The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

7. Kaplan and John Dewey

PART THREE Intellectual Contemporaries CHAPTER 7 Kaplan and john Dewey Allan Lazaroff Mordecai Kaplan has long been linked in the popular Jewish mind with the great American philosopher John Dewey.' In spite of this common association, there has been no scholarly research on the similarities between them nor an analysis of the influence of Dewey on his younger contemporary. If similarities and influences were found, it would constitute a significant religious application of Dewey's generally secularist philosophy. Dewey's direct influence on Kaplan is difficult to trace, however, because most early twentieth -century American reformers were Deweyites before they ever read Dewey.2 This essay will concentrate on the similarities and differences between Dewey and Kaplan that emerge from their many published writings and will only briefly consider the question of direct influence. One similarity between Dewey and Kaplan was their pragmatism and concern with action as well as theory. Dewey argued that the customary separation of ends from means had turned experimental hypotheses into absolute ideals. He criticized the abstractness of classical philosophy and the otherworldliness of the historic religions because both had led to passivity and inaction in this-worldly matters. 3 He emphasized active involvement and practical subjects, This paper is part of a project supported by a Senior Research Fellowship from the john Dewey Foundation and the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University. The author is most grateful for this support. 173 174 ALLAN LAZAROFF such as education, not only in his writings but also in his own life. He supervised a laboratory school in Chicago, for example, and he continued to lead and to participate vigorously in many organizations and social causes throughout his long life. Kaplan was also concerned with activity and pragmatic consequences , not just theory. His functional rationalism claimed that Judaism needed working hypotheses, not immutable creeds; thus, he shared Dewey's opposition to abstract philosophy and religious otherworldliness. Kaplan maintained that Judaism from the Pharisaic period onward had become otherworldly and therefore was in need of reconstruction in modern times.4 As for those who contended that traditional Judaism was already this-worldly, Kaplan dismissed them as apologists, much as Dewey dismissed those religious modernists who sought to play down the otherworldliness of Christianity.5 Like Dewey, Kaplan did not just write about the importance of practical affairs. He was an activist who founded his own synagogue, for example, and led many community efforts and professional organizations. For him as for Dewey, the practical pursuit of education was a central and lifelong endeavor. The title and contents of Kaplan's last book, If Not Now, When? (1973), indicate his continuing impatience, even in his nineties, to implement his projected reconstruction of the Jewish people. For both Dewey and Kaplan, the problem with supernaturalism was not so much its theoretical irrationality as its negative practical and social effects.6 Hence, the thought of Dewey and Kaplan, in contrast to that of William James, is essentially social, reflecting the influence of the social sciences, such as sociology, social psychology, and anthropology , on early twentieth-century intellectuals.7 According to Dewey, the very process of inquiry is cooperative as well as experimental. Further, his moral philosophy of shared experience both begins and ends in society. Culture, thought, and science are conditioned by social and other surroundings, and in turn a goal of science is to influence and direct social life. Dewey's fondest dream was the application of scientific method to social problems.8 Similarly, for Kaplan religion and Judaism are social both in origin and effect. Religion and Judaism arise as the collective self-consciousness of KAPLAN AND JOHN DEWEY 175 the group, and their goal is to criticize, formulate, and direct group life for the greater self-realization of their members.9 Kaplan was a Jewish social engineer who sought to reorganize Jewish life in all its aspects following modern scientific and pragmatic procedures. His first book, judaism as a Civilization (1934), emerged from courses he was teaching Jewish social workers. Dewey and Kaplan's pervasive social concern reflects their basic humanism and anthropocentrism. 10 In opposition to a traditional overbearing theocentrism, on the one hand, and to an impersonal natural necessity, on the other,11 they both spoke of the importance of the human personality; of the centrality of human freedom, effort, and responsibility; and of the nobility and significance of human purposes and ideal ends...