Pragmatism versus Marxism: An Appraisal of John Dewey's Philosophy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 133 endeavor and have done much of the work that would still have to be done in using McKinnon's volumes. Although there is no denying the unique value of the latter, its limitations and its distinctive character vis-a-vis other Kierkegaard research tools should be clearly understood. A comprehensive index to the published works of Kierkegaard that will be useful to a wider circle of researchers--e.g., those who may not be Kierkegaard scholars and/or those who must confine their research to translations--still remains a desideratum. Indeed, McKinnon's work could even be a propaedeutic for such a more generally useful instrument. GEORGE L. STENGREN Central Michigan University Pragmatism versus Marxism: A n Appraisal of John Dewey's Philosophy. By George Novack. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975. Pp. 320. Cloth, $13.00; paper, $3.45) George Novack, for several years editor of the International Socialist Review and leader in the Socialist Workers Party, has written a detailed criticism of Dewey's pragmatism that serves to point up the radical difference between Dewey's philosophy and that of the Marxists, a difference that perhaps is most obvious in their respective conceptions of science. Novack, as a matter of fact, presents this book in fulfillment of his role as he sees it in light of Marx's scientific account of history. He argues that pragmatism is the national philosophy of the great American middle class and that Dewey is the foremost theoretician of pragmatism, towering "far above his fellow philosophers, not only in influence, but in moral stature" (p. 53). Dewey's pragmatism therefore represents to him the most thorough formulation of the latter stages of American bourgeois capitalism, including in its statement all of the weaknesses and errors that make necessary the next stage in philosophy and politics. Novack makes his case for the nature of science on the evidence of physics and biology and extends that notion of science to the Marxist theory of historical materialism. On this view, science proceeds by induction to the establishment of fixed laws that reflect the direct penetration of the working of nature, and these laws function as indubitable principles from which logical deductions lead to necessary conclusions (pp. 99-102). The nature disclosed by these principles and conclusions is a material universe precedent to and independent of life or human experience, a universe governed by causal laws, which operate only as efficient causation (p. 96). Among the characteristic human truths Novack recognizes as permanently established by science are (1) that matter is the efficient cause of mind (p. 90); (2) that the definitive law of history is that of class struggle in the pattern made clear by Marx (p. 158); and (3) that economic vaIue is the measureable embodiment in things of socially necessary labor time (pp. 105-106). In contrast with this conception of science, pragmatism is seen as a philosophy without orientation. "It is the habit of acting in disregard of solidly-based scientific rules and tested principles. In everyday life, pragmatism is activity which proceeds from the premise (either explicit or unexpressed) that nature and society are essentially indeterminate" (p. 17). The result, for Novack, is a philosophy that wanders inconsistently from one position to another, as he sees glaringly exemplified theoretically in Dewey's switch from the antimetaphysical position in his note "Some Implications of Anti-Intellectualism" to the development of a metaphysics in Experience and Nature. And Dewey's controversial personal stands with regard to the two world wars provide all the evidence Novack needs for the practical inconsistency inherent in pragmatism. Novack calls Dewey the bravest and best of his breed; but the breed, shaped by anachronistic middle-class values, waffles and compromises in the face of any real crisis. "In the matter of sticking to principles, pragmatism differs from Marxism as a jellyfish differs from a vertebrate" (p. 82). According to Novack, the wavering course of pragmatism is the necessary consequence of 134 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the relativistic theory of knowledge common to all the pragmatists, the doctrine Peirce called fallibilism and which Dewey argued for at length in The Quest for Certainty. From this Marxist standpoint, over-emphasis...