Dr. Darren Staloff, John Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy

[Music] in many ways john dewey was the stereotypical or prototypical american philosopher much like pragmatism itself which is not only a distinctively american philosophy but as bertrand russell has argued a stereotypically american philosophy and that's because like pragmatism dewey is intensely democratic practical progressive optimistic it's a he was an individual and it's a philosophy which is always bursting with activity and new projects of reform and it represents much of what is best in the american character in particular in the case of dewey what's best in the new england variant of the american character what used to be called new england liberalism in addition to his philosophic writings dewey is famous for among other things the dewey decimal system and writings on various social and pedagogical issues many of which had profound impact particularly the pedagogical ones he uh championed and instituted a lot of the reforms in higher education particularly the seminar form which was uh previously associated with german universities however philosophically he's most famous for his defense of pragmatism and his uh instrumentalist version of pragmatism which is as i mentioned the distinctively american philosophy now pragmatism had been created in fact by a american logician in the 19th century by the name of charles saunders purse and it had primarily been a philosophical movement based on a theory of meaning the theory of meaning says something like this that a sentence uh the meaning of a sentence or a statement can be is based on what philosophers sometimes call its logical consequences what that means is if we have a sentence we want to understand we ask ourselves if this sentence were true what would be the practical results for experience what would we expect to experience if this sentence were true as opposed to some other sentence when we get a sense of what the practical significance for our experience of the truth of a particular sentence would be we have a sense of what that sentence means now in in philosophy this became a method because it's a method for settling arid metaphysical disputes we have two philosophers one says that being is unity is one reality is unified it is one big whole another is a pluralist there's no reality as many the pragmatist says okay what practically would i experience differently if if being was one or if being was many would the coffee taste differently would science work differently would the cosmos work differently and if they don't work differently if there's no practical consequence from one belief or the other then they mean the same thing or better yet they mean nothing at all and so in fact a very radical methodology for literally dissolving uh philosophical problems and pushing them towards either practical solutions or complete dissolutions entirely now with this method and theory of meaning was associated a conception of truth uh sentences are true when they successfully predict our experience in other words if the meaning of a sentence is what potentially it implies for our experience when that implication comes true in our experience then that sentence is right for us since such predictions uh afford control over the world theories are true collections of sentences when they are predictive and in this sense help when they work when they help us master our environment right prediction allows us control over nature so a theory is true when pragmatically speaking it works when it works better than its competitors when there's more things we can do with it to help us get some handle on working through our environment now first lay down this sort of central elements of the doctrine william james the doctor biologist psychologist uh had popularized the doctrines of purse um and added a theistic and morally progressive element to them in fact i think it's important to realize the early 20th century pragmatism is associated with a political reform movement known as progressivism which is basically the uh ancestor to modern uh liberal social democracy um and while dewey added uh his instrumental uh pragmatism added some new nomenclature particularly the phrase naturalistic empiricism that we'll talk about to this theory his real contribution to pragmatism lies elsewhere not in the development of the theory but rather in giving it a historical and what i would call a story cystic dimension what i mean by that is dewey is the first to try to place philos uh pragmatism within the large context of the traditional genre of philosophy to see where it fits there what its role within that tradition is now there are a couple reasons for this that dewey would do this first of all he's the first pragmatist who's really a trained philosopher schooled in the traditional literature and that gives him i would argue the perspective to judge just what the significance of this new movement is but secondly and in many ways more importantly before being a pragmatist dewey was a hegelian uh as such he there's a strong residue of hegelian historicism in dewey's thought he always tends to look at things in their historical context to be sensitive to the relativity very often of judgments in a cultural context now dewey's historical defense of pragmatic philosophy uh was in many ways a very difficult project because in some sense at least pragmatism is not really a philosophy at all consider it rejects the classical pursuit of eternal truth it offers no eternal truths it offers no epistemological certainty what works today may not work tomorrow what works today may be superseded by something that works better tomorrow it offers no necessary metaphysical doctrines right in in offering a method it offers no conclusions and even that conception of truth is far from a theory of truth to say that the true is what works is simply to say it's good to believe true things well that's a nice compliment to say about truth but it's hardly what the traditional philosophy would consider a theory of truth in any serious sense so in that traditional sense of philosophy it's not really philosophy at all in fact it's really an anti-philosophy it's really a critique and negation of philosophy as i mentioned it's a way of dissolving of eliminating philosophy of suggesting that it's been a mistake and we should try to do something else for a change so what dewey does in his historicizing project is try to show us how he came to practice traditional philosophy rather than what other historians of philosophy would do which is to offer the reasons on behalf of a particular system dewey never offers the reasons on behalf of a system instead he says look there are historical reasons why this system took the form it did let me explic give you those and then we can look at its results and criticize it on that basis um now that this is not a unique methodology other hegelians do it most notably this is what marxist critique is right mark says i don't want to explain the reasons for ricardo's classical economy i want to show you the sociological reasons why he believes what he does and once i've done that i've demystified demystifies what may seem to be the necessity of ricardo solutions so and nietzsche did the same thing with uh christian morality instead of arguing forward or against it he said look let me explain to you historically how this thing came to be and you'll see that it's not necessary and it's possible to conceive of the world without it so much of dewey's work uh both in reconstruction and philosophy and an experience in nature takes the form of a historical sociological criticism of previous philosophies as in as i've mentioned nietzsche and marx now at the center of dewey's historical criticism is an interpretation of the origins of philosophy on the one hand and the critique of the traditional philosophy and its fixation with what he considers the central element a spectatorial or contemplative theory or view of knowledge now for dewey the basic stuff of philosophy isn't science it doesn't derive from reason rather the basic stuff the ursh stuff from which you will later develop historically speaking is desire and imagine an imagination as they take form in things like poetry drama and myth over time and specifically we're thinking of greece which is where philosophy was historically born over time these things become um ritualized and consolidated in things like religious doctrine uh social ritual and even for that matter religious ritual philosophy emerges when at a certain point breakthroughs in natural science as we've seen in the pre-socratics and in mathematics as we've seen with pythagoras and euclid come into conflict with those traditional beliefs and customs attention emerges the world view of the olympian pantheon of the homeric hero uh starts to come in conflict with a changed environment do not only as i've mentioned to these breakthroughs in natural science and and mathematics but also in a changed political environment the overthrow of the persians the emergence of the greek city state so what philosophy tries to do is secure a new foundation for our traditional moral beliefs a rational foundation for them which is which is necessary since the traditional foundation has been undermined by these changes it also however tries to adjust those values customs and more rays to this changed environment so that those mores will be more effective and that the form of life will be more successful now this was the basic project of both the sophists on the one hand and plato and aristotle on the other and it remains for dewey at least the primary charge of philosophy in the best and by this we mean the non-traditional sense the love of wisdom it's basic charges to show how things hang together and how they ought to hang together in the broadest sense how our drama and literature hangs together with our science and our logic and our moral conceptions okay i want now to turn to the uh the major problem do we find in the historical tradition which is the spectatorial view of knowledge now the spectator view interprets knowledge as a relation between on the one hand a passive knowing subject and on the other an inert world of objects external objects knowledge occurs then when the knowing subject uh correctly identifies the properties classifications and forms essences of objects and beings that are external to him in his thought or her thought this conception obviously originated with plato and aristotle now dewey wants to suggest that this is not the only way to think about knowledge that it seems natural to us because it's what we're used to but it originated in plato and aristotle not for logical reasons but for historical and sociological reasons greek society divides into two very broad classes on the one hand there were idle aristocrats who lived a life of aesthetic contemplation what distinguished the aristocrat was he never worked with his hands he never got involved in the grubby world of material phenomena and changes he lived the world a life of enjoying beautiful works of art of enjoying um various leisure activities on the other hand with the vast bulk of people living in a place like athens who are either slaves or artisans or farmers or laborers and these were people who in fact whose activities were purely practical okay plato and aristotle obviously didn't come from that second group of people came from the former group they plato was a sean of a very wealthy aristocratic family as a result they naturally came to see knowledge as uh akin to aesthetic apprehension literally as contemplation knowledge is a relation between subject and object much as looking at a piece of art is a relation between a passive subject looking at an inert object that's why they are so obsessed with unchanging form right both of their philosophies seek the eternal the immutable uh in reality at the expense of the temporary malleable which they argue you can't really know there's nothing you can really uh understand about that all you can really understand is essence and form the timeless and eternal we should remember sociologically speaking that the world of the temporal and malleable the lower realm as plato would put it is precisely the world of craftsmen of artisans of people whose lives are practical so the realm of the craftsmen was the secondary um not only in an epistemological sense and that you really couldn't know anything about it so craftsmen really don't know anything as it turns out or anything worth knowing but more importantly it's also metaphysically secondary they live in a grubby world a world of purposes and change as opposed to a world of eternal forms and truths which is superior and more real of course than the physical world in which we live the world of grubby mechanics and it's a world in which we can step in whenever we engage in philosophic contemplation we can leave the grubby world of shopkeepers and workers now this interpretation of the knowledge situation subject and object was inherited by the medieval and scholastics from the classical tradition and it remained at the core of theological thinking after that it was given new form and a new life in the modern epic by descartes whose entire conception and search for epistemic certainty comes from a spectatorial view we are a mind looking at an external inert world of matter and we have to our truth comes when our ideas and our mind correspond to that external world and this forms the core of modern traditional philosophy and has given rise to several rather unfortunate distinctions and quandaries i want to run through some of them for you the first is that the distinction between a knowing subject and the known object gives rise to the larger distinction between subject and object as metaphysical categories this becomes very important in german philosophy in the 19th century it turns out the fundamental structure of the universe is subject object this is out there objectively and this gives us a bifurcated world between on the one hand the material world of objects and on the other a super sensible supernatural world of subjects subjects which don't exist in space and time which transcends space and time which aren't physical which have no mass no volume that's left for that lower world of of objects now this distinction between obviously the realm metaphysical realm of subject and object is always an invidious distinction the purpose of it is to draw us away from the world of objects because that's lower it's baser again there's that aristocratic element there it tries to draw us up into the richer higher ethereal realm of subject true being now the next distinction is that between theory and practice and this is uh perhaps even more troubling sinch true knowledge is purely contemplative right it's that active apprehension as opposed to grubby practical knowledge there emerges a distinction between on the one hand theory which gives us truth and practice which only gets results theory is thus concerned with capital t truth and as a result it is giving carte blanche to have no implication for practical results so true theories may not have anything to do with the world around us in fact presumably they will have nothing to do with the world around them and they have every right to ignore practice and as we'll see subsequently this has profound moral implications for the practice of philosophy but by contemplating the nature of pure being in itself being with the capital b being timeless and eternal theory builds in fact an imaginary world a world which is immune from the the other world the world in which we live it's immune from change it's immune from transformation it's immune from all of the quote defects and maladies of practical life it is in fact an aesthetic uh aristocratic refuge from the life of a common man it's a way of leaving the world of troubles in which we live and entering a dream world philosophy thus comes in the in the words of the layman to be painfully abstract from everyday life and irrelevant to human concerns uh as mark said and i think there's a strong correlation between dewey and marx on the question of theory and practice i quote marx on his thesis on fjorback the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways the point however is to change it right the point of philosophical breakthrough is to make the world better not just to amuse us with sort of interesting riddles now the contemplative vision of knowledge also gives rise to another distinction especially in post-cartesian philosophy between mind and matter which is emblematic of a whole host of other metaphysical dualisms now the first thing to note is none of these are fruitful in any practical sense i mean the distinction between mind and matter is not an important element in the development of psychology it's not important in the development of physics it's a purely philosophic in the worst sense doctrine and one of the other and perhaps more damning results of these sorts of dualisms is that they all attempt to derive eternal verities absolute truths moral as well as metaphysical which necessarily bear no relation to the human situation or what we would call practical life what all these dualisms of mind and matter serve to do or ideal and material is bootstrap us out of nature tell us that we're not really part of this physical world part of a higher realm where there is no uncertainty there is no change there is no becoming there's just pure fixed eternal capital b being now such metaphysical doctrines and we've gone through them in this course can be on the one hand they're always interesting but they can be either from our perspective in the 20th century either laughable and i give you as an example descartes solipsistic ghost in the machine if someone were to come up to you today and say well you know i've been thinking seriously and i've decided that i'm really just an unextended spirit or ghost trapped in a material sort of soft machine and i've really come to doubt whether there's anything else in the universe i'm not even sure you're there anymore you wouldn't say well that's a really deep metaphysical insight which you'd probably say is even work a little hard jerry i mean why don't you go see a doctor see if that's the medication um so that's laughable but it can be even worse than that they can be absolutely morally repugnant so you have leibniz in the late 17th century metaphysically proving that this is in fact the best of all possible worlds this is repugnant because leibniz is a late 17th century german germany has been decimated for roughly a century by some of the most horrific religious wars known to man i mean the palentine became soaked in blood the reason there are so many germans in pennsylvania was they were fleeing for their lives from this incredible period of incredible carnage and destruction i mean havoc it would look like the apocalypse had come to western germany and here's leibniz living there saying well this is really the best of all possible worlds it's not that's not even laughable something despicable about philosophy that does that or i'll give you another example hegel hegel whose doctrine is that the rational is the real and the state is the highest form of moral historical community that would seem like a laughable doctrine is that except that hegel is saying that on behalf of a prussian militaristic government he's being paid to say that to stop student revolts that are trying to bring crazy ideas like say democracy republican government to germany so in fact this traditional metaphysical dualism and practice of traditional philosophy has had some rather uh troubling implications for practical life and this is because the fundamental result of his story of the traditional philosophy has been to divorce inquiry from actual historical conditions and needs it is thus moved away from if you remember its original project in greece which was to bring together to show how things hang together to reform customs and mores in light of changed circumstances but traditional philosophy does just the opposite it tells us no no we have to stand on fixed verities fixed moral principles eternal moral truths and the problem is these moral truths were built for a different era to give an example that was very uh important for dewey who lived through the first world war hegel and a whole host of other 19th century thinkers especially german thinkers taught us that the nation state was the ultimate form of historical community and that its demands exhausted our highest moral duties so when the first world war came about we all supported our nation states 100 and our states became more powerful and fought the war with every resource they could possibly mobilize and the results were disastrous millions upon millions of people were killed nothing was achieved there was no victory there was no loss it was just a huge bloodbath dewey's point is that the hegelian moral conception of the state no longer makes sense in a world with mustard gas machine gun nests tanks and aerial bombing right you need different values for a changed environment science unshackled from the straitjacket of philosophy in the 17th century has fundamentally changed the world in which we live but traditional philosophy concerned with being with a capital b in eternal truths has been unable and unwilling to adapt itself and our moral conceptions to this changed world okay now dewey's historical uh deconstruction and by the way i want to pause here for a minute and point something out what dewey has done here what i've presented to you is historical deconstruction and it is exactly the same sort of thing that french philosophers are now famous for having quote originated and this is a deep point rorty makes about dewey the french and many continental thinkers are famous for proclaiming regularly that they've just invented the wheel for the first time all of that project was done by dewey long ago and dewey says but the difference is dewey's historical deconstruction is actually a preparatory phase to reconstruction and philosophy to building a post-traditional philosophy now while pragmatism as a method offers no particular doctrines in fact there are a host of different views one could have and be a pragmatist dewey does sketch for us an overall view of his beliefs which he can which he describes as ultimately naturalistic empiricism or empiricistic naturalism no its empiricism lies in the fact that it always begins and ends in experience all increase starts with our experience and its point is to terminate in our experience and to change it to enrich it to make it better it's naturalistic because it treats the world as natural as physical not because of some metaphysical scruple not because it's a convinced hardshell materialism but because that's the current state of our most advanced knowledge right our physics and our biology and our chemistry tell us that the world is natural if in five years it tells us that it's not then we'll be we'll believe something else so it's not a metaphysical scruple at all it's a common sense view what is it that our most advanced knowledge tells us the world is like whatever that is that's our view it's not metaphysical in that sense it's scientistic naturalism now this naturalistic empiricism of dewey's has profound implications that i want to examine in both the traditional concerns of epistemology and then moral and political philosophy now in epistemology dewey wants to replace that epistemic situation of subject and object that i talked about with a naturalistic relationship between organism and environment it's not subject object organism and environment as an organism becomes increasingly complex has more organs more functions its relations with its environment become a lot more precarious and uncertain and that's because as it becomes more complex they open up more possibilities for action a wider range of possible interactions with its environment it becomes harder to know which is the most fruitful course of interaction it's exactly that situation of doubt which gives rise doing things biologically to thought thought is a biological function which serves to help us resolve uh problems in our interaction with our environment it's a sort of stimulus and response mechanism doubt as to what to do next creates a problem what should we do next and thought arises to resolve that problem to help us figure out in a particular situation our thought emerges to help us solve that particular situation such thought becomes in dewey's sense intellectual only when it actually changes the environment to make it more secure and less precarious we we are as in a traditional primitive society we are concerned about uh the coming rains we think about the problem that thought becomes intellectual when we come up with some scheme for self shelter we change your environment so that those rains will not drench us now i should point out that dewey conceives this natural environment um as including cultural as well as physical problems in other words he's completely rejecting the dualisms of mind and matter and culture and nature is in fact arguing that culture is part of nature we are natural animals you know we are organisms after all and our culture is part of the world of nature it's a very complex part but it's part of it and just as we have problems with our physical the physical side of our natural environment we also have problems in the cultural side of our natural environment and thus we find that philosophy is and ought to be concerned with moral and political problems adjusting our cultural environment as well as our physical one but in general i want to sum up this this brief point by saying knowledge is ultimately a natural relation between an organism a biological entity and its environment and it's one that's marked by fruitfulness right it's a relation that is uh life enhancing for the organism now for all of his naturalism dewey like all pragmatists is in fact an epistemological idealist i want to clear up different senses of idealism there's two senses there's metaphysical idealism that there exists some ideal realm outside of the realm in which we live and it's really there it's objective and it's probably more real in the world we live in it's metaphysical idealism then there's an epistemological idealism and that argues that the objects of our knowledge are in fact constructed by our inquiry that seems very abstract and difficult but in many ways it's a very common sense kind of view how so well take the notion of direction north south west and east no one believes i think that those are natural relations that the universe comes broken into north south west and east and there's a true one right it's always relative to where you are that's something we added to the world but it's nonetheless an object of our knowledge i mean direction is important to us so consider this then we invented or added or better yet we made an as object of knowledge direction and we've retained it because it's a useful tool in getting around our environment and working our way through a cityscape for example or countryside now the general way of putting this would be would be to say that what's true of direction is true of all of our schemes of the world the world does not come pre-parsed into pre-packaged natural kinds our actual experience our immediate experience is like an animal's experience it's pre-cognitive there are no concepts and no entities there's just one damn thing after another what intelligence what thought does is it breaks things down and it chunks them into the definable objects it says this collection of um particular uh molecules and substances and organs that seems to be changing over time is in fact one substance a particular person or that this uh collection of colors and textures is one object a podium right that's a particular parsing we parse it that way because we have certain functions towards this entity if our functions change our parsings change right right for me i might uh look at this podium and say this is you know a a lectern for speaking and it's made out of wood or some airsofts would however if i was a a um a chemist i might look at this entirely differently say well it's not really made of wood it's made out of various chemical substances it's made out of molecules the physicists might read parts say well it's not really the molecules it's really made out of is atoms and maybe even subatomic particles so what there is is a fact is a function of what we're doing and uh we create these issues these entities of the world as tools tools to help us adjust to our environment we change them when they become more or less fruitful as we develop better tools atoms molecules we dispense with other tools substances or we keep them for restricted uses so i want to say that not only our parsings and our objects of knowledge are instruments for action but all of our theories are too right we develop theories of the world because they help us in quote understanding the world to manipulate it and change it now dewey's epistemological naturalism dramatically changed i think the traditional situation first of all the the bane of traditional epistemology which is skepticism is finally eliminated why well remember from the skeptic from the spectatorial view of things the contemplative situation you can never be sure if the ideas in the subject's mind exactly correspond or copy the nature of things in the object world because they're always mediated through his representations through his ideas right and that's why descartes opened up the possibility of skepticism well naturalistic empiricism banishes that skepticism precisely because it eliminates the correspondence theory of truth right our sentences or our beliefs aren't true when they copy the world there weren't they're true and they work what would it mean to say that a sentence is a copy of a thing or a state of affairs they don't look the same states of affairs don't sound like the sentences which talk about them instead sentences are tools they're they're instruments and there is no copying involved does the thing work is there a better sentence that better describes things so we can do better work if if this is the best sentence we have about something that fulfills our purposes that's the true one okay so the next element uh the next changes that in fact for dewey we're best off forgetting the whole idea of truth right if truth is always going to be associated with some eternal unchanging verity well we never know what that is so let's talk about warranted assertability instead let's say that a sentence or a theory is has a warranted assertability when it works better than its competitors when it solves the the problems for which it was created and that's in fact fits with our scientific legacy scientific theories are always susceptible to change to emundation and to replacement if one comes along that's better and how do we know if one is better it's practical results it works better it helps us explain things that the other could helps us predict our experience in ways the other couldn't i want to quote from dewey on this point um because as although he doesn't offer a theory of truth the compliments he pays towards truth it's practicality i think is emblematic of what he's after now an idea or conception is a claim or injunction or plan to act in a certain way as the way to arrive at the clearing up of a specific situation when the claim or protection or plan is acted upon it guides us truly or falsely it leads us to our end or away from it its active dynamic function is the all-important thing about it and in the quality of activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity not in a copy relation to the world the hypothesis that works is the true one and truth is an abstract noun applied to the collection of cases actual uh foreseen and desired that receive confirmation in their works and consequences so again contrary to traditional philosophy there are no eternal truths and immutable truths even for dewey the truths of mathematics and logic are instrumental now these have served for us for a long time with great effect but that's basically what they are they're extremely they're tools we developed very early on in and they've worked very well but it is not inconceivable that we could develop better logics better mathematics and then dispense with the old tools and adopt new ones in fact that's happened we used to believe in a syllogistic aristotelian logic held for close to 2000 years in the late 19th century early 20th century we developed formal mathematical logic we had no reservation among magicians to say well what we used to think was the truth of logic has been replaced by a new truth of logic similarly in mathematics we used to exclusively believe in the axioms of euclidean geometry we now believe in curved space we've adopted different geometries that could change again do we always wants to argue that's always open the project is never closed so the point of knowledge is work is practice knowledge then and this is the key thing is not something sui generous it's not something unique that's not part of nature it's in fact a natural phenomena it's a natural relationship between a complex organism and its environment now i want to turn to the implications of dewey's naturalistic empiricism on moral and political philosophy because i think that's largely what motivated dewey who's very concerned with those issues do we reject the traditional quest of philosophy for ultimate ends for that one true value that is the essence of all values and that all other values can be reduced to and we have various candidates for that there is kantian duty all morals ultimately turn out to be duty you must do everything for the sake of duty or utilitarian pleasure and happiness everything must be a species of pleasure and happiness and conduce to it even benevolence and duty and charity all turn out ultimately pleasure and happiness dewey thinks that whole quest is is part of that metaphysical traditional project we'd be best off dropping it and applying that same experimental method we use in science to ethical problems um to try and re and resolve some sort of good natural results this is important because frame ethical problems are just as natural scientific problems okay well for dewey humans like all animals are creatures of habit and disposition right we have trained behaviors and propensities and that's on one hand on the other we also have impulse impulse is that the spontaneous element in uh in any organism and in nature and it breaks through uh habits it's what induces change now what that means is if we think about things like customs moires and institutions what they really are are widespread uniformities of habit the custom of handshaking arises because a vast number of individuals share the habit of shaking hands upon meeting other people and they do so because they've always found it a useful way of greeting one another okay now the problem is i mean customs and habits become powerful because of their utility their usefulness the way they work however as the cultural and physical environment changes they can sometimes outlive their usefulness when this happens a tension emerges between the environment or part of the environment and another part of the environment the the changed circumstances and the old customs and moires and institutions now as this tension becomes acute um impulse is going to break through if it doesn't you're just going to get a fossilized culture you're going to get something like you know the new kingdom of egypt which is just a fossilized 2000 year old variant of something that's far older without any change if that doesn't happen impulse is just going to wildly break through the cake of custom and things will fall apart what you will get is well in the political realm the most famous examples are violent political revolutions where you get reigns of terror and destruction because the customs are just uh no longer fit into the modern world french revolution excellent example right we are living in a more commercial bourgeois democratic world the old feudal order the customs and institutions of it no longer fit with that world there's no accommodation therefore kaboom we head off to the guillotine the function of intelligence or ethical philosophy should be to guide impulse in instead of simply breaking institutions and forming new ones and forming new habits and forming new customs and again to use the analogy the function of philosophy should be to avoid revolutions by political reform that's what politic that's what uh ethical philosophy ought to do it ought guide intelligent action in pursuit of an end now i want to speak about ends while ethics guide action in pursuit of an end ethics does not itself determine that end it doesn't tell us what we should pursue this is another way of saying there are no fixed and final moral ends now that to traditional philosophers seems to be nihilistic but it's actually not it's actually if anything democratic fact of matter is our ends arise from our culture we value the things we do because of the ways we've been brought up because of the customs we've been raised with because of the habits that we've been inculcated with by our parents and our schools and our society as a whole and these ends change over time at some point we may value salvation 700 years ago more recently perhaps happiness or pleasure prosperity wealth justice and that varies with their culture it's not so much that there are no values which would be a truly nihilistic position rather dewey's an ethical pluralist in the sense that there's a multiplicity of values sure justice is good so salvation so is health sells wealth sells pleasure there's a whole host of values and in fact everybody knows them they don't arise from philosophy they arise from life and they feel and the ethical philosopher has no more insight to them than the plumber right and it's an arrogant hubristic claim on his part that he knows what the true ends are and somehow the plumber doesn't so what the philosopher needs to do instead of trying to reduce all values to one ultimate value or lexically order them the philosopher should look at individual problems in a society each one is unique there is no one fixed final solution what do people want to do in that in that problem what's the problem think his way through to a practical solution by saying if we pursue this value in this situation this is what we're going to get and this is how we might do it and then turn to the rest of the society and say does it sound good to you or did you have some other end in mind if you have some other end in mind i'll show you how we might get there and again in that sense it's profoundly uh democratic so you know ethics is not a deductive science or an a-priori search for first principles but it's really practical uh science it's very similar to aristotle's notion of phronesis now while values and ends according to dewey are historically contingent they're historicists they're a function of our culture as a creature of early 20th century america dewey has his own historically contingent ends which i would describe as progressive and democratic they're progressive because like nietzsche he's an optimist who is an almost promethean faith in change and growth he also shares with niche of you that the individual character or what is sometimes called human nature is primarily the moral and social object of growth right that's what we're interested in human character human nature a person's character is constituted by their dispositions or habits we are the sort of person we are because of the things we sort of we do habitually and regularly and that's how we know each other this human nature isn't fixed or given it's determined by our culture and customs the goal of ethical philosophy then should be to change those customs and institutions to promote the development of this character to develop its rich possibilities uh in as uh as large an extent as possible so this in a sense like nietzsche dewey's moral project is really one of self-creation right selves personalities don't come fully formed born into the world they have to be created through institution custom training and education and that's one of the projects of ethical philosophy that's why he's so concerned in pedagogy and making a lifelong project is to create cells dynamic strong vital selves cells which have no final ends which are constantly growing and changing unlike nietzsche however dewey is democratic he's interested in self in not only the self-creation of a handful of superior men but in the self-creation of every single member of society he thinks that in each of them there is a kernel a possibility of development of a rich richly integrated character in part this is because the individual for him is always formed by his society and his culture as such if we want rich individuals we need to change cultural institutions so the ultimate test of any custom or institution uh is how we contribute to the growth of all the persons in that society and this promethean democracy is uh i would argue reminiscent of another ex-segalian naturalist uh karl marx whose communist man has a fully developed and rounded humanist character he's the guy who is a shepherd in the morning and a literary critic in the afternoon i think that's sort of what dewey wants all right i want to sort of sum up now dewey's pragmatism and pragmatism in general in fact is a combination of on the one hand particularly american attitudes towards democracy work progress practicality and science things which europeans see as thoroughly american and sometimes boorish and on the other hand a set of philosophical dispositions that constitute a dissenting theme within the modern philosophic tradition it's the american variant then of a counter voice within the canon of traditional philosophy it speaks out against the given dualisms of subject and object mind and matter reason and experience and i would argue most importantly theory and practice this counter canon would include people like uh bacon uh marx and nietzsche at the least all of whom shared a deep and abiding naturalism a view that talking about metaphysical realms is pointless this is the world in which we live um as well as a view that somehow or other knowledge should be practical that philosophy should have some impact on life and on society and that should that it should further practically human ends uh and that in this sense traditional philosophy has been a miserable failure now with bacon dewey shared a deep and abiding commitment to science and scientific method and a deep and uh distrust of the blind adherence to the various idols of custom and convention with marx he shared a commitment to social reconstruction and in fact he was a socialist although never a revolutionary and a belief in social science and social democracy but finally with nietzsche he shared a commitment to self-creation and dynamism aesthetic and spiritual as well as social and political

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 13,067

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Comte, Origins, Sociology

Id: JFs1wrRytUs

Length: 46min 55sec (2815 seconds)

Published: Sun May 15 2022