- Length
- 448 pagesThe Later Works vol. 1, Southern Illinois University Press, 1981
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Experience and Nature
The most systematic statement of American pragmatism, by a man who spent seventy years arguing that philosophy's central problems were manufactured by a picture nobody had examined. Its argument is that the knower was never outside the world, so the problem of getting back in never had to arise.
- Date
- 1925
- Author
- John Dewey
- Region
- New York
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Lectures
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 284 years
Dewey was the most publicly influential philosopher America has produced and this, his most systematic book, is among his least read.
What the book says
An attempt to put experience back inside nature, against a tradition that had placed it outside looking in. Dewey's diagnosis is that philosophy has been organised around a set of inherited splits - mind against body, knower against known, means against ends, the ideal against the actual - and that each of them began as a social arrangement rather than a discovery. A leisured class that did not work took contemplation for the highest activity and treated practice as inferior; the resulting picture of a spectator observing a world he does not touch has governed epistemology ever since. Against it Dewey argues that experience is not a private film played inside a skull but a transaction between an organism and its surroundings, in which knowing is one activity among others and is undertaken when something has gone wrong. Ideas are plans for action, tested by what they do. Thinking begins in an indeterminate situation and ends when the situation has been resolved. The later chapters extend this to nature, communication, art and value, arguing that meanings arise in shared activity and that the aesthetic is the fulfilment of ordinary experience rather than an exception to it.
What it argues
That the classical problems of philosophy are the residue of a social division between those who worked and those who did not, and that dissolving the division dissolves the problems. Experience, properly understood, is not a screen between us and nature; it is what happens when an organism with needs interacts with surroundings that sometimes cooperate and sometimes do not. Knowing is a phase of that interaction - an activity undertaken when habitual action breaks down, aimed at reconstructing a situation so that action can continue. On this account, ideas are hypotheses about what to do, truth is what survives the doing, and the traditional demand for certainty is a demand for a kind of security that action cannot supply and does not need. Value and meaning are not additions to a neutral world; they arise wherever there is shared activity and communication.
What it answered
Descartes and the epistemological tradition after him, and also the version of pragmatism James had left. Dewey thought James' formulations invited the misreading they received, and his own work is more careful, more systematic and far less readable. He is answering the culture too: much of his life was spent on education, democracy and public affairs, and this book supplies the theoretical ground for the practical positions.
How it argues
By diagnosis before construction, at length and in prose that is famously difficult - not technical, but loose, abstract and repetitive, so that a reader can follow every sentence and lose the argument. Dewey's method is to show that a philosophical problem has a history, that the history includes a social arrangement, and that the problem looks compulsory only from inside that arrangement. The constructive half is harder to summarise because it deliberately avoids the vocabulary the tradition supplied and has to build its own.
The moment
Dewey was in his mid-sixties, at Columbia, and already the most publicly visible American intellectual - he had founded a laboratory school, helped establish the association that defends academic freedom in American universities, and travelled to China and Japan to lecture. He would later chair the commission that investigated the charges against Trotsky. The systematic philosophy and the public work are the same project on his own account.
How it travelled
Into schools and out of philosophy departments. Dewey's influence on American education, on liberal political thought and on public argument was enormous through the first half of the century. Within academic philosophy his standing collapsed after the 1930s as analytic methods arrived, and for thirty years he was treated as a period figure. Rorty's work from 1979 put him back into serious circulation, and the recovery has continued through work on embodied cognition, on enactive approaches in cognitive science, and on the philosophy of education.
The strongest objection
That the key term is never pinned down. Dewey uses experience to cover the organism's dealings with its environment, the qualities of situations, culture, and the whole of what there is for us - and having refused the tradition's vocabulary he supplies no clear replacement, so critics from Russell onward complained that the argument cannot be assessed because it cannot be stated precisely. Dewey half conceded the point: he wrote late in life that the word had misled everyone and that he should have used culture instead. That is an unusual admission and it locates the difficulty exactly. The related objection is that dissolving problems by exposing their history does not show they are not problems, only that they have one.
Why read it
The first chapter and the chapters on nature and communication, and on existence and value. It is hard going, and a reader wanting Dewey's argument in usable form is better served by The Quest for Certainty or by his shorter writings on education. This is the systematic version, and it is here because the section records the books rather than the summaries.
- First printed
- 1925
- First in English
- 1925
- Digitised
- No
The 1929 second edition replaces the opening chapter entirely, and the two versions are printed together in the critical edition. Dewey's late remark that the book should have been called Culture and Nature is recorded in an unfinished preface to a planned reissue.
Written in English. In copyright.
Where it stands
Revived and useful. Dewey is now read seriously in philosophy of mind for the transactional account of organism and environment, in epistemology for the critique of the spectator picture, in aesthetics, and across the philosophy of education, where he never stopped being read.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
What Dewey means by experience is the standing question and his own late regret about the word has sharpened rather than settled it. Whether his naturalism is a metaphysics or the refusal of one is argued. How far he departs from James, and whether the departure improves the position, divides pragmatists. And whether the historical diagnosis - that the theory-practice split reflects a class division in ancient Greece - is doing philosophical work or supplying a plausible story is a fair question that the book does not really answer.