Dewey's Concept of Community: A Critique

Dewey's Concept of Community: A Critique BETH J. SINGER JOHN DEWEY'S APPROACHTO philosophy can best be characterized by the name 'scientific naturalism'. He contended both that philosophy should employ the method of science and that it should make use of the results of scientific investigation, and especially that ethics and social philosophy should employ the methods and results of the biological, psychological, and social sciences. We can therefore expect that in Dewey's social philosophy normative principles will be rooted in the kind of empirical analysis of generic traits which Dewey identified with metaphysics, and that they will be justified by appeal to empirical data. However, in analyzing community or sociality, and in the concept of communication on which his analysis rests, Dewey allowed his metaphysical position to be excessively influenced by his normative stance, and the same bias colors some of his empirical judgments. In this paper I shall discuss some of the resulting weaknesses of Dewey's conception of community and communication and suggest an alternative view based upon principles drawn from a philosopher whose thought evolved partly in response to that of Dewey, Justus Buchler. 1. In Democracy and Education) Dewey is concerned with education, in the broad sense, as "the means of [the] social continuity of life," of the perpetuation of "the life experience" of "a social group" (DE 5). In this book, as in other contexts, Dewey uses the expressions 'society', 'social group', and 'cornJohn Dewey,Democracyand Education, in Jo Ann Bodyston,ed.,John Dewey,TheMiddle Works, z899-i924, Vol. 9, 1916. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; London and Amsterdam: Feffer and Simons,Inc., 198o);hereafter citedas "DE." [555] 556 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:4 OCTOBER 1985 munity' interchangeably, to refer to what we may call 'social entities'. He advances the thesis that every such entity is established and sustained by communication and is held together by "a common understanding" arrived at through communication. Society not only continues to exist by transmission, bycommunication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.... Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a common understanding--like-mindedness as the sociologists say.... The communication which insures participation in a common understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual dispositions---like ways of responding to expectations and requirements. (DE 7) Dewey soon ceases to refer to emotional dispositions and ways of responding and emphasizes conscious perceptions, purposes, and interests as essential to community. Common aims, beliefs, aspirations and knowledge, necessary conditions of community for him, are now shown not to be sufficient conditions. "Individuals do not even compose a social group because they all work for a common end," he asserts. Only if "they were all cognizant of the common end and all interested in it, then they would form a community " (DE 7-8). He continues, "Each would have to know what the other was about and would have to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own purpose and progress" (DE 8). This communication about the ongoing life of the group itself is what Dewey has in view when he says that "social life is identical with communication" (DE 8). In The Public and Its Problems, ~wishing "to demarcate the organized public from other modes of community life" (PP 252 ), Dewey sets out to identify the distinguishing features of a community as such. Here, 'community' and 'society' are the terms he uses. 'Social group' is reserved for what he calls 'primary groupings': a church, trade-union, business corporation, or family institution, all of which are primary in relation to the state, which is secondary (PP 279-81). Dewey raises "the question how individuals or singular beings.., come to be connected in just those ways which give human communities traits so different from those which mark assemblies of electrons, unions of trees in forests, swarms of insects, herds of sheep, and constellations of stars" (PP...