Blogging Dewey: Dewey and Religion

A couple of bloggers mention Dewey in the context of the role of religion in today’s world. Thoughts from Kansas discusses a Washington Post article where physics is called a “secular ideology” along with capitalism and communism. Josh Rosenau brings up Barack Obama’s recent speech on religion (which I really need to discuss in its own right as soon as I get the energy to do so) and says:

Persuade people about a common reality, eh? What field of human endeavor seeks to understand our common reality? Ask John Dewey about that, and he’d have known that we’re talking about scientific pragmatism. Communism and capitalism adhere to unverifiable personal (unshared) assumptions about the nature of people, history, and morality. As such, they are unable to reach any synthesis but death or peaceful coexistence. Science, because it is the study of our shared reality is capable of synthesis. I can convince you that physics works because I can show it to you. We share that experience, and so long as we both value a commitment to reality, physics is the same for everyone.

I think this is a pretty good capsule of Dewey’s approach to empiricism. I do think that Dewey, at least, would be inclined to bring both communism and capitalism under empiricism’s scrutiny as well. Those “assumptions about the nature of people, history and morality” lead people to make predictions about how the future will unfold. We should be able to see whether or not these predictions pan out. Indeed, I’d argue that one of the reasons so many people either reject or want to modify capitalism and communism is that the predictions haven’t come to pass.

Todd at Todd’s Hammer – a really good blog that I’m going to add to the links sections here as soon as I hit post – briefly mentions Dewey in the context of the religion-vs.-science conflict. I’d like to quote a fair chunk of his opening paragraph along with the Dewey mention that comes later on:

Religion is a “meaning-maker� that for thousands of years has been mis-apprehended as a “truth-spring�, a source of empirical truth. The problem with religion and science over the past 500 years is that our human understanding of knowledgecraft, that is, how we know, has progressed to what we commonly call the “scientific method,� leaving religious truth-claims in the dust. Truth-seeking guided by the assumptions of scientific method produces a radically different kind of knowledge than that produced by religion (or philosophy or music or art or literature), one anchored in embodied experience, observation, deductive reasoning and generalizing inference from experimental data. Religion produces meaning through tradition, story, theorizing from foreknown assumptions, and affective experience or feelings. The conflict arises when religion is mistaken as the truth-spring, the source of our knowledge of the natural world, rather than a meaning-maker.
. . .
John Dewey’s particular version of Naturalism sees human meaning production, that is, the humanities, as a biological function. Our brains are set up to produce meaning. And George Herbert Mead argued that, psychologically, despite our formal knowledge systems in modern societies, at its root, meaning arises in interaction with the world. That is, our brains produce meaning through interaction and experience. We know what something means but, crassly put, using it. Thus, meaning production is embodied and social, by nature.

This probably cuts right to the core of why Dewey and pragmatists are so fiercely criticized by strong supporters of religion. When pragmatists says that meaning comes from use, on the one hand there’s a very basic and “practical” way to take it. If I say “The sun is bright outside,” I can describe a lot of different phenomena that I might be trying to point out in terms of light and color. But in order for me to understand what the sun being outside means, the sentence has to call to mind different ways that the sun being bright shapes the world around me. I need sunglasses, I should think about sunblock, and so on and so forth. We know more about what it means for the sun to be bright now than we did years ago when we didn’t understand UV radiation so well. Well, you can take this concept and scale it up to the big ideas, which is what Dewey is famous for doing with things like democracy and education. We grasp the meaning of democracy to the extent that we take actions that increase human potential to understand and act and unlocks that potential in everyone. This is a big idea, on the scale of many religious ideas, and Dewey tries to explain how meaningful it is to him in his book A Common Faith. But it is based entirely on the natural world that we experience, and so it isn’t a satisfactory source of meaning for many people.

About Dave Thomer

Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.

July 6, 2006 @ 8:23 pm

Philosophy