John Dewey's Philosophy of Spirit by John R. Shook and James A. Good (review)

The recent publication of Dewey's seminar lectures on Hegel's philosophy of spirit, which he delivered in Chicago in 1897, contributes significantly to the ongoing task of more accurately appreciating the confluence of historical influences that shaped the trajectory of classical American philosophy. Dewey's 1897 Hegel lectures are situated within their philosophical context by two seminal essays describing the relevance of recent scholarship to the philosophical or historical question of Dewey's ambivalent indebtedness to Hegel. In their essays, Shook and Good emphasize the positive roles that certain Hegelian themes played in Dewey's mature thought—that is, in texts produced many years after Dewey's alleged break from Hegel (or neo-Hegelianism)—and they also suggest how certain formative influences on Dewey might plausibly if not compellingly explain why these Hegelian themes first became so convincing and why they remained influential throughout Dewey's career as a philosopher and public intellectual.

Shook's introductory essay explores Dewey's philosophy of religion in general and his inheritance from Hegel's philosophy of spirit in particular. Good provides us with a similarly valuable interpretation or depiction of Dewey's unique and nuanced reading of Hegel in 1897; Good is especially keen to stress Dewey's 'historicist and progressivist' reading or appropriation of Hegel's analysis of freedom, religion, morality, and politics. Combined, Shook and Good show that when we understand Dewey's reading of Hegel prior to the alleged break, between 1897 and 1902, as Good reads him, and when we understand Dewey's mature system, as Shook reads him, the community of scholarly inquiry is led to reflect more creatively and intelligently on the pragmatic consequences of Hegelianism for Dewey's life work. For their part, Shook and Good agree that Dewey's philosophy of spirit "was heavily indebted to Hegelian themes and that the resulting philosophy of religion is a key component of his social and political theory"; Shook and Good suggest that the essential elements of Dewey's earlier Hegelianism, properly understood, are still present yet distinctively transformed in Dewey's mature writings. For Shook, Dewey shifted away from neo-Hegelianism to a "humanist/historicist" reading of Hegel; Dewey's mature philosophy, suggests Shook, can be seen to be "a non-Marxist and non-metaphysical type of left Hegelian." Good speculates that "Dewey embraced the moderately left of center reading of Hegel that Rosenkranz defended" (i.e., Hegel construed as "a liberal reformer concerned with theoretical issues only to the extent that they illuminate momentous concrete issues"). Shook and Good argue that when we revise or otherwise recalibrate our reading of Hegel, as well as our reading of Dewey's reading of Hegel, we discover a far more significant Hegelian deposit than previously acknowledged in the scholarship. Misreading or otherwise misrepresenting Dewey's reading of Hegel obstructs, surely, our collaborative reading of Dewey.

Shook and Good, here and elsewhere (e.g., in Shook's Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality and Good's A Search for Unity in Diversity), provide the community of inquiry with a sympathetic reexamination of Hegel's influence on the trajectory of Dewey's thought. Dewey's lectures on Hegel display a sophisticated interpretation or appropriation of Hegel. And while it sounds strange, Dewey tended to read Hegel as a proto-pragmatist, as someone who took a "generally pragmatic approach to religion," and a proto-personalist, as someone "ultimately concerned with individuality and the social conditions requisite for the growth of individuality"; in certain ways, suggests Shook, it is tempting to say that Dewey read Hegel as an empiricist. Beyond merely setting the record straight, as it were, which is not unimportant, Shook and Good also forge forth beyond the limits of source studies to explore some of the consequences of Dewey's Hegelianism for his mature formulations of "social psychology" and "deliberative democracy" as well as his "idealism of action" and "religious humanism" or "spiritual naturalism...