a symposium on james good's "a search for unity in diversity" || dewey's...

Dewey's "Permanent Hegelian Deposit": A Reply to Hickman and AlexanderAuthor(s): James GoodSource: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 44, No. 4, A Symposium on JamesGood's "A Search for Unity in Diversity" (Fall, 2008), pp. 577-602Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40321286 .

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Deweys "Permanent Hegelian Deposit": A Reply to Hickman and Alexander James Good

Abstract I respond to the comments by Larry Hick- man and Thomas Alexander about my book, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philoso- phy of John Dewey, I focus on four issues: 1) Precisely how do I prefer to characterize Deweys debt to Hegel? 2) How do I justify my admittedly controversial reading of Deweys World War I criticisms of Hegel? 3) Where do I believe Dewey found ideas in Hegel that led him to articulate the historical fallacy? 4) How do I respond to Alexan- der's concern that I have underestimated the influence of William James's Principles of Psychology (1890) on Dewey?

Keywords: John Dewey William James, James A. Goody Hegel

At the 2006 Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy meeting, I had the opportunity to hear substantive comments on my book, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey} Because we ran out of discussion time, at the suggestion of Michael Eldridge, Peter Hare graciously agreed to publish our papers in the Transac- tions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. First and foremost, I want to thank Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander for the constructive feedback I received in that session, because it was precisely the sort of scholarly interac- tion that authors need to both broaden and deepen their understanding of the subjects they hope to master. In the following pages I respond to their comments by focusing on four issues: 1) Precisely how do I prefer to characterize Dewey's debt to Hegel? 2) How do I justify my admittedly controversial reading of Dewey s World War I criticisms

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 44, No. 4 ©2008 577



^ of Hegel? 3) Where do I believe Dewey found ideas in Hegel that led <u him to articulate the historical fallacy? 4) How do I respond to Alexan- g der's concern that I have underestimated the influence of William 3 James's Principles of Psychology (1890) on Dewey?

^ /. Dewey s Debt to Hegel <u Hickman writes that one of the "great lessons" of Hegel's Phenomenology 6 of Spirit "is that when an institution or a system succeeds, it renders itself -g unnecessary." He follows that assertion with the claim that "Hegels í> influence on Dewey s early work seems to have succeeded so thoroughly ^ that it makes itself unnecessary in his later work." I would like to place a ^ slightly different spin on the latter claim that I believe makes better sense ^ of Dewey s 1945 letter to Arthur Bentley, from which Hickman quotes: HH "I jumped through Hegel I should say not just out of him. I took some £- i of the hoop with me, and also carried away considerable of the tense {J paper the hoop was filled with."2 <^ I am reminded of the St. Louis Hegelians' claim that one of their goals c/D was "to make Hegel talk English."3 Their pursuit of that goal gave them ^ an important place in any adequate history of the American reception of <í Hegel because, rather than simply study the British neo-Hegelians or P¿ other commentators, they studied Hegel's complete works in the 1832- H 1845 German edition, translated significant portions into English, and

published works of their own in which they applied Hegelian insights to both philosophical and political/social problems. In all of this, however, the St. Louis Hegelians tended to remain so indebted to Hegelian terminology, much like many Hegel specialists today, that they limited their reach. Unless one is immersed in that terminology, it is difficult to fully appreciate and evaluate the profundity of their Hegelian analyses of theoretical and practical problems. Thus, although the St. Louis Hegelians promoted the American reception of Hegel, at the same time they limited his influence by not completing the translation of his terminology into the language of late-nineteenth-century American intellectuals.

Although it was not a stated goal, nor maybe even his intention, I believe Dewey went a long way toward completing the St. Louis Hegelians' goal of disseminating Hegelian insights to Americans. He was able to do so because, in addition to thorough study of Hegel, he immersed himself more deeply than the St. Louis Hegelians in other contemporary intellectual currents. For example, rather than translate philosophical problems generated by the challenge of Darwinian biology and experimental psychology into Hegelian terminology, during the 1890s Dewey became increasingly adept at translating Hegelian insights into the naturalistic terminology that was coming into vogue because of the influence of Darwinian biology and experimental psychology. In this way, Dewey truly "made Hegel talk English." Nonethe-

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less, this does not mean that Hegel became unnecessary in Dewey's D mature thought. His own claim that he took part of the Hegelian hoop ^ with him is consistent with HegePs dialectic, properly understood. For ^ Hegel, when institutions and systems succeed they are not merely « absorbed into a more inclusive identity; in fact, Hegel derided this as Q "identity philosophy" in his criticisms of Spinoza and Schelling.4 § Rather, successful institutions and systems retain their identity as they n are shaped and combined with the other through the dialectical ^

process. As Dewey understood quite well, this is one of Hegel's most a important insights - identity in difference.5 Hence from one angle, we £L might describe Dewey as a philosopher who so comprehensively 3 absorbed and extended Hegelianism that that he became something ü quite new and different (e.g., a particular kind of American pragmatist) ""o and, from another angle, we might view Dewey as one of the greatest g- Left Hegelians because he furthered the development of Hegelian philosophy along humanistic and historicist lines. ^

I argue at length that by the early 1890s Dewey developed a "non- _g metaphysical" reading of Hegel remarkably similar to a great deal of "T current Anglo-American Hegel scholarship.6 In order to distinguish it o from late-nineteenth-century British neo-Hegelianism, which I label £5 the "metaphysical/theological" Hegel, I label Dewey s new interpreta- gr tion of Hegel the "humanistic/historicist" Hegel. On Dewey s reading, p Hegel should be read as a post-Kantian philosopher. For example, on ^ this reading, rather than a theory of the categories of reality, Hegel's jL logic is a theory of the categories according to which humans experi- > enee reality. This reading highlights the historicism of Dewey s reading g because he came to believe Hegel successfully resisted the philosophical §^ temptation to posit a supra-historical being or realm of logical cate- 8 gories that would function as a guarantor of comfort and stability * within the unsettling adversities of everyday life. The British neo- "p Hegelians sought to "correct" Hegel on precisely this point because ^ they feared historical relativism, so they transformed his absolute either ^ into a transcendent being or into unchanging logical categories. In his q published writings, Dewey began to refer to the neo-Hegelians as neo- g Kantians for a very good reason; he recognized that they sought to correct Hegel by making a Kantian move when they posited a reality that transcends possible experience.7 These neo-Hegelians, or neo-Kantians, introduced dualism into Hegelianism, which, as all Dewey scholars realize, Dewey was loathe to avoid. Perhaps few Dewey scholars are aware, however, of the extent to which Hegel also viewed dualisms as anathema. In point of fact, for Hegel, the reification of dualisms is what calls philosophy into existence. Rather than contradiction, as is so often claimed, it is a human quest for unity or harmony that drives the dialectic forward. On this point, I prefer to quote from my book:

579



^t1 In an early essay, "The Difference Between Fichte's and Schellings <3 System of Philosophy" (1801), Hegel explained that antitheses -

£H "spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and intellect, freedom and

§ necessity, etc." - arise naturally as we struggle to understand our

^ existence. These antitheses emerge, Hegel explained, in particular n-jh places and times in response to particular problems but, "with the ^ progress of culture," they lose their force because past problems are rj no longer our problems. Nevertheless, these antitheses are enshrined 3 as indubitable "products of Reason" and, as such, the same lifeless

^O antitheses seem to animate philosophy for time immemorial. For ^ Hegel, "the sole interest of Reason is to suspend such rigid antithe- <y} ses." Reason is not opposed, Hegel wrote, to oppositions, limitations

^ and dichotomies, because "life eternally forms itself by setting up ^ oppositions. . . . What Reason opposes, rather, is just the absolute

^ fixity which the intellect gives to the dichotomy ..." Hegel recog- r t nized that conceptual dualisms serve a legitimate function in every- r -a day life, but believed that problems arise when we mistake these

^ functional concepts for fixed, eternal truths. He believed philosophy should serve the practical purpose of resolving dualisms that have

vy become reified with age and that set man against himself, his neigh- *""} bor, and his natural environment.8

According to Hegel, "When the might of union vanishes from the life of men and the antitheses lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need for philosophy arises."9

For Hegel and Dewey, dualisms and oppositions are a normal part of life. Reified dualisms are a different matter, however. More than logical puzzles for philosophers, they saw reified dualisms as manifestations of modern mans alienation from society, nature, and his highest ideals. This takes us to the core of what I believe is Dewey s "permanent Hegelian deposit." Both the St. Louis Hegelians and Dewey imbibed Hegel's conception of philosophy as Bildung, an organic process of individual and cultural maturation. As Bildung, philosophy is inherently practical because it promotes growth through a never-ending process of diremption and reunification of individual humans and of their culture. Further, rather than seek to eliminate adversity and oppositions, which are necessary to growth, philosophy as Bildung teaches us how to use them productively An important implication of this conception of philosophy and human life is that social tensions created by individual diversity are necessary to the process of reunification and growth. Thus we must go beyond tolerance and learn to embrace diversity10

//. Dewey's World War I Criticisms of Hegel Alexander correctly notes that I rely heavily on Dewey s unpublished Hegel lecture, "Hegel s Philosophy of Spirit." I argue that the lecture is the most complete source for Deweys non-metaphysical reading of

580



Hegel and that his published comments about Hegel up until the pub- D lication of German Philosophy and Politics (GPP) in 1915 are consistent ^ with that lecture. 1 1 1 maintain that in GPP, Dewey abruptly reversed his ^ reading of Hegel without fully articulating or defending the new read- * ing. Certainly, he never articulated or defended his post- 19 14 reading fi of Hegel as fully as his previous reading. I also contend that in GPP g Dewey mistranslated and misused passages from Hegel's Philosophy of n> Right to support his new reading of Hegel and that the new reading is ^

highly problematic when compared to what Hegel actually wrote. In « GPP Dewey makes Hegel out to be a pre-Kantian metaphysical £L philosopher who posited a transcendent God that not only constitutes § all of reality, but also drives history toward a predetermined endpoint. D All of this strikes me as rather irrational behavior on Dewey s part, and ^g for this reason I believe Dewey scholars must be careful with his post- g- 1914 comments about Hegel. Consequently, I view Dewey's 1915 letter to Scudder Klyce, from which Hickman quotes, more as an indi- ^ cator of Dewey s irrationality than a thoughtful interpretation of Hegel. ^g Dewey may have genuinely believed what he said about Hegel after ^ 1914, at least for some time, but I think many of those comments pro- o vide little evidence about the "permanent Hegelian deposit" in his 5 thought because they are so biased. R-

Alexander addresses my characterization of Dewey s World War I p criticisms of Hegel more directly, writing that, for me, Dewey s "'offi- p cial break' with idealism is ... German Philosophy and Politics " At this jL juncture I would like to point out that I consciously avoid discussing > Deweys "idealism" in favor of talking about his "Hegelianism," and g that I define "Deweys Hegelianism" over the course of several chapters j^ in an effort to avoid confusion over words like "idealism" and 3 "Hegelianism" that I believe has been prevalent in the literature on • Deweys debt to Hegel. Moreover, I never claim Dewey made a philo- "p sophical break with Hegel. On the contrary, because I see such a signif- ^ icant Hegelian deposit in his mature thought, I think it is misleading to ^

speak of Dewey s break from Hegel at all. q Alexander oversimplifies my interpretation of GPP when he writes g

that I read it as "the outcome of personal family crisis, a new academic environment at Columbia, and anti-Germanism," and that I depict "Dewey [as] swallowing pragmatist caricatures of idealism in order to be popular and credible." I argue that, beginning in 1905, Dewey focused less on parsing the myriad types of idealism (i.e., distinctions between Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and all of the fin de siede ver- sions of British and American idealism) and more on advancing pragmatism. In order to accomplish that, Dewey seems to have decided that he would characterize idealism broadly to the extent that was necessary to this agenda, and focus on characterizing pragmatism precisely. This strikes me as a perfectly legitimate strategy. ¿^



^ I also explicitly reject the notion that Dewey wrote GPP because he <u was caught up in anti-German hysteria:

3 At the time of the original publication of the book, war had been rag- JZj ing in Europe for a year, and it is easy, perhaps too easy, to conclude ^ that Dewey had been caught up in anti-German hysteria. Yet in 1915 ^ widespread anti-German hysteria had not begun in the United States

g and, in fact, most Americans still favored President Wilsons policy of 3 neutrality. Moreover, it was after the publication of German Philoso- kO phy and Politics that Dewey engaged in heated polemics about Amer- ^ ican involvement in World War I. At this time he was only mildly CO involved in the "preparedness versus pacifism" debate, opposing uni- ^ versal military training for schoolboys. (A Search for Unity in Diver-

q sity, 242)

£- i I do, however, invoke personal crises, not as an explanation for GPP in its {J entirety, but as a way to explain the substandard scholarship in Dewey s <J critique of Hegel. As I mentioned above, Dewey s critique of Hegel in ^O GPP is a significant reversal of his previous interpretation, and it is based £i primarily on mistranslation of passages in the Philosophy of Right taken <í out of context. It would be tedious to repeat all of the arguments I make &* about Dewey s characterization of Hegel in GPP. My primary points are H that, for the first time, Dewey reversed his previous interpretation of

Hegel, and that his reversal relied on much weaker evidence than he pro- vided for his earlier interpretation. In my view, that behavior cries out for explanation, and philosophical explanations do not work because Dewey does not rationally defend his World War I interpretation.

I do not need to develop a special explanation for GPP as a whole because the bulk of the book is a critique of Kant that is consistent with both Dewey s pre-war and post-war readings of Kant. I argue in previous chapters of the book that Dewey s critique of Kant is substantially the same as Hegels critique of Kant. The primary problem for both Hegel and Dewey is Kant s dualism, which they claim makes it impossible for him to account for the unified self and the unified world of ordinary experience. I point out that what worried Hegel the most was Kant's ethical formalism, which, Hegel argued, was the sort of thinking that led to the violence of the French Reign of Terror.12 Because French Revolutionaries believed they had abstract equality and freedom, equality and freedom that transcends social mores, and that they had absolute rights, they concluded that they should destroy anything and everything that opposed their individual, subjective goals: "This is why the people during the French Revolution, destroyed once more the institutions they had themselves created, because all institutions are incompatible with the abstract self-consciousness of equality."13 Hegel warned that this sort of abstract ethical theory would inevitably lead to

<™ violent terrors; in GPP Dewey claimed it led to the German militarism



of World War I. Dewey s analysis of abstract ethical theory bolsters a O claim I make that GPP is fundamentally Hegelian intellectual history. ^ In addition to repeating Hegel's critique of those types of theories, ^ Dewey sought to demonstrate that German philosophers, particularly ^ Kant, had given voice to the German Volksgeist. Thus I read most of 2 GPP as a remarkably Hegelian book. g

Dewey s objection to dualistic moral theories is extremely important a> to the larger issue of his Hegelian deposit. In 1943 Morton White ^

argued that a movement away from Hegelian idealism can be detected ?? in Dewey s criticisms of T. H. Greens moral theory.14 In "Greens The- £L ory of the Moral Motive" (1892), Dewey is critical of the dualism g Green posited between the finite moral agent and the infinite, univer- D sal self because it made the moral perfection that was supposed to be "o the goal of moral life unattainable. According to Dewey, Greens moral g- ideal was "the bare thought of an ideal of perfection, having nothing in common with the special set of conditions or with the special desire of r* the moment."15 Although Whites interpretation is based on more evi- ^ dence than this one article, the upshot for him was that Dewey s criti- "T cisms of Greens ethical thought demonstrated that he was rejecting o Hegel. White, and many subsequent Dewey scholars, worked on the 5 assumption, not always particularly explicit, that all forms of Hegelian ft idealism posit transcendent ideals or norms. p

I argue in the book that Dewey s criticism of Greens moral theory is p virtually cribbed from Hegel's criticisms of both Kant's and Fichte's eth- jL ical theories, maintaining that this illuminates Dewey's 1893 claim that t> T. H. Greens ethical theory was "falsely named Neo-Hegelian, being in | truth Neo-Fichtean."16 Both Kant and Fichte, according to Hegel, erred g_ when they posited moral ideals that transcend our particular desires and S social context. Because they did so, their theories are mere Moralitat, sys- « terns based on abstract moral rules that are difficult, if not impossible, to ^ apply in the concrete situations in which we must act. A true ethics, § what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit, is based on rational standards tempered by ^

culturally accepted standards of conduct that help us understand how to q act morally within our social context. Moralitat, Hegel argues, assumes g we are asocial, isolated individuals who are obligated to fulfill moral duties despite our actual desires, the practical consequences of our actions, and the demands of our society. Hence, Moralitat simultane- ously sets man against himself and his society, sending him in search of a moral ideal that is "the unattainable beyond" because of the limitations of the concrete world in which we must act.17 Dewey reiterates this line of criticism against Kant's moral theory in GPP.

///• The Historical Fallacy Hickman asks me to say more about where Dewey might have found the historical fallacy in Hegel. In "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology"



^ (1896), Dewey objects to what he sees as a reification of both stimulus <u and response into metaphysical realities, arguing that they are stages g within "an act, a sensori-motor co-ordination." Dewey explains that psy- 3 chologists thought "stimulus" and "response" allowed them to overcome Z the metaphysics of mind/body dualism and that they were working to ^ establish mechanical principles of human behavior. But for Dewey,

£ the ordinary conception of the reflex arc theory, instead of being a J2 case of plain science, is a survival of the metaphysical dualism, first £> formulated by Plato, according to which the sensation is an ambigu-

ous dweller on the border land of soul and body, the idea (or central ^ process) is purely psychical, and the act (or movement) purely physi- Z cal.18 O HH Dewey claims psychologists erred because they committed "the psycho- '~H logical or historical fallacy."19 This fallacy occurs when

^ A set of considerations which hold good only because of a completed ^ process, is read into the content of the process which conditions this Z completed result. A state of things characterizing an outcome is ^ regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this out- P^ come; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been in f- i existence, there would have been no necessity for the process.20

In short, Dewey believes we must move beyond the reflex arc concept and see human behavior as a completed circuit, rather than an arc, of coordinated activity, because there is no scientific basis for metaphysical dualism, but also because the reflex arc model distorts our perception of human behavior. Rather than stop with the analysis of behavior into discrete stages, we should move on to see the whole, what Dewey calls "the act." Doing so, he affirms, allows us to understand human learning and development. Borrowing William James's example of an infant reaching for a bright light that turns out to be a lit candle, Dewey maintains that the stimulus, the light, and the response, reaching for the light, are part of a larger temporal process.

Traditionally, Dewey scholars have characterized "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" as evidence that he was moving from Hegel- ianism toward pragmatism under the influence of James' Principles of Psychology}1 It seems obvious that James influenced Dewey s criticisms of the reflex arc concept, because he not only uses James' example, but he also uses James' term "the psychological fallacy." Despite this evidence, John Shook recently argued that Dewey had formulated a version of the psychologist's fallacy ten years earlier in "The Psychological Standpoint" (1886).22 In that essay, Dewey argues that philosophical concepts like sensations are the results of our analysis of experience, but we must resist the temptation to read the results of our analysis into



experience as though they were there all along. To quote Dewey, "the D correctness of the procedure which, discovering a certain element in ^ knowledge to be necessary for knowledge, therefore concludes that this ^ element has an existence prior to or apart from knowledge."23 Shook s « interpretation led me to consider the possibility that, before James' S Principles, Hegel had already influenced Dewey to undercut philosoph- g ical dualisms in this way. In the book, I argue that Dewey did find the S historical fallacy in Hegel. •"*

To see how this might be the case, it is useful to think about the dif- a ferences in Dewey's and James' characterizations of this fallacy. James £L defined the psychological fallacy as "the [psychologists] confusion of his § own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his D report."24 Although Dewey uses James' appellation, "the psychological ho fallacy," and deploys it in the same way as James, Deweys preference for £• "historical fallacy" emphasizes his point that the error occurs when we mistake the early moments of a temporal process for pre-existing realities. ^

I believe it becomes apparent that Dewey could have found this >g strategy in Hegel when we go beyond the textbook characterization of "<r the dialectic as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, terms Hegel uses only o once in his writings.25 There are two important problems with this 5 characterization. First, it may suggest Hegel developed a formal logic, g- according to which we apply logical categories to a content that is for- p eign to our thoughts about it. I will return to this issue a bit later. Sec- p ond, it might imply that Hegel's dialectic was based on traditional jL binary truth values: Thesis and antithesis are asserted as truths, they are ¡> discovered to be false, and the third stage is a simple truth that has p emerged from recognition of their falseness. This is utterly at odds with g^ Hegel's concept of Aufhebung, commonly translated as "synthesis" or 5 "sublation," which includes the notion that the truth of the first two ® stages of cognition is preserved in the third. According to Hegel, it is ^ not that the two original stages were false, but that it would be false to § stop at either of those stages, or to assume the truth of the dichotomy ^

they represent. This, I believe, is precisely what Dewey calls the histor- q ical fallacy; it is the error of artificially truncating the process of inquiry g and mistaking the early stages of an inquiry for real objects. Thus I believe Dewey could find the historical fallacy any place in Hegel's writings where he uses the dialectic, which is arguably the most pervasive feature of Hegel's entire philosophical oeuvre. In fact, the bigger problem in my mind is that, heretofore, Dewey scholars have not seen his historical fallacy as an example of Hegel's philosophical method rather than an indication that he was moving away from Hegel.

IV. The Influence of James's Principles of Psychology I will now focus my attention on Alexanders very substantive comments about the influence of James's 1890 The Principles of Psychology -g-



^f on Dewey. Anyone familiar with the secondary literature on Dewey's <u philosophical development knows it is common to claim that James's g Psychology inspired Dewey to embrace functional psychology and the d historical fallacy. In the book, I disagree with both of those claims, Z arguing instead that, prior to the publication of James's Principles, 3J Dewey had found functional psychology and the historical fallacy in <u Hegel. I will begin addressing the issue of Deweys source for functional 6 psychology by quoting at some length his letter to James, dated 6 May

| 1891:

I cannot suppress my own secret longing that you had at least worked

^ out the suggestion you throw out on Page 304 of voi I. If I under- ^ stand at all what Hegel is driving at that is a much better statement of O the real core of Hegel than what you criticize later on as Hegelianism. J"^ " Take out your "postulated" 'matter' and 'thinker,' let 'matter' (i.e. the "

physical world) be the organization of the content of sciousness up to ^ a certain point, & the thinker be a still further unified organization ^ [not a unify-ing organ as per Green] and that is good enough Hegel ^ for me. And if this point of view had been worked out, would you ¿* have needed any 'special' activity of attention, or any 'special' act of ^ will? The fundamental fact would then be the tendency towards a Pm maximum content of sciousness, and within this growing organiza- ré- ' tion of sciousness effort &c could find their place. At the risk, after

all, of burdening you, it seems to me that on page 369 you virtually fall into the meshes of the "psychological fallacy" (Let me say that I think the discovery & express formulation of this alone would have marked any book as 'epoch-making.') I surrender Green to your ten- der mercies, but the unity of Hegel's self (& what Caird is driving it) is not a unity in the stream as such, but of the function of this stream - the unity of the world (content) which it bears or reports. It may seem strange to call this unity Self, but while Kant undoubtedly tried to make an agent out of this (and Green follows him,) But Hegel's agent (or Self) is simply the universe doing business on its own account. But I must forbear. But Hegel seems to me intensely modern in his spirit, whatever his garb, and I don't like to see him dressed up as Scholasticus Redivivus - although of course his friends, the professed Hegelians, are mainly responsible for that.26

At the beginning of the comments above, Dewey refers to the provocative passage in James's Principles in which he distinguishes the "stream of Sciousness" from "consciousness" Consciousness, James explains, implies that a precondition of all experience is that the thinker is aware of his existence as a subject during experience. James uses the term Sciousness to underscore his claim that we only distinguish between the self and its object "in subsequent reflection" upon experience.27 James also speaks of the Self and not-Self, me and not-me, language reminiscent of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre (1794/95), but

586



explicitly rejects the view of James Frederick Ferrier, the Scottish ideal- D ist who was influenced by Fichte's notion of the "self-positing I" that is ^ a precondition of all consciousness.28 The similarity to Fichte is tanta- ^ lizing because of Fichte's rejection of substance metaphysics and his * famous pragmatic claim that all philosophy is founded on the act of S positing rather than on a logical principle. Moreover, Fichte actually § agrees with James's claim that we are only aware of the self-positing in 3 subsequent philosophical reflection upon experience. Furthermore, in * The Vocation of Man (1800), Fichte articulated the pragmatic maxim: a "We do not act because we know, but we know because we are called CL upon to act: - the practical reason is the root of all reason."29 Nonethe- g less, not only is there no evidence in the Principles that James is aware D of the similarity between his position and Fichte's, he seems convinced *o that his position is at odds with Fichte's. Nor does Dewey's letter betray £• any interest in that connection. Instead, Dewey is keenly interested in what he believes are Hegelian overtones in James's reflection on the ^ stream of Sciousness. ^

As I read Dewey's letter, he is trying to tell James, respectfully, at "T least three important things. 1) The Sciousness passage reveals that you o are more Hegelian than you realize. 2) You misunderstand how 5 Hegelian you are because you confuse Hegel with the neo-Hegelians. 3) *~ You would be wise to become even more Hegelian because doing so p would help you eliminate mind/body dualism from your psychology p and articulate an embodied self. Although in previous sentences Dewey gL acknowledged a deep indebtedness to James, he was not specific about > the content of his debt, other than to say that he was indebted to "por- * tions of the book as had previously appeared."30 jj^

So how would Hegel, according to Dewey, help James avoid S mind/body dualism in his psychology? In addition to Hegel's concep- • tion of mind and body as moments within the learning process, rather ^ than pre-existing entities, Hegel would help James because he had ^ already begun working out a functional psychology. I draw this conclu- ^ sion from study of Hegel's critique of faculty psychology, particularly as q found in Kant. Although he never analyzes it specifically, the term "fac- g ulty" is pervasive throughout Kant's critical philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he speaks of the faculty of understanding, which applies rules and categories to experience, and the faculty of reason, which applies categories to that which is, in principle, beyond possible experience. In his critique of faculty psychology, Hegel found it astonishing that "such a contingent medley of heterogeneous beings can be together in the mind like things in a bag, more especially since they show themselves to be not dead, inert things but restless movements."31 Similarly, in the Encyclopedia, Hegel wrote "... our own sense of the mind's living unity naturally protests against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities,



^t conceived as independent of each other."32 I could quote similar pas- <u sages at some length, but suffice it to say that Hegel's critique of faculty g psychology is almost as pervasive in his writings as the term "faculty" is d in Kant's.33 Rather than faculties, Hegel speaks of the understanding Z and reason as "moments" within a temporal process. Because Hegel 3 does not use the terms "function" or "functional psychology," in the <u book I argue that Dewey found a rudimentary functional psychology in 6 Hegel. The important point is that, for Hegel, terms like understand- - ing and reason refer not to things, or even to capacities, but to momen- £> tary stages within a dynamic process. ^ Accordingly, in the passage I quoted above, Dewey explains to James ^ that Hegel thought of "matter" or "the physical world" not as a meta- p. physical realm distinct from mind, but as the organization of the con- _ tent of consciousness. "The thinker," Dewey maintains, is, for Hegel, f-H not a unifying organ, as in T.H. Green (and in Kant), but "a still further (J unified organization." Most importantly, Dewey says "the unity of <^ Hegel's self. . . is not a unity in the stream as such, but of the function co of this stream."34 I read that claim as Dewey attributing functional psy- JZÜ chology to Hegel. Reason and understanding, mind and world, for <3 Hegel, are moments within a process. This is true because Hegel con- tó ceives mind as activity, rather than as an object or metaphysical realm. H Hegel's usage of the term Begriffi which is usually translated as concept

or notion, lends plausibility to Dewey's reading of Hegel. For Kant, Begriffwas a static universal representation; Hegel draws on the root meaning of the word, which is the verb begreifen or greifen, to grasp or seize.35 This is one of the ways in which Hegel offers an alternative to Kant's faculty psychology. Hegel maintained that the self encounters the world because we are always engaged in some project; all activity, including intellectual activity, is motivated by desire.36 The self gener- ally pursues its projects through habitual, non-reflective activity. When the self encounters an obstacle to its project, it is alienated from the world and responds by fashioning concepts, which are essentially tools, to reach out and grasp elements of the situation in which it encoun- tered the problem for the purpose of analyzing the situation into its constituent parts. This is the moment or stage of understanding, and its function is analysis. The self engages in this activity for the purpose of reintegrating itself into its situation so that it can resume its project, but it can only do so by moving beyond the moment of analysis to reason. In reason, the self reintegrates itself with its environment by modifying both, and thus usecs the whole."37 This is the dialectical process and its conclusion always goes beyond mere negation, driven by a determinate negation that culminates in a positive solution that allows the self to resume its project by overcoming alienation and returning to "home with itself in ... its other."38 For Hegel, this process is dialectical pre-

^^ cisely because the two poles are both shaped and reintegrated without



losing their identity (Hegel's concept of Aufhebung). Moreover, Hegel's D language of alienation and return brings into sharp relief that this ^ process is more than a formal, antiseptic method applied to an external ^ reality; it is "the way of despair" that leads to personal growth. ^

Hegel's rejection of faculty psychology may be even clearer in his £? discussions of the will. In The Philosophy of Right Hegel declares g

n It must not be imagined [sich vorstellen] that a human being thinks on rt the one hand and wills on the other, and that he has thought in one j]h pocket and volition in the other, for this would be an empty repre- °a sentation [Vorstellung]. The distinction between thought and will is 5" simply that between theoretical and practical attitudes. But they are ^ not two separate faculties; on the contrary, the will is a particular way a of thinking - thinking translating itself into existence [Dasein], o

thinking as the drive to give itself existence. ^ >

Later in the same passage, Hegel writes, "The theoretical is ... con- po tained within the practical."39 Hegel viewed all cognition as "purposive ^ activity."40 And Dewey agreed that Hegel rejected faculty psychology, ^ asserting that Hegel's, ^

o" philosophy of spirit shows that these so-called faculties of mind, and F also all concrete empirical material, are simply elements in the devel- g opment of the active unity of spirit. We understand spirit, then, not p when we begin by supposing a substance which we term soul or by q^ supposing a lot of separate mental faculties, but only when we trace > the varied process by which spirit realizes itself. Our so-called facul- $ ties will then appear in their proper place as stages in its evolution. p Thus the whole science becomes living, organic and systematic.41 n>

I will now focus on Dewey's postscript to the 6 May 1891 letter to ,_ James, because it is relevant to Alexander's statement that "By 1894 | Dewey is able to undertake a critique of James's theory of emotion." £ Dewey writes, O

o Would it horrify you, if I stated that your theory of emotions (where Ü

you seem to me to have completely made out your case) is good Hegelianism? Although, of course, Hegel gets at it in a very different

way. But according to Hegel a man can't feel his own feelings unless

they go around, as it were, through his body.42

In "The Theory of Emotion" Dewey also writes, "On the historical side, it may be worth noting that a crude anticipation of James's theory is found in Hegel's Philosophie des Geistes, 40 1."43 Why, according to Dewey, does Hegel have such a theory of the emotions? I believe this becomes apparent in Dewey's unpublished Hegel lecture in which he writes that according to Hegel, the soul's "unity with nature" entailed ^



^ that "it can feel its own qualities only so far as these find bodily expres- <u sion," taking on outward form. In the lecture, Dewey goes on to claim g that, for Hegel, "a man cannot feel his own feelings except as they come d in this round-about way through his body. . . . That is to say, sadness or Z joy, scorn, hatred, courage, etc., are not felt directly and of themselves; ^ they are felt only through the outward bodily expression." Here I must <u point out that as I was writing the book, I relied on a copy of the lec- 6 ture dated 1897 that is located in the John Dewey Papers of Morris - Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Subsequently, John £> Shook discovered what he and I believe to be a substantively similar ^ copy of the lecture located in the University of Michigan's Bentley ^ Library that is dated 1891. Whether or not Dewey attributed this the- ^s ory of emotions to Hegel before he read James's Principles I cannot say ^ for certain. f-H Be that as it may, in §401 of the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel proposes (J "a peculiar science - a psychical physiology" that would study the way <^ feelings manifest as "specific bodily forms." According to Hegel, "the co most interesting side of a psychical physiology would lie in studying . . . Z the bodily form adopted by certain mental modifications, especially the <3 passions or emotions."44 Although Hegel speaks of "mental states" in P^ that section, in his lecture Dewey agreed with contemporary scholars H who argue that Hegel overcame Cartesian mind/body dualism. Hegel

opposed Cartesian dualism not because it generated an annoying epis- temological problem, but because it alienated man from nature, from his own natural desires and inclinations, and from his fellow man. Although Hegel praised Descartes' reliance on reason, rather than authority, he viewed mind/body dualism as a manifestation of the most vexing and potentially destructive problem of modernity, alienation.

Hegel overcomes mind/body dualism by contending that mind and world are moments within consciousness and that consciousness does not go beyond itself to embrace objects in the world. This view makes sense if Hegel used "consciousness" the way Dewey used "experience," and in the book I argue that Hegel did. That is to say, Hegel's consciousness is not an inner realm metaphysically set apart from the world. Rather than giving "reality to a different content," consciousness works with what it finds within itself. This content is "an initially implicit being" translated by consciousness into an explicit being.45 Engaged in a project, the self encounters a negation of its project. As it focuses on and analyzes that negation, it becomes an explicit being. At the same time, the self becomes an explicit being as well, because it is now set over and against an other, the negation. As it reintegrates the negation into its project, through a dialectical process that shapes both self and other, mere negation becomes a determinate negation, meaning that it is now integrated into the refashioned project. It is impera-

-Qft tive to notice that, for Hegel, even "being" is a stage in the process of



consciousness, and consciousness itself is an act rather than some sort of O incorporeal object. The content of both the self and the other are made ^ explicit by the action of consciousness; in that process, both self and ^ other become real: "Accordingly, an individual cannot know what he « [really] is until he has made himself a reality through action." Hegel 5 goes on to say that a persons "essence and intrinsic nature is beginning, g means, and End, all in one."46 In other words, beginning, means, and n> end are different ways of describing the essence or nature of a continu- rt ous process, in this case, the process of the self's becoming. The dis- « tinction between self and other is real because the other really did £L interrupt, or negate, the self's project and, at the same time, the dis- 3 tinction is a construction within the r process of consciousness as the self O

, . . . r n> seeks , to continue its project. ^ How is this relevant to Hegel's theory of emotions? According to g-

Hegel, "self-consciousness is Desire in general."47 Through the process I described above, the self becomes self-conscious, aware of itself, and it ^ does so because desire impels it to act. As the self engages in action it ^ gains a growing awareness of the desires that impel it to act. As Dewey *T realized, the process of consciousness is also central to Hegel's theory of o cognition. According to Dewey, Hegel believed that "we only know our 5 thoughts when we give them an objective form, when we ... get them gr out into spoken sounds or written words." For this reason, in his Hegel 2 lecture Dewey describes Hegel as "the great actualist." For Hegel, p Dewey writes, "there is no such thing as a faculty of thought separate jL from things."48 The real, as far as humans are concerned, is that which > has actual effects in human experience. ><

If I am correct that Dewey read Hegel in this way during the 1890s, g^ what was left for James to do for Dewey? I agree with other Dewey S scholars that, in James, Dewey found a more fully biological functional- « ism that he could not have found in Hegel, and that this allowed him to "p naturalize Hegel in a Darwinian way. As a pre-Darwinian thinker, I S believe it should come as no surprise that Hegel did not emphasize con- ^

tingency to the degree that many post-Darwinian philosophers have, q including both James and Dewey. For example, James's talk of percep- g tions and conceptions as "biological sports" is nowhere to be found in Hegel.49

In 1905 Dewey explicitly associated himself with the pragmatist movement initiated by Peirce and James.50 Over the next several years, he defended pragmatism, and penned many criticisms of idealism. I find it telling that when Dewey attacked idealism, he criticized it as neo-Kantian because it assumes the existence of "apart thought," logical categories supplied by thought to sensations. I believe Dewey understood he was attacking Kantian transcendentalism, not Hegelian historicism. In his Hegel lecture, Dewey describes Hegel as reluctant to speak "in order that the fact may be heard." Dewey maintains that this



^ restraint "does not imply a low conseption [sic] of thought or reflec- <u tion: it implies rather the highest conception of the value of thought."

3 It implies that thought is so real that it can be found only in the J2 object and not in any subjective opinion. Nor does such a method n^i imply that knowledge is passive, that the mind is to be merely recep-

tive in knowing; on the contrary, it implies the most acute, the most g intense mental energy. It is when mental energy is only partial that we 3 indulge in opinions and arguments. We get part way into a subject ^O and, lacking energy to pursue the quest for the real meaning of the ^ fact, we come to a halt. Then the checked energy relapses into sub- CO jective reflection and disputation. The mind has not enough activity *7 to break out of the weary treadmill of its own ideas; to make its way r-s to the fact itself. The highest activity of thought is that which will ^ make itself the pure expression of the facts.51 f- . qj In this

. passage alone, Dewey implies that Hegel did not believe in "apart

<J thought," that Hegel rejected the passive spectator theory of knowledge, co and that Hegel advocated avoidance of the historical fallacy. JZJ I need to return to Alexanders comments, however. Alexander <J explains: tí f-H In my view, the impact of James's Principles showed that the proffered

solution of a "synthetic power" as a condition of experience was not needed simply because experience didn't need "synthesis" to begin with.

I take Alexander to be saying that Dewey learned from James's Principles^ rather than Hegel, that experience does not need synthesis. But in my fifth chapter I quote a passage from Dewey s Hegel lecture that indicates he believed Hegel agreed that a synthetic power is not a precondition of experience. This passage occurs in Dewey s discussion of Hegel's dialectic:

First, the period of implicit unity when, apparently all was harmony; when man and Nature and God were one. Then, secondly, there was the period of negation and of discord, the period when the various elements of the original unity were isolated and set over against each other. In the third period, however, a true reconciliation takes place. It is seen that underlying the discord and opposition there is still a unity, nay, even more, it is seen that the very principle of difference, of negation, is itself an expression and a realization of this unity, - that the period of discord is an element in the process by which the real harmony maintains and extends itself.

Although Dewey is talking about the dialectic as an historical process here, rather than experience as dialectic, he maintains Hegel does not believe in pre-existing separation of thought and being, and thus experience only needs synthesis when it has been disrupted by a negation.



This issue returns me to Dewey s 6 May 1891 letter to James O because it is entwined with the question of whether or not Hegel 3 believes in "apart thought." I find it telling that Dewey complains he ^ does not "like to see [Hegel] dressed up as Scholasticus Redivivus - *

although of course his friends, the professed Hegelians, are mainly 2 responsible for that." Not only does this indicate that Dewey sees his | reading of Hegel as contrary to certain "professed Hegelians," but it g also indicates that Dewey believes Hegel does not view thought as the rt formalization of an externally given content. Throughout his 1888 n> book on Leibniz, Dewey equates "scholastic method" with formal logic. £L Dewey continues to use "scholastic" in much the same way in later § writings. For example, in "Is Logic a Dualistic Science?," Dewey defines O scholastic logic as "an attempt to deal with thinking in vacuo, that is *g with methods which leave out (or abstract from) the material of g- fact. . ."52 As I address Alexanders next comment, I provide more evidence that Dewey believed Hegel rejected "apart thought." ^

Finally, Alexander wrote: *g v<r The impact of this [still referring to James] is seen in what I consider o to be the single most important shift in Dewey's philosophy after that £C made in "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," the 1905 essay £L "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism." Not only does this essay 3 exhibit everywhere the influence of James's formulation of radical 3

empiricism (which Dewey mentions in this first sentence and with p which he allies himself)» it marks the dawning of the theory of expe- ^ rience that would only really be first coherently articulated in the long £p introduction to the Essays in Experimental Logic (1916) and restated p with more depth and force in Experience and Nature (1925/1929). p- Dewey here breaks with the 2,400-year tradition in Western philoso- ■"»

phy beginning with Parmenides of identifying reality with the object • of knowledge. I think this has serious ramifications for trying to think ^ of Dewey as an Hegelian in any sense of the word, and it sets Dewey £ apart from the realists and naturalists he was engaged with at the ^ time. In this article Dewey argues that the world of experience O extends far beyond our experiences of "knowing." Philosophers, with q their focus on "the problem of knowledge," have turned every type of °

experience into an instance of knowing, pasting an "Ich denke" in front of any sentence. Knowing, however, only is possible because it occurs in the context of living in a world of events. However one might want to tune the meaning of "the rational is the real," Hegel is committed to the fundamental thesis that all forms of experience (or existence) are, ultimately, moments of self-knowledge.

First, I am convinced Dewey disagrees with Alexander s claim that "Hegel is committed to the fundamental thesis that all forms of experience (or existence) are, ultimately, moments of self-knowledge." In his 1905 presidential address to the APA, Dewey address this issue directly: -^



^ Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and transcendentalism material-

qj ist and spiritualist, defining this object [the object of knowledge] in as -5 many differing ways as they have different conceptions of the ideal

§ and method of knowledge, are at one in their devotion to an identifi-

^ cation of Reality with something that connects monopolistically with

xjh passionless knowledge, belief purged of all personal reference, origin, ^ and outlook.53

S d In footnote at the end of that sentence, Dewey writes:

3 Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit of interpreting

c/D Hegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian enlarged and purified, is a purely ¿^ Anglo-American habit. This is no place to enter into the intricacies of

q Hegelian exegesis, but the subordination of both logical meaning and

)mmmi of mechanical existence to Geist, to life in its own developing move-

f-i ment, would seem to stand out in any unbiased view of Hegel. At all

qj events, I wish to recognize my own personal debt to Hegel for the

^ view set forth in this paper, without, of course, implying that it rep- 0/3 resents Hegel's own intention.54

z ^ Alexander claims that, for Dewey, knowing is possible only "because it P¿ occurs in the context of living in a world of events." Similarly, Dewey ^h claims Hegel subordinates "logical meaning and . . . mechanical exis-

tence ... to life in its own developing movement." In my book I argue that this claim is consistent with Dewey s Hegel lecture.

For Dewey, Hegel was not primarily concerned with knowledge. And rather than a theory of knowledge, Dewey depicts Hegel as developing a theory of learning or growth (Hegels Bildung motif). In so doing, Dewey reads Hegel in a way that is consistent with a large body of Hegel scholarship. Moreover, Hegel has a concept of habit in which he claims we function, ordinarily, without thinking about what we are doing. According to Dewey, Hegel believes in an original "unity of the body and the soul," that is "transformed" into a "made unity" by habit, "a unity which is the outcome of the souls own activity." By allowing it to master the body, Dewey writes, habit "enables the soul to project itself into nature."55 Finally, as I mentioned above, early in the Phe- nomenology Hegel asserts that "self-consciousness is Desire in general," and he remains consistent on that point throughout his writings.56 This raises significant doubt about Alexander s claim that Hegel reduces all experience to knowing experience.

According to Dewey, Hegels dialectic begins with an "implicit unity," proceeds to an apparent opposition in which "the various elements of the original unity [are] isolated and set over against each other," and ends with "true reconciliation." Periods of negation are "element [s] in the process by which the real harmony maintains and extends itself."57 Thus we ordinarily live in a state of harmony with our

594



environment, but we periodically encounter negations that initiate the O dialectical process, which seeks a reconstruction of the original unity. ^ Rather than a synthetic construction of experience, this process is a ^ reconstruction of experience because its ingredients are both found and * fashioned in the dialectical interplay of the self with the negation that 8 initiated the learning process when it disrupted the project in which it | was engaged. Rather than being ubiquitous, knowing experiences only g occur when we seek to reconstruct the original unity of ordinary expe- rt rience. Moreover, this is more properly characterized as a learning expe- a rience, rather than a knowing experience, because we construct the gL object of knowledge in the dialectical process of growth (Bildung). g

In an exposition of Hegel's concept of the will, Dewey states that the D goal of human growth, on Hegel's account, is self-unification and uni- "g fication of the self with the other. g-

Will realizes the unity in an activity which is neither merely subjective ^ nor merely objective, but in which both the idea and the existing h object are included and transformed, thus constituting what we may v^- term either a higher idea or a more adequate form of the object. Will, g that is to say, is not merely an act of changing ideas into existences, ^ but is the activity which comprehends within itself as factors both an o' idea and an object.58 3

p

Rather than equating the object of knowledge with reality, according to g Dewey, Hegel's theory of the will posits both objective and subjective ^ realities that are transformed and united in a dialectical process. The ff separation of object from subject occurs in the moment of negation, p analysis (Verstand) defines the poles of the negation, and reason {Ver- g- nunjt) sees the opposition as moments within a larger process and, in so doing, fashions the object of knowledge. In this process mere negation is transformed into a determinate negation, a negation that furthers >

growth. Rather than markers of ontologically separate realms, Hegel's w dialectical stages are functions within the learning process. Dewey calls q them "stages" within the "evolution" of the self.59 Further, Dewey g explains that, for Hegel, "we attend only to that which interests us, and o only that interests us which is felt to be bound up within our own being."60 It seems logical to conclude that Dewey believed Hegel's philosophy allowed for reality beyond that which interests us, and thus beyond the object of knowledge. All of these statements can be found in the 1897 version of Dewey's Hegel lecture, and the 1891 version is substantially similar, which demonstrates that, at least eight years before 1905, if not sooner, Dewey believed Hegel did not equate reality with the object of knowledge.

Dewey's reading is substantiated by Hegel's attack on the very idea of a theory of knowledge. In The Phenomenology, Hegel claims the

595



^f conundrums of modern epistemology were created by the assumption <u that there is a boundary between thought and world.61 Hegel also g argues that the idea of knowing a theory that precedes knowledge itself d is a manifest absurdity. As Hegel writes in his "Lesser Logic," "to seek to Z know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, 33 not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim."62 Like <u swimming, Hegel maintains, in order to understand knowledge we 6 must learn by doing. Thus Hegel rejects epistemology-centered philos- - ophy, transforming the western tradition of which Alexander speaks. £> Hegel's rejection of the dualism between thought and world is ^ directly relevant to another issue Alexander raises, which is the way I (7- believe Dewey "tune[s] the meaning of 'the rational is the real.'" Hegel p. formulated the classic statement of the Dopplesatz, or double dictum, in HH the Preface of The Philosophy of Right. "What is rational is actual; and f-H what is actual is rational."63 Commentators have argued about this (J claim for decades, articulating three basic interpretations. First, some <J characterize the claim as an expression of political conservatism, co according to which, whatever happens to exist at the time is rational Z and therefore right. For Karl Popper, the dictum demonstrates that <3 Hegel was an uncritical apologist for the conservative Prussian state Pi precisely as it existed at that time. On this reading, Hegel is admonish- H ing his readers to jettison all hope of changing the status quo through

normative critique or political action.64 A second, and related reading, is that the claim is a statement of rationalist epistemology and metaphysics, according to which we can discern truth through the applica- tion of formal reason to a foreign content because, behind the flux of experience, which is merely ephemeral, reality conforms to a perfectly logical pattern. Among Hegel specialists, both of these readings have fallen into disrepute in recent decades, and I see no evidence that, prior to World War I, Dewey favored either one. On the contrary, I believe Dewey favors the third, politically progressive reading of the claim, which I outline below.

Alexander seems to imply that the claim is primarily related to Hegel's epistemology. I think related passages in Hegel's writings cast doubt on that implication and favor a methodological/ethical reading that I find in Dewey s Hegel lecture. In the introduction to his "Lesser Logic," Hegel writes: "The actuality of the rational stands opposed by the popular fancy that Ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras, and philosophy a mere system of such phantasms" and "by the very different fancy that Ideas and ideals are something far too excellent to have actuality, or something too important to procure it for themselves."65 English translation of this passage, as well as the one from the introduction to The Philosophy of Right, is complicated by Hegel's use of wirklich, which is translated as "actual," but also means "effective."

_, Thus when Dewey refers to Hegel as "the great actualist," I think he



demonstrates his understanding of Hegel's choice of words rather well, U conveying that, for Hegel, the rational is that which actually has effects ^ in the world. But rather than a manifestation of rationalist epistemol- ^ ogy, or political conservatism, Dewey appreciates that, in these claims, *

Hegel is articulating the view that philosophy is a fundamentally prac- S tical endeavor. This reading is consistent with another passage from | Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: "Philosophy . . . has g nothing at all to do with mere abstractions or formal thoughts, but only ^ with concrete thoughts."66 This commitment is evident in Hegel's n> claim that the Phenomenology could not legitimately go beyond or 2- behind experience in order to explain it. As Josiah Royce explained in § an apparent allusion to William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, D the Phenomenology can be understood as a study of the varieties of ^g "individual and social types."67 It is not hard to find contemporary g- Hegel scholars who agree with Royce's assessment.68 This returns me to the notion that, on Dewey s reading, Hegel believed philosophy should ^ not posit explanations of human experience that transcend possible ^g experience. ^<T

In addition to this methodological implication, I believe Dewey saw o an ethical implication in Hegel's dictum as well, because it is a claim ¡? about what philosophical method ought to be in order to be culturally g- reconstructive. Philosophy must confine itself to the world in which we 2 actually live, so that it can change that world for the better. Recently, p Robert Stern has argued against both the conservative reading of a. Hegel's Dopplesatz, and the progressive reading I attribute to Dewey. > Stern characterizes Hegel's Dopplesatz as a commitment to philosophi- * cal methodology that is politically neutral, but I believe Dewey saw that §_ methodology as politically progressive because it committed philoso- 5 phy to "the problems of men" in addition to the "problems of philoso- • phers."69 Thus I believe Dewey reads Hegel's dictum as consistent with ^ his oft-quoted 1917 claim that "Philosophy recovers itself when it ^ ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and ^ becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the q problems of men."70 It is not difficult to find this perception of Hegel's § methodology in the writings of the St. Louis Hegelians. In a description of Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, William Torrey Harris wrote,

[Brokmeyer] could flash into the questions of the day, or even into the questions of the moment, the highest insight of philosophy and solve their problems. Even the hunting of wild turkeys or squirrels was the occasion for the use of philosophy. Philosophy came to mean with us, therefore, the most practical of all species of knowledge. We used it to solve all problems concerned with school teaching and school management. We studied the "dialectic" of politics and political parties and understood how measures and men may be combined by its light.71 597



^ This is an important element of the American Hegelian deposit in ft Dewey's reading of Hegel. Whether this is a "correct" reading of Hegel g perhaps no one can definitively say, but recent historical, biographical, 3 and philosophical scholarship indicates that it is certainly a plausible Z reading.72 An important example is Steven B. Smiths Hegel's Critique of ^ Liberalism: Rights in Context. According to Smith, Hegel believed the <u primary purpose of philosophy was immanent cultural critique. He 6 argues that Hegel intended the dialectic as a method of cultural criti-

- cism that identifies the standards of rationality within an existing cul- ^> ture or system of thought and then criticizes practices that do not

^ accord with those standards of rationality. This method is immanent

^ critique in the sense that it criticizes a culture on its own terms, on the

^s basis of its highest ideals, rather than some apodictic first principle or ^ transcendent, abstract moral standards.73 This reading makes Hegel's f-H dictum consistent with other passages in his writings. For example, in QJ his Science of Logic, Hegel writes, < C/3 refutation must not come from outside; that is, it must not proceed ^ from assumptions lying outside the system in question and inconsis-

^ tent with it. The system need only refuse to recognize those assump- p> tions; the defect is a defect only for him who starts from the

r, requirements and demands based on those assumptions. . . . The gen- uine refutation must penetrate the opponents stronghold and meet him on his own ground; no advantage is gained by attacking him from somewhere else and meeting him where he is not.74

In closing, my central purpose in writings! Search for Unity in Diver- sity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey was to argue that there is a far more significant Hegelian deposit in Dewey s mature philosophy than scholars have previously recognized. I have no doubt that James, Peirce, and many other intellectuals besides Hegel, profoundly influenced Dewey as well. The more I study this issue, however, the more I am inclined to believe those intellectuals helped Dewey primarily by providing him ways to translate ideas he found in Hegel into language that was far more accessible to twentieth-century, naturalistic thinkers. Rather than a revolutionary who upended a 2,400-year tradition, I see Dewey as reconstructing that tradition by drawing on resources he found in Hegel more than any other philosopher.

Lone Star College - North Harris jagness@earthlink. net

NOTES

1. James A. Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006). Citations within the text that consist solely of page numbers refer to this text. 598



2. Dewey to Bentley, 9 July 1945. All quotations from Dewey's correspondence are taken from Larry A. Hickman, general editor, The Correspondence of John Dewey, 1871-1952. 3 vols. (Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex Corporation, 1999- 2005).

3. Dentón Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, Literature, Education, Psychology, with Chapters of Autobiography (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing Company, 1920), 279. Although "making Hegel talk English" was an important goal of the St. Louis Hegelians, it was only one component of their overall project of cultural reform. Good, "Introduction," in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1867; reprint, Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 1: v- xx.

4. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1977), §§15, 16. I discuss this issue on pages 30-31 of A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006). In "Dewey, Hegel, and Causa- tion," presented at the 2008 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Amer- ican Philosophy, Jim Garrison and I argue Hegel's dialectic is based on a non-reductive conception of causation that Dewey embraced. We contend that this theory of causation prevents Hegel from being a monist of any sort and pro- vides the basis of Dewey's pluralism.

5. See Dewey's discussion of the importance of Hegel's concept of negation beginning on page 24 of "Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit: Lectures by John Dewey," University of Chicago, 1897. Unpublished manuscript, John Dewey Papers, Col- lection 102, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Car- bondale, IL.

6. The sources on the non-metaphysical reading of Hegel are voluminous. For an introduction to it, readers should consult Klaus Hartmann, "Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View," in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A. Macln- tyre (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972), 101-24; and H. Tristram Engel- hardt, Jr., "Klaus Hartmann and G. W. E Hegel: A Personal Postscript," in

Engelhardt and Pinkard, eds., Hegel Reconsidered: Beyond Metaphysics and the Authoritarian State (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 225-9.

7. I take this to be the crux of Dewey's criticisms of neo-Hegelianism in arti- cles as early as "The Psychological Standpoint" (1886), "Psychology as Philo- sophic Method" (1886), and "Illusory Psychology" (1887). Dewey's position becomes increasingly explicit in essays such as "The Present Position of Logical Theory" (1891), in which he argues Hegel rejects Kant's formalization of thought, which separates it from empirical reality.

8. Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 2.

9. Hegel, The Difference between Fichtes and Schellings System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 90-91.

10. Good, "Beyond 'Sushiology': John Dewey on Diversity." The Pluralist 1, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 123-132.

11. For a rendition of these arguments that is more concise than the book, see Good, "Dewey's 'Permanent Hegelian Deposit' and the Exigencies of War," The Journal of the History Philosophy AA, no. 2 (April 2006): 293-314.

12. See Freedom and Terror in the Phenomenology oj Spirit, 582-95; and Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right,

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trans, with an introduction by Richard Dien Winfield (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982).

13. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5.

14. Morton White, The Origin of Dewey s Instrumentalism (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1943), 96-108, 134. Cf. Michael Buxton, "The Influence of William James on John Dewey s Early Work," Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1984): 451-63; and Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), ch. 16.

15. Dewey, "Green's Theory of the Moral Motive" (1892), The Early Works of John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1972): 3: 163.

16. Dewey, "Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal" (1893), Early Works, 4: 52, 53; and Dewey, "Green's Theory of the Moral Motive," (1892), Early Works, 3: 160.

17. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §217. Cf. Hegel's critique of the Enlight- enment in Phenomenology of Spirit, §§538-73.

18. Dewey, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896), Early Works, 5: 104.

19. Ibid., 105. 20. Ibid., 105-106. 21. A recent example is Jennifer Welchman, Dewey s Ethical Thought (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1995), 124. 22. John Shook, Dewey s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (Nashville:

Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 49. 23. Dewey, "The Psychological Standpoint" (1886), Early Works, 1:125. 24. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publica-

tions, 1950), 1:196 (emphasis in the original). 25. Gustave E. Mueller, "The Hegel Legend of 'Thesis- An ti thesis-Synthesis'"

Journal of the History of Ideas 19, no. 3 (June 1958), 41 1-14; Walter Kaufmann, Hegel, a Reinterpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 154-5.

26. Dewey to William James, 6 May 1891. 27. James, Principles of Psychology, 1:304. 28. James Frederick Ferrier, Institutes ofMetaphysic: The Theory of Knowing and

Being (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1854); Johnann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, trans, and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1988).

29. Fichte, The Vocation of Man trans. William Smith, introduction by E. Ritchie (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1906), 111.

30. Dewey to William James, 6 May 1891. 31. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §303. 32. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Translated from The Encyclopaedia of the

Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1971), 379.

33. Cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §378, 440, 442, 445, 451; Hegel, Phenom- enology of Spirit, §304; Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, §20, 24, 130, 135, 136, 195.

34. Dewey to William James, 6 May 1891.



35. Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 118-21; and M. J. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 58-61.

36. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §22, 167. Cf. Hegel's claim that "The dif- ficulty for the logical intellect consists in throwing off the separation it has arbi- trarily imposed between the several faculties of feeling and thinking mind, and coming to see that in the human body there is only one reason, in feeling, volition, and thought." Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 471 (emphasis in the original).

37. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §564. 38. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §413. 39. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, §4. 40. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §22 (emphasis in the original). 41. Dewey, "Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, 28. 42. Dewey to William James, 6 May 1891. 43. Dewey, "The Theory of Emotion' (1894-1895), EW 4:171. 44. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §401. 45. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §401. 46. Ibid., §401. 47. Ibid., §167. 48. Dewey, "Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, AG, 6, 4. 49. Dewey explicitly mentions James's use of the term "biological sports" in

"The Development of American Pragmatism" (1925), The Later Works of John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981-1999), 2:16.

50. Dewey, "The Realism of Pragmatism" (1905), The Middle Works of John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976-1983), 3:154.

51. Dewey, "Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit," 4. 52. Dewey, Leibnizs New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Crit-

ical Exposition, Early Works, 1: 251-436; Dewey, "Is Logic a Dualistic Science?" (1890), Early Works, 3:75. Cf. Dewey, "The Present Position of Logical Theory" (1891), Early Works, 3: 135-41.

53. Dewey, "Beliefs and Existences," Middle Works, 3:86. 54. Ibid. 55. Dewey, "Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit," 49. In this passage, Dewey is com-

menting on Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §409-410. 56. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §167. 57. Dewey, "Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, 14. 58. Ibid., 58. 59. Ibid., 24 60. Ibid., 60. 61. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §73. 62. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, §10. 63. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 20. 64. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume II: The Hide Tide of

Prophecy: Hegel Marx, and the Aftermath, 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 1966), 41. For more examples of this reading, see M. W. Jackson, "Hegel: The Real and the Rational," in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: North- western University Press, 1996), 19-21.

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65. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, §6. 66. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical

Writings, ed. Ernst Behler, trans. Steven A. Taubeneck (New York: Continuum, 1990), 58. Cf. Hegel's claim in the Science of Logic that "what is actual can act."

Hegel, Science of Logic, 546. 67. Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, ed. Jacob Loewenberg (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 139. 68. See Michael N. Forster, Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1998). 69. Robert Stern, "Hegel's Dopplesatz: A Neutral Reading," Journal of the His-

tory of Philosophy 44, no. 2 (April 2006): 235-66. 70. Dewey, "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" (1917), Middle Works,

10: 46. 71. W.T. Harris, Hegel's Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the

Mind (Chicago: S.C. Griggs, 1890), xiii. On the St. Louis Hegelians' commitment to philosophy as a practical endeavor see also Snider, A Writer of Books, 317.

72. H. S. Harris, Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770-1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); John Toews, Hegelianism (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1980); H. S. Harris, Hegel's Development: Night Thoughts (Jena, 1801-1806) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1 807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2000); and Horst Althaus, Hegel: An Intellectual Biogra- phy, trans. Michael Tarsh (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

73. Steven B. Smith, Hegel s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Cf. Lewis Hinchman, Hegel s Critique of the

Enlightenment (Gainesville and Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1984); and William Maker, "The Science of Freedom: Hegel's Critical Theory," Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 41-42 (2000): 1-17.

74. Hegel, Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: 1969), 580-81.

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