Abstract

Sixty years ago, John Dewey argued that a “spectator theory of knowledge” has dominated Western thought from the birth of primordial religions through the modern era. According to Dewey, this theory's gnostic claims about foundational realities and the transcendence of ordinary experience have provided spiritual compensation for our always experientially precarious and contingent everyday existence. Dewey believed that the intelligentsia have fashioned their certain truths to glorify their own intellectual “labor” and to devalue the practical arts of the underclasses. For Dewey, the history of Western religion has been composed of successive waves of priests, metaphysicians and epistemologists wasting millenia genuflecting before a priori spiritual and material foundations, and fretting about the consequent aporetic dualisms between body and soul, mind and matter, ideal and real, subject and object, fact and value, reason and feeling, perception and will, theory and practice — ad infinitum.