The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 1, 1925 - 1953: 1925, Experience and Nature

Reading Experience And Nature

This past year, I have been studying the American philosopher John Dewey (1859 -- 1952), including his books "Democracy and Education" (1916), "Human Nature and Conduct" (1921) and "Experience and Education" (1938). This latter work relies heavily on Dewey's "Experience and Nature", published in 1925 and revised in 1929. Readers should be careful to use the 1929 version.

"Experience and Nature" is a formidable, daunting work, both in what it says and in the character of Dewey's prose. The book is undeniably a struggle. The work is part of Dewey's project of the reconstruction of philosophy. He expanded his philosophy of pragmatism to a philosophy he called empirical naturalism. His philosophy broadened to include, in reconstructed form, questions of metaphysics that he wanted to reject in some earlier works.

In the Preface, Dewey writes: "Modern science, modern industry and politics, have presented us with an immense amount of material foreign to, often inconsistent with, the most prized intellectual and moral heritage of the western world. This is the cause of our modern intellectual perplexities and confusions." Dewey attempts to show the source of these confusions in philosophical dualisms between, for example, the transcendent and the immanent, appearance and reality, subject and object, and mind and matter. His goal is to show the continuity between experience and nature rather than their separation. At the conclusion of the book's first chapter (rewritten in 1929) after strongly criticizing transcendental philosophies for the aspersions they allegedly cast on everyday experience and for discouraging a view that life "is or can be a fountain of cheer or happiness", Dewey says: "If what is written in these pages has no other result than creating and promoting a respect for concrete human experience and its potentialities, I shall be content."

Dewey shows historical and philosophical learning particularly from the ancient Greeks, from whom he learned much but also disagreed. He discusses the split between experience (subjectivity) and nature (objectivity) that characterized modern philosophy beginning with Descartes and tries to show how this split was based on what Dewey terms the "philosophic fallacy" of taking what is helpful as an instrument in understanding one part of expeience as a rule governing the whole. Dewey writes throughout to understand the role of intelligence and reason in nature and in human life. Philosophers had tended to reify Reason when nature and the scope of experience were much larger. Reason and intelligence are of cruicial importance for Dewey. They are instrumental in helping one work through a particular situation that presents itself rather than as omnipotent qualities somewhow separate from experience. Dewey is critical of substantialization and in seeing reality as composed of stable objects. He sees instead reality as a process and as a flow of change, quickly or slowly, through time. His process thinking is related to the thought of William James and Alfred North Whitehead, among others.

Over the course of the book, Dewey develops and applies his thought to a broad range of philosophical problems, beginning with philosophical method and proceeding through existence as "precarious and stable", the nature of teleology and purpose, language, knowledge, mind and body, and consciousness, and the centrality of art and imagination to human experience. He concludes that "the highest because most complete incorporation of natural forces and operations in experience is found in art." Throughout the work, Dewey considers the nature of philosophy as the love of wisdom without a particular subject matter of its own. He sees philosophy as a "generalized theory of criticism. Its ultimate value for life-experience is that it continuously provides instruments for the critiicism of these values -- whether of beliefs, institutions, actions, or products -- that are found in all aspects of experience." Criticism involves metaphysics or "the nature of the existential world in which we live" or "cognizance of the generic traits of existence" as discussed throughout "Experience and Nature". The reader new to the book should, I suggest, pay special attention to the Preface and to the opening and concluding chapters as a way of getting a sense of what Dewey is about.

This book is the subject of many interpretations and critiques, on whether Dewey makes good on his program of empirical naturalism, whether it is internally consistent, and whether he has adequately explained the nature of "experience" among other issues. It is an important, inspiring work of Anmerican philosophy which for a time fell into obscurity but which has become deservedly influential in more recent years. "Experience and Nature" is a book for readers with a passion for philosophical questions.

Robin Friedman