The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (review)

Sensitive readers of Dewey will note that his style and the confidence with which he expresses his views often obscure their radical nature. Dewey fully understood that Darwin overthrew both the necessity of human progress and the fixity of nature. Nonetheless, Dewey has been saddled by some critics with a naive intransigence about the hopeful prospects for human inquiry. Fortunately, Melvin Rogers has provided Dewey scholarship with a recovery of the Darwinian grounds of Dewey’s philosophy and its broader consequences for Deweyan thought. Simply put, because the world is fraught with prospects for both failure and success, or evolution and extinction, this makes active inquiry into morality and science all the more necessary, not all the more hopeless.

Rogers’s book, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy, attempts two things. The first is to rescue Dewey from critics who see him as naively optimistic concerning the prospects of human inquiry. The second is to interweave this insight into the “historical framework in which Dewey’s appreciation of Darwin is located . . . and distill his understanding of its epistemological and normative importance in guiding human life” (x). The book is divided into two parts, the first of which situates Dewey in America’s confrontation with Darwin at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rogers recounts both pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the significance of Darwin for understanding whether or not human moral progress is possible. The pessimists, exemplified in Rogers’s narrative by Charles Hodge, deny that an evolutionary understanding of human nature can provide “something of substance” that can “bestow meaning and direction on our lives” (40). On the other hand, those whom Rogers dubs “liberal protestants” appropriate Darwin to provide a bulwark against scientism, which would be inevitable if Darwin were left in the hands of the scientists. Within this debate, Dewey appears as the philosopher who takes Darwin seriously in recognizing the contingency and flux of human and animal life, but who nevertheless “seeks to nurture an aestheticized notion of human action in crafting a meaningful existence”(52).

In chapter 2, the second half of part 1, Rogers gives a novel reading of Dewey in which the Aristotelian categories of knowledge are superimposed upon Dewey’s own concepts of agency and inquiry. This superimposition reveals that Aristotle’s distinction between epistēmē, phronēsis and technē are collapsed in Dewey’s philosophy of action. Deweyan inquiry, like Arisotelian phronēsis, is a dynamic interplay between the self and the world, neither of which remains static if touched by the other. In the context of an “aleatory world” (87), the agent of practical wisdom negotiates its complexity by virtue of a sensitivity made possible only via the “second nature” acquired as a result of experience and enculturation. Thus, Rogers explains Dewey’s philosophy of action through John McDowell’s appropriation of Aristotle in which action and perception are always already normative and conceptual, respectively. Although normative and conceptual elements pre-exist any particular action, Dewey shows us how they are transformed in our transactions with the world. Rogers argues that an agent acquires practical wisdom at the moment she becomes cautious and humble in applying habitual categories to a problematic situation, always ready to revise these categories no matter how engrained. This cautious humility is integral to Dewey’s new understanding of metaphysics. This metaphysics is directed toward the inquiring agent, where “experience is the primary touchpoint,” not the objects experienced (100). The nature of the object is always contestable and changeable, but the usefulness of inquiry for the reflective agent confronting a world in which there are no eternal truths is not.

In part 2, “Religion, the Moral Life, and Democracy,” applies Rogers’s insights concerning Dewey’s confrontation with contingency to religion, morality, and politics. Chapter 3 is an extended exegesis of Dewey’s A Common Faith. What emerges from this extended treatment...