Dewey: Growth and Its Problems

Dewey and Freud wed biology to history, producing doctrines of ‘growth.’ In this they follow Darwin—Freud doing so less directly, more soberly.

Dewey begins The Public and Its Problems with some silly polemics on religion. Claiming that “religious emotions… attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it”—a charge that ignores the impact of, for example, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism to name a few—he asserts that there has been no “large idea about the world… independently generated by religion,” overlooking that little matter of creation ex nihilo. One may also pass over the nonsense about static philosophic ideas necessitating political stasis, inasmuch as such ideas might as easily serve as measures of how far one needs to go.

More seriously, Dewey argues that Darwin “conquered the phenomenon of life for the principles of transition,” freeing it from ancient Greek ‘idealism’ and teleology rather as modern astronomers, physicists, and chemists had done in their fields, earlier. This liberation in turn freed the new, empiricist logic “for application to mind and morals and life.” As a matter of fact, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke had done this already, as Dewey acknowledges elsewhere in his vast corpus, but in one sense Dewey’s claim may be defended. Earlier empiricisms, with their crude, atomistic reductionism, fail the plausibility test for most people. Dewey may mean that Darwin was the first empiricist to give a plausible account of biological complexity, and to link this with the contemporary fascination with historical change. Darwin changes biology into natural history, and incidentally enables Dewey to construct a comprehensive historicism does not depend upon Hegel’s Absolute-Spirit/’idealist’ dialectic or upon its Marxist/’materialist’ derivative, centered on socio-economic class struggle. He retains the Hegelian and Marxist claims for a historical teleology (as Darwin does not), but a gentler form than any of his predecessors.

If intelligence can plausibly be made to arise out of things, if things and intelligences reciprocally shape each other, if both divinity and natural teleology are discarded as elaborate tautologies, and if the grander ‘German’ forms of historicist teleology are to be feared as ‘totalizing’ invitations to tyranny (Dewey was an early and honorable critic of Bolshevism), we are left with an empirical historicism of social experimentation, with “verifiable and fruitful” results expected—any day now. Dewey’s neo-Darwinism (a democratic-socialist Darwinism, though emphatically not Social Darwinism) does posit an end of sorts, although it is an endless sort of end: growth. It isn’t clear that Dewey can show what constitutes social ‘growth,’ inasmuch as Dewey’s moral distinction between ‘positive’ social interaction and a life of crime—which may be seen in Experience and Education (New York, 1939, p. 29)—is merely risible, leading to his own indulgence in tautology: “When and only when development in a particular line conduces to continuing growth does it answer to the criterion of education as growing” (ibid., p. 29).

As for Dewey’ social-experimental method, it curiously combines pride and humility. In one paragraph he promises what Machiavelli promises in plotting the mastery of fortune, and what Bacon and Descartes promise in proposing the conquest of nature: a method. In the next paragraph he speaks of humbling philosophy’s pretensions, particularly its supposed claims to answer large and, by Darwinian lights, rationally unanswerable questions. This combination of pride and humility will issue in “responsibility,” Dewey says. As with any social experimentalism, Dewey’s is vulnerable to the critique Madison (that earlier advocate of responsibility in politics) makes of Jefferson’s proposal for constitutional convention cycles—the same critique Aristotle makes of the Greek reformer who offered a prize to anyone who thought of a legal innovation adopted by the city: laws require obedience; obedience requires respect; respect requires stability; legal tinkering breeds a casual attitude toward the laws, injuring respect and inducing lawlessness. Reformism defeats the purpose of the very rule of law the reformer seeks to refine. This is especially true when the reformer denies from the beginning that there is any set end to human life. In the actual course of history—by which any historicism must be judged, if it is to be judged in its own terms—Deweyism has issued in the current American public school system, of whose current ills a Deweyan might say, as Dewey says of American democracy, the cure of the ills of Deweyism is more Deweyism. Or not.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud subtracts the puerilities from progressivism, without denying that progress is possible. Human beings retain a nature, in Freud, and a recalcitrant, ‘discontented,’ cussed thing it is. He too conjures away religion with empiricism—a move that usually presupposes the falsehood of what it wants to disprove—but does not supposed that social science, or even his psychoanalytic techniques, can replace it with complete success, despite his Baconian rhetoric about “subjecting” nature “to the human will.” Freud is a Hobbesian, albeit one who leave room for eros as something more than a power-relation. “The essence of [civilization] lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual [in the state of nature] knew no such restrictions,” but lacked the power to master nature. Freud rejects the Rousseauian and Marxist claim that property causes aggression; assumption of natural human gentleness and of the possibility for a community of sexual partners are chimerical. In entering community life, the individual trades a portion of natural freedom and happiness for security. He will never get those things back in their pure form, without trading back his security.

Productive of association and therefore of civilization, eros exists in a state of tension, sometimes war, with the Ego, which would preserve the body but also contains a contradictory instinct toward destruction. “The evolution of civilization” consists of “the struggle between Eros and Death.” The Super-Ego, consisting of authoritative customs, beliefs, and laws, constitutes the third term that mediates between these natural instincts. When the Super-Ego becomes too powerful, when human beings ‘over-compensate,’ imposing excessive guilt upon their fellows by setting impossibly rigorous standards, the science of psychology can relieve the pressure that induces alienation and increased violence by lowering the individual’s felt need to meet the Super-Ego’s demands, and conducting the psyche toward a more orderly development or growth that will result in happiness. With this, Freud provides a new variation on a characteristic modern theme, as may be seen in Chapter XV of The Prince, and in Bacon’s aphorism on the stars (they give us weak light because they are too high). But Freud must not be understood to usher in an age of sexual license, or indeed of any kind of license. Like any good Hobbesian, he criticizes democracy (“America”) for failing to develop adequate leadership (the book was published during the Hoover Administration), and, while insisting on the need to liberalize public opinion concerning diverse sexual drives, he could hardly be said to tout a society founded upon the ‘polymorphous-perverse.’ This was a task adopted by intellectuals who wanted to combine psychotherapy with Marxism in yet another failed attempt to ruin the bourgeoisie.

Freud’s doctrine stands or falls on his conception of Eros. His psychological framework of Super-Ego, Ego, and Id resembles to some degree the structure of the soul described in Plato’s Republic: logos, thumos, and eros. The differences are important. Freud leaves no well-demarcated natural place for his own scientific enterprise. In Plato, reason causes the philosophic soul’s ascent from the ‘cave’ of conventional opinions, enabling the philosopher to discover natural right. In contrast, Freud rejects the idea of transconventional justice, saying that there is no standard of “normalcy” to appeal to, from one society to another. It is not so much that psychotherapists can only ‘adjust’ individuals to existing social conditions but that Freud cannot account for his own scientific enterprise. If psychoanalysis is an advance in modern science, what is the source of scientific knowledge, and indeed of the capacity to analyze anything, in the human psyche? How does the Super-Ego ‘attach’ to the human mind? Where does the human capacity to reason fit in?

Freud claims not only that individual Egos and Ids can be adjusted to existing Super-Egos, but that Super-Egos and their norms can also be adjusted. Perhaps because he cannot arrive at any standard of conduct that transcends the demarcations between one Super-Ego and another, Freudian psychology provides no basis for addressing the problems of war. This point becomes evident in his 1932 letter to Einstein, in which he can only recommend somehow diverting destructive impulses by getting people to pursue shared interests. His unacknowledged mentor Hobbes has more interesting things to say on the issue of war and peace than that.

In addition to criticizing Freudianism from the standpoint of Platonic-philosophic eros and logos, one might also note that Freud’s misunderstands love as understood in Judaism and Christianity. Freud associates Christian love with eros; to him, Christian charity is only humanitarianism—an attempted, and dubious expansion of affective love to social relations. But, as Anders Nygren had shown around the same time Freud wrote, Christian love is not eros but agape, not affectionate at all but a kind of stern goodwill found not in Greek philosophy but in the Jewish thought from which Christianity derives. Given the Jewish and Christian teaching on shalom or peace—a clear-cut alternative to the Hobbesian and Platonic views—Freud’s misconception is disappointing.

In both Dewey and Freud, developmentalism inadequately answers the question of exactly what constitutes ‘growth.’ Neither solves the typically modern problem of subjectivism. Take the ‘end of history’ away from history (including ‘natural history’) and you begin to see the makings of ‘relativism’ or nihilism.