Characters And Events: Popular Essays In Social And Political Philosophy - Volume I

Text extracted from opening pages of book: AND POPULAR ESSAYS IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY BY JOHN DEWEY EDITED BY JOSEPH RATNER VOLUME I Better it is for philosophy to err in active participation in the living struggles and issues of its own age and times than to maintain an immune monastic impeccability. To try to escape from the snares and pitfalls of time by re courseto traditional problems and interests rather than that, let the dead bury their own dead. JOHN DEWEY NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, INC. i\' A, *&) PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE The most elaborate philosophies are founded on a few sim ple ideas. For the generation in which the philosophy is de veloped these fundamental ideas are most often obscured by the abstruse and technical aspects of the system; but in the course of time they rarely ever fail to disengage themselves from the superstructure they support and to become part of the common intellectual coin which circulates in the realm of mind. Instrumentalism has been unusually superior in this respect to the law of time; its basic ideas have been rapidly appropriated, if not completely assimilated, by contemporary thought. This easy naturalization is partly due to employ Mr. Dewey's own criterion to the fact that instrumentalism is grounded in the pervasive interests of life and is concerned with the values that all men cherish; but it is also in significant measure due to the fact that Mr. Dewey has constantly used his philosophy as a basis for analyzing and interpreting current social and political affairs. To be able effectively to develop, in popular essays, the social and politicalimplications of in strumentalism, he had to divest philosophic principles of their technical garments and dress them in the fashion of common speech and circumstance; as a result, large audiences have had, through these essays, ready access to the essentials of his teaching. It is hardly just a sheer accident of Mr, Dewey's interest or versatility that made him apply instrumentalism to the criti cism of current events. Such application is a natural conse quence of his central doctrine concerning the nature of reason or intelligence. According to instrumentalism, reason or intel ligence does not reside in some transcendental sphere where it concerns itself primarily with observing its own precious states, and from where, when it is so inclined, it views as a pale spectator what goes on below; the proper home of intelligence vi PREFACE is the world, and its true function is to act as critic and regu lator of the forces operative within it. This doctrine, which is the philosophic raison d'etre of these essays, is also one of their fundamental unifying principles. Except for a few essays dealing with purely local or purely evanescent events mostly Chinese all of Mr. Dewey's popu lar social and political writings are included in these volumes. Some of the essays those on Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan antedate the technical formulation of the philosophy of instrumentalism, but it will be found that that philosophy already appears in them in nascent form. It was impossible to arrange all of the essays included in these volumes in an order that would exhibit in minute detail the natural progres sion of ideas and the philosophic viewpoint which underlies and permeates them all. This is easilyaccounted for by the fact that they were, a few exceptions apart, written inde pendently of each other, and at widely differing times. The essays did naturally lend themselves, however, to an order of arrangement that would exhibit these desirable characters in a general way. Some of the Books permitted a more inte grated development of ideas than others; but in all of the Books, despite the occasional gaps that separate individual essays from their neighbors, an inherent form of intellectual development will be found. The task of ordering the Books themselves in this manner