FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY REQUIRE MATERIAL EQUALITY

FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY REQUIRE MATERIAL EQUALITY

1. ABSTRACT FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH: WE NEED THE MATERIAL AND ECONOMIC MEANS TO BE FREE

John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, p. 281.

The notion that men are equally free to act if only the same legal arrangements apply equally to all—irrespective of differences in education, in command of capital, and the control of the social environment which is furnished by the institution of property—is a pure absurdity, as facts have demonstrated. Since actual, that is, effective, rights and demands are products of interactions, and are not found in the original and isolated constitution of human nature, whether moral or psychological, mere elimination of obstructions is not enough. The latter merely liberates force and ability as that happens to be distributed by past accidents of history.

John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, pp. 297-98.

I sum up by saying that the possibility of freedom is deeply grounded in our very beings. It is one with our individuality, our being uniquely what we are and not imitators and parasites of others. But like all other possibilities, this possibility has to be actualized; and, like all others, it can only be actualized through interaction with objective conditions. The question of political and economic freedom is not an addendum or afterthought, much less a deviation or excrescence, in the problem of personal freedom. For the conditions that form political and economic liberty are required in order to realize the potentiality of freedom each of us carries with him in his very structure.

DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY IS GENERALLY REMOVED FROM REALITY

1. DEWEY’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY HAS NO OBJECTIVE BASIS

George Novack, Marxist philosopher and activist, PRAGMATISM VERSUS MARXISM, 1975, p. 251.

Dewey’s theory of ethics suffers from the same faults as his theory of knowledge. Just as ideas have no validity before all the returns are in but must be tested afresh in each instance, so moral judgments have no verifiable value or weight in advance of their results in action. Instrumentalist morality goes from case to case and from one step to the next without reaching any general standards of right or wrong and what makes them so. The most it can offer is a reasonable assumption or hopeful expectation that this way may be better than that, without examining the requisite objective grounds for the hypothetical belief.

George Novack, Marxist philosopher and activist, PRAGMATISM VERSUS MARXISM, 1975, p. 256.

Any philosophy which had not lost contact with the realities of social life should have been able to foresee, at least in broad outline, the growth and outbreak of these upheavals; to have interpreted their meaning; to have prepared and equipped people to cope with them; and thereby to have helped influence the course of events in a progressive direction. Certainly a philosophy like instrumentalism, which claims to be so realistic and practical, should have done no less. However, the record shows that at every critical turn of American history in the twentieth century, Deweyism has been caught off guard and overwhelmed by the sweep of events. Instead of playing a directing role, its adherents have been towed along in the wake of the more aggressive and dominant forces of plutocratic reaction. Their perplexity and powerlessness was first exhibited in the First World War; it has been duplicated in every serious crisis convulsing the United States since that time.

DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION IS FLAWED

1. DEWEY FAILS SYNTHESIZE THE TEACHER’S ROLES AS PARTICIPANT AND AUTHORITY

R.S. Peters, professor of the philosophy of education at the University of London, JOHN DEWEY RECONSIDERED, 1977, p. 114.

Dewey’s view of the teacher, who is society’s agent for the transmission and development of its cultural heritage, is also unsatisfactory, for it slurs over the dualism between the teacher’s position as an authority and the legitimate demand for “participation.” A teacher is not just a leader in a game, like a football captain. In a game most of the participants know how to play; but pupils come to a teacher because they are ignorant, and he or she is meant to be, to some extent, an authority on some aspect of the culture. This disparity between teacher and taught—especially in the primary school—makes talk of “democracy in education” problematic, unless “democracy” is watered down to mean just multiplying shared experiences and openness of communication, as by Dewey. If “democracy” is to include, as it usually does, some suggestion of participation in decision-making, we are then confronted with current tensions underlying the question of how much “participation” is compatible with the freedom and authority of the teacher.

R.S. Peters, professor of the philosophy of education at the University of London, JOHN DEWEY RECONSIDERED, 1977, p. 115.

Dewey’s treatment of the psychological principle was equally unsatisfactory; for it combined a conception of the child, which was almost as idealistic as his conception of democracy, with a too limited view of what he called “the social medium.” This led him to oversimplify the dualism between what he called “internal conditions” and what is the result of social influences. Dewey was impressed, as I have reiterated, by the informal learning that went on in the home and in the local community and wanted to forge a link between this sort of learning and learning at school. But he did not ask the questions “which home?” and “which local community?”, for sociologists have catalogued the vast disparities that exist between homes in this respect.

DEWEY’S JUSTIFICATIONS FOR DEMOCRACY ARE FLAWED

1. DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY OF DEMOCRACY IS MYSTICAL AND IMPRACTICAL

R.S. Peters, professor of the philosophy of education at the University of London, JOHN DEWEY RECONSIDERED, 1977, pp. 114-115.

Dewey himself never paid much attention to institutional issues. This was not just because he lived before the days when “participation” became an issue. It was also because his attitude towards the democratic way of life was semi-mystical. “When the emotional force, the mystical force, one might say, of the miracles of the shared life and shared experience is spontaneously felt, the hardness and concreteness of contemporary life will be bathed in a light that never was on land or sea.” I wonder if he always felt like this about sitting on committees!

George Novack, Marxist philosopher and activist, PRAGMATISM VERSUS MARXISM, 1975, p. 291.

Dewey derived his basic stance toward democracy not, as he contended, from a scientific investigation of the history of society and a realistic analysis of American conditions, but rather from a tradition that was rooted in the mystical equality promised by the Christians. He accused the dualistic idealist philosophers of Greek and modern times of “operating with ideal fancies” instead of dealing with the given facts. Yet he committed the same error of metaphysical abstraction in the pivotal question of his whole philosophy: the origin, meaning, and application of democracy. He approached democracy not in its concrete manifestations throughout class society, but as an abstraction to be stuffed with the content he preferred to give it. Democracy to him was less a historical phenomenon than a secular religion.