So today we're tackling a real giant of American
thought, John Dewey. A giant is absolutely the
right word. I mean, if you're preparing for a
meeting or just trying to get a handle on intellectual
history or, you know, just curious about how
our modern world even functions. You run into
his shadow. Exactly. How we learn, how we solve
problems as a society, how democracy is supposed
to actually work. His ideas are just everywhere.
And think about the time he was alive. Born in
1859, lives all the way to 1952. It's... Just
an incredible span. You're talking about the
aftermath of the Civil War through two world
wars and right into the atomic age. He saw arguably
the most intense transformation in American history.
And he wasn't just a bystander. He was, without
a doubt, the most prominent American scholar
of the entire first half of the 20th century.
Okay. And the sheer volume of his work is, well,
it's intimidating. It's staggering. It really
is. We're talking more than 700 articles and
something like 140 different journals. And that's
on top of... About 40 books. And the topics cover
everything. Epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics,
ethics, social theory, journalism, you name it.
So that brings us to our mission for you, the
listener, in this deep dive. His body of work
is immense, almost, you know, unwieldy. So our
goal is to go in and pull out those absolutely
crucial interconnected ideas that really defined
his legacy. We're trying to give you a solid
shortcut to understanding the philosopher. And
to do that, we have to start with the one thing
that ties it all together. The great overriding
theme. Because without it, you're right, his
work can feel really disparate. Like, what does
a theory on psychology have to do with a classroom
curriculum or the role of the press? But there
is a thread, and that thread was his profound...
I mean, truly lifelong dedication to democracy.
But not just democracy in the sense of voting
every few years. No, no, not at all. For him,
it was so much more. He saw it as being synonymous
with, and this is a quote, the one ultimate ethical
ideal of humanity. That's a powerful statement.
It's a mission statement. And he articulated
it as early as 1888. When he was still a young
professor at the University of Michigan, this
was his North Star from the very beginning. So
this wasn't just some political preference or
a side interest. This idea, this ethical ideal
of democracy, it informed everything. Everything.
Whether he was writing about a child's psychology
or the structure of civil society, it all came
back to this one goal. How do we create the conditions
for a fully functioning democracy? which for
him meant encouraging what he called experimental
intelligence and plurality. It sounds like society
itself needed to be rebuilt from the ground up
to support that ideal. Precisely. He argued that
this reconstruction had to happen in two absolutely
foundational places, our schools and our civil
society. Because a complete democracy needs more
than just the right to vote. It requires a fully
formed, robust public opinion. And that, he said,
could only be achieved through open, critical
communication. Among everyone, citizens, experts,
political leaders. So it puts a huge burden on
the citizen. You can't just be a passive receiver
of information. You have to be an active thinking
participant in actually creating knowledge. Absolutely.
That's the high bar he sets. His ideas are, you
know, they're undeniably complex. The academic
language can sometimes get in the way. Sure.
But the driving force underneath it all is actually
remarkably simple. How do we create a functioning,
cooperative democracy through thoughtful, reflective
and just ceaseless action? OK, let's unpack this
then. That seems like the perfect place to start
with the philosophical engine that powered this
whole massive enterprise. We have to start with
the schools of thought he's associated with.
He's a central figure in American pragmatism,
of course. Of course. But he had his own preferred
terms, didn't he? He did. He was always very
precise. While he was okay with the pragmatism
label, he often preferred to call his own approach
instrumentalism. And he also saw links to consequentialism.
Yes. And these aren't just, you know, splitting
academic hairs. These labels signal a really
fundamental shift in philosophy. Away from this
ancient search for some kind of eternal capital
T truth. Right. And toward a system for validating
ideas based on what they actually do in the real
world. OK, so it's all about the results. Right.
But that that sounds a little dangerous if it's
just whatever works that could justify anything.
We know Dewey was incredibly rigorous. So how
did he stop his instrumentalism from just becoming.
expediency that's the critical question and you've
really hit on the core of his rigor he was very
aware of that danger when he was trying to define
the actual criterion of validity for all three
of those schools pragmatism instrumentalism consequentialism
he laid out this incredibly precise definition
the one from his big book on logic logic The
theory of inquiry. That's the one. It sounds
incredibly dense at first, but every single word
matters. Let's hear it. OK. He defined the criterion
as the function of consequences as necessary
tests of the validity of propositions. All right.
So breaking that down, the validity of an idea
proposition is tested by its results, its consequences.
That part is clear. Right. But what makes those
consequences a valid test? This is where the
instrumental part comes in, I assume. Exactly.
This is the fine print that separates it from
a simple whatever works mentality. He adds a
crucial condition. The consequences only count
as a valid test provoded. Okay. Provided those
consequences are operationally instituted and
are such as to resolve the specific problem evoking
the operations. Operationally instituted. That
phrase feels like the engine of the whole thing.
Let's really spend a minute on that. It is the
engine. Think of it like a scientist running
an experiment in a lab, but you're applying that
same level of rigor to a belief or an ethical
claim or social policy. So a proposition is like
a hypothesis. Exactly. And you don't just sit
in your armchair and ponder whether your hypothesis
is true in some abstract sense. You have to actively
test it. You have to put it into practice in
the world. That's what operationally instituted
means, carrying out observable, verifiable steps.
OK, let's use a real world example, something
that ties back to his interest in social problems.
Let's say a city government has a belief, a proposition
that installing new streetlights in a high crime
neighborhood. will reduce burglaries. Perfect.
Under Dewey's instrumentalism, you can't just
validate that idea based on the good intention
or the theory that light deters crime. You have
to operationally institute it. So you have to
actually fund the project, buy the lights, install
them, make sure they're maintained. The active
application. Yes. And then comes the second part
of the criterion, which is just as vital. The
consequences have to resolve the specific problem
evoking the operations. So it's not enough that
something good happens in a general sense. Maybe
the new lights make people feel safer or property
values go up. Right. Those might be nice side
effects. But the test of validity is whether
the lights specifically reduce the burglary rate.
That was the specific problem that started the
whole inquiry. So if burglaries go down. the
proposition, the belief in streetlights as a
solution is for now validated. It's instrumentally
true in that context. Provisionally validated,
yes. And if the burglary rate stays the same
or even goes up, then the proposition is nullified.
The idea failed the test and the process of inquiry
has to start all over again with a new hypothesis.
That's a fantastic way to ground it. It's basically
the scientific method applied to all beliefs.
Everything is a hypothesis and everything is
subject to revision based on evidence. And he
was very much in dialogue with his peers on this.
He wasn't working in a vacuum. He had a lot of
respect for the other great pragmatists. A great
deal. In his essays in Experimental Logic, he
gives a shout out to Charles Sanders Pierce,
who, funnily enough, actually got the word pragmatic
from Immanuel Kant, using it to mean something
that has... empirical consequences. And then
there's William James, who is probably the most
famous of the group and gave pragmatism its most
memorable slogan. Right. James's famous line
that general notions must cash in. Great line.
It's a great line. But Dewey, while respecting
James, felt it needed a bit of clarification
to avoid that. Whatever works fallacy we were
just talking about. He pointed out that for James,
cashing in didn't mean, is it profitable? It
meant the ideas must be translatable into verifiable,
specific things. So it always comes back to that
verifiable, specific consequences that come from
taking action. That's instrumentalism. That's
the heart of it. OK, so we have to talk about
one of his biggest attempts to put all this together
into one grand statement. His 1925 book, Experience
in Nature. It's often called his most metaphysical
work. It is. But the sources say he was really
unhappy with how it was first received. He was,
yeah. The first edition just didn't land the
way he wanted it to. Critics tried to sort of
cram his ideas into the old philosophical boxes
they were familiar with. So he rewrote it. He
did. For the second edition in 1929, He rewrote
the entire first chapter and added a new preface
to make his intentions crystal clear. And in
that rewrite, he basically said he wasn't trying
to fit in with the old philosophies at all. Not
at all. He came out and said he was presenting
what we would now call a new Kuhnian paradigm,
a whole new way of seeing things. He wasn't interested
in continuity with the past. He was saying his
ideas were. incommensurable with the old ways
of thinking you couldn't even measure them by
the old standards a total break yeah and to emphasize
just how revolutionary this was he used this
really striking quote about the book's title
yes he knew people would stumble on the title
itself experience and nature he wrote to many
the associating of the two words will seem like
talking of a round square Around square. I mean,
that's a powerful way to put it. Why were those
two concepts, experience and nature, seen as
so mutually exclusive in traditional philosophy?
Well, historically, philosophy loved to split
reality in two. On one side, you had nature,
the objective, external, real world governed
by fixed laws that science could measure. And
on the other side, you had experience. And experience
was seen as subjective, internal, the messy world
of consciousness, feelings, interpretations,
and, you know. error so mind versus matter subject
versus object precisely dewey was trying to tear
down that wall He was arguing that experience
isn't something that just happens inside our
heads, separate from the world. Experience is
a real event that is fully and inescapably part
of nature itself. He was trying to heal that
split. He was. And he knew you couldn't do it
with just a simple argument. He said these old
dualistic associations were too deeply ingrained
in our language. So he hoped that by reading
the whole book, the reader would insensibly produce,
if one is fortunate, a change in the signification.
So it's not about winning a debate. It's about
slowly converting the reader to a whole new worldview.
It's a vision of intellectual transformation,
yeah. Built on this idea that your experience
is a natural event, just like a thunderstorm
or a chemical reaction. It's amazing how that
same rigor he applied to logic and philosophy.
It's the same functional approach he took to
the human mind. And that leads us directly into
his work as a founder of American psychology.
It's a perfect transition. You can actually trace
this path through his early career, which is,
well, it's a bit surprising. He wasn't always
a university philosopher. Not at all. He started
out as a teacher. He taught high school for two
years in Pennsylvania and elementary school for
a year in Vermont. And he later said he was completely
unsuited for it. He did, which is pretty ironic
for the man who would go on to revolutionize
education. But, you know, he moved on, got his
Ph .D. from Johns Hopkins. And the real turning
point was his arrival at the brand new university.
University of Chicago in 1894. Right. This is
where the famous Chicago group forms. This was
a critical moment. He and his colleagues, James
Hayden Tufts, George Herbert Mead, and one of
his students, James Roland Angel, they started
developing what became known as functional psychology.
And this was a direct challenge to the dominant
psychological school at the time. A very deliberate
one. They were pushing back against the very
rigid physiological psychology of Wilhelm Wundt
in Germany and his American students. So what
was the big difference? What was the Chicago
group's emphasis? Well, Wundt's psychology was
very structuralist. tried to break the mind down
into its basic components, almost like chemistry.
The Chicago group said that's the wrong approach
entirely. OK. Their emphasis was on the influence
of the social environment on the mind and on
behavior. They wanted to understand the mind
in action as an adaptive function in a real world
context. The mind wasn't a collection of static
parts. It was something that did things. And
this new school of thought was really launched
by one landmark paper in 1896. The reflex art
concept in psychology. It's considered the first
major statement of functional psychology. It's
just a brilliant piece of work because it challenges
a really fundamental assumption. The traditional
model of the reflex arc. Exactly. The old model
was the simple linear chain. You have a stimulus,
like a pinprick, that causes a sensation, the
feeling of pain, which then causes a response.
You pull your hand away. ABC, like dominoes.
Like dominoes, separate distinct links in a chain.
Dewey argued against this. He said that's not
how it works at all. So he wasn't denying that
the stimulus or the response exist, but he rejected
the idea that they were separate events. What
was his alternative, this circular account? He
defended what he called the unitary nature of
the sensory motor circuit. The whole thing is
one continuous geomantic process. It's a loop.
How so? He argued that the stimulation is always
being enriched by the results of previous experiences.
The sensation isn't just raw data coming in.
It's an active interpretation from the very start.
And likewise, the response is constantly being
modulated by sensorial experience as it happens.
Okay, let's use an example. A child sees a candle
flame for the first time. Right. The old model
says flame, stimulus, causes pain, sensation,
causes withdrawal response. Yeah. How does Dewey's
model see it differently? Dewey would say, hold
on. The act of seeing the flame and reaching
for it is already a complex behavior, probably
driven by curiosity based on prior experiences
with interesting objects. The stimulus of the
light isn't separate from the motor response
of reaching. I see. And then the painful sensation
immediately informs and reshapes the child's
perception of flames in the future. It's not
three separate events. It's one integrated dynamic
loop where past knowledge shapes present perception,
which in turn instantly shapes future action.
That's a profound shift. From seeing the mind
as a machine to seeing it as an adaptive functional
system. It was huge. And it's why he was so recognized
in the field. He was president of the American
Psychological Association in 1899 and then the
American Philosophical Association in 1905. And
this functional view of the mind. feeds directly
into his work on logic. He saw logic itself not
as a set of abstract rules, but as an instrument
for investigating the world. Absolutely. In his
1938 book, Logic, the Theory of Inquiry, he points
out this paradox he saw in the logical theory
of his day. The split between what logicians
could agree on and what they just argued about
endlessly. Exactly. He said, you know, when it
comes to the proximate subject matter, the actual
techniques and methods of reasoning. Everyone
basically agrees and we make progress. But when
it comes to the ultimate subject matter, what
is truth? What's validity? It's just constant,
unresolvable controversy. So he challenged them.
He did. He asked. Are these logical operators
just pure extractions like in math? Or do they
actually connect with the real world and help
us alter it or understand it better? For him,
logic had to be an engaged process, an instrument
for solving real problems. And this goes back
to his focus on precise language. He was engaging
with logical positivism, but he had some critiques.
He did. He welcomed their shift in focus. The
positivists were moving away from abstract terms
like propositions and terms and focusing on the
concrete reality. reality of sentences and words.
Which he liked. He liked it because it focused
attention on the actual symbolic structures we
use to communicate, but he also felt it narrows
unduly the scope of what counts as a symbol.
Because symbols aren't just words on a page.
Of course not. What about a map? or an architect's
blueprint, or a clenched fist. Those are all
powerful symbols, but we don't usually call them
a word or a sentence. He stressed that you can't
understand the intent of a symbol in isolation.
You can only judge it by its context. If you
miss the context, you miss the meaning. This
holistic contextual approach led him to try and
solve the massive terminology problem in epistemology.
This was in his final major work with Arthur
Bentley, Knowing and the Known. Right. They argued
that so much of the confusion came from philosophers
clinging to outdated ways of thinking about how
things are organized and how they interact. And
they laid out three historical levels of this
thinking. Yes. The oldest, most primitive way
of thinking they called self -action. act because
of some power they have inside them. The ocean
is angry, so the ship sinks. That person is just
evil. That's why they did a bad thing. Exactly.
It achieves causation to some fixed internal
essence, very pre -scientific. The next level,
which really dominated modern science for centuries,
was interaction. The Newtonian model. Billiard
balls colliding. Perfect analogy. Here, things
are balanced against each other in a system of
equal and opposite reaction. It's systematic,
it's measurable, but it still thinks in terms
of separate, independent objects acting on each
other, cause and effect between distinct entities.
And then the third level, the one they were proposing
to deal with modern complexity, was transaction.
This is the big leap. In a transaction, you stop
thinking about separate, pre -existing entities.
Transactionalism deals with the multiple aspects
and phases of a whole action without breaking
it down into ultimate, final, or independent
entities. Wait, I need a clearer distinction
here. How is transaction really different from
interaction? It sounds a bit like systems theory.
It's a precursor to systems theory, for sure.
The key difference is that interaction still
assumes you have separate things that then act
upon each other. A buyer and a seller, for example.
Transactionalism says you can't even define the
buyer without the seller or the seller without
the buyer. They are mutually defining aspects
of a single event, the purchase. You, the observer,
the environment, the object being sold, it's
all one complex situation. You can't pull them
apart without destroying the meaning of the event.
Let's use a more complex social issue, say a
citywide protest. Great. From a self -action
perspective, you'd say those protesters are inherently
disruptive or the police are inherently oppressive.
You assign the cause to a fixed internal nature.
Got it. From an interaction perspective, you'd
say the protesters marched, so the police responded
with force. Action and reaction between two separate
groups. A more balanced view, but still separate.
Right. But the transactional approach demands
you look at the entire system. You have to analyze
the overlapping history of the community, the
economic pressures, the media coverage, the political
climate, the specific training of the officers,
the motivations of the protesters, all of it
as one indivisible event. You realize that the
police and the protesters are being defined in
and through that very situation. That is a much
more intellectually demanding way to look at
the world. And if the goal of logic and philosophy
is to help us navigate these complex transactions,
then... Individuals need the right mental tools.
And that's where his definition of reflective
thinking from his 1910 book, How We Think, becomes
the absolute foundation for everything else.
This is the blueprint for the intelligent citizen
he wanted to create. It is. He defines reflective
thinking as an active, persistent, and careful
consideration of any belief in the light of the
grounds that support it and the further conclusions
to which it tends. And that word active is doing
all the work there. All of it. Thinking is not
passively soaping up information from a teacher
or a news report. It's an active process of questioning,
analyzing, testing beliefs against evidence,
and then tracing those beliefs forward to see
where they lead. What are their logical consequences?
And he laid out what well -executed thinking
looks like versus poorly executed thinking. He
did. The difference is that reflective process.
Poor thinking relies on habit, prejudice. or
just accepting things without question. But well
-executed thinking requires specific steps. Skepticism,
followed by investigation, to find evidence that
either supports or nullifies a belief. It's the
instrumental method applied to your own mind.
It's a systematic design for applying intelligence
to life. And once he had that blueprint, it was
obvious what the schools needed to do. This connects
everything. If your whole political and social
philosophy depends on citizens being transactional,
reflective thinkers, then the number one job
of the education system is to produce those citizens.
And this is where he really becomes the major
voice for progressive education. Dewey was never
going to let these ideas just stay in a book.
He needed a laboratory. The University of Chicago
Laboratory Schools. Yeah. The Dewey School. Exactly.
This was his chance to put his theories into
practice, to test them, to refine them. It was
action research on a massive scale. And his core
beliefs, which he laid out in things like pedagogic
creed and democracy and education, they just
turned the existing model of schooling on its
head. Completely. First, he said that education
and learning are fundamentally social and interactive.
You don't learn in a vacuum. And from that flows
his most radical idea for the school itself.
That the school is a social institution where
social reform should and must take place. He
saw the classroom as the primary engine for cultivating
the habits of democracy. It's a micro democracy
in training. Where the act of learning is supposed
to mirror the act of civic engagement. in every
way he believes students thrive when they're
allowed to experience and interact with the curriculum
this is the bedrock of what we now call experiential
education so the whole purpose of education shifts
it's not about cramming a predetermined set of
facts into a student's head anymore no the purpose
is to help each student realize their full potential
and gain the ability to use their skills for
the greater good His phrase was to give him command
of himself so he would have the full and ready
use of all his capacities. He really saw the
school as the most instrumental institution for
social change. Because it regulates, in his words,
the process of coming to share in the social
consciousness. And adjusting individual activity
based on that shared consciousness is the only
sure method of social reconstruction. But he
was very careful not to fall into extremes here.
He saw a big pedagogical dilemma emerging, one
that, honestly, we still argue about today. He
did. In The Child and the Curriculum, he laid
out the two opposing camps. What were they? On
one side, you had the old guard, the rigid, traditional,
curriculum -centered approach. Where the subject
matter is king? The subject matter is king, the
facts are fixed, and the student's job is to
just be a passive vessel and absorb it all. Dewey
said the big flaw here is that it treats the
child as this superficial being who is to be
deepened by the all -knowing curriculum. And
on the other extreme. The extreme child -centered
approach, this was adopted by some of his more,
let's say, enthusiastic followers. They placed
so much emphasis on the child's immediate interests
that they ended up minimizing the importance
of structured content and the teacher's expertise.
So he rejected both. He saw both as incomplete.
And his synthesis is just beautiful. He wrote,
the child and the curriculum are simply two limits
which define a single process. They aren't in
opposition. They're two poles of the same thing.
Exactly. The teacher's job is to relate the facts
and truths of the curriculum to the student's
own prior experiences, to their life, to forge
that vital connection that makes active inquiry
possible. So the curriculum doesn't connect to
the child's life. It's just meaningless rote
memorization. Right. But if you only follow the
child's whims, there's no structure, no intellectual
discipline. The teacher has to be the skilled
bridge between the two. That synthesis is the
foundation of pretty much all modern effective
teaching. Problem -based learning, project -based
learning, hands -on science, it all comes from
that idea. And this led him to completely rethink
the role of the teacher. He was deeply critical
of the purely vocational view of education. The
idea that you're just training kids for a specific
job in a factory or an office. Yeah, just imparting
a limited set of skills that an employer needs.
He found that view to be profoundly anti -democratic.
Because if that's all schools do, they're basically
preparing students for docile compliance with
authoritarian work and political structures.
You're limiting their ability to think for themselves.
And so you're stifling their ability to participate
in social reform. Which means the teacher, as
a social service provider, has this much more
profound democratic responsibility. The goal
isn't to produce future. workers. It's to produce
what he called psychological and social goods.
Those goods being intelligence, skill, and character.
Those are the big three. And the urgency here
is that this had to be focused on the present
life of the child, not some imaginary future.
Because the future is unpredictable. He knew
that. He wrote that because of the pace of change,
it's impossible to foretell definitely just what
civilization will be 20 years from now. So training
for a specific job today is probably pointless.
The teacher's real business is to cultivate the
intelligence and character needed for the child
to live an intelligent, moral, democratic life
right now. Okay, let's go deeper on the specific
attributes he saw in a successful teacher. He
really separated the true professional from a
mere technician. Let's start with... A teacher's
knowledge. Right. And for him, this wasn't about
being a walking encyclopedia. He stressed that
a teacher doesn't have to be a high class scholar
in every subject they teach. That's an impossible
standard. Instead, they must have an unusual
love and aptitude in some one subject. It could
be history, math, science, art, whatever. And
that passion for one area gives them a kind of
intellectual compass for all the others. A general
feel for what genuine information and real inquiry
look like. Exactly. If you know what true discovery
feels like in your own field, you can guide it
in others. And this has to be a constant process,
a lifelong study of the classroom, of children,
of methods. And he also believed that learning
is incomplete unless it is shared. A great teacher
has this natural burning desire to communicate
what they know. Okay, next up is a teacher's
skill. This isn't about having neat handwriting
on the board. No, it's much deeper. He said the
best indicator of a quality teacher is their
ability to watch and respond to the movement
of the mind with keen awareness. So it's about
observation and connection. It's about intellectual
empathy. He said the best teachers, even those
with no formal training, possess a quick, sure,
and unflagging sympathy with their students.
Their minds can move in harmony with the students'
minds. They can anticipate the difficulties,
feel the confusion, and celebrate the breakthroughs.
Yes. They see learning not as delivering a lesson,
but as navigating a complex, shared, transactional
inquiry. And finally, the foundation for all
of it, a teacher's disposition. This was paramount
for him. He put teaching on the same social level
as the ministry or parenting. He said no amount
of knowledge or skill can make up for a deficiency
in personal traits. You have to have an indispensable
passion for the work. And the mental fortitude
to handle the stress. The long hours, the low
pay, the sheer difficulty of it. This goes back
to his instrumentalism. If your internal state,
your disposition is dysfunctional, you cannot
perform your function effectively. And he had
this vivid image of the consequences. The careworn
teachers, with anxiety depicted on the lines
of their faces, reflected in their strained,
high -pitched voices and sharp manners. And that
negative demeanor, he warned, actively prevents
children from learning and makes them afraid
to be curious. The teacher becomes a barrier
to inquiry instead of a guide. All of which led
him to have some pretty strong opinions on teacher
education programs. He thought they were focusing
on the wrong things. They shouldn't be obsessed
with producing proficient practitioners of mechanical
skills like lesson planning or discipline. technique.
Because those are things you learn on the job.
You can and you should learn them over time.
He drew this brilliant long -term contrast. The
teacher who only has the mechanical skills, they
look great in their first year. Exactly. They
have the basic operations down, so they appear
superior. But that teacher, who just keeps perfecting
the skills they already have, he wrote, may continue
to improve in the mechanics of school management,
but he cannot grow as a teacher and inspirer
and director of soul life. Whereas the teacher
who has the deeper intellectual grounding might
struggle a bit at first, but has the potential
for real growth. Because the goal of teacher
education, for Dewey, must be to produce professional
students of education. People who have a deep
-seated propensity to inquire about everything.
The subjects, the methods, the very activity
of the mind. That spirit of perpetual inquiry
is the true professional spirit. just like in
law or medicine. That concept, cultivating active
inquiry, it's the perfect bridge to his vision
for the larger democratic sphere. The adult citizenry
needed to practice the same habits of reflective
thinking he wanted in the classroom. Yes, he
argued that a complete democracy requires a fully
formed public opinion, which can only be accomplished
through communication. Which brings us to the
big question. What did he think the media's role
was in all this? His major work here is The Public
and Its Problems from 1927. And it's really an
exercise in applying his instrumental and transactional
logic to politics. He starts, as always, by defining
his terms. He had a very specific definition
of a public. It's not a fixed group of people.
No. A public is a spontaneous group that forms
because they all share in the indirect effects
of a particular action. So a factory pollutes
a river. The people downstream who are affected
by that pollution, whether they're fishermen
or just homeowners, they now share a common problem.
They become a public. Precisely. They have a
shared interest in controlling those consequences.
And because life is complex, publics are constantly
forming, overlapping, and dissolving. They're
dynamic. And this understanding formed the basis
of his famous rebuttal of the journalist Walter
Lippmann. Right. Lippmann had written The Phantom
Public, which took a very dim view of the average
citizen. Very pessimistic. Lippmann basically
argued that political issues were too complex
and the public was too distracted and uninformed
to deal with them. So all the important thinking
should be left to experts and elites. A tap down
model. The media's job is to tell people what
the experts think. And Dewey, of course, argued
for the complete opposite. It reflects his deep
faith in the common person as long as they're
educated for inquiry. He believed politics is
the duty of each individual. Yes. And the knowledge
needed for that Dewey has to be generated by
the interaction of everyone. Citizens, elites,
experts, all mediated by journalism. In this
model, it's not just the government that's held
accountable. The citizens and the experts are
also accountable to the process of inquiry itself.
So journalism has to completely change its focus
from spectacle to inquiry. It's a radical shift.
He said journalism needs to move away from just
covering actions or happenings. You know, who's
winning the horse race? Who committed the crime?
And move toward discussing alternatives, choices,
consequences and conditions. So the news should
function more like a tool for teaching reflective
thinking. giving people the context they need
to form an intelligent opinion. That's it exactly.
It's the only way to foster a real conversation
and improve the public's generation of knowledge.
The goal is to replace the passive audience with
active collaborators. And the ultimate prize,
the societal payoff for this kind of communication.
He believed that this kind of communication was
the only thing that could convert what he called
the great society, this massive disconnected
populace driven by industrial forces into a great
community. A community bound by shared interests
and shared inquiry. Yes. He wrote, the clear
consciousness of a communal life and all its
implications constitutes the idea of democracy.
And that can only happen with free and full intercommunication.
That was the crucial role he saw for journalism
and education. It's so clear that for him, this
wasn't just theory. He was deeply engaged politically
and socially his entire life. He really put his
instrumentalism into practice. From very early
on. And he was often quite radical for his time.
Take the 1894 Pullman strike when he was at the
University of Chicago. His private letters from
that time show these incredibly strong. pro -labor
anti -establishment views he was furious with
the ruling class he was he wrote and this is
an amazing quote the only wonder is that when
the higher classes damn them take such views
there aren't more downright socialists He was
even worried that the university itself, funded
by people like Rockefeller, was a capitalistic
institution that was at odds with his democratic
ideals. And his engagement wasn't just local.
It was global. Oh, absolutely. His trip to China
from 1919 to 1921 was hugely influential. He
was invited by some of his former students, including
Hu Shi, who was a leading intellectual. He ended
up staying for two years and gave nearly 200
lectures. And the people there called him the
American Confucius. They did. And he was giving
them this advice during an incredibly volatile
time in China. His core message, his instrumental
advice, was to base their transformation on education
and social reform, that slow experimental process
of democratic inquiry, not on a violent dogmatic
revolution. It's fascinating that a young Mao
Zedong was in the audience for one of those lectures.
It is. Mao was a library assistant at Peking
University at the time. He certainly went in
a different direction. He also took his ideas
to South Africa in 1934. He did. He was invited
to speak on educational reform. And there his
secular democratic ideas were just flat out rejected
by the white only government, which included
some of the future architects of apartheid. They
weren't interested in an education system that
fostered universal intelligence and equality.
Not in the slightest. But the black population
and their white allies were incredibly receptive.
They saw the potential of his ideas as a path
toward liberation. And back in the U .S., he
was involved in some major civil rights and political
fights. He was. He was a co -founder of the NAACP
and sat on its early executive board. And then
there was the famous Dewey Commission in 1937.
The one that investigated the charges made against
Leon Trotsky by Stalin during the Moscow trials.
Yes. And that must have been an incredibly fraught.
politically charged situation. How did his philosophy
apply there? It was pure applied instrumentalism.
Dewey wasn't a communist. He wasn't a Trotskyist.
But he agreed to lead the commission because
he was determined to apply the most rigorous
standards of reflective thinking and objective
inquiry to find the truth. And their conclusion.
The commission concluded that the charges against
Trotsky were a complete fabrication. He prioritized
the process of open inquiry over any political
allegiance. That's his democratic faith in its
highest form. And he was consistent across the
board. women's rights, economic justice. Absolutely.
A staunch advocate for women's suffrage, arguing
that a woman's place is determined by her environment
and education, not by some fixed biology. A total
rejection of that old self -action thinking.
He was president of the League for Industrial
Democracy and a big supporter of Henry George's
ideas on land value tax. For him, intellectual
engagement with these issues was just part of
being an ethical citizen. So after all this,
what does it all mean? We've traced this single
thread from technical philosophy through psychology
to a total reformation of education and a new
vision for journalism and a political life. He
was a true polymath. He was. And all of that
massive output consistently converges on this
one vital necessity, the active experimental
democratic application of intelligence to solve
human problems. He really provided the intellectual
architecture for a democratic life that goes
way beyond just the ballot box. And his influence
is just, it's amazing. People like Carl Rogers
in psychology, B .R. Ambedkar, who was the law
and justice minister of India and helped frame
their constitution. They were all drawing on
Dewey's blueprint for how an intelligent, cooperative
community should function. We should also note
his personal journey on religion. He moved from
a very evangelical upbringing to becoming an
atheist and a secular humanist later in life.
He did. He was one of the original signatories
of the first humanist manifesto in 1933. And
his view of humanism was that it was an expansion,
not a contraction, of human life, where science
is made the willing servant of human good. It's
a perfect summary of his entire philosophy. using
instrumental reason to serve human flourishing
in a democratic context. It really is. But there
was a common criticism of his work, which the
sources note, that for all his sweeping ideals,
he often didn't provide systematic, detailed
strategies for how to achieve them, how to actually
win women's suffrage or fix the massive economic
problems of his day. He knew about entrenched
power, but he wasn't tactical revolutionary.
And that's the central tension, isn't it? But
it's a tension that's built into his own philosophy.
Instrumentalism explicitly rejects fixed, predetermined,
dogmatic plans. It relies on experimental intelligence
and constant revision. So if his core belief
is that the responsibility for thinking has to
be distributed to everyone, not concentrated
in a few leaders, then asking him for the perfect
10 -point plan would be asking him to violate
his own deepest conviction. The whole point is
that there is no perfect plan. We have to discover
the path through the process of inquiry itself.
So his philosophy is less about providing the
final answer and more about providing the tools
for a perpetual search. Exactly. The final plan
for a perfect democracy is an impossibility because
society is always changing, always creating new
problems that need new inquiries. Which leaves
a really important question for you, the listener,
to think about. If Dewey's whole philosophy rests
on this idea of experimental intelligence and
constant revision, does the real test of his
ideas lie not in the perfection of his theory,
but in the perpetual, messy, imperfect struggle
of its application? By all the countless citizens
and journalists and teachers who came after him?
And maybe, what is the limit of a theory like
that when it comes up against entrenched power
that simply refuses to engage in that kind of
inquiry? That's John Dewey, a true giant whose
influence on how we think, how we learn, and
how we try to live together democratically is
still unfolding right now. Something for you
to mull over on your own.