Few deny the extraordinary influence John Dewey exerted during the first half of the twentieth century. His time at Columbia University, beginning in 1904, overlapped with a number of movements interested in laying out a social theory to underwrite political transformation. Both the Social Gospel and the Progressive movements of the previous century reached maturity in the twentieth, attempting on the one hand to elucidate the social commitment of Christianity as the only road to God and sustain the integrity of moral agency, and on the other to harness the power of institutions and the rising social sciences to improve human welfare against a willful and economically exclusive liberalism. In this context, Dewey addressed problems relating to economic and industrial life first in Chicago and then in New York. He sought to redefine the meaning of liberal democratic politics in order to sustain a society of free individuals without the deleterious impact such an account has if left unchecked by a vision of social responsibility.1
But Dewey’s preoccupation with reform and persistent talk of the importance of science to political action prompts some of his admirers and critics to see him as an exemplar of self-assertion. Dewey, it is argued, synthesized the theological commitments of Protestantism with his theory of inquiry; he carried forward the commitment of his time to reformism based on a carefully worked out epistemology that leads to social engineering. The most important and sympathetic of these accounts has come in Steven C. Rockefeller’s John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism.2 But its extension has taken a more critical turn, I believe. “The spirit of revelation [in Dewey],” Hans Joas writes disapprovingly, “is … ‘sublated’ in scientific inquiry, as the incarnation of God in man is ‘sublated’ in the democratic community.”3 In his A Nation of Agents, James Block extends the claim by connecting it to the larger horizon of twentieth-century America: “[Dewey’s] vision of a progressively and transcendently realized liberal society invested early twentieth-century liberalism with the powerful cultural legacy of Protestant millennialism.”4 Such readings are continuous with a series of attacks that see Dewey as hopelessly optimistic regarding inquiry and his conception of experience (à la Cornel West and Richard Rorty), as encouraging self-assertion over and against humility (à la Reinhold Niebuhr and John Patrick Diggins), as unable to makes sense of the tragic dilemmas at the heart of our moral lives (à la Hilary Putnam and Raymond Boisvert).
These readings, I believe, go wrong at the level of ontology; they imply that Dewey misrepresents fundamental features of human existence through his account of inquiry, mistaking the irreducible circumstances of life for pathologies that can be surmounted rather than negotiated. But if we interpret his philosophy only as an analogical but secular application of liberal Protestantism, then we miss how his work undermines hubris and encourages humility. To put it crudely, we obscure the fact that inquiry-talk for Dewey is not doing the same work as God-talk does for liberal Protestants. In fact, Dewey’s response to liberal Protestantism and the crisis of religious certainty indicates a thinker more circumspect about the ambitions of inquiry and more attentive to the spiritual sickness that closes the nineteenth century and opens the twentieth. It is to this moment that we must turn.
The image of the period that comes to mind, although in need of some qualification, is one William James offers us. In his 1902 Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), we find the following description of the sick soul:
But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy.5
The description is arresting; here we have an account of individuals who long for comfort that outstrips temporal existence, and for whom the Jamesian voluntaristic outlook is unsatisfactory.6
James’ description, however, is not readily transparent. Admittedly, he often speaks of the sick soul more as a temperament or character-type and less as a description of the age.7 But in the context of late-nineteenth-century America spiritual sickness has a more expansive designation. The longing for a supernatural remedy is coeval with the sense that no such cure exists. Spiritual sickness thus denotes not estrangement from a unified and stable cosmological order—a state of mere sinfulness in the presence of God—but a full acknowledgment of its absence.8 Spiritual sickness should be read as a forerunner to Max Weber’s now famous account of disenchantment—an image in which science profoundly alters the outlook of individuals because it erodes the religious roots that sustain both them and society. Prefiguring Weber’s description, in which science eviscerates meaning from nature, James writes the following in the latter part of Varieties:
The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as the smallest of facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the drifting of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel sympathy…. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles,—epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world’s irremediable currents of events.9
Like Weber’s view of modern science, James often expresses ambivalence about how we ought to orient ourselves to Darwinian evolution and what it means for our religious and moral lives. For both him and Weber, if the world looks increasingly alien, if our destinies weigh and determine nothing in the world, it is because the scientific transformations in modern life have reached the level of metaphysics.
Prominent theologians such as Charles Hodge write in agreement. For Hodge, Darwinian evolution erodes purpose in the world and a sense of moral commitment to self and society by denying individuals the object of their piety—namely, God. Liberal Protestants, such as Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman Abbott, James McCosh, and John Fiske, weed out the contingency Darwin’s theory implies in order to sustain a conception of piety that can underwrite human agency. The religious framework thus renders intelligible and legitimate both humans and the world in which they live. The preoccupation of liberal Protestants with certainty and progress remains, but it finds expression through a divinely sanctioned vision of self-assertion.10
The word “self-assertion” does some work for us precisely because it carries implications often attributed to Dewey’s philosophy. At one level, it denotes an image of humans as artisans whose intervention is applied to humanity, society, and nature to mold a world for human purposes. In its theological guise, this vision retains the belief that a fully meaningful view of the world must continue to draw on a metaphysical source of creation. But liberal Protestants give salvation a decidedly historical character that underscores self assertion’s formative powers.11 Self-assertion rejects the existential threat posed by the sick soul precisely because it affirms (a) a vision in which the accent is placed on the ability of humans to fashion a world for use and comfort, along with (b) a view of the world, in its materiality, as wholly amenable to human purposes. This description dissolves a humble orientation toward acting in the world in favor of a strong presumption of the world’s openness and encouragement of human aims and aspirations. It is therapy in the form of spiritual reedification.
This is the problematic and complex context in which to locate Dewey and to which he should be read as responding. This context includes a decline in the importance of a religious ethos and an ascendancy in the belief that human action is completely arbitrary and uncertain and that one’s identity, conduct, and political institutions are thus without a moral compass.12 Dewey’s mature philosophy—which emerges in the early 1890s13—develops at the very moment in which the stability of the self is disrupted ontologically and the epistemological framework to which individuals appeal seems less plausible. The crucial point, however, is that his intervention leaves him with neither recourse to Hodge’s pessimism nor the reconciliation that liberal Protestants’ proffer.
We can thus read Dewey, without this appearing anachronistic, as accepting Hodge’s contention that the naturalization of human development severs the connection between a divine Creator as the ultimate source of allegiance and what this reveals to us regarding human agency. But he rejects the claim that such a position leads to paralysis of will or ethical nihilism. In taking seriously the biological anthropology of Darwin’s theory and its constitutive features of change and contingency in grounding human development, Dewey also punctures the conceit of liberal Protestants regarding the relationship between human beings and the natural world. For him, where reliance on God or natural law is now in doubt, the untidiness of human existence cannot simply be folded back into an unfolding story of progress. Rather, this untidiness serves as the wellspring from which inquiry and identity flow—in short, the foundation of human agency. Only at the end of this chapter will we get a brief outline of this account and its importance.
The relationship between religion and science during the late nineteenth century gradually undergoes an important transformation in the United States, in part because of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. As historian Herbert Hovenkamp notes, science initially found a home among Protestant theologians in America.14 Yet Darwin’s The Origin of Species of 1859 and subsequent Descent of Man of 1871—particularly with its emphasis upon change, process, and struggle in understanding human development—called into question the religious foundations of social and political life in ways that were absent from previous accounts of evolution.15 What distinguishes Darwin’s theory from earlier evolutionary doctrines is the specific place given to chance, which, when placed in the context of religion, undermines the entire project of Ultimate Design.16 As Keith Ward explains, unlike in other theories of evolution the “irony is that the theory of natural selection has virtually no predictive power. It makes the existence of presently known facts highly improbable, rather like the outcome of the National Lottery.”17
Darwin’s language points in this direction. Diversity in an organism’s development, he maintains, can potentially aid survival and thus be passed on to the next progeny. As he states: “[A]s natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.”18 At this juncture we must exercise caution. To be sure, enhancements that result from an organism’s adaptation to its environment are possible. Such adaptations that affect groups of organisms allow for diversity in taxonomic status, even though they are genetically tied to a single organism. This explains the origination of species by descent with modification from a shared ancestry.
Darwin underscores, however, that such transfers are merely the result of chance. The transfers could potentially not have taken place at all largely because they depend on a number of other unpredictable variables—namely, various environmental factors—that could be at variance with survival conditions.19 Even here, Darwin doubts that natural selection can produce an absolutely perfect organism, for what is “perfect” in regard to survival abilities is relative to other species that exist in the same ecosystem, and is constantly in jeopardy of being rendered “injurious” because of “changing conditions of life.”20 For this reason, he does not subscribe to a law of necessary development where that denotes change in a specific direction resulting from fundamental elements that exist in a latent or immature state.
This is only a bare sketch of some of Darwin’s claims. Consider, however, one negative interpretation of this account that assumed primacy in the late nineteenth century among theologians such as Hodge. Here I mean only to briefly articulate this interpretation, turning explicitly in the next section to Hodge’s language. To the extent that Darwin’s theory is credible, the story goes, arguments from Ultimate Design are rendered problematic. From the perspective of natural selection, nature appears ruthless. Natural selection empties the world of mercy and justice, once believed to have been invested by God at the moment of creation. This equally throws into doubt the belief that human conduct is sanctioned by a higher power.
We find echoes of this perspective outside the American context, directed at the larger scientific horizon to which Darwin belongs. Weber, for instance, reaches a conclusion quite similar to Hodge, albeit derived more directly from his analysis of modern science. In a Weberian framework, Darwin is merely the outgrowth of the naturalization of all norms and values that result from science’s engagement with the natural and social world. What is left, argues Weber, in the wake of modern science’s encounter with the sacred sources of existence is an unanchored subjectivism.21 If God is dead, to whom should one turn for guidance? The self seems more autonomous to be sure, but the lightness of being is seemingly unbearable.
It is at this point that the theological framework of justification by faith comes under assault. Beliefs no longer seem grounded in a fixed benevolent reference point—an unchangeable divinely ordained universe—but are the contingent result of humans attempting to cope with a treacherous and wasteful world. To employ the language of “contingency,” “chance,” “fortune,” and variations of the same, is to underscore the unpredictability that inheres in nature. Recourse to God, in whose image one’s identity is concretized and given purposeful direction, seems problematic because the world God seemingly provides works against human efforts.22 Moreover, Scripture as a point of adjudication and assessment at the level of metaphysics (i.e., the study of Being) and epistemology (i.e., the study of knowledge with respect to truth) no longer seems viable for many when read through the lens of Darwin’s theory of evolution. As we shall see in a moment, natural selection symbolizes for a number of theologians an attack resulting from modernity’s development on the place religion occupies in American society.
Few terms have as many incompatible uses and meanings as “modernity.” The notion provokes much debate, to which I do not want to contribute. But I employ the term to call attention to a change that begins in the seventeenth century and reaches its zenith in the nineteenth century: individuals come to understand nature in a more scientific way that stimulates the construction of rational techniques to penetrate, interpret, and ultimately control nature in its totality. The term “rational” is doing more work than we might think, for it denotes a conflation of reason with a conception of scientific certitude. To apply rationality, then, to the study of natural, social, and political affairs is thus to seek out certain or exact knowledge regarding their functioning.23 This change in orientation draws a strong connection between science and progress that in turn extends to human affairs. But it takes the form that it does not because scientific advances spark an epistemological crisis, but rather because of the larger theological-political conflicts. The religious and political affairs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus stimulated the application to the study of human affairs of a mode of reasoning based on science, creating a tension between religion, understood as an “unprovable and accordingly uncertain” faith, and science, perceived as that which discloses clear, distinct, and certain ideas.24 This understanding of modernity is thus coextensive with the philosophical and political developments of the Enlightenment.25
In characterizing modernity and the Enlightenment in this manner, however, we need to take note of the internal complexity that, in a pre-Darwin era, rendered intelligible the positive relationship between science and religion in the United States. After all, both Hodge and liberal Protestants understand themselves as heirs to the Enlightenment. So although the tension described above did exist, this is not the complete story. Natural philosophy was not always employed over and against religion, but often as empirical support. While we often emphasize the tension between the two, few can deny that thinkers as diverse as Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant sought to elucidate the appropriate relationship between reason and faith. As Jonathan Israel skillfully explains in a passage worth quoting at length:
Most men had no more desire to discard traditional reverence for established authority and idealized notions of community than their belief in magic, demonology, and Satan. Doubtless, this is true of both elites and common people…. Even those relatively few in society sufficiently swayed by the Cartesian intellectual revolution to adopt mechanistic explanation and mathematical logic as the new general criterion of truth rarely sought to apply it to everything. Just as Descartes with his two-substance dualism created a reserved area for spirits, angels, demons, and miracles, and Boyle and Locke with their emphatic empiricism similarly ring-fenced miracles, spirits, and the core Christian “mysteries,” so the intellectual elite of Europe mostly sought one or another intellectual expedient for having it both ways—that is reconciling the new mechanistic criteria of rationality not just with religion and theological doctrine but also with social norms.26
Israel’s point is that a cognitive orientation, infused by a belief in an enchanted background, served as the site for the development of modern philosophy and the new science. Even in Newton’s world of inert matter, human purpose continued to appear ennobled by something other than creative wills, making the motion of human and celestial bodies more than contingent. If these thinkers are sometimes thought of as articulating a science of humanity, for them, as Israel explains, it is only because there was an authority to give that science direction. That the reconciliation often encountered conceptual problems and contradictions in no way diminishes the attempt that these thinkers made. This explains why American theologians so often understood themselves as working within the Enlightenment tradition, albeit the Cartesian and Newtonian variant. They interpreted that tradition (and with good reason) as committed to a cosmic horizon in which human purpose and reason were affirmed within a distinct soteriology. To be sure, their approach involved a less mystical analysis of religion, as we will see below, but it was an approach that did not deny the mysteries of the divine or that God was necessary to live a morally upright and meaningful existence.
Confining ourselves for a moment to the American context, then, what was troubling in relation to Darwin was not simply that his arguments seemed to deny the existence of God because scientific investigation and evidence do not warrant God’s existence. This problem was an issue from the time of Hume. The threat Darwin posed was more specific, relating to the absence of moral purpose in existence. This is the conclusion that scholars such as Hodge attacked. But others, such as some liberal Protestants we shall consider in a moment, attempted to redefine this feature of Darwin’s theory altogether. My contention is that Dewey is attentive to both the worry that precipitated Hodge’s challenge and the attempt by liberal Protestants to recast Darwin and escape the potential frustration of human energies. He sought a path between the religious traditionalism and lamentation that we find in Hodge and the overconfidence of Protestantism. This third way has profound implications for his philosophical outlook; Dewey retained the humanistic and political hope of both the Newtonian and Darwinian Enlightenments to be sure, but he located it in a more humble understanding of knowledge acquisition that is sensitive to the primacy of contingency.
Many American theologians during the period in question saw themselves as engaged in a genuine scientific enterprise in their elucidation of Christian commitments, and so viewed their activities as consistent with the Enlightenment. However, they believed that their conception of the field of inquiry was far more expansive in the context of Darwinian evolution. Thus Charles Hodge remarked that scientists in the wake of Darwin did not acknowledge “the strength with which moral and religious convictions take hold of the minds of men.”27 For that reason, Hodge continues, such convictions should “be accepted as facts” susceptible to analysis. Failure to acknowledge the intuitive power of these facts, he argues, will leave us morally adrift.28 As Mark Noll and David Livingston remark: “The heart of Hodge’s interest [is] the Augustinian picture of human salvation.”29
The image of humans as morally adrift is crucial to understanding the nature of Hodge’s worry. For him, Darwin’s theory provided a scientific foundation for a life and culture that increasingly defined itself in the absence of God. As Hodge explains in his classic What Is Darwinism? (1874), belief in our abilities to sustain ourselves in God’s absence is tantamount to “atheism.”30 We might consider Hodge’s formulation of the matter this way: Is Darwin’s theory of natural selection a doctrine that can accommodate Christian beliefs without those beliefs ceasing to be true? For him the answer is a resounding “no.” He explains the reason for this in his well-respected Systematic Theology (1872–73), where he lays out the meaning of Scripture’s claims based upon the same methods of inductive reasoning championed by Francis Bacon and exalted by Newton. As he writes of his method, “it agrees in everything essential with the inductive method as applied to the natural sciences.”31 For that reason, he continues, “[t]he Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science…. In theology as in natural science, principles are derived from facts, and not impressed upon them.”32 If Darwin’s theory is accepted, Hodge reasons, the Bible as a reservoir of facts must be rejected because natural selection is intelligible only if we accept its “ateleological” character.33
Hodge’s philosophical move follows from the very popular commitment to commonsense realism and the exaggerated Baconian outlook regarding induction. Indeed, many relied on this union as a way to reconcile genuine religious belief in God and divine purpose with scientific methodology.34 In Hodge’s case, it allowed him to underscore the hypothetical nature of Darwin’s theory, and as a result deny it the status of a fact. For what distinguishes the scientist from the theologian is not, in Hodge’s view, their methodology, but the content of what is investigated. Darwin’s methodology as it relates to his “rules of evidence,” Hodge argues, makes his conclusions the object of attack.35
Here Hodge is extending the commonsense realism articulated by Thomas Reid.36 What Theodore Bozeman writes of Reid can equally be applied to Hodge: “[I]f efficient causal agency in nature is beyond sensory reach, then the scientific investigator properly may deal with its visible effects.”37 God, in Hodge’s view, is in essence the nonempirical connector between what lies beyond sensory reach and the visible effects that give Biblical data credibility. Systematic theology, then, is a further effort at classifying and eliminating wrong correlations within the Bible so that factual generalizations regarding conduct and right living can be sustained. “The law,” writes Hodge, “is revealed in the constitution of our nature, and more fully and clearly in the Written Word of God.”38 This is the claim noted earlier, in which principles are derived from facts rather than being impressed upon them. The point, however, is that for Hodge facts assume greater weight over theories because the latter are necessarily tentative and dependent on facts for evidential support. But facts, Hodge tells us, “are determined by the wisdom and will of God. To deny facts is to deny what God affirms to be true.”39 Hodge contends that since Darwin’s theory lacks sufficient support and the evidence offered contradicts the wisdom of God, it should be rejected.
In saying this, we must be clear that Hodge does not oppose science as such. He is very clear, as are many American theologians, that Christians have often adjusted themselves to scientific truths that are then hermeneutically related back to and affirmed by the Bible. “The Bible,” he remarks, “has stood, and still stands in the presence of the whole scientific world with its claims unshaken.”40 But he adds: the “theologian … acknowledges that the Scriptures must be interpreted in accordance with established facts. He has a right, however, to demand that those facts should be verified beyond the possibility of doubt.”41 Such an account of the relationship between reason and faith, science and religion, was not antithetical, even if not identical, to the much earlier positions staked out by Descartes and Newton.42 Hodge’s aim, no less than these thinkers before him, was to offer a more moderate picture, in which human rationality matters in our negotiations with the world, but which nonetheless does not expunge God from the universe.
There is a running together of several distinct claims worth mentioning that no longer seem viable in the wake of Darwin, but to which Hodge and others subscribe. The first is that intuition is an objective feature of our psychological profile given by God.43 Second, within this framework we comprehend and experience the divine, since it is here that the moral laws are inscribed. Third, Biblical facts become further proof of God’s existence, but more significantly provide evidence from which axioms for conduct are drawn. Here we see a metaphysical horizon against which one’s claims to knowledge are located and rendered intelligible. Hodge’s worry is that once this background disappears, piety no longer makes sense. The result would be that we become, in a moral sense, individuals without direction, and the possibility for commitment to self and society would equally become unintelligible.
The urgency was all the more pressing because the crisis of religious certainty extended beyond the bourgeois intelligentsia. Precisely because those individuals who sided with Darwin were more thoroughly bound up with the strands of popular culture, the growing erosion of religious belief developed alongside a crisis of certainty that extended beyond the academy and America.44 In this context we should observe, as did Hodge, a framework that questioned the possibility of an objective horizon in which to locate one’s beliefs. Moreover, the significance of sincerity for self-identity—that is, a state of being free from personal dissimulation—was unpleasantly cast into relief. For Hodge, the evaluative stance that one assumes toward actions presupposes an independent reference for its own assessment that is beyond contingency. For him and others, absent this independent reference point, our moral and political lives are open to arbitrariness and chance.
The significance and historical scope of Hodge’s worry cannot be understated. Weber expressed the same concern years later in his 1918 address “Science as a Vocation,” which is worth mentioning in this context. After all, his account is the most famous description, even if not the first, of the mood with which we have been concerned and continues to serve as a touch-point for contemporary reflections. For Weber, disenchantment has two distinct but related components: a psychological dimension, and an institutional aspect that centers on a specific deployment of the scientific paradigm in modern democratic life. As I mentioned earlier, Weber shared Hodge’s worry not because of an analysis of Darwin, but because he believed that he discerned within the larger scientific tradition to which Darwin belonged a logic that eroded the religious and teleological roots of the moral life. This erosion, he argued, followed simply from the cognitive attitude of the scientific stance—namely, that all could be known, that there was no limit to human knowledge and so no mysteries in nature.45 Nature may well be a problem, but no longer a mystery. Ironically, it is the sense of a mysterious nature that implies forces at work “not of ourselves”—forces that provide comfort and a point of epistemic and moral adjudication in the management of our lives. For Weber, as Lawrence Scaff explains, disenchantment denotes the “disruptive sense of disengagement, abstraction, alienation, homelessness, and the ‘problem of meaning’ that begins to gnaw at the vital core of modern experience and social philosophy.”46 But there is another—more institutional—dimension to Weber’s analysis that outstrips Hodge’s reflections. Science’s quest to understand reality by “increasingly precise and abstract concepts,” coupled with the growing complexity of modern societies, will inevitably lead to a reduction of politics to mere calculation and a displacement of the citizen by the expert.47 We shall come back to this second dimension in chapter 5, since it relates directly to how Dewey seeks to reconcile the relationship between experts and the public in the context of democratic decision-making.
If we focus for a moment on this first dimension, however, a crucial question emerges that is explicitly at work in Hodge’s account. If Christian beliefs—principally in the existence of God—are in fact a sham, what beliefs can one confidently commit oneself to? Here the issue of sincerity rears its head for Hodge as it did years later for Weber. In other words, in the face of Darwin’s theories and the modern scientific stance, the objective correlate to which faith attaches comes undone. The agency-enabling element that supports and guides the construction of individual identity and social cohesion disappears.
The results of this are twofold. The first is the emergence of competing and conflicting value commitments—a theme most clearly at work in Weber’s analysis. On this view, the crisis of religious certainty contributes, if not wholly produces, the crisis in normative evaluation that continues to animate thinkers as diverse as Jürgen Habermas and John McDowell.48 The crisis in normative evaluation informs Hodge’s worry about the disappearance of an objective horizon to guide life. How, in other words, do we adjudicate between conflicting value commitments? What are the normative resources available to modern individuals if a thoroughgoing naturalism is accepted or inescapable?
The second result is a kind of perpetual doubt regarding one’s commitments. As James puts the matter: “Now our Science tells our Faith that she is shameful, and our Hopes that they are dupes; our Reverence for truth leads to conclusions that make all reverence a falsehood.”49 Along these lines, for Hodge, the certainty that theological beliefs find justification in something beyond what is distinctively human is fundamentally tied to and sustains the faith one accords them. Indeed, it is what makes both purposefulness and commitment possible. Man, writes Hodge, “has desires, aspirations, and necessities for which the world does not furnish the appropriate object.”50
If, however, the background of meaning implicates one in self-deception because an infallible criterion of knowledge cannot be had, any acceptance of belief thereafter, Hodge reasons, will be experienced not merely with caution, but with corrosive skepticism.51 Theologian Theodore Munger laments all this before offering a more positive alternative when he observes that such individuals “cannot make the transition from that which no longer feeds and satisfies to the fresher conceptions that can. Hence it is largely an age of arrested belief, dangerous to all, fatal to many.”52 We hear of a similar concern across the Atlantic, this time from Matthew Arnold in 1852, a feeling of “[w]andering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”53 But in the context of Darwinian evolution, Arnold comes to lament the emerging world. This much he indicates in his 1867 poem, “Dover Beach”:
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
…………………
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we hear as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.54
The upshot is the following: Darwin’s theory throws into doubt the foundation of existence and does not equally provide a suitable replacement that answers the question of central importance: “What shall we do and how shall we live?”
This question, offered first by Leo Tolstoy and then by Weber,55 is intimately bound up with Hodge’s lament: “Without the Bible we are without God and without hope. The present is a burden and the future a dread.”56 That the future is a dread I take to be both a psychological and sociological claim. Regarding the psychological aspect, Hodge seeks to save individuals who are without firm ground upon which to stand by underscoring the incompatibility between theological facts and the scientific hypothesis of evolution, and then retreating to the former. This serves, he believes, as the only genuine answer to the crisis in normative evaluation—that is, do not abandon God or the Word of God. But here Hodge differs dramatically from Weber, since the latter views the modern condition as irreversible—“the fate of our times” as he says—and so rejects otherworldly solutions.57 In fact, as Eyal Chowers explains, the only explicit response Weber offers to the “crisis of the modern self” is that the solution should be “sought for ‘each person by herself.’”58 But this only sends us back to a kind of subjectivism, groping after what both Weber and Hodge take the modern self to be longing for and in need of—namely, a comprehensive view that serves as a foundation for adjudication in our moral and political lives.
Hodge fleshes out the sociological implications of his approach with its political undertones when he remarks: “[Darwinism] does not meet the religious and moral necessities of our nature.”59 For him, we need something of substance that is beyond the precinct of the human to bestow meaning and direction on our lives.60 In this train of thought Hodge’s concern is with a hidden and much greater threat that prefigures the political, to be sure, but also sustains and orients it. The ability to see beyond our subjective experiences to the experiences of others as objects of concern and thus ennoble our existence is made possible only if we travel down a road that ends in God’s company and grace. The possibility for positive redemptive political action depends on a prior metaphysical commitment to God in order to guide life. This is precisely why, for him, we perceive but do not create moral laws.61 To rely exclusively on our rational capacities will lead to a proliferation of evil and deny to us the possibility of salvation that is bound up with faith.
Hodge’s point, one which comes out in Systematic Theology, is that a turning away from God—that is, a renouncing of one’s piety—renders unintelligible the moral faith that orients our conduct and sustains political life. To him, our individual and collective lives are wholly impoverished and crippled once we have accepted the Darwinian stance. The conclusion, then, is that at the heart of spiritual sickness lies paralysis of will. In this context, Hodge remarks: “[T]heism is the basis of jurisprudence as well as morality.”62 This suggests that his psychological claim is always accompanied by the worry that political life apart from acknowledgment of God will be equally emptied of normative force and direction.63
In contrast to Hodge’s pessimism, liberal Protestants were far more open to Darwin’s conception of evolution and the scientific milieu to which it belonged. This openness was necessary in order to reconfigure God’s relationship to humanity and categories such as original sin, redemption, and progress. By using the term “liberal” to describe one branch of American Protestantism, I mean it to refer to a theological outlook not simply friendly to evolution and modernity, but even, more significantly, optimistic in its orientation toward the world because of this amicable relationship. While Hodge argued incompatibility, others believed they need only adjust features of the theological account. For them, these adjustments did not harm the metaphysical or epistemological dimensions of belief, and in fact reasserted a more resilient notion of human action. The classics of this genre, we might say, are works like Munger’s The Freedom of Faith (1883), John Fiske’s The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin (1884), Henry Ward Beecher’s Evolution and Religion (1885), James McCosh’s The Religious Aspect of Evolution (1890), and Lyman Abbott’s two works, The Evolution of Christianity (1892) and The Theology of An Evolutionist (1897).
The issue of human agency, specifically in it social context, was central to their outlook. If the developing partnership between science and Protestantism aimed to realize progress and deepen social harmony, then the elements of purposefulness and commitment would seem untouched. Thus on the heels of Munger’s earlier lament, he quickly rebounded, asserting a spiritual optimism: “There is, however, this sure ground of hope that the great body of mankind will not long live without a faith.”64 Reconciliation between Protestantism and evolution did not rest merely on a semantic distinction, nor was it simply an argument about the appropriate understanding one should take regarding humanity’s relationship to the divine. This latter view worked within the traditional framework, where, although humans are estranged from God, there is an unquestioned assumption that God exists. The matrix of justification was not at issue.
More subtly, however, liberal Protestantism was about the meaning of the divine as such. Precisely because of the ensuing crisis, liberal Protestants were more anxious to find confirmation for the divine and corresponding moral beliefs in the reconciliation of science and religion. The upshot of this position was that to accept Darwinism did not necessarily lead to disenchantment. We cannot deny that the objective of liberal Protestants was to respond to traditional problems within the Christian worldview, but this was because those problems, given the tension between religion and evolution, hindered a more robust attempt to renew faith in the existence of God, which could in turn serve as a basis for one’s actions and commitments. Of course, they often spoke in the name of Darwin, but could not remain completely consistent with his theory. It is precisely the element that Hodge worries about—natural selection’s ateleological character—that falls away when read through the reconciliation thesis.
James’ description of the “healthy-minded temperament” captures the nature of this reconciliation. As James writes, the healthy-minded temperament is one which has a “constitutional capacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual’s character is set.”65 This description, in which progress and certainty become possible in this world because one’s character is placed beyond the crippling reach of suffering, most resembles the aspirations of liberal Protestants. This account mingles with an activist will, resulting in self-assertion. But once self-assertion and a commitment to progress replace humility, sin undergoes a radical transformation that relocates it from the level of ontology to history.
In his 1882 article, “Progress of Thought in the Church,” Henry Ward Beecher, a popular Brooklyn pastor, gives us a taste of this developing sensibility. “There is a strong and growing tendency,” Beecher explains, “to enlarge the sphere of Divine Revelation by adding to the Bible the revelation of Nature, and of man’s reason and moral consciousness, which are a chief part of Nature.”66 Historian and philosopher of religion John Fiske gives this vision greater clarity when he observes that the story of evolution “shows us Man becoming more and more clearly the image of God, exercising creative attributes, transforming his physical environment, incarnating his thoughts in visible and tangible shapes all over the world.”67
For Beecher and others, nature’s revelation through evolution need not be inconsistent, and indeed is essential to understanding God’s work and our moral nature. This much we see when Beecher makes an understanding of human nature the bedrock upon which one manages and realizes a moral government:
Now, let us see what government is. It is the science of managing men. What is moral government? It is moral science, or the theory upon which God manages men. What is the management of men, again, but a thing founded upon human nature? So that to understand moral government you are run right back to the same necessity. You must comprehend that on which God’s moral government itself stands, which is human nature.68
But the unfolding of our nature, as he goes on to say, reveals itself through evolution. To deny evolution misses what our nature reveals about how we ought to conduct ourselves in society. Evolution is thus an exemplary process of moral self-disclosure that informs collective self-governance. The two—moral self-disclosure and collective self-governance—are intimately linked, with the former serving as the center of gravity for the latter. Through the unfolding of humanity’s moral biography we come to desire rightly, with the belief that insofar as our actions are based on those desires, we may act rightly as witnesses to God’s kingdom in this world.
On this matter, of course, we should be clear. Beecher concedes in his sermons of 1885, Evolution and Religion, that evolution is a hypothesis that makes the origins of man “uncertain and debatable.”69 But this is not something that leaves much doubt in his mind, as it had done with Hodge. Notwithstanding the hypothetical character of natural selection, Beecher goes on, what should not be in doubt is that our earlier beginnings when compared to now are proof of an “incubation” period in which we developed those “social and moral elements which would make it possible for men to understand the moral character of God.”70
Beecher, Fiske, and others thus give salvation a decidedly historical character. This undercuts the world-weariness and angst that are bound up with visions of redemption through an impersonal God. This perspective displaces Hodge’s worries precisely because once we see evolution as an expression of the union between religion and science it is possible to take comfort in a view of the world that seems to be ruled by chance—a world where the image of fortune appears to find naturalistic grounding.
The result of all this was a transformation of evolution into eschatology, for evolution was thus seen to work on the level of epistemology to influence the moral and political levels of existence. This eschatological view provided the model in which the forward movement of history embodied in evolution was made possible, and which at no point denied its consummation in time. This is because evolution was considered a process of extrapolating and perfecting from within an organism in response to the larger environment.71 In this thinking, evolution always already orients one in time as it refers back beyond to that eternal locus that underwrites reality and secures human self redemption. Liberal Protestants were thus representational realists for whom moral knowledge was mediated through humanity’s evolution. As an independent source, God was responsible for the substance of moral knowledge, but the human grasp of this independent reality came through evolution.
Thus conservative Protestants who clung to a narrow reading of Scripture, especially in the wake of Darwin, Beecher argues, misconstrued the relationship between humanity and God. Indeed, they diminished the importance of a purposeful existence because of the way they defined the object of humanity’s loyalty. As such, they consigned humanity to a world of “infinite sin and suffering.”72 With Luther, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards our ability to partake of God’s complete nature is prevented by our disobedience; God’s image must forever remain vague and unclear, obstructed by the veil of knowledge beyond which we can never see. Temporal existence, in this view, is thus devoid of meaning. Augustine’s morality, much like that of Calvin, Luther, and Edwards, is one in which goodness in the world becomes a mechanism by which we exalt God and are allowed to experience a realm of transcendence. But this exaltation of God is independent of the question of whether it leads to social improvement, indicating in essence the inconsequential nature of human purposes to God. Our purposes are ennobled through our commitment to God, as we are simultaneously reminded of the diminutive human horizon that grounds those purposes. This description, Beecher explains, understands the fall as an ontological description—that is, as an event that results in God imposing an eternal condition on humanity’s existence in the world. The implication is that God transmits “to the whole human race, through all time, the degradation … [and] suffering of [the] divinely destroyed experimentalists of Eden.”73
Instead, Beecher likens man’s evolution to acquiring the fundamentals of reading and writing, which begins with learning the alphabet. Analogously, he reasons, the earlier stages of Christian development were trial-and-error attempts in gaining first letters, words, and a vocabulary with which to decipher God’s work and understand precisely the importance of man’s development.74 Hence his earlier description of Adam and Eve as “experimentalists” admits fallibility to be sure, but more significantly bespeaks our ability to revisit and correct the errors of the past in future activity. Because sin becomes a historical event redemption is equally made temporal in character.75 The image of Adam and Eve as experimentalists implies that humans should hold in reserve the ability to impose themselves upon nature as a way to prevent regression or the replication of error that would stifle evolution. In redefining through evolution the proper object of religion as man rather than God, liberal Protestants placed greater emphasis on humanity’s moral transformation, yet it was a transformation that looked backward in defining to humanity God and forward in reconciling humanity in this world to the image of its Creator. Human nature and human institutions became the new repository of the redemptive power once properly tied to Christ’s spiritual intervention.76
I do not want to exaggerate the importance of the scientific discovery of evolution for Beecher, Abbott, and others. That is to say, we must be careful not to obscure the role of the ministry in this philosophical context. For to rely completely on facts gained from science was to miss precisely the importance of those facts. They revealed more than an empirical world subject to investigation, but rather a connection to divinity and knowledge upon which to stake humanity’s claim to the future. Man’s self-disclosure through evolution was seen as an education to human nature in which the species “comes under the law of the human,—that is, under the law of God, under the law of right and wrong.”77 To proceed in this way, liberal Protestants believed, both rescued humanity from the older Manichean conception of Christianity and staved off the suggestion that evolution destroyed God. To ensure this conclusion, Beecher adds: “[W]e are in danger of having the intelligent [i.e., scientific] part of society go past us, [for] the study of human nature is not going to be left in the hands of the church or ministry.”78
We must parse this claim carefully largely because it attempts to define what an appropriate recognition of our dependence on God should look like, blurring, as did Hodge, the metaphysical presupposition of God with epistemological claims regarding right action in the world. To begin, Beecher’s philosophical idiom restates the implication of Hodge’s worry regarding the collapse of the moral economy of self and society, although the ateleological character of evolution that concerned Hodge is missing. And Beecher agrees with him regarding the importance played by theology in educating us to human nature; science’s disclosure of evolution alone does not meet the moral and religious demands of our nature. Moral guidance and locating its legitimation in a larger horizon thus remained the essential principle of religion in ways that resembled the concern of Hodge: “the moral structure of the human mind is such that it must have religion.”79
But if the study of human nature was not to be left in the hands of the Church because of its failure to engage evolution, and yet the moral structure of the human mind must have religion, what conclusion should we reach? We are to conclude that for liberal Protestants something of primacy in human life would be lost. For that reason, Beecher says elsewhere, “if ministers do not make their theological systems conform to facts as they are, if they do not recognize what men are studying, the time will not be far distant when the pulpit will be like the voice crying in the wilderness.”80 The image of wilderness that he invokes conjures up a darker vision—a site potentially populated by unwieldy beasts, incapable of displaying the traits of human agency. The taming of the wilderness is thus a copartnership between God and man: “Though [God] works through laws and a continuity of laws, yet there is a large commonwealth of liberties by which a man can produce effects through God, that cannot be produced in any other way.”81 Beecher’s attempt, like that of his fellow liberal Protestants, was to satisfy the psychological and sociological aspirations of theologians like Hodge through the language of evolution, and in doing so to stave off the concern he expresses regarding the appropriation of evolution in the first instance.
The vision of self-assertion expressed above was inextricably linked to belief in a normative reality independent of human beings and their practices. The result was an oscillation between questions of epistemology and claims about moral and political direction. Evolution filled the gap that separated human action from an independent God-sanctioned reality, therefore justifying self-assertion and locating progress within time. Liberal Protestants connected their optimism about humanity’s potential to their ecstasy about the immanence of God. Their conceptions were predicated on the elevation of the self that paradoxically occurs through an incessant preoccupation with God as the self-affirming source of human existence.
There is, however, an irony to the foregoing account that must be acknowledged. The meaning of this reconciliation belied its inner secrets: religious self-understanding agonizes over the melancholy it rejects. “In early affairs,” James McCosh (president of what would later be named Princeton University) contends, “there may be greater glory in suffering and sorrow than in prosperity and dazzling splendor.”82 The reconciliation gestures, as indicative of McCosh’s remark, toward sickness. We will obscure the darker undercurrent of the very notion of spiritual loss in this period if we interpret McCosh and others purely through a theological framework. In the context of Darwin we must render differently the inner turmoil of the self no less than its impact on society. At one level it refers back to God, and at another it bespeaks the absence of the divine altogether. On the one hand, the self exists in the presence of the divine, and on the other, it is simply thrown back on itself.
The worry Hodge captures was thus part of the motivating force that generated the quest for reconciliation by liberal Protestants. The healthy-minded temperament expressed by the reconciliation grew out of the same worries over spiritual sickness that we find in Hodge and that came to define the modern era in Weber’s work. This is because the sick soul (as with the implied feelings of despair, melancholy, anxiety, suffering, and sorrow) takes on new meaning in the context of modernity. “It [melancholy] arises,” Charles Taylor remarks in his recent commentary on James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience
in a world where the guarantee of meaning has gone, where all its traditional sources … can be cast in doubt. It therefore has a new shape: not the sense of rejection and exile from an unchallengeable cosmos of significance, but rather … a definitive emptiness, the final dawning of the end of the last illusion of significance. It hurts, one might say, in a new way.83
The Jamesian sick soul existed, then, in a darker universe than did the Augustinian self because it embodied Hodge’s and Weber’s worry. This concern stimulated a need for reconciliation and conditioned the particular way it framed itself. The union between science and theology thus reconfigured the religious possibilities through an activist spirit that recognized human imperfection, but which, as William Clebsch argues, “assure[d] the spirit of its relevant engagement with reshaping the universe” by taking up a “program of reform.”84 Protestantism thus rationalized its creed, and liberalized its approach, as it engaged social and political relations to sustain that optimism regarding worldly progress. In this account, the contingency of life must be perpetually denied. The result, however, was that Adam and Eve’s reluctant naturalism could produce only a half-hearted experimentalism.
The worries of Hodge and liberal Protestants, including the positions they assumed, received serious attention throughout Dewey’s mature career. We can thus read Dewey’s critique of the varieties of foundationalism—philosophic, scientific, and theistic—that he developed after 1900, along with his constructive projects during the period, as an attempt to respond to the crisis of agency. The full significance of this account will have to await our investigation in later chapters, but a substantive overview is necessary to show how Dewey negotiated the crisis. In this regard, we should turn immediately both to the importance he attributed to our embodied existence, and to the centrality of change and uncertainty in his philosophy. What work were these doing for Dewey’s overall philosophical outlook? In answering this question, I want to highlight his views on the emergence of knowledge, and on the dynamic process of our encounters with the world.
The approach by liberal Protestants, on Dewey’s view, led to a false promise regarding the relationship between human agents and the natural world. There was in it a strong presumption of an articulable world that provided fixed reference and guidance markers, which were nevertheless independent of human perspective and indeed legitimized human action. For him, to treat known elements within experience as causally connected to something beyond it was to insert a suspicion of sense perception that seemed unwarranted, even if one conceded that this was all we had to go on. For knowledge would always appear, in this view, as a revelation—indeed, one that was true and untarnished. The conclusion, then, would have to be that if integrity of agency in relation to Darwinian evolution depended on the old way of thinking, we would, in effect, have to view agency as emptied of normative force because the entire project was conceived through a structure corresponding to something fixed and outside of experience.
In Dewey’s reading of Darwin, the notion of stasis is rejected in favor of the empirical belief in change and contingency in constituting human development. Dewey’s point was that there is a transactional relationship among self, other, and the world—resulting from the movement of and disruptions in life (what he often calls “problems”)—that generates and structures frameworks of meaning. We are connected to the world and others in a more fundamental way before the question of the absence of agency can even arise in the first instance (see, for example, EWLP [MW8:83–98]).85 Dewey takes as his starting point an unquestioned belief in our embodied existence in social relations as the primary datum of investigation. Or to say it differently, Dewey’s claim is that if we understand the question of agency not as a logical problem—an attempt to ascertain its vitality in relation to objects that precede it in a causal but nonexperiential chain—but rather as an issue of social psychology, then the problem as here defined dissolves.
Of course, as made clear in Hodge and Weber above, this standpoint must raise another issue relating to the objective status of morality. As Weber put the matter, a form of human inquiry modeled after science “is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe.”86 How, then, do we retain the very notion of objectivity when, in James’ famous words, “the trail of the human serpent is thus over everything?”87 Notwithstanding this issue, which we take up most directly in Part Two, for Dewey any account of moral objectivity will have to be internally situated within social life, as an emergent corollary to our engagements with the social world. That is, the point is not to get in touch with something that bestows normative guidance and provides objectivity from without, but to understand how these elements inhere in our social practices from the start if we are to make sense of how they function.
Situated inquiry, for Dewey, is always coextensive with the fact of contingency. The primacy of contingency, he argues, is brought home to us by Darwin. Recognition of contingency is the beginning point for understanding our biological anthropology, and by this I mean an empirical account of the nature and origins of, and ways of maintaining, human existence. This empirical account, since it takes its point of departure from experience, disrupts the traditional structures in which knowledge claims are grounded. This is the frame to Dewey’s philosophical outlook, and its reverberations can be identified throughout his religious, moral, and political philosophy.
One result is a relocation of knowledge claims. At one end, knowledge cannot be the result of impingement of external things on a passive mind, since this is merely to speak the language of revelation. But nor is knowledge wholly spun from the mind’s formative powers independent of external things. For in both cases knowledge appears to preexist: either the senses distort it, needing the mind’s formative powers, or the senses accurately perceive it (SLT [MW2:298–337]; RE [MW3:101–107]; ETK [MW3:107–128]; PIE [MW3:158–168]).88 Both perspectives, Dewey argues, preclude knowledge from being an “affair of the intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environments” (NRP [MW10:6]). For him, it is the flux of our environments and the indeterminate pressures they place on us that generate responses in which knowledge emerges. This is precisely why inquiry is situated.
Although scholars often get sidetracked by Dewey’s explicit criticisms of classical thinkers, especially Aristotle, we should nonetheless read him as rehabilitating practical intelligence, or phronēsis, through a Darwinian outlook. Thus Dewey refers to “experience in its vital form [as] experimental, an effort to change the given; it is characterized by projection, by reaching forward into the unknown” (NRP [MW10:6]). He presupposes a chastened account of inquiry, given its generative structure in experience. But this means that unlike Aristotle’s division between theoretical and practical action, inquiry becomes the central practice that underwrites and connects both. Dewey’s aim, then, is not simply to lay out a method, narrowly conceived, but to articulate the way inquiry makes us sensitive to the complexities and potential disruptions that emerge in our natural encounters with and negotiations of the world. Whereas Aristotle, Dewey argues, seemingly confined this sensitivity to ethical and political life (BE [MW3:89]), he extends it to all aspects of the human condition precisely because the contingency that Darwin highlights runs all the way down. His approach is thus a modified Aristotelianism, with a difference attributable to the pervasiveness of contingency he discerns (via Darwin) in nature.
How does this sort of account help us with the question of human agency? How is one to proceed given the prior commitment to the substantiality of the self articulated by the liberal Protestants and Hodge? Here the worries of these thinkers meet the concerns of contemporary theorists. If human agency rests on a prior commitment to something fixed for its legitimation, how do we hold on to this substantive account of the self after we have abandoned the prior commitment—that is, after the world has become disenchanted? The question is particularly acute in our own time, serving as the backdrop of both Richard Rorty’s liberal irony, on the one hand, and Charles Taylor’s concept of the self on the other.
For Rorty, the question is itself based on confusion: “[It] ask us to believe that … the springs of private fulfillment and of human solidarity are the same.”89 “The vocabulary of self-creation,” argues Rorty, “is necessarily private … while the vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared.”90 As such, we must abandon the presumption that there is a connection. There is a fundamental anxiety in Rorty’s philosophy—that is, he seems to acknowledge that our socio-linguistic practices and frameworks demand that we see the world as ethically infused, and yet this seems to be in tension with his strongly aestheticized notion of self-formation. In Rorty’s philosophy there is a structural analogue to the problem we have preoccupied ourselves with: If spiritual sickness implies that we have to drop truth as correspondence to a reality independent of us, then we must provide a radical picture that divinizes the self through exalting its self-creative powers. This radical picture of self-assertion runs up against the boundaries of social life, leading Rorty to assert: “The [I]ronist … worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being.”91 Taylor’s account of the self, however, hovers between presupposing a theistic framework and the straightforward point that our social practices generate allegiance and commitments that take hold of us in a deeper sense than is often thought.92 In both cases the question remains: once we acknowledge the contingent-laden character of human development and values does this mean that we must partition what is most important to the self from the motivation needed to sustain political life? Can we no longer speak meaningfully and coherently about the world we inhabit and the people with whom we associate, without lapsing back into a theological story about the primacy of a background independent of human perspective that affirms “the human” (à la Taylor) or saying that the only valuable kind of determination is that which is self-determining in the strong sense (à la Rorty)? Dewey’s answer consists of a complex set of points to which we must now turn.
Any attempt to salvage a meaningful view of agency must, in Dewey’s view, confront the sense of longing expressed by the sick soul and what this implies about the self’s relationship to the natural world and the web of social relations. As such, he wants us to take seriously the implication of Darwin’s theory in our understanding of human agency: “The subject is that which suffers, is subjected and which endures resistance and frustration; it is also that which attempts subjection of hostile conditions; that which takes the immediate initiative in remaking the situation as it stands” (EN [LW1:184]). The sick soul, then, is a commentary on, as much as it is a product of, a vision of human existence that entails a kind of resistance and frustration from which we cannot be permanently relieved once a personal God is thrown into doubt. But unlike Hodge’s response, this carries the beginning of a richer self understanding concerning the source of the attachments and values that sustain us and provide direction. In placing transactionalism at the core of our biological anthropology, Dewey attempts to make us feel comfortable with a picture of ourselves as beings that do and suffer, resist and are frustrated. With our doing this, the art of living is defined not by our ability to escape our condition, but rather how well we can successfully navigate and improve it.
The background of Dewey’s commencement address “Philosophy and American National Life,” delivered at the University of Vermont in 1904, articulates this position. We have already referred to this essay and the following passage, but let us take a look at it once more, now in the light of the concerns delineated above. Here Dewey brings into focus the problems of the self in modern times:
If our civilization is to be directed, we must have such a concrete and working knowledge of the individual as will enable us to furnish on the basis of the individual himself substitutes for those modes of nurture, of restraint and of control which in the past have been supplied from authorization supposedly fixed outside of and beyond individuality. (PAL [MW3:75])
The passage raises a crucial question suggested, I think, by the direction of liberal Protestantism: Can Dewey provide an answer to the problem he describes without domesticating contingency? Can he resist the worry, expressed by William Connolly, that because of a preoccupation with human mastery we will simply “experience modern life … [as being] … conducive to [a] faith in the responsiveness of the world to human organization?”93 For Dewey, the use of the word “faith” makes sense only over and against the potential for that faith to go unrealized, just as accentuating the world’s responsiveness only means that it does not necessarily work against us. As we shall see in the next chapter, he favors a more Aristotelian view of practical rationality that is bound up with a “sense of our dependence upon forces that go their own way without our wish or plan” (HNC [MW7:200]).
Against this backdrop, the passage from “Philosophy and American National Life” takes on a different meaning. We must first look to the use of the word “substitutes,” which can have two meanings. The first would suggest that we are finding substitutes for x, where x is understood to be fixed but simply relocated within rather than outside of the self. This accentuates the interiority of the self as being the most authentic light by which we ought to guide ourselves. But this formulation often courts a strong vision of human mastery and threatens to camouflage the extent to which “we are beings who suffer” (BE [MW3:84]). In other words, it obscures the possibility of frustration and so distorts what Dewey takes to be an appropriate psychology of expectation under modern conditions. So when he says that the substitutes are furnished on the basis of the individual, he must mean something other than this romantic view.
My claim here and throughout the book is that Dewey’s intentions are more complicated. On the one hand, he refers to and seeks to nurture an aestheticized notion of human action in crafting a meaningful existence. But (and this is crucial) he divorces the implications of what the self creates from some stronger claim about its metaphysical status in or beyond nature (BE [MW3:84]). This separation means that the substitutes are not cordoned off from future consideration, in which case our self-fashioning, at both the individual and collective levels of existence, does not presume that we are merely little Gods. The substitutes are fallible. As Hilary Putnam keenly observes: “Fallibilism does not require us to doubt everything, it only requires us to be prepared to doubt anything—if good reason to do so arises!”94 But there is a stronger point here. Dewey wants to keep in view the extent to which we remain answerable to the world of social and natural phenomena and so engage in an objective affair, without also making the more dubious claim about corresponding to the real. This view, which Dewey shares with contemporary thinkers such as Brandom, McDowell, Sabina Lovibond, and Jeffrey Stout, is nicely crystallized by Cheryl Misak when she writes: “An objective area of inquiry must be such that its beliefs are sensitive to something that can speak for or against them.”95
To verify my understanding of Dewey’s intentions, consider the following. In his 1906 address “Beliefs and Existences,” Dewey expresses sympathy with a desire to have an authorization that precedes existence and is fixed. But he is clear in that essay that “the progress of intelligence … has evolved a procedure of knowledge that renders untenable the inherited conception of knowledge” (BE [MW3:92]). For Dewey, this inherited conception—which he takes up in a number of works and identifies with the modern revolutions in philosophy and science initiated by Descartes and Newton—is founded on a procedure that aims to establish beliefs that are incontrovertible and certain (QC [LW4]). In his view, this fails to address the existential despair at the heart of spiritual sickness: that perhaps order is not inherent in nature, that there is no sanction that precedes the human and which justifies and guides our conduct. As with Hodge and Weber, Dewey is no stranger to what may potentially follow from this, for as he writes in “Religion and Our Schools” of 1908: “There is undoubted loss of joy, of consolation, of some types of strength…. There is manifest increase of uncertainty; there is some paralysis of energy” (ROS [MW4:168]). To be sure, this essay reflects on the growing tensions between religious belief and the secularization of public schools, but underlying this is a deeper attentiveness to the existential crisis that saturates the historical moment.
The crucial starting point, in Dewey’s view, is that rather than understanding the sick soul as the diagnosis of the modern age—Hodge’s and Weber’s claim—we should see it as a pathological mood within modernity for which he wants a diagnosis. Here he immediately rejects what appears in our time as a kind of apocalyptical postmodernism that falls prey to the belief that without a strong metaphysics all that is left is a constant play of signs. But unlike some communitarians, Dewey does not run in the opposite direction, by defending a strong vision of identity, the good, and community to serve as a substitute for a unifying religious or ethical framework. In fact, his analysis parallels Nietzsche’s description of the advent of nihilism that follows from the eclipse of the transcendent. And he articulates, as did Nietzsche, a new religious sensibility bound up with our worldliness.96 “It may be,” Dewey remarks, “that the symptoms of religious ebb as conventionally interpreted are symptoms of the coming of a fuller and deeper religion” (ROS [MW4:176]). Of course, Dewey’s account, in contrast to Nietzsche’s philosophy, is at home with democracy and eschews viewing the romantic quest for individual greatness or genius as the paradigmatic expression of modern life. His notion of natural piety, which he mentions in this essay but takes up fully in A Common Faith (1934), is an attempt to retrieve the religious impulse from the strong metaphysical frameworks in which it previously functioned:
Yet nothing is gained by deliberate effort to return to ideas which have become incredible, and to symbols which have been emptied of their content…. Bearing the losses and inconveniencies of our time as best we may, it is the part of men to labor persistently and patiently for the clarification and development of the positive creed of life. (ROS [MW4:168])
If spiritual reedification is a pathology that persists in the context of modernity, so too, Dewey argues, is the existential despair of spiritual sickness. Individuals who assume either position are like artists who have imagined the ideal painting of a human being but are disheartened by the many pictures they or others have painted. Such renditions do not exemplify the model. The fault, Dewey maintains, is with the ideal itself. It is not simply an incorrect model, but in being so, it incorrectly shapes that which is most vital to the model: piety, human purpose, and commitment to self and society. These positions—spiritual reedification and spiritual sickness—then are two sides of the same coin. Dewey’s wager—the hope of laboring persistently and patiently, as he says—is that the first of these is not essential for a meaningful existence, and that the paralysis of the second need not be the final conclusion. The upshot, then, is that moral life does not have to connect piety to a strong metaphysical structure to avoid spiritual sickness or Rortyan irony. There must, in Dewey’s view, be a third way. A unifying theme in his writings is the effort to paint a different picture in which human agency is still intelligible.
From the points Dewey articulates in “Philosophy and American National Life,” “Beliefs and Existences,” and “Religion and Our Schools,” we discern the importance of his religious naturalism. Put another way, he finds a way for us to speak and act seriously regarding our fundamental commitments, while simultaneously holding at bay the tendency to reify them. At bottom Dewey seeks to articulate a new psychological posture—that is, to supply substitutes, even as we acknowledge their contestability. He refers to this natural piety in A Common Faith not as blind deference; such an account would make sense only if one accepted the older model of knowledge as correspondence. Rather, natural piety is an appropriate posture toward the sources of a meaningful existence; they aid us in moving through life, but are open to critical engagement. Prospectively, religious naturalism means that our orientation to the world is such that our aspirations and ideals—what Dewey calls faith—ought not to be excluded out-of-hand, but still must be reconciled with reality.97 We shall turn to Dewey’s specific language in chapter 3, but I use the words “appropriate posture” here to signal something about his approach. His third way is an articulation of the psychological disposition humans ought to cultivate and nurture as they attempt to negotiate and sustain political and ethical life. This foregrounds the importance he attributes to inquiry and the contingency of our practical lives that it implies.
Dewey’s approach tilts our understanding of metaphysics in a different direction. Because the experiential dimension of human existence constitutes stimulated inquiry, structured and directed by an assessment of the consequences of action, it generates traits that we employ in future inquiry. Metaphysics thus consists, he argues, in positing constructs derived from experience that we believe will help us fruitfully manage the world we encounter. It becomes an empirical metaphysics. The potential failure of these constructs is not the beginning point but rather one forced upon us by their inability to hold up in the battleground of everyday life. We weakly embrace our metaphysical commitments, Dewey maintains, not because we do not take them seriously. It seems an inaccurate picture of our moral world to imply that a critical disposition toward our commitments implies a diminution of their meaning. Instead, we weakly embrace such commitments because we acknowledge that our projections into the world and reception of what exists may fall short of what we intend for them to do for us.98 Thus the line by Dewey quoted earlier, referring to the precariousness of practical activity, concludes with the following observation: “Judgment and belief regarding actions to be performed can never attain more than a precarious probability” (QC [LW4:6]). This claim is obviously the background commitment to Putnam’s account of fallibilism.
If this is so, Dewey’s realism is provisional, evolving, as it does, out of the impasses that stimulate inquiries aimed toward human flourishing. “[J]udgment appears,” Dewey writes, “as the medium through which the consciously effected evolution of Reality goes on…. Reality is thus dynamic or self-evolving” (SLT [MW2:296]). Science generally, but inquiry in human life specifically, works in a piecemeal fashion wherein the facts upon which we work are coextensive with, evolving out of, the process itself. For Dewey, this is more than enough reason to believe in the growth of knowledge, even as the structure and ground from which inquiry flows tell us that there is no necessary reason to believe that such growth will occur. The results of inquiry form an interlocking web of warranted beliefs—that is, beliefs assessed on the basis of their consequences in action—upon which we stand as we move forward and further engage the world. This is one aspect of Dewey’s much larger reflections on experimentalism and the anti-authoritarianism it expresses; he deploys it in his understanding of religion, morality, and democracy. But I mention it at this juncture because it stipulates features that provide expansive psychological and emotional direction in our practical judgments. This is the reason Dewey often speaks of human existence as requiring courage: “An empirical method which remains true to nature does not ‘save’; it is not an insurance device nor a mechanical antiseptic. But it inspires the mind with courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world” (EN [LW1:4]; cf. HNC [MW4:163]).
The sources of a meaningful existence do not precede what it means to be a human being or the contingencies of human experience. Rather, they are the result of a more primordial encounter that leads to a constructivist account of our relationship with self, other, and the world. Here is the positive extension of Darwin’s impact; it resists the despair of spiritual sickness because the religious content is relocated to an experiential domain presupposed by a web of social relations that is plural in its offerings. This domain works in turn to condition an aestheticized vision of the self that if completely unhinged or totally opened to transformation will slowly erode our connections to others both morally and politically. This also provides resources to hold at bay a strong communitarianism that if left unchecked equally threatens to make us unresponsive to the claims of others. Both private aestheticism and strong communitarianism block us from engaging in the practice of giving and asking for reasons that is, in Dewey’s estimation, so central to legitimacy and justification in the modern world—the anti-authoritarian legacy of modernity.
The lectures that comprise A Common Faith, writes Dewey to a soldier in 1943, were “meant for those whose religious beliefs had been abandoned, and who were given the impression that their abandonment left them without any religious beliefs whatever. I wanted to show them that religious values are not the monopoly of any one class or sect and are still open to them.”99 If we map his preoccupation with the problems of the self onto the crisis of religious certainty, then we can see that his mature philosophy is a sustained attempt to articulate what he expresses in this letter.100
In referring to his understanding of our embodied existence and its connection to inquiry and knowledge formation, his appreciation for contingency and continuity in experience, his account of religious naturalism and its attending psychological orientation, and the central weight he places on a view of legitimacy grounded in a practice of giving and accepting reasons, we hit on a deeper claim. Dewey is offering a way to see ourselves in relation to each other and the natural world in which human agency can still find a home. He attributes significance to these concepts and worries, as did Hodge and liberal Protestants, about their fate. His approach is an attempt to rescue their meaning from metaphysical exaggeration and therefore the confusion or evisceration that results from spiritual sickness. Yet he rearticulates human agency through a specific view of the practical limitation of being-in-the-world. The question is not whether we can hold on to the substantiality of the self, but rather how it looks once we take this existential background seriously.
Another way of putting this matter is the following: Dewey is attempting to answer a question regarding the fate of human agency; the answer to that question is either no longer satisfying or wholly nonexistent in the wake of modernity, but its importance persists nonetheless. His response continues to affirm self-assertiveness, to be sure, but it is mingled with humility born out of our encounter with self, other, and world. If we return to the view of self-assertion articulated in the introduction, we might say, then, that he accepts proposition (a), that we must encourage human intervention in order to realize the better and advert the worse. But he rejects proposition (b), since he affirms that just because the world is there for us to encounter does not ipso facto mean that it is wholly amenable to human aims and aspirations. To explore the meaning of these points we need to understand, as I argue in the next chapter, the precise importance Dewey attributes to contingency and the connection to practical action that it presupposes. What, in other words, is the significance of moving from philosophical and religious quests for certainty to an acceptance of contingency? The answer to this question will help us clarify Dewey’s understanding of inquiry and tease out its all-important normative character.