The Pluralist

Simply put, this book is the best short introduction to John Dewey’s philosophy.¹ It is lucidly written and is sensitively accurate in things both great and small. It is concise yet broadly informed. It is balanced without straining to say everything, focused without being compressed. It directs the reader to Dewey’s key writings and indicates reliable commentary. It concludes by indicating Dewey’s relevance for contemporary issues: medical ethics, environmentalism, feminism. Nevertheless, that the book appears in a series called “Beginner’s Guides” should be taken therefore with a grain of salt, for it will be helpful to many advanced scholars starting to explore “pragmatism.” There are now so many strange notions of what “Dewey said” or what “pragmatism is” that this reliable handbook may admonish gross misunderstandings abounding and prevent others from arising.

The seven chapters are devoted to experience, inquiry, morality, politics, education, aesthetics, and religion. Experience, the most difficult and crucial term in Dewey’s philosophy, is traced from Dewey’s early work to his crucial replacement of the “reflex-arc” model of behavior with that of the “circuit of coordination.” This idea is central for understanding everything in Dewey, and Hildebrand’s discussion is particularly clear. Anyone who thinks Dewey was a “behaviorist” committed to linear stimulus-response sequences will benefit greatly. Hildebrand then proceeds to Dewey’s situational or “ecological” view of experience. Likewise, temptations to Cartesian readings of “mind” are epigrammatically averted: “A mind is like a friendship: it only exists through ongoing conversation and activity” (21). Confusions of “mind” and “consciousness” are also concisely rectified by a simple a point-by-point comparison (33).

[End Page 54]

How many false puzzlements and their resulting articles could have been averted by this! Hildebrand confronts the temptation to give quality a simple location: “A quality is a transactional event” (21). In the discussion of habit and emotion, common misunderstandings are pointedly corrected. “Habits are also misconceived to be largely unchangeable. But unlike a machine’s routine, our organic habits are plastic, capable of redirection and change. . . . Communication is the key to the evolution of habits” (25). This chapter concludes by emphasizing the social, not simply organic, nature of experience.

The other chapters exhibit the same sort of clarity across the breadth of Dewey’s thought. “Inquiry” locates Dewey’s instrumentalism within the larger field of non-cognitive experience, a caution to those who see Dewey only as a “pragmatist.” Hildebrand grasps the radical empiricism beneath Dewey’s instrumentalism and understands the implications of Dewey’s rejection of equating “the real” with “the object of knowledge,” and the corollary assumption that all experience is cognitive.

The chapter on morality develops the idea of habit as an expanding, growing activity. Dewey’s pluralistic approach to value is distinguished from the “monocausal” view of most ethical theories. Hildebrand points to an “existentialist dimension” in the centrality of ethical choice in Dewey, a significant connection that is often ignored, except in John McDermott’s work (72). The charge of “relativism” is succinctly handled: “Individual relativism rests on the assumption that the self is essentially atomistic, while social or cultural relativism rests on the atomism of communities” (87).

The discussion of politics focuses on the role of democratic ideals and Dewey’s distinctive form of liberalism. Hildebrand faces Reinhold Niebuhr’s criticisms of Dewey’s “optimism”: the complaint stems from a desire for “perfection” in ethical conduct. The possibility of progress does not depend on it. The rejection of perfectionism also answers Robert Talisse’s criticism of the moral ideal of “growth.” Talisse challenges: Who gets to define “growth”? Hildebrand responds: Just because “growth...