John Dewey
was not a member but was a close friend of the Unitarian
movement. The memorial service celebrating his life was
held at a church with a long-distinguished Unitarian heritage,
the Community Church of New York. Reverend Donald Harrington
had once driven Dr. Dewey from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin,
and back, and the philosopher had asked his wife to contact
Harrington when he died. She did, and she also requested
that Dewey’s Unitarian philosopher friend, Max
Otto of the University of Wisconsin, be the speaker.
John
Dewey
by Max Otto
Toward sundown
on the first day of June, the thing happened that had to
happen sooner or later. The life of John Dewey came to a
close. He had remained singularly active, not only in body
but in mind and heart and spirit, more than a score of years
after reaching the officially designated termination of
professional effectiveness and the traditionally announced
ending of the possibility of finding life enjoyable. But
it is not granted to any man to live forever.
It is being said in newspaper reports, in editorials, in
conversations across the country, that such a life cannot
end; that John Dewey lives on and will live on down the
long stretch of time.
Dewey
early in his career at Columbia University (The Dewey
Papers, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern
Illinois University-Carbondale)
In one sense this is profoundly true. In another sense it
is not true at all. John Dewey's impact upon affairs, upon
public education, the sciences, philosophy, religion, the
enterprises of politics, of business, of labor, has been
so pervasive and penetrating that men and women in the most
various walks and ways will continue to think and act, unknowingly
when not knowingly, under the persisting influence of his
initiating genius.
But he himself is gone. The never failing source which he
was of original insights and novel perspectives, of fresh
ideas and new methods creatively responsive to changed conditions—this
has been taken away.
John Dewey lived his philosophy. His stature as a crusader,
who poured his incredible gifts and energies into the struggle
to improve the lot of mankind, equaled his stature as a
philosophic thinker and educational pioneer. A progressive
in every sense of the word, he took his place at the front
with the most daring of those who sought to build a new
political party for the people of America. He gave his vigorous
support to social movements designed to provide more hope
and greater opportunity and dignity for the underprivileged
of our country and the world beyond our shores.
One of John Dewey's far-reaching ideas was the idea that
talking or communication is miraculous. It seemed to him
the most wonderful occurrence in the world that things should
have evolved beyond externally pulling and pushing one another
around, and we should have developed the ability to communicate,
should have acquired the art of handling our feelings and
meanings to one another.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to hear one another
talking. The complexity and speed, and the very weight of
life's machinery are forcing the spirit of man to retreat
in upon itself. Yet out of the deepest retreat, even out
of the fears, suspicions, distrusts, animosities that shout
their denunciations on every side, we keep on talking to
one another. We ask one another for understanding, for support,
for affection. John Dewey was among the greatest of those
who persisted in laboring to win better and better means
of articulating man's hunger for comradeship in making individual
lives and the lives of individuals in togetherness as joyous
and worthy as possible. And he did not speak, as have others,
for a given culture, a limited geographical area, a particular
time. He spoke for the human undertaking as a whole, for
the entire world for times to come no less than for the
time in which we must make our way. The past did not enslave
his thinking and the future has not yet caught up with him.
John
Dewey celebrates his 90th birthday at a party given
in his honor in 1949. (Photo; courtesy of Special Collections/Morris
Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)
One evening several
months before his 90th birthday, John Dewey was discussing
cultural trends with some dinner guests. Suddenly a young
doctor of medicine blurted out his low opinion of philosophy.
"What's the good of such clap-trap?" he asked.
"Where does it get you?"
The great philosopher settled quietly back into his chair
and smiled in appreciation of the young man's frankness.
"You want to know what's the good of it all,"
he said. "The good of it is that you climb mountains."
"Climb mountains!" retorted the youth, unimpressed.
"And what's the use of doing that?"
"You see other mountains to climb," was the reply.
"You come down, climb the next mountain, and see still
others to climb." Then, putting his hand ever so gently
on the young man's knee, he said, "When you are no
longer interested in climbing mountains to see other mountains
to climb, life is over."
From The Progressive (Madison, July 1952)
John Dewey and
His Influence
by
Alfred North Whitehead, Department of Philosophy, Harvard
University
Philosophy is
a widespread, ill-defined discipline, performing many services
for the upgrowth of humanity. John Dewey is to be classed
among those men who have made philosophic thought relevant
to the needs of their own day. In the performance of this
function he is to be classed with the ancient stoics, with
Augustine, with Aquinas, with Francis Bacon, with Descartes,
with Locke, with Auguste Comte. The fame of these men is
not primarily based on the special doctrines which are the
subsequent delight of scholars. As the result of their activities
the social systems of their times received an impulse of
enlightenment, enabling them more fully to achieve such
high purposes as were then possible.
By reason of the Stoics, the subsequent legal tradition
of the Western World was securely founded in the Roman Empire;
by reason of Augustine Western Christianity faced the Dark
Ages with a stabilized intellectual tradition; Aquinas modernized,
for the culmination of the Middle Ages, this ideal of a
coordination of intimate sources of action, of feeling,
and of understanding. The impress on modern life due to
Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and Comte, is too recent to need
even a sentence of reminder.
John Dewey has performed analogous services for American
civilization. He has disclosed great ideas relevant to the
functioning of the social system. The magnitude of this
achievement is to be estimated by reference to the future.
For many generations the North American Continent will be
the living center of human civilization. Thought and action
will derive from it, and refer to it.
We are living in the midst of the period subject to Dewey's
influence. For this reason there is difficulty in defining
it. We cannot observe it from the outside in contrast to
other periods also viewed in the same way. But knowledge
outruns verbal analysis. John Dewey is the typical effective
American thinker; and he is the chief intellectual force
providing that environment with coherent purpose. Also wherever
the influence of Dewey is explicitly felt, his personality
is remembered with gratitude and affection.
Dewey
working and studying at his summer retreat at Hubbards,
Nova Scotia in the mid-1940s
The human race
consists of a small group of animals which for a small time
has barely differentiated itself from the mass of animal
life on a small planet circling round a small sun. The Universe
is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied
dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history
cherishes the delusion of the finality of its existing modes
of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are all alike. At this
moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists.
Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred.
This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure.
The Universe is vast.
Dewey has never
been appalled by the novelty of an idea. But it is characteristic
of all established schools of thought to throw themselves
into self-defensive attitudes. Refutation has its legitimate
place in philosophic discussion: it should never form the
final chapter. Human beliefs constitute the evidence as
to human experience of the nature of things. Every belief
is to be approached with respectful inquiry. The final chapter
of philosophy consists in the search for the unexpressed
presuppositions which underlie the beliefs of every finite
human intellect. In this way philosophy makes its slow advance
by the introduction of new ideas, widening vision and adjusting
clashes.
The excellence of Dewey's work in the expression of notions
relevant to modern civilization increases the danger of
sterilizing thought within the puny limitations of today.
This danger, which attends the tradition derived from any
great philosopher, is augmented by the existing success
of modern science. Philosophy should aim at disclosure beyond
explicit presuppositions. In this advance Dewey himself
has done noble work.
From The Philosophy of John Dewey ; edited
by Paul Arthur Schilpp (The Library of Living Philosophers,
New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951).
The classic
and controversial expression of John Dewey’s philosophy
of religion is found in his Terry Lectures at Yale University,
entitled A Common Faith.
Faith
and Its Object
by John Dewey
The idea of God, or, to avoid misleading conceptions, the
idea of the divine is, one of ideal possibilities unified
through imaginative realization and projection. But this
idea of God, or of the divine, is also connected with all
the natural forces and conditions—including man and
human association—that promote the growth of the ideal
and that further its realization. We are in the presence
neither of ideals completely embodied in existence nor yet
of ideals that are mere rootless ideals, fantasies, utopias.
For there are forces in nature and society that generate
and support the ideals. They are further unified by the
action that gives them coherence and solidity. It is this
active relation between ideal and actual to which I would
give the name "God." I would not insist that the
name must be given.
A clear and intense conception of a union of ideal ends
with actual conditions is capable of arousing steady emotion.
It may be fed by every experience, no matter what its material.
In a distracted age the need for such an idea is urgent.
It can unify interests and energies now dispersed; it can
direct action and generate the heat of emotion and the light
of intelligence. Whether one gives the name "God"
to this union, operative in thought and action, is a matter
for individual decision. But the function of such a working
union of the ideal and actual seems to me to be identical
with the force that has in fact been attached to the conception
of God in all the religions that have a spiritual content;
and a clear idea of that function seems to me urgently needed
at the present time.
John
and Roberta Grant Dewey, late 1940s. (The Dewey Papers,
Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois
University Carbondale)
One
reason why personally I think it fitting to use the word
"God" to denote that uniting of the ideal and
actual which has been spoken of, lies in the fact that aggressive
atheism seems to me to have something in common with traditional
supernaturalism. I do not mean merely that the former is
mainly so negative that it fails to give positive direction
to thought, though that fact is pertinent. What I have in
mind especially is the exclusive preoccupation of both militant
atheism and supernaturalism with man in isolation. For in
spite of supernaturalism's reference to something beyond
nature, it conceives of this earth as the moral center of
the universe and of man as the apex of the whole scheme
of things. It regards the drama of sin and redemption enacted
within the isolated and lonely soul of man as the one thing
of ultimate importance. Apart from man, nature is held either
accursed or negligible. Militant atheism is also affected
by lack of natural piety. The ties binding man to nature
that poets have always celebrated are passed over lightly.
The attitude taken is often that of man living in an indifferent
and hostile world and issuing blasts of defiance. A religious
attitude, however, needs the sense of a connection of man,
in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping
world that the imagination feels is a universe. Use of the
words "God" or "divine" to convey the
union of actual with ideal may protect man from a sense
of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance.
Abridged
from A Common Faith; by John Dewey (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1934).
