John Dewey and Continental Philosophy

Introduction: Overdue Conversations

[ 1 ] Introduction: Overdue Conversations Paul Fairfield It is a surprise to no one well versed in both classical pragmatism and philosophy in any of the continental European traditions to hear that opportunities for fruitful conversation are plentiful across this particular boundary of thought, especially in the case of the greatest of American pragmatists, John Dewey. Dewey made no secret of his profound and lifelong indebtedness to the thought of G. W. F. Hegel in particular, and not only during his early period when he was working under the heavy influence of Anglo-American idealism.1 Whether we are speaking of Dewey in the context of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America or of phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, or poststructuralism in twentieth-century continental philosophy, we find a common trajectory, or trajectories, of thought all arising from post-Kantian idealism and continuing efforts to come to terms with issues bequeathed to us primarily by Immanuel Kant and Hegel. It is this conversation into which Dewey was initiated during his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University in the 1880s, under the direction of George Sylvester Morris , and which provided a basic orientation to his thought throughout a long and extraordinarily productive writing career. Hegel’s thought, together with an equally profound indebtedness to Darwinian biology, informed Dewey’s contributions quite obviously in the fields of metaphysics and epistemology but also in various other branches of philosophical inquiry that equally concerned him, from ethics and politics to education and aesthetics. Despite the simplistic misreadings to which his works were often subject during his lifetime and which remain unfortunately common today, Dewey was an original , subtle, and fundamentally dialectical thinker. Despite waning interest in his works in the middle to latter decades of the past century—an eclipse, it seems, that was temporary and owing not to any actual refutations of his thought but to the popularity of analytic philosophy with which Dewey’s thought is somewhat uncongenial—Dewey’s writings remain as relevant today )DLUILHOG,QWURLQGG $0 2 Paul Fairfield as any philosopher of his era (1859–1952) and have enjoyed new life since the publication of his complete works and correspondence.2 Widespread misunderstanding and ungenerous dismissals regularly greeted early pragmatist thought in both Anglo-American and continental philosophical circles. To early analytic critics such as Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey alike seemed like so much superficiality and crass Americanism, an apologia for New World optimism that appeared to overlook dimensions of thought that philosophy in the rationalist and empiricist traditions had better grasped. These figures received an equally dismissive hearing on the Continent, aided and abetted no doubt by two world wars in the case of Germany, effectively causing pragmatism and continental philosophy to develop as separate traditions on separate continents, barely on speaking terms with each other in spite of numerous and obvious affinities between them. The nondialogue was fully reciprocated. Despite his facility with the French and German languages, his unmistakable Hegelian leanings, and a deeply phenomenological sensibility, Dewey lacked more than a passing knowledge of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other major figures in continental philosophy after Hegel but for Karl Marx, whose works he knew and held in low regard. The thirty-eight thick volumes that make up Dewey’s complete works contain either no references or only a small handful to each of these figures, again with the exception of Marx. We can only speculate about what an exchange between Dewey and Husserl or Heidegger might have looked like and the themes upon which it might have turned, the possibilities being many. Dewey’s private correspondence contains a similar dearth of references to such figures, confirming his thorough lack of acquaintance with and interest in them. A letter from Dewey to Arthur Bentley from May 1941, for instance, reads in part: “I never followed Husserl; I got the impression that he was trying to say things that should be said empirically in some circuitous language that would keep up some connection with the Teutonic tradition in philosophy. But I’ve nothing in the way of knowledge to go on.” Another letter to Bentley, from February 1942, reads: “I hope in the long run the influx of German refugees will contribute something but meantime a lot of them are committed to advertising the goods they brought over with them—intellectual...