Ethical Communication: Moral Stances in Human Dialogue

26. John Dewey: Democratic Conversation

186 John Dewey Democratic Conversation Lee Wilkins Philosopher John Dewey was an intellectual child of the Enlightenment tempered by a young adulthood in an America experimenting with reform. The result was a wide-ranging philosophical vision of which ethics was a central, but by no means solitary, part. To summarize Dewey is to invite reductionism, but his approach to ethics could be characterized as follows: individual ethical choice arises from the community in which the individual finds himself. Choice must be evaluated from multiple perspectives and is always concerned with the impact on the democratic community of which the individual is an organic part. Journalism played a significant role in Dewey’s vision. Dewey was born in Burlington,Vermont, on October 20, 1859, the third of four sons born to Archibald and Lucina Dewey. Although his family had a farming heritage, his father moved to town to establish a grocery business. Biographers described Dewey as a shy, selfeffacing young man, a quality he carried with him into adulthood. His mother was more ambitious for her children than his father, but both were inspired by their evangelical Protestant faith, an approach that influenced Dewey’s thought although he abandoned formal religion as an adult. Dewey came to intellectual maturity at a time of worldwide intellectual ferment; the rationality of the Enlightenment was giving way to the insights of Freud, Darwin had reoriented humanity’s relation to the natural world, and the insights of Einstein, although several years in the future, were to fundamentally reshape the physical world. Dewey had access to all of these changes through his favorite 26 .   187 John Dewey reading, British publications such as the Contemporary Review, the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly Review. Closer to home, he was influenced by the beginning of the Progressive movement in the United States. Progressivism, which became nationally influential during the first decade of the twentieth century, asserted that smart government was good government and that the focus of both was human improvement and well-being. From these intellectual foundations , Dewey developed the concept of the continuing social experiment —which is how Dewey characterized democratic life—and his view that the results of the experiment, particularly social policy, must be evaluated rationally in a scientific way. This process, Dewey believed, would provide feedback to the public. Citizens would, in turn, make political choices to move the social experiment forward. Dewey’s theory of truth, which is essential to understanding the rest of his philosophy, had as its primary purpose “to show that the methods by which truth is won in the sciences are more important than any single result.”1 Dewey’s belief in the scientific method was undoubtedly influenced by the university at which he earned his doctorate, Johns Hopkins, which was the U.S. institution most devoted to advancing knowledge through scientific inquiry. Just as it does today, logic and empiricism provided the dominant intellectual framework at Hopkins, a legacy of Enlightenment thinking critical to Dewey’s philosophical approach. While some biographers attribute Dewey’s lifelong fascination with the impact of community on human progress to his New England childhood, Robert Westbrook, in his authoritative study, suggests that Dewey’s first wife, Alice, had at least as much to do with his progressive turn of mind. Alice Dewey was an extraordinary woman whose grandfather was an adopted member of the Chippewa Indian tribe. From him,Alice inherited a disdain for social conventions and a critical social conscience. Dewey credited her with a keen intelligence and social concern, saying that it was she who had put the “guts and stuffing” into his often abstract, intellectual work. Alice was known to lecture family and friends on the importance of writers such as Emile Zola, whose work on the European continent (for example, the novel Germinal) foreshadowed efforts by journalists such as Upton Sinclair, who combined in-person reporting with literary device (The Jungle, The Brass Check) to prod the political system toward social justice. 1. S. Hook, John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait, 87. 188 . Lee Wilkins Dewey’s fascination with journalism and its role in a democracy also began early in his career. His initial foray, “The Thought News,” never saw the light of day. In 1890 Dewey wanted to spread his ideas beyond the classroom and had his first of several encounters with eccentric journalist Franklin Ford. Ford had quit his New York newspaper job to found a...