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  • The Influence of Darwinism on John Dewey’s Philosophy of Art
  • Christopher Perricone

Mind and Morals and Life . . .

In July 1909, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, John Dewey published "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy." At the very outset of the essay, Dewey makes it clear how Darwin has brought about a Copernican-like revolution not only in the history of science, but also in the overall history of ideas. Dewey says that for two thousand years the ways of thinking about nature and knowledge "rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested on treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality" (1965, 1). The "Origin of Species, however, introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion" (1). 1

Darwin challenged some of our most cherished ideas, not only the ideas of knowledge as the pursuit of essence and the purposive character of man and nature, but also their corollaries such as absolutism, spiritualism, intelligent design in nature, and the perfectibility of mankind. Darwin, and later Darwinians, in effect, showed that the difference between living and nonliving beings is only a difference in degree and not in kind. Hence although the methods and outcomes of comprehending how astronomical, physical, and chemical phenomena work, on the one hand, and the methods and outcomes of comprehending how the phenomena of life, mind, and politics work, on the other hand, are different in detail, nevertheless, in principle, they are very much the same. Dewey says that what Descartes asserted of physical things is true of all things, that is, they are "much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state" (8) Of course, the implication is that there is nothing other than physical things. Hence "The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life" (9). [End Page 20]

The lynchpin of Darwin's conquest is the idea of natural selection, a simple principle that states that "all organic adaptations are due simply to constant variation and the elimination of those variations which are harmful in the struggle for existence" (11). The idea of natural selection is a simple idea, yes, but an extraordinarily fecund idea. What Dewey is arguing in his essay is that this simple idea not only explains why you don't need to invoke an intelligent designer in order to understand the cumulative changes of nature, this simple idea will help you to understand better "mind and morals and life." Natural selection is crucial in explaining the morphology of our noses and toes, and it is crucial in explaining the modular characteristics of the brain, the roles of sexes, the relationships to kin and to non-kin, our competitive and cooperative dispositions, and so forth, and so on.

Given the Darwinian paradigm shift, Dewey sees the quest for certainty epistemologically and the pursuit of absolutism metaphysically as fundamentally bankrupt. Consistent with the paradigm shift, we need to shift our attention from "absolute finalities" to "specific conditions of generation," from necessity to contingency, from dichotomies to continuities, from "wholesale transcendent remedies" to "specific consequences" here and now. In short, a paradigm shift is a radical shift of human perspective as well. As Copernicus moved the earth from center stage, Darwin moved man from center stage. Man humbled should also humble his philosophy. "A philosophy that humbles its pretensions to the work of projecting hypotheses for the education and conduct of mind, individual and social, is thereby subjected to test by the way in which the ideas it propounds work out in practice. In having modesty forced upon it, philosophy also acquires responsibility" (18).

It is well recognized among scholars of American philosophy in general and Dewey scholars in particular that Dewey was profoundly influenced by Darwin's ideas, especially in respect...

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