Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The ideas of Dewey, along with those of Freud, were undoubtedly influential in helping attach far more importance to childhood than before. The notion of personal growth and the drawing back of traditional, authoritarian conceptions of what knowledge is, and what education should seek to do, were liberating ideas for many people. (Dewey’s frank aim was to make society, via education, more ‘worthy, lovely and harmonious’.)⁶⁹ In America, with its many immigrant groups and wide geographical spread, the new education helped to create many individualists. At the same time, the ideas of the ‘growth movement’ always risked being taken too far – with children left to their own devices too much. In some schools where teachers believed that ‘No child should ever know failure . . .’, examinations and grades were abolished.⁷⁰

Dewey’s view of philosophy agreed very much with James and the Peirces. It should be concerned with living in this world, now.⁷¹ Both thinking and behaviour are different sides of the same coin. Knowledge is part of nature. We all make our way in the world, as best we can, learning as we go as to what works and what doesn’t: behaviour is not pre-ordained at birth.⁷²

This approach, he felt, should be applied to philosophy where, traditionally, people had been obsessed by the relation between mind and world. Because of this, the celebrated philosophical mystery, How do we know?, was in a sense the wrong question. Dewey illustrated his argument by means of an analogy which Menand highlights: no one has ever been unduly bothered by the no less crucial question, the relation between, for example, the hand and the world. ‘The function of the hand is to help the organism cope with the environment; in situations in which a hand doesn’t work, we try something else, such as a foot or a fishhook, or an editorial.’⁷³

His point was that nobody worries about those situations where the hand doesn’t ‘fit’, doesn’t ‘relate to the world’. We use hands where they are useful, feet where they are useful, tongues where they are useful.

Dewey was of the opinion that ideas are much like hands: they are instruments for dealing with the world. ‘An idea has no greater metaphysical stature than, say, a fork. When your fork proves inadequate to eating soup, you don’t worry about the inherent shortcomings in the nature of forks; you reach for a spoon.’ Ideas are much the same. We have got into difficulty because ‘mind’ and ‘reality’ don’t exist other than as abstractions, with all the shortcomings that we find in any generalisation. ‘It therefore makes as little sense to talk about a “split” between the mind and the world as it does to talk about a split between the hand and the environment, or the fork and the soup.’ ‘Things,’ he wrote, ‘. . . are what they are experienced as.’⁷⁴

According to Menand, Dewey thought that philosophy had got off on the wrong foot right at the start, and that we have arrived where we are largely as a result of the class structure of classical Greece. Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers were for the most part a leisured, ‘secure and self-possessed’ class, and it was pragmatically useful for them to exalt reflection and speculation at the expense of making and doing. Since then, he thought, philosophy had been dogged by similar class prejudices, which maintained the same separation of values – stability above change, certainty above contingency, the fine arts above the useful arts, ‘what minds do over what hands do’.⁷⁵ The result is there for us all to see. ‘While philosophy pondered its artificial puzzles, science, taking a purely instrumental and experimental approach, had transformed the world.’ Pragmatism was a way for philosophy to catch up.

That pragmatism should arise in America is not so surprising, not surprising at all in fact. The mechanical and materialist doctrines of Hegel, Laplace, Malthus, Marx, Darwin and Spencer were essentially deterministic whereas for James and Dewey the universe – very much like America – was still in progress, still in the making, ‘a place where no conclusion is foregone and every problem is amenable to the exercise of what Dewey called intelligent action’. Above all, he felt that – like everything else – ethics evolve. This was a sharp deduction from Darwin, quickly reached and still not often enough appreciated. ‘The care of the sick has taught us how to protect the healthy.’⁷⁶