A Peek at Relevance - Sidney Hook (1973)

This week I am looking at the writing of Sidney Hook, who gives a very detailed and credible analysis of Dewey’s philosophy concerning its continued relevance in society. I feel that this piece could greatly help justify the use of Dewey within a dissertation as modern as this. Reading through this piece I found myself underlining and starring words and phrases constantly, and so I have decided to simply list these relevant quotes here and discuss them in sections rather than en masse.

When I speak of the relevance of John Dewey’s thought I refer not to its bearing on crisis situations but to its bearing on the condition of man, his problems and predicaments in war and peace, good times and bad, whenever he reflectively examines alternatives of action in the course of choosing a desirable way of life. (Hook xviii)

They (Dewey’s ideas) are relevant to areas of thought and action in which our basic intellectual and practical interests are still involved – education and ethics, culture and politics, social philosophy in the broadest sense. (Hook xviii)

An education that seeks to make its students imaginatively aware of those dynamic forces in society and humanistic activity must stress the understanding of its basic social and economic structure, the problems and conflicts of the encompassing cultural milieu, and the alternatives of development or retrogression always open to it. That is why the abstract celebration of moral values – dignity, integrity, happiness, serenity – is insufficient to tell us what changes in social institutions are required to give them a concrete embodiment in the life of most human beings. (Hook xx)

Hook brings up an interesting point in these quotes, mainly the definition of relevance. Pointing to the fact that relevance is always relevance to something. It is a relational term, always used in connection to something, and immediately I draw that the term cannot be used abstractly. The very idea of relevance supposes a sort of pragmatic undertone, that it is not used unless there is some actual use for it. Abstract celebrations of values as educative are insufficient.

Neither humanistic nor scientific education traditionally conceived, because of their failure to understand the encompassing third culture of social, economic, political, and historical studies, can tell us when to produce, what to produce, and why. (Hook xx)

Hook establishes Dewey as recognizing a third form of education outside the normative scientific and humanistic mode, namely a social and cultural mode. Scientific and humanistic educations alone, without the influence of social education, fail to breach out of their abstractness and actually teach us what do to and why to do it.

Dewey continuing the Greek tradition has maintained that philosophy is a quest for wisdom, but as distinct from ancient, medieval, and almost all other modern thinkers, he has rejected the attempt to identify or ground wisdom with or on some metaphysical or transcendental (ultimately religious) insight or with the purely descriptive knowledge of the natural sciences. (Hook xx)

Wisdom for Dewey is a moral term […] As a moral term it refers to a choice about something to be done[.] (Hook xx)

(Referring to those now concerned with a normative analysis of values in their social bearing) They seek to politicalize philosophy by harnessing it to some specific controversial political program rather than to the analytic functions of clarifying the alternatives of social action and their consequences. (Hook xxi)

For the existentialists a moral choice is a passion. For Dewey it is more than a passion, it is a conviction for which rational grounds can be given, that is, it is “a passion that would exhibit itself as a reasonable persuasion. (Hook xxi)

These quotes relate to Dewey’s philosophy as a whole, his method of thinking and how he uses that thinking. Hook is pointing out here that Dewey reaches a form of pragmatic existentialism, in that he reaches a philosophy of values and well-being but does this through the most practical and experientially rich ways, emphasizing constantly the active, objective use of these ideas in the real world. No angels dancing on the head of a pin metaphysics. These ideas cannot be confined within the realms of thought and pointless discourse. Go out. Use this in your everyday life. Let it fuel your passions; drive you to live in the best way possible.

This piece contains so much more that I haven’t been able to see yet. I’m excited to see the rest of it.

Hook, Sidney. The Relevance of John Dewey’s Thought. The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Vol 17, pg xviii-xxi.

Education as a Social Function - The Rest of It (1916)

Woe. The mistress of irony has laid her cruel hands upon me. This Monday I could not attend my usual working time in the writing production lab, because I was driving down to Warwick to take the GRE exam. Quietly I laughed to myself as I struggled to write that paragraph in cursive, just as I had done four years ago for the SAT. But alas I survived to soldier on and pick the brain of John Dewey once more. This week I am looking at other selections from the same chapter of Democracy and Education that I had quoted last week.

What stands out concerning this chapter, namely Education as a Social Function is that most of the discussion involves a sort of inclusive education within a specific society. This delves deep into Dewey’s educational theory without bringing up any concerns of ethnocentric behavior. In general, the discussion is of the nature and meaning of environment, the social environment, the social medium as educative, and the school as a special environment.

[A] society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. (Dewey 15)

The words “environment” and “medium” denote […] the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies. (Dewey 15)

Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the fish’s activities – to its life. (Dewey 16)

What I find that connects these quotes is a constant emphasis on the role of society in the education of the immature. Dewey goes into the school as a sort of “society” later on, but since we are more concerned with the topic of global citizenship, let us take this in a broader sense. Let us treat a nation as if it were a sort of “school” and we can see that as a school aims to create a sort of ideal environment of passion in learning, the nation may equally take this responsibility as a whole. Arguably, the sort of open-mindedness that we wish to obtain must start within the schooling system, but cannot stop there. True adoption of a concept spreads wild through society as a whole.

Repeatedly made evident in this piece are the concepts of belief and continuity - surely a theme in Dewey’s earlier philosophy. Dewey is emphasizing the role of a person’s environment in their education. A sort of authentic and inauthentic education is defined, but Dewey names these modes training and education, respectively. Training is the sort of fostering of habit gained through a mode that would make Kant roll in his grave. It treats people as a means and not an ends, sort of like animals, educating them by conditioning them to certain modes of thought rather than fostering any sort of passion or mindfulness.

I wonder immediately what sort of passion or mindfulness we retain in the contemporary day and age. Has our education system trained us, or truly educated us? Amidst my schooling I have indeed found a sort of passion for knowledge, but I often wonder if this is because I have taken such a specific path (writing/rhetoric/philosophy). I talk to my friends drowning in the midst of the world of STEM and see that their education can be dimmed to a sort of regurgitation of information. Mindlessly they memorize, stacking flash cards upon flash cards, taking their tests, repeating this over and over. And conclusively they experience a sort of revolt; a sort of “thank God that is over” attitude. They don’t seem to have learned anything. I turn back to my own experiences and find that while I often experience quite a bit of stress as my friends do, there is no revolt. There is no innate feeling of pointlessness. I conclusively determine that I have learned, and my passion grows. Now in many cases – too many cases – the activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. (Dewey 18) I see this quote and cannot help but see the contrast of my education and the education of my friends. I feel as though I am learning, and they are simply creating useful habits.

Four years and I’ve been kindled into a fire. My friend John was kindled into a Computer Scientist.

Dewey, John. (1916) Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. 2. Education as a Social Function. The Middle Works of John Dewey, (1899-1924). Vol 9. Pg 15-28

My Assumption (Based on Writings of Dewey, Fallace, and Sartre) (1916-2010)

I must admit that I am becoming more inclined to intertwine Sartre’s philosophy into this subject in order to defend Dewey. Perhaps it may be because my classes have recently showed much emphasis on Sartre’s work and it is difficult for me to remove myself from this. Perhaps there is a sort of relation to be made.

Sartre argues that consciousness has the ability to apprehend ‘not-being’, because consciousness is nothingness in itself. One quote that stands out to me in particular is [t]he world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities (Sartre 253). In quick summation, it is because I expect to find something that I experience its absence. When I ask myself the question “is John here?” and I come to notice that no, he is not here, John’s not-being happens. The nothingness reveals itself to my consciousness and I may apprehend it.

Returning to the quote from Sartre 253 and relating this to Dewey, it can be said that questions of political correctness and social equality did not truly emerge until the civil rights movement. In other words, these questions were not posited as possibilities by Dewey and his colleagues. Because of this, the not-being of social equality and political correctness does not occur as an absence to their minds. Surely if it had, Dewey’s philosophy would support the idea of it. I fail to see conversations of social equality within Dewey’s time and place in American culture. Indeed Thomas Fallace admits himself that his hypotheses are based on historiographical assumptions (Fallace 472). These questions, which we hold so sensitively in contemporary American culture, are simply not considered by the philosophers of Dewey’s time. Must we blame Dewey and the rest of the pragmatists or educational philosophers for not discovering the not-being of social equality? Could we blame Magellan for not discovering the entire world, but just a part of it?

I wish to conclusively argue that Fallace’s claims are focused on specific historiographical assumptions and avoid others. Fallace’s assumptions, though well-rooted, ignore other aspects of Dewey’s philosophy. I understand these assumptions to an extent, for Dewey’s writings are so voluminous it is near impossible to read them all and understand them in their entirety. And yet I take the following quote from the same exact section, of the same exact chapter of Democracy and Education. Some kinds of participation in the life of those with whom the individual is connected are inevitable; with respect to them, the social environment exercises an educative or formative influence unconsciously and apart from any set purpose (Dewey 21). This is Dewey acknowledging the fallibility of human kind. Individuals may be influenced by others and to an extent must engage in inevitable participation. Luckily, Dewey is included in this category. He is a human being.

This is my assumption. Though Dewey does not explicitly say I might be wrong to prelude each and every sentence (and I would argue the merit of any philosopher that would repeatedly emphasize their incapacity for truth), he acknowledges humanity in a way that philosophers seldom do. Individuals may be influenced by their surroundings into a sort of complacency with their social situation and indeed this is inevitable according to Dewey. Dewey acknowledges the potentiality and inevitability for an individual to be influenced by society, and by association he is included in this. These claims against Dewey remove him from the very humanity that he is discussing. Dewey at least acknowledges this inevitability, and such reasoning is suitable explanation for his terminology and complacency. Claims that aim to discredit the ethos of Dewey simply ignore the context of his writing and his overall points.

I believe that I have reasonable argued against the following two points in Fallace’s article:

1.     Fallace’s Historiographical Assumptions

a.     Certain words used by Dewey and his collaborators, such as savage, barbarian, and primitive, reveal underlying beliefs through which the world was viewed by most 19^th-century social scientists. (Fallace 472)

                                               i.     In contemporary American culture we define these words differently than their meaning during Dewey’s time. I argue that the intended use of these words in Dewey’s philosophy is to identify specific groups rather than to attack them.

b.     Unless specifically noted otherwise, Dewey accepted the language and ideas of his peers and collaborators. (Fallace 472)

a.     This acceptance is merely due to the fact that philosophers at the time were not presented with this conversation. The ‘not-being” of social equality had not been posited as a possibility within Dewey’s environment.

c.      General points

                                               i.     These assumptions are based primarily within the earlier works of Dewey and do not focus on his development as a philosopher or the application of his later ideas in contrast to his earlier ones.

                                              ii.     This subject is never specifically discussed in Dewey’s earlier works.

2.     My Assumption

a.     Dewey’s philosophy acknowledges the fallibility of humanity and by association his own capacity for fallibility.

                                               i.     Dewey acknowledges inevitable social acceptance in the very same section that Fallace takes his claims from. This points to the view that Fallace’s claims ignore aspects of Dewey’s philosophy, and fail to contextualize properly.

                                              ii.     These claims remove Dewey from the very humanity that he is discussing.

I must say that had I been tasked to write a research paper rather than a blog, it would probably address this subject. I feel as though I have good points, and I could elaborate and go into much more detailed analysis concerning this, but I also know that it is not the function of a blog to be a detailed analysis. Instead I have listed my points above in the more general sense, to maintain a consistent style in this blog.

Fallace, T. (2010). Was John Dewey Ethnocentric? Reevaluating the Philosopher’s Early Views on Culture and Race. Educational Researcher, Vol 39. No 6. 471-474

Oaklander, L. Nathan. Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. Print. Cited material if from the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre

Dewey, John. (1916) Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. 2. Education as a Social Function. 3. The Social Medium as Educative. The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924). Vol 9. Pg 21-23

A Quick Look at Fallace (2010)

I do apologize for the lateness of this blog post. Around my usual working time on Monday I was attending an academic conference concerning theories and best practices within the field of higher education administration, and specifically experiential learning. Although I do value this work very much, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be the only undergraduate student amongst 100+ professionals!

I’ve bit the bullet of what we have comically named the “St. Dewey” attitude and decided to look into the work of Thomas D. Fallace. Specifically I am looking at Was John Dewey Ethnocentric? Reevaluating the Philosopher’s Early Views on Culture and Race. While I do admit that Fallace argues well, and that his points do coincide with his title well, I believe that they do not hold much water concerning our studies.

The first point that stands out to me is Fallace’s careful wording. As he states, [o]verall, I provide a nuanced, contextualized reading of Dewey’s views on culture and race during a critical period of his intellectual development (1895-1911) (471). Surely it is important to note that this is before Dewey’s revealing trip to China, and before the revision of How We Think. Fallace argues that the primary texts of Dewey’s philosophy that are used for education are taken from this early period, however. But is this a proper consideration, to avoid the later works of Dewey and simply focus on these earlier views?

“To study a philosopher” is truly an ambiguous statement. What are you studying? A living or dead body? Accounts of this philosopher written by other people? The writings of this philosopher? Who was this philosopher in the first place? A person, or a series of writings? Their past, or what they had become? Such questions of being are pointed out in Sartre’s existentialism. His philosophy is a bit off topic, but I will throw it into sum by stating that Sartre points out the paradox of human existence in that we are what we have been and something completely different at the same time. If I have been a waiter and I am waiting tables now, surely I am a waiter, but at the same time I am not a waiter since I have the innate freedom to be anything I wish to be. So if I am ethnocentric now, and yet I choose to purport myself in the future as not ethnocentric, am I still ethnocentric due to what I had argued in the past? If this waiter chooses to manage his own restaurant, or become a NASCAR driver, is he still a waiter?

In other words, it is confusing and illusory to throw human existence into something definite, for we are not definite. The entire idea of humanity is that a human being is constantly becoming something. To say “Dewey was ethnocentric” in general is to argue Dewey as some sort of object. Fallace’s careful choice to focus on specific writings of Dewey evades this paradox, but runs into another problem rather quickly.

What are these earlier views that Fallace points out? Dewey did not specifically address (472) views on race and culture during this time. Fallace points towards the verbiage of Dewey, indicating that such terminology is indicative of his views. To what degree can this be said to be true? Fallace alludes to the writing of historian Thomas Kuhn. [L]ook first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them (xiii). I believe that Fallace hits the wall with this quote. In looking for these absurdities that change the meaning of these texts, who is looking? Surely it is Fallace. How can this be said to be a fair presumption of absurdity? In trying to decipher the work of Dewey there is a profound culture gap. To regard these terms, savage, barbarian, primitive, as intellectually absurd and denotive of ethnocentric behavior requires a first-hand understanding of American intellectual culture at the time, modes of communication and acceptable terms. These words are indeed taboo in contemporary American culture, but surely they are not within Dewey’s culture. To label him as ethnocentric based on these assumptions gives ill-consideration to the situation. Labeling terms have been used throughout mankind (falling back to Sartre’s philosophy, terms that try to define humanity, which is indefinable by nature since it is always becoming). These terms help us to create the illusion of organization within our chaotic and insensible world. Every so often, these words are subscribed with hate within a culture, deemed as taboo, and done away with. Let us think to ourselves how often this happens and wonder how long it will be until words such as gay or lesbian receive this taboo. What is to become of the psychological academic writings that have used these words to describe these people? Shall we cast them into flames for using terms commonly accepted amongst society not to hate others but to identify them?

The second point Fallace makes within the methodology of his claims is that Dewey’s acceptance of this language and unvoiced opinions concerning culture and race reflect his statement of habitudes which lie below the level of reflection. Are race and culture included within these habitudes? I will admit that it is hard for me to find evidence against this point. I am inclined to believe that Dewey is not considering race and culture in this statement, but Fallace draws a painstaking connection that perhaps Dewey believes that words like savage are below the level of reflection.

I intend to look further into this piece and decide how well Fallace argues against the point I have brought up concerning the relevance of verbiage to the viewpoints of a person, and whether or not it is right to consider this philosophy (as a whole) as ethnocentric based on its early stages which had much influence on it, according to Fallace. 

Fallace, T. (2010). Was John Dewey Ethnocentric? Reevaluating the Philosopher’s Early Views on Culture and Race. Educational Researcher, Vol 39. No 6. 471-474