John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect: A Critical Engagement with Dewey's Democracy and Education

2. “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful": The Communicative Turn in Dewey’s Democracy and Education

2 “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful” The Communicative Turn in Dewey’s Democracy and Education GERT BIESTA The Communicative Turn in Dewey’s Philosophy Democracy and Education is not a book that gives itself easily to its readers. I have to confess that when I first read the book as an undergraduate , I found it quite boring. In its attempt to cover almost everything there was to say about education past and present, the book didn’t stand out—or at least not to me and not at the time—as making a particular point in the educational discussion or taking a particular position in the educational field. I had to make quite a detour to arrive at a point at which I began to see that in between the chapters and passages that have remained challenging up to the present day, Dewey was actually doing something that was quite unique if not revolutionary, both from an educational and a philosophical point of view. The detour I took first led me to Dewey’s writings on knowledge, such as Studies in Logical Theory (1903), Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), and Knowing and the Known (1949, with Arthur F. Bentley); then to his work on social psychology , most notably Human Nature and Conduct (1922); and from 23 24 John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect there to what I still consider to be Dewey’s most fascinating and most important book: Experience and Nature (1925). It was through my reading and rereading of the latter book that I slowly began to see what Dewey was actually trying to do. In Experience and Nature I found a Dewey who was trying to move modern philosophy away from its Cartesian preoccupation with mind and consciousness and who was instead putting communication at the very center of his thinking. When Dewey opened “Nature, Communication and Meaning,” chapter 5 of Experience and Nature, by stating that “(o)f all affairs, communication is the most wonderful” (Dewey, 1958[1929], p. 166), it was not because he had found a new topic to philosophize about. It was because he had come to the conclusion that mind, consciousness, thinking , subjectivity, meaning, intelligence, language, rationality, logic, inference , and truth—all those things that philosophers over the centuries have considered to be part of the natural makeup of human beings—only come into existence through and as a result of communication. “When communication occurs,” Dewey wrote, “all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking” (ibid.). And, in a slightly more daring passage: “That things should be able to pass from the plane of external pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves; and that the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales” (ibid.). Chapter 5 of Experience and Nature contains many passages that exemplify the ‘communicative turn’ in Dewey’s philosophy. He introduced his views by noting that “(s)ocial interaction and institutions have been treated as the products of a ready-made specific physical or mental endowment of a self-sufficient individual” (ibid., p. 169; emphasis in original). But this is not how Dewey saw it. He argued instead that “the world of inner experience is dependent upon an extension of language which is a social product and operation” (ibid., p. 173), which means that “psychic events . . . have language for one of their conditions” (ibid., p. 169). In Dewey’s view, language is itself “a natural function of human association” and its consequences “react upon other events, physical and human, giving them meaning or significance” (ibid., p. 173). Failure to see this, so Dewey argued, led to the “subjectivistic, solipsistic and egotistic strain in modern thought” (ibid., p. 173). Yet for Dewey “soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy” (ibid., p. 170). This ultimately means that “communication is a condition of consciousness” (ibid., p. 187). As Dewey explained: “If we had not talked with others and they with us, 25 “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful” we should never talk to and with ourselves” (ibid.). Along similar lines, Dewey argued that “the import of...