This book offers a new perspective on the foundations of John Dewey’s philosophy and so tilts our understanding of his religious, ethical, and political reflections in a novel direction. This assertion may seem a bit cavalier. After all, in the past two decades the field of Dewey scholarship has greatly expanded. Influential books have been written by Cornel West, Robert Westbrook, James Kloppenberg, Alan Ryan, John Patrick Diggins, and Steven Rockefeller, making the field a crowded one. Yet even in these important contributions Dewey is consistently understood as a child of the Enlightenment in regard to his appreciation for scientific inquiry. Despite his consistent rejection of philosophical and theological certainties, he seems inescapably wedded to a progressive view of experience, making him an unlikely guide in these politically uncertain times. Indeed, all of these contemporary thinkers are united by a singular worry: Dewey’s conception of inquiry denies the fragility of life that a thoroughgoing experimentalism demands.
While there is much to recommend in the work of these scholars, their view of Dewey has the effect of obscuring the significance of his philosophy for understanding ourselves under modern conditions. All of these scholars miss or diminish in various ways the profound influence of Charles Darwin’s account of evolution on Dewey’s notion of inquiry and the corresponding ideas of contingency and uncertainty it introduced. By focusing on this influence, I show that for him, our cognitive abilities are both stimulated and potentially frustrated by contingency, and that this beginning point guides even as it humbles the significance of human action. While he retains the humanistic and political hopes of the Enlightenment, those hopes are cautiously advanced and defended, given the background of contingency from which they derive. The result, as Dewey himself explains in his 1910 essay, “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” is that Darwin “introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.” To follow this line of inquiry, as this book does, is to encounter the undiscovered Dewey.
My purpose in this book is twofold: to investigate and reconstruct the historical framework in which Dewey’s appreciation for Darwin is located, on the one hand, and to interpret and distill his understanding of its epistemological and normative importance in guiding human life, on the other. I trace the way in which the former—as articulated through the themes of inquiry and contingency—informs and appropriately directs the latter as revealed in his engagement with religious, moral, and democratic commitments. The book encompasses a large swath of his writings, while holding in view and exploring the different dimensions of the connection between inquiry and contingency for managing modern life.
This helps explain my selection of texts throughout this book. After all, the reader may worry that the texts I have used have been cherry-picked to suit the overall interpretation being advanced here. Moreover, one might object that the differences between this work and those of the commentators I criticize arise solely from selection of texts. In all respects, I avoid this problem by (a) employing the same texts that Dewey’s critics use and (b) using a thematic approach to my analysis that relies on and shows continuity among a variety of Dewey’s writings. In this regard, I try to do justice to the larger argument of this book while keeping in view the peculiarities of Dewey’s specific works. And I largely work in his middle and later works, beginning roughly in the 1890s, since these texts are developed outside of his previous and deeply held Hegelian commitments and are instead located more firmly within a Darwinian framework.
The line from Dewey’s essay on Darwin, then, provides not only a rejoinder to critics, but also the outline, interpretative goals, and organizing structure for this book. The text is divided into two parts. In part I—“From Certainty to Contingency” (chapters 1 and 2)—I analyze the importance of contingency in Dewey’s philosophy of action, and the precise relationship between that account and what he says about inquiry. This requires that we turn our attention, as intellectual historians, to the ascendancy of Darwin’s notion of evolution within the context of the nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism with which Dewey is often allied. The project attempts to understand better than we now do how each—that is, liberal Protestantism and Dewey—appropriates Darwin’s vision of evolution.
What emerges is a startling and vital distinction, the result of which will orient the reader differently to the very foundations of Dewey’s philosophy. While his liberal Protestant counterparts exploit evolution as a story about progress, he argues that inquiry proceeds from and must not presume to overcome the uncertainty that characterizes human action. Dewey separates the meaningfulness of inquiry from a larger metaphysical story about human development, while simultaneously opening our commitments to reflective reevaluation and public contestability in the context of our ongoing social practices. There is a guiding insight at work in this account to which scholars have paid little or no attention, but which this project uncovers for readers: Dewey’s account of inquiry attempts a transformation in the modern self-understanding that simultaneously encourages a Promethean intervention in managing our social and natural environments, but constrains action by highlighting its intimate relationship to uncertainty. That the Enlightenment gave birth to Dewey’s outlook cannot be denied, but in his hands that vision has reached maturity.
In part II—“Religion, the Moral Life, and Democracy” (chapters 3–5)—the book is more explicitly philosophical. I explore and explicate the relationship between inquiry—now understood as preceding from a more contingent foundation—and Dewey’s religious, moral, and political philosophy. As I argue, he does not seek to abandon religious commitments, as many scholars have thought, but rather to redescribe their place within the context of democracy. He is thus sensitive to modern pluralism, especially the absence of a dominant theological or ethical horizon that would otherwise guide the substantive content of our lives. And he seeks to provide an answer to the following question: In the absence of unifying theological commitments, how do we go about the business of managing democracy while simultaneously paying respect to religious commitments? His answer, I argue, awakens us to the importance of our religious commitments from the outset. We honor and pay due respect to those commitments not by blindly deferring to them, but by elucidating their place in sustaining and ennobling human existence. This elucidation places our pious allegiances within the everyday discourse of giving and asking for reasons and so allows us to invite our fellow citizens to partake in the richness of our lives.
This sensitivity to pluralism in religious matters makes Dewey very attentive to the presence of moral conflict. To be sure, inquiry does seek to achieve resolution among conflicting moral claims, but Dewey acknowledges that the result of reflection may be to reveal the incommensurability of values. Too often, however, we are seduced into believing that the very fact of pluralism and the inevitability of conflict imply some deeper crisis in normative evaluation. We are told that the world is disenchanted because we are without a nonhuman background to which we can appeal to adjudicate between moral conflicts. Yet Dewey shows us that even amid conflict there still exist resources within our social practices to guide and assess moral reflection. We are beings for whom it is natural to be moral and this implies a normative character to our entrance into the world at birth and participation in social practices throughout life. As Dewey argues, the question is not whether we will be moral agents and so engage in evaluation of right and wrong, good and bad, but rather with what skill will we exercise that agency.
The unifying theme throughout much of Dewey’s reflections on religion and the moral life turns on a certain way of understanding inquiry, how it opens us up to the possibility of transformation even as it places us in positions where we court danger and so come to acknowledge the limitations of human existence. Yet again and again we come back to a kind of anti-authoritarian impulse—a vision that rejects the claim that some few have privileged access to truth and so are beyond the practice of giving and asking for reasons. This view informs and profoundly shapes Dewey’s democratic philosophy. After all, given the specific connection he draws between inquiry and modern science, we worry (and rightfully so) that his view invites epistemic elitism. And yet it is precisely his specific understanding of inquiry and its cooperative character, I argue, that provides us with an appropriate way to think about the relationship between experts and the larger public so that epistemic power does not lapse into domination. In fact, if we take seriously the relationship between contingency and action that is the backdrop of democracy, Dewey helps us see the inescapable incompleteness of democratic politics. For him, democracy is that regime that instantiates reason-giving as the fundamental principle for legitimating its ongoing affairs, even as that principle always already points beyond any final settlement of democratic practices and institutions.
These discrete, but connected accounts revolve around the centrality of the reflective and contestable character of inquiry. They are seen, in this study, as emerging from a mature vision of human enlightenment—an account that demands intervention on our part and cautions humility at every turn.
That I have framed this work partly as an engagement with Dewey scholars should not obscure the fact that I find much of their work compelling. In engaging their works, I hope I have been steady and careful in my judgments, that my inferences have not been carelessly drawn, and that once complete, these thinkers would see this book as a complement to rather than an attempted refutation of their own hard intellectual work. I make this point explicit so that the reader can properly receive the book and understand where it hopes to stand among others like it. In doing so, my central goal is to say that there remain untapped resources in Dewey that can help us navigate our very complex individual and collective lives.
My engagement, then, with Dewey scholars and the elucidation and defense of his work is about so much more. It is about a certain way of seeing ourselves as human beings under modern democratic conditions attempting to realize the good in life. In this respect, the book is consistent with Dewey’s deepest belief that philosophies are “not colorless intellectual readings of reality, but men’s most passionate desires and hopes, their basic beliefs about the sort of life to be lived” (PD [MW 11:44 (emphasis added)]). The defining feature of Dewey’s philosophy—and an outlook that we are desperately in need of cultivating in these uncertain times—is an understanding of humility that does not extinguish hope. We build better than we know, and worse than we could ever imagine. The first encourages our forward-looking outlook as we engage each other and the natural world that we inhabit, while the second demands that we not become too sure of ourselves, that we reject the presumptive belief that justice and right are on our side, and that we alone have a claim to truth beyond contestability.