John Dewey's Great Debates–Reconstructed

Our embodied capacity for action and our dispositions towards goals define our perception of a situation and possible actions. Thus, situations are not constitutive of action, but they demand that we act. For Shane Ralston, the situations that call for action are historical, imagined, or projected debates involving John Dewey. When Dewey is portrayed not just as a presenter of theory, but as an actor in debates grounded in time, place, and daily life consequences, we understand his arguments in new ways. When he is called upon to act by engaging in debates that arose even long after his death, the interaction (or transaction) of philosopher and situation produces new meaning.

The non-teleological, creative conception of the relationship between actor and situation has been developed well by Hans Joas, building upon the work of George Herbert Mead, Dewey, and other pragmatists. As the actor engages with changing situations, new meanings emerge. There is thus a quasi-dialogical relationship between action and situation, which implies a creativity of action, neither pre-determined by intentionality nor pre-established by the situation. ¹ Hubert Dreyfus expresses a similar idea in a passage about falling in love: “In such a creative discovery the world reveals a new order of signification which is neither simply discovered nor arbitrarily chosen.” ² The reconstructions of Dewey that we observe in Ralston’s reconstructed debates are prime examples of what Joas calls the creativity of action. They are not merely a means to understand a pre-determined Dewey; they reveal “a new order of signification.”

The debates presented cleverly demonstrate the quasi-dialogical relation between situation and actor. Instead of being simply another reading of Deweyan texts, they are an effort to bring Dewey to life, not to “maintain an immune monastic respectability” but to participate actively “in the living struggles and issues” of the times ³ . Of course, Dewey, as much or more than any other major philosopher, understood philosophy as active participation in life and embodied that in his own work. Moreover, growth is a unifying concept linking many aspects of Dewey’s philosophy. It seems especially fitting for Ralston to ask how Dewey’s ideas themselves would grow in response to new challenges.

Dewey was a consummate debater, not as we might think today of one who excels at oral debate competitions with assigned positions to defend, but rather as someone who wrestled with important public policy issues and intellectual discussions of his times, defending positions that were deeply held, but often unpopular. He engaged with Bertrand Russell on theories of logic, with Walter Lippman on the role of expertise in public deliberations, with Kenneth Burke and with Randolph Bourne about democracy and World War I, with Jane Addams regarding violence in the context of the Pullman strike, and with many others on diverse topics.

One consequence of this wrestling with issues of the day is that Dewey’s ideas are best understood not as fixed elements within an abstract system. Instead, as he saw them, they are tools for inquiry situated in the context of active struggles of the times and his own engagements as a public intellectual. Others have used reconstructed debates to examine Dewey. For example, Paul Stob reads him as engaging in a postmortem dialogue with Burke. The areas of agreement and points of contention between Burke and Dewey become both more lively and more comprehensible when presented in the context of concrete historical reality. ⁴ Similarly, John Capps brings Dewey into dialogue with AIDS activists and creationists, and Michael Eldridge, the dedicatee of Ralston’s book, does the same with a dispute put to the grievance committee that Dewey chaired for the New York Teacher’s Union. ⁵

Ralston takes the idea of debate as a medium for understanding much further. The first two debates he considers are among ones that Dewey actually had with his contemporaries, one with Leon Trotsky and the...