Reconstructing Dewey: The Philosophy of Critical …pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/siap/readings/kadlec_critical_prag.pdfReconstructing Dewey: The Philosophy of Critical Pragmatism Alison

Reconstructing Dewey: The

Philosophy of Critical

Pragmatism

Alison Kadlec

Public Agenda, New York

The historical relationship between pragmatism and critical theory is one in

which the antifoundational and practice-oriented dimensions of pragmatism appear

to exist in tension, if not outright conflict, with the emancipatory commitments

of the neo-Marxist legacy of critical theory. While Deweyan pragmatism is most

often understood in its deliberative, experimental, open-ended, and contextual

dimensions, little attention has been paid to the critical dimensions of Dewey’s

thought. In what follows, I take the initial steps in recovering the critical features

of Dewey’s pragmatism by developing my analysis along two lines. First, I sketch

the general contours of the relationship between pragmatism and critical

theory in order to account for and unpack the long-standing hostility of critical

theorists toward pragmatism. Second, I argue that these hostilities are unwarranted,

and that they have been passed to us in the form of a persistent inability to

appreciate the critical features of Dewey’s pragmatism. Through an investigation

of the philosophical underpinnings of Dewey’s pragmatism, I hope to show

that Dewey’s democratic commitments to the transformatory potential of lived

experience, to a reconstructed conception of individualism, and to the cultivation

of reflective social intelligence might be viewed as the basis of a critical

theory worthy of greater attention and appreciation. Moreover, I hope that this

effort will open avenues of inquiry into what might be called a model of ‘‘critical

pragmatism.’’

Polity (2006) 38, 519–542. doi:10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300067

Keywords Dewey; pragmatism; critical theory

Alison Kadlec is a Senior Research Associate at the nonprofit public interest/

public engagement research organization Public Agenda in New York City. She is

the author of a book on Dewey’s Critical Pragmatism to be published by Lexington

Books, a division of Rowman and Littlefield. The author can be reached at

www.publicagenda.org.

Polity . Volume 38, Number 4 . October 2006

r 2006 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/06 $30.00www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

‘‘In dethroning our absolutes, we must take care not to exile our imperatives,

for after all, we live by them.’’

—Alain Locke1

This paper joins a broad discussion of the relationship between John Dewey’s

pragmatism and the tradition of critical theory.2 In general terms, the historical

relationship between pragmatism and critical theory is one in which the

antifoundational and practice-oriented dimensions of pragmatism appear to exist

in tension, if not outright conflict, with the emancipatory commitments of critical

theory’s neo-Marxist legacy. While Deweyan pragmatism is most often understood

in its deliberative, experimental, open-ended, and contextual dimensions, little

attention has been paid to the critical dimensions of Dewey’s thought. In what

follows, I take initial steps in recovering the critical features of Dewey’s

pragmatism by developing an analysis along two lines. First, I sketch the general

contours of the relationship between pragmatism and critical theory in order to

account for and unpack the long-standing hostility of critical theorists toward

pragmatism. Second, I argue that these hostilities are unwarranted, and that they

have been passed to us in the form of a persistent inability of critical theorists to

appreciate the more radical features of Dewey’s pragmatism. In contrast to the

prevailing characterizations of pragmatism, I argue that the philosophical

underpinnings of Dewey’s pragmatism form the core of an enterprise which is

both antifoundational and critical. Moreover, I hope that this effort will open

avenues of inquiry into what might be called a model of ‘‘critical pragmatism.’’3

1. Alain Locke, ‘‘Values and Imperatives,’’ in The Philosophy of Alain Locke, ed. Leonard Harris

(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1935).

2. It is certainly because of Jurgen Habermas’s attraction to American pragmatism, particularly that

of Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead, that interest in the relationship between the two

traditions has emerged in recent years. See Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Bookman, and Katherine Kemp, ed.,

Habermas and Pragmatism (London: Routledge Press, 2002).

3. Although Dewey himself never used the phrase ‘‘critical pragmatism,’’ chap. 10 of Experience and

Nature (LW1: 295–326) is dedicated to delineating the relationship between ‘‘existence, value, and

criticism.’’ In this chapter, Dewey argues that criticism begins as reflective analysis, which in turn forms

the basis of philosophy. The argument is rich and complex and, though Experience and Nature is not the

subject of my effort here, deep engagement with this work, along with The Quest for Certainty (LW4)

would be required for any comprehensive treatment of the critical dimensions of Dewey’s pragmatism.

The actual phrase ‘‘critical pragmatism’’ appears at least as early as 1935 in Alain Locke’s pragmatic

theory of valuation. In the context of Locke’s work, the idea of a critical pragmatism was supposed to

undergird the development of cultural pluralism. Although Locke’s work has received scant attention,

it should be noted that much of his work in the context of the Harlem Renaissance was grounded

in his reading of Dewey, and his having studied with James. See Johnny Washington, Alain Locke and

Philosophy: A Quest for Cultural Pluralism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). More recently, however,

the idea of a critical pragmatism as well as a pragmatist critical theory has begun to receive new

attention. See Dmitir Shalin, ‘‘Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge,’’ American Journal of

Sociology 98 (September 1992); Steven K. White, The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1995); James Farr, ‘‘John Dewey and American Political Science,’’ American

520 CRITICAL PRAGMATISM

In an article for the new Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, Stephen

K. White becomes the most recent contributor to the burgeoning field of inquiry

into the relationship between pragmatism and critical theory. White argues that,

if appropriately revised, the early critical theory of the Frankfurt School provides

a sound philosophical basis for a critical social science. This revision proceeds

in two directions; Habermas’s model of ‘‘communicative rationality’’ is an internal

source, while the deliberative properties of pragmatism serve as an external

source for this productive revision of critical theory. As a point of departure,

I begin with White’s claim that pragmatism does not, in and of itself, contain

the substance required to count among the legitimate approaches to social

science. According to White, while pragmatism may help to revitalize critical

theory, it does not constitute a coherent tradition of social criticism. As a social

philosophy based on multiplicity and contingency, pragmatism is merely an

‘‘ethos’’ containing ‘‘some minimal direction and sensibility.’’4

This ethos, says White, requires the fortification of a more forcefully normative

research tradition in order to gain the ‘‘necessary substance to stand as

an adequate approach.’’5 Because pragmatism is ‘‘problem-driven,’’ it has, since

its resurrection by Richard Rorty in the late 1970s, been consistently deployed

in ways that are ‘‘decidedly unsuspicious about structures of power.’’6 For White,

this apparent blindness to issues of power seems a natural accompaniment

to the antifoundational, associational, and perspectival ethos of pragmatism.

In short, pragmatism cannot be viewed as a critical tradition because one

cannot adopt an antifoundational stance and still cultivate a guiding focus on

power relations and structures of inequality. Although I agree with White that

pragmatism benefits enormously from being placed in dialogic relation with

critical theory, I argue that there is another way to frame the political relevance

of this dialogue.

Despite the growing interest in the relationship between pragmatism and

critical theory, remarkably scant attention has been paid to the historical

dimensions of this relationship. Although Dewey never explicitly discussed the

work of critical theorists, there exists a long history of hostility toward pragmatism

Journal of Political Science 43 (April 1999); and ‘‘Engels, Dewey, and Marxism in America,’’ in Engels After

Marx, ed. Manfred Steger and Terrell Carver (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,

1999). All references to Dewey, with the exception of Democracy and Education are to the collected

works, published in three sets. The Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL:

Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1972). The Early Works, 1882–1889 (EW, 5 volumes); The Middle

Works, 1899–1824 (MW, 15 volumes); The Later Works, 1925-1953 (LW, 17 volumes).

4. White, Cambridge Companion, 314.

5. White, Cambridge Companion, 314.

6. It is generally accepted that with the 1979 publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty

single-handedly revived interest in Dewey by arguing that along with Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Dewey

‘‘is one of the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century,’’ in Richard Rorty, Philosophy

and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 5.

Alison Kadlec 521

on the part of critical theorists and their predecessors. Beginning with Gramsci

and extending through the Frankfurt School, there has long been a perceived

affinity between pragmatism and positivism, which forms the core of critical

neo-Marxist rejections of pragmatism.7 I argue that there is little hope of

fully appreciating the critical dimensions of Dewey’s pragmatism without first

understanding the consequences that have followed from the specious

association of pragmatism and positivism. Specifically, by erroneously equating

Dewey’s celebration of lived experience and a scientific worldview with a vulgar

glorification of all things given, the early critical theorists shut off access to an

innovative and deeply critical component of Deweyan pragmatism.8

In his well-known summary of the basic principles of critical theory, Raymond

Geuss says, ‘‘critical theories have special standing as guides for human action’’

because (1) they aim at producing enlightened individuals capable of identifying

their own real interests; (2) they are inherently emancipatory, particularly in their

attention to the ways humans unwittingly participate in creating the conditions

for their own oppression; and (3) their ‘‘reflective’’ epistemological stance stands

in contrast to the ‘‘objectifying’’ epistemology of the natural sciences.9 Although

it is not my purpose to demonstrate definitively that Dewey’s pragmatism is an

‘‘authentic’’ critical theory, my approach here is aimed at helping us rethink the

perceived epistemological variance between critical theory and pragmatism.

Through an investigation of the philosophical underpinnings of Dewey’s

pragmatism, I hope to show that Dewey’s epistemological commitment to the

transformatory potential of lived experience, to ‘‘growth as the only moral end,’’

and to the cultivation of reflective social intelligence might be viewed as the basis

of a critical theory worthy of greater attention and appreciation. My historical

reconstruction is, in other words, aimed at narrowing the epistemological gap

7. For a related discussion. see Chaps. 3 and 4 of Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1993), 79–125.

8. It is important to make clear from the outset that ‘‘experience’’ connotes a very specific, although

rather complicated, constellation of ideas. Although he explored many different kinds of experience

(e.g. aesthetic experience, cognitive experience, and religious experience), there are red threads that

run throughout his multifarious use of the term. Most simply, ‘‘experience’’ in Dewey’s lexicon means two

specific things. First, in contrast to the traditional conception of experience as a matter of individual

consciousness, Dewey’s notion of experience is intersubjective, communicative, and social. As Dewey

says, ‘‘Experience is no slipping along in a path fixed by inner consciousness. Private consciousness is an

incidental outcome of experience of a vital objective sort; it is not its source.’’ Second, experience is

a matter of ‘‘enduring’’ and ‘‘undergoing’’ the consequences of our actions, and is therefore best

understood as an ongoing process. Taken together, these ideas form the basis of a powerful resource for

critical reflection and social transformation. In Dewey’s social philosophy, lived experience is a tool for

meaningful democratic struggle to the extent that it consists of a critical and forward-thinking perception

of the private and shared consequences of our actions. See Dewey’s ‘‘The Need for a Recovery of

Philosophy,’’ MW10.

9. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–2.


between the commitments of critical theorists and the antifoundational

celebration of science that undergirds Dewey’s pragmatism.

After tracing the historical dimensions of the relationship between pragmatism

and critical theory, I will return to Dewey’s own understanding of the critical

purpose of philosophy and social inquiry. Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) is an

ideal locus for this investigation for both historical and practical reasons. The

broad historical sweep of the work makes it an excellent introduction to Dewey’s

pragmatism in a broad context.10 Aside from the fact that Reconstruction in

Philosophy is one of Dewey’s most historically perspicuous and philosophically

focused works, it also happens to be the repository of ideas subjected to the most

scathing attack by the Frankfurt School theorists.11 As the explicit subject of

Max Horkheimer’s assault on pragmatism in Eclipse of Reason (1947), Dewey’s

understanding of ‘‘reconstruction’’ must be defended as an intrinsically critical

concept against Horkheimer’s identification of pragmatism with vulgar positivism.12

For Dewey, reconstruction is the name given to the work we do when we apply

creative intelligence to rethinking and readjusting our principles and practices.

In Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey engages in a historical analysis of the

development of Western philosophy in order to reconstruct its potential for

informing democratic struggle. Although Dewey was a great admirer of the Greek

contributions to philosophy, he argued that Plato and Aristotle were, each in his

own way, to blame for many of the persistent shortcomings of Western philosophy.13

Dewey’s reconstruction of philosophy focuses to a large extent on exposing and

dismantling the Ancient Greek bifurcation of reason and experience in order to

recover the power of everyday lived experience to fund critical reflection or reason.

This reconstruction, I argue, lends itself to misunderstanding because it is

grounded in Dewey’s unabashed admiration of science. By turning my attention

to the impact of Darwin on Dewey’s thought, I hope to demonstrate that Dewey’s

approach to science belies any sharp epistemological distinction that one might

be tempted to draw between genuine reflection and scientific inquiry. Moreover,

I argue that Dewey’s intersubjective and dynamic conception of experience is

10. Although Reconstruction in Philosophy is a relatively short book, Dewey essentially surveys the

history of Western philosophy from the Ancients to the Enlightenment. These broad strokes are helpful in

creating a macrocosmic picture of his general approach to pragmatism in philosophical terms. All

references to Reconstruction in Philosophy are found in Middle Works (MW12).

11. Horkheimer’s attack is grounded in his creative reading of Dewey’s 1917 reflections in ‘‘A

Recovery in Philosophy,’’ the short essay which prefigures the themes developed in Reconstruction in

Philosophy (MW10).

12. For an excellent discussion of Horkheimer’s conflating of positivism and pragmatism, see Hans

Joas, ‘‘An Underestimated Alternative: America and the Limits of Critical Theory,’’ in Pragmatism and

Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 79–93.

13. In addition to Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey’s most sustained discussions of classical

philosophy are located in The Quest for Certainty (LW4) and the shorter ‘‘The ‘Socratic Dialogues’ of

Plato’’ (LW2).

Alison Kadlec 523

itself a critical construct that can be deployed in the service of meaningful social

struggle.

Realizing the potential of everyday experience as a definitive source of critical

reflection and democratic struggle requires a reconstruction of the notion of

‘‘individualism’’ that Dewey’s idea of ‘‘growth’’ makes possible.14 Although lived

experience is, in and of itself, not necessarily a resource for critical reflection,

Dewey argues that the critical potential of experience can and must be tapped if

we are to mount an effective challenge to entrenched interests and actualize our

democratic commitments to liberty and equality of opportunity. This realization

of potential, however, first requires a dedication to reconstructing our under-

standing of individualism.15 Therefore, in the last section here, I turn to

Individualism Old and New (1929) and argue that Dewey advances a profoundly

critical notion of individualism that is based on his unique conceptions of

experience, growth, and social intelligence. In order to pave the way for an

examination of this nexus between experience as critical reflection, growth as

reconstructed individualism, and social intelligence as the fodder for democratic

struggle as key components of Dewey’s critical pragmatism, I begin here by

tracing key historical dimensions of the relationship between critical theory and

pragmatism. As Hans Joas has noted, this history is one of ‘‘misunderstandings,

deliberate distortions, and well-meaning incomprehension.’’16

Pragmatism and the Politics of Positivism: from Gramscito the Frankfurt School

The early critical theory of the Frankfurt School may be viewed as the second

generation of critical neo-Marxism, a strain of Marxist thought that has its direct

14. I place these words in quotes because they are complex ideas that Dewey characteristically

defines against the grain of ordinary usage.

15. It should be noted that my focus here on lived experience and reconstructed individualism,

while sufficiently robust for my purposes, only captures two aspects of a far more comprehensive,

complex, and expansive system that comprises Dewey’s philosophical worldview. For a more complete

understanding of this larger framework, one must engage a number of works Dewey produced in the

1920s, including, in addition to Reconstruction in Philosophy, both Experience and Nature (LW1) and The

Quest for Certainty (LW4).

16. Although there is not a great deal of literature on this subject, Hans Joas’s article on the

relationship between German thought and American pragmatism in Pragmatism and Social Theory has

cleared the ground for my approach. Although my focus here is quite distinct from Joas’s, there are two

notable commonalities: First, like Joas’s, my discussion is aimed at illuminating the persistently

overlooked theoretical common ground shared by critical theory and pragmatism. More specifically,

both Joas and I discuss the particular impact of Horkheimer’s rejection of pragmatism in The Eclipse of

Reason. Although we take different approaches, and therefore cover quite distinct terrain, Joas’s

contributions form an important backdrop for the specific trajectory I trace here. See Hans Joas,

‘‘American Pragmatism and German Thought: A History of Misunderstandings,’’ in his Pragmatism and

Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 94–121.


antecedents in the work of, among others, Gramsci.17 From Gramsci, the early

Frankfurt School theorists inherited the kernel of their hostility toward

pragmatism. It is within his construction of the ‘‘philosophy of praxis’’ that

Gramsci first takes aim at pragmatism, thus setting the stage for the subsequent

interpretations of pragmatism as a crude apology for the status quo.

For Gramsci, philosophy should be viewed as a social activity in which all

people are implicitly engaged. ‘‘All men are philosophers,’’ he argues, because in

‘‘even the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in

‘language,’ there is contained a specific conception of the world.’’ Since we are

in fact always living some conception of the world, the question becomes, ‘‘is it

better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the

external environment . . . or, on the other hand, is it better to work out

consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, take

an active part in the creation of the history of the world?’’18 Because one’s

conception of the world is a response to certain specific problems posed by life

as we experience it, the goal of the philosophy of praxis is to dissociate these

problems from the hegemonic realm of ‘‘common sense,’’ and subject them

instead to the critico-practical activity of philosophy properly conceived. Gramsci

cautions that the critico-practical nature of the philosophy of praxis must not be

confused with the practical spirit of pragmatism, although he finds this spirit

praiseworthy. In short, it is in contrast to the merely practical approach of

pragmatism that Gramsci advances his properly practical understanding of

philosophy as political action.19

17. In addition to Gramsci, Lukacs and Korsch were the most notable figures who shared in the

revival of German idealism at this time. Although Korsch and Lukacs made significant contributions in

the struggles against determinist and positivist interpretations of historical materialism, it was Gramsci’s

‘‘philosophy of praxis’’ that most fully embodied the aims of this first phase of critical Marxism. For

discussions of the theoretical and political problems plaguing both Lukacs’s and Korsch’s careers as

critical Marxists, see Martin Jay’s classic Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1973), and Andrew Arato, ‘‘Political Sociology and the Critique of Politics,’’ in The Essential

Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).

18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey

Nowell (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 321.

19. This is perhaps the area in which Gramsci’s misunderstanding of pragmatism is at its most acute,

because his understanding of common sense is deeply akin to pragmatic treatments of the idea of

‘‘habit.’’ For example, Gramsci’s understanding of common sense as a ‘‘collective noun’’ is not unlike

William James understanding of ‘‘habit’’ as the ‘‘enormous fly-wheel of society.’’ Both ideas denote those

thought patterns that allow for the continual reproduction of existing values and institutions in the

absence of critical reflection. As a consequence, Gramsci’s contrasting concept of ‘‘good sense’’ is very

similar to Dewey’s reconstructed understanding of ‘‘habits’’ as the flexible patterns of thought and action

generated according to the sorts of critical ruminations that work to continually undo ‘‘common sense’’

in the Gramscian sense of the word. For James’s discussion of habit, see the chapter entitled ‘‘Habit’’ in

The Principles of Psychology, The Works of William James,19 volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1975–1988), 1890. For Gramsci’s discussion of common sense, see Prison Notebooks, 325–35.

Alison Kadlec 525

In order to understand the shortcomings of pragmatism, says Gramsci, one

must take into account the Anglo-Saxon cultural and historical context from

which it emerged. Although Gramsci argues that philosophy must be understood

as a political enterprise, he finds the pragmatist approach to be steeped in

a tradition of vulgar utilitarianism.20 The pragmatists’ focus on the political

dimensions of everyday experience is, for Gramsci, correct but insufficiently

mediated by critical reflection. While the great virtue of pragmatism is precisely

its understanding of human agency as something developed through social

interaction, this relationship between experience and agency is too narrowly

conceived.21 Quoting an Italian translation of William James’s ‘‘The Variety of

Religious Experience,’’ Gramsci argues that pragmatists correctly identify the

importance of human agency, but fail to tie this agency to criticism.22 Therefore,

pragmatists are unable to identify hegemonic structures at work in the generation

of common sense and instead ‘‘judge immediate reality, often at the most vulgar

level.’’23 In contrast, the continental tradition is steeped in a desire to ‘‘raise this

existing cultural level’’ and has, as a result, produced more genuinely ‘‘practical’’

thinkers by virtue of their philosophical depth.

Therefore, argues Gramsci, whereas ‘‘Hegel can be considered the theoretical

precursor of the democratic revolutions of the nineteenth century, the

pragmatists, at the most, have contributed to the creation of the Rotary Club

movement and to the justification of conservative and reactionary movements.’’24

Although Gramsci does not directly tie his criticisms of pragmatism to his fleeting

discussions of positivism, the relationship between the two is implicitly

established in his argument that pragmatism is a philosophy best suited to

buttressing the status quo.25 Because Gramsci’s attack on positivism was aimed at

the Orthodox Marxist approaches to scientism in the late 1920s, a more thorough

20. It should be noted that this criticism of pragmatism is alive and well today. See Christopher

Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, (New York: Norton, 1991); and John Patrick

Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994).

21. The distinction Gramsci makes between the Factory Council Movement and the struggle of labor

unions best captures his disdain for pragmatism. According to Gramsci, labor unions cannot effect real

social change because they treat the worker as a mere wage earner. In contrast, Factory Councils treat

workers as members of a productive community, and are therefore able to cultivate a proper relationship

between organic and traditional intellectuals in the factory itself. Whereas labor unions can only

marginally improve existing conditions in the factory, the Council Movement is about to reconstruct the

factory as the nucleus of the future proletarian state. For Gramsci, pragmatists can only form labor

unions, while the philosophy of praxis is aimed at fomenting the more properly revolutionary Council

Movements.

22. There are no references to Dewey or Peirce in The Prison Notebooks, and so it is unclear whether

or not Gramsci read either.

23. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 372.

24. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 373.

25. Both positivism and pragmatism, according to Gramsci, are blindly infatuated with anything

immediately given, thus they are natural allies.


conflation of positivism and pragmatism had to await the Frankfurt School’s

emigration to the U.S. in the 1930s. While nearly all of the early critical theorists

took aim at pragmatism at one point or another, it is particularly in the work

of Max Horkheimer that the most devastating misappropriations of Dewey’s

pragmatism were developed and situated firmly within the tradition of critical

theory.26

From Gramsci to Horkheimer: Pragmatism Reviled

In his now-classic history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay notes that a

significant element of the Frankfurt School theorists’ hostility toward American

pragmatism may be traced to the comparatively warmer reception the Vienna

Circle was given in the U.S. during the period of their common emigration.27

Richard Bernstein also notes that while logical positivism did not take deep hold

in America, a ‘‘positivist temper and the legacy of logical empiricism did flourish.’’

The ascension of analytic philosophy underscored those divisions between

American and Continental philosophy that Gramsci had noted two decades

earlier and there emerged at this time, particularly in figures such as W.V.O. Quine,

expressions of natural affinities between positivism and pragmatism.28 In his

earlier assaults on logical positivism, Horkheimer argued that the critically

inspired and dynamic elements of empiricism had been completely undermined

by the positivist ‘‘abdication of reflection,’’ which resulted in the fetishization

of ‘‘facts’’ given immediately in the existing order. Although there is nothing

particularly surprising or novel about this attack on positivism, Horkheimer’s

pointed and sustained attack on pragmatism must be understood in the context

of this critical rejection of positivism.

As the locus of these connections, Horkheimer’s 1947 Eclipse of Reason

represents his most sustained attempt to recast pragmatism as nothing more than

the philosophical residue of positivism. Eclipse of Reason embodies a remarkably

clear argument, developed in large part as an explicit attack on Dewey’s

particular brand of pragmatism. The work traces the decline of reason as an

emancipatory human faculty grounded in objectivity, and the resulting

ascendancy of positivism with its narrowly quantitative approach to reason. For

my purposes, this is perhaps the clearest example of the Frankfurt School’s

conflation of positivism with pragmatism as a philosophical approach. In early

26. It is not clear whether or not Gramsci read Dewey, but Horkheimer certainly did. For similar

attacks on pragmatism, see Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941) and

One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

27. Martin Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 297.

28. Richard Bernstein, ‘‘Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds,’’ reprinted in

Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. and intro. Louis Menand (New York: Vintage, 1997), 391.

Alison Kadlec 527

modern thought, argues Horkheimer, the sort of empiricism advanced by John

Locke had carried with it a conception of reason grounded in critical

discernment and reflection. However, with the rise of scientific rationality, reason

was severed from the higher claims of objective truth and was reduced instead

to the exclusive service of subjective means/ends calculations.29

According to Horkheimer, the birth of pragmatism cannot be understood

apart from the ascendancy of positivism: ‘‘Pragmatism has from its beginnings

implicitly justified the current substitution of the logic of probability for that of

truth. To this kind of philosophy prediction is the essence not only of calculation

but of all thinking as such.’’ Whereas reason had once furnished us with the ability

to challenge existing structures of domination, be they authoritarian religions or

feudal economic relations, the ascendancy of positivism reduced the scope of

philosophical reflection to the anemic offerings of pragmatism. For Horkheimer,

While philosophy in its objectivist stage sought to be the agency that brought

human conduct, including scientific undertakings, to a final understanding of

its own reason and justice, pragmatism tries to retranslate any understanding

into mere conduct. Its ambition is to be itself nothing else but practical

activity, as distinct from theoretical insight, which, according to pragmatistic

teachings, is either only a name for physical events or just meaningless.

In other words, in exiling objective reason, pragmatism is capable of merely

providing the calculations by which the existing order may be legitimized. For

Horkheimer, pragmatism not only lacks ‘‘philosophical pedigree,’’ but it is also

tantamount to a philosophical apology for all things given. Although Horkheimer

refers to James and Peirce, it is Dewey who represents the greatest obstacle to

the recovery of critical reflection.30

As the progenitor of the ‘‘most radical and consistent brand of pragmatism,’’

Dewey represents the clearest nexus of positivism and pragmatism, according

to Horkheimer. Given his ardor for the natural sciences, Dewey is the pragmatist

responsible for the final reduction of human experience to the scientific

experiment. Whereas reason had once aimed to overshoot existing structures,

thus allowing us to imagine a better possible world, pragmatism can only

evaluate existing reality according to its capacities for efficiency, expediency, and

predictability. For Horkheimer, Dewey’s positivist call for the unity of sciences ‘‘is

the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of

human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on

the conveyer belt, or after the rationalized front office.’’31 As philosophy is drained

29. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum Press, 1947), 5.

30. Horkheimer, Eclipse, 48, 71.

31. Horkheimer, Eclipse, 50.


of critical purpose, most notably historical sense and self-reflection, reason

is necessarily and hopelessly debased. Pragmatism represents, in short, the

philosophical propagation of all modern forms of domination that result from this

decline of reason. In the absence of historical perspective and self-awareness,

individual pragmatists are ‘‘liberal, tolerant, optimistic, and quite unable to deal

with the cultural debacle of our days,’’ while pragmatism, as a philosophy,

‘‘reflects with an almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business

culture.’’32

Horkheimer’s argument in Eclipse of Reason is an excellent representation

of the hostilities of the early critical theorists toward pragmatism, and captures

some enduring features of these hostilities as they have filtered through time

to the present. Although the strict association of pragmatism with positivism

began to decline with Rorty’s recovery of pragmatism in the late 1970s,

the themes celebrated in this recovery underscore the view of pragmatism

as a thin philosophy of antifoundational bourgeois liberalism. In a sense, Rorty’s

celebration of Dewey mirrors Horkheimer’s rejections; whereas Horkheimer

associates pragmatic antifoundationalism with a flimsy apology for all things

given, Rorty associates pragmatic antifoundationalism with a blessed liberation

from all things dogmatic. Despite the fact that Rorty is an undeniable back-

ground figure in any discussion of Dewey, what is important for my purposes is to

hold up Horkheimer’s rejection of pragmatism against Dewey’s own account of

the philosophic meaning and nature of pragmatism. In doing so, it becomes

easier to understand that the early critical theorists’ misrepresentations were

passed to their intellectual heirs. Because my specific concern here is with

Horkheimer’s view of pragmatism as a philosophy that jettisons reason and

reflection, there is no better place to turn than to Dewey’s critical intellectual

history of the relationship between reason and experience in Reconstruction in

Philosophy.33

Reconstructing Philosophy: Reuniting Reason andExperience

Beginning as a series of lectures given in Japan in 1919, and prefigured in

his introduction to Essays in Experimental Logic in 1917, the text that later

32. Horkheimer, Eclipse, 85.

33. It is interesting to note that Reconstruction in Philosophy was the text that first attracted the young

Marxist, Sidney Hook, to pragmatism. Hook described Reconstruction in Philosophy as ‘‘a brilliant

application of the principles of historical materialism,’’ and argued that Dewey, although he did not

consider himself a Marxist, ‘‘tried to show in detail how social stratification and class struggles got

expressed in the metaphysical dualisms of the time. . . .’’ See Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth

Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 81.

Alison Kadlec 529

became Reconstruction in Philosophy signifies the most public pronouncement

of a set of ideas that Dewey began developing in the 1880s and 1890s.34 These

ideas emerged in the context of Dewey’s larger efforts to trace what he

viewed as a noxious strain in Western philosophy, a strain which had afflicted

philosophy with latent but persistent antidemocratic tendencies35 Dewey’s

intellectual history of Western philosophy yielded a narrative that Robert

Westbrook aptly summarizes as ‘‘the story of an inevitably unsuccessful pursuit

by philosophers of a therapeutic quest for absolutely certain knowledge of

truth, goodness, and beauty in an unavoidably contingent world.’’36 Although

Dewey admired the Greeks, he argued that Plato and Aristotle, each in his

own way, ‘‘translated into rational form the doctrine of escape from the

vicissitudes of existence by means of measures which do not demand an active

coping with conditions.’’37 The deleterious consequences of this escapism, says

Dewey, must be understood if we are to reconstruct philosophy for democratic

purposes.

In his introduction to Reconstruction in Philosophy, published some 25 years

after the original work, Dewey clarified the key point of his historical approach to

philosophy; contemporary society has inherited from classical philosophy a set of

dualisms that must be exposed and dismantled if we are to make real progress

toward improving the human condition in an age of industrialization and world

war. Dewey undertakes the task of exposing what he sees as the unfortunate

consequences of the bifurcation of reason from experience in the work of the

classical philosophers. He argues that classical philosophers, in seeking to

preserve the threatened beliefs of a fading tradition, attempted to cast their own

interests as ultimate truths. In attempting to anchor traditional forms of authority

under conditions of social flux, the Ancients demanded a normative and final

distinction between Truth-yielding Reason and mere experience. Reason, ‘‘which

in its metaphysical rendering became the world of the highest and ultimate

reality,’’ was thus placed in a position to debase, subjugate, and thereby discipline

the other ‘‘ordinary empirical’’ realm of everyday experience. The result was that

philosophy, from the classical age forward, ‘‘has arrogated to itself the office

34. See ‘‘Ethics and Physical Science’’ (EW1), and ‘‘Reconstruction’’ (EW4).

35. This effort to deploy historical investigation in exposing obstacles to democracy began quite

early in Dewey’s career and culminated in The Quest for Certainty (LW4).

36. Westbrook, John Dewey, 348.

37. The Quest for Certainty (LW4: 20). Dewey’s appreciation of classical Greek philosophy owed

a great deal to the early influence of G.S. Morris and the later influence of F.J.E. Woodbridge. In addition

to The Quest for Certainty and Reconstruction and Philosophy, see Dewey’s ‘‘The ‘Socratic Dialogues’ of

Plato’’ (LW2: 124–40). For an excellent discussion of Dewey’s complex ambivalence toward Aristotle and

Plato, and his subsequent appraisal of classical philosophy at the start of the 1920s, see Westbrook, John

Dewey, 347–61.


of demonstrating the existence of a transcendent, absolute or inner reality and

of revealing to man the nature and features of this ultimate and higher reality.’’38

In turn, the everyday lived experience has been relegated to the lowly and

unenlightening position of mere experience and cannot, therefore, be a viewed

as a legitimate or authoritative resource for critical reflection.

Dewey argues that the divarication of reason and experience is especially

troubling because it derived in part from a distortion that served to mask

particular entrenched interests. Moreover, the crimes of the Ancients exceed their

specific context because historical perspective reveals that this false dualism has

been passed to us in the form of a decidedly antidemocratic inability to give full

credit to the role of experience in the exercise of reason as a critical faculty.39

Alan Ryan, in his excellent treatment of Dewey’s ambivalence toward Plato and

Artistotle, emphasizes the extent to which class interests figured into Dewey’s

indictment of dualistic thinking. Dewey was aware, says Ryan, that ‘‘a society in

which the grinding hard work was done by slaves, or by a lower class excluded

from politics, was always in danger of associating thinking with high status and

doing with low status and thus of projecting its own snobberies into the universe

and receiving them back as metaphysics.’’40 As the classical philosophers debased

lived experience, the power to criticize existing institutions and arrangements

was essentially taken out of the realm of ordinary people’s lives, while those who

had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo had recourse to the

‘‘transcendent and ultimate realm’’ to buttress their authority.41 The implication of

this prioritizing split is that Reason became a remote realm, accessible only to the

elite few, while the more properly democratic realm of lived experience was

38. Dewey, Reconstruction, 91–92.

39. Although I take up Dewey’s notion of ‘‘experience’’ in more detail in subsequent sections, it is

important to clarify here that Dewey’s vibrant and transformatory view of experience stands in stark

contrast to the Ancient Greek view of experience as the ordinary and unreflective realm in which we

privately absorb the given stimulus of everyday life. Likewise, as an intersubjective, communicative, and

social medium that is grounded in the back-and-forth movement between reflection and forward-

thinking perception of consequences, Dewey’s view is radically different from the positivist notion of

experience as mere sense-perception.

40. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton and

Company, 1995), 98. While any simplistic notion of ‘‘class struggle’’ would be regarded by Dewey as

coming dangerously close to generating yet another noxious dualism (‘‘oppressor’’/‘‘oppressed’’), it is

nonetheless true that he was deeply concerned with the ways in which failure to grasp the democratic

possibilities of experience plays a part in the discursive construction of iniquities. The most explicit and

concrete expression of this concern is found in Dewey’s discussions of education, and in his particular

struggle against a dual system of vocational education that gained momentum during the first decades of

the twentieth century. In this context, Dewey occasionally deployed the language of class struggle to

distinguish his social democratic view of education from the prevailing view of education. See

‘‘Education from a Social Perspective’’ (MW7: 113–27). Also see Chap. 19 of Democracy and Education

(MW9) for Dewey’s explicit discussion of the relationship between class oppression in Ancient Greece

and the inherited labor/leisure dualism undergirding the call for a dual system of vocational education.


Alison Kadlec 531

sapped of it power to inform or guide critical reflection. As the few made

themselves the sole guardians of truth, the many lost the footing from which

a challenge to dominant norms and practices might have been launched.

By exposing the interests at work in the construction of classical dualisms,

Dewey engages in a type of social criticism that is aimed both at exposing

fraudulent interests lurking beneath the surface in classical philosophy and at

producing the conditions for greater enlightenment among the inheritors of the

classical legacy. Using the traditional vernacular of critical theory, one could say

that Dewey’s intellectual history of philosophy is aimed at enabling agents to

distinguish between real and false interests. In other words, Dewey’s attempt to

expose the elitist interest in tradition-preservation at the core of the Ancients’

bifurcation of reason and experience is properly critical because it reveals the

‘‘mobilization of bias’’ and the disciplinary function involved in appeals to

ultimate Reason.42 By reconstructing the power of lived experience to inform

critical reflection, Dewey engages in a type of trenchant social criticism that is

akin to the emancipatory interest-oriented analyses of traditional critical

theorists. The crucial difference, however, is that it is an antifoundational

disposition that undergirds Dewey’s hostility toward dualistic constructs.

Although Dewey’s elevation of experience as a critical resource does not

necessarily mean that lived experience must or will serve progressive purposes,

it is precisely this potential that motivated Dewey’s pedagogical commitments

and political struggles throughout his life.

Arguing that the reason/experience split was passed to us in the form of

the leisure/labor and thinking/doing dichotomies, Dewey argues that a

democracy cannot thrive under such debilitating constructs. In fact, he says,

‘‘the price that democratic societies will have to pay for their continuing health

is the elimination of an oligarchy that attempts to monopolize the benefits

of intelligence and of the best methods for the profit of a few privileged

ones. . .’’43 Refusing to accept the dichotomies that pit reason against experience,

and thought against action, puts us on the right path in this battle, because a

reconstruction of experience is an integral component of democratic struggle. In

contrast to a narrowly conceived notion of experience as a matter of immediacy

or mere sense-perception, Dewey’s robust notion of experience is imbued with

critical social force. As the intersubjective, social, and communicative medium

from which knowledge springs, lived experience is both the source and the

42. I borrow the phrase ‘‘mobilization of bias’’ from Steven Lukes here to underscore the extent to

which Dewey’s analysis is grounded in his attention to power relations. While my discussion of the

Ancient Greeks’ use of power to buttress the status quo is aimed at exposing power relations, I do not

mean to imply any vulgar or simplistic or dualistic notion of ‘‘class struggle.’’ See Power: A Radical View

(London: Macmillan Press, 1974).

43. ‘‘Education From a Social Perspective’’ (MW7: 127).


product of reflective reason.44 Further, because experience is a back and forth

process of perceiving and adjusting to the consequences of our actions, it is ‘‘a

future implicated in a present’’ and therefore replete with experimental and

democratic possibilities. From this perspective, dismantling the dualisms that

protect what Dewey calls the ‘‘orthodox description of experience’’ is required in

order to reveal the democratic potential residing in a more dynamic and social

conception of experience. Not only is Dewey’s notion of experience ‘‘more

congenial to present conditions,’’ it is also a powerful resource for the

development of our capacities for free inquiry and critical reflection.45

Given Dewey’s democratic commitments, the question is how do we actualize

the critical potential of everyday experience and transform it into an active

reservoir for social change? Although Dewey was famously elusive when it came

to providing hard and fast answers, the most important clues may be found

in Dewey’s celebration of the scientific enterprise. Out of his persistent and

contentious admiration of science, Dewey developed a morally charged idea of

‘‘growth’’ that serves as the linchpin of his commitment to lived experience as

a repository for critical reflection. Moreover, it is from this unique conception

of ‘‘growth’’ as a moral imperative that Dewey undertakes a reconstruction

of ‘‘individualism’’ aimed at fulfilling the critical promise of experience for

democratic struggle. Dewey’s antifoundational enthusiasm for a scientific

worldview is the context in which this nexus of experience, growth, indivi-

dualism, social intelligence, and meaningful democratic struggle must be

understood. Therefore, it is only by turning to the role of science in Dewey’s

view of reconstruction that we may begin to trace the contours of this complex

matrix.46

Science and Reconstruction: Experience as Social, Dynamic,and Reflective

In Reconstruction in Philosophy science plays a crucial role in Dewey’s desire

to reconstruct the relationship between reason and experience, and if we look

closely at Dewey’s celebration of science we find that it is not of the sort that

Horkheimer maintains. Dewey’s enthusiasm for the scientific method is not

grounded in a positivistic desire for verification of objective facts or for prediction

and control, although he does maintain that science affords us greater control of

44. See Experience and Nature for Dewey’s discussion of the primacy of experience in the

development of knowledge (LW1:27–28).

45. ‘‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’’ (MW10: 8–9).

46. For an especially good discussion of the failures of positivism, see Chap. 10 of The Quest for

Certainty (LW4).

Alison Kadlec 533

the elements determining our condition. Nor is Dewey’s approach to science a

vulgar or reductionist glorification of all things given, as Horkheimer and Gramsci

would argue. For Dewey, science releases us from a fixed and static conception of

the world, and presents in its place a dynamic world that is always in-the-making,

always changing, ever open, and ‘‘so multiplex and far-reaching’’ that it cannot

be contained in any cramped metaphysical vision that sets Reason over and

above the world as it is experienced in everyday life. Horkheimer’s claim that

pragmatism cannot be understood apart from the advent of the scientific

revolution is absolutely correct. It is, however, the meaning of this relationship

that Horkheimer and a multitude of subsequent thinkers have misconstrued.

Although the intricacies of Dewey’s enthusiasm for science could, and does,

fill volumes, it is enough here to say that one key to understanding the role of

science in Dewey’s critical philosophy of pragmatism is located in the influence

of Darwin on Dewey’s thought.47 For example, Dewey’s short and remarkably

lucid ‘‘The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy’’ (1909) serves as an important

backdrop to many of the themes he developed a decade later in Reconstruction in

Philosophy. In particular, the idea of philosophy as a problem-centered enterprise,

the importance of change rather than permanence, the emphasis on

consequences rather than absolute Truths, and the celebration of process rather

than the search for final ends are all deftly touched upon in this article.

According to Dewey, the publication of On the Origin of Species performed the

timely and much needed service of ‘‘laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute

permanency’’ and, in doing so, opened the door for a transformation in ‘‘the logic

of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.’’48 In

short, the intellectual transformation effected by Darwinian thought represents

a shift in the sorts of questions we are able to find interesting; we are free to forgo

questions of who or what made the world, in favor of questions about what kind

of world it is and may become.49

47. The influence of Darwin’s work on Dewey was profound, and it has been either misunderstood

or merely overlooked. As Louis Menand notes, the world that Darwin described was one governed by

contingency, process, random chance, and openness, and it was out of this world that Dewey himself

grew and developed as a philosopher of ‘‘continued investigation, experiment, hermeneutic openness,

provisional conclusions, and social progress.’’ See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York:

Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001), 121; and Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2002), 253. It must also be noted that Dewey went to great lengths to

distinguish his holistic and progressive evolutionary perspective from those of vulgar social Darwinists

such as Herbert Spencer. For excellent treatments of the conceptual and moral poverty of Spencer’s

conception of ‘‘survival of the fittest’’, see Dewey’s ‘‘Ethics and Physical Science’’ (EW1) and ‘‘Evolution

and Ethics’’ (EW5).

48. ‘‘The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy’’ (MW4: 3).

49. This is akin to Foucault’s understanding of truth. As Paul Rabinow notes in his comparison of

Chomsky and Foucault, the latter is less interested in identifying the truth than in exploring what

functions are performed by truth claims. This shift from ‘‘what’’ to ‘‘how’’ is very much like the shift that

Dewey sees initiated by Darwin. See The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 12.


For the Greeks, human experience was confined to the realm of custom,

over and above which Reason had to stand as the ultimate redeemer. With

the scientific revolution, however, this relationship undergoes a peculiar

reversal; experience becomes a central focus of scientific inquiry, while ‘‘Reason

and its bodyguard of general notions is now the conservative mind-enslaving

factor.’’ As a consequence, appeals to universal Truth begin ‘‘to strike us as

remote, uninteresting and unimportant.’’ In other words, we are indebted to the

scientific revolution because its unfolding revealed that reason does not occupy

a realm apart from experience, and intelligence is not something possessed

once and for all. Instead, both reason and intelligence are aspects of a process,

a process that can only be comprehended in experience. Whereas Horkheimer

argues that this elevation of experience over abstract appeals to Reason

represents a crude justification of the status quo, Dewey argues the reverse.

In contrast to an experimental and readjusting intelligence, the old idea of

Reason originated in specific entrenched interests and has resulted in

irresponsible rigidity and negligent vanity.50 In letting go of absolutes, we do

not abandon our convictions or surrender our capacity for critical reflection.

Instead, says Dewey, ‘‘when the belief that knowledge is active and operative

takes hold of men, the ideal realm is no longer aloof and separate; it is rather that

collection of imagined possibilities that stimulates men to new efforts and

realizations.’’ Philosophically speaking, reuniting reason and experience does not

diminish the dignity of philosophy by knocking it from its speculative pedestal

and replacing it with gross utilitarianism. Rather, it elevates experience and

signifies that the prime function of philosophy is that of working toward realizing

the possibilities of experience as a social and dynamic medium for critical

reflection. From this perspective, Dewey’s approach to the relationship between

experience and reason has more in common with Gramsci’s philosophy of

praxis than with Bentham’s utilitarianism. In contrast to both Gramsci’s and

Horkheimer’s characterizations of pragmatism as vulgar utilitarianism, Dewey

argues that, ‘‘if utilitarianism did not actively promote the new economic

materialism, it had no means of combating it. In spite of its interest in a

thoroughly social aim, utilitarianism fostered a new class interest, that of the

capitalist property-owning interests.’’51

For Dewey, if we overlook the social functions involved in all enterprises of

knowing, then we lose the critical capacity to identify distortions in commu-

nication that serve specific antidemocratic interests.52 In other words, inquiry


51. Dewey, Reconstruction, 150.

52. See ‘‘The Inclusive Philosophical Idea’’ (LW3) for a great discussion of Dewey’s view of ‘‘the

social’’ as a linchpin for any effective critical philosophy. For Dewey, ‘‘the social’’ is a construct deployed

to capture the intersubjective and communicative dimensions of philosophy as a critical enterprise, and,

Alison Kadlec 535

loses its critical purpose and we lose the ability to identify the power at work

when particular interests masquerade as epistemological truths. Under these

conditions, the democratic potential of a socially conceived notion of experience

is eclipsed and, as a result, our capacity to develop the sorts of habits required for

the pursuit of democratic goals is effectively curtailed. In fact, says Dewey, ‘‘the

barriers to free inquiry are so many and so solid that mankind is to be

congratulated that the very act of investigation is capable of itself becoming

a delightful and absorbing pursuit.’’

Contrary to the views advanced by the early critical theorists, we are not

released from social obligations because we relinquish our ultimate, fixed, or

final standards of moral judgment. In fact, says Dewey, our obligation to battle all

barriers to freedom of inquiry and expression are only deepened because they

become a matter of addressing the real conditions of peoples’ lives. Like Gramsci,

Dewey breaks down the division between politics and philosophy by arguing that

the political responsibility to critically engage lived experience is itself a

philosophical matter. Moreover, it is the social purpose of philosophy that gives

pragmatism its normative meaning and moral force. Our social arrangements

and institutions should not be viewed as the means for obtaining things for

individuals. Instead, they are the ‘‘means of creating individuals,’’ and thus

individuality is itself ‘‘something to be wrought out’’ in social life.53 This view of

the individual is, I argue, profoundly critical and can only be understood in the

context of Dewey’s broader views on the relationship between ‘‘growth,’’ social

intelligence, and democracy.

Reconstructing Individualism: Growth and the CriticalPurpose of Philosophy

In Reconstruction in Philosophy, ‘‘growth’’ is the linchpin of Dewey’s democratic

commitments to lived experience. Dewey’s understanding of meaningful

democracy is intimately connected to his understanding of ‘‘growth’’ as the only

genuinely moral goal of any society. In declaring that growth is the only moral

end, Dewey characteristically avoids a substantive definition of the word, and this

refusal to pin a final meaning on his use of ‘‘growth’’ raises some troubling

questions: If growth is to be generally celebrated, does this mean that any sort of

growth is to be valued? If so, how are we to understand the varieties of growth

that are deleterious to individuals and society? For example, within the social

sciences, ‘‘growth’’ is often associated with unfettered capitalism or explosions

as such, it should not be confused with Arendt’s use of the term. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s Attack of the

Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).



in population, and this is to say nothing of the troubling connotations the word

‘‘growth’’ carries in the medical sciences. For Dewey, growth cannot be conflated

with any unspecified or generic conception of expansion. Growth is not to be

understood as expansion, unless that which is expanding the capacity for critical

inquiry, or in Dewey’s words ‘‘the method of intelligence.’’ Moreover, like the idea

of experience, growth implies a reciprocal relationship between the expansion of

social intelligence and the goods generated by these means. To grow, according

to Dewey, is both to increase an individual’s capacity for social intelligence

and to translate that capacity into the generation of concrete goods. In other

words, growth is simultaneously the goal and the process, the critical standard

and the product of social intelligence. Social intelligence, in turn, is a concept

that must be understood in the context of Dewey’s critical reconstruction of

individualism.

Dewey’s brief statements regarding the relationship between philosophy,

education, and democracy as put forth in Reconstruction in Philosophy help

to shed light on this idea of growth, as well as the critical status of experience

in pragmatism:

Government, business, art, religion, all social institutions have a meaning,

a purpose. That purpose is to set free and to develop the capacities of human

individuals without respect to race, sex, class or economic status. And this is

all one with saying that the test of their value is the extent to which they

educate every individual into the full stature of his possibility. Democracy has

many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the

supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall

be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of

society.54

Democracy, then, cannot be reduced to a set of institutional functions or abstract

visions of the state. Institutions must be evaluated according to their educative

function, and for Dewey this means that institutions must be judged according

to the sorts of individuals they cultivate. Although Dewey does not focus his

attention in Reconstruction in Philosophy on delineating the conditions for the

cultivation of individuals who are capable of critical social intelligence, he was

not blind to such matters. In fact, much of Dewey’s work in the 1920s and 1930s

was aimed at creating a picture of the sorts of habits required for a full release of

the critical potential of lived experience. In Individualism Old and New (1929),

Dewey argues explicitly for a reconstructed notion of individuality that is

consistent with his principle of growth as the expansion of the individual’s

capacity for free inquiry, social intelligence, and critical reflection. In this, and


Alison Kadlec 537

many other works of this period, Dewey argues that we have inherited from

an earlier epoch a conception of the individual which is not consonant with our

contemporary conditions, and the result of this inheritance is the perpetuation of

an undemocratic mindset and its attending institutions. The heart of the problem

is that individuals are wrongly conceptualized in isolation from one another,

and individualism is speciously conflated with atomistic and antagonistic

independence. Despite the fact that we live in a profoundly collective world,

our inherited image of the individual has created a contemporary situation

in which we are unable to perceive our shared interests or the consequences

of our collective existence. We are educated into a system that views individuals

as competitive and antagonistic, when in fact we live in a world of inescapable

interdependence. This dissonance has potentially disastrous consequences,

because the ongoing failure to apprehend the shared consequences of our

individual choices can become a mortal threat to our most deeply held

commitments to liberty and equality of opportunity.

For Dewey, the effects of this bankrupt conception of atomistic individualism

cascade through every level of society, revealing structures of domination and

distortions of communication all along the way. In being educated by a discourse

of rugged individualism which places the highest value on individual pecuniary

gain and competition, we are the manipulated products of a ‘‘mental and moral

corporateness for which history affords no parallel,’’ and ‘‘live exposed to the

greatest flood of mass suggestion that any people has ever experienced.’’55 The

result of this pecuniary individualism is a crushing conformity of public opinion

that cripples citizens’ abilities to identify, much less understand, real shared

interests and when those interests are being undermined. In the absence of an

ability to perceive the consequences of our collective existence, no meaningful

individualism can flourish, and no real democracy can be cultivated. In fact, ‘‘one

cannot imagine a bitterer comment on any professed individualism than that it

subordinated the only creative individuality—that of mind—to the perpetuation

of an unjust and morally impoverished regime of pecuniary gain.’’56 In bold

55. Although it is only in the later Liberalism and Social Action (LW11) that Dewey focuses explicitly

on the extent to which entrenched economic interests directly benefit from a perpetuation of this

fraudulent conception of the individual as an isolated, acquisitive entity, Individualism Old and New

(LW5) does represent the first step in that direction.

56. Dewey, Individualism Old and New, (LW5:59, 85). Dewey’s concern with the ‘‘subordination of

creative individuality’’ places him in the company of other thinkers, most notably J.S. Mill and Alexis de

Tocqueville who have been, each in his own way, preoccupied with the tendency in modern society

toward regimentation of thought and opinion. For Mill, this ‘‘despotism of custom is everywhere the

standing hindrance to human advancement,’’ and for Tocqueville, the power of public opinion in

America is such that it ‘‘brings immense weight to bear on every individual. It surrounds, directs, and

oppresses him.’’ J.S. Mill, On Liberty (London: Everyman’s Press, 1972), 138; Alexis de Tocqueville,

Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row), 643.


statements such as these, Dewey reveals the extent to which his vision of a vital

public and a meaningful democracy provides the tools for critical interrogation

of existing institutions. Just as contemporary critical theorists look beyond

vulgar materialism to instead focus on the discursive manipulation of interests,

Dewey argues, ‘‘the educative influence of economic and political institutions

is, in the last analysis, even more important than their immediate economic

consequences. The mental poverty that comes from one-sided distortion of mind

is ultimately more significant than poverty in material goods.’’57

The critical purchase of Dewey’s understanding of individuality here is located

in his hope for a new type of individualism that is communicative, imaginative,

and critical, rather than atomistic, acquisitive, and antagonistic. Reconstructing

our understanding of individualism is of paramount importance for Dewey,

because it is only through a conscious commitment to the cultivation of habits

of social intelligence that we will be able to reverse the antidemocratic tide.

Contrary to Gramsci’s, Horkhiemer’s, and now White’s claims that pragmatism

does not contain sufficient normative force because it fails to appeal to an

objective notion of ‘‘real interests,’’ Dewey responds that the development of

individuals who possess habits of critical intelligence and the capacity to engage

in shared inquiry and communication ‘‘are the only actual ways of universalizing

the moral law and end.’’58 For Dewey, if we do not undertake a pragmatic

reconstructing of philosophy, aimed at recovering lived experience as a socially

dynamic reservoir for critical reflection, we will be unable to understand, much

less expose, systemic patterns of injustice and inequality plaguing our past,

present, and foreseeable future. As it stands now, in the absence of such a

pragmatic reconstruction of philosophy,

The region of concrete difficulties where the assistance of intelligent method

for the tentative plans for experimentation is urgently needed is precisely

where intelligence fails to operate. In this region of the specific and the

concrete, men are thrown back upon the crudest empiricism, upon short-

sighted opportunism and the matching of brute forces.

For Dewey, the ‘‘growth’’ of individuals imbued with the habits of social

intelligence and critical reflection is itself a real interest. From this perspective,

Dewey’s lifelong commitment to improving the conditions of early childhood

education takes on greater political significance.

Releasing the critical potential of lived experience requires, first and foremost,

that we rethink the purpose and meaning of our educational practices. Because

democracy concerns far more than institutional mechanisms for Dewey,

57. Dewey, Individualism, 103.

58. Dewey, Reconstruction, 190, 197.

Alison Kadlec 539

education must also entail a great deal more than the formal schooling which

prepares us to occupy our proper and productive places in society. Education,

says Dewey, does not prepare us for anything, it is rather the process by which we

‘‘grow’’ and develop as self-directing human beings capable of recognizing the

consequences of our actions and, as a result, become capable of effecting

change toward the betterment of our collective existence. For Dewey, education

is ‘‘a process of living and not a preparation for future living’’ that receives its

moral content through its connection with social life. Dewey most clearly makes

the argument that proper education, as a matter of morality, can only take place

in a social context in his statement that,

Much of the present education fails because it neglects this fundamental

principle of the school as a form of community life. . . . I believe that moral

education centers about this conception of the school as a mode of social life,

that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets

through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and

thought.59

In other words, moral and ethical considerations are important only insofar

as they are connected to the continual growth and of social life, or associated

living. For Dewey, there is no individual morality apart from social context

and, therefore, education must be anchored by the principle that individual

intelligence is a process of social growth. Not only must we revamp the way we

treat childhood educational institutions, we must also provide the opportunities

for real growth of creative intelligence for all adults as well. By improving habits

of communication, we can rethink the meaning of individualism along more fully

democratic lines. Opening paths for this sort of reconstruction of individualism

can, in turn, help us realize the critical potential of lived experience as that which

funds creative social intelligence.

Conclusion

When Alain Locke warned in 1935 that, ‘‘we must take care not to exile our

imperatives, for after all, we live by them,’’ he went straight to the heart of the

problems that accompany any undertaking that might call itself ‘‘critical

pragmatism.’’ How is it that we can reject all absolutes and yet retain the

normative force required for anchoring our critical judgments? In short, how

might a philosophy of critical pragmatism be both pragmatic and critical? My



efforts here have been aimed at opening avenues of inquiry into this question

by attempting to reconstruct the critical features of Dewey’s pragmatism.

By focusing first on the historical dimensions of the relationship between

critical theory and pragmatism, I have attempted to demonstrate that a

persistent conflation of pragmatism and positivism, along with a foundational

rejection of science as vulgar reductionism, has served as an obstacle to

recovering Dewey’s pragmatism as a critical social theory. Second, by turning

to Dewey’s own historical approach in Reconstruction in Philosophy and

Individualism Old and New, I aimed to delineate the critical features of

Dewey’s approach to lived experience, growth, individualism, and social

intelligence. Although it has not been my intention here to show that Dewey’s

pragmatism is a definitive or ‘‘authentic’’ example of a critical theory, I hope

to have contributed to closing the epistemological gap between critical theory

and pragmatism.

Contrary to Gramsci’s spectacular misunderstanding of pragmatism as nothing

more than philosophical inspiration for Rotarians, and Horkheimer’s under-

standable though utterly inaccurate treatment of pragmatism as the philosophical

justification of positivism, Dewey’s emphases on growth and social intelligence

are grounded in a critical commitment to meaningful democracy. The

democratic values of free inquiry and genuine equality of opportunity to develop

individual capacities in the context of a community of shared interests are

nothing less than real interests. In turn, this critical commitment to these real

interests, I have argued, is made possible through Dewey’s antifoundational

rejection of dualistic constructs. In other words, Dewey’s emancipatory and

interest-oriented social theory is critical because, not in spite, of his anti-

foundationalism. For critical pragmatists such as Dewey, the point of reflective

inquiry is not to generate final principles, but rather to improve our capacity for

tapping into the critical potential of lived experience in a world defined by flux

and change. The political, social, and economic challenges we face require

that we arm ourselves not with fixed absolutes, but rather with a commitment

to open-ended and flexible inquiry aimed not at final consensus about our aims,

but rather at achieving a greater understanding of the consequences of our

practices and policies.

Critical pragmatism is instructive in its commitment to building thick

connections between individuals, groups, and disciplines for the purpose

of expanding understanding of our shared interests. We do not need absolutes

of any kind to critically interrogate the antidemocratic interests that are being

served by the perpetuation of an antagonistic and pecuniary conception of the

individual. Our very real interests in freedom of thought and action are obviously

not being served by a prevailing view of the individual that closes off any number

of possibilities for experiential and communicative creativity. A reconstructed

Alison Kadlec 541

notion of the relationship between individualism and democracy, consistent

with an enlightened conception of the experiential dimensions of social

intelligence, is itself the goal. However, the goal is not an end or a destination;

it is a process, and the stakes are enormously high. Regardless of the irreducible

plurality of our values and the ineradicable contingency of our condition,

Dewey helps us remember that ‘‘the only freedom that is of enduring importance

is the freedom of intelligence.’’


Documents

Reconstructing Dewey: The Philosophy of Critical …pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/siap/readings/kadlec_critical_prag.pdfReconstructing Dewey: The Philosophy of Critical Pragmatism Alison