The argument of the previous chapter focused on the crisis of religious certainty in late-nineteenth-century America and its impact on perceptions about human agency. In this context, Dewey’s approach (as noted at the end of chapter 1) sets him apart from thinkers like Hodge, who reject Darwin out of hand, and the liberal Protestants, whose reformulation of evolution leads to a reluctant experimentalism. Liberal Protestantism’s description of evolution underwrites an expansive conception of self-assertion. In contrast, for thinkers like Hodge, “spiritual sickness” is not merely a shorthand description of Darwin’s impact on the American religious imagination, but more profoundly a belief that experience is emptied of meaning altogether because of its connection to contingency. Spiritual sickness thus prefigures the disenchantment thesis that we have come to associate with Max Weber. My final argument of the previous chapter was that Dewey’s account of self assertion is more circumscribed than that of the liberal Protestants because he accepts the contingency that Darwin reveals, but it is not as crippling as spiritual sickness because he rejects the original connection between meaning and epistemic certainty. There are three questions that must orient and guide our analysis here.
First, what is Dewey’s precise understanding of Darwin in comparison to his liberal Protestant counterparts?
Second, what is the specific usage to which Dewey puts Darwin, especially in relation to his account of human agency and inquiry?
Third, how does the answer to the second question stave off the worries advanced by Hodge and Weber?
In seeking to answer these questions, this chapter examines the connection between contingency and action in order to clarify for us Dewey’s understanding of inquiry. The charge, after all, is that his conception of inquiry is based on an ontology that orients the self to the world in a way that cuts against a belief in the fragility of life that a thoroughgoing experimentalism demands. Dewey seemingly, the argument goes, flattens the otherwise rough terrain of the natural world we inevitably confront, and simplifies the cognitive resources he most certainly intends for us to use. The accuracy of this criticism, however, has to do with the weight Dewey accords contingency in what I refer to as his philosophy of action,1 and the precise relationship between that account and what he says about inquiry. If we are to short-circuit the criticisms directed at inquiry, then we must first understand better than we currently do his philosophy of action, in which inquiry functions.2 This will clear the way for us to examine in part II how Dewey envisions the role of inquiry in our religious, ethical, and political lives.
I begin in the first section with an interpretative claim, one which I advanced in passing in the last chapter: Dewey 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 [MW14:200]). This implies that inquiry must not be perceived as a crass form of proceduralism—a set of rules to be followed in order to yield answers to very clear problems. On the contrary, inquiry is something far more complex. Of course, my placing Dewey and Aristotle in closer proximity will strike some as odd.3 After all, among all the ancient thinkers, it is Aristotle against whom Dewey often directs his harshest criticism. But this observation obscures the fact that Aristotle’s formal categories of knowledge—epistēmē(scientific knowledge), phronēsis (practical wisdom), and technē (technical knowledge)—undergo an important usage and modification in Dewey’s philosophy. This modification captures the complexity of inquiry as well as the epistemic status he believes we can accord the knowledge that inquiry produces.
We can extrapolate from Dewey’s texts against the backdrop of Aristotelian categories in a way that is consistent with what Dewey intends to convey when he discusses inquiry. In doing so, we are positioned to see that inquiry extends the status of practical wisdom, and the contingency it implies, beyond the ethical and political realm, in which Aristotle locates it exclusively. For Dewey, all domains of human inquiry provide a truth about what is probable. The suggestion for pursuing this line of investigation comes from Dewey in a striking passage from Experience and Nature (1925): “Aristotle perhaps came the nearest to a start in [the direction of naturalism]. But his thought did not go far on the road, though it may be used to suggest the road which he failed to take. Aristotle acknowledges contingency, but he never surrenders his bias in favor of the fixed, certain and finished” (EN [LW1:47] [emphasis added]).4
In order to make good on this interpretative claim—the suggestion provided above by Dewey—we need to ask, as I do in the second section below, the following: What is the greatest obstacle to recognizing the reach of contingency in action? This question is central not only to his essay “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (1910), but to one of his most important books, The Quest for Certainty (1929). In both works he turns to the history of Western metaphysics and epistemology. He focuses on the distinction between theory (thēoria) and the practical domain of ethical and political life (praxis). He rejects a description that perceives knowledge of human values to be independent from our practical transactions with the social and natural world. This distinction implies that theory can lay claim to a nonexperiential realm—the “antecedently real,” as Dewey refers to it (QC [LW4:14, 193])—that can direct our experiences in the world. The quest for certainty, features of which we will recognize from the last chapter, produces a view of agency that is always retrospective and singular, and denies the reach of contingency.
But as Dewey points out, the quest for certainty actually implies that the content of one’s commitments develops through action. Our commitments thus have a socially constituted, constructed, and contingent character. His philosophical anthropology reveals that the distinction between theory and practical action presupposes that the latter is the primary point of departure for inquiry. The quest for certainty thus obscures our original relationship to this sphere; it blocks from view a clearer and more productive account of the relationship between contingency and action.
This relationship is the subject of the third section. There I explicate Dewey’s positive appropriation of Darwin in “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy.” Whereas earlier the analysis only opens space for examining the relationship between contingency and action, here I explore the precise connection between the two. In short, Darwin helps Dewey undermine the quest for certainty, collapse the distinction between theory and practice, and understand the reach of contingency in human action. Here I focus on several elements key to Dewey’s philosophy of action—that is, its existential dimension, its function in constituting the self, its temporal quality, and what I call the psychological orientation of expectation—and the place of contingency therein. In brief, contingency becomes the paradigm in which action and knowledge (that is, of both self and world) are emergent environmental properties, potentially defying human mastery and control. This description makes his philosophy of action a descendent of Aristotelian naturalism, but with a difference attributable to the more thoroughgoing experimentalism of Dewey’s scientific milieu.
The relationship between action and contingency frames the role of inquiry discussed in the final part of this chapter. The Aristotelian connection explicitly returns. Precisely because of the centrality of contingency to experience, coupled with the collapse of theory and practice, inquiry functions as that paradigmatic social practice in which knowledge emerges. This presents a problem precisely because for Aristotle thēoria, in contrast to praxis, produces a kind of knowledge that is universal and unchangeable (epistēmē).5 The knowledge of praxis—namely, practical wisdom—however, involves a capacity to act, rather than a kind of knowledge; it requires more than the application of universals to particulars, but the ability to understand, discern, appraise, and manage the complexities of specific situations.
But for Dewey, knowledge claims are experimental at their core, and therefore fallible and revisable in the context of experience. To be sure, although he emphasizes the procedural structure of inquiry, he intends much more. His aim is to underscore the fact that when we say a person (e.g., scientist, craftsman, or citizen) displays practical wisdom, we are reading their judgments within a complex horizon, wherein success as judgments requires alertness, cultivation of perception and imagination, and discernment of salient features in response to a demanding environment. As I argue, for him, the structure of action places demands on the function of inquiry such that individuals must be sensitive to and perceptive of the particularity of the situation in which they operate in order to make an informed judgment.
There is a corollary to understanding action and inquiry in this way. The conception of metaphysics to which Dewey subscribes can only be weak. In other words, inquiry acts as a limiting condition relative to traditional ways of understanding metaphysics that had previously been bound up with the quest for certainty. For him, inquiry can only provide access to a world in which the meaning-content of our practices is retained, but not in the rigid, nonexperimental form suggested by the quest for certainty. This is because the logic of inquiry incorporates the theoretical tools that allow metaphysics to remain critically aware of the contingent circumstances under which it functions, thus limiting its descriptive reach.
Since the Second World War we have witnessed a revival in the use of Aristotelian categories to reinvigorate a philosophy of practice that is sensitive to the complexities of our moral and political lives. Thinkers with whom this revival is commonly associated include Hannah Arendt, Hans Georg-Gadamer, and Leo Strauss.6 Given the list, it is no wonder that Dewey has been overlooked as a potential contributor. Writing as they do amid the vertigo of disenchantment and instrumental reason, these later thinkers turn to Aristotle to undercut the assimilation of ethical and political life into science. As they argue, the result of this assimilation exaggerates what we can expect from human action when it is guided by science. Dewey’s language of instrumentalism and inquiry seems to make him one of the forces we should struggle against.
Dewey is in fact much closer to the Aristotelian line that includes Hegel and Marx and that undergoes a transformation as a result of the evolutionary biology of Darwin. This line stands in contrast to the thinkers cited at the outset of this section, all of whom owe, in some significant degree, their analysis to Martin Heidegger’s narrow conception of modern science and technology. Here I am interested only in elucidating the way Dewey’s account of inquiry modifies Aristotelian categories and their meaning and so provides us with a more complete naturalism; I have no intention of exploring the comparisons above. My aim is to put us on track to see the complexity and dynamism of inquiry.
In book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle lays out his all-important categories of knowledge: epistēmē, phronēsis, and technē.7 Since I have already described the first of these, we can focus on the other two categories. For Aristotle, phronēsis denotes a performative quality of practical action, while technē signifies a qualitative evaluation of action based on its productive results.8 To say that phronēsis is displayed in practical action means for Aristotle that it is inseparable from the person who displays it—that is, it cannot be distilled as a formula to be learned, used, and appropriated in the same way the craftsman teaches his trade. The success that practical action seeks is internal to itself. Action-specific judgments have remainders that are not reducible to the formal structure of deliberation. This is because phronēsis belongs to the ethical and political practices relating to human goods that admit of change and variation.9 Aristotle is clear that phronēsis and technē correspond to ontological distinctions and therefore do not refer to different accounts of action proper.10 That both are a kind of action aiming at a goal he admits. But for him they are not one and the same kind of action.
For Dewey, to locate inquiry against the backdrop of contingency foregrounds the pressures under which living well takes place—the extent to which humans are always both agents and patients. Here, we find our point of positive contact between Dewey and Aristotle: action denotes a kind of performance that is constitutive of the agent of inquiry. Individuals display wisdom, a kind of cumulative experience, in their judgments throughout life that make them an object of respect. His understanding of the proper functioning of inquiry in any given case can thus be read as including Aristotle’s account of phronēsis.
What needs to be observed, however, is that while Aristotle confines phronēsis to moral and political deliberation, in Dewey’s view, this is also part of the fundamental character of human action in toto. The entire process of inquiry seeks to make the agent attuned to the uniqueness of the situation and potential disruptions. We might call this inquiry’s internal good; it is bound up with the individual’s character and conditions her outlook, providing insight into both the concrete situations and their existential background. For Dewey, this undermines the commitment to a permanent set of beliefs that are thought to be applicable to all situations, and, instead, emphasizes prudence and experimentation in constructing judgments.
If the process of inquiry makes the agent sensitive to the uniqueness of and complexities within situations, it does so for Dewey because it seeks external goods. Here he departs from the ontological claim upon which Aristotle bases his distinctions in at least three ways that constitute the modification. First, inquiry is always enacted with an end-in-view: “[I]ntelligence develops within the sphere of action for the sake of possibilities not yet given” (NRP [MW10:45]; cf. LJP [MW8:48]). Inquiry thus realizes goods that are external—observable products that extend beyond the agent. The result of this, however, is that Dewey collapses the rigid distinction between phronēsis and technē. For him, it is a person’s attentiveness to context and sensitivity to the existential background that combine in a formal process that potentially bears fruit in experience. The bearing of fruit will at once refer to the internal good that is bound up with the agent—a kind of excellence of character, we might say—but also external goods that we appraise and judge. External goods in this sense become the legacy of the individual.
Second, Dewey believes that these previous remarks regarding internal and external goods apply to all domains of human endeavor: science, art, and moral and political reflection. It would be odd in Dewey’s view to speak of someone as displaying practical wisdom and therefore successfully engaging in inquiry, if they consistently made bad choices or were subject to constant misfortune.11 In fact, we would begin to make judgments about their character, their intellectual abilities, and their insensitivity to the complexities of the situations in which they find themselves.12 Understood this way, a crucial dimension to realizing the end-in-view, for him, is the extent to which one commands the skill to engage in the entire performance—the art of living.
On careful inspection, Dewey’s outlook intentionally dissolves the meaning behind epistēmē. As he says in emphatic engagement with Aristotle in his 1906 essay “Beliefs and Existences,” noting both the possibilities and limitations of an Aristotelian outlook:
We recall Aristotle’s account of moral knowing, and his definition of Man. Man as man, he tells us, is a principle that may be termed either desiring thought or thinking desire. Not as pure intelligence does man know, but as an organization of desires effected through reflection upon their own conditions and consequences. What if Aristotle had only assimilated his idea of theoretical to his notion of practical knowledge! (BE [MW3:89])
This passage is critical because it brings us to the third crucial point of difference. Continuity between action and production for Dewey is the origination of knowledge, which, in turn provides points of departure for future encounters with the world that either reaffirm that knowledge or throw it into question. This is what it means, as Dewey says above, to reflect upon one’s own conditions and consequences as materialized in experience. Here he takes his cue from the nineteenth-century science of human development with its corresponding reliance on probability. In short, the Darwinian paradigm becomes the framework in which he works. As Robert Brandom remarks, this framework emphasizes “situated narratives of local, contingent, and mutable … reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats” in which the expected is coeval with the unexpected.13
Of course Dewey concedes that the knowledge of the craftsman or physical scientists is often “more precise and more technical,” in contrast to the complexity and imprecision of knowledge associated with ethical and political life (QC [LW4:158–159]). But this is not an ontological difference, and so for Dewey, Aristotle needed only to extend the internal dynamism of moral knowing to knowing as such. As he points out, the “object of specifically physical knowledge is the same thing as being an object of operations that discriminate definitely fundamental relations of the experienced world from others, and that deal with them in their discriminated character” for engaging other aspects of the world (QC [LW4:158–159]). “The objects thus known,” he contends, “lay no claim to be final. When used as factors for inquiring into phenomena of life and society they become instrumental” (QC [LW4:158–159]). In his reading, he does what he perceives Aristotle to be unable to do—that is, Dewey assimilates epistēmē to phronēsis, transforming knowledge once thought certain and unassailable into knowledge that is fallible. In Dewey’s hands, the latter is informed by the experimental method he discerns in the modern self-understanding, rather than its other—problematic—quest for mathematical precision.14 The latter view is often premised on a more structured and purposive view of nature.
Dewey’s underlying claim is that experience constitutes the beginning and terminal points for both the “normative” and “empirical” sciences, giving the actions of both a logical form and experimental character for which explanation and defense can be provided. What hypothesis we should endorse or ideal we should follow equally unfolds against the background of past experiences and future expectations relative to a specific problem. The validity of the hypothesis is no clearer before action than the normative ideal, and so both must be tested by way of action. The difference lies not in the operation responsible for the emergence of knowledge, but rather in the scope of such knowledge: “The more complex the conditions with which operations are concerned … the more significant … is the resulting knowledge” (QC [LW4:159]).
He does not deny that we can continue to speak of technical or scientific knowledge, thus marking off the distinctions between art and science for functional purposes. Rather, the acquisition of such knowledge is not qualitatively distinct from the knowledge of ethical and political life. We would want the agent of inquiry, the craftsman, and the scientist to be capable of responding to the vicissitudes of life that confront them in their respective domains. This allows us to say when they are successful that they have skill or a knack for making good judgments.15 We long to be the apprentice or to use them as models of good conduct, with the hopes that something of what they have might “rub off” on us.
To read Dewey this way provides us with the all-important methodological clue for using the Darwin essay to highlight the importance of practical action to human self-understanding, while texts such as How We Think (1910/1933), Experience and Nature (1925), and The Quest for Certainty (1929) in particular elucidate various features of practical action, its connection to contingency, and the role of inquiry. Indeed, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action announces in its very title the continuity with Aristotle and thus circumscribes its subject matter as a philosophy of practice.
Thus far I have meant to deal only with the relationship between Aristotle’s distinctions and what Dewey has in mind when he discusses inquiry. We should now turn to what he believes is the obstacle to appreciating the importance and centrality of contingency to human action. This will allow us to answer more directly the questions set for ourselves at the outset.
The obstacle to understanding the importance of contingency to human action is what Dewey calls the quest for certainty. By this he means an attempt within the philosophical and theological discourse of the West to shield ourselves from the intrusion of uncertainty, contingency, or fortune. In his view, the quest for certainty often takes the form of an epistemological project, but it dramatically alters our psychological orientation to the world, as expressed in the rigid distinction between theoretical reflection and practical action. In both “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” and The Quest for Certainty, Dewey engages in a strategy of selective historiography, one that seeks to isolate the original motivation behind the quest for certainty and to liberate it from the distorting framework in which it is located. He often uses the language of “recovery” or “reconstruction” in his recounting of the history of philosophy largely because he sees himself as retrieving that primordial motivation as it has emerged out of a confrontation with the recalcitrant dimensions of the human condition. As we shall see in this section, recounting this story allows Dewey to critically reappropriate the past, imbue the present with purpose and meaning, and humbly guide the future without overstating the possibilities and limitations that attend human intervention.
In §I of “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” Dewey writes the following: “In … treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and … treatment of morals, politics and religion” (IDP [MW4:3]). Darwinian evolution is a protest against a static conception of species, that is, a belief that there are latent traits to which development can be referred. Dewey’s interest in this is important. The model exemplifies not simply a way of understanding the development of species, but a view of knowledge acquisition that links the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition to the Christian tradition and then to the modern debates among rationalists and empiricists (QC [LW4: chaps. 3–4]). For Dewey, species variation, as Darwin uses it, is evidentiary support that undermines the more traditional account and with it the vision of knowledge it advances.
His claim is not that we ought to jettison teleological constructions (as if that were possible). After all, theories of nature or life processes that seek to realize goods and projects can scarcely be thought problematic in themselves. But for him a teleological vision that presupposes a reference point of permanence and one that does not will look very different. Each will configure our relationship to the landscape in fundamentally different ways and each will offer a different account of our cognitive abilities. This distinction is important because Dewey wants to retain the teleological orientation of human life, but without reifying its content. Reification, as we will see, often follows from a specific understanding of the sources of our teleological orientations.
What are the implications of Darwin’s account of species for understanding “the cause and the import of the sharp division between theory and practice” (QC [LW4:5])? Dewey’s answer works on two distinct levels. The first relates to a theory of knowledge and the second, although connected, has to do more with “ontological security“; by this I mean the intellectual and emotional foundations of practical consciousness that respond to fundamental existential questions regarding self-understanding and the narrative of experience in which it emerges.16
In §II of the Darwin essay, Dewey provides us with a very clear statement of the early notion of species, taking the Greek tradition as his primary point of departure:
The conception of species … a fixed form and final cause, was the central principle of knowledge as well as of nature. Upon it rested the logic of science … Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes, holding them thereby within the metes and bounds of fixed truth. Completely to know is to relate all special forms to their one single end and good: pure contemplative intelligence. Since, however, the scene of nature which directly confronts us is in change, nature as directly and practically experienced does not satisfy the conditions of knowledge. Human experience is in flux, and hence the instrumentalities of sense-perception and of inference based upon observation are condemned in advance. Science is compelled to aim at realities lying behind and beyond the processes of nature, and to carry on its search for these realities by means of rational forms transcending ordinary modes of perception and inference. (IDP [MW4:6])
This conception of knowledge is understood as analogically derivative of the notion of species. To know is to grasp the permanent, that which exists in and through change. Knowledge is understood as a fixed reference point to which the object of study is referred. The most immediate example to which Dewey refers is Aristotle’s conception of matter as the embodiment of purpose, whose final shape comes into view through growth (EN [LW1:53]). The underlying model is that of a vertical axis: the process of change is understood within a purposive framework and so excludes the possibility of contingency.
Because change and “the scene of nature” are inextricably linked in this view, our practical experience of the world will always fall short of the demands of knowledge. Dewey frames this issue more precisely in The Quest for Certainty when he writes: “Practical activity deals with individualized and unique situations which are never exactly duplicable and about which, accordingly, no complete assurance is possible” (QC [LW4:6]). Dewey associates this negative view of practical activity with the Greeks, arguing that for them, self-sufficient knowledge “was ideal and eternal, independent of change and hence of the world in which men act and live, the world we experience perceptibly and practically. ‘Pure activity’ was sharply marked off from practical action” (QC [LW4:5]).
On this view, Dewey maintains, we cannot elicit from our reflections on practical experience any meaningful features to orient life. As such, “experience [of the world] and thought [about the world] are antithetical terms” (NRP [MW10:6]). To speak, for example, of crafting tools or instruments to refine and enhance knowledge makes little sense. Science will have to be of a special kind, conducted quite differently from the technique of using practical experience as an experimental domain to arrive at knowledge.
Dewey believes that this traditional model of knowledge, experience, and science is the fundamental contribution of Greek thought to the Western philosophic and religious traditions (QC [LW4:22]). In later empiricism and rationalism, he argues, knowledge is understood through an a priori lens. In both cases the experiential dimension of life is disparaged. This may seem odd, at least from the perspective of empiricism, but even there he notes, the term does not mean attentiveness to experience as producing knowledge, but only refers to the belief that sensations are the true place of our “first hand intercourse with reality” and knowledge (QC [LW4:88, 90–91]; cf. LJP [MW8:58]).17
The point above is important in the light of the earlier distinction drawn in both the introduction and chapter 1 between the Cartesian and Newton Enlightenment on the one hand and the Darwinian Enlightenment on the other. Dewey’s point is not that experimentation and judgment do not take place for empiricists and rationalists, but that these processes are secondary to and not originative of knowledge. Even in Newton, says Dewey, “scientific conceptions are valid in the degree in which they are revelations of antecedent properties of real Being and existence” (QC [LW4:153; cf. 93–95]). Indeed, when placed in this framework, he argues, the radical character of the modern experimental method is undermined. Its distinctive importance is defined by science’s ability to drive to the core of reality and access fundamental laws or first principles (QC [LW4:83, 112–113; cf. chap. 8]).18
This is not to suggest that the new science, with its emphasis on experimentation, did not involve a latent transformation in metaphysics. As Dewey explains, it made the “realm of change which had been the subject of opinion and practice … the sole and only object of natural science” (QC [LW4:76]). “But—and this ‘but’ is of fundamental importance—in spite of the revolution, the old conceptions of knowledge as related to an antecedent reality and of moral regulation as derived from properties of this reality, persisted” (QC [LW4:76–77]).19 Hence the motivating force, for example, behind Descartes’ retention of God as a founding property in his system is no different than what we find in Newton, despite the many other substantive differences between them. This much Dewey explains regarding their underlying agreement:
Since science has made the trouble [between itself and religion], the cure ought to be found in an examination of the nature of knowledge, of the conditions which make science possible. If the conditions of the possibility of knowledge can be shown to be of an ideal and rational character, then, so it has been thought, the loss of an idealistic cosmology in physics can be readily born. The physical world can be surrendered to matter and mechanism, since we are assured that matter and mechanism have their foundation in immaterial mind. (QC [LW4:33; cf. 93–95])
Why should the notion of understanding knowledge as something which human beings simply discover, whether it be by intuition, reason, or revelation, make us worry? The problem is that this formulation partitions our encounter with the world into theory and practice. In focusing as he does on this distinction, Dewey makes central to his investigation the problem concerning philosophical certainty and social practice. This is a problem which is central to Greek philosophy; it is transformed in the Christian figuration of the two cities, Hegel’s critical assessment of Kant, and Dewey’s own abandonment of Hegel’s nonnaturalized account of history’s movement. The distinction emerges out of a confrontation with uncertainty and a desire to be placed beyond risk. Dewey refers to this as one of two responses to uncertainty, which seeks a “method of changing the self in emotion and idea” (QC [LW4:3]; cf. IDP [MW4]). By this he simply means that the distinction between theory and practice carries a psychological orientation toward contingency—a belief that one can contain or avoid it altogether.
For him, this is especially acute within the Western philosophical and theological discourses on moral and political life. Hence he remarks that the Greek tradition sought to “develop a method of thought and knowledge which while purifying tradition should preserve its moral and social values unimpaired” (RIP [MW12:89]). This reappears in the Christian and modern traditions, finding its grandest formulation, Dewey notes, in Kant. “[Kant’s] revolution,” says Dewey, “was a shift from a theological to a human authorship; beyond that point, it was an explicit acknowledgement of what philosophers in the classic line of descent had been doing” (QC [LW4:230, 242–243]; cf. DE [MW9:345]). Here he is referring to Kant’s description of the moral law as borrowing nothing “from experience or from any external will,” and to his epistemology, which distinguishes between things as they appear (phenomena) and things as they are in themselves (noumena).20 The transcendental framework, as Dewey well knows, saddles us with the unfortunate thought that we partake of a supersensible reality that is independent of our conceptual and discursive activities.
The premise behind Dewey’s account is that uncertainty carries ethical import. It potentially “involves us in peril of evils,” leaving both our fate and values in doubt (QC [LW4:4]). “[T]here is the enforced recognition,” he says, “of the peril and frustration in the actual world of meanings and goods most prized, a matter which makes men ready to listen to the story of a higher realm in which these values are eternally safe” (QC [LW4:62]; cf. BE [MW3:87]). In these formulations, Dewey is already noting the socially constituted character of our values, which, because of their conduciveness to order, stability, and human flourishing in navigating a hazardous world, are reified by the quest for certainty.
Retrospectively, however, the quest for certainty misdescribes the origins of such values. Our prospective orientation regarding right conduct is defined through attentiveness to known elements:
As far as [philosophy] occupied itself at all with human conduct, it was to superimpose upon acts ends said to flow from the nature of reason. It thus diverted thought from inquiring into the purposes which experience of actual conditions suggest and from concrete means of their actualization. It translated into a rational form the doctrine of escape from the vicissitudes of existence by means of measures which do not demand an active coping with conditions. (QC [LW4:14])
This passage and many others like it in his work indicate that he is deeply concerned about the distinction between theory and practice as such, and not simply in its modern incarnation in Kantian rationalism. For the distinction implies that values are not generated through life; we do not speak of them, in Dewey’s view, as being forged, but rather as discovered or revealed, and this shifts our focus to mere application. Motivated by a quest to escape practical insecurity we ironically run headlong into cognitive certainty (QC [LW4:28]).
Here, he suggests, lies the fatal flaw, one that recalls the problem of the last chapter. At one extreme, certainty becomes the standard by which practical action is assessed and directed independent of its contingent and historical character. At the other extreme, practical activity is left to languish in the vicissitudes of existence. Descriptions such as “corrupt” and “deprave” become not moments in action, but define the very character of action. Can we not see, in this context, a resemblance to the therapeutic reedification and spiritual sickness of the last chapter? In a vivid passage obviously meant to unsettle, Dewey gives us little doubt of the connection:
Men move between extremes. They conceive of themselves as gods, or feign a powerful and cunning god as an ally who bends the world to do their bidding and meet their wishes. Disillusionized, they disown the world that disappoints them; and hugging ideals to themselves as their own possession, stand in haughty aloofness apart from the hard course of events that pays so little heed to our hopes and aspirations. (EN [LW1:313])
As in the Darwin essay, Dewey’s language in this passage from Experience and Nature is doing a couple of things. He refers us to the specific character that philosophy gives to our orientation toward the world. Although this orientation, he maintains, casts into relief the messiness of existence, it nonetheless pays very little heed to our hopes and aspirations. The relationship between theory and practice is thus the “most practical problem of life. For it is the question of how intelligence may inform action, and how action may bear the fruit of increased insight into meaning” (QC [LW4:224]; cf. LJP [MW8: §§III–IV]). If what we originally cared about—that is, managing and navigating a treacherous world—stimulated the distinction between theory and practice, but now is ironically neglected by our approach, Dewey attempts to return us to the original ethic of care.21 His claim is that if we define our socially constituted condition as an imperfection from which we must escape, then the art of living will have been misunderstood from its inception. What is crucial, then, is not escaping this condition, Dewey contends, but orientating ourselves to it differently—coming to terms with ourselves as beings that enjoy, love, suffer, and die. Coming to terms is not a note of resignation or toleration, but an act of realizing the historicity of the lived relations in which human possibility, fragility, and defeat emerge.
There is yet a bolder message to Dewey’s account. In this traditional view, agency is always retrospective, its object singular, and its method coercive. Both purpose and the strength of our ethical commitments are assessed in relationship to how closely one aligns him or herself to Being. Perversions of practical experience “are to be corrected and controlled through adoption of methods of conduct derived from loyalty to the requirements of Supreme Being” (QC [LW4:205]). “Only the single,” he says elsewhere, “the uniform, assures coherence and harmony” (DE [MW9:274]). For the “intervention of initiative and invention, of individuality are counted contrary to reason as well as to sincerity and loyalty” (EN [LW1:166]). Thus, “[t]he world of experience can be steadied and ordered, [but] only through subject[ion] to its law of reason” (DE [MW9:274]). To be responsible to the world of action does not mean attentiveness to specific problems and the conflicts of opinion regarding their resolution, nor does it orient us to refinement of how we engage such quandaries. It does not encourage, in Dana Villa’s apt phrase, “end constitutive debate,” but the “mechanical application” of the antecedently real to practical activity.22
When Dewey argues that the distinction between theory and practice diminishes the latter at the expense of the former, he maintains that both the prospective character of agency and the world of plurality to which it belongs are emptied of normative worth. That is to say, in the older view, practice, by virtue of its ontological description, cannot generate values to orient and guide life. The existence of a world of plurality from which inquiry emerges and to which the products of inquiry must return for assessment always implies an uncertain dependence on forces beyond our control. To display agency, however, in the traditional model, is to be unhinged from the uncertainty that otherwise attends practice. It describes freedom as a romantic vision of mastery over the forces that threaten us by referring the agent to a realm beyond what is the source of concern in the first instance. Such an account of freedom, as Isaiah Berlin reminds us in a line that sounds very Deweyan, “derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind.“23 In Berlin’s formulation of this radically romantic notion of “positive” liberty we find the quest for certainty. I say radically romantic because, as we will see, Dewey also advances an account of positive freedom, but one that does not fall prey to the worry being advanced. Notwithstanding, he and Berlin argue that in venturing on this quest we ironically cultivate hubris rather than humility, and overstate what human intervention can achieve. Linking practical action, as Dewey does, more precisely to contingency is an attempt to cultivate humility by making us aware of the fragility of the objects of inquiry. But if this is his goal, as I believe it is, then we must understand more clearly the dynamics between action and contingency before approaching his conception of inquiry.
Having laid out this account, Dewey turns to Darwin in §§III and IV of that essay for reconstructive purposes—“reconstructive” in the sense that Darwin helps him, in contrast to his liberal Protestant counterparts, dispense with permanence. In contrast to what is the case for Hodge, Darwin also helps Dewey foreground the world of practical action as the primary locus in which the acquisition of knowledge is meaningfully possible. This is because he provides an alternative model capable of preserving, he argues, the productive and aesthetic aspects of practical action while keeping in view its limitations. He thus refers to practical action in The Quest for Certainty as the second “constructivist” response to uncertainty.
In §III of the Darwin essay, Dewey underwrites his philosophical anthropology with a precise statement of Darwin’s positive contribution: “If all organic adaptations are due simply to constant variation and the elimination of those variations which are harmful in the struggle for existence that is brought by excessive reproducing, there is no call for a prior intelligent causal force to plan and preordain them” (IDP [MW4:9]). His point here is straightforward. Darwin’s empirical work, we recall from the last chapter, indicates that the generative structure of species’ development is a function of varying and unpredictable pressures on existence resulting from the external environment.24 This shifts attention away from belief in some prior directive force in or outside of nature. Instead, the biological paradigm indicates that since we encounter nature in experience, direction—that is, ways of coping, dealing, enduring, and surviving—emerges out of that transaction. Analogously, cognition becomes an emergent moment relative to specific demands in nature that we experience.
The impact of Darwin’s account is threefold. First, the specific conception of knowledge that was, as previously discussed, a derivative of the earlier model of species falls away. “Philosophy,” Dewey argues in this regard, “forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them” (IDP [MW4:10]). Knowledge comes to fruition within nature as an “affair of the intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environment” (NRP [MW10:23]).
Second, philosophy no longer sets itself up to prove that “life must have certain qualities and values—no matter how experience presents the matter—because of some remote cause and eventual goal” (IDP [MW4:12]). The meaningfulness of life does not hang on a logical argument of causal antecedents that are thought to be enchanted or in which determinate goods are identified. Instead, philosophy orients itself positively to the plurality of life, taking this as its starting point for yielding qualities and values that sustain and direct human conduct. The analogue here, one that relates to the first point, is that when we say that an object is “known,” we do not mean this to refer to its antecedent properties, and so do not mean to make a claim about its putative origin. Rather, we mean “known,” Dewey argues, as devolved from its consequent use in experience. To know an object is thus to have experience of its function in this or that way. That there may be intermediates between the object and us or cherished values and us, such as other individuals, institutions, stories, and the like, in no way undermines the notion that the original knowledge results from experience with this or that object. From this perspective, we are positioned to become more reflective vis-à-vis traditionally sacred hierarchies or political arrangements, exposing them to potential reconsideration and alteration.
Third, it introduces responsibility, but not one determined exclusively by how well the agent adjusts to extant knowledge, but rather one that is capable of elucidating a “method of locating and interpreting the more serious of the conflicts that occur in life … a method of projecting ways for dealing with them” and accepting the consequences that follow (IDP [MW4:13]; cf. DE [MW9:153]). Inquiry is prospective and experimental rather than retrospective and submissive; it seeks to elucidate and engage in “a method of moral and political diagnosis and prognosis” (IDP [MW4:13]). That Darwin’s account introduces responsibility among agents is to say, with Eric MacGilvray, that the “appeal to experimental intelligence is egalitarian in the sense that all may reasonably be thought capable of developing this faculty more fully and profiting thereby.“25
What, then, is the precise character of this second—constructivist—response to uncertainty, what Dewey refers to as “doing and making” (QC [LW4:3, 26])? We risk obscuring what he says in his positive project regarding the role of inquiry if we do not attend carefully to what he means in connecting contingency to action. Even some of Dewey’s more careful interpreters have underappreciated the importance of contingency to his philosophy. Cornel West, for example, misrepresents the matter when he argues that Dewey does not maintain a “delicate balance between excessive optimism and exorbitant pessimism regarding human capacities.“26 Raymond Boisvert adds to West’s mischaracterization when he suggests that “sensitivity to inherent natural limitations is decidedly underemphasized” in Dewey’s work.27 But how can West and Boisvert—sympathetic interpreters—make such claims? This is especially surprising considering the latter’s treatment of Darwin’s importance to Dewey.28 Essentially, what they argue is that inquiry presupposes a description of the relationship between action and nature (broadly conceived) which obscures the uncertainty that connection involves.29
Unfortunately, Dewey fuels such indictments with a number of remarks in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) that seemingly suggest that our only limitation is failure to apply the scientific method to the problems of life (RIP [MW12:102]). On close analysis of that work, argues Boisvert, limitation of human capacities does not capture the classic vision of fortune Machiavelli worries about—a vision in which fortune’s potential intrusion is ever present.30 Limitation for Dewey seems to be one of application and is therefore methodological, while the latter Machiavellian view regarding fortune seems to be an ontological claim. These moments in Reconstruction in Philosophy (or others like them) are employed by Boisvert and others as part of a much larger indictment, suggesting that unlike Hannah Arendt, for example, Dewey is unable to see the “futility, boundlessness and uncertainty of outcome” that attends action.31 Whatever the differences between Machiavelli and Arendt (and there are many), they seem to share a sense of the contingency of human affairs that is seemingly missing from Dewey. He lacks, it is argued, a tragic sensibility.
This critique will return in later chapters, specifically when we are examining Dewey’s moral philosophy. At this stage, we need only consider it as a broad phenomenological challenge to his project. In my view, critics understate the importance of contingency to his philosophy of action, and in so doing overlook the way it positively informs and circumscribes what Dewey can reasonably attribute to inquiry. His conception of inquiry will be operative in the background of this account, but I want to focus attention only on the contours of action—that is, its existential dimension, its function in constituting the self, its temporal quality, and what I will call the psychological orientation of expectation. These themes are crucial to Experience and Nature, but also to his work in education as found in How We Think (1910/1933) and Democracy and Education (1916), the social psychology of his Human Nature and Conduct (1922), and his ethical theory in “Psychological Method in Ethics” (1903) and Ethics (1932).
THE EXISTENTIAL DIMENSION OF ACTION
In linking the world of action to uncertainty, Dewey is referring to something very specific about our relationship to the environment. Action in this instance does not mean the commonsensical notion of movement or series of movements. That action is this for him cannot be denied, but action for him also equals organized activity to achieve ends. Hence the examples he offers of the world of practical activity: “Man constructs a fortress out of the very conditions and forces which threaten him. He builds shelters, weaves garments, makes flame his friend instead of his enemy, and [this] grows into the complicated arts of associated living” (QC [LW4:3]; cf. DE [MW9:146]). The relationship between action and uncertainty reveals the self-reflective character of identity. Human beings find themselves located within problematic environments and the potential correctives to those situations are partly dependent on how those individuals respond.
There is, however, another revelatory dimension to action. This refers to the intentionality of consciousness as realized through action that orients individuals to the larger context (e.g., nature, other individuals, and social arrangements). The self is not focused on its needfulness, but rather on the problematic situation that generated the need from the outset. Action thus discloses to us a world that is unfinished, in the process of becoming, and which demands a response. The “stimulus to thinking … implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us, incomplete and hence indeterminate” (DE [MW9:158]; cf. PD [MW11:50]). An uncertain world thus impinges on and provokes the self, bringing action into existence. The dual dimension of action exposes the self and creates space not simply for commendation and condemnation or critique and affirmation by other individuals. In doing so, action also opens up the possibility for uncertainty to emerge. We do not know how the world will respond to us, both in its natural movement and in the reactions by others who inhabit the world. When Dewey speaks, for instance, of the complicated arts of associated living he is referring, in particular, to the uncertainty implied by the presence of other human beings.
THE EXISTENTIAL DIMENSION OF ACTION AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE SELF
What is important to note is that contingency and action are coextensive and so are constitutive of identity formation. For Dewey, we do not think about being creatures of action, constructing ways of managing and navigating our environment. This is simply what we are in a primordial sense. “We are,” he says, “active beings from the start and are naturally, wholly apart from consciousness, engaged in redirecting our action in response to changes in our surroundings” (LJP [MW8:52 n. 16]). Our sense of the world and ourselves comes to us through action and therefore has a determined character by virtue of its generative structure in specific situations. Action thus discloses the contours of reality and the commitments of our agency. Obviously, this claim rejects the Cartesian thinking subject as the appropriate beginning point of analysis, since this thinking subject is prefigured and constituted by specific problems. Nor does this account embrace the romantic notion of the sovereign self as indicated earlier, since the reflexive dimension of action bespeaks our sustained dependence on the external world. Thus knowledge of self and world does not, Dewey contends, just come intuitively, we must do something to achieve it—we must act.
At this juncture, critics often emphasize the progressive view of Dewey’s account, arguing that embedded in his conception of action is the assumption of a world, open to human intervention, waiting to be bent and altered to human desire. Recall John Patrick Diggins’ remark: “Although Dewey has been hailed for ridding philosophy of epistemology … he appears to be returning to the eighteenth century…. Enlightenment in his conviction of a rational world responsive to scientific manipulation.“32 The implication is that the obstacles to human intervention for Dewey have nothing to do with the world as such—that is, the impediments do not inhere in the subject matter.
But we move too quickly if we ignore the subtlety of his claim and its underlying realism. Of course his philosophy of action is coextensive with a theoretical framework that is progressive and reformist in orientation, much in keeping with the Progressive movement of his time. But progress is a socio-scientific possibility, not an ontological fact. He retains, without contradiction or subterfuge, the cautionary note at the heart of his philosophy—namely, that a thoroughgoing experimentalism “is not an insurance device nor a mechanical antiseptic … 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 [MW14:163]). If action allows the self to control and understand the world, to disclose the possibility within life and the potentiality of one’s own life, then action can equally make clear and deepen the contingent dimension of human projects.
In this description, we see the priority of action for the formation of character. Action is the site for the emergence of a shared world in which the self is constituted and from which it distinguishes itself. Dewey shares this position with both William James and George Herbert Mead and discusses it in several places in his writings (HNC [MW14: pts. I, IV]; cf. EN [LW1: chaps. 6–7]; E3 [LW7: chap. 15]).33 As he says in Human Nature and Conduct, character is formed through and constituted by habituation: “For it makes us see that character is the name given to the working interaction of habits” (HNC [MW14:31]). And he argues that upon honest reflection, we realize that “habit has this power [that is, disposes us to act in certain ways] because it is so intimately a part of ourselves. It has a hold upon us because we are the habit” (HNC [MW14:21]). When someone says of another, “I know his character,” what is known is the way in which a configuration of habits disposes him to act. Or, when we say of a person that “she is not acting like herself,” we are able to utter and make sense of this claim because of our capacity to connect dynamic actions across a temporal landscape to say something consistently about who she understands herself to be, and the ways in which she can be expected to act in the light of certain situations. We are reminded of that wonderful Biblical dictum: “By their fruits ye shall know them.“
Dewey can accept this claim provided we understand it to assert two points. The first is that character is intelligible (that is, can be assessed and understood) through action. The second point is that the very constitution of character is linked to and informed by the layered connections among previous experiences. This forms the basis of phronēsis—that is, the wisdom we draw on in our engagement with the world and its various parts. He speaks along these lines in his defense of his use of the term “habit“:
The word habit may seem twisted somewhat from its customary use when employed as we have been using it. But we need a word to express that kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of action; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation; and which is operative in some subdued subordinate form even when not obviously dominating activity. (HNC [MW14:31]; cf. EN [LW1:213])
There is interdependency then between action and self-understanding in that the former helps constitute the latter, which in turn allows us to transform the world we engage. As Dewey explains, “[s]ince habits involve the support of environing conditions, a society or some specific group of fellow-men, is always accessory before and after the fact. Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up reactions in the surroundings” (HNC [MW14:16]). For this reason he writes in his Ethics that “there is no such thing as a fixed, ready-made, finished self. Every living self causes acts and is itself caused in return” (E3 [LW7:306]).
His claim is quite similar to those of contemporary thinkers who emphasize the narrative dimension of action.34 So for him, we cannot tell a story about the identity of agents and ourselves without reference to the context in which the individuals find themselves. Our identity comes into view in relation to a past that we do not make and a future that we do not completely control (HNC [MW14: pt. I]). This simply means that the social world forms a temporal-spatial horizon; it embodies funded experiences that extend around the self in both time and space. It exists before and after the fact in the sense implied by intersubjectivity, through which institutional structures, symbols and their meaning-content, and the consciousness of persons emerge (L [LW12: chap. 12]).
Dewey thus understands the social world as forming a narrative background of experience in which the self is initiated and from which she draws linguistic and conceptual resources to engage in interpretation. This initiation involves the acquisition of what Dewey, and most recently John McDowell, calls a “second nature“—that is, the habits and sensibilities that accrue to our cognitive capacities and that open us up to the demands of social life as such (HNC [LW14:65]).35 Of course, in attempting to understand a person’s actions we must examine the individual in question, but Dewey quickly adds that “to convert this specific reference into a belief of exclusive ownership [by the individual] is … misleading” (HNC [MW14:15]; cf. EN [LW1:170–172]). It implies an atomistic psychology that betrays the sociological and narrative character of our situated existence.
We must be careful here. To say that these two, action and self-understanding, are interdependent must not be taken to mean, for Dewey, that they are completely equal. “Personality,” he writes, “selfhood, subjectivity are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions” (EN [LW1:162 (emphasis added)]). “Subjectivity,” he says more precisely, is thus “a novel reconstruction of a pre-existing order” (EN [LW1:168; cf. 170–171; 187–188]). Self-understanding emerges during breaks in what is otherwise the continuous connection between self and its context. These breaks mark off the points where we speak of the uniqueness of selves. Dewey specifically intends to capture the meaning of uniqueness in its political and ethical dimension, highlighting the resources of identity that serve to reconstitute and transform the larger social world:
The point in placing emphasis upon the role of individual desire and thought in social life has in part been indicated. It shows the genuinely intermediate position of subjective mind: it proves it to be a mode of natural existence in which objects undergo directed reconstitution. Reference to the place of individual thought in political theory and practice has another value. Unless subjective intents and thoughts terminate in picturesque utopias or dogmas irrelevant to constructive action, they are subject to objective requirements and tests…. Thinking and desiring, no matter how subjective, are a preliminary, tentative and inchoate mode of action. They are “overt” behavior of a communicated and public form in process of construction, and behavior involves change of objects which tests the meanings animating behavior. (EN [LW1:171 (emphasis added)])
These reflections from chapter 6 of Experience and Nature, “Nature, Mind and the Subject,” are critically important because they begin to shed light on what I have referred to as the normative dimension of self-understanding for Dewey. They encapsulate his belief that practical action both regulates and liberates. What he intends to capture in the passage above goes some way toward avoiding the concern expressed by Hodge and Weber that without a sacred foundation we lapse into a radical subjectivism. I will not try to do complete justice to the point in this context and will instead return to it in chapters 3 and 4, but it is helpful to initiate the discussion. In elucidating Dewey’s argument, I will also make reference to two other thinkers, namely, Brandom and McDowell, who advance similar claims that help capture the force of his position.
For Dewey, practical action regulates in the sense captured by the habitual dimension of identity, which, although flexible, nonetheless narrows and steadies the self—a self about which claims can be made, from which fulfillment of commitments can be demanded, and to which obligations can be owed and settled. The regulating or constraining dimension comes into view in Human Nature and Conduct when Dewey says: “A general liberation of impulses may set things going when they have been stagnant, but if the released forces are on their way to anything they do not know the way nor where they are going” (HNC [MW14:115]); he mentions this in the context of explaining the importance to freedom of social institutions and conventions. Such impulses will appear as mere behavioral spasms inexplicable within and unconstrained by the norms of the community. This is what he means when he says, in the passage quoted earlier: “Unless subjective intents and thoughts terminate in picturesque utopias or dogmas irrelevant to constructive action they are subject to objective requirements and tests.“
The use of “objective” in this instance functions in precisely the way Brandom speaks about “constraint“: “Being constrained by or subject to norms is a matter of belonging to a community, and that is a matter of being taken to be a member by the rest of the community.“36 If the relationship between practical action and self-understanding in Dewey’s philosophy that I have been describing is correct, then it means that constraints are internally generated by virtue of our entrance into a social world. The constraints are immanent to a specific community, to be sure, but as I read Dewey and Brandom, the very idea and existence of constraints transcends all communities in the sense that we understand actions qua actions as that for which reasons may be provided, criticized, and assessed. This harmless view of transcendence, as McDowell explains, does not have as its aim the desire to escape the world, the “illusion that though we aim our thought and speech at the world from a standpoint constituted by our present practices and competences, we must be able to conceive the conformity of our thought and speech to the world from outside any such standpoint.“37
Notice that on this account we remain completely located in the natural world, even as our extra-natural world (that is, of norms and their conceptual content) is emergent from it. Hence Dewey says in chapter 8 of The Quest for Certainty, “The Naturalization of Intelligence,” that the “intelligent activity of man is not something brought to bear upon nature from without; it is nature realizing its own potentialities in behalf of a fuller and richer issue of events. Intelligence within nature means liberation and expansion” (QC [LW4:171]). Herbert Schneider provides us with a very animated, but helpful description of Dewey’s position: “Mind is simply nature feeling her way, groping in her own darkness by her own light, trying herself out, finding out for herself what she can and cannot do.“38 Indeed, for Dewey the second, extra-natural, world functions as a normative constraint in the same way that the first, natural, world functions as a causal constraint. Naturalizing intelligence in this way, to quote McDowell once more, “removes any need to try to see ourselves as peculiarly bifurcated, with a foothold in the animal kingdom and a mysterious separate involvement in an extra-natural world of rational connections.“39
Practical action also liberates in precisely the way Dewey is suggesting above. It provides the self with the very social world that potentially becomes an object of reconstruction.40 “Habit,” he explains, “is more than a restriction of thought. Habits become negative limits because they are first positive agencies. The more numerous our habits the wider the field of possible observation and foretelling” (HNC [MW14:123]). The idea of the social world, then, is meant to be taken expansively, so that acquiring habits to engage in communal practices includes resources for the development of new habits for managing and negotiating the world. Remember, Dewey discusses the importance of institutions and conventions in the context of freedom to describe not merely how they constrain, but what they make possible. And what they make possible, in this instance, is a novel reconstruction of a preexisting order. This much he says in his Ethics: “No argument about causation can affect the fact, verified constantly in experience, that we can and do learn, and that the learning is not limited to acquisition of additional information but extends to remaking old tendencies” (E3b [LW7:305]). This is precisely why he goes on to say that “positive freedom“—what Brandom calls “expressive freedom” and McDowell refers to as “responsible freedom“—“is not a native gift or endowment but is acquired” (E3 [LW7:306]).41 Once more, it is worth turning to Brandom at length; he makes the same point in the context of human languages:
One has not learned the language, has not acquired the capacity to engage in the social practices which are the use of the language, until one can produce novel sentences which the community will deem appropriate, and understand the appropriate novel utterances of other members of the community…. This emergent expressive capacity is the essence of natural languages. We ought to understand this creative aspect of language use as the paradigm of a new kind of freedom, expressive freedom. When one has mastered the social practices comprising the use of a language sufficiently, one becomes able to do something one could not do before, to produce and comprehend novel utterances. One becomes capable not only of framing new descriptions of situations and making an indefinite number of novel claims about the world, but also becomes capable of forming new intentions, and hence of performing an indefinite number of novel actions, directed at ends one could not have without the expressive capacity of language…. Without a suitable language there are some beliefs, desires, and intentions that one simply cannot have.42
I cite Brandom here because his account of the expressive capacity that accrues to language acquisition can be read (although I am not sure he would agree) as a more general explication of what Dewey means by the positive agencies that attach to practical action. For both, the conceptual substance needed to render intelligible to ourselves and others our desires, beliefs, and intentions (even novel ones) would not be possible without the prior contentful restrictions of a social horizon. Hence Dewey explains in a letter to James in 1907: “I cannot help feeling that an adequate analysis of activity would exhibit the world of fact and the world of ideas as two correspondent objective statements of the active process itself…. It is this transcendence of any objectified form, whether perceptual or conceptual, that seems to me to give the clue to freedom, spontaneity, etc.“43 Expressive freedom does not simply fall out of the acquisition of our second nature, but is constitutive of it in the sense that it makes our entrance into and negotiation of the social world something more than mere imitation.
THE EXISTENTIAL DIMENSION OF ACTION AND ITS TEMPORAL QUALITY
Precisely because action is revelatory it implies a condition of possibilities that may attend specific situations. Following James, Dewey notes in Experience and Nature that experience is “a double-barreled word … in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality” (EN [LW1:18]).44 But what does he mean here? To begin, although there is a revelatory dimension to action, it would be inaccurate to say that all experience is of this quality. Consider our everyday interactions with the world. We constantly employ habits and ways of doing things that do not disclose anything about the environment or us. To confront the loss of a loved one, to experience the excitement of an event, to drive and adhere to the rules of the road—each implies cognitive awareness, to be sure, but such experiences, in Dewey’s view, are not primarily reflective. Our daily encounters are not necessarily an adventure in self-discovery; in fact, the habitual character of life saves us from having to reflect all the time. In this way we are not fundamentally creatures of thought.
This does not mean that reflection has never taken place, but rather that habits move to the background of reflection after having been formed through a process of reasoning in context. So when Dewey refers to experience as an “unanalyzed totality” or as “primary,” he does not mean “any aboriginal stuff out of which things are evolved,” for this stuff “is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages” (PIE [MW3:166]). He continues in Experience and Nature: primary experience “is filled with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought, which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh naïve empirical materials” (EN [LW1:140]). Habits only appear to be pre-reflective, as simply part of the narrative in which we are implicated and to which we adhere by virtue of the choices we continually make. These choices help redeem the relevance of the narrative. To say that we build a storehouse of habits that allow us to engage our environment intelligently does not mean we are going through the motions outright. Nor does it make a claim in Dewey’s view about the indeterminacy of the environment or the putative search for knowledge. Habit acquisition is not an adventure in discovery, even as the habit itself denotes that such an adventure has taken place.
Yet to refer to experience as “unanalyzed totality” or “primary” means that there are distinct reflective moments—that is, experience when analyzed and secondary—in which action emerges in relationship to the temporal horizon that makes the experience of agents purposive, meaningful, and an object of knowledge. The self is poised in an immediate way in the problematic or needful present between a past that provides resources (i.e., accumulated habits) discordant with the present, and a future in which the present event may be settled.45 The self takes cognitive control to realize and determine some possibilities, while interpreting and avoiding others within the same temporal field that indicates the problem in the first instance. The intervention of action will effect a modification in two ways. First, there is a reconstruction and extension of past elements to create something novel that seeks to restore continuity (the view of expressive freedom discussed above)46; second, if continuity is restored the self is related differently to the experience previously understood as problematic.
The line of argument we have been pursuing indicates a more fundamental point about Dewey’s philosophy that is rarely emphasized. His account of action should be read as also making a phenomenological claim that our cognitive capacities do not inherently or necessarily grasp the complex and elusive dimensions of the experiences they engage. “[W]e live forward,” he says, “we live in a world where changes are going on whose issue means our weal or woe” (NRP [MW10:9]; cf. EN [LW1:18]; DE [MW9:146]). In a critically important passage in Experience and Nature, one which has parallels elsewhere in his work, he states this point and its implication clearly:
The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched and ungrasped. The contrast and the potential maladjustment of the immediate … with those direct and hidden factors which determine the origin and career of what is present, are indestructible features of any and every experience. We may term the way in which our ancestors dealt with the contrast superstitious, but the contrast is no superstition. It is a primary datum in any experience. (EN [LW1:44–45]; cf. CIF [MW4:83]; HNC [MW14:145]; QC [LW4:6])
This passage is drawn from chapter 2 of Experience and Nature, “Existence as Precarious and as Stable.” He uses the designation of “precarious” as part of that title to define one dimension of the world of action. If this claim is so rarely the primary object of Dewey’s analysis, it is not because he discounts it, but rather because he takes it for granted. If, however, we centralize precariousness, and we understand action and the realization of values as organically related, then Dewey must be saying that precariousness saturates the whole of human experience. Contingency thus determines not merely the origin, but more critically the career of what is present (i.e. had, enjoyed, loved, valued).
His point is that the end toward which action aims is potentially resistant to mastery. The qualifier “potentially” is important: we do not know the consequent impact of our actions, “ends-in-view,” as Dewey says, until they have played themselves out. In action, says Dewey, we put the “world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place” (EN [LW1:172]). This unpredictability—what Arendt would later call the “capacity for action“47—does contain within itself the possibility of settling needs, demands, problems. But for both Dewey and Arendt it equally places us in a position where we court adverse consequences. Action and the absence of complete mastery are coextensive; this means, to quote Arendt once more, that the “capacity for action does not harbor within itself certain potentialities which enable it to survive the disabilities of non-sovereignty.“48 If the term “adverse consequences” used a moment ago is to do justice to what Dewey means by linking contingency to action, it must denote the multifaceted composition of the natural world (including the agent), which may very well undermine action.
To identify the agent as a potential site for the display of contingency follows from Dewey’s claim that our character is expressed through action. The self potentially becomes an obstacle to the settlement of the issue to the extent that “a desirable trait of character does not always produce desirable results” (HNC [MW14:36]). We are reminded of those unfortunate souls in Greek tragedies: they never realize the extent to which they become the source of their own demise or that of the people they most cherish. This is not usually because of their vices, but more tragically the way in which commitment to specific virtues obscures other factors of consideration. Hence Dewey’s remark: “[E]ven when proper allowances are made [regarding the complex relationship between character and consequences], we are forcing the pace when we assume that there is or ever can be an exact equation of disposition and outcome” (HNC [MW14:36]).49 As Patchen Markell explains in a different context, there is thus a potential vulnerability built into the temporal structure of action that “involve[s] the doubling back of some human capacity upon itself—a recursivity, in which a source of possibility also operates as its own limitations.“50
The dual dimension to Dewey’s account of action must therefore always be kept in focus, lest we obscure the character of action altogether. His point is captured nicely by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his discussion of Greek tragedy:
From a tragic point of view then, there are two aspects to action. It involves on the one hand reflection, weighing up the pros and cons, foreseeing as accurately as possible the means and the ends; on the other, placing one’s stake on what is unknown and incomprehensible, risking oneself on a terrain which remains impenetrable, entering into a game … not knowing whether, as they join with one, they will bring success or doom.51
Much akin to Vernant’s language, Dewey fundamentally understands living as a gamble. His language replicates the complexity of action to which Arendt, Markell, and Vernant draw our attention:
Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and season…. It is the darkest just before dawn; pride goes before a fall; the moment of greatest prosperity is the moment most charged with ill omen, most opportune for the evil eye. (EN [LW1:43])
The enabling relationship between contingency and action potentially contains disabling features that may undermine action.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIENTATION OF EXPECTATION
The foregoing remark is a crucial insight that has considerable value for understanding not only political and ethical life, but also scientific activity. Many, from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Arendt, have developed this insight in thinking about political action. For them, as for Dewey, it implies that the moral and political domains of life cannot wholly be captured or systematized under a covering law of universalism. Similar to these thinkers, for Dewey this chastened outlook does more, the substance of which goes to the very heart of our self-understanding. There is an internal tentativeness—a specific psychological orientation regarding expectation—to his conception of action that distinguishes his reflections from the traditional quest for certainty. For this reason the optimism-pessimism distinction does not capture the complexity of his position. He is clear that he rejects optimism as an appropriate stance toward the world of practical action, for “optimism has been the consequence of the attempt to explain evil away” (RIP [MW12:181]). And he equally abandons pessimism, for in “declaring the world is evil wholesale, it makes futile all efforts to discover the remediable causes of specific evils” (RIP [MW12:181]). Instead, the position of the practical actor is that of the meliorist—that is, “the belief that the specific conditions which exist at one moment, be they comparatively bad or comparatively good, in any event may be bettered” (RIP [MW12:181–182]). The auxiliary verb “may” in this formulation denotes caution. That we are creatures in time subject to all sorts of miseries equally means that we are capable of bringing into existence that which will sustain us through time. As Thomas Alexander keenly observes, Dewey’s universe is one in which “action matters because tragedy is real.“52 The upshot is that the relationship between action and contingency for Dewey refers to that which is unprepared for because it is unanticipated or unexpected. But this, as he understands the matter, is nonetheless a presupposition for the unfolding dimension of life.
Thus far the argument has advanced several steps. First, we examined the appropriate fit between Aristotle’s categories of knowledge and the way in which Dewey’s account of inquiry generally transforms those categories. In that context, the emphasis was placed on the importance of contingency not only to ethical and political life as found in Aristotle’s thoughts, but more broadly to human action, as Dewey argues. Here we answered the first two of the questions with which we began, questions relating to his understanding of Darwin in contrast to his liberal Protestant counterparts and the precise usage to which he puts Darwin’s theory. Second, we examined his account of the philosophical obstacle—namely, the quest for certainty—to seeing the importance of contingency to human action. And third, we explicated how Darwin helps him undercut the quest for certainty. This opened space to explore the relationship between contingency and the contours of Dewey’s philosophy of action. Here we found resources to hold at bay the worry advanced by Hodge and Weber regarding spiritual sickness or disenchantment. These three steps were necessary in order to understand Dewey’s perspective on inquiry’s proper functioning.
There are several conclusions we must now keep in mind as we transition to an explication of inquiry. If certainty cannot be had, Dewey’s aim is to structure inquiry such that the judgments we reach are the products of a bit more than luck. His conception of inquiry is therefore unintelligible unless it proceeds via sensitivity to particulars and the potential for disruptions. This works on two levels:
First, there is the character of the agent—the experiences and habits that feed into and comprise his character.
Second, there is the complexity and salience of the situation of concern—the unavoidable rough terrain of life.
Inquiry works best as Dewey describes it when there is a dialectical relationship between these two dimensions. The well-functioning inquiry is not merely a matter of proceduralism, but must also include appreciation for just those features of a situation that ought to engage a person in order for us to be able to say that they have made an informed decision. This description, I argue, solidifies the connection that we have stipulated in general terms between Dewey’s notion of inquiry and Aristotle’s account of phronēsis.
There are two additional points we should remember as we examine inquiry. First, I have referred to inquiry as a social practice. Given the discussion above, this means that it is functionally assessed in the flow and reconstruction of problematic experiences to which others are privy. We should remember that while there is a larger context (i.e., institutions, symbols, persons) in which inquiry derives its significance, the connection between action and contingency means that this context cannot be so unshakable as to prevent future deployment of inquiry. Second, I have referred to Dewey’s account of inquiry as setting limiting factors that allow for a weak metaphysics. That is, the proper functioning of inquiry orients the self not merely to the material objects of the world but also to the potential pressures that are emergent in our connection with the world. Dewey often reads as a cartographer with his use of the language of maps to explain what inquiry does and the way it helps navigate the world of practical action. Precisely because of the primacy of contingency, he understands the fundamental need to revisit the map’s construction. A weak metaphysics thus has an open-ended, evolving, and therefore experimental dimension. This must mean, as Richard Bernstein notes, that “such a metaphysics makes no claim to reveal a reality which is beyond all experience and is known only in an a priori fashion. It is an a posteriori metaphysics, descriptive and hypothetical.“53 These two points—inquiry as a social practice and inquiry as a limiting factor on metaphysics—represent analytic distinctions, but are coextensive at the moment of intelligent action.
DEWEY’S MODIFIED ARISTOTELIANISM REVISITED
Let us return to Aristotle for a moment in order to focus our analysis. When Aristotle refers to phronēsis as an intellectual virtue, he indicates that it is a “reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods,” and when so exercised it “issues commands, since its end is what ought to be done or not to be done.“54 What Aristotle means by this statement is captured by the relationship between phronēsis and the moral virtues. The virtue of generosity, for example, means that, when applied, it will be for the correct reason in the right context. But exactly how are individuals to know the right context if not because they have cultivated a level of sensitivity to particular situations that helps render the use of generosity intelligible. “Sensitivity” is a compact word in this instance; it means that one has assessed the situation that suggests the need for generosity; one has ruled out the particular need for another virtue as a settlement of the issue, and one has made a judgment that generosity fits the need. Individuals build up a storehouse of cases throughout their lives that provides them with the information to allow them to deal with other situations that are similar in structure, although not identical in substance. Aristotle expresses this point by making deliberation a vehicle through which phronēsis is expressed: “Deliberation is concerned with things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but in which the event is obscure, and with things in which it is indeterminate.“55
That Aristotle views phronēsis as the completion of a deliberative process does not preclude error or the intervention of things about which we could not have been aware. It presupposes the relationship between action and contingency suggested above by Dewey’s account. Aristotle presents phronēsis as the completion of a process to capture its fundamental aim. Thus, he understands phronēsis as reasoning well about ethical life generally as connected through particular actions.56 The claim is simply this: whether one displays the virtue of generosity, courage, or justice, all require one and the same phronēsis.
As already noted, I read Dewey as expanding the reach of phronēsis via Darwin. In the first instance, the reliance on Darwin helps him highlight that contingency is a fundamental part of the world as such. This allows us to recast Aristotle’s statement regarding deliberation from Dewey’s perspective: inquiry into natural phenomena—broadly conceived—is concerned with “things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but in which the event is obscure, and with things in which it is indeterminate.” In the second instance, Dewey interprets all cases in which we make a judgment of action as sharing the same intellectual structure. That some of these judgments are closer to or further away from the contours of one’s identity (say, for example, moral decisions as oppose to scientific ones) is important in assessing the scope and consequences of those judgments, but does not transform their underlying intellectual structure. If moral and scientific judgments are radically different, in Dewey’s view, the difference can be in terms of neither the intellectual structure that underwrites them nor their potential fallibility.
Another way to state my point is to say that phronēsis, for Aristotle, is to the moral virtues, what inquiry, for Dewey, is to human action in toto.57 The claim is not, as indicated in the first section of this chapter, that phronēsis and inquiry are the same, but rather that if the latter is to function properly, it must, in my reading of Dewey, include the content of what we mean when we refer to the former. As a social practice, then, inquiry is exercised relative to a particular context and embodied in actions, the content of which exists at the crossroads between various experiential factors and reasons and the way the agent determines them.
If we turn to Dewey’s formal structure of inquiry, we can see the dialectical relationship between the two levels mentioned earlier at work. He provides a precise statement of this in How We Think:
(i) a felt difficulty; (ii) its location and definition; (iii) suggestion of possible solution; (iv) development by reasoning of the bearings of the suggestion; (v) further observation and experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection; that is, the conclusion of belief or disbelief. (Dewey, HWT1 [MW6:236]; cf. LJP [MW8:15–23], L [LW12: pt. 2])
The felt difficulty means that the situation exerts pressure that demands a response. The continuity within experience is fractured, opening up the necessity for reflection so as to achieve restoration. But here, and this point is crucial, the fractures indicate the exhaustion of existing habits such that the problem requires creative valuation. What is needed is a judgment of action, something to be done in which the problem acts as a guiding marker in moving us through the other stages of our reflection.
The feeling of the difficulty requires us to localize and define the problem. The issue may require several propositional formulations before the clarity of the problem comes into view. We will often need to take counsel with others, for example. So there may be a subclass of formulations that are constitutively connected to articulating the precise problem to be addressed. “Their subject-matter,” writes Dewey, “implies that the proposition is itself a factor in the completion of the situation, carrying it forward to its conclusion” (LJP [MW8:16]).
Obviously this is an intermediate stage—an attempt to clarify the situation so as to move to other aspects that will settle the problem. But even at this juncture, Dewey’s language indicates that there are better or worse descriptions of the problem if we are to potentially arrive at a solution. “Better” or “worse” indicates that unless the situation is descriptively impenetrable, 58 it must contain elements that refer to a multitude of other—different—situations that indicate in abbreviated form how this situation should roughly look whether we are responsive to those elements or not. Now, the better or worse is not, properly speaking, derived from objective criteria regarding the specific case—no such criteria exist. Rather, better or worse is derived, as Brandom says, from the “holistic objective regularities of performance[s]” in relation to these various other elements that are salient.59 Inquiry thus works, in Dewey’s view, as a culling mechanism that registers content from the intersubjectively formed social world that extends beyond the epistemic authority of the self. Our ability to make reference to comparable features of the social world allows us to understand these objective regularities to which we appeal in making claims about better or worse.
Responsibility for describing the situation—crystallizing its contours or distorting them altogether—lies with the agent. That one takes counsel with others, as Dewey often emphasizes in his explication of the cooperative character of inquiry, is based on the belief that others may very well see the matter differently because their particular experiences shape their perceptual abilities in ways unlike our own (EN [LW1:135]). This is particularly so, he insists, in moral and political matters, but is no less apparent in empirical science. For in all cases what is needed is a sense of “sympathy which carries thought out beyond the self and which extends its scope … it is sympathy which saves considerations of consequences from degenerating into mere calculation, by rendering vivid the interests of others [or other factors] and urging us to give them weight” (E3 [LW7:270]). McDowell, for instance, writes nicely on this point; his thoughts are much akin to Dewey’s outlook: “The deliverances of a reliable sensitivity are cases of knowledge; and there are idioms according to which the sensitivity itself can appropriately be described as knowledge: a kind person knows what it is like to be confronted with a requirement of kindness. The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity.“60
But honing this perceptual capacity, as Dewey and McDowell argue, will often involve us in significant exchanges with others. The kind of collaboration, then, suggested by intersubjectivity involves an underlying normative claim that we readily employ and usually take for granted—namely, that there are instances in which persons can incur blame for relying insufficiently or too heavily upon themselves when assessing complex terrain in which a judgment of action is necessary. The sensitivity here, Dewey explains, consists in just the extent to which we engage in a “broad, just, sympathetic survey of situations” to register relevant data in forming our judgments (HNC [MW14:144]). Dewey, no less than Aristotle before him and McDowell after him, views this not as blind deference, but rather as individuals allowing an authority that they acknowledge to participate in the formation of their own judgments.
What Dewey is drawing our attention to is the explicability of action that makes discursive negotiation central. This theme figures prominently in Brandom’s normative pragmatics, Jeffrey Stout’s attempt to distill the ethical and political implications of such a pragmatics, and Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics.61 For all these thinkers, to say some actions as opposed to others proceed from inquiry is to evaluate their reasons as appropriate because of the context in which they function. The agent is prepared to justify why that action is done rather than some other—which is simply to say, action is explicable in terms of the reasons we offer on its behalf. We understand ourselves to be offering cause or basis from a background of potential reasons that embody attentiveness to just those various considerations one could offer given the situation of concern. When a hypothesis or norm is advanced as a response to a problem situation, we usually justify our choice to other individuals by reference to competing alternatives that for one reason or another fail to sufficiently take into account important considerations which would otherwise make them the best projected options. Practical actions, then, have a linguistic counterpart—that is, they are responses to “why-questions” in a practice of giving and asking for reasons (HNC [MW14: chap. 14]; EN [LW1: chap. 5]).62 This form of mutual responsiveness is reflected more clearly in the social psychology of Dewey and Mead. For both of them it grounds moral life proper (see the first section of chapter 4 below), and in Dewey’s philosophy in particular it provides the framework from which democracy proceeds and in which it finds support (see the first section of chapter 3, and chap. 5).
The reason-giving character of inquiry rests on two separate tenets of Dewey’s philosophy that we have considered thus far. The first relates to viewing experience as a potential experimental domain. And the second is Dewey’s specific account of the way in which self-understanding emerges in a social network, with its liberating and constraining aspects. Inquiry and communication are thus coextensive. The result of this is that action and language are equi-primordial as well as publicly accessible: “[D]eliberation … regards the end-in-view … as tentative and permits, nay encourages the coming into view of consequences which will transform it and create new purpose and plan” (HNC [MW14:149]). He remarks elsewhere: “When communication occurs, all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking” (EN [LW1:132]).
Yet what determines whether the problem is clearly described is something other than the formal process of inquiry, and is rather bound up with the shape of one’s receptivity from upbringing. This much Dewey suggests: “Habit does not preclude the use of thought, but it determines the channels within which it operates. Thinking is secreted in the interstices of habits” (PP [LW2:335]; cf. HNC [MW14:142]). Habits open the self to receiving considerations that inform inquiry’s functioning, and those habits shape our understanding of those considerations. When we say a person is diligent, focused, attentive to others, cold, unimaginative, dramatic, careless, we are delineating character traits that will direct and condition both incoming data and information and outgoing responses and proposals (cf. E3 [LW7:256–258]). We are reminded of situations in which individuals exclude or fail to take into consideration factors that might otherwise clarify the issue of concern. Our utterances often take the form of: “Did you consider X?” or “Did you look at Y?” In some cases these utterances will simply bring to light information that guides inquiry; they are not claims about a person’s character. This is because the individual is appropriately sensitive in precisely the way I identified above. But in other cases these questions are asked because we know the agent to be just the sort of person who would not consider such factors. Or we know that because of various features of a person’s character—traits such as the ones listed above—they simply cannot see the way in which those considerations ought to engage them given the problem.
These two previous statements advance different but important claims. The first suggests that one’s character is of such a nature that given the situation a person simply ignores factors that any other competent inquirer in the situation would usually consider. The issue is not what we will say to the individual, but what we will say about their genuine desire to inquire—by elucidating the various epistemic virtues they refuse to employ. Such individuals, we might say, avoid having to address objections raised about their position or considerations that are contrary to their own beliefs. They are not interested, at least in this context, in offering beliefs or hypotheses that aim at being the best beliefs or hypotheses they could have. The second claim suggests that the considerations simply do not engage the person, independent of a desire and willingness to ignore them. Here we may be more interested in how they may become better attuned to the world. But neither claim necessarily means for Dewey that transformation within the self’s outlook is closed off, for we recall that the self is relatively stable, not fixed.
To say that others can recognize and assess the content that feeds into inquiry simply identifies individuals as sharing modes of perception, senses of significance, parallel cases, interests, and desires—in short, forms of life. This allows us not only to identify better or worse characterizations of the problem situation, but, more significant, to indicate that there is a best achievable state of the agent regarding sensitivity to just those reasons and factors that help define the situation from the outset (see the first two sections of chap. 4).63 What to do is parasitic on how the situation looks, and this requires, as Dewey understands the matter, a proper appreciation for those features which are constitutive of the present moment, but which can only be received based on the character of the self. Construal of the situation will always be something more than proceduralism, even as these independent dictates guide inquiry to fruitful destination points. If my reading is correct, it would show that for Dewey these independent dictates given the situation of concern are to be identified with inquiry—that is, practical wisdom and inquiry completely interpenetrate.
Dewey’s third and fourth phases relate to the suggestions of possible solutions and reasoning from those suggestions. These two stages are critically important because they imply the launching into the unknown. He often refers to these stages as involving the “art of inference“:
Every act of human life, not springing from instinct or mechanical habit, contains it; most habits are dependent upon some amount of it from their formation, as they are dependent upon it for their readaptation to novel circumstances. From the humblest act of daily life to the most intricate calculations of science and the determination and execution of social, legal, and political policies, things are used as signs, indicates, or evidence from which one proceeds to something else not yet directly given. (LJP [MW9:69])
Inference does not function in the way that we would usually find articulated by statisticians; it does not simply refer to induction and deduction but also to what Charles S. Peirce calls abduction—that is, “studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. Its only justification is that if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way.“64 As Norwood Hanson explains of Peirce’s position, although it applies equally to Dewey’s account: “Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative; Abduction merely suggest that something may be.“65 That inference is an art for Dewey (as well as for Peirce) means, among other things, that there is a level of imprecision in our attentiveness to the relationship between information gathered and the hypothesis inferred and proposed. “A keen eye and a quick ear,” says Dewey, “are not in themselves guarantees of correct knowledge … but they are conditions without which knowledge cannot arise” (E3 [LW7:268]). So inference here must be understood broadly to denote a kind of sensitivity to the salient elements of an intricate situation. We move back and forth between these features, at first only imaginatively envisioning the proposed consequences and then ultimately following their course in the domain of experience. But in this back and forth (a discursive-reflective equilibrium, we should note) we are reasoning and making judgments, taking hold of some set of factors that allow us to move to some other set, while ruling out others—all of which suggests that inference is a messy affair.
The fact that this process is not explicable in clearly stated rules does not undermine its importance. In the end, the suggestion is simply that we make inferences within the context of the problem, not external to it, so that the judgments made implicate us in the resolution or irresolution of the situation.66 For this reason our conjectures, suggestions, or beliefs potentially carry an attached risk that is located at two different levels. The first level is the relationship between agent and context. Here the self constitutes a fundamental datum in arriving at a solution. The second level is the relationship between proposal and context. As Dewey says: “[T]hrough inference men are capable of a kind of success and exposed to a kind of failure not otherwise possible” (LJP [MW8:71]).67
The emphasis Dewey places on inference sheds some light on his thinking about the creative character of inquiry. Consider, for a moment, the section heading and subheading Dewey uses in chapter 6, “Examples of Inference and Testing” to the 1933 revised version of How We Think: “II. Inference to the Unknown” and “Inference Involves a Leap” (HWT 2 [LW8:190–191]). The titles are more than suggestive. But we do not infer blindly; the unknown is not meant as such largely because the problem guides the structure of the inquiry. This is also evident by the preposition he uses: something is already known from which we move to ascertain something unknown. As he says in “The Logic of Judgments of Practice“: “[I]nference takes absent things as being in certain real continuum with present things, so that our attitude toward the latter is bound up with our reaction to the former as parts of the same situation” (LJP [MW8:71]; cf. NRP [MW10:15], VEK [MW13:10 n. 7]).
Inference as a phase in inquiry is clearly the moment of transformation and creativity. Transformation thus means that the thing known is related differently to the incomplete space that constitutes the problem situation. Our apprehension of the thing known—that is, the meaning-content—is different from what it was before inquiry began. The creativity of this moment rests with the settlement of the problematic situation, making the meaning of the experience richer than before, which becomes the new content that we use in other related experiences. Precisely because our inferences have their career in some present situation and set of facts and reasons we are able to defend against claims that our proposals or hypotheses are mere illusions or unrealistic.
The confirmation of phases three and four rests with the last stage, that of further observation and testing, on which Dewey places particular emphasis. “What is important is that every inference be a tested inference; or that we discriminate between beliefs that rest upon tested evidenced and those that do not, and be accordingly on our guard as to the kind and degree of assent or belief that is justified” (HWT 2 [LW8:92 (original emphasis)]; cf. L [LW12:14–15]). As Dewey explains in his Logic of 1938, we are thus warranted in asserting a belief, the accuracy of a proposed plan, or the appropriateness of this or that virtue if it settles the experience that stimulated the inquiry (L [LW12:15–17; cf. 156–161]). It is important to understand that in certain cases we will have suspended other beliefs that are ancillary to the hypothesis tested. That is, there will be an array of factors that we will need to take for granted but which contextualize the hypothesis under consideration. As Peirce reminds us, we will most certainly find it very hard to think at all if we stopped taking a great many factors for granted. But if this is so, as Dewey believes, acceptance of a hypothesis means that it settles the problem, that it can withstand new experiences and arguments if they arise, and that in some sets of cases (usually the most important ones) it coheres with other settled and suspended beliefs (L [LW12:343]). This last point merely carries through Dewey’s initial commitment to experience as the beginning and terminal point for inquiry, where “terminal” denotes a potentially different temporal moment from the one in which the hypothesis originally settled the matter.68
The general account of inquiry we have been pursuing as well as the connection drawn between Aristotle and Dewey raises a concern worth considering. The worry is that Aristotle specifically wants to distinguish between cases in which one employs inquiry for the acquisition of some skill to achieve some given end, for example, and cases in which the end itself is determined in the process of deliberation. If assimilated, the argument might go, we risk obscuring the noncodifiable nature of phronēsis. If applied to the art of living, it implies that the purpose of human existence must be as fixed as the goal of acquiring and using a skill or form of technical knowledge.
Here the relationship between phronēsis and technē returns, but now it works as a critique against Dewey. It appears that Dewey’s conception of inquiry is concerned only about means to some defined end, but is unable to reach and potentially transform the end sought after or create a new end altogether. When his account of inquiry is challenged for being instrumental, this is often one of the lines pursued. There is, however, an interesting argument presented by Julia Annas in her reading and expansion of Aristotle’s thoughts.69 In brief, she argues that there is a unifying logical structure that underwrites the acquisition of both skills and virtues. As she writes of this, “to consider our telos as a fixed point to guide our thoughts about the virtues is to get matters wrong way round. It is not the object of the skill but the structure and unification of the skilled reasoning that is the crucial point of analogy for ethical reasoning.“70 Dewey anticipates Annas’ move in his account of inquiry:
If thinking is the art by which knowledge is practiced, then the materials with which thinking deals may be supposed, by analogy with the other arts, to take on in consequence special shapes. The man who is making a boat will give wood a form which it did not have, in order that it may serve the purposes to which it is to be put. Thinking may then be supposed to give its material the form which will make it amenable to its purposes—attaining knowledge, or, as it is ordinarily put, going from the unknown to the known. (LJP [MW8:65–66)
There is a clear sense in which a skill can easily be taught and appropriated, but which in no way seems to depend on the practical wisdom of the maker. But this, argues Dewey and Annas, wrongly imports the determinate end back into the intellectual structure needed to originally arrive at the end and subsequently bring it to fruition again. If an instrument made to sail the boat-maker safely from one shore to another looked very much like what we call a boat, but seemed to sink immediately upon entering the water or was unable to last long enough in moving from one shore to another, we would scratch our heads in bewilderment. As Dewey says, however, in fixing our attention on the belief that the construction of objects such as boats requires “mere repetition [of a procedure] or literal loyalty” to a model, we obscure the extent to which the individual must “take account of” or “reckon with” factors that are not mere repetition, such as assessing, for example, “the grain and strength of the wood” (LJP [MW8:67]). This formulation immediately prompts us to ask: “How much should we take account of?” or “To what degree must we reckon with various factors?” If I understand Dewey correctly, the answer to these questions will often take the form: “You have to see for yourself.” We can make use of and slightly amend Annas’ language to serve Dewey: “As with any skill we can give rules to help the learner, but obviously there is no foolproof recipe or guarantee of success. And so with [the practice of inquiry]—success is not mechanical; there are many incalculable failures of temperament or intellect that may thwart the right decision.“71 Understanding this point, to employ Annas’ language once more, keeps us from being tempted to see in Dewey’s thought the “ideal of a purely mechanical decision-making procedure, one which would do the work for us and leave no role to individual deliberation.“72 Thus Dewey concludes: “To say that something is to be learned, is to be found out, is to be … believed, is to say that something is to be done. Every such proposition in the concrete is a practical proposition. Every such proposition of inquiry, discovery and testing will have then the traits assigned to the class of practical propositions” (LJP [MW8:65]).
There are two points we can draw from the line of reasoning we have pursued thus far that address the extent to which inquiry is also concerned about ends. First, the intellectual structure need not imply a substantive character to the end, as the example of boat-making suggests. It need only claim that the assessment of the end implies that its career begins and terminates in experience, the result of which often means that the agent is doing more than merely following a formal decision-making procedure. Recall the importance of inference in Dewey’s account. There is a creative moment here that draws on funded experiences, but which is not reducible to such experiences. Second, this does not rule out those cases in which the means used to settle some problem or demand in experience transform and define what determinate judgment we make. Recall that the character of the agent, as well as context, influences considerations and factors at various stages of the overall inquiry, so that a subclass of outcomes will often reflexively impact the original intentions and outlook of the agent.
Dewey crystallizes this point in the context of our moral lives where end constitutive debate is at issue. He writes the following: “The more completely the notion of the model is formed outside and irrespective of the specific conditions which the situation of action presents, the less intelligent is the act” (LJP [MW8:38–39]). In such cases, says Dewey, “[t]he man who is not accessible to such change in the case of moral situations has ceased to be a moral agent and become a reacting machine” (LJP [MW8:39]). Dewey’s claim is obviously wide enough to account for reflection about what is to count as the end. But in order to say anything meaningful about ends, we need a much richer narrative about the communities involved, their ethical and political commitments, and their willingness to subject their decisions to scrutiny and revision. This should immediately signal that for Dewey whatever our ends are, they are subject to constraints, which contain normative implications that can potentially transform how we navigate through our religious, ethical, and political landscapes. To say, then, that control of our physical environment, the acquisition and successful deployment of skills, and the art of living share the same intellectual structure is only to point to a shift, Dewey believes, away from “forming ideas and judgments … on the basis of conformity to antecedent objects, [and rather] to constructing … objects directed by knowledge of consequences” (QC [LW4:217]).
Of course this explication of inquiry raises a number of issues, not the least of which pertains to the relationship between belief, evidence (old and new), and context, on the one hand, and the status and place of impartiality and objectivity, on the other. I have touched on some of these issues here, but we will take them up in the coming chapters as part of a reconsideration of the character of inquiry. In this chapter, I have intended only to explicate Dewey’s conception of inquiry in the context of his philosophy of action, and to make a gesture toward the complexity this suggests. What this account ultimately commits us to can be discerned only through a consideration of the specific subject matter of religion, ethics, and politics. For the moment, the above account will suffice.
INQUIRY AND WEAK METAPHYSICS
We may now turn to the issue of metaphysics. At the outset we should acknowledge that Dewey departs from the standard usage of the term. Many Dewey scholars have tended to focus on that part of Experience and Nature that attempts to lay out the “generic traits of existence” (EN [LW1:50]). This vague phrase, to which Richard Rorty and others attach themselves, makes it appear as if Dewey seeks to articulate traits of existence prior to experience of them.73 But if experience is our primary touch point, how can we be sure of the persistence of these traits? Surely, they will appear just as foundational as any other piece of traditional metaphysical reflection, beyond the testing reach of inquiry. There is an industry of commentary on this formulation of Dewey’s that makes him the problem, rather than framing investigations into Dewey from the perspective of the problem he seeks to address.74 To approach him from the latter perspective, as suggested throughout, redirects our attention in Experience and Nature to figuring out metaphysics’ meaning for him. It takes seriously the narrative of the last chapter and its connection to the account in this one.
To begin, in chapter 3 of Experience and Nature, “Nature, Ends, and Histories,” Dewey writes the following: “Poets who have sung of despair in the midst of prosperity, and of hope amid darkest gloom, have been the true metaphysicians of nature” (EN [LW1:96]). But what does Dewey mean by this formulation? Why is the poet—the artist—considered the true metaphysician of nature? This imagery of art comes back again where he notes that metaphysics provides a “ground-map of the province of criticism” (EN [LW1:309]). As he tells us in the unfinished introduction to an intended reissue of Experience and Nature, “experience [acts as a] cautionary and directive word … to remind us that the world which is lived, suffered and enjoyed as well as logically thought of, has the last word in all human inquiries and surmises” (ENR [LW1:372]). “This is,” he adds, “a doctrine of humility but it is also a doctrine of direction” (ENR [LW1:372]).
When Dewey’s philosophy is criticized, these challenges are animated by the frustration that somehow his project and reflections on inquiry lack a certain gravitas that life demands. But if we combine the image of the artist or poet with that of the ground-map as a meeting point through inquiry, we find that his vision of what metaphysics is in fact achieves the opposite. It provides a figuration of the experiential world that serves not only as a source of direction, but also as one of caution, as he says. Inquiry makes us aware of nature’s “impressive and irresistible mixture of sufficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going to consequences as yet indeterminate” (EN [LW1:47]). This is precisely why practical wisdom becomes important to inquiry, making the latter more than a mere inflexible procedure. Dewey acknowledges Aristotle’s attentiveness to contingency, and so he notes continuity between his naturalistic metaphysics and what we find in Aristotle. But alas, he argues, Aristotle is unable to abandon a fundamental essentialism that installs a realm of Being and makes the world of practical action appear fallen—a sick world from which we are alienated (EN [LW1:47–49]).
For Dewey, humility is the gift of inquiry. Inquiry ascertains meanings otherwise not there and satisfies fractures in human life, but also may fail to do so—that is, our projections into the world may fall short of what they attempt to satisfy, manage, or negotiate. For an object may, says Dewey in Experience and Nature, “endure secula seculorum and yet not be everlasting; it will crumble before the gnawing tooth of time, as it exceeds a certain measure. Every existence is an event” (EN [LW1:63]). But we ought not to lament. The fact is “something to be noted and used. If it is discomfiting when applied to good things, to our friends, possession and precious selves, it is consoling also to know that no evil endures forever” (EN [LW1:63–64]). Recall the image of the poet who sings of despair at the moment of joy, and hope in the darkest hour. Retaining both of these images allows us to see that inquiry reins us in as well as spurs us on; it encourages self-assertion and cautions humility. So inquiry provides us access to a kind of metaphysics about human beings and the natural and social world they inhabit that simultaneously opens us to precisely those elements within experience that structure our future encounters. Opening us to elements in experience potentially points to the limitation of the foundations on which we rely from the outset. Stephen White provides some direction here in his elucidation of the contemporary turn in political theory to weak ontology against the background of two pressing issues:
First, there is the acceptance of the idea that all fundamental conceptualizations of self, other, and world are contestable. Second, there is the sense that such conceptualizations are nevertheless necessary or unavoidable for an adequately reflective ethical and political life. The latter insight demands from us the affirmative gesture of constructing foundations, the former prevents us from carrying out this task in a traditional fashion.75
The upshot is that inquiry works to keep us critically aware of this in the sense suggested by the frame of mind it puts us in regarding expectation. When read through Dewey, I take this to mean that our conceptualizations of self and world are not placed beyond reevaluation. Recall the meliorist! The words that come to mind here include: watchful, wary, receptive, perceptive, and alert. Dewey provides an important passage worth citing at length that acknowledges and prefigures White’s point:
Fidelity to the nature to which we belong, as parts however weak, demands that we cherish our desires and ideals till we have converted them into intelligence, revised them in terms of the ways and means which nature makes possible. When we have used our thought to its utmost and have thrown into the moving unbalanced balance of things our puny strength, we know that though the universe slay us still we may trust, for our lot is one with whatever is good in existence. We know that such thought and effort is one condition of the coming into existence of the better. As far as we are concerned it is the only condition, for it alone is in our power. To ask more than this is childish. (EN [LW1:314])
Cornel West, for example, reads this passage as a wonderful example of what I referred to in the last chapter, following William Connolly, as the domestication of contingency.76 No matter what fate may befall the products of inquiry, we can be sure, the passage seemingly says, that good is on our side and the better is coming into existence. If this is right, then Dewey will have fallen into a version of the problem that afflicted liberal Protestantism.
We should not conclude on this note so quickly. The question underlying this passage is the following: Where do we stand once we have sincerely deployed inquiry, come up with a course of action, and acted upon that decision? For Dewey, we confidently believe that our decision, our lot as he says in the passage, is on the side of whatever is good in existence—that is, what will sustain us—though the universe may slay us nonetheless. And perhaps we discover that we were wrong, or better still, we were right, but something befalls the plan and undermines our aims. Dewey’s point is that if we do not at least assume the position that good possibilities may accrue to inquiry’s productions, then it is unclear why we would employ it to begin with. We would, in other words, have fallen prey to pessimism. For this reason he argues, assuming the thought that inquiry can do some work in realizing the better is one of the conditions for the good coming into existence. Since this is all we have, he concludes, inquiry alone is in our power.
It is a mistake to ask for much more. The point is that Dewey seeks to engender an outlook toward the art of living that transforms the emotional and intellectual course one takes into any one particular issue in life. In his estimation, this is the framework of our metaphysical projects when they take their point of departure from the world of practical action. Our hubris is revealed by an inability to embrace the goods realized because we are unable to make a strong claim about their epistemic status or the extent to which they find affirmation in something nonhuman in character. This, I suggest, frames not only Dewey’s reflections on religion in A Common Faith, but his ethical and political outlook as well.