Review of David Hildebrand's *Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide* (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2008) more

Access Provided by Gonzaga University at 11/12/11 2:16AM GMT reviews 57 Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide David Hildebrand. Oxford, Eng.: Oneworld, 2008. This book is a clear, engaging, and ambitious introduction to the philosophy of John Dewey. First, a comment about the subtitle: while I recognize that it reflects the book’s inclusion in a series of “beginner’s guides,” the subtitle (“a beginner’s guide”) is unfortunate. The book is much more than that, and, as such, it is more valuable than the subtitle suggests. It is clearly of help to people new to Dewey, and yet it is also a significant resource for those returning to Dewey in a variety of capacities. For example, this reviewer has found Hildebrand’s book helpful for thinking about pedagogical strategies for teaching Dewey in a recent seminar class (on James and Dewey), and I expect many other teachers will find Hildebrand useful for helping them to better incorporate Dewey into a variety of theme-based courses on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, aesthetics, or philosophy of religion. For reasons including the above, I believe this book deserved a better subtitle, although I realize this was likely to have been largely or completely outside of the author’s control. In addition to the Introduction and perhaps too brief Conclusion, Dewey is constituted by seven chapters, each intended to be able to stand independently of the others. Chapter 1 (“Experience: Mind, Body, and Environment”) is an exploration of various themes crucial for understanding Dewey’s naturalism, including Dewey’s account of transactional experience. The chapter is strengthened by Hildebrand’s Figure 1 (33) on mind and consciousness. Chapter 2 (“Inquiry: Knowledge, Meaning, and Action”) discusses Dewey’s notion of inquiry as fundamental to the naturalistic/instrumentalist “critique and diagnosis” of traditional epistemological projects such as classical rationalism, empiricism, and Kant’s failed attempt to adequately adjudicate between them. Instead, for Dewey, knowing is reconstructed as an organic function, and it is here that we also receive some helpful background on Peirce (regarding the “Fixation of belief ”). These first two chapters lay the groundwork for the remaining chapters, each of which, as Hildebrand says, “constitutes a special inquiry of their own” (6). Let us now turn briefly to each of them. Chapter 3 (“Morality: Character, Conduct, and Moral Experience”) does an outstanding job of elucidating Dewey’s reconstruction of ethics. There is extremely lucid exploration of Dewey on ends/means, habit and functional virtue, socialization, and, as a part of all this, Dewey’s rejection of absolut- 58 the pluralist 6 : 2 2011 ism. Within his discussion, Hildebrand makes judicious use of insights from Steven Fesmire, Gregory Pappas, and Jennifer Welchman. Also, he is surely right to pinpoint Dewey’s 1930 “Three Independent Factors in Morals” as a crucial statement of his pragmatist critique of traditional approaches to ethics (Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Mill’s and Bentham’s utilitarianism, and Kant’s deontological ethics) as dismissive of the moral situation’s uncertainty because of various assumed transcendental realities and fixed ends. Hildebrand rightly emphasizes that, according to Dewey’s approach to morality, the proper aim of life is “the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining” (as cited in Hildebrand 84). In pragmatist fashion, Dewey rejects absolute criteria, perspectives, and values in favor of his moral criterion of growth as the only moral end. In Chapter 4 (“Politics: Selves, Community, and Democratic Life”), I am pleased to see that Hildebrand begins with reference to Dewey’s 1939 “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us,” surely the most important and succinct statement of Dewey on democracy apart from the fifth chapter of The Public and Its Problems. Once again, Hildebrand includes the work of others as part of his weaving the tale. In addition to Dewey himself, we encounter Alan Ryan, James Campbell, Alison Jaggar, and James Gouinlock, all of whom aid our author in his focus here upon the Deweyan analysis of liberalism, of the relationship between individual and society, as well as the relationship between democracy and education, community, and public. For Dewey, as Hildebrand emphasizes, “faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education” (as cited in Hildebrand 123). While it perhaps goes beyond the intended and stated purpose of the book, Hildebrand ends the chapter by briefly responding to one of Dewey’s contemporary critics, Robert Talisse. Talisse has created significant waves in recent years with his criticism of Deweyan democracy (in favor of a more Peircean approach), which is, in short, that “Dewey’s justification of democratic ideals and growth rests upon his particular account of experience and intelligence would be oppressed by the Deweyan democracy based on it” such that “[s]chools, government agencies, companies, etc., would not represent the way of life of anti-Deweyan communities, and would instead be their antagonizers” (121). Hildebrand notes briefly that one Deweyan response to such a challenge is to note that Dewey’s conception of democracy is not one according to which there can be an amelioration of every social conflict whatsoever. However, it is a proposal directing us away from violence, away from dogmatic, fascistic regimes, and toward situation-bound social inquiry and constructive argument. I like the way Hildebrand provides brief Deweyan responses to the critics introduced reviews 59 in this book, as he does—without overdoing it—in this case and in others. This chapter will surely make for valuable supplementary reading in both undergraduate and graduate courses in social and political philosophy. Chapter 5 (“Education: Imagination, Communication, and Participatory Growth”) should be read by all educators, period. An important dimension of this chapter is its discussion of Dewey’s insights about education as a social process. In relation to this, when I was teaching my recent aforementioned seminar, Hildebrand came in handy in reminding me of the important contrast between Dewey’s philosophy of education versus both “traditionalists” and “romantics,” or as Dewey, in a few places, calls these movements: old education (“curriculum-centered” education) on the one hand, and new or progressive education (“child-centered” education), on the other hand. As Hildebrand reminds us, Dewey, of course, satisfied neither of these groups, even though sometimes people erroneously lump Dewey in with the so-called “progressive education” movement. Neither of such extreme approaches to education truly recognizes education as fundamental to democracy, although it “becomes vital to democracy only once it provides individuals with the intellectual habits not only for rejecting authoritarianism, but for critically evaluating everyday persuasion and trickery” (144). A key is to avoid simply imposing values upon students (all too easy to do), as traditionalists such as the one-time student of Dewey, Mortimer Adler, would have it, and instead recognize that values have a broader origin than their merely external sources. Chapter 6 (“Aesthetics: Creation, Appreciation, and Consummatory Experience”) is a discussion of Dewey’s account of experience as applied to art—works of art, the production of art, the appreciation of art. This chapter is the longest (and one of the best) of the book. Hildebrand indicates how, for Dewey, aesthetic experience is a part of all genuinely meaningful experiences, and, as Hildebrand says, “aesthetic theory reflects living functions and continuities connecting creature and world” (149). As part of this, we are introduced to Dewey’s well-known phrase “an experience,” as his term for consummatory experience, which “can have either a positive or negative value; . . . what marks out this experience as special is its self-integrated nature, its unity” (157). Along the way, we are introduced to several Dewey critics, including Monroe Beardsley, according to whom Dewey exaggerates “the influence of the museum conception on viewers of art” (155), and D. W. Gotshalk, according to whom the Deweyan attempt “to reconstruct the identity of art (by divorcing it from physical things and marrying it to aesthetic experience) results in an account that is too subjective—and so too uninformative” (165). Let me add that, throughout much of this, I find 60 the pluralist 6 : 2 2011 the chapter to be strengthened by its use of various insights from the work of Thomas Alexander. The last chapter (Chapter 7: “Religion: Religious Experience, Community, and Social Hope”) examines religion from the standpoint of naturalism and pragmatism. Drawing on the classic biography of George Dykhuizen, Hildebrand first relates Dewey’s own alleged “mystical experience” of his early twenties in Oil City, Pennsylvania, allegedly reported by Dewey to Max Eastman. He then explores Dewey’s (1934) A Common Faith, a work according to which, as Hildebrand summarizes, “all the elements that make the religious attitude valuable exist in experience, and these elements do not require either a traditional religious framework or supernaturalism” (188). We are introduced to Dewey’s odd use of the term God as the “active relation between ideal and actual” (as cited in Hildebrand 199), “a unification of ideal values that is essentially imaginative in origin when the imagination supervenes in conduct” (as cited in Hildebrand 198). Democracy, Hildebrand notes for Dewey, is one such ideal value, and a person’s activity of “faith” in the general unity of every one of these ideal values is itself the meaning of the Deweyan “God.” All of these chapters are guided by Hildebrand’s explicitly stated “keys to understanding Dewey.” In his Introduction, he outlines “two beliefs fundamental to Dewey which will aid readers in their understanding” of Dewey’s complex thought (4). Hildebrand points out what he terms Dewey’s practical starting point and melioristic motive, summarized with an excellent and poignant paragraph just before his brief “plan of the book” section—it must be quoted in full: Dewey’s entreaties—that philosophy start from lived experience (practically), motivated by moral ends (meliorism)—are prescriptive but necessarily vague. They pose a challenge to professionalized philosophers, who tend to respond by demanding specifics. Which cherished philosophical problems should be abandoned—and when? Where should philosophical investigations be focused instead? What happens to the identity of philosophy once it abandons traditional problems? Dewey’s general retort to such responses is ‘look around.’ Philosophy can discover new problems in the crucible of common life if its practitioners have the courage and emotional intelligence to trade certain answers for questions which aim to make life better. (5–6) In my view, Hildebrand has it exactly right by focusing both on the issue of philosophy’s best starting-point as a practical one (although he could just as easily couch this in terms of radical empiricism) and also on the motive of meliorism. Such emphases are fundamental to understanding the philosophy reviews 61 of Dewey and, indeed, of the broader spirit of classical American pragmatism more generally. For classical pragmatists, practical experience is the startingpoint, from which we derive our fallibilism, our orientation to social/political concerns, and from which we derive our melioristic motivation—all on the basis of lived practical experience. While Hildebrand could have added some additional background on James’s meliorism for historical context, I do not think this detracts from the book’s overall value. The book is right on target, throughout, with its focus on experience—with theory arising out of and with respect for experience—as the only legitimate starting point for the philosopher. It is where we begin and to which we must maintain fidelity. The book invites the reader’s attention with his approachable, well-organized style, and the author writes in such a crisp and clear way that it is hard to put down (and I have spotted no glaring typographical errors of concern). Hildebrand has done a masterful job—his Dewey will no doubt become an invaluable classic for a diversity of readers over many generations, and the listed $14.95 seems a fair price for this paperback. I began this review complaining about the subtitle; perhaps a more suitable one would be a “handbook” or a “road map,” and an excellent one at that. Charles A. Hobbs Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition: 1890–1892 Peirce Edition Project, Ed. Nathan Houser et al. Vol. 8. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. The central philosophical texts of this volume, the “metaphysical” or “cosmological” essays of the early 1890s published in The Monist, have long been a source of enjoyable controversy for Peirce scholars. From the reasonably straightforward arguments of “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” to the wild and fascinating speculative suggestions in “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce marks out the transitional ideas of his mid-career. Whether one sees, as I do, a continuity among these essays and their predecessors and followers, or whether one reads them as idiosyncratic efforts of a midlife Peirce, one is compelled to wrestle with their meaning. This alone makes the reading of Volume 8 of the Chronological Edition an exhilarating experience. But there is much more.