John Dewey's logical theory Part 14

It is this very form of treatment, strangely enough, which enables Dewey to call biology to the support of his interpretation of the function of knowledge. According to the Darwinian theory, survival of the species is dependent upon the development of special structures and capacities which enable the organism to adjust itself to its environment. Dewey finds, following a familiar argument, that the lower animals are adapted to their environment by special habits of reaction which are relatively fixed and inelastic. Man, on the contrary, has an exceedingly plastic nervous system, which enables him to meet changing conditions. Man is not only highly adapted, but highly adaptable. This trait of plasticity, or adaptability, Dewey believes, is a product of natural selection, and, of course, in the final a.n.a.lysis, this high degree of plasticity is the thought function.

It is scarcely necessary to say that this treatment of thought is highly speculative. Dewey offers little concrete evidence to support his position; indeed, it would require the labor of a Darwin to supply the needed evidence. Instead of grounding his theories upon the results of science, Dewey adapts the ever elastic 'evolutionary method' (not really that of biological evolution, however indeterminate) to his own scheme of things. It would be hard to discover in philosophical literature a method more purely theoretical and even dialectical than that whereby Dewey gives his logical theory the support of evolutionary theory.

The ultimately mechanical tendencies of his argument are conspicuous, in spite of all disclaimers. The effect of his a.n.a.lysis is to set plasticity or adaptability off by itself, as a special trait or feature of the nervous system. The lower forms of life are governed, we are told, by fixed reflexes, and the trait of adaptability appears at some higher stage in the process as a superadded capacity of the nervous system, correlated, no doubt, with special nervous structures.

Evolutionism would not serve Dewey so well, had he not previously made this separation between the organic functions and their correlated structures; but, given this abstract treatment of the life processes, he is able to make the doctrine of selection contribute to its support. In opposition to Dewey's argument, it would be reasonable to contend that plasticity is inherent in all nervous substance. The higher organisms are more adaptable, because there is more to be modified in them,--more nerves and synapses, more pliability. There is no sound empirical reason for accepting Dewey's biological conclusions.

Taking Dewey's theory at its face value,--and it would be presumptuous to search for hidden meanings,--its net result is to place the function of knowing in an embarra.s.sing situation with respect to its capacity for giving a correct report of reality. Dewey expressly denies, indeed, that the purpose of knowing is to give an account of the nature of things.

Reality, he a.s.serts, is whatever it is 'experienced as being,' and it is normally experienced in other ways than by being known. The nature of reality is not hidden behind a veil, to be searched out; but is here and now, as it comes and goes in the form of pa.s.sing experience. Knowing is designed to transform experience, not to bring it within the survey of consciousness.

How does it stand, then, with Dewey's own account of the knowledge process? He has reflected upon experience, and claims to have given a correct account of its nature. Dewey's conception of the processes of experience is genuinely conceptual, a thought product, designed to furnish a solid basis for belief and calculation. But reflection, by his own account, is shut in to its own moment, cannot apprehend the true nature of 'non-cognitional' experiences, and cannot, therefore, deal adequately with any problems except such as are furnished it by other 'functions.' No wonder that 'anti-intellectualism' should result from such a conception of knowledge.

Philosophers have always held that the purpose of reflection (whatever reflection may be, psychologically) is the attainment of a reliable insight into the nature of the world. Practical considerations compel this view. Ordinary, casual observation is superficial and unsystematic; it never penetrates beneath the surface. Doubtless reality is, in some degree, what it is in unreflective moments; but it is frequently something more, as man learns to his sorrow. Reflection displaces the casual, haphazard att.i.tude, in the attempt to get at the real nature of the world.

The results of reflection, moreover, are c.u.mulative. It tends to build up, by gradual accretions, a conceptual view of reality which may serve as a relatively stable basis for conduct and calculation. Thought does, indeed, possess a transforming function. The reasoned knowledge of things is gradually extended beyond the occasional moments of inquiring thought, supplanting the casual view with a more penetrating insight; reality becomes more and better _known_, and less merely _experienced_.

Dewey reverses this view in a curious manner. It is 'experience' that is built up by the action of thought, not knowledge itself. This play on terms might be innocuous, if it were not accompanied by his separation of the knowing function from others. Dewey makes 'knowing' the servant of 'direct experience' by giving it the function of reconstructing the habits of the organism, in order that unreflective experience may be maintained with a minimum of effort. The non-reflective experience becomes the valuable experience, and knowledge is made to minister unto it. This is truly a 'transvaluation of values.'

Dewey asks: "What is it that makes us live alternately in a concrete world of experience in which thought as such finds not satisfaction, and in a world of ordered thought which is yet only abstract and ideal?"[286] This sharp separation of thought from action is vigorously maintained. Following are some of the terms by means of which the difference between direct and reflective experience is expressed: 'direct practice,' 'derived theory;' 'primary construction,' 'secondary criticism;' 'living appreciation,' 'abstract description;' 'active endeavor,' 'pale reflection.'[287] This casual, easy distinction escapes criticism because it seems harmless and unimportant. The distinction, however, is _not_ real. It does not correspond to the simple facts of life. Thinking, far from being 'pale reflection,' is often a strenuous and energetic 'activity.' Reflection, not 'direct experience,' is often, at least, at the high moment of life. Experience becomes unmeaning on any other basis. 'Living appreciation' and 'primary construction'

involve thought in a high degree; 'pale reflection' is lazy contemplation, lacking the spark of life that characterizes true thought.

There is no escape from Dewey's needlessly alarming conclusions, except by maintaining that thought accompanies all conscious life, in greater or less degree, and that the moment of _real_, earnest thinking is at the high tide of life, when all the powers are awake and operating.

Thought must be made integral with all other activities, a feature of the total life organization, rather than an isolated phenomenon. Man is a thinking organism, not an organism with a thinker.

It is not to be supposed for a moment that by 'thought' is here meant the activity of a merely subjective knower. Dewey does, indeed, deal effectively with the subjective ego, and with representative perceptionism. But by 'thought' is here meant reflection, judgment, inference; and in this sense thought is said to be present in all experience. There can be no question of the relation of thought, so understood, to reality; for the reason that it has been so integrated with experience as to be inseparable from it. Setting aside knowing as the awareness of a conscious subject, there remains an issue with Dewey concerning the actual place of thought, as an empirical process, in experience, and the issue must be settled on definite and really empirical grounds. So much, then, for 'functionalism' and its psychology.

Something should be said, before closing this discussion, concerning philosophical methods in general, since Dewey's psychological approach to the problems of philosophy must be held responsible for his anti-intellectualistic results, with their sceptical implications. In the beginning of his career, as has been seen, Dewey adopted the 'psychological method,' and he has adhered to it consistently ever since. This initial att.i.tude, although he was not aware of it for many years, cut him off from the community of understanding that exists among modern idealists concerning the proper aims and purposes of philosophical inquiry. Although at first a professed follower of Green and Caird, Dewey's method was not reconcilable with idealistic procedure, and in a very real sense he never was an idealist. The virulence of his later attacks on 'intellectualism' may be explained in terms of his reaction against a philosophical method which interfered with the development of his own 'naturalistic' tendencies.

The method of idealism, or speculative philosophy, is logical; but it may perfectly well be empirical at the same time. To the anti-intellectualist empirical logic is an anomaly, a red blue-bird, so to speak. The philosophical logician is represented as one who evolves reality out of his own consciousness; who labors with the concepts which have their abode in the mental sphere, and, by means of the principle of contradiction, forces them into harmony until they provide a perfectly consistent representation of the external world which, because of its perfect rationality, must somehow correspond with the cosmic reality. In spite of the fact that no man possesses, at least in a sane condition, the mental equipment requisite for such a performance, certain critics have not hesitated to impute this kind of logical procedure to the idealists. To quote from Dewey himself: "For modern philosophy is, as every college senior recites, epistemology; and epistemology, as perhaps our books and lectures sometimes forget to tell the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma. Pa.s.sionless imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete subjection to a ready-made and finished reality ... is its professed ideal.... Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowledge which is other than the propitious outgrowth of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their ulterior implications in order to recast them ..., the dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects having no nature save to be known."[288]

This charge against modern idealism has little foundation. Speculative philosophy repudiated, long ago, the 'epistemological standpoint' as defined by Dewey. Idealists have not fostered the conception of a knowing subject shut in to its own states, seeking information about an impersonal reality over against itself. Note, for example, this comment of Pringle-Pattison on Kant, made over thirty-five years ago: "The distinction between mind and the world, which is valid only from a certain point of view, he took as an absolute separation. He took it, to use a current phrase, abstractly--that is to say, as a mere fact, a fact standing by itself and true in any reference. And of course when two things are completely separate, they can only be brought together by a bond which is mechanical, external, and accidental to the real nature of both."[289] Dewey himself never condemned 'epistemology' more effectively. But it is useless to cite instances, for any serious student familiar with the literature of modern philosophy ought to know that 'idealism' has never really been 'epistemological' in the sense meant by Dewey and his disciples. Subjectivism is not idealism,--the stolid dogmatism of neo-realism to the contrary notwithstanding.

Idealism holds, speaking more positively, that philosophers must submit the conceptions and methods which they employ to a preliminary immanent criticism, in order to determine the limits within which they may be validly applied. Every genuine category or method is valid within a certain sphere of relevance, and the business of criticism is to determine by empirical investigation or by 'ideal experiment' (which means much the same thing) what concrete significance the conception is capable of bearing. Dewey, from the standpoint of idealism, is guilty of a somewhat uncritical use of the categories of 'description' and 'evolution.' Are the categories of biology fitted to explain mind and spirit? Instead of inst.i.tuting an inquiry designed to answer that question, Dewey accepts 'evolutionism' as final, and attempts to force all phenomena into conformity with his resulting logical scheme. He misses the valuable checks upon thought which are furnished by the 'critical method,' and is none too sensitive to the technical results of the special sciences.

The logical approach to philosophy strictly involves certain implications which have been overlooked by many of its critics. It may well be admitted that our real categories are not fixed and final, but are perpetually in process of reconstruction. The process of criticism inevitably makes manifest the human and empirical character of the particular forms of reflective thought. It recognizes the fact of development, both in knowledge and in reality, and by this very recognition the value of knowledge is enhanced. It is forced, by the very nature of its method, to recognize the concrete and practical bearings of thought. Indeed, there is a sense in which idealism would declare that there is no thought--when thought, that is, is taken to mean an isolated fact out of relation to the world. It is not possible to make this retort upon the critics of idealism without recognizing that there has been a vast misjudgment, amounting almost to misrepresentation, of the intellectual ideals of modern speculative philosophy.

To conclude, it is neither by abstract logical processes, nor yet by the dogmatic employment of scientific categories, that philosophy makes progress, but by an empirical process which unites criticism and experiment. In speaking of the development of modern idealism, Bosanquet says: "All difficulties about the general possibility--the possibility in principle--of apprehending reality in knowledge and preception were flung aside as antiquated lumber. What was undertaken was the direct adventure of knowing; of shaping a view of the universe which should include and express reality in its completeness. The test and criterion were not any speculative a.s.sumption of any kind whatever. They were the direct work of the function of knowledge in exhibiting what could and what could not maintain itself when all the facts were confronted and set in the order they themselves demanded. The method of inquiry was ideal experiment."[290]

When all has been said, this method remains the natural and normal one.

Dewey's 'psychological method,' by contrast, seems strained and far-fetched, an artificial and externally motived attempt to guide the intellect, which only by depending upon its own resources and its own increasing insight can hope to attain the distant and difficult, but never really foreign goal.

FOOTNOTES:

[281] _The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy_, p. 240.

[282] _Op. cit._, Mind, Vol. XI, p. 8 f.

[283] "The Experimental Method," _Influence of Darwin on Philosophy_, p.

228.

[284] "The Experimental Method," _Influence of Darwin on Philosophy_, p.

240.

[285] See the review of Dewey's essay, "The Experimental Method," in Chapter VII of this study, p. 91 ff.

[286] _Studies in Logical Theory_, p. 4.

[287] _Ibid._, p. 2.

[288] "Beliefs and Existences," _The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy_, p. 172 f.

[289] _The Philosophical Radicals_, p. 297. The essay in which it occurs, "Philosophy as a Criticism of Categories," was first published in 1883, in the volume _Essays on Philosophical Criticism_.

[290] "Realism and Metaphysics," _Philosophical Review_, Vol. XXVI, 1917, p. 8.