John Dewey, (born Oct. 20, 1859, Burlington, Vt., U.S.—died June 1, 1952, New York, N.Y.), American philosopher and educator who was a founder of the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, and a leader of the progressive movement in education in the United States.
Dewey graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Vermont in 1879. After receiving a doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1884, he began teaching philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan. There his interests gradually shifted from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to the new experimental psychology being advanced in the United States by G. Stanley Hall and the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James. Further study of child psychology prompted Dewey to develop a philosophy of education that would meet the needs of a changing democratic society. In 1894 he joined the faculty of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he further developed his progressive pedagogy in the university’s Laboratory Schools. In 1904 Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in New York City, where he spent the majority of his career and wrote his most famous philosophical work, Experience and Nature (1925). His subsequent writing, which included articles in popular periodicals, treated topics in aesthetics, politics, and religion. The common theme underlying Dewey’s philosophy was his belief that a democratic society of informed and engaged inquirers was the best means of promoting human interests.
Being, nature, and experience
In order to develop and articulate his philosophical system, Dewey first needed to expose what he regarded as the flaws of the existing tradition. He believed that the distinguishing feature of Western philosophy was its assumption that true being—that which is fully real or fully knowable—is changeless, perfect, and eternal and the source of whatever reality the world of experience may possess. Plato’s forms (abstract entities corresponding to the properties of particular things) and the Christian conception of God were two examples of such a static, pure, and transcendent being, compared with which anything that undergoes change is imperfect and less real. According to one modern version of the assumption, developed by the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, all experience is subjective, an exclusively mental phenomenon that cannot provide evidence of the existence or the nature of the physical world, the “matter” of which is ultimately nothing more than changeless extension in motion. The Western tradition thus made a radical distinction between true reality on the one hand and the endless varieties and variations of worldly human experience on the other.
Dewey held that this philosophy of nature was drastically impoverished. Rejecting any dualism between being and experience, he proposed that all things are subject to change and do change. There is no static being, and there is no changeless nature. Nor is experience purely subjective, because the human mind is itself part and parcel of nature. Human experiences are the outcomes of a range of interacting processes and are thus worldly events. The challenge to human life, therefore, is to determine how to live well with processes of change, not somehow to transcend them.
Nature and the construction of ends
Dewey developed a metaphysics that examined characteristics of nature that encompassed human experience but were either ignored by or misrepresented by more traditional philosophers. Three such characteristics—what he called the “precarious,” “histories,” and “ends”—were central to his philosophical project.
For Dewey, a precarious event is one that somehow makes ongoing experience problematic; thus, any obstacle, disruption, danger, or surprise of any kind is precarious. As noted earlier, because humanity is a part of nature, all things that humans encounter in their daily experience, including other humans and the social institutions they inhabit, are natural events. The arbitrary cruelty of a tyrant or the kindness shown by a stranger is as natural and precarious as the destruction wrought by a flood or the vibrant colours of a sunset. Human ideas and moral norms must also be viewed in this way. Human knowledge is wholly intertwined with precarious, constantly changing nature.
The constancy of change does not imply a complete lack of continuity with the past stages of natural processes. What Dewey meant by a history was a process of change with an identifiable outcome. When the constituent processes of a history are identified, they become subject to modification, and their outcome can be deliberately varied and secured. Dewey’s conception of a history has an obvious implication for humanity: no person’s fate is sealed by an antecedently given human nature, temperament, character, talent, or social role. This is why Dewey was so concerned with developing a philosophy of education. With an appropriate knowledge of the conditions necessary for human growth, an individual may develop in any of a variety of ways. The object of education is thus to promote the fruition of an active history of a specific kind—a human history.