Internal Critque of Dewey (Draft 2)

 

The Limits of the Transactional Toolbox

An Internal Pragmatist Critique of John Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience

Draft 2 — for markup. Bracketed bold items are placeholders to check against the sources.

Introduction: The Visionary Legacy of a Pragmatist Giant

To offer an internal critique of John Dewey is to engage with one of the most imagi- native, generous, and staggeringly influential system-builders of the twentieth cen- tury. Dewey’s philosophy was never a cloistered academic exercise; it was a vibrant, emancipation-focused architecture that animated democratic struggles across the globe. His vision directly nourished the May Fourth reformers in China, the Taishō liberals and internationalists in Japan who were living on borrowed time, and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as he chiseled an anti-caste framework into the soul of the Indian Constitution. In the West, his legacy runs directly through the sociological imagina- tion of C. Wright Mills, the pragmatic realism of Hilary Putnam, the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty, the prophetic radicalism of Cornel West, and the brilliant falli- bilism of Sidney Morgenbesser. His insights into human sociality also prefigured major contemporary developments in cognitive science—enactivism, the extended mind, and the biosocial theory of normativity and agency cashed out by Michael Tomasello in his empirical extensions of George Herbert Mead.1

As a longtime admirer of Dewey, I do not enter his house as a hostile demolition- ist, but as a grateful inheritor of a profound philosophical wisdom. Yet within con- temporary scholarship one typically encounters either title-clearing assaults on the pragmatist project or uncritical, hagiographic devotion. This paper seeks to chart a third path: a respectful, honest, internal critique of Dewey’s ontology of nature and his theory of experience. I argue that Dewey’s deeply held post-Enlightenment tri- umphalism and his unacknowledged metaphysical architecture frequently collide with his best philosophical impulses as a fallibilist empiricist.

1See especially Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

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The collision turns on two words, inquiry and experience, which Dewey uses in two registers. In the first, disciplined register, inquiry is a fallible method of obser- vation, experiment, record, and controlled reflection, answerable to consequences. In the second, expansive register, the same vocabulary swells into a metaphysics in which experience opens onto “the enduring and comprehending whole,” and ide- als carry an authority no method certifies. Dewey moves between these registers, often within a few pages, without marking the transition. When history failed to yield the democratic victories he hoped for, he stretched his terms into an elastic

“semantic shell game,” overreaching his own standard of warranted assertibility to manufacture a cosmic security net his empirical toolbox could not support.

Section I: The Unconscious Blueprint — The Transactional Monism of Process

To understand the subterranean plumbing of Dewey’s mature philosophy, we must look to his most candid private reflections. In his 1915 correspondence with Scud- der Klyce, Dewey explicitly wrestles with the categories of monism and pluralism. Klyce pushed Dewey to accept a form of monism, and Dewey vocally resisted, declaring himself a “confirmed infinite pluralist.”2 To Dewey, “monism” was a dirty word, synonymous with the static, pre-established harmonies of the Absolute Idealism (Bradley, Royce) he had spent his early career escaping. He rejected it to preserve the reality of time, genuine loss, open-ended chance, and the necessity of human struggle.

Yet in attempting “to make language do what it won’t do,” Dewey disclosed the metaphysical engine driving his system: “The ‘one’ is always pluralizing and recovering its diversities before they escape, or become plural and thereby keeping itself going.”3 This is not a radical, fragmented pluralism; it is a dynamic, self- stabilizing holistic system—what I shall call a transactional monism of process.4

2John Dewey to Scudder Klyce, [date], 1915, Scudder Klyce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; quoted in Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 326. The letters are also available in The Correspon- dence of John Dewey, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Charlottesville, VA: InteLex), [letter no.]. Klyce pub- lished his side of the exchange as Dewey’s Suppressed Psychology (Winchester, MA: S. Klyce, 1928).

3Dewey to Klyce, [date], 1915; quoted in Rockefeller, John Dewey, 327.
4“Transaction” is Dewey’s late term of art, systematized in John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Know-

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Dewey collapsed the dualism of mind and matter into a single, integrated event: the nature–experience transaction. Because experience is not a subjective ghost locked “in our heads” but a transaction with an environment mediated by culture, Dewey can argue that ideals are extra-individual reals: culturally supplied, natural forces. Crucially, a naturalized teleology enters this process. In the same letter Dewey proposes to use “God” pluralistically, “to denote those forces which at a given time and place are actually working for the better.”5 He then adds: “I admit that any (relative) falsity acted upon tends, in time, to correct itself—to expose itself and discover the truth. In that sense the whole might be called true or good, but even

here it is the pluralistic interaction rather than the whole which works.”6
The final clause is a hedge, and it deserves to be quoted rather than cut. But notice what the hedge accomplishes. Dewey does not withdraw the self-correcting

tendency; he relocates it from the whole into the interactions. The bias toward cor- rection remains, distributed through the process rather than vested in a totality. Rockefeller’s gloss is apt: if the universe as a whole is not to be called good or God, it is nonetheless worthy of natural piety, because it includes “a process making for progress.”7 This is Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung) naturalized and poured into the physical world. For Hegel, Spirit uses history to achieve conceptual clarity; for Dewey, the nature–experience continuum uses human biosocial agents to correct its own internal blockages. He built an autotelic escalator into nature itself, assum- ing that the transactional continuum has an immanent bias toward self-correction and growth. And the very definition of God as forces “working for the better” pre- supposes a criterion of better that Dewey nowhere supplies—not in the Klyce letters, not in A Common Faith, not in the closing pages of Human Nature and Conduct, and not in Art as Experience, precisely the texts in which the criterion is most needed.

The point becomes explicit on a single, load-bearing page of A Common Faith. Dewey does not deny that ideals exist, nor that they carry authority:

What I have been objecting to, I repeat, is not the idea that ideals are linked

ing and the Known (1949), LW 16. I apply it retrospectively to name a structure already present in the 1915 letters, not to claim that Dewey had the term in hand.

5Dewey to Klyce, [date], 1915; quoted in Rockefeller, John Dewey, 328. Rockefeller rightly observes that this is the idea of God Dewey first endorsed publicly in A Common Faith (1934).

6Dewey to Klyce, [date], 1915; quoted in Rockefeller, John Dewey, 328–29. 7Rockefeller, John Dewey, 329. The phrase is Rockefeller’s summary, not Dewey’s.

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with existence and that they themselves exist, through human embodiment, as forces, but the idea that their authority and value depend upon some prior complete embodiment—as if the efforts of human beings in behalf of justice, or knowledge, or beauty, depended for their effectiveness and validity upon assurance that they already existed in some supernal region where criminals are humanely treated, where there is no serfdom or slavery, where all facts and truths are already discovered and possessed, and all beauty is eternally displayed in actualized form.8

What Dewey rejects, then, is one account of where the authority of ideals comes from. His own account follows immediately:

The aims and ideals that move us are generated through imagination. But they are not made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and social experience. The locomotive did not exist before Stevenson, nor the telegraph before the time of Morse. But the conditions for their existence were there in physical material and energies and in human ca- pacity. Imagination seized hold upon the idea of a rearrangement of existing things that would evolve new objects. The same thing is true of a painter, a musician, a poet, a philanthropist, a moral prophet. The new vision does not arise out of nothing, but emerges through seeing, in terms of possibilities, that is, of imagination, old things in new relations serving a new end which the new end aids in creating.9

The analogy conceals a decisive asymmetry, and the passage itself displays it. Only the engineers receive named examples, because only their success is certified by a test indifferent to anyone’s preferences: the locomotive runs or it does not. The painter, poet, philanthropist, and moral prophet receive no examples at all. And the list ascends in claimed authority as it descends in testability. The painter’s new vision binds no one; the engineer’s binds only through physics; the moral prophet claims authority over everyone’s conduct. Dewey’s argument requires the author- ity of the last item but borrows its support from the testability of the first. Had he named his prophets, the obvious candidates—Amos, Isaiah—would have been figures whose authority was claimed from precisely the supernal source he rejects.

Nothing comparable to the running locomotive certifies that a moral or political ideal has locked onto a possibility that is also good. Functional success will not do:

8John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 49; LW 9:[p.]. All refer- ences to A Common Faith are to the Yale edition. [Verify wording of both p. 49 passages against the text.]

9Dewey, A Common Faith, 49.

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ideologies of national cohesion—the kokutai ideology of imperial Japan is a case in point—“ran” very well. Dewey therefore needs a domain of real, unactualized, authoritative possibilities that sorts right imaginings from wrong ones, democratic pluralism from talking snakes. That domain is neither actual nor invented, and it binds. It is hard to see how it differs from the “supernal region” he rejects, except by the subtraction of completeness.

Section II: The Fuzzy Target and the Post-Enlightenment Triumphal Roll

This smuggled Hegelian engine comes into full view when we turn to the polemical structure of A Common Faith. Throughout the text, Dewey rails against “the super- natural,” yet he never provides a rigorous definition of the domain he is attempting to eviscerate. Instead, he relies on normatively loaded binaries—primitive versus civilized, superstition versus science—performing a semantic shell game that pro- tects his own expansive metaphysics from the very criteria he levels at religion.

Early in the book, Dewey performs a classic comparative-religion liquidation of “unseen powers.” He lists Melanesian mana, the kami of “primitive Shintoism,” the African fetish, Christian Providence, and the Muslim will of Allah, arguing that because these conceptions are radically incompatible, they reduce to a meaningless common denominator.10 The irony is that Dewey executes this clearance of histor- ical faiths to make room for his own entry on the list: the unseen power of unac- tualized ideals that carry authority over us. Section I has shown what that power consists in—a domain of authoritative possibilities that no inquiry certifies. Why should this conception of moral gravity be exempt from the historical provincialism he uses to dismiss kami or Providence?

The answer lies in the triumphal roll that opens his second chapter. Dewey en- lists the contemporary university catalog to declare a total revolution in intellectual authority:

Biology has revolutionized conceptions of soul and mind.... Anthropology, history and literary criticism have furnished a radically different version of

10Dewey, A Common Faith, 4.

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the historic events and personages upon which Christian religions have built. Psychology is already opening to us natural explanations of phenomena so extraordinary that once their supernatural origin was, so to say, the natural explanation.11

He then draws the moral: “the new methods of inquiry and reflection have become for the educated man today the final arbiter of all questions of fact, existence, and intellectual assent. Nothing less than a revolution in the ‘seat of intellectual author- ity’ has taken place.”12

To this overreach the only honest fallibilist response is skepticism. Dewey is car- ried away by the enthusiastic zeitgeist of his era. Biology may have revolutionized conceptions of the soul, but a revision of conceptions is not a verdict on existence, and no empirical instrument is structurally equipped to deliver such a verdict about an immaterial construct. Anthropology, history, and literary criticism are interpre- tive, hermeneutic disciplines, not laboratories of repeatable vetoes; to enlist them, alongside experimental science, as co-authors of a single “final arbiter” of fact and existence is a staggering inflation. Dewey stretches “inquiry” so wide that it ceases to be a method and becomes an ideology: a narrow method of observation, experi- ment, and record is handed unlimited jurisdiction.13

Set the two uses of “authority” side by side and the two registers stand exposed in Dewey’s own words. On page 39, inquiry is the sole seat of intellectual authority. On page 49, ideals possess an authority grounded in possibilities that no inquiry certifies. The slide between them is not confined to A Common Faith; it runs through the closing pages of Human Nature and Conduct, where a discussion of social pres- sure and the urgent need for “science” crescendos, within four pages, into a con- sciousness of “the enduring and comprehending whole” in whose presence “we put off mortality and live in the universal.”14

11Dewey, A Common Faith, 31. [Check this passage against the text, including the ellipsis.]

12Dewey, A Common Faith, 39.

13For Dewey in his most austere methodological register, close in tone to the logical empiricism of the series in which it appeared, see Theory of Valuation, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 2, no. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); LW 13:189–251.

14John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt, 1922), 327–31; MW 14:[pp.]. The passage moves from the claim that social relations “cannot be understood and utilized when the mind is left to itself to work without the aid of science” to the assertion that “even in the midst of conflict, struggle and defeat a consciousness is possible of the enduring and comprehending whole,” and that “within the flickering inconsequential acts of separate selves dwells a sense of the whole which claims and dignifies them.” [Verify quotations against the text.]

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Section III: The Flaw of the Unequivocal Verdict

By establishing a scientific monopoly on “truth,” Dewey traps his own political and moral philosophy in an impossible corner. If the only road to truth requires obser- vation, record, and controlled reflection, then his preference for communitarian democracy over alternative regimes cannot be validated as a truth in that sense— and the authority he claims for it must come from the other register.

To see this limit, we can employ a distinction about how human reason-giving actually operates. As Hilary Putnam rightly argued, our everyday lives are full of “thick concepts” in which facts and values are entangled.15 Within a shared socio-linguistic matrix, we can resolve spatio-temporal questions quickly: “There is a restaurant operating on the corner of First Avenue and Tenth Street.” If we share the same language and cultural coordinates, we can walk there and establish a clean True/False verdict. We can even engage in rational discourse about value, debating what makes a dish tasty or an action virtuous by citing salt content or historical precedent. But none of this delivers an unequivocal, cross-cultural verdict of the kind the restaurant question admits.

People sharing the same language and historical records will continue to ar- gue for decades or centuries about the virtues of democracy. The “hard stuff” of experience does not deliver a singular veto in politics the way it does in thermody- namics. Dewey himself insists that there are “enormous differences of better and worse in the quality of what is social”;16 the question is what tells us which is which. The problem is not that nature is “indifferent”—a characterization that reifies na- ture into a monolithic canvas possessing an affective posture. Rather, the problem is what nature is not: it is not a unified, singular system, and it is not a waiting repository of ideals designed to correct its own blockages and privilege particular democratic scripts. Localized instances of human nurture are real parts of the nat- ural world—found in families, neighborhoods, and texts—but they do not justify a grander cosmic extrapolation. A genuine, radical pluralism recognizes that nature is fractured all the way down. Even under the single roof of a nurturant family, one might find a Deweyan cousin and a Communist uncle living together. Their

15Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

16Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, [p.]; MW 14:[p.]. 7

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ultimate value systems are irreconcilable, and no natural harmony or objective lab- oratory exists to sublate their conflict into a unified whole.

Section IV: The Experimental Runway Runs Out

When history refused to ride his progressive escalator, the collision between Dewey’s two registers forced a defensive retreat. We see it in his 1939 address, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” delivered as fascist and Stalinist state machin- ery demonstrated its terrifying efficacy. Here, at the point where justification was most needed, Dewey did not adjust his hypothesis like a laboratory scientist. He substituted the language of loyalty:

Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished. I have been accused more than once and from opposed quarters of an undue, a utopian, faith in the possibilities of intelligence and in education as a correlate of intelligence. At all events, I did not invent this faith. I acquired it from my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit.... I am willing to leave to upholders of totalitarian states of the right and the left the view that faith in the capacities of intelligence is utopian. For the faith is so deeply embedded in the methods which are intrinsic to democracy that when a professed democrat denies the faith he convicts himself of treachery to his profession.17

Consider the logical structure. The faith is made definitional of being a demo- crat; doubt about it is therefore not a hypothesis to be weighed but a betrayal. Dewey names no one, but the best-known critics who had charged him with utopi- anism, Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr, were both professed democrats.18 The passage leaves them nowhere to stand: as democrats who doubt the faith, they

17John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939), LW 14:227. First published in John Dewey and the Promise of America, Progressive Education Booklet no. 14 (Columbus, OH: Amer- ican Education Press, 1939). Quoted in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 534; see also “John Dewey Responds,” in John Dewey at Ninety, ed. Harry W. Laidler (New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1950). [Restore the sentences elided after “democratic spirit” from LW 14:227.]

18Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922) and The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925); Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scrib- ner’s, 1932).

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stand convicted of treachery; as critics who call it utopian, they share the view of to- talitarians. The claim is protected by definition rather than tested—the opposite of fallibilism, and a defensive circle drawn around a theory under attack from several quarters.

This is not to say that Dewey ignored his critics. He answered Lippmann at length in The Public and Its Problems,19 and much of that answer remains persuasive. A charitable reader will also note that the sentences elided above tie the faith to free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication, so that the “treachery” might be read as a performative contradiction: one cannot defend free communication while denying that people can judge what is communicated. But Lippmann himself is the counterexample. He defended free inquiry and free expression while doubting the public’s competence on complex questions. Democratic methods can be defended without Dewey’s faith—through fallibilism about elites, or as the least bad of the available arrangements. The methods do not presuppose the faith, and the defini- tional move conceals exactly that alternative. The dichotomy is false, not merely ungenerous.

Niebuhr’s challenge cut deeper. He warned that collective egoism and raw power could not simply be educated away, and though his own theological po- sition carried its own problems, he exposed a real blind spot: Dewey had great difficulty writing about irretrievable loss and genuine tragedy. Dewey did not dis- miss Niebuhr with a label, but he never framed a convincing answer to the claim that some losses are uncompensated and some destructive human traits are not smoothed away by a process that makes for progress. His impulse was toward a secularized, naturalized theodicy. The essay closes on the same ontology that un- derwrote page 49: to treat democracy as a way of personal life, Dewey writes, is to realize that it is “a moral ideal and so far as it becomes a fact is a moral fact.”20 The political faith rests on the same faith in authoritative possibilities as the meta- physics. At this point the fallibilist empiricist speaks in the idiom of creedal loyalty.

19John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927); LW 2:235–372. 20Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” LW 14:228.

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Conclusion: Shifting from Active Idealism to Reverent Coping

In A Common Faith, Dewey explains that he wants to keep the words “God” and “the divine” to name the active relation between the ideal and the actual, because such a usage “protects man from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair ordefiance.”21 Herejectsmilitantatheismbecausehecannotstomachauniversein which nature is negligent of human values. He landed not far from Spinoza, except that nature for Dewey was not a set of determinate geometric principles but a field

of plastic potentialities bridging the ideal and the actual through intelligent effort. Yet without his naturalized Hegelian system of experience and growth functioning as an ascending escalator, what does Dewey actually have left on offer?

As Cornel West recognizes in his formulation of prophetic pragmatism, when the experimental runway runs out, the authentic response of the pragmatist “ex- istential bluesman” is sometimes simply to sing the blues.22 Singing the blues is neither an admission of totalizing defeat nor an uncritical secular theodicy; it is an act of tragic resilience. It is a modern instance of what the songs of the Babylonian Exile accomplished: a way of honoring collective memory, mourning irretrievable loss, and maintaining solidarity in a displaced world. This is the heart of what I call reverent coping, come what may.

We do not need Dewey’s covert monism or his transactional security net to pre- serve a progressive social ethics. As Putnam’s thick concepts show, we are born into robust, localized language games and cultural matrices that shelter us. Rev- erence means honoring reality as it is, which is not always as we would have it. It means recognizing that the line between what can be changed and what must be endured is a fluid, time- and culture-specific mystery that we must navigate by fallible hunches, not certainties. We courageously endeavor to ameliorate present suffering through active, experimental struggle, but we do so without cosmic guar- antees that we will win, and without the comforting illusion that the universe is steering our ship. Hats off to John Dewey for the magnificent depth of his transac- tional tools—but it is up to us, standing soberly on the fractured, unscripted stuff of experience, to do the heavy lifting of coping reverently in an unscripted world.

21Dewey, A Common Faith, [p.]. [Verify wording.]

22Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), on prophetic pragmatism; [source of the “bluesman” formulation to confirm].

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Abbreviations. MW and LW refer to The Middle Works and The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–1990), cited by volume and page.