By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Putnam, Hilary, and Ruth Anna Putnam. Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey. Edited by David Macarthur. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. xi + 475 pp. Cloth, $49.95.
This book consists of twenty-seven essays, thirteen by Ruth Anna Putnam, eleven by Hilary Putman, and three jointly written. Fully a third of the volume is devoted to the thought of William James, yet the focus is primarily on the pragmatic naturalism of John Dewey.
Early on in the volume, it is made clear that “pragmatism” is a generic term. There is a difference in the meaning of the term as used by Charles Sanders Peirce, by William James, and by John Dewey.
Nevertheless a common disposition prevails. This is seen as both authors bring into their discussions the work of contemporaries such as W.V. Quine, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, John Rawls, and Rudolf Carnap. To anyone who subscribes to the Journal of Philosophy these names would all be familiar. The Review of Metaphysics was created as an alternative to the prevailing modes of discourse.
As a way of life, pragmatism, as initially embraced by the Putnams, was that of John Dewey. Dewey began his philosophical career as an idealist in the mode of Hegel. In one of his first public lectures he declared:
“There is an obligation to know God and to fail to meet that obligation is not to err intellectually but to sin morally. Belief is not a privilege but a duty. Man’s knowledge or lack of it depends wholly on the attitude of his will and desire toward God.”
But by the time he gave the Gifford Lectures in 1929, the founding purpose of which was the promotion of natural theology, Dewey was a thoroughgoing materialist or atheist. As such, he denied not only what he calls the “supernatural” but also purpose in nature. On his premises, nature is the whole of reality. Its most general account may be called a philosophy of nature. Given his denial of a natural order, Dewey must speak of “ends in view” rather than ends simpliciter.
A feature of Dewey’s philosophy is its epistemological realism. He avoided the analytic turn in philosophy emanating from England in the mid-decades of the twentieth century, as well as phenomenological investigation inspired by Husserl and his disciples on the Continent.
Preferring the lead of David Hume, Kant, and Spinoza, Dewey’s empiricism is a descriptive enterprise, one dedicated to the explanation of all events in nature solely in terms of their material and efficient causes, without reference to a teleological or natural order. Aristotle’s four causes are reduced to two.
A bugaboo is the status of value judgments. While Dewey distinguishes between what is valued and the valuable, between desire and the desirable, the problem he inevitably faced was the determination of the good to be sought, the “warranted embrace” of one goal over another.
Ruth Anna Putnam will say at one point that the whole of the Dewey corpus amounts to a treatise in moral philosophy. Dewey cannot avoid the problem and surreptitiously evokes nature as a guide. No ethicist, not even a strict Platonist, would say that what is right and wrong is independent of human nature, or independent of how human beings raised in a community with a moral tradition regard things.
Still, Dewey avoids the error of supposing that merely being valued makes something valuable. Critical intelligence must be brought to bear even on widely accepted social goals. This is the message of his Gifford Lectures, published as The Quest for Certainty in 1929.
The collected works of John Dewey runs to thirty-seven volumes. Although he held firmly to his basic assumptions, he was not always consistent in emphasis or free of contradiction. In the Terry Lectures delivered at Yale University and published as A Common Faith in 1934, he had much to say about the transfer of values across the ages.
Sounding almost like an Aristotelian, he wrote:
“The things in civilization that are most prized are not of ourselves. They exist by the grace of the doings and sufferings of the human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying, and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we received it.”
Still, history does not play a major role in Dewey’s thought. When emphasis is placed on criticism of the received, a vast amount of learning is likely to be left out.
In the last essay of the present volume, Ruth Anna Putnam provides an interesting discussion of Dewey’s contention that democracy is more than a political system. It is a personal way of life. Democracy, Dewey contends, is “the participation of every human being in the formation of values that regulate the living of men together.”
Unfortunately, democracy is challenged from two sides: excessive individualism in the form of laissez-faire capitalism, on the one hand, and collectivism, on the other. Social progress rests on the ability of individuals to criticize the prevailing conception of the good.
While this volume will be of interest primarily to the professional philosopher, given Dewey’s influence on public education at all levels it may also be of interest to a broader educated public. Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam provide much food for thought.
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