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functions of a growing organism's accommodating, adapting, or recon–
structing its relationship to its environment through the exercise of what
he called "the method of intelligence." His focus was on problem-solv–
ing truths in contrast to James's profound interest in truths of orienta–
tion and in the confronting of issues that are posed for the will, rather
than for technological control or scientific understanding.
Dewey was like James in having an admirable sense of public respon–
sibility as a philosopher-citizen. As a trustee of Hull HOLlse in Chicago,
he marched in a suffragettes' parade in New York, shared platforms
with labor leaders, and in 1937 courageously went to Mexico to inves–
tigate and expose the Soviet trumped-up charges against Leon Trotsky.
Dewey's most recent admirer, Alan Ryan, has rightly called him a "sec–
ular preacher and lay saint to the Republic" in his role as philosopher
of a religion of democracy.
Dewey's temper was markedly different from James. Seeking to har–
monize every dualism into a unity, his positive thinking entirely lacked
james's sense of radical evil. "Before choice no evil presents itself as
evil," Dewey wrote, as if it were only a competing good before it was
rejected. "Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the
future are not perturbing," Dewey asserted, "is a being wholly united
with his environment and therefore fully alive." James might rightly
have considered such a bland harmony as being true only of the corpse
in the grave. Ryan, for all his admiration, concedes that Dewey "took
for granted a malleability and predictability in institutional arrange–
ments that all experience refutes."
If
in 1920 Dewey wanted the Bacon–
ian theme of knowledge as power to come to "a free and unhindered
expression," by 1939 he was well aware that a science of human nature
might only "multiply the agencies by which some human beings manip–
ulate other human beings for their own advantage" and thus obscure
the "fundamentally moral nature of the social problem."
Dewey had defended President Wilson's intervention in the First
World War and had been dismayed by its results. A burnt child who
shunned the fire, he clung thereafter to an old-fashioned sense that an
American "resort to military force is a first sure sign that we are giving
up the struggle for the democratic way of life, and that the Old World
has conquered morally as well as geographically-succeeding in impos–
ing upon us its ideals and methods." Giving a speech when the Japanese
bombed Pearl Harbor, Dewey remarkably proclaimed: "I have nothing,
had nothing, and have nothing now to say directly about the war."
It
was
a sign of the end of his role as an American public philosopher.
