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.
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