John Dewey was one of the most influential philosophers to come out of the then-rising United States. Specifically, he lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and was a professor at a number of universities. He wrote on a number of topics, but is best remembered for his writings on philosophy. In particular, he commented on education, and believed that he was “revolutionizing” all of American education with his philosophy.
John Dewey was part of a philosophical school called “pragmatism.” That is to say, he was the heir to other American philosophers like William James and Charles Sanders Pierce. But some have found it a bit strange to hear the words “pragmatic” and “philosophy” uttered in the same sentence. This may be a little harsh on philosophy, but I nonetheless found the term “pragmatism” to be ironic in this context. This is because, to me, the philosophy didn’t seem very pragmatic. Dewey actually argued that his system was the first system to be truly “empirical,” and thus rejected all prior philosophers as “un-empirical.” But to me, the prior philosophers – such as Aristotle, John Locke, and David Hume – seemed far more empirical than John Dewey ever was. In his attacks on their empiricism, he offered no evidence to support his charges, and made the lack of evidence into a distinguishing feature of his philosophy.
John Dewey
John Dewey spent a lot of time attacking the status quo. Civilization, he said, was failing on nearly all fronts. For the first half of this audiobook, I had a hard time figuring out where Dewey was coming from. He seemed to me to be a master of vague generalities, of unsubstantiated charges against existing institutions. As the audiobook went on, I started to realize where he was coming from: he was a strong critic of capitalism. To my knowledge, he never admitted to being a Marxist, and was criticized by those who called themselves “Marxists.” Indeed, they accused him of perpetuating “bourgeois” ideas, which seems to be a vague (yet all-encompassing) term for anything that Marxists dislike. But the term “Marxist” nonetheless seems to fit him, because he considered capitalism to be “fundamentally corrupt” (to paraphrase what he said). Thus, he seems to be indistinguishable from a Marxist. This was one of my criticisms of Dewey.
John Dewey
He also had ideas that would today be called “postmodernist.” That is to say, he was skeptical of notions of absolute or objective truth, and believed that all truths (including moral truths) are relative. In this doctrine, he was preceded by many others, such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, this idea can be traced back to Protagoras’s statement that “Man is the measure of all things.” This is another of my criticisms of Dewey. He also appears to have been a bit skeptical of religion, much like Charles Sanders Pierce – one of his predecessors in the philosophy of “pragmatism.” His ideas on these (and other) subjects can be a bit hard to follow, partly because his writing style was somewhat unclear. He used more words than was necessary (particularly big words), and he could hardly be accused of being a great stylist. Indeed, at times, his writings seemed to border on word salad – “the self-evident made horrifying, the obvious in terms of the staggering,” to paraphrase something that H. L. Mencken said about a similar thinker from the same general era.
John Dewey
I went into this audiobook with an open mind, hoping to hear some innovative ideas about the philosophy of science. Indeed, my prior experience with the previous pragmatic philosophers had me expecting similar contributions from him. I’m almost tempted to say that Dewey had many “true and original ideas,” but that his true ideas were not original, and that his original ideas were not true (to paraphrase something that I once heard). But I am skeptical that he had any original contributions in the first place, even of the bad kind. To me, it seems like the same old nonsense peddled by previous generations, claiming “originality” for empirical ideas that had actually been around since Aristotle. For a philosophy calling itself “pragmatism,” it seemed rather un-pragmatic, and seemed more like a gigantic step backwards. But I’m still glad that I listened to this audiobook despite these disagreements with its presentation. My main criticism was that they omitted a full biography of John Dewey – instead focusing entirely on his ideas. But his ideas are still worthy of note, even when they don’t make much sense.
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Part of an audiobook series
The Giants of Philosophy
John Dewey
Others to be covered later
Others to be covered later
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