John Dewey's Critique of Abstraction
The Intellectual Life as a Tool
John Dewey (October 20th, 1859-June 1, 1952) was an important American philosopher, social commentator, as well as education reformer, and, along with Charles S. Peirce and William James, set the foundations of American Pragmatism. He is most widely known for work in the progressive education movement during the 20th century. His pragmatic philosophy concentrated on using thinking as a tool for problem solving rather than an idealized process free from the domain of ‘real’ life.
Reason for the Critique
John Dewey was trying to reverse the trend in the history of philosophy of deifying the process of thinking and rationalizing over the process of ‘action-undergoing’. He explicitly attacked the notion many philosophers held of being able to take objects of experience, formulate a vague ‘metaphysical theory’ about those objects, but fail to return back to the mode of experience that provided those objects, to see what benefit the theory provides. Dewey could not comprehend the usefulness of a theory that did not revert back to, and benefit, our original mode of experience: primary experience.
Primary Experience
What is provided in primary experience is a ‘gross’ and thoroughly subjective relationship to external objects. These objects imprint emotive, psychological, physical, and all sorts of sensory data onto our minds, and with very little, if any at all, reflection upon these objects, we come to have experience in the most basic sense possible. Most of life is conducted in this ‘mode’. It is not until we enter the ‘mode’ of secondary experience that we begin to understand objects of primary experience in a systematic, intelligent, and comprehensive fashion.
Secondary Experience
Secondary experience is a rational process in every sense possible. But it should not be thought that we are even conscious of the distinction between primary and secondary experience. The transition from primary to secondary is simply a matter of coming to be conscious of, and comprehending the experience at hand. This secondary ‘mode’ of existence is really just our everyday sense of what it means to think about something.
Importantly, though, there are consequences involved when the process of systematic thinking is directed upon objects of primary experience. Concepts, ideas, relationships, biases, and eventually, in the context of philosophy and science, theories about the objects of experience are formed. It is this process of theory building and abstraction, with our personal notions about experienced objects involved, that Dewey forms his important critique.
Critique and Use of Abstractions
First of all, abstractions formed about objects of primary experience are essential for the development of knowledge and intelligent understanding, argues Dewey. He in no way aimed to discredit the function and utility of abstractions. What he critiques is, is when philosophers take their developed abstractions about primary objects and regard the abstractions as the ‘antecedent’ causes of those objects.
Meaning, the objects of primary experience exist and possess their ‘nature’ because of the ‘antecedent’ causes. These ‘antecedent’ causes are then ‘deified’, considered as the prime ‘substance’, ‘thing’, or ‘reality’ of the objects, and held as the only possible cause for the existence of the objects. But a problem occurs because the abstracted ‘antecedent’ causes are never used in the context from which they were originally borne: primary experience. This is the holy sin of philosophy.
Science, on the other hand, functions entirely differently. Similar to philosophy science does take primary experience as the starting point for rational thought about the primary ‘mode’. But, unlike philosophy, science takes the abstractions it has developed and then returns to primary experience to confirm that the abstractions make sense and serve as functional tools.
Consider Dewey’s remarks about Darwin: he “began with pigeons, cattle, and plants…”, formed a theory (abstraction), and even though Darwin’s conclusions were “contrary to commonsense” his hypothesis proved fruitful when used in the context of “raw experience”.
Abstractions can serve no other function. They have no use beyond the beneficial understanding they provide us in regards to primary experience. The usefulness of an abstraction is defined by the limits of what it provides us. And so, it is not the process of forming abstractions that Dewey opposes. He simply warns that when we ‘selectively emphasize’, or choose at will what concepts and abstractions to use for reflection upon primary experience, that we remember the fact of the choice. We cannot take the abstraction, and the further abstractions/concepts it provides, as the ‘reality’ underlying the objects at hand. The only ‘antecedent’ entity we can make reference to is primary experience itself.
References
John Dewey, Experience and Nature, 2nd edition. (Open Court: La Selle, Illinois: 1929) Concentration should be made on chapter 1: Experience and Philosophic Method.
John Dewey Looking Sharp
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