2011 SAAP Paper Submission
Reconsidering John Dewey’s Relationship with Ancient Philosophy
ABSTRACT: Dewey’s comments on the ancients often appear as constituting a significant
tension. On the one hand, upon a variety of occasions, Dewey offered outright polemics in which
he condemned the lasting influence of Greek philosophers as deleterious. Indeed, there is within
Greek philosophy a clear presence of the origin of what Dewey famously called “the quest for
certainty,” a quest that has led Western philosophy into many dualisms, whether they be
dualisms between reason and emotion, mind and nature, individual and community, or between
theory and practice. This can be seen, for example, with reference to aspects of Plato, whom
Dewey criticizes for his conception of the absolute superiority of theory over practice, a
conception Dewey recognizes as retained within twentieth-century philosophy, i.e., within
contemporary philosophy that systematically denies any possibility of intelligent, meaningful
concern with the social realms of human existence. On the other hand, he also, and quite often,
has very sympathetic things to say about the Greeks. For example, we know that Dewey draws
heavily from Aristotle to construct his own rich and expansive American philosophical
naturalism. Further, Aristotle and Dewey have conceptions of philosophy itself which are quite
similar, with both in their own ways conceiving of philosophy as practical wisdom. Not a lot of
attention has been focused on this tension in Dewey, and it has been quite some time since
(Anton, 1965; Anderson, 1967; Betz, 1980). I proceed in this paper by articulating my
understanding of the dimensions of this tension, utilizing, where appropriate, some of the
insights of the above scholars – among a few others. I conclude with some brief remarks towards
putting this tension into Deweyan perspective.
John Dewey has occasionally had an ill-deserved reputation as one with little
appreciation for or engagement with intellectual history and tradition, perhaps best exemplified
in light of his battle of the nineteen-thirties with Robert Hutchins, then president of the
University of Chicago and close friend of the dogmatic Aristotelian/Thomist philosopher
Mortimer Adler. Alan Ryan summarizes it for us:
Hutchins was a devotee of teaching students timeless truths in general and those
uncovered by Thomas Aquinas in particular. Dewey thought that there were no such
truths to teach and that Hutchins would paralyze the minds of students by telling them
that every serious thought about the human condition had been produced by the end of
the thirteenth century. Hutchins thought Dewey wanted to throw the traditional
humanities into the street and replace them with modern and dubious social sciences.1
See Ryan’s John Dewey And the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W W Norton &
Company, 1995), p. 39.
1
1
Ryan goes on to identify the “minimal truth” of Hutchin’s accusation as having to do with
Dewey’s belief that recent philosophers have been overly inclined to study perennial questions of
academic tradition, as opposed to engaging with contemporary social problems.2 However, the
accusation that Dewey is somehow simply opposed to the humanities and to the significance of
taking history seriously is patently false, which Ryan for his part recognizes.3
My discussion here adds to the dialogue on such issues through discussion of Dewey’s
relationship with ancient philosophy, in which I not only demonstrate that those who would call
Dewey an a-historical thinker are simply wrong, but, more importantly, I shall try to indicate
some of the complexity of Dewey’s relationship with ancient philosophy, while also taking into
account some of the past scholarship related to this general issue.
More specifically, what is at issue here is that, at least upon a broad survey of them,
Dewey’s comments on the ancients often appear as constituting a significant tension. On more
than just a few occasions, Dewey offered outright polemics in which he condemned the lasting
influence of Greek philosophers as deleterious.4 (It is also worth taking note, as Frederick R.
Anderson has pointed out, that when Dewey speaks of “Greek philosophy” he is referring almost
exclusively to Athenian philosophy, and so not, for example, to the Epicureans, Stoics, or
2
John Dewey And the High Tide of American Liberalism, p. 39.
Ibid, pp. 39-40. This is not, of course, to say that the interest Dewey does have is one of being interested
in history simply for history’s sake alone. That would be far from the case, as he indicates, for example, in his 1909
article “History for the Educator”, in which (with regard to elementary education) he writes as follows:
“If history be regarded as just the record of the past, it is hard to see any grounds for claiming that it should
play any large role in the curriculum of elementary education. The past is the past, and the dead may be safely left to
bury its dead. There are too many urgent demands in the present, too many calls over the threshold of the future, to
permit the child to become deeply immersed in what is forever gone by.” [emphasis mine] The Middle Works of
John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), vol. 4, p. 192.
4
However, as Raymond D. Boisvert has noted, when engaged in such polemics, Dewey tends “…to deal
chiefly with types rather than with actual individuals…”, that is, with composite pictures “…reflecting the major
characteristics of a position without necessarily being exemplified in any single thinker.” See Boisert’s Dewey’s
Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), p. 70.
3
2
Skeptics.5) Indeed, there is within Greek philosophy a clear presence of the origin of what
Dewey famously called “the quest for certainty,” a quest that has led Western philosophy into
many dualisms, whether they be dualisms between reason and emotion, mind and nature,
individual and community, or between theory and practice. This can be seen, for example, with
reference to aspects of Plato which, in the words of biographer Steven C. Rockefeller, Dewey
criticizes “…because they lack the faith that every human being is capable of forming a true idea
of the ideal and striving to reach it.”6 Yet he also, and quite often, has very sympathetic things to
say about the Greeks. Especially striking, for example, is Dewey’s report of Plato as having been
and remaining “…my favorite philosophic reading.”7 Also, with regard to Aristotle, in addition
to a poem he wrote about the Greek master, Dewey draws heavily from Aristotle to construct his
own rich and expansive American philosophical naturalism.8 Further, as Richard Bernstein has
Anderson has written that “To Dewey, ‘Greek philosophy’ is, practically speaking, synonymous with
‘Athenian philosophy’; this in itself is a significant equation.” See “Dewey’s Experiment with Greek Philosophy” in
International Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 7, No. 1 (March 1967), p. 87.
6
John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991),
p. 156. By contrast, as Rockefeller notes, Dewey in 1903 praises Ralph Waldo Emerson, due in part to Emerson’s
reverence for the impulses and instincts of human nature, as the Philosopher of Democracy. (Ibid)
7
Dewey reveals this in his autobiographical sketch of his philosophical development – the 1930 essay
“From Absolutism to Experimentalism”. The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), vol. 5, p. 154. This essay was first published when Dewey was seventyone years of age, and so, even though Dewey would live just over another twenty years, we can take this remark
about Plato to be a “mature” statement. The essay as a whole is a personal articulation of how he gradually moved
farther away from his original form of Hegelianism, while also continuing to recognize a “…greater richness and
greater variety of insight in Hegel than in any other systematic philosopher [excluding Plato]…” Ibid.
Regarding the relationship between Dewey and Hegel, one is well advised to see James A. Good’s A
Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent Hegelian Deposit” in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Lexington
Books, 2006), in which Good argues, convincingly and contrary to traditional Dewey scholarship, that Dewey, until
the end, was always influenced by his reading of Hegel and the American Hegelians of St. Louis (aka the “St. Louis
Hegelians”).
8
The poem to which I refer (never intended by Dewey for publication) appears to be a kind of celebration
of Aristotle’s contemplative ideal. See “A Peripatetic’s Prayer” in The Poems of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977). Boydston provides a fascinating Introduction, in which she
tells the story of how these poems were discovered. See also Philip W. Jackson’s “John Dewey’s Poetry” in the
American Journal of Education Vol. 91, No. 1, November 1982, pp. 65-78.
5
3
noted, Aristotle and Dewey have conceptions of philosophy itself which are quite similar, with
both in their own ways conceiving of philosophy as practical wisdom.9
Not a lot of attention has been focused on this issue in Dewey, and it has been quite some
time since. I refer to three articles in particular: John Anton’s “John Dewey and Ancient
Philosophies” (1965), Frederick M. Anderson’s “Dewey’s Experiment with Greek Philosophy”
(1967) – which I have already mentioned – and Richard Betz’s “Dewey and Socrates” (1980).10 I
would like to proceed in this paper by articulating my understanding of the dimensions of this
tension, utilizing, where appropriate, some of the insights of the above scholars – among a few
others. I conclude with some brief remarks towards putting this tension into Deweyan
perspective.
Now, let us turn to some of the negative evaluation of Greek philosophy: if we somehow
lacked what is our Greek intellectual heritage, it seems, in Dewey’s view, that a whole host of
pernicious philosophical problems might well not have made any appearance on the
contemporary scene. Regarding Kant’s synthesis of empiricism and rationalism in the second
chapter of his 1920 Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey writes that “It is evident that this
development represents merely a transitional stage…”, having attempted to put new wine into
old bottles.11 Having tried to do so, this development failed to gain a liberated articulation of the
significance of knowledge’s power for directing and reshaping nature, for the voice of ancient
Greece remained itself powerful enough to strongly affect our modes of thought, and to constrain
John Dewey (New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1966), p. 7. It is worth noting that Dewey’s
appreciation for ancient philosophies also includes Epicureanism (although, as I have already indicated, this is a
tradition not referred to by Dewey when he speaks of “Greek philosophy”), itself a tradition of practical wisdom as
demonstrated by Epicurus, Lucretius, and the lesser known Philodemus – I intend to discuss this neglected thread in
a separate paper, particularly in relation to Parts Three and Four of Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1922).
10
Anton: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 25, No. 4 (June 1965); Anderson: International
Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 7, No. 1 (March 1967); Betz: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Vol. XVI,
No. 4 (Fall 1980).
11
The Middle Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1982), vol. 12, p. 108.
9
4
truly modern forces and goals.12 Moreover, we can identify the legacy of the ancient Greeks as
something retained by the modern philosophical tradition as a whole, with the moderns and
many of their contemporary successors retaining the classical view, as Dewey explains in The
Quest for Certainty (1929), “…that practical activity is an inferior sort of thing, necessary simply
because of man’s [sic] animal nature and the necessity for winning subsistence from the
environment…”13 This dichotomy of theory and practice is one of great significance and concern
for Dewey in his analysis and diagnosis of the development and contemporary state of
philosophy, a dichotomy he believes leads philosophical work into a kind of indifference or
irrelevance to life. This dualistic heritage has its root in Plato, who thought of his method of
reason as totally different in kind from any techne or “craft,” and Anton has pointed out that “An
essential part of the polemical Dewey is his insistence that the Greek emphasis on the cognitive
mode of experience was rooted in a leisure class theory.”14 Indeed, it seems fair to say that
ancient Greek metaphysics was influenced by the fact that so much of the practical work of
doing was denigrated due to its cultural association with the lower or slave class.15
In the first chapter of Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey reminds us of the contrast
Plato constantly draws: of the shoemaker being a judge of good shoes, but not of whether or
when one should wear shoes, or of the doctor as a good judger of health, but not of whether it is
Ibid. On the other hand, there is Dewey’s own reconstructive philosophical project, which he
distinguishes from this modern development when he immediately goes on to say as follows:
“Essential philosophic reconstruction represents an attempt to state these causes and results in a way freed from
incompatible inherited factors. It will regard intelligence not as the original shaper and final cause of things, but as
the purposeful energetic re-shaper of those phases of nature and life that obstruct social well-being. It esteems the
individual not as an exaggeratedly self-sufficient Ego which by some magic creates the world, but as the agent who
is responsible through initiative, inventiveness and intelligently directed labor for re-creating the world,
transforming it into an instrument and possession of intelligence.” Ibid.
13
The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1984), vol. 4, p. 41.
14
“John Dewey and Ancient Philosophies”, p. 479.
15
Ryan appears to agree: “A society in which the grinding hard work was done by slaves, or by a lower
class excluded from politics, was always in danger of associating thinking with high status and doing with low status
and thus of projecting its own snobberies into the universe and receiving them back as metaphysics.”
John Dewey And the High Tide of American Liberalism, p. 98.
12
5
better to have health or to die.16 For Plato, such knowledge is intrinsically inferior, and it
“…needs to be controlled by a higher kind of knowledge which will reveal ultimate ends and
purposes, and thus put and keep technical and mechanical knowledge in its proper place.”17
That is, as Dewey indicates, for Plato, the ideal philosopher is not just another kind of
craftsperson. Instead, Plato emphasizes the need for such a higher sort of knowledge, and so
does Aristotle, as Dewey makes clear in the Conclusion of his Human Nature and Conduct
(1922), where he chastises them both for having either “…set up a transcendental meaning and
reason, remote from present experience and opposed to it…”, or for having insisted on some
special type of meaning attainable only by modes of knowing inaccessible to most people and
the plurality of their lived experiences.18
With apparent reference to the logical positivist movement in the Introduction to his 1946
collection entitled Problems of Men (i.e., human problems), Dewey maintains that this ancient
conception of the absolute superiority of theory over practice is retained in twentieth-century
philosophy, which holds onto “…the notion that philosophy’s concern is with superior reality,
taking its cue in search for it, mainly from mathematics and quasi-mathematical
symbolisms…”19 According to Dewey, such contemporary philosophy systematically denies any
possibility of intelligent, meaningful concern with the social realms of human existence. He
writes that such philosophizing “…holds that the practical affairs of men [sic] which are of
highest and deepest significance are matters of values and valuations, and that therefore they are
16
The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 12, p. 88.
Ibid. See also The Quest for Certainty: “As Plato was given to pointing out, the physician knows how to
heal and the orator to persuade, but the ulterior knowledge of whether it is better for a man to be healed or to be
persuaded to the orator’s opinion remains unsettled. Here there appears the split between what are traditionally and
conventionally called the values of the baser arts and the higher values of the truly personal and humane arts.”
–The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 4, p. 214.
18
The Middle Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1983), vol. 14, p. 200.
19
The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1989), vol. 15, p. 158.
17
6
by their very nature incapable of intellectual adjudication…”, that is, of either condemnation or
justification upon rational grounds.20 As Dewey sees it, such contemporary philosophy has fully
retained the Greek view that theory is in every way greater and more excellent than all types of
practical concerns, “…the latter consisting of things that change and fluctuate in contrast with
the eternity of Being.”21 Yet such recent philosophizing actually “…goes, so to speak, the classic
doctrine one better.”22 The ancient Greek model maintained that the practical affairs of human
existence are at least kinds of knowledge, although, to be sure, vastly inferior to the higher
philosophical knowledge of theory. However, there are recent developments in philosophy
according to which “…moral affairs, concerned as they are with ‘intrinsic’ values, or ‘ends-inthemselves,’ are wholly outside the reach of any sort of knowledge whatever.”23 At any rate, we
see quite clearly Dewey’s identification of the root of this problem in ancient Greece.
Now for all of his energetic work at tracing various destructive dualisms back to their
Greek roots, Dewey also offers us a kind of sympathetic portrait of praise and affinity for ancient
voices. While our pernicious dualisms have ancient roots, Betz has reminded us that “…Dewey
and Socrates appear to be of the same mind…”, that is, with respect to their understandings of
20
The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. 159.
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid. Without explicitly naming names, Dewey then elaborates as follows:
“A distinguished member of this school of contemporary thought has recently written that ‘the actions of
men, in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world and human life, as to
what is good and evil.’ But he has also written that what men hold about ‘what is good and evil’ is wholly a matter
of sheer likes and dislikes. They, in turn, are so completely private and personal–in the terminology of philosophy so
‘subjective’–as to be incapable of judgment having ‘objective’ grounds. Likes and dislikes are immune to
modification by knowledge since they dwell in inaccessible privacy. Values that are ‘extrinsic’ or ‘instrumental’
may be rationally estimated. For they are only means; are not ends in any genuine sense. As means their efficacy
may be determined by methods that will stand scientific inspection. But the ‘ends’ they serve (ends which are truly
ends) are just matters of what groups, classes, sects, races, or whatever, happen irrationally to like or dislike.”
–The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. 159.
21
7
the nature of the philosophical enterprise.24 Also, as we already know, Dewey reports Plato as his
favorite philosophical reading, and in the same place Dewey remarks that he views himself as
within the Socratic/Platonic tradition in that he stands with “…the dramatic, restless, cooperatively inquiring Plato of the Dialogues…”, with “…the Plato whose highest flight of
metaphysics always terminated with a social and practical turn, and not to the artificial Plato
constructed by unimaginative commentators who treat him as the original university
professor.”25 Indeed, as a Socratic inquirer, Dewey understands philosophy as a powerful method
for advancing human transformation and growth. It is a kind of critical thinking applied to our
quest for wisdom, and he understands ancient philosophy as indicating a condition helpful for
this. I refer here to Dewey’s 1941 essay “The Objectivism-Subjectivism of Modern Philosophy”,
in which Dewey says that, as contrasted with the classical modern philosophical project, ancient
philosophy is naïve in the best sense of the term, “…using that word to designate a condition in
which the distinction between the subjective and the objective is not made.”26 That is, as Dewey
goes on to note, one might say that ancient philosophy involved a fusion of qualities that today
“Dewey and Socrates”, p. 332. It is worth noting Betz’s overall thesis that there is in Dewey an overall
ambivalence about Socrates, which, in Betz’s words, is as follows:
“…that Dewey’s writings present unresolved contradictions in their many treatments of Socrates: they are
contradictions both in Dewey’s intellectual appraisal of Socrates and in Dewey’s emotional regard for him. This
love-hate relationship or attraction-revulsion complex arises in the following way. Though Dewey almost never
hesitates to say what Socrates thought and did, Dewey must have experienced some indefiniteness about this, the
sort of indefiniteness which the traditional ‘Socratic problem’ (a phrase which I believe Dewey never mentions)
recognizes. Every Socratic scholar must supply something of his own to complete and make definite the incomplete
and indefinite historical Socrates. Dewey, like any other scholar, does this, but in doing it he alternates between two
opposed interests or betrays the existence of a troublesome, ambivalent interest among his feelings.” Ibid, p. 329. As
for my own assessment of Betz’s thesis, I confess to remaining, for now at least, in a state of undecided meditation
upon it.
25
The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, p. 155. In the same paragraph, Dewey adds that “…I am unable
to find in him [Plato] that all-comprehensive and overriding system which later interpretation has, as it seems to me,
conferred upon him as a dubious boon.” Ibid, pp. 154-155.
26
The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1988), vol. 14, pp. 192-193. Dewey adds the following: “Since naivete suggests freshness and directness of
approach, due to absence of artificial sophistication, one may apply the word “naïve” eulogistically to Greek
philosophy.” Ibid.
24
8
we tend to distinguish between, that is, if it were not the case that such fusion is suggestive of
antecedent differences that are in fact happily lacking in the Greek attitude.27
Moreover, in the Introduction to Problems of Men, Dewey associates himself with
Socrates and calls for the activity of philosophy to return to the Socratic vision, writing that
“Present day philosophy cannot desire a better work than to engage in the act of midwifery that
was assigned to it by Socrates twenty-five hundred years ago.”28 Pronouncements such as this
from Dewey are no doubt driven, as Anderson has emphasized, at least as much by his well
known impatience with contemporary philosophy as by his admiration for Socrates or Plato.29 At
any rate, while the above comment was written about six years before Dewey’s death, this
general theme runs back at least thirty years earlier in Dewey’s career.30
In the eleventh and final essay of his 1910 The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,
Dewey closes with a striking characterization of his own philosophy as a sequel to Socrates’
dictum “…that ‘an unexamined life is not one fit to be led…’”31 Similarly, in the decade
following, Dewey characterizes himself as part of a reawakening of the Greek tradition. I refer
here to the reply Dewy is reported to have given to some Columbia University graduate students
in the 1915/1916 school-year. Their question is purported to have been about how Dewey would
classify himself as a philosopher, to which Dewey is said to have swiftly responded that the
answer is easy – he readily classified himself as part of a revival of Greek Philosophy, one in
which, as Betz has said, Socrates is very much a friend of Dewey in that both conceive of
27
The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, p. 193.
The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. 169.
29
“Dewey’s Experiment with Greek Philosophy”, pp. 90-91.
30
I will not be surprised, upon my further exploration, to discover that Dewey’s professions of alliance
with the Socratic vision begin earlier than this – I suspect that they do.
31
proper citation forthcoming
28
9
philosophy as a cultural criticism necessary for “…the re-examination of traditional values.”32 In
terms of when it began (first half of the twentieth-century), this revival, as Anton has noted,
coincided and is indebted to, the new philological work producing better editions of Greek
philosophy, the influence exerted by Darwinian evolutionary theory on philosophy, the various
post-Hegelian studies dealing with cultural/intellectual history, and the emphasis upon language
and classical studies in the growing American graduate programs of the time.33
During this same period of time as Dewey’s 1916 remark to his Columbia students, near
the beginning of his German Philosophy and Politics (1915), we find Dewey openly expressing
a kind of admiration for Plato and the Republic. He holds, despite the mystical and
transcendental coloring of his philosophy, that Plato’s work is among the great illustrations
“…of the mutual relationship of philosophy and practical social affairs…”, a mutual relationship
Dewey himself of course strived to cultivate.34 Further, in the contemporaneous work Schools of
To-Morrow (1915), Dewey approvingly credits Plato as unique among the ancients in his having
given attention to the topic of play with respect to philosophy of education.35
See Walter B. Veazie’s “John Dewey and the Revival of Greek Philosophy” in University of Colorado
Studies, Series in Philosophy, no. 2 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1961), p. 3. Veazie, a student of Dewey,
frames his reminiscences of Dewey in terms of Dewey’s remark (as his title indicates) ; Betz, “Dewey and
Socrates”, p. 329.
33
See Anton’s American Naturalism and Greek Philosophy (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2005),
p. 60.
34
The Middle Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1979), vol. 8, p. 144.
35
The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 8, p. 275. Here Dewey mentions Plato in the same breath as
German philosopher of education Friedrich Froebel (widely credited for developing the concept of kinder-garten –
“children’s garden”), whom Dewey holds to be unique among the moderns for the same reason.
In his contribution on “Character” to the 1911 Macmillan A Cyclopedia of Education, Dewey also
approvingly cites Plato as recognizing the significance of early childhood: “…Plato stands almost alone, till the
eighteenth century, in his recognition of the fundamental importance of the very early years of life, before technical
skill and conscious reasoning are possible.” The Middle Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), vol. 6, p. 386. In this way Plato can be seen as an ancient predecessor to
Froebel.
32
10
It is, of course, only ten years later that Dewey publishes Experience and Nature (1925),
and a special dimension of that work is Dewey’s frequent references to Greek philosophy. He
employs the Greeks as part of the articulation of his own naturalistic metaphysics or, as Dewey
also calls it, empirical naturalism.36 In attempting to state the experiential implications for
philosophy and for how, in terms of lived experience, to understand nature, Dewey utilizes
approaches and insights of the Greeks which allows him to transcend many of the methods and
assumptions of modern philosophy (in particular, mind/body dualism). In this, there are many
convergences and continuities with Aristotle.
As Dewey’s student John Herman Randall, Jr., recognized, for Dewey, similar to
Aristotle, particulars (what Dewey calls “situations”) are what constitute the real world, with the
importance of universals being that they make up the meaning of and relations between such
particulars.37 Also, following the general approach of Aristotelian naturalism, for Dewey, the
work of metaphysics complements and is continuous with empirical inquiry, although it moves
beyond the work of any singular science. The task is one of reflecting upon the varieties of topics
examined by the sciences and of identifying the aspects of things that are irreducible and
universal, aspects of reality which Dewey refers to as the generic traits of existence, which, as
Thomas Alexander points out, is a theory owing quite a bit to Dewey’s Columbia colleague
36
The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1981), vol. 1, p. 4.
37
See Randall’s Nature and Historical Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 42. It
is uncontroversial to say that Randall was one of Dewey’s (and Frederick Woodbridge’s) greatest students, and he
offered a decidedly pragmatist reading of Aristotle, in, e.g., his Aristotle (New York: Columbia University Press,
1960).
However, as Thomas M. Alexander has commented, we should clarify that “Unlike Aristotle’s ousiai,
however, Dewey’s situations have no fixed or essential endstate toward which they are heading.”–John Dewey’s
Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1987), p. 114. Dewey’s approach to metaphysics is a turning away from such fixed essences. Still, the similarity is
remarkable. See also John P. Anton’s “Randall’s Interpretation of Greek Philosophy” in Naturalism and Historical
Understanding: Essays on the Philosophy of John Herman Randall, Jr., ed. Anton (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1967), pp. 21-22.
11
Frederick Woodbridge.38 Such a metaphysics is an empirical inquiry into what lived experience
reveals about the common (“generic”) characteristics of the diverse number of those things we
experience, and this being the case, there is no part of human experience deemed irrelevant to
such an understanding of nature’s metaphysical dimension.39
Also, in his later article “Anti-Naturalism in Extremis” (1943), Dewey opens by clearly
and explicitly identifying Aristotle as an ancient representative of the sort of philosophical
naturalism that Dewey himself is championing.40 For Aristotle, human beings are part of the
natural order of the world and not somehow removed from it, and this is certainly the case for
Dewey as well. As Dewey points out, Aristotle is the first real (post-Socratic) historical instance
of naturalism, into which only later on a dogmatic supernaturalism is injected, such that the
dominant trend in philosophy later became very much anti-naturalistic, that is, until relatively
recently in history.41
Further, Dewey, earlier in his career, turns to Aristotle for help in formulating his ethics.
Aristotle helps enable Dewey to develop a theory of the moral self which does not merely take
into account the lives of others, but a theory according to which the moral self is dependent upon
The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, p. 52 ; see Chapter 3 (section III.) of Alexander (John Dewey’s
Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature).
39
Examples of such generic traits of existence include stability and precariousness, discreteness and
continuity, the varying and the repetitious, and the finished and the incomplete. Dewey says that “If we trust to the
evidence of experienced things, these traits, and the modes and tempos of their interaction with each other, are
fundamental features of natural existence.” The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, pp. 66-67.
40
The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. 46. In this rather aggressive article attacking Kant and
German idealism, Thomists, and others, Dewey characterizes naturalism in the following way:
“The fact of the case is that naturalism finds the values in question, the worth and dignity of men and women,
founded in human nature itself, in the connections, actual and potential, of human beings with one another in their
natural social relationships. Not only that, but it is ready at any time to maintain the thesis that a foundation within
man [sic] and nature is a much sounder one than is one alleged to exist outside the constitution of man [sic] and
nature.” (Ibid, p. 54)
That is, such a (Deweyan) naturalist looks to the human realm itself in order to understand any form of
value. Human experience of whatever kind is understandable in such natural terms.
41
The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 15, p. 46.
38
12
others for its very existence itself.42 In Human Nature and Conduct, for example, he cites
agreement with Aristotle, writing that, “…as Aristotle remarked, the untutored moral perceptions
of a good man [sic] are usually trustworthy, those of a bad character, not.”43 Dewey agrees with
Aristotle that it is the quality of one’s moral character which constitutes the only real guarantee
of moral deliberation being sufficiently impartial, just, and wise.
There are, of course, significant points of divergence as well, such as Dewey’s distinction
between Aristotle’s somewhat flat characterization of habit as simply the repetition of similar
activities versus Dewey’s more robust understanding of habit (in the second chapter of Human
Nature and Conduct) as “…an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to
particular acts except as, under special conditions, these express a way of behaving…”, which
involve “…special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing
predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts.”44 There is also Dewey’s
acceptance of Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the tendency of organisms to adapt which makes
for a sharp contrast to the Greek master. This is because while both found their views about
human flourishing and the virtues upon a biological understanding of humans, and while Dewey
admires Aristotle for this, Dewey operates within a framework of biological flux, whereas
Aristotle, it is well known, holds species to be unchanging. Moreover, Dewey diverges in yet
other ways from Aristotle: for example, in The Quest for Certainty, Dewey classifies Aristotle as
This point has been well articulated, most recently, by Nicholas O. Pagan, in “Configuring the Moral
Self: Aristotle and Dewey” in Foundations of Science Vol. 13, Issue 3/4 (Sept. 2008), pp. 239-250.
43
The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, p. 26 [emphasis mine] – although Dewey adds that Aristotle
“…should have added that the influence of social custom as well as personal habit has to be taken into account in
estimating who is the good man [sic] and the good judge.” Ibid. Also, significantly earlier, in his 1894/1895 “The
Theory of Emotion”, Dewey writes (in a footnote referring to his first book, the 1887 Psychology) as follows:
“In my Psychology…it is laid down, quite schematically, that feeling is the internalizing of activity or will.
There is nothing novel in the doctrine; in a way it goes back to Plato and Aristotle [emphasis mine].” The Early
Works of John Dewey, vol. 4, p. 171.
44
Nicomachean Ethics, Book II (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), p. 19 ;
The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, p. 32. Thanks to Aaron Massecar (U. of Guelph) for past discussion of
the difference of their two characterizations of habit.
42
13
being among those representatives of what Dewey disapprovingly calls the spectator theory of
knowledge.45
So, while greatly influenced by Aristotle and Athenian philosophy more generally,
Dewey does not simply accept all of Aristotle uncritically. Had he done that, of course, we
would likely not ever talk about Dewey as offering much in the way of original contributions to
the philosophical conversation of our over two-thousand-year-old Western philosophical culture.
Rather, as we have seen, Dewey also criticizes Aristotle as well – and not only Aristotle, but also
elements from Plato, as I have pointed out. He simultaneously applauds and criticizes the
ancients.
In terms of the criticism, it would not be enough to simply say that Dewey criticizes the
tendency to denigrate practical activity. Rather, he is criticizing and rejecting the whole range of
the dichotomy between theory and practice as manifested historically in ancient philosophy. The
biggest reason for this is that it has contributed to the tendencies today for philosophy to exist as
irrelevant to lived human concerns and problems, whether we find that with respect to the logical
positivism encountered by Dewey during parts of the first half of the twentieth-century, or, for
that matter, with respect to some of the more recent trends in philosophy.
On the other hand, Dewey finds more in the ancients to applaud than one might initially
guess. I have tried to indicate some of what he finds praiseworthy. Dewey is influenced by and
applauds Plato and Aristotle, as he puts it in the Conclusion of Human Nature and Conduct, for
having “…found the good in meanings belonging to a conscious life, a life of reason, not in
45
By “spectator theory of knowledge,” Dewey refers to the notion that the knower is passive before a fixed
or antecedent object. Dewey also refers to such a view as a photograph theory of knowing (The Later Works of John
Dewey, vol. 4, p. 172), and he thinks that much of modern philosophy embodies this spectator theory. For an
argument that Dewey was wrong to include Aristotle as an early “spectator theorist,” see John MacPartland’s
“Aristotle and the Spectator Theory of Knowledge” in the Journal of Philosophy Vol. 42, No. 11, May 24, 1945,
pp. 291-293.
14
external achievement...”, for having “…exalted the place of intelligence in securing fulfillment
of conscious life.”46 As such, Greek philosophy is to be praised for having avoided subordinating
our conscious lives to some external obedience, and for having avoided conceiving excellence as
differing from the excellence of living.47
Now, with all of this in mind, I do not yet have my own systematic argument for best
explaining Dewey’s seeming ambivalence, but it is clear to me that Dewey’s relationship with
ancient philosophy is properly viewed within the context of his tendency to articulate his own
positions dialectically, that is, in conversation with the history of philosophy. At any rate, if
Dewey is part of the revival of Greek philosophy, then the revival is to be understood, to use
Dewey’s term, as a reconstruction of the (incomplete) truths he recognizes in the Greeks. When
he turns to philosophy’s past, it is, of course, never for appreciating it merely for whatever its
intrinsic value. The purpose, rather, is to employ it. The orientation of Dewey toward the history
of philosophy, and most certainly including ancient Greek philosophy, is an instrumental one. To
be clear, this should not be taken as devaluing the importance of history, but instead as
intensifying it. Within the context of such intensification, perhaps the tension I have described in
Dewey does not have to be thought of as ambivalence, but rather as a function of his work of
philosophical reconstruction. At any rate, it should not surprise us that a philosopher of Dewey’s
ambition and scope would have rather nuanced views of the ancients with whom he has more
contact and for whom he has more respect than the once president of the University of Chicago
would believe.48
46
The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, p. 200.
Ibid.
48
For helpful suggestions, questions, and relevant discussion, I thank Tom Alexander, Angela Andrews,
Ann Clark, George Trey, Megan Zwart, and Gabriel Torres.
47
15