second, Dewey was so impatient with the classic tradition that he was evidently resistant to searching it for profound insights and its store of wisdom. On this, Dewey might have learned from Santayana, who was exceptionally talented at discerning the wisdom embedded in the human record. Ancient sages, for example, might be remarkably perceptive about the passions, evils, ideals, and forms of moral nobility revealed in their history, and these perceptions were recorded in religion, myth, poetry, literature, philosophies, and written histories. There is matchless wisdom in Plato’s dialogues, regardless of the literal truth of the theory of forms. Even discounting his theory of final causes, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics are alive with vital wisdom that could thrive in any age, if one had the wit to appropriate it.
Dewey was evidently too eager to keep on with other matters, but this is a surprising bent in a man who was first, last, and always a moralist. Such a person typically welcomes wisdom from any source. Love of wisdom, after all, is not the last stage before moral dogmatism. It might even ward off dogmatism.
Dewey provides a great and matchless service in his critique of the classic tradition, and his inclusive and penetrating accounting of the nature of things is truly a philosophy of liberation and empowerment. Even so, it is disappointing that he withdraws from any serious attempt to discern and articulate a sampling of the great fulfillments of the human condition. Such renderings are not merely edifying in an offhand way; they are lessons in life, and they provide powerful inspiration. Moral growth and dedication are quickened by the appreciation of exemplary persons and ideal loves.
Apparently, Dewey was temperamentally unsuited to this sort of thing. But this and other such ventures are vital to one of his major themes: the practical realization of the new paradigm of conduct requires the emergence of a moral agent that is almost without precedent in human history.
This leads us to my third and final criticism: Dewey conceives of an “ideal” moral agent who would, however, be ineffectual in the real world. Dewey, so to speak, put almost all his chips on the strategy of inculcating social intelligence and its associated virtues: those familiar with the norms of experimental thinking, and who are habituated to it, will save the world. Educators will be the chief instruments of this awakening by teaching and implementing experimental inquiry in all phases of schoolroom life. One who would be fully scientific must be a fallibilist, welcoming of new ideas, willing to accept or reject ideas on the basis of intersubjectively warranted testing, sensitive to the interests of others, and sufficiently adaptable to fundamentally revise one’s life practices and allegiances, if need be, so far as social intelligence requires. I have never met such an agent, and I don’t have much hope that I will.
The sources of irrationality, for example, are evidently deeper, more complex, and much more persistent than Dewey supposed. It is commonplace to witness individuals who have attained high distinction in scientific pursuits and are at the same time fanatically resistant to any sort of argument that challenges their religious, moral, or political views. Many generous and decent people remain impervious to any challenge to their basic loyalties. We are familiar with individuals who feign kindness and tolerance while being deceitful, manipulative, controlling, insensitive, and ruthless for power. Especially in conflicts where the stakes are high, such people will be heavily represented, and many of them will attain positions of authority and dominate the rest of us. We can say about as much for each of the seven deadly sins—about how deep-seated and virulent they are.
In short, I am skeptical that the intelligent agent in Dewey’s sense is much of a possibility, and insofar as there are few who are capable of it, they would be well advised not to practice it openly to avoid being devoured by the others. For better or worse, moral argument typically carries large doses of prejudice, hatred, resentment, compromise, intransigence, threat, authority, submission, and bruised feelings; it commonly has little effect on the antecedent moral convictions of the respective participants.
Insofar as moral discourse might be truly efficacious, it requires resources in the individual to which Dewey gives scant attention: classical virtues such as courage and justice, for example, temperance, a sense of duty, and practical wisdom. These are not so much acquired in formal teaching as they result from initiation into traditions and customs that are sustained by virtuous conduct. This sort of learning, to be sure, tends to be conservative and hence suspect to Dewey. But perhaps he was not sufficiently appreciative of how much virtue and justice in our tradition we are heir to and how worthy of preservation they are.
There are further issues, to be sure, about the nature and acquisition of desirable traits in would-be moral beings. I believe Dewey falls short on such themes, so I do not share his enthusiasm for social intelligence. I do share his enthusiasm for intelligence and intellectual candor. One can have the highest regard, as I do, for his revolution in philosophy without subscribing to every part of it.
James Gouinlock is professor of philosophy emeritus at Emory University. He is the author or editor of several books and many articles and contributions to books on philosophy. He is particularly well known for his writing on the philosophy of John Dewey.
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