John Dewey and the Hope for Reform

Abstract

BY THE END of his long, productive life John Dewey had become as familiar part of the American scene as any man of ideas of the century. He reigned as aegis of progressive education, the final architect of Pragmatism -America's own philosophy-and the writer of so many books, articles, reviews and broadsides that it is hardly any wonder he has been so often mistaken for Melvil Dewey, the inventor of library classification systeml Yet there has long hung around John Dewey an aura of what his philosopher friend, Charles Frankel, once called a curous remoteness. (1) Another of Dewey's proteges, Sidney Hook, who strained to bring pragmatism into the forefront of social action, related Dewey's detachment from leading social doctrines to an odd habit Dewey had of spending time on out-of-theway persons and ideas. Others, friends and foes, have been moved as well to note Dewey's disaffected ways. (2) I would like to focus on that and approach the relationship between Dewey and his public life on three levels: The immediate level of his activities and judgments on philosophy and social affairs; the preceding level of his intellectual formation under the tutelage of nineteenth century science and German philosophy; and the bottommost level of psychic and emotional response. Taken together, these three levels show an uneasy balance between Dewey's Instrumentalism, the larger world of philosophic ideas, and the train of social reform, which was his end concern. Dewey struggled in protean way to synthesize the elements of his experience. But he was handicapped by whatever aspects of his character caused his remoteness and by corresponding disinclination to fashion definitive social reform doctrine. By tracing the three levels of his life back from the surface to the inner being we can gain some understanding of Dewey's hesitancies and with it further insight into the old mystery of pragmatism's aloofness from other main currents of reform doctrines, notably Marxism and Freudianism.