Richard M. Gale
The Metaphysics of John Dewey
I. The Professed Metaphysics of John Dewey
Introduction
John Dewey was not the greatest philosopher of all time, only the greatest person ever to
have been a philosopher. His greatness was his character, his heart; for, more than any other
philosopher, Dewey cared about improving the lives of his fellow human beings, and he worked
with unmatched energy and dedication throughout his long life, which spanned almost ninety-two
years, in the service of this ideal.1 He can best be described as a Biblical prophet who had a
Ph.D. in philosophy. He even likened himself to John the Baptist, 2 which is an apt comparison
since both claimed to foresee the coming of a Messiah who would enable us to make everything
right with ourselves and our society. But Dewey’s Messiah, unlike John’s, is not going to ride into
town on the back of a donkey wearing open-toed sandals, like some kind of hippie. Rather his
Messiah dwells within each person, being nothing but their native intelligence, which makes it
possible for them to develop into effective cooperative problem solvers, provided that they employ
a generalized form of scientific method, called “inquiry.” Dewey not only worked tirelessly at
articulating the nature of inquiry but attempted to apply it to most of the societal ills of his day and
often with considerable success. In a more enlightened society than ours, he would be among
Mattel’s best selling action figures, no doubt with a manually adjustable mustache – let it droop
when he is writing in his study (the figure comes with a toy desk and a beat-up old typewriter) and
point upward when engaged in a heated public debate.
Dewey wrote with the apostolic fervor of someone who has seen the truth in full frontal nudity
and knows how it can be used to save us. This gave his writings a very preachy quality, which
would have been offensive were it not for the fact that they reeked with a sincerity the like of
which has never been matched, not even by Elvis Presley. Moreover, his sermons had the ring of
truth. Ever since I first read John Dewey, which was in my first class in philosophy in 1950, I have
firmly believed that if I would place one hand on my copy of his Experience and Nature, opened
or unopened, it didn’t matter, and the other on where it hurt, I would be cured. Many times
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throughout my adult life I have been tempted to put five dollars in an envelop and send it to him
so that he would pray for me, as well as all the sick and shut-ins.
But what exactly was Dewey’s vision of salvation like? And what is needed to achieve it?
Salvation is a process of full human flourishing in which people, through their own free actions,
bring about a full realization and integration of all of their best potentialities. To achieve a full
integration of the self it is necessary to achieve a unification with both one’s natural environment
and society. Dewey appealed to the emerging social sciences in support of his view that
everything that is distinctive about human beings results from their active participation within a
society of fellow humans. Because of this deep involvement between persons, such that each
person’s self-realization depends upon that of the other persons in her society, it follows that each
person can find salvation only if everyone else does. But to achieve full human flourishing, they
must learn the technique of gaining control over their environment, both physical and social, so
that they can effectively bring about their growth, that is, their creation of ever higher order
syntheses and unifications, both within themselves and in their relations with nature and their
fellow persons.
What technique of problem solving will best aid such growth? Past experience teaches us
that it is a general version of the method that has been so successfully employed in science, as
well in our successful problem-solving activities in everyday life. Such inquiries begin with an
indeterminate or problematic situation that calls for action in order to restore integration and
harmony between an organism and its environment. Relevant facts of the case must be gathered
so that a likely plan of action can be devised and then acted on so. If the original indeterminate
situation thereby gets transformed into a determinate one, the inquiry has succeeded. If this fails
to happen, a new plan of action must be devised, and so on until we succeed. This method of
inquiry can be successfully employed only in a society that is democratic in the moral sense of
according to everyone the freedom, both positive and negative, to realize their potentialities
through joint, cooperative inquiry. To enable people to become effective joint inquirers they must
be educated in a way that will develop in them the ability to inquire in a collective and cooperative
manner, in which they accord to all of their fellow inquirers all the rights and privileges
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appertaining to respected and empowered fellow inquirers. Only when we learn how to apply the
technique of scientific inquiry to our social, political, economic, and moral problems will salvation
be realized. To accomplish this we must make use of our best available scientific knowledge to
devise plans for large-scale social action so as to eliminate or at least ameliorate these “problems
of men,” to use a title of one of Dewey’s books.
Dewey’s panacea of salvation-through-inquiry seems eminently reasonable. However, it is
easier said than done, for there are, as Dewey never tires of pointing out, sinister repressive
forces afoot in contemporary societies that block the realization of a Deweyan moral democracy
and thereby prevent the effective wide-scale use of the method of inquiry to solve the problems of
men. Some of these forces, Dewey argues, undermine our negative freedom by blocking our
freedom of speech and assembly. Others undermine our positive freedom to gain effective control
of our lives by preventing us from being afforded the requisite social, political, economic, and
educative opportunities to become effective inquirers.
Deconstruction of Traditional Metaphysics
Surprisingly, among the many culprits Dewey names as blocks to wide-spread effective
inquiry is traditional metaphysics. But why metaphysics rather than the bike riders? It is because
metaphysics has the following four undesirable consequences. Because it locates true being in
some timeless supernatural realm it saps our incentive to take our workaday world seriously and
fosters an undemocratic, hierarchical society in which one class exercises authority over other
classes. Its theses are unverifiable and thus without cognitive meaning, and, as a result, it is
completely aloof from the concerns and activities of ordinary people. Each of these charges will
be considered in turn.
(1) Traditional metaphysics located true being in some timelessly immutable, super-sensible
reality, such as Plato’s forms, Aristotle’s essences, the eternal one of Plotinus, Hegel’s Absolute,
and the God of traditional theism. This created an invidious ontological distinction between the
changing workaday world in which we are up to our necks in problematic situations and a perfect
reality in which is realized all of the things that we prize as ideal ends. This ontological
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downgrading of the world of becoming belittles its importance, and thereby saps our incentive to
labor in behalf of these ends through the use of inquiry. Herein we take, not the occasional moral
holiday that William James saw as the cash value of Abolute Idealism, but a permanent one.
But to read back into an order of things which exists without the participation of our
reflection and aim, the quality which defines the purpose of our thought and endeavor is
at one and the same stroke to mythologize reality and to deprive the life of thoughtful
endeavor of its ground for being (MW3, 127).
The most serious indictment to be brought against non-empirical philosophies is that they
have cast a cloud over the things of ordinary experience. They have not been content to
rectify things. They have discredited them at large…[They] have denied that common
experience is capable of developing from within itself methods which will secure direction
for itself and will create inherent standards of judgment and value (LW1, 40-1).
(2) Moreover, this invidious ontological distinction invariably has rationalized the existence of
an undemocratically structured society in which some privileged class of “philosopher kings” or
“priests,” who supposedly possess special epistemic powers of accessing the realm of true being,
exercised authoritative control over the masses. This is the biggest block of all to inquiry,
especially since these privileged knowers claimed to have a special authority with respect to
matters concerning values and higher spiritual realities, thus preventing social. political,
economic, and moral issues from being subject to intelligent inquiry. Even the traditional
Cartesian dualism between the mental and the physical had the pernicious social consequences
of endorsing the authority of some privileged social class.
The relation between mind and matter really is the abstract form of the problem of the
relation of the so-called material, that is, industrial and economic life, to the intellectual
and ideal life of a democracy, and particularly to the ethical demands of democracy for a
just distribution of economic opportunity and economic reward. One might even show
how the entire dualism of mind and matter haunting the footsteps of historic philosophy
is, at bottom, a reflex of a separation of want, of appetite, from reason, from the ideal,
which in turn was the expression of non-democratic societies in which the ‘higher’ and
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spiritual life of the few was built upon and conditioned by the ‘lower’ and economic life of
the many (MW3, 76).
(3) This is not the end of Dewey’s beef with traditional metaphysics. Because it attempts to
give us knowledge about a non-empirical reality, its claims are not empirically verifiable, and, as a
result, the disputes between rival metaphysicians are intractable and futile.
But the problems to which non-empirical method gives rise in philosophy are blocks to
inquiry, blind alleys; they are puzzles rather than problems (LW1, 17).
The formalism and unreality of the problem [of the relation between mind and matter]
remains, however, in the theories which have been offered as its “solutions”…The
diversity of solutions together with the dialectical character of each doctrine which
renders it impregnable to empirical attack, suggest that the trouble lies not so much in the
solutions, as in the factors which determine statement of the problem (LW1, 194).
Variation [among philosophies] has extended so far that the controversial and polemic
nature of philosophy and the failure of representatives of opposed doctrinal schools to
reach agreement are among the great causes of the general loss of esteem that
philosophy is progressively undergoing (LW1, 332-3).
If this sounds like Richard Rorty, it is no accident, since his deconstruction of philosophy uses
Dewey as a springboard.
(4) Because traditional metaphysics uses a non-empirical method, its claims are not only
untestable but also fail to enrich our everyday experience.
So far as philosophy is marked by aloofness, by irresponsibility, by pompous futility, so
far philosophy cries aloud of the evils due to its departure from the common method and
test. Having repudiated as a test of its truths the test of use and practice, it can hardly be
surprised if it find itself in a state of “splendid isolation,” where the isolation is most
evident and the splendor depends upon the point of view (MW6, 52).
The Things of ordinary experience do not get enlargement and enrichment of meaning as
they do when approached through the medium of scientific principles and reasonings.
This lack of function reacts…back upon the philosophic subject-matter itself. Not tested
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by being employed to see what it leads to in ordinary experience and what new meanings
it contributes, this subject-matter becomes arbitrary, aloof – what is called “abstract”
when that word is used in a bad sense to designate something which exclusively
occupies a realm of its own without contact with the things of ordinary experience (LW1,
17).
In mounting an all-out attack against traditional metaphysics, Dewey really is attempting to
exorcise his own personal devil; for he began his professional career as an ardent Hegelian
absolute idealist, and a believing and practicing Christian too boot, both of which he did not give
up until after he left the University of Michigan for the University of Chicago in 1894. Dewey’s was
well aware of this demon when he wrote the following in 1930.
I imagine that my development has been controlled largely by a struggle between a
native inclination toward the schematic and formally logical, and those incidents of
personal experience that compelled me to take account of actual material. Probably there
is in the consciously articulated ideas of every thinker an over-weighting of just those
things that are contrary to his intrinsic bent, and which, therefore, he has to struggle to
bring to expression…a case might be made out for the proposition that the emphasis
upon the concrete, empirical, and “practical” in my later writings is partly due to
considerations of this nature…It is, I suppose, becoming a commonplace that when
anyone is unduly concerned with controversy, the remarks that seem to be directed
against others are really concerned with a struggle that is going on inside himself (LW5,
150-1).
Dewey’s impassioned deconstruction of traditional metaphysics reads like that of a reformed
metaphysician who is always struggling to resist temptation. If he allows himself just one sip of
metaphysics, it will set him off on a binge that will end with him brown-bagging it in some hallway
spouting incoherent drivel about the Absolute, which reminds me of the time I was having a
discussion with C. J. Ducasse late at night on a street corner in Greenwich Village about absolute
idealism. Some derelict was standing next to us waiting for an opportunity to break in and ask us
for some money so he could get some hot soup and beans in himself. When he heard Ducasse
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mention Hegel, he immediately asked, “Will one of you dialectical intellectuals give me a
quarter?” That derelict, but for the grace of God, would have been John Dewey.
There is a tension between the different ills that Dewey finds in metaphysics. On the one
hand, he argues that because metaphysical claims are unverifiable they are devoid of cognitive
content, but, on the other hand, argues that these claims have had the pernicious effects of
sapping our incentive to lead the morally strenuous life and supporting undemocratic societies. It
would seem that metaphysics cannot have these pernicious effects unless it can be an object of
belief and thus not devoid of all cognitive meaning. Dewey’s response would be that although
traditional metaphysics is devoid of any cognitive meaning, it has significance in that it expresses
human ideals and aspirations.
Systems of philosophy however abstract in conception and technical exposition lie,
after all, much nearer the heart of social, and of national, life than superficially
appears…philosophy is a language in which the deepest social problems and
aspirations of a given time and a given people are expressed in intellectual and
impersonal symbols (MW3, 73).
For things which are false or even meaningless if they are taken to be what they purport to
be, statements about the ultimate structure of the universe and absolute truth, acquire
another import when they are interpreted in the context of their bearing upon human and
social predicaments and activities (LW15, 16).
James’s Will-to-Believe was not concerned with scientific truth but the significance, that is,
the weight, the momentousness, the raison d’etre, of philosophical systems and principles
(LW15, 15).3
Although Dewey argued strenuously against the emotive theory of ethics of the logical
positivists, he was in full agreement with their emotive theory of metaphysics, even down to the
heaping of rhetorical scorn upon its other-worldly forms, as was amply seen in some of the
preceding quotations. There are serious problems with Dewey’s emotive theory of metaphysics,
but I cannot pursue them now.
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Empirical Metaphysics
After Dewey threw off the yoke of absolute idealism in the mid-1890s by devising his
pragmatic or instrumentalistic theory, he expressed pride in the fact that his theory required no
metaphysical support.
[Instrumentalism] involves the doctrine that the origin, structure, and purpose of knowing
are such as to render nugatory any wholesale inquiries into the nature of Being (MW6,
89).
But the chief characteristic trait of the pragmatic notion of reality is precisely that no
theory of Reality in general, uberhaupt, is possible or needed (MW10, 39).
But, as Dewey matured as a philosopher, he came to realize that metaphysics need not
be pernicious, since there is a legitimate empirical way to do it, which, moreover, can make us
better inquirers by showing how inquiry fits into the larger scheme of things.
We may begin with experience in gross, experience in its primary and crude forms, and
by means of its distinguishing features and its distinctive trends, note something of the
world which generates and maintains it (LW1, 366).
This program is worked out in Dewey’s classic work, Experience and Nature, whose
stated aim is “to discover some of these general features of experienced things and to
interpret their significance for a philosophic theory of the universe in which we live” (LW1,
14). Following Aristotle, Dewey held that “metaphysics is cognizance of the generic traits of
existence” (LW1, 50).4 The outcome would be a naturalistic metaphysics that would be
testable in terms of its experiential consequences, thereby satisfying his pragmatic
requirement that a meaningful idea or hypothesis be empirically verifiable by future
consequences. What is this empirical method for doing metaphysics? and how is a
metaphysical theory to be verified?
Throughout his career, even when he was an absolute idealist, Dewey was seeking to
find an empirical method for doing philosophy that would set it on the path of a science in which
there is a growing body of truths accepted by all competent practitioners. In 1886 he called this
method the “psychological standpoint.” It holds that “the nature of all objects of philosophical
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inquiry is to be fixed by finding out what experience says about them. And psychology is the
scientific and systematic account of this experience” (EW1, 123). In 1905 the name of the method
of experience was changed to “immediate empiricism,” according to which “Anything, everything,
in the ordinary or non-technical use of the term “thing”…are what they are experienced as.
Hence, if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being”
(MW3, 158). In a note that was added to this essay in 1910, Dewey unwittingly changes the
postulate of immediate empiricism in a way that trivializes it, for it is now claimed that “Philosophy
can pass upon its nature – as upon the nature of all of the rest of its subject-matter – only by first
ascertaining what it exists or occurs as” (MW3, 166). That everything is as it exists as is an empty
tautology, unlike the claim that everything is as it is experienced, which is an exciting, hotly
contested thesis.
In Experience and Nature the name of the method again changes, this time to the “denotative
method.” This is a most unfortunate name, since it suggests that in doing philosophy one just
points to things that are given in experience. But if philosophers are confined to just pointing, a
face-to-face dispute between philosophers would resemble the state that Aristotle claimed
philosophers would be left in if they rejected the law of noncontradiction, namely they could only
mutely gesture with their index finger as if they were making a point. Plato, for example, would
silently point his index finger toward the heavens where his forms are housed and Aristotle would
shake his head and point to empirical objects about him, because of his rejection of Plato’s
separation of the forms from the empirical particulars that instantiated them. As an
autobiographical aside, I have found that I am unable to give a lecture to beginning students on
the difference between Plato and Aristotle without making such ostensive gestures. Fortunately, I
did more than this: I had something enlightening to say, such as “Aristotle brought Plato’s forms
down from heaven to earth,” and that is why I somehow managed to get tenured.
Ostending not only does not describe it also is radically ambiguous with respect to its
referent, a point that both Dewey and Wittgenstein stressed. To disambiguate the referent of an
act of ostension, some description must accompany the act. Dewey is well aware of this, since he
requires that the empirical metaphysician – the good kind of metaphysician – describe things in
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terms of what they are experienced as. To experience as involves the employment of some
concept or description. In fact, Dewey thought that all perceptual experience is an active
perceiving as, this being the basis of his attack on the myth of the given. But if concepts must be
employed by the empirical metaphysician, which concepts should they be? It would appear that
the metaphysician is free to choose what they will be, which would destroy the neutrality of
perspective that Dewey was after in his empirical method. Another way of making this point is that
every description requires a context which will determine what are the relevant concepts to use.
But what is the context in which we are to describe the generic traits existence? Dewey seems to
be impaled on the horns of a dilemma. Either the metaphysician’s description of the generic traits
of existence makes use of concepts or it does not. If it does, the neutrality of her perspective is
undermined and thereby Dewey’s empirical metaphysics does not escape the endless, intractable
disputes that were the bane of traditional metaphysics. And, if it does not employ concepts,
Dewey violates his own rejection of a non-conceptually given in experience. This problem will be
put aside for the time being.
Another problem for the denotative method of doing metaphysics is that it seems to beg
the question against the metaphysician who holds there to be supersensible, transcendent
realities. For such realities cannot be ostended, since only what is sensibly perceived can be
pointed at. A similar sort of begging of the question occurs with William James’s postulate of
empiricism in his doctrine of Radical Empiricism which requires that philosophers limit
themselves to what is definable in terms drawn from experience.
What does Dewey discover to be the generic traits of all existents through the use of his
empirical or denotative method? It is that every existent involves some mixture of the precarious
and the stable, the settled and the unsettled, the determinate and the indeterminate. In addition,
each of them possesses a unique qualitative individuality and is an event or processual. It is
curious that the arguments that Dewey presents for these traits being generic are not based on
what is phenomenologically vouchsafed by gross experience, which is what you would expect,
given his adherence to the denotative method – the method of immediate experience – but
instead are based on the findings of cultural anthropologists, Goldenweiser, Sumner, Tylor,
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Malinowski, and Boas, with respect to the discourses of different cultures. I believe that the
explanation for this curiosity is that Dewey was working with two different senses of generic,
namely what is common to all experienced entities and what is common to every universe of
discourse. At one place, he speaks of the generic traits as “the traits and characters that are sure
to turn up in every theme of discourse” (LW1, 308). He obscured the distinction between these
two different senses of generic by his occasional use of “universe of experience” interchangeably
with “universe of discourse” (LW12, 74). In dealing with the question of whether Dewey’s alleged
generic traits are in fact generic, we must divide the question between the found-in-everyexperienced-existent and found-in-every-universe-of-discourse sense of “generic.”
Are these traits found in every experienced existent, no less every existent? Let’s first
consider Dewey’s claim that every such existent is found to be an event or processual. Certainly,
this is not something vouchsafed by gross experience, for when I perceive a chair, for example, I
don’t ordinarily see it as a change or as a process, as I might if the chair was made of ice cream
and was rapidly melting in a hot sun. Dewey supports his event ontology by appeal to how natural
science conceives of the chair, as a succession of events, but this conception is not
phenomenologically-based. Furthermore, by having theoretical science determine the nature of
reality, Dewey goes against his instrumentalistic account of the theoretical entities of science,
which denies an objective existence to them, and instead sees them as nothing but the inferential
vines that connect gross experiences. He does give an empirically-based argument for every
existent being an event, but the argument contains a howler.
But in truth anything which can exist at any place and at any time occurs subject to
tests imposed upon it by its surroundings, which are only in part compatible and
reinforcing….The stablest thing we can speak of is not free from conditions set to it by
other things. That even the solid earth mountains, the emblems of constancy, appear
and disappear like the clouds is an old theme of moralists and poets….[Therefore]
every existence is an event (LW1, 63).
The argument seems to be this:
1. Every existent changes. an empirical fact
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2. Therefore, every existent is a change (event)
This is like arguing that since every existent has a color, every existent is a color, which is
based on failing to distinguish between the “is” of predication and the “is” of identity.
What about the traits of having some mixture of the precarious and the stable. Are they
traits of every experienced entity? Again, we find that our gross experience doesn’t support
Dewey’s genericality claim. Most of the things that we perceive are not perceived as
combining these traits. A chair, for example, is not perceived as being unstable or precarious
unless it is missing a leg or the like. A more promising way of construing Dewey’s claim that
every existent is perceived as combining precarious and stable traits is that every existent is
perceived as being related to a problematic situation. Since a problematic situation, which is
the initial stage in an inquiry, combines these traits, this is tantamount to saying that we
experience everything in terms of how it pertains to inquiry. Dewey, in fact, says this at many
places. “The conjunction of problematic and determinate characters in nature renders every
existence, as well as every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even though not in
design” (LW1, 63). “Awareness means attention, and attention means a crisis of some sort in
an existential situation” (MW4, 72).
The following explicit argument, based on the premise that every experience is inquiryrelated, can be given for Dewey’s claim that every existent, 5 and not just every experienced
existent, has inquiry-related traits.
Main Argument of Experience and Nature
1. Every existent is an experience.6
2. Every experience has the generic traits of existence.
3. The generic traits of existence are inquiry-related traits.
4. Every existent has inquiry-related traits.
Obviously, premise 3 stands in need of some justification, and the following is an argument
for 3 that is in the spirit of Dewey’s humanistic philosophy.
Subsidiary Argument for 3
5. We humans can describe existents only from a human point of view.
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6. The human point of view is an inquiry-based one.
7. We humans can describe the generic traits of existence only in terms of properties that
pertain to inquiry. Therefore,
3. The generic traits of existence are inquiry-related traits.
This is the sort of argument that Dewey would have to come up with in order to meet the
standard objection that his metaphysics is nothing but philosophical anthropology – a
description of man-in-the-world but not a description of the-world-as-it-is-in-itself apart from
its relation to men. Sidney Hook wrote that
Dewey would have done well in my view to modify his conception of metaphysics and
to avoid the imputation that it is an independent discipline that gives us knowledge of
the world that we cannot reach by any other study, and that what it gives us
knowledge about are generic traits that are discoverable in any subject-matter or
every universe of discourse….What he is really interested in is cataloging and
analyzing those features of the world that have an important bearing on the human
condition, on human hopes and possibilities, that are often taken for granted without
being clearly articulated (Introduction to LW1, xiv).
And, in the same vein, Richard Rorty claimed that “It is easier to think of the book
[Experience and Nature] as an explanation of why nobody needs a metaphysics rather than
as itself a metaphysical system.7
But is premise 6 true? Is it true that the human point of view always is an inquiry-based
one, which would entail that we are always inquiring and thus perceiving every existent as
related to some on-going inquiry? That we are not always inquiring was forcefully brought
home to me one Sunday morning in a bakery filled with regular customers. A portly middleaged gentleman told the counterlady, also portly and middle-aged, that he wanted a dozen
chocolate doughnuts even though they wouldn’t be good for his boyish figure, to which she
responded “You said it. I didn’t,” which occasioned gales of laughter in the bakery, as if this
was an original line being heard for the first time. I am a quick study and immediately figured
out that I was in the cliché bakery so that when the next gentlemen, before placing his order,
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told the counterlady that he was going on a cruise next week, I jumped in and said “Don’t do
anything I wouldn’t do,” which also occasioned considerable laughter, though not as much as
the counterlady’s remark. When the laughter subsided, the counterlady quipped, “He said it. I
didn’t,” which really broke up the bakery. Even I could hardly keep my feet. It suddenly
occurred to me that the idle banter in the bakery is the very cement that holds our society
together, being an instance of the ritualistic or ceremonial use of language. The bakery
example of a non-inquiry can be changed so that the counterlady was performing an inquiry;
for example, she was ordered by her boss to increase sales and was experimenting with the
use of humor to achieve this end. But it is no great feat to change a counter-example into a
non-counter-example by changing it.
The bakery is not an isolated counter-example. There are countless instances of uses of
language that are not inquiry-related, such as when we are just hanging out, chilling, or
bullshiting, provided it is to amuse rather than defraud. Many of our most important activities
and experiences, such as praying, having religious experiences, and making love, are not
inquiry related. When two people make love for the right reason, namely to communicate on
a deep level so they can achieve a union of their spirits through a union of their flesh, they
are not performing an inquiry in which they are formulating plans of action to resolve a
problematic situation – I have something stiff and throbbing and wonder what I can do about
it. This, unfortunately, isn’t always the case. You might be a gigolo or in women’s underwear,
so to speak, and she is the buyer from Saks or you might be a song-plugger and she is the
record librarian who programs the shows for all the disc jockeys at the station.
Dewey’s insistence that we are always inquiring leads to some pernicious consequences.
Consider his following claims.
They [pleasure and enjoyment] are something to be investigated, challenges to
inquiry and judgment. The more connections and interactions we ascertain, the more
we know the object in question (LW4, 213).
Reflection upon what we have liked and have enjoyed is a necessity. But it tells us
nothing about the value of these things until enjoyments are themselves reflectively
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controlled, or, until, as they are recalled, we form the best judgment possible about
what led us to like this sort of thing and what has issued from the fact that we liked it
(LW4, 217).
All experienced objects have a double status. They are individualized,
consummatory, whether in the way of enjoyment or suffering. They are also involved
in a continuity of interactions and changes, and hence are causes and potential
means of later experiences. Because of this dual capacity, they become problematic.
Immediately and directly they are just what they are; but as transitions to and
possibilities of later experiences they are uncertain (LW4, 188).
If we take these claims seriously, it would require us to treat all of our experiences of
enjoyment as occasions for an inquiry into their causes and consequences. I enjoyed the idle
banter and bull-shit in the bakery but that should not require that I investigate the causes and
consequences of this enjoyable experience. More seriously, think of the pernicious
consequences that would result from subjecting our enjoyable sexual experiences with our
beloved spouse or, if you prefer, one-night stand to such inquiry. When the townies in the bar
warned the man who is about to travel up the mountain to Count Dracula’s castle that there
are some things that man should not know, they had it right. To investigate the causes of our
enjoyable sexual experiences would drain the experiences of all their marvelous mystery. Do
you really want to find out that she looks like your mother. This is not to say that there are not
occasions when such experiences do become problematic and there is a need to consult
therapists and sex manuals. But, fortunately, not all occasions of enjoying or valuing are of
this problematic sort. Dewey’s moral idiocy about intimate human relations is the price he
paid for being a John the Baptist.
This sort of one-idea fanaticism was not confined to his claim that we always are (or
should be) inquiring.
The bad man is the man who no matter how good he has been is beginning to
deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter how morally
unworthy he has been is moving to become better (MW12, 180-1).
15
A consequence of this mad dog pronouncement is that if the Marquis de Sade shows moral
improvement– he no longer tortures to death ten but only nine helpless victims each day and
now contributes three instead of two dollars annually to his favorite charity, the Home for
Wayward Girls – he is the good man! Albert Schweitzer, on the other hand, if he were to
become less morally good –he does not adhere as strictly to his reverence-for-life principle as
he formerly did (he swatted a mosquito last night in his tent), and he now medically
administers to only ninety-nine rather than, as he formerly did, one hundred patients each
day – he would qualify as the bad man. One does not know whether to say of Dewey’s ethical
pronouncement that it is perverse or just silly. Probably the safest thing to say is that it is
perversely silly.
Some of Dewey’s sympathetic interpreters have attempted to find a response to the
charge that not all of our activities and experiences are inquiry-related. They have used as
their jumping-off point Dewey’s attempt to show that, according to biology, an organism
continually has to come to grips with changes in its environment, such as those that upset its
homeostasis.
The truth is that in every waking moment, the complete balance of the organism and
its environment is constantly interfered with and as constantly restored. (MW14, 125)
In the process of living, attainment of a period of equilibrium is at the same time the
initiation of a new relation to the environment, one that brings with it potency of new
adjustments to be made through struggle (LW10, 23).
On the basis of these remarks they have argued we are always inquiring. Thomas Alexander
writes that
All experience is problematical in some degree. By this term, Dewey was trying to
refer to the tensive focus of a situation. Lying down after a heavy meal is hardly the
problematic situation that the lean hunter faces trying to snare today’s food. It is for
convenience that we call the latter problematic and not the former, but both are
modes of adjustment.8
16
Tom Burke, in basic agreement with Alexander, speaks of there being a “proto-inquiry” when
there is such a non-cognitive tensive problematic situation. 9 There are two objections to this
way of saving Dewey from all the preceding counter-examples of non-inquiry-related activities
and experiences. First, Dewey’s generic traits of existence are supposed to be read off from
what is given in gross experience, but Alexander and Burke must appeal to facts unearthed
by the science of biology. Second, a “proto-inquiry” is not an inquiry since it fails to satisfy
Dewey’s requirement that an inquiry employ “discourse through use of symbols” in its
transformation of the original indeterminate situation into a determinate one (LW12, 109). For
the same reason, Alexander’s “tensive situation” is not a problematic situation; for, a
problematic situation initiates an inquiry, but his after dinner recliner does not inquire, given
that he does not symbolically formulate any plan of action.
Maybe things will go better for Dewey if we give the universe of discourse interpretation
of his generic traits of existence. Dewey never defines what a “universe of discourse” is. But
whether a universe of discourse be taken in an extensional or intensional sense, his generic
traits fail to be common to all of them. When taken in an extensional sense, a universe of
discourse would be individuated by its ontology -- the individuals over which it quantifies or
refers to. So understood, it is clear that Dewey’s generic traits are not common to all
universes of discourse: Mathematics, for example, does not quantify over or refer to
problematic situations or events. When taken intensionally, a universe of discourse is
individuated by the meaning of its predicative expressions. Mathematics again is a counterexample, since it does not contain any predicates that connote being a problematic situation
or being processual.
But maybe Dewey had something else in mind by a universe of discourse. Given that he
actually went about determining the generic traits of existence by examining the descriptions
that cultural anthropologists gave of the literature or discourse of different cultures,
civilizations or societies – their cosmogonies, myths, proverbs, philosophies, and literature,
both oral and written – it might be that a universe of discourse should be individuated by
cultures, civilizations or societies. Each one has its own universe of discourse that is unique
17
to it. So construed, the claim that the traits of being a combination of the precarious and the
stable are common to every universe of discourse would mean that every culture’s literature
or discourse makes mention of these traits. This way of construing Dewey’s generic traits of
experienced individuals fits his claim in his aborted attempt in 1949 to write an introduction to
a planned new edition of Experience and Nature.
Were I to write…Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and
Nature and the treatment of specific subject-matters would be correspondingly
modified. I would abandon the term “experience” because of my growing realization
that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of “experience”
are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable. I would substitute the term “culture”
because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully and freely carry my
philosophy of experience….The name “culture” in its anthropological...sense
designates the vast range of things experienced in an indefinite variety of ways (LW1,
361-2).
Another reason for the cultural construal of Dewey’s universe of discourse is that it helps to
explain away an apparent inconsistency in his writings. In the 1925 Experience and Nature and
its revised edition of 1929, the task of metaphysics is said to be that of describing the generic
traits of experience or every universe of discourse. But in 1928 “The Inclusive Philosophic
Category,” which falls between these two editions, an apparently different task is assigned to
metaphysics, that of articulating a category which “is indicative of the widest and richest range of
association empirically accessible” (LW3, 46). Being at heart a good Hegelian, he finds it to be
that of the social, for a society represents the actualization of all the potentialities of individuals
that are lower on the scala natura. Several commentators have noted this shift in Dewey’s
conception of metaphysics but have made no attempt to harmonize them.10 But, since the
category of the social is the same as that of the cultural, there is a concurrence between the two
accounts of the task of metaphysics. That the social is not common to every existent – a star is
not social – refutes the claim that the social is a generic trait of every existent, but not the claim
that every culture or society does take note of Dewey’s generic traits of existence.11 Another point
18
of concurrence between them is that each is an anthropomorphic metaphysics that makes reality
in the image of man by imputing to it those qualities that are prominent in human activities.
That Dewey’s generic traits are common to every known universe of discourse in the
cultural sense, however, is a far less exciting claim than that they are common to every
universe of discourse in its ordinary extensional or intensional sense. And the latter claim, in
turn, is far less exciting than the claim that these traits are common to every experienced
existent, no less every existent simpliciter. There is, however, a more exciting true claim that
can be made about Dewey’s generic traits, when understood in the inquiry-related rather than
universe of discourse-related sense. Although they are not found in every human activity or
experience, for we are not always inquiring, it still is the case that all human activities and
experiences derive part of their meaning or value from the fact that they are connected up,
even if indirectly, with the workaday activity of inquiry. Consider a paradigm case of a noninquiry-related experience, a religious or mystical experience. It is the stark significant
contrast that they have with our precarious life as inquirers that imports meaning and value to
such experiences, making them oases at which the self enjoys some R and R amidst the
travails of the workaday world. Experiences of a timeless undifferentiated unity are especially
cherished because they give one a sense of safety and peace in the midst of a challenging
world. Our life as an inquirer is like a dye that spreads over all of our experiences. Our
religious experiences, in turn, can serve as a dye that colors our Promthean endeavors as
inquirers.
The manner in which the mystical and Promethean dimensions ideally should
interpentrate is beautifully captured in Dewey’s obituary for G. S. Morris.
He was preeminently a man in whom those internal divisions, which eat into the heart
of so much of contemporary spiritual life, and which rob the intellect of its faith in
truth, and the will of its belief in the value of life, had been overcome. In the
philosophical and religious conviction of the unity of man’s spirit with the divine he
had that rest which is energy. (EW3, 9)
19
The interpenetration of active Promethean endeavors with passive mystical experiences is
Dewey’s requirement in Art and Experience to have our doings and undergoings organically
connected writ large. While Dewey was in China in 1921 he contrasted the activism of the
West with the aesthetic passivity of the East and found the ethical ideal to be one that
combined both: “A true ideal includes factors from both sides [the West and the East] (MW13,
266).
Verification
It was Dewey’s commitment to verificationism that served as the linchpin of his
deconstruction of traditional metaphysics. Its claims are not verifiable whereas his empirical
metaphysics is. But just how is a metaphysical system to be tested? And does his own
metaphysical theory pass his own verificatory tests?
A traditional metaphysician would not cower before Dewey’s claim that the test for a
philosophy is whether “it ends in conclusions which, when referred back to ordinary lifeexperiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and
make our dealings with them more fruitful” (LW1, 18). For all metaphysicians claim that their
systems make the world of our ordinary experience more luminous, more intelligible to us.
But Dewey’s verificatory test requires more than purely intellectual satisfaction – the aha-thatis-how-things-really-are feeling. A metaphysical system must issue in predictions that will aid
us in gaining power to control the on-going course of events, such as is done by a science.
If, then, the conclusion is reached that knowing is a way of employing occurrences
with respect to increasing power to direct the consequences which flow from things,
the application of the conclusion must be made to philosophy itself. (MW10, 37-8)
Every system of philosophy presents the consequences of some…experiment (LW1,
35).
The recorded scientific result is in effect a designation of a method to be followed and
a prediction of what will be found when specified observations are set on foot. That is
all a philosophy can be or do (LW1, 39).
20
These quotations reveal the deep scientistic streak in Dewey’s philosophy, requiring of
every meaningful cognitive discourse that it satisfy scientific standards of verification. This is
something for the traditional metaphysician to cower before, since it is obvious that traditional
metaphysics does not issue in any predictions that admit of verification. What does Aristotle’s
hyle-morphic system predict that Plato’s theory of forms, Leibniz’s monadology or
Whitehead’s organicism does not? Furthermore, these system do not give us the
Promethean power to “direct the consequences which flow from things,” which is the ultimate
verificatory test for Dewey. Before raising the question of whether metaphysical systems
should have to satisfy Dewey’s strong verification requirement, it will be asked whether
Dewey’s own “empirical” metaphysics satisfies it.
It was seen that Dewey describes the generic traits of existence in terms of what is
required for us to be inquirers; for, if they were taken to be traits of all existents, numerous
counter-examples arise. The metaphysics of Experience and Nature, accordingly, can be
understood as a transcendental deduction argument for what is required if it is to be possible
for inquiry to take place.12 “Any theory that detects and defines these traits [the generic traits]
is therefore a ground-map of the province of criticism, establishing based lines to be
employed in more intricate triangulations” (LW1, 309), in which criticism, for Dewey, is an
inquiry into the causes and consequences of an enjoyment or liking.
The literal meaning of the base lines metaphor is not obvious and needs to be filled in.
The basic idea is that by having a firm grasp of the nature of the world in which inquiry or
criticism is possible, we will somehow become more informed and dedicated cooperative
inquirers.
The more sure one is that the world which encompasses human life is of such and
such a character…the more one is committed to try to direct the conduct of life, that of
others as well as of himself, upon the basis of the character assigned to the world. And
if he finds that he cannot succeed, that the attempt lands him in confusion,
inconsistency and darkness, plunging others into discord and shutting them out from
participation, rudimentary precepts instruct him to surrender his assurance as a
21
delusion; and to revise his notions of the nature till he makes them more adequate to
the concrete facts in which nature is embodied (LW1, 309).
To note, register and define the constituent structure of nature is not then an affair
neutral to the office of criticism. It is a preliminary outline of the field, whose chief import
is to afford understanding of the necessity and nature of the office of intelligence (LW1,
315).
in which “intelligence” means inquiry. That our acceptance of Dewey’s inquiry-based
metaphysics has the beneficial consequence of making us better inquirers, more effective
in resolving the problems of men, serves to verify his metaphysics.
Dewey is subjecting his metaphysics to his pragmatic test of truth – act on the idea and
see if it leads to the predicated consequences. In this case, the predicate consequences are
that we will become more effective inquirers.
The generic insight into existence which alone can define metaphysics in any
empirically intelligible sense is itself an added fact of interaction, and is therefore
subject to the same requirement of intelligence as any other natural occurrence:
namely, inquiry into the bearings, leadings and consequences of what it discovers
(LW1, 310).
Dewey even applied the pragmatic test to pragmatism itself.
And one consequence (which is of consequence) he [the pragmatist] claims the
theory will produce when acted upon is the clearing away of the artificial problems
that arise from isolating the notions of statement, correspondence and consistency
from their only significant context – the context of use and office (MW6, 50-1).
Let us grant for the sake of argument, though this is very dubious, that if Dewey’s
metaphysics of inquiry were to be widely accepted, it would result in our becoming more effective
inquirers. This outcome counts as verificatory only if we require of a true metaphysical theory that
its wide-spread acceptance lead people to become better inquirers. But why should this outcome
be the measure of the truth of a metaphysical theory, for man does not live by inquiry alone? It is
here that the problem that was adumbrated earlier concerning what concepts to employ in
22
describing what is given in gross experience arises. There is a need to supply a context for such
a description in which the purposes for giving this description are made manifest. Dewey’s
purpose is to makes us better inquirers, but obviously that is not the purpose of every
metaphysical system. Some have as their purpose to help us become more spiritual beings who
can enter into a communal relation with God or the deeper dimensions of reality. Others have as
their purpose to give an account that gives the bests integration of everything we know about the
world. Dewey was aware of this diversity of contexts or purposes for a metaphysical description
when he wrote:
An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot
permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we
assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture
demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what
they are made of and what wearing them does to us (LW1, 40).
I have tried to help Dewey disrobe, and what we see is that his “intellectual habits” are far
from being neutral but are very much a reflection of his age, which was one of unbridled
Prometheanism due to the wondrous advances of science and the God-like technological
powers it gave us.
Dewey’s verificationist-based deconstruction of traditional metaphysics also is an
expression of his promethean scientisitic “intellectual habits,” which takes scientific
method as legislative for all meaningful discourse. Dewey, and following him, Rorty, look
at the history of metaphysics, with its endless intractable debates, and are horrified
because there is no agreed upon decision-procedure for resolving disputes between
metaphysicians, being in this respect like a game in which it is impossible to keep score
and determine who wins – a crap game played with unmarked dice. I look on it as one of
the great accomplishments of the human race and see their attempt to proscribe
metaphysics as an act of cultural barbarism analogous to someone who burns down the
Louvre because no decision-procedure can be produced to determine when a painting is
a good one or even a painting at all. All attempts to articulate the rules of the
23
metaphysical language-game fail miserably, but that is no reason not to go on playing the
game. We know how to play the game even though we cannot say what are its rules. The
only proper response to the challenge posed by the deconstructionists of metaphysics is
to simply ignore them and just do more metaphysics: For the only justification for
metaphysics is metaphysics.
Fortunately, Dewey was not the cultural barbarian he appeared to be when he was
officially doing metaphilosophy and issuing his scientistic-based prohibitions against
continuing to do traditional metaphysics. Dewey really was very much of a traditional
metaphysician, but his real metaphysics was not his professed metaphysics based on the
generic traits of existence or the inclusive philosophic idea. In part II of this paper, it will
be shown that, far from being the all-destroyer of past metaphysics, Dewey really was the
Plotinus of Burlington, Vermont, who developed a highly mystical philosophy that had no
redeeming social value, its purpose being to give one the aha-that-is-the-way-thingsreally-are feeling. It turns out that it was Dewey, after all, who accosted C. J. Ducasse
and myself on that Greenwich Village street corner. Some evidence for this, other than
that the derelict had a drooping mustache, is that when he hit us for money he asked,
“Will one of you dialectical intellectuals, as such, give me a quarter, as such.”
University of Pittsburgh
Notes
1
Lewis Feuer hit the nail on the head when he said that “Dewey’s abiding greatness lies more in
what we might call ‘the method of character’ rather than in ‘the method of intelligence’ and ‘the
logic of inquiry’ to which he gave his scientific energies…. All those who have known Dewey or
his writings have experienced that balance of character in Dewey; he lived spontaneously by the
axiom that his thinking was a moment in the common aspiring, often weary, sometimes
24
discouraged, struggle of the human race for self-enlightenment” (Introduction to LW15, xxxiii-iv).
All Dewey quotations are from the Southern Illinois University Press editions of The Works of
John Dewey. LW is Later Works, MW Middle Works and EW Early Works. LW2, 7 abbreviates
the Later Works, volume 2, page 7.
2
John Dewey’s letter to Scudder Klyce, May 29, 1915, Scudder Klyce Papers, General
Correspondence: John Dewey, Manusciprt Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
3
This is a self-serving distorted account of James, since prime examples of will-to-believe cases
for James were ones in which a person needed to believe some proposition so as to build up her
confidence or courage. Furthermore, only something that has cognitive meaning can be an object
of a will-to-believe option, since one cannot believe what is meaningless.
4
In his 1915 “The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry,” Dewey claimed that metaphysics
seeks the “ultimate” and “irreducible” traits of existence. (MW8, 4). These traits, however, must be
carefully distinguished from the generic traits of existence, since a trait could be ultimate or
irreducible, such as being pink, without, being generic in the sense of being common to all
existents. Maybe yellow would be a generic trait if the Pink Panther were the creator of the
universe.
5
R. W. Sleeper made out a very good case for the thesis that Dewey had a metaphysics of
existence, not just of experience. He also saw that Dewey’s generic traits of existence are derived
from our concept of inquiry. “Inquiry itself…shapes our concept of ‘being,’ and not our concept of
‘being’ that should be allowed to shape our theory of inquiry.” The Necessity of Pragmatism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 61.
6
Dewey is not consistent on this issue. On the one hand he says that “No one with an honest
respect for scientific conclusions can deny that experience as an existence is something that
occurs only under highly specialized conditions, such as are found in a highly organized creature
which in turn requires a specialized environment.” (LW!, 11-2) But in apparent opposition to this
view of experience as limited are many claims that make experience ubiquitous, as is seen in the
following quotations. “Experience…includes everything and anything, actual or potential, that we
think of and talk about.” (LW1, 371) “We mean then by experience something at least as wide
25
and deep and full as all history on this earth.” (LW1, 370) “’Experience’ denotes the planted field,
the sowed seeds, autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are observed, feared, longed for.”
(LW1, 18) “Experience has its equivalents in such affairs as history, life, culture.” (LW1, 42) I have
some ideas how to resolve this tension in the text but cannot do so now.
7
Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 74.
8
Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1987, pp. 147-8.
9
Tom Burke, Dewey’s New Logic: A Reply to Russell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1994), pp. 105 and 140.
10
See, for example: Raymond D. Boisvert, “Dewey’s Metaphysics: Ground-Map of the
Prototypically Real,” in Reading Dewey, ed. by Larry Hickman (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1998), pp. 158-61; and Thomas Alexander, op. cit., p. 107.
11
There are problems, however, with Dewey’s claim that the social is the most inclusive category.
Taken extensionally, this claim seems false, since the universe contains more individuals than
does a society. Taken intensionally, it again seems false, for an analysis of the concept of a
society or culture does not bring in galaxies, nor does the analysis of the concept of the universe
bring in societies. That Dewey never developed his idea of the most inclusive philosophic
category probably is due to his realization of these problems.
12
Thomas Alexander realized this when he wrote that “the generic traits will attempt to reveal to
inquiry its contextual origin and its moral obligation…Dewey seeks here what might be called a
transcendental or hermeneutic exploration of reflective experience.” Op. cit., p. 91.
26