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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253340825 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/11/2002 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Becoming John Dewey
Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist
By Thomas C. Dalton
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2002 Thomas C. DaltonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34082-5
CHAPTER 1
From Calvinism to Evolutionism
John Dewey's life as a public philosopher and reformer is probably one of the more thoroughly documented careers of any American intellectual in this century. Yet remarkably little is known about Dewey's childhood and his early professional life prior to undertaking his academic career as a philosopher. Dewey is partly to blame for this gap because he wrote almost nothing about these lost years, and he preferred to begin his own autobiography, published in 1930 when Dewey was seventy, by describing his intellectual interests as an undergraduate at the University of Vermont. Perhaps Dewey didn't think there was much worth reporting before that time, and by all accounts Dewey seemed to have had an unexceptional childhood.
Dewey's daughter Jane tried to correct this deficiency in her biography in 1939 by persuading her father to furnish more details about his early years. Jane Dewey succeeded in completing a family history with personal anecdotes and occasional insights about Dewey's early development that propelled him toward philosophical pursuits. Several of Dewey's former students and colleagues also contributed their recollections of their personal association with Dewey in articles and unpublished interviews, but their commentaries largely focus on his later years at Columbia University. Max Eastman, a former Dewey student, had more success than other close Dewey friends in getting him to reveal more details about his childhood and youth. Eastman, who had an amiable relationship with Dewey, probed Dewey's early years with a disarming wit that brings Dewey's persona alive. Not until 1977, however, when George Dykhuizen published his biography, which involved extensive research in the Dewey archives and correspondence, including interviews with Dewey family members, did a more coherent picture emerge.
LIVING BY THE CREED OF REDEMPTION
Dewey was born in 1859 i middle-class Vermont family whose self-educated father, Archibald, traced his lineage to descendants who fled Flanders to escape religious persecution. They eventually settled in a farming colony in western Connecticut. Archibald gave up on farming in his mid-forties to run a grocery business. To the dismay of some prohibition-minded neighbors, he possessed the only license to dispense liquor for medicinal purposes. Archibald took time out in 1860 to serve as quartermaster of a Vermont cavalry unit for four years during the Civil War before resuming his business. The young Dewey and his two surviving brothers, Davis and Charles (John Archibald died in an accident at home at two and a half years old), got reacquainted with their father after the war. He was personable, had a dry sense of humor, and forgave more debts than was financially advisable. Archibald had a surprisingly wide-ranging though intellectually superficial interest in literary figures that included Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, and Hawthorne and political philosophers William Thackeray and Thomas Carlyle. Dewey's father was fond of quoting from these writers' works, delivering his recitations with an entertaining oratorical flourish. Dewey's father also had an uncanny ability to recall (or so he claimed) exactly what he was doing when he was his sons' ages. This striking gift for recollection through mental association may have stimulated John's curiosity in psychological processes.
Dewey's mother, Lucina Rich, came from a well-to-do, better-educated, and politically active family whose grandfather was a congressman and whose father served as a "lay" judge in a county court. Lucina took pride in her family upbringing and the fact that both her brothers were first-generation college graduates, a goal she ardently sought for her own sons, two of whom, John and Davis, obtained Ph.D.'s. She was a devoted mother, spendthrift, and disciplinarian who made sure her sons had plenty of books to read and lots of chores to complete. When he was old enough, John delivered papers after school until he got a summer job at fourteen, "tallying" in a lumberyard.
Lucina was a devout Congregationalist who expected her sons to adopt the Calvinist creed in word and deed. Her strong religious convictions reflected the conflicting currents of religious belief characteristic of the Reconstruction era. She was a member of the Universalist sect who occupied the liberal wing of Calvinism. Universalists rejected as elitist the doctrine of the elect, believing instead that God would forgive anyone who confessed their sins. This democratic conception of redemption was appealing because it was never too late, as Saint Augustine declared, to rectify one's sins. However, after attending a religious revival sponsored by an evangelical "New Divinity" movement, Lucina had a change of heart and decided to join the "Partialists" who adopted a strict construction of redemption, including the orthodox belief in predestination. Although it was impossible to predict who would be elected for redemption, Partialists believed that good acts could increase the probability of being chosen. In any event, grace could not be purchased with down payments of temporary righteousness, but only through cumulative acts of sacrifice and renunciation.
SECTARIAN SKIRMISHES
The fundamental differences in Calvinist orthodoxy between Unitarians and their New Divinity, or Partialist, rivals merit further elaboration because their creedal conflicts involving free will versus determinism posed dilemmas for the young Dewey that were not easily reconciled. Unitarians challenged the orthodoxy that all mankind was depraved, believing that this robbed persons of their capacity to recognize and choose between good and evil — a choice that each individual ultimately must make to have any hope of attaining Gods grace. It was surely more logical to presuppose that mankind had free will or moral agency than to hold that a person's fate was sealed regardless of his or her conduct. Harvard theologians such as Andrew Norton contended that Christ's sacrifice was an affirmation of human freedom and the belief that human beings were capable of recognizing and pursuing the right path to moral righteousness. The scriptures did not require absolute repentance or atonement but only demanded evidence that an individual had sincerely undertaken the effort to reform his or her conduct and character.
The shrill disputes raging between these religious factions were eventually replaced by the moderating voices of reason that wanted to find a place for benevolence in divine governance and to reconcile the rift between spiritual and natural worlds. The "New Divinity" movement led by Jonathan Edwards emerged to defend Calvinism against Unitarian charges of incoherence. Edwards and his followers drew on Baconian and Newtonian science to suggest how the duality of spiritual and natural worlds could be reconciled through a conception of causality that acknowledged human free will while upholding divine intervention. The Baconian conception of science insisted that only natural phenomena are explicable in causal terms. Isaac Newtons theory of universal gravitation supported this dualistic or deistic worldview. Physical laws governing matter and motion could be stated in causal terms that need not specify the ultimate origins of force underpinning these natural phenomena.
Edwards proposed two levels of causation based on these postulates. God, whose divine powers are not susceptible to human comprehension, constituted a sole or sufficient cause of human existence. Gods will operated in unseen ways, like Newtonian gravitation, acting at a distance to effect changes beyond human control. A second level of causality was operative in human affairs. Human behavior was subject to natural or social contingencies whose causes and effects could be identified through scientific inquiry.
This cosmology was deployed to reconcile the co-existence of good and evil. In his benevolence, God gave mankind psychological freedom to choose between good or evil. Thus God did not directly cause humans to be evil or sinful, but gave them the power to make their own decisions and to take individual responsibility for their moral conduct. Nathaniel Emmons, an adherent of Edwards's New Divinity, was a popular exponent of the "taste" or "exercise" evangelical movement that swept rural New England during Dewey's mother Lucina's youth. According to Emmons, a taste was a potentiality or disposition to act for good or evil that could only become manifest through "exercise." An exercise was not an overt act but what the heart willed or intended. The tastes codified a certain structure or sequence of good conduct in which heart, soul, mind, and body could function in synchrony. Prayer was indispensable to good behavior because it was directed at the heart and mind where the propensity for wrongdoing could be controlled through an act of will.
Dewey apparently accepted and internalized during his childhood this New Divinity psychological formula for redemption. It hardly could have been otherwise. Lucina was relentless in her solicitude, as a surrogate conscience, watchfully steering her children away from forbidden behavior while reminding them of their obligations to God. Steven Rockefeller reported in his biography that Dewey recalled Lucina's tedious interrogations, which she sometimes conducted in the presence of friends. "Are you right with Jesus? Have you prayed to God for forgiveness?" Temperamentally shy and reticent, Dewey admitted to biographer Max Eastman that his religious upbringing only exacerbated his social anxieties. He recalled:
I was unduly bashful and self-conscious, always putting myself over against other people. Perhaps that was it. Or perhaps an overemphasis on evangelical morals had given me a feeling of alienation from the world. I can't recover it. If I could, I would write something about adolescence that really would be interesting.
Lucina's piety seems to have sunk into Dewey's psyche. Dewey told another correspondent in the 1920s that as a youngster he was "hypersensitive, morbidly to thinking of others' alleged opinions of me, which I really knew were mostly imaginary anyway, as they weren't bothering to think of me at all. "Dewey's mother had so set him apart from other children in terms of expected conduct that Dewey may have feared that befriending those guided by lesser standards would be tantamount to falling from grace, or at least putting him at risk of losing his mother's love. Moreover, his doubts were symptomatic of a spiritual conflict within, one that centered on whether he possessed the necessary will, knowledge, and judgment to think and strive toward a virtuous life.
The New Divinity evangelicals retained a belief in predestination, but left unexplained how election for God's grace could occur solely on the basis of a psychological predisposition. The possibility that just thinking a bad thought was tantamount to doing it must have been inhibiting to the young Dewey. That the fear of moral backsliding was a real one for Dewey was no better expressed, as Eastman reports anecdotally, than when "in the midst of prayer, the question rose up into his [Dewey's] mind: 'Isn't this, after all, just a routine performance?'" Eastman said that "[t]hat question bothered him a good deal for a long time." Dewey continued to struggle with the problem of sin in relation to free will while teaching at the University of Michigan. There he argued that "to sin morally is a moral defect," which originates in an "attitude of ones will and desires." The paradox of original sin was how anyone could knowingly do anything wrong while unaware of the good. If this were true, then mere mortals escape completely the moral responsibility for their actions.
Dewey did not openly question or challenge his mothers relentless appeals to think and behave well in the eyes of God. He preferred instead to interrogate his own heart and mind to find evidence for his emerging belief that the soul is more likely to find release through the expression rather than continuous suppression of ones feelings. He wondered why emotions should be considered suspect, when Darwin was saying that they evolved to enable humans to express and to communicate their feelings more completely and accurately. Moreover, the spiritual and emotional signs of personal revelation seemed ambiguous to Dewey. Continuous prayer did not seem to increase enlightenment or bring about a closer relationship with God.
Apparently, Dewey became increasingly distraught over this issue until his first bout with Hegelianism after graduating from college enabled him to heal this "inward laceration." Perhaps he glimpsed a fatal ontological error in the logic of redemption that rendered faith by introspection incapable of bringing about the spiritual reunification of mind and body. Dewey opined a few years later that "[r]eligious feeling is unhealthy when it is watched and analyzed to see if it exists, if it is right, if it is growing. It is fatal to be forever observing our own religious moods and experiences, as it is to pull up a seed from the ground to see if it is growing."
The fatal flaw Dewey found in fundamentalism and later in psychological introspectionism was the belief that we can comprehend our own divinity simply by praying or thinking about it. The attempt to objectify the soul, he believed, detached it from the natural processes of human growth and experience in which it emerges. To be certain, Lucina's faith was not restricted to creedal admonitions. She engaged in many philanthropic activities benefiting the poor. But her brand of idealism, according to one close friend, "was always reaching to something beyond, something, which might be done for those who needed help in body and soul. She was always looking forward from things as they are, to what they ought to be, and might be." Dewey found through Hegel a way to transform his mother's spiritual idealism into a novel philosophy of social reconstruction.
BELIEF AND PROBABILITY
Joseph Butler's writings were the perfect antidote for someone like Dewey, who was frustrated by ambiguous and inconsistent religious doctrine and uncertain about what constituted moral conduct. Dewey recalled that Butler's "cold logic and acute analysis" contributed to his "developing skepticism." Butler was a sophisticated apologist for Christianity during the eighteenth century, when philosophers such as David Hume were attacking as incoherent the doctrine of free will. The brilliant, argumentative Butler defended the principle of free will by exploiting the probabilistic principles underpinning Humes idea of contingency to support the rationality of religious faith. Hume is well-known for contending that cause and effect are merely contingently related. But he also argued against the supposition that natural or human phenomena whose origins or causes are unknown or unexplainable can therefore be attributed to divine intervention. Butler cleverly turned Hume's empiricism on its head. Nature furnishes innumerable analogies that life bears only a contingent relationship to death, and that to presuppose otherwise is to introduce a premise that all known life forms will never assume any alternative existences with which we are now familiar.
Butler found a logical parallelism between statements of probability about the outcomes of natural phenomena whose ultimate origins or causes are unknown, and spiritual phenomena whose ultimate ends are unknowable. Uncertainty about just what kind of person we are going to turn out to be justifies our apprehension that what we do in our earliest years (including even the most trivial and minor acts) may significantly affect what we are likely to become or achieve in our later lives. Likewise, Butler contended that no matter how improbable the existence of an afterlife, given the absence of verifiable evidence, the belief in such a supernatural existence is nevertheless justified from a natural point of view. From a probabilistic point of view, Butler reasoned, those beliefs or actions considered only incidental to our development may turn out to be crucial to our future existence. The probability that an afterlife would possess attributes that are analogous to those found in human existence, Butler argued, made it non-frivolous and prudent to live this life as though it were true.
Butler's argument from natural analogy appealed to Dewey, helping him overcome doubts that Calvinism had planted in his mind about whether he could ever exercise his natural capacities morally to increase the likelihood of redemption. Butler dissented from the conventional wisdom of his day that the human body had been corrupted by sin. He believed that God equipped humans with physical functions whose exercise were naturally beneficial and incorrigible. Those functions, such as seeing, hearing, thinking, and so forth, although intended to fulfill specific needs, possessed potential uses or powers that could never be completely anticipated or exhausted by their current uses. We find this probabilistic conception of function surfacing in Dewey's first essays on ethics in the 1890s, where he asserted, "A large part of our moral discipline consists precisely in learning how to estimate probabilities — to distinguish between relatively necessary and relatively accidental results and to mediate the impulse accordingly."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Becoming John Dewey by Thomas C. Dalton. Copyright © 2002 Thomas C. Dalton. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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