Raymond D. Boisvert (1998). John Dewey: Rethinking
Our Time. Albany:
State University of New York Press
Reviewed by James Garrison
Virginia Tech University
February 3, 1998
Boisvert’s latest book provides the best introduction to the
whole of John Dewey’s philosophy available to the non-specialist.
It would serve especially well in an introductory course on Dewey
for those without any philosophical background. The instructor
could easily supplement the book with primary readings from
Dewey’s work, perhaps by just simply using some of the texts so
aptly cited by Boisvert. The only rivals for this text are J. E.
Tiles’s longer and more detailed Dewey (New York: Routledge, 1988)
and James Campbell’s Understanding Dewey (Chicago: Open Court,
1995). Both of these are fine works in their own right. Tiles,
though, wrote a book for those who are already philosophically
mature, while Campbell omits Dewey’s aesthetics and is also
somewhat challenging to the beginner, although less so than
Tiles. I do not mean to suggest that Boisvert’s text is
simplistic or unsophisticated, far from it. Boisvert is
conversant with, and a prominent contributor to, the new
scholarship on Dewey that has emerged over the last twenty years.
His book is recommended reading for anyone at any level of
philosophical competence or familiarity with Dewey’s philosophy.
It is very rewarding reading, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
The work appears as a volume in the popular SUNY series The
Philosophy of Education edited by Philip L. Smith.
Significantly, however, only one chapter is directly devoted to
education. Yet this does not detract from its value to
educators. Rather, it adds to it because Dewey's educational
writings cannot be properly understood without an appreciation
for the whole system of his thought. A systematic introduction
such as that offered by Boisvert helps educators grasp that
whole. Only then is it possible to make sense of Dewey's
conjecture that philosophy may even be defined as the general
theory of education. Educators limit themselves by not
contemplating this broader view.
Dewey is often called a philosopher of reconstruction.
Boisvert does a remarkably good job of presenting him that way.
In his introductory chapter, Boisvert identifies three major
dogmas of Western thought entirely rejected by Dewey. He calls
them "The Plotinian Temptation," "The Galilean Purification," and
"The Asomatic Attitude." Every chapter of Boisvert’s book shows
how one or another of Dewey’s reconstructions were carried out to
avoid these dogmas. The discussion of these dogmas is a superb
way of showing how Dewey deconstructed much of the Western
tradition without abandoning it.
According to Boisvert, "The ideal of a unity as both
underlying the complexity of existence and serving as the
ultimate end of life has had a controlling influence in much of
Western thought" (p. 6). To reduce everything to a single
underlying unity is "The Plotinian Temptation." By contrast,
"Dewey, admitting the irreducible nature of multiplicity, seeks
harmony. He is the anti-Plotinus. For him pluralism goes all the
way down" (p. 7). Curiously, most Deweyan scholarship in
education ignores this infinite pluralism.
Boisvert suggests, "The genius of Galileo . . . lay in his
willingness to substitute an idealized situation for the clumsy,
muddled context provided by ordinary experience" (p. 7). For
example, ignoring the friction and bouncy effect of air, and
other "accidents," Galileo was able to develop an abstract law
for free fall in a perfect vacuum, even though there is no such
thing as a perfect vacuum anywhere in the universe. Purists take
such laws as more real than the primary experience. Degrees of
reality made no sense to Dewey. For him there is simply
naturalistic, empirical reality, and useful abstractions
extracted from it. Descartes engaged in a similar abstraction
from the senses, cultural, and personal history to obtain his
apodictic "I think therefore I am." What both of these
purifications have in common is that they reify and hypostatize
as antecedent existence the "ideal" products (consequences) of
inquiry. Dewey called this tendency "the philosophic fallacy" and
later "the contextual fallacy." In spite of his superb job of
explicating Dewey overall, Boisvert could have clarified Dewey’s
position regarding this dogma further by discussing these
fallacies.
The last dogma, "The Asomatic Attitude" involves the mind-
body dualism wherein cognition and rationality are mental
functions that should command the unruly body. For Dewey,
intelligence was embodied therefore it involves bodily activity
and feelings. Indeed, activity was most fundamental for Dewey
with thoughts and feelings arising as one strives to harmonize
some situation. Boisvert‘s preference for biological metaphors in
expositing Dewey’s thought implicitly emphasizes the importance
of activity in Dewey. However, I wish he had emphasized the
primacy of action a bit more, especially in his discussion of
Dewey’s aesthetics and theory of inquiry. Nonetheless, his
biological approach is very effective in explicating Dewey’s
organic functionalism.
Another idea in Boisvert’s introduction that he also
develops throughout the book is the notion that "the best label
for Dewey can be neither ‘Modern’ nor ‘postmodern’ " (p. 5).
Boisvert makes the penetrating insight, Dewey "was rather, in the
term introduced by Bruno Latour, ‘polytemporal’ in attitude" (p.
5). This is a penetrating insight. Dewey worked in the Emersonian
tradition that insisted philosophers must embrace and participate
whatever historical era they find themselves born in and abandon
any hope of ever obtaining a spectator view of timeless and
immutable truth. Dewey saw his task as one of critically
recovering whatever is valuable in the past into the present
where it could be reconstructed for the purpose of securing a
better future. Boisvert believes that "modernity" stretched from
about 1600 to 1900. While it might be useful to call the present
age "postmodern," he thinks it is more useful to be, as Dewey
was, polytemporal. That is one reason why Boisvert believes Dewey
is so helpful in our time and will be for a long time to come.
In Chapter 1, "The Life-World" Boisvert does a superb job of
distinguishing Dewey’s organic, biological, historical,
contextual, and qualitative theory of experience from the atomism
of the British Empiricists, especially that of Bertrand Russell.
Dewey steadfastly refuses "the Galilean Purification" and "The
Asomatic Attitude" that leads to mistaking an abstraction for
concrete experience. Boisvert identifies a number of important
stances assumed by Dewey in defending his commitment to lived
experience.
Dewey identified what he called the "fallacy of
intellectualism" or the assumption that "experience is a mode of
knowing." Embodied experience is immediately had, enjoyed, or
suffered, whereas knowledge is the mediated product of inquiry.
"The Plotinian Temptation" leads to the view that there must be
one single best view of reality that determines all other views.
Dewey also insists on "the primacy of interaction." For Dewey,
everything that exists is such that when it interacts with other
existences there is interconnectedness, interpenetration, and
reciprocal influence. Boisvert calls this "an ecological stance."
Near the end of his life, Dewey begins consistently using the
word "transaction" to emphasize the transformative aspects of
interaction. That might have been the better term for Boisvert to
use; nonetheless, what he describes so well surely includes
transformation. Dewey also emphasized the role of temporality and
possibility in experience. Dewey thought human beings participate
in an ever evolving Darwinian world, not spectators of a fixed
and final Plotinian universe. Because human beings are capable of
altering the course of events across time and actualizing some
possibilities rather than others, Dewey emphasized
responsibility. Finally, Dewey thought philosophy is best
evaluated by its fruitfulness in enhancing everyday life, not in
securing timeless truth.
Dewey did not think there were any eternal, fixed, and
immutable truths. His theory of inquiry rejected the quest of
apodictic foundations and certainty. Dewey, I think, did for
truth and essences what Darwin did for species. Chapter 2,
"Thinking," explicates Dewey’s anti-epistemological theory of
inquiry. Rejecting the purifications implicit in the asomatic
attitude implicit in the subject vs. object dualism, Dewey
rejected both object-centered and subject-centered epistemology.
Instead, he emphasized their transactions. For Dewey, all inquiry
was contextual, temporal, and transformative. For him, all
inquiry begins in a situation of disrupted functioning and ends
with the successful transformation of the subject matter of the
situation into one where harmonious functioning is restored.
Inquiry for Dewey is the art of securing objects of need and
desire. Instead of the bipolar subject-object situation
envisioned by modern epistemology, Dewey advocated "a
tridimensional paradigm: inquirer, subject-matter, and objective"
(p. 36). The same subject matter, say water, could be manipulated
for any number of purposes, chemistry (H2 O), mineral content,
religion, agriculture, etc. Boisvert expresses it this way:
"Traditional epistemology tended to think on the model of a
spectator viewing a finished picture rather than that of the
artist producing a painting" (p. 37). The same material may
produce many portraits of a subject.
The third chapter was this reviewer’s favorite. Boisvert
shows how Dewey reconstructed the ideas of freedom and equality
that emerged in 17th Century England. This reconstruction
involved replacing the dominant notion of individualism with one
of individuality. Individualism dominates Western political
thought. It assumes innate rationality, freedom of will, and
inalienable rights; all of these located in a mind apart from the
body. It also assumes "man" is autonomous, self-possessed, and
equal in the brutish state of nature. To avoid this brutishness,
individuals signed social contracts yielding up their freedom and
often their equality, or so the fable goes. This monadic "man" is
an expression of the Plotinian temptation while Hobbes’ and
Locke’s notion of the state of nature and social contracts are
nothing other than a hypostatized instance of The Galilean
Purification. For Dewey, individuality, rationality, freedom,
rights, and equality emerged in time through one’s transactions
with the environment, especially the social environment.
Dewey recontextualized the notions of freedom and equality.
Freedom for Dewey meant growth where growth may be understood as
functional differentiation. As Boisvert describes it, "Growth
means . . . the continual flowering and actualizing of
possibilities" (p. 59). Growth cannot be achieved in isolation,
it is nourished by connection, dependence, and communion with
others. Ultimately, democracy is communication with others,
especially others different from ourselves. Only in communication
with others different from ourselves may we ever hope to escape
preestablished cultural scripts and form a truly unique and
original self. For Dewey, equality was a moral ideal; for him it
meant that each individual has unique and irreplaceable
potential. One achieves equality by actualizing her unique
potential. Dewey explicitly stated, "Moral equality means
incommensurability, the inapplicability of common and
quantitative standards" (Boisvert, p. 68). In a truly democratic
community there are no universal preexisting hierarchies and
standards. In democratic education this mitigates against
standardized testing for the purposes of social sorting. The
educational task is to help each individual actualize his
potential to the greatest degree. Democracy, for Dewey, was
"aristocracy carried to its limit" for it assumed that for every
human being there was something, some function, for which some
unique individual was most fit to rule. In the fourth grade
reading-writing workshop I aid in once a week, there is a child
with Downs Syndrome who regularly rules a class with his
captivating dramatic narratives.
Chapter 4, "The Public" is a continuation of Chapter 3.
Dewey’s task, especially in The Public and Its Problems, is to
respond to the democratic realists such as Walter Lippmann.
Democratic realists believe the masses are easily manipulated by
demagogues, especially by mass media. Since James Madison the
realist response in the United States has been that a republic
functions better than a pure democracy. In a republic a
relatively small elite would be charged with running the
government. The result, of course, is not democracy, but
oligarchy; which, in turn, tends toward bureaucracy. Boisvert
fails to extend his analysis to bureaucracy as such, or to
capitalism, but it is easily done. He does speak of
social/industrial experts, and since the task of an introduction
is to introduce general ideas and provide perceptive examples,
his discussion here is enough.
The following observation by Boisvert seems to me to capture
the core of Dewey’s commitment to participatory democracy and his
response the democratic realists: "Democracy, as we saw in the
last chapter, involves more than the institutions of certain
political practices. It is the social ideal which demands
creative, experimental efforts to encourage freedom and equality
understood as growth and individuality" (p. 78). Democracy is the
best tool to use if we want to see what humankind might make of
itself, it does not assume some antecedently innate essence of
"man." For the most part, the democratic experiments are yet to
be performed. Boisvert explicates three problems of the public
identified by Dewey. First, the public "has been splintered into
many narrowly self-interested publics" (p. 79). Boisvert calls
this "the narrow public," today these are called special interest
groups. Next, there is "the diffuse public." Many people
experience the limitations of time, ability, and interest along
with the increasing intricacy of contemporary issues. Finally,
there is "the distracted public." This is the public that is
amusing itself to death watching MTV, football, and soap operas
(I have done two of these three in the last week).
Improved communication is Dewey’s response to these
problems. According to Boisvert, Dewey delineated three
fundamental ways to improve communication. First, we need a new
symbolism, something other than wealth (Donald Trump), celebrity
(Princess Diana), self-interest (the fitness craze), autonomy
(Clint Eastwood), power (provide your own example), and youth
(MTV). Second, an experimental attitude is required; we need to
play with the possibilities of democracy. "Rejecting the picture
of the philosopher who withdraws for the purpose of analyzing
ideas," Boisvert declares, "Dewey prefers the example of an
artist engaged in fabrication as more accurately symbolizing the
process of deliberation" (p. 88). Wisdom is beyond knowledge, it
is about creating ideal values to live by. Rationality does not
exist in merely being rightly motivated by reasons alone. Third,
as Boisvert puts it, "The process of gathering and disseminating
news must be recognized as an art, and reformed in the light of
artistic values" (p. 85). News without context, history, or
interpretation is meaningless, or rather its meaning is
determined by unreflective ideology. Merely informed beings are
not moral agents. Reporting that hides behind an impossible value
neutrality merely defaults to the dominant and unquestioned
values of our culture. In fact, most so-called value neutral
reporting merely repeats the dominant symbols and ideology of the
nation.
Walter Lippmann’s trump card is that advertising pays for
the distribution of media; therefore, the values of those who pay
for programming and newspapers with control the news. Dewey’s
only response is that we have yet to experiment with alternatives
is not good enough, in part because almost all such experiments
have thus far failed. Dewey gives general guidance, but we need
more.
Chapter 5, "Educating," is especially valuable because it
takes us back to the Deweyan basics of education so often
ignored. Boisvert begins by citing what he considers is Dewey’s
basic credo: "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own
child, that must the community want for all of its children"
(Boisvert, p. 95). The greatest appeal of the home, according to
Boisvert, is that it integrates intellect, emotion, affection,
manual skill, and moral development holistically. Dewey rejected
the mind/body dualism, the asomatic attitude, and the Galilean
purification (expressed by the primacy of pure cognition) in
education. He could have chosen others, but Boisvert chooses to
emphasize two themes often overlooked in discussing Dewey’s
philosophy of education. The centrality of "occupations" and the
notion that education is an end in itself.
Dewey battled the attempt early in this century to transform
education for many into vocational education; he lost. Dewey
thought it undemocratic to separate schools into one track for
the "cultured" and another for "workers." To him, this just
reinforced class divisions; the equivalent of the epistemological
separation of theory and practice. Everyone, he thought, should
learn through the occupations in ways that integrated theory with
practice. This is how we are to appreciate Dewey’s emphasis on
such domestic functions as cooking. Cooking includes chemistry,
soil cultivation, political economy, personal finance,
transportation, labor and management, weights and measures, and
the dinner table; breaking bread is still a popular metaphor for
communication and communion. The goal is to have children engage
in the ordinary activities of life with a variety of interests
that involved organizing subject-matter in ways that eventually
involve formal, symbolic activity, including textbook study.
Discipline is intrinsic to the practical occupation and the logic
of one’s own interests and purposes. School subject-matter (e.
g., cooking) should be approached in conformity to Dewey’s theory
of inquiry discussed earlier. Learning is a lived participatory
activity, not a passive spectator phenomena. Students should not
watch a teacher as they watch a cartoon, rather they should work
with the teacher and with other students.
As we have seen, the ultimate aim of education for Dewey was
growth. Education as preparation for external and future ends was
as immoral as it was impractical for Dewey. The task of education
is to extract the greatest amount of growth possible, understood
as reorganizing and reconstructing experience, out of every
living moment of life. External ends deplete the power of the
present moment, while morally treating the person as a means to
an end rather than an end in herself. This does not mean that the
learning is aimless; learning through immediate and undistracted
involvement in the occupations is the best preparation for
engaging in the activities that will later occupy one as a fully
functioning member of society. Finally, education should be
democratic according to Dewey, that is, it should foster
equality, growth of individuality, and widen the scope of the
students interests so as to break down distinctions of social
class.
Chapter 6, "Making," recognizes the central role art plays
in the architectonic of Dewey’s philosophy. The emphasis upon
Dewey’s aesthetics has been perhaps the most important
development in the new scholarship on Dewey, for example, in the
work of Thomas Alexander and Richard Shusterman (both of whom,
interestingly, supply laudatory blurbs on the book's back cover).
Boisvert begins by noting that Dewey rejected the asomatic
version of aestheticism as an escape from the limits of embodied
living as well as the Plotinian temptation to establish a
hierarchy of the arts that converged in some supreme unifying
art. Boisvert notes that the sharp modern demarcation between
fine and useful arts was not one of skill or delicacy but beauty.
The Romantic German philosophers made art an achievement of a few
intuitive geniuses that could express beauty without rational
reflection or even conscious intention. Thus was born the museum
conception of art wherein, as Boisvert puts it, "The developments
of capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism have been powerful
vectors in constituting art ‘objects’ as possessions whose value
can be calculated in monetary terms, in terms of national pride,
or of cultural and military superiority" (p. 120). Dewey embraced
the premodern notion of the arts as including both the practical
and fine arts within the craft tradition. Creation is a constant
human occupation participated in by poets, engineers, musicians
and artisans who are often the same person. For Dewey, "Any
activity that is productive of objects whose perception is an
immediate good, and whose operation is a continual source of
enjoyable perception of other events exhibits fineness of art"
(p. 121). As badly as I play it, basketball has been such an
activity for me; it produces fairly good health. Friends have
mentioned gardening, rock music, and needlework as activities
that have been a continuous source of growth for them, not just
hobbies or amusements.
Much of Dewey’s reconstruction of the modern philosophy of
art centers on the concept of expression. Dewey rejected the
model of simple "self-expression." As Boisvert notes, "Too often
the model for art as expression includes the following elements:
(1) a complete idea or emotion which exists within the artist,
(2) selection of materials, and (3) a finished product that
‘expresses’ the complete idea or emotion" (p. 130). For Dewey
artistic expression is wrung out of us much as the wine press
expresses the grape. As the act of creation unfolds, emotions and
ideas are clarified, intentions become clear. Ultimately, a work
of art is what it does, not what it is. The meaning of a work of
art is determined by its consequences for not only the creator
but also the larger community. Boisvert may well have noted here,
as well as elsewhere, the pragmatic definition of meaning
determines meaning not by antecedent conditions (such as ideas or
feelings), but, rather, by consequences. The meaning of a work of
art is worked out in the process of creation and continues its
work when, as Boisvert affirms, "it is an active component in the
ongoing communal quest for meaning" (p. 131). The moral work of
art lies, in part, in the fact that it is in the arts that we
first catch a glimpse of possibilities that lie beyond the actual
that, morally, should become actual.
"Devotion," the 7th Chapter, deals with Dewey’s philosophy
of religion. Religion, for Dewey, involved a sense of natural
wonder and piety. It was Dewey’s fervent desire to restore a
sense of immediate and intimate connectedness between human
nature and the rest of nature. Dewey’s task was to free the
religious from the supernatural and the dogmas of organized
religion. Nowhere does "The Plotinian Temptation," "The Galilean
Purification," and "The Asomatic Attitude" do more damage than
regarding religion. For Dewey, God is the active relation between
ideal and actual. This definition brings religion very close to
the arts. I have suggested that for Dewey our artistic acts of
creation have religious significance because they connect human
creation to the larger creation, but Boisvert is correct to claim
that Dewey’s philosophy of religion is not reducible to
aesthetics, or morality. Religiosity may pervade any domain of
human experience.
Faith, for Dewey, involved commitment to an ideal beyond the
actual and therefore, beyond epistemological certainty that we
are prepared to strive to overcome obstacles and personal loss to
actualize. In an ever evolving Darwinian universe some
possibilities may be actualized through human effort that would
not be otherwise. Sometimes we may simply create things for which
there is not even evidence for their existence beyond the
imagination. This is how Dewey understood William James’ "The
Will To Believe." Knowledge (e. g., science) and religion need
not compete because religion does not have to be thought of as a
special epistemological providence. Wisdom for Dewey was beyond
knowledge; the office of active inquiry and knowledge lay in what
it could contribute as a means to our securing the good. Finally,
God, for Dewey, is not an antecedent theistic existence, but
something that is actively wrought out as a consequence of
temporal processes. Nor is there any end of history, any final
consequence, some absolute Being, that terminates the process of
creation for Dewey, after he abandoned his Hegelianism.
Dewey felt that existence supported our struggle to achieve
ideals, or at least offered no permanently unsurpassable
obstacles. In the struggle to secure ideals, Dewey thought social
cooperation especially important. As he saw it "there are forces
in nature and society that generate and support the ideals"
(cited in Boisvert, p. 154). It is here that democracy and
education begins to have not only moral but religious
significance.
In his conclusion, Boisvert returns to Dewey’s
polytemporality with which he began. He observes, "The
hermeneutics of suspicion seems to have triumphed decisively over
the hermeneutics of recovery" (p. 157). Although he does not
mention it, the hermeneutics of suspicion, as Paul Ricoeur called
it, originated with Martin Heidegger, and has had an especially
strong influence on so-called postmodern thinkers like Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and even neo-pragmatists like
Richard Rorty. Heidegger also had a hermeneutics of recovery, but
it lacked the crucial component of reconstruction found in Dewey.
That is at least one of the reasons, I believe, that Heidegger
was ultimately driven toward quietism. Surely a sense of despair
often characterizes those aspects of the "post-modern" influenced
by the late Heidegger. I wish Boisvert had made more of his
hermeneutic insight than he does, but perhaps that lies beyond an
introduction. I am sure that he could have done more if he so
chose. After all, as indicated in his acknowledgments, several of
the books' chapters where written as a Fulbright Scholar at the
University of Lyon II, a fine location for a Deweyan to reflect
on contemporary French thought.
Another magical moment in this conclusion calls attention to
something developed throughout Boisvert’s book, and which he
should have called attention to from the very start. Dewey, as
Boisvert notes, "makes no sharp bifurcation between logos and
mythos" (p. 158). Boisvert cites passages where Dewey says quite
explicitly that philosophical discourse partakes of both
scientific and literary discourse. The human task is to make a
"cosmos" out of "chaos;" to do so Dewey thought we must
articulate a "composed tale of meanings" (cited in Boisvert, p.
158). Scripts for such stories are to be found wherever and
whenever we can, and new scripts are made by troping old scripts.
This, indeed, is the deep meaning of Deweyan reconstruction.
There is no better introduction to the whole of the Deweyan story
than Raymond D. Boisvert’s John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time. I
recommend it without reservation to beginning students and
advanced scholars alike.
Appendix A
Since the preceding review appears on the internet, I have taken
the liberty of reproducing the following from Boisvert’s book.
Appendix B
Dewey in Cyberspace
The online discussion group devoted to Dewey’s philosophy is
one of the most cordial on the internet. It was begun by Todd
Lekan, now at Muskingum College. It is presently managed by Tom
Burke at the University of South Carolina. To join the discussion
send the message listed below to the listserv address.
Message: subscribe jdewey-1 firstname lastname
Address: listserv@vm.sc.edu
The Center for Dewey Studies, directed by Larry Hickman at
the Southern Illinois University, has its own homepage:
http://www.siu.edu/~deweyctr. In addition to being a source for
activities at the Dewey Center, this homepage is valuable for its
list of the latest secondary literature on Dewey.
Craig Cunningham at Northeastern Illinois University has set
up a comprehensive homepage which includes a section on Dewey:
http://www.neiu.edu/~ccunning/dewey.html.
The Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia
University also has several sites relating to Dewey:
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/academic/digittexts/dewey/bio.dewey
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/academic/texts/dewey/d_e/contents.html
The writings of Dewey are also available on CD-ROM:
Hickman, Larry, ed. (1996). The Collected Works of John Dewey:
The Electronic Edition. Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corp.
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