Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide (review)

David Hildebrand has written an excellent introduction to John Dewey’s thought. It can be recommended not only for beginners but also for everyone whose conception of Dewey’s writings is based on secondary sources. Misinterpretations of Dewey’s pragmatism are far too common. Hildebrand’s clear and thorough exposition helps to avoid them, even though he does not take stands on debates concerning interpretations of Dewey’s work. Or perhaps his book succeeds in this just because Hildebrand is content to explain Dewey’s basic ideas in a truthful way.

Hildebrand discusses all the important aspects of Dewey’s thought. As to religion, one might expect that Dewey’s naturalism leads to rigorous atheism, but this is not the case. Instead Dewey wants to show how experience can be religious without being supernatural. The same strategy is applied to the notion of aesthetic experience. Its character must be explained without any appeal to things over and above nature. Dewey’s naturalism does not entail reductionism. It entails only that culture is a product of nature in the sense that one species of animals has developed it inside nature, on planet Earth. When explaining art one must begin with the raw, that is, with the concrete interaction of living organisms and their environments. With the notion of aesthetic experience Dewey tries to find connections between (fine) art and life in general. Almost any experience can have aesthetic quality. This implies that Dewey’s purpose most definitely was not to define art with the concept of aesthetic experience. Dewey was against all efforts to compartmentalize cultural phenomena.

Dewey challenged classical philosophy very radically. This holds for metaphysics as well as for morality and political philosophy. Values come neither from “moral Mount Sinai” nor “out of the a priori blue” (Dewey’s expressions). Instead of searching for one definition or rule by conceptual analysis, we should change ethics into a scientific theory that critically investigate existing values, makes testable hypotheses about better values, and promotes public discussion about how different viewpoints, goals, and values can be reconciled. This, in turn, requires democratic society, and Dewey devoted a significant part of his life to advancing democracy both in theory and in practice.

Perhaps the most important tool for advancing democracy is education. Education is the only way to teach people critical thinking that gives them tools for controlling their own lives and for participating in communal life. Dewey also makes an important point in defining philosophy a general theory of education. A philosopher’s main task is to develop conceptual tools for critical analysis of the problems of life. The critical issue here is the character and quality education. What counts as competent critical inquiry in the first place? What is knowledge and what is experience? Hildebrand states that the first chapter of his book, which deals with the concept of experience, is foundational in the sense that Dewey’s conception of experience has important consequences for all the things he has to say about issues discussed in the later chapters. The second chapter dealing with knowledge and inquiry has the same feature. In these two chapters Hildebrand might have pushed his exposition a few steps further.

Dewey rejected the classical distinction between the changing and unstable experienced world and the immutable and fixed real world as an object of true knowledge. Hildebrand points this out but writes, when discussing the truth of the statement “Fresh bread, when eaten, provides nourishment,” that this “is not a statement about the way the world really is” (p. 61). Hildebrand clearly refers to the classical distinction and wants to take distance from it. But, on the other hand, if we drop the classical distinction, what do we have? We have this one experienced world that is as real as anything can be. We cannot have knowledge about any other worlds that possibly are “more real.” This real world contains biological organisms that eat food. This world really is such that fresh bread, when eaten, provides nourishment.

Hildebrand discusses the pragmatist...