Raymond D. Boisvert (1998). John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time. Reviewed by James Garrison

Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas

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.