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  • John Dewey’s Quest for Unity: The Journey of a Promethean Mystic
  • Charles A. Hobbs
John Dewey’s Quest for Unity: The Journey of a Promethean Mystic Richard M. Gale. Amherst. N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2010. pp. 215. $32.90 h.c. 9781591026303

This book is a severely critical effort at evaluating Dewey’s philosophy. More specifically, Gale’s aim is to free Dewey’s normative vision from (what Gale takes to be) his metaphysics. The work is composed of two parts: “Growth, Inquiry, and Unity” and “The Metaphysics of Unity.” There are a total of eight chapters (and an introduction), divided evenly between the two parts. First things first: Gale has a gift of lively wit and clarity, and he uses colorful examples that grab the attention of the reader. These are qualities we do not find in enough work on the history of philosophy, and they make the book a genuinely engaging and entertaining contribution.

A skilled polemicist and self-acknowledged analytic philosopher, Gale criticizes Dewey’s theory of inquiry as Promethean. Further, he charges that Dewey, to the end, is also guilty of absolutist metaphysical (indeed, mystical) assumptions of basic unity, making, in conjunction with the Promethean inquiry, for a divided Dewey—hence the label of Promethean Mystic. Despite his criticisms, Gale highly esteems the Deweyan “grand normative vision” and the significant potential such a theory of inquiry has for the amelioration, if not the complete resolution, of human problems (16). [End Page 428]

Gale argues that the search for unity is pervasive throughout Dewey’s writings. He describes Dewey as “the Plotinus of Burlington” (24), a mystic at heart. As Gale articulates it, the mystical premise of Dewey centers on the denial “of there being any direct, nonmediated relation between numerically distinct individuals and instead has them emanate out of some background unity” (111–12). Gale names this the Humpty Dumpty Intuition—an absolutist monism shared, he says, by fellow pragmatists Peirce and James—as opposed to the contrasting Humean Intuition that individual existents are bound together through nothing but contingent, external relations. The Humpty Dumpty Intuition is also seen as a kind of explanation for Dewey’s commonly recognized difficult, and sometimes maddeningly vague, writing style. Further, Gale argues that Dewey always held this premise/intuition and, accordingly, that when he supposedly transitioned from absolute idealism to pragmatism, Dewey was simply putting the same old wine into new bottles. That is, according to Gale, it was not a genuinely philosophical shift, which, if the case, appears to put the post-Hegelian instrumentalist/experimentalist Dewey in an untenable position and exposes his “fake empiricism” (192).

As for the theory of inquiry, Gale holds that, according to Dewey, inquiry is ubiquitous within human experience and that we ought to use inquiry to ameliorate all of our problems. Gale labels these views, respectively, the Ubiquity of Inquiry Thesis and the Desirability of Inquiry Thesis, and Dewey is criticized at some length for them (see chapter 3: “Inquiry, Inquiry, Inquiry”). Dewey has a “fanatic” belief that there cannot ever be too much inquiry, and Dewey apparently gives it completely unlimited scope to include non-inquiry-related activities such as “praying, having religious experiences, and making love” (68). Such fanaticism is the root of Dewey’s “Prometheanism,” and we are asked to consider “the pernicious consequences” of inquiring into “our enjoyable sexual experiences with our beloved spouse or, if you prefer, one-night stand. . . . Do you really want to find out that she looks like your mother?” (69).

Now, while it is true that Dewey is sometimes too optimistic about the power of intelligent inquiry for solving human problems, I will simply point out that he in fact rejected the first of these views, as highlighted by Dewey’s 1905 essay “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism”: he argues that the things of the world are that which they are experienced as. Thus all experiences are real, that is, regardless of the fact that a great number of them lack any significant cognitive dimension. Contrary to [End Page 429] Gale’s misunderstanding, knowing for Dewey is but one form of human experiencing. Gale’s privileging of the epistemic is...

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