July 10, 2006
Louis Menand on John Dewey (from The Metaphysical Club)
The "Reflex Arc" paper ["The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," 1896] is the essential expression of Dewey's particular mode of intelligence. It is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.
Dewey was not reversing the priority of the terms he identified in these analyses. Invidiousness was precisely what he wished always to avoid. In condemning (as he did) the elevation of thinking over doing as a reflection of class bias ([Thorsten] Veblen would have said that philosophical speculation if a form of conspicuous consumption: it shows we can afford not to work with our hands), Dewey was not proposing to elevate doing over thinking instead. He was only applying the idea [Jane] Addams was trying to explain to him when she said that antagonism is unreal: he was showing that "doing" and "thinking," like "stimulus" and "response," are just practical distinctions we make when tensions arise in the process of adjustment between the organism and its world.
Dewey was not reversing the priority of the terms he identified in these analyses. Invidiousness was precisely what he wished always to avoid. In condemning (as he did) the elevation of thinking over doing as a reflection of class bias ([Thorsten] Veblen would have said that philosophical speculation if a form of conspicuous consumption: it shows we can afford not to work with our hands), Dewey was not proposing to elevate doing over thinking instead. He was only applying the idea [Jane] Addams was trying to explain to him when she said that antagonism is unreal: he was showing that "doing" and "thinking," like "stimulus" and "response," are just practical distinctions we make when tensions arise in the process of adjustment between the organism and its world.
The quote comes from The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001), Menand's Pulitzer Prize-winning study of American intellectual life from Emerson to W.E.B. DuBois, abolitionism to cultural pluralism. The book focuses on four figures: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce, three members of the informal, short-lived, Cambridge-based discussion group that gives the book its name, and John Dewey, whose contributions to education theory and philosophy came a little later. Despite a somewhat knotty section concerning the meetings between and overlapping influences on the various Metaphysical Club members, the book is a great, brisk read, drawn largely from the protagonists' own words.
Though I haven't read it, I suspect that Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (W.W. Norton) would make a very good companion to The Metaphysical Club.