Steven Tucker

Honestly, I'm starting to research Graduate Schools. I'm resolved to get my masters in political science and seek out someone who will employ me to help reduce the influence and power of the Statist class in our government. I'd like to end up with a PHD eventually so that I may teach philosophy and political science to students.

Dewey's fundamental criticism of American Culture was rooted in his direct opposition to the negative consequences of the dialectical tradition resulting in false dualistic distinctions. Dewey was the first Pragmatist to dispense entirely with the artificial problems manufactured by philosophy, choosing instead to focus on objective problems, distinctions, definitions, and the like. According to John Stahl, Dewey "is critically rethinking our dominant beliefs and institutions, arguing that they are founded on faulty conceptions of experience, and are obsolete, irrelevant, and detrimental in light of changes in the actual conditions of contemporary life" (Stahl, 441). According to Dewey, our conception of reality depends upon our understanding of certain definitions relating to culture, religion, individualism, and value. He writes, "Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible" (Dewey, The Eclipse of the Public, 323-324). As society changes, our language and definitions too must change. We cannot simply begin entirely new debates bred of new experiences on the basis of old understandings. To even attempt this is to create false distinctions and irrelevant contradictions in terms. The "social activism" associated with Pragmatism and the modern Progressive movements, is directly related to Dewey's understanding of philosophy as experimental and his understanding of American Society as fundamentally Democratic. We could dispense with the aged arguments that had historically taken up so much of our time and energy between theorists such as Hobbes and Locke; and instead focus on the immediate dilemmas associated with American Society as presently constituted. In Dewey's mind, an inapplicable philosophy was an irrelevant one. Philosophy must directly and honestly deal with matters of culture when considering the philosophical dilemmas raised by public debate in a democratic environment. From this perspective came the first break between America's commitment to the US Constitution and the European philosophies upon which it was founded, and American Democracy as a living, breathing organism. Dewey argued that, "American philosophy must be born out of and must respond to the demands of democracy, as democracy strives to voice and to achieve itself on a vaster scale, and in a more thorough and final way than history has previously witnessed" (Dewey, Philosophy and American National Life, 73). Democracy is fluid and progressive. It builds upon each generations experience, taking from them what it has learned, and moving society forward. The idea that a government could be constituted upon strict principles handed down by societies that presently have no consequence on American Culture simply doesn't make sense to Pragmatists. Dewey continues, "It is, then, to the needs of democracy in America that we turn to find the fundamental problems of philosophy; and to its tendencies, its working forces, that we look for the points of view and the terms in which philosophy will envisage and solve these problems" (Dewey, 74). Whether or not we notice the diseased shift from an objective approach to social criticism, to a progressive role in social activism, we can at least appreciate Dewey's consistency of relating philosophy to experience and truth to objective reality. There is no relativism or subjectivism here. While Dewey departs from historical materialism, his empiricism is sound. To delve deeply into the realities of a people is to understand them; and to fail to even attempt this level of understanding, but continue to philosophize concerning ethics or politics or the human condition, is futile. "The beginning of a culture stripped of egoistic illusions", argues Dewey, "is the perception that we have as yet no culture; that our culture is something to achieve, to create..." (Dewey, American Education and Culture, 198). As I alluded to before, it didn't take long for this balance, this proper relation between "Society" and "Individual" to break down for John Dewey. By repudiating our self-esteem as being constituted by "egoistic illusions", Dewey firmly places the individual into a social context, and fails to understand the two in a coexisting, coequal state. His objectivity from this point breaks down and his will to power takes over. "To transmute a society built on an industry which is not yet humanized into a society which wields its knowledge and its industrial power in behalf of a democratic culture requires the courage of an inspired imagination" (Dewey, 198). The terms of Dewey's Pragmatism have been established as fundamentally Progressive. From Dewey's own point of view and analysis, he would have to admit that he has chosen a social context from which to view and classify all individuals; which is contradictory to the balance he initially raised as his ideal. At least, as a philosopher, he had the intellectual honesty to define the direction and the motive of his thought. In this sense, Dewey is very much the same kind of philosopher as an Ayn Rand or a Frederich Nietzsche: experimental, objective, empirical, and social. But we must read his work as being Progressive, as much as Pragmatic. Best known for his theories on Education, John Dewey freed American Pragmatists from the chains of European Philosophy and even from their own early histories on American Soil. Philosophy became about the future, not about the past. The Pragmatist motive was to create and manufacture, not to dig up, categorize, and analyze. Experimental Philosophy is an active philosophy, aimed at consolidating many sciences and experiences into a cohesive understanding with a set of consistent principles from which to act. Then, those actions are to be judged on the basis of their success or failure in producing their intended consequences. This is the essence of Pragmatism. It is no surprise then, to us, as Objectivists, that the Progressive and Pragmatic movements in America have been plagued by over 100 years of unintended consequences. Their failure to understand the individual as the primary motive power in society, has led them to the false belief that to change a society is to change individuals. That we can manufacture individuals by manufacturing social conditions. The result has been the attempt to turn individuals against themselves, to force them to act unnaturally in order to fit them like so many puzzle pieces into a picture that simply cannot exist. John Dewey began in the right place, but was simply too excited by the power of ideas to affect individuals and move them in a unified direction. Most Pragmatists fall into this trap of believing that human beings have actually evolved beyond their basic need for self-esteem and security. We are collectively dangerous to our own liberty and security; and we cannot be depended upon, as individuals, to obey or conform with any movement when we cannot see an end in sight which will improve our station; and when we see more security in our own reason and sovereignty, than in the will of a collective majority, we individuals do not take kindly to requests for voluntary submission, or to being involuntary forced.

John Stuhr, in Dewey's Life: Cultural Context and Philosophical Background, expounded as well as anyone the fundamental principles of John Dewey's philosophical perspectives. When most students think of Pragmatism, they think of Charles Pierce and William James, and forget the most important contributions from America's most American philosopher, John Dewey. We owe much of our Education and Political environment to the thought and perspective of Dewey, who conceived, not only psychology, but philosophy as being primarily indicative of sociological conditioning. Stuhr writes, "Stated negatively, philosophy, for Dewey, is not the achievement of, or even the quest for, certainty. It cannot and does not begin in total doubt or some presuppositionless state and it issues in no absolute knowledge or eternal truths" (Stuhr, Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 435). This thought echoes something distinct in American Pragmatism. Our philosophers were not seeking to understand the meaning of life or to conceive the Universal Forms from which all absolute knowledge is derived. Instead, they saw philosophy as a vehicle to express the socio-psychological reality within which the individual mind is raised and the contexts through which the individual mind comes to understand its' own reality. This is the essence of American Pragmatism. Stuhr continues discussing Dewey's negative view on philosophy, "It does not provide knowledge of supposed final causes or some ultimate, transcendent reality. It concerns no special, self-contained, disciplinary subject matter, problems that are philosophical rather than, for example, psychological, social, economic, biological. It is not a form of disinterested contemplation, a passive mirroring of reality, a spectator sport or form of intellectual voyeurism uninvolved intrinsically with experienced problems and efforts to ameliorate them" (Stuhr, 435). In essence, the Pragmatists broke away from the metaphysical debates which mired European Philosophers for centuries. Questions concerning the supremacy of Kant over Aristotle no longer seemed relevant to the Americans. Instead, philosophy was something much more meaningful. Something specific to our daily lives and capable of governing our understanding of life, not from some mystical and distanced point of view requiring a mix of imagination of logic, but from inside the experience itself. "Stated positively", Stuhr writes, "Dewey understands philosophy as follows. First, the ultimate subject mater of philosophy is experience and its problems. 'Reference to the primacy and ultimacy of the material of ordinary experiences protects us,' Dewey writes, 'from creating artificial problems which deflect the energy and attention of philosophers from the real problems that arise out of actual subject-matter'. It is in this spirit that Dewey praises Ralph Waldo Emerson for judging every philosophy by its reference to the immediacies of life and reminds us that philosophy must not be a study of philosophy, but a study, by means of philosophy, of life-experience and our beliefs about and in this experience" (Stuhr, 435). This is the starting point for a purely American brand of philosophy. All the good and ill that has come of our thinking started here. It can be argued that Americans, such as John Dewey, were overly obsessed with sociological interpretation and psychology; that we never developed the necessary metaphysics and epistemology necessary for developing a consistent philosophical worldview. Such criticisms, I think, hold a great deal of weight. But the uniqueness of the American Philosophical experiment with Pragmatism certainly wasn't held back by such academic criticisms. It proved as powerful an intellectual persuasion as any system of thought developed in Europe and it proved its applicable power within American society. John Dewey exacts a nearly perfect insight into the intellectual dishonesty of the entire history of philosophy, however, stating, "When it is acknowledged that under disguise of dealing with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with the precious values embedded in social traditions, that it has sprung from a clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible contemporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of future philosophy is to clarify men's ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become so far as is humanly possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts" (Dewey, "Changing Conceptions of Philosophy," in Reconstruction in Philosophy, 94). . John Dewey rejected the image of the philosopher in his dark unventilated chamber-room, reflecting upon the nature of existence and the minds ability to grasp the ultimate realities of the universe. Even after years of such philosophizing we still haven't been able to agree on anything. There has been no final proof of any concrete conclusion regarding the ultimate realities of the universe. Dewey appears to have grasped the importance of the Pragmatists. They practiced philosophy, instead of merely studying it. Dewey writes, "When the practice of knowledge ceased to be dialectical and became experimental, knowing became preoccupied with changes and the test of knowledge became the ability to bring about certain changes. Knowing, for experimental sciences, means a certain kind of intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be contemplative and becomes in a true sense practical. Now this implies that philosophy, unless it is to undergo a complete break with the authorized spirit of science, must also alter its nature. It must assume a practical nature; it must become operative and experimental" (Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 149). This is true for Objectivists as much as it is for Pragmatists. We all recognize the tradition of reflection and abstract postulation as the search for justification. Philosophy has always been political, ethical, and cultural; but in the modern world, politics and ethics, culture and society are so readily available to the masses and Democracy has brought the debate to everyone's doorstep, if they want it, that now everyone understands what is at stake in the proposition. Everyone understands that a premise is a serious thing. Everyone quickly begins the process of induction when presented a funny smelling proposition. "IF what you say is true, then...". To say that philosophy is experimental, is not to say that philosophy necessarily produces an understanding of facts. This is left to the more deliberate sciences. Rather, what modern philosophy produces is an understanding of the relationship between us and facts, between us and thinking, between ideas themselves, and of processes. Philosophers dig up the foundations of ideologies to see what those foundations are made of and critique how well they were constructed. Pragmatists attempt to answer and to define the relationship between our ideas and logic, and their practical results in society. Since what Dewey is studying when he "philosophizes" is experience, it is important to explain how Dewey understands experience itself. John Stuhr explains, "For Dewey, experience is not to be understood in terms of the experiencing subject, or as the interaction of a subject and object that exist separate from their interaction. Instead, Dewey's view is radically empirical: experience is an activity in which subject and object are unified and constituted as partial feature and relations within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity. Dewey warns us not to misconstrue aspects of this unified experience-activity: distinctions made in reflection do not refer to things that exist as separate substances prior to and outside of that reflection" (Stuhr, 437). While this constitutes Dewey's first objective mistake in his appreciation for the concrete reality of human experience and the inescapable and inevitable quality of reality itself, it does dispense with the unnecessary distinction between the person experiencing and the things experienced. This "radical empiricism" is a beautiful rejection of a dualism that separates us from nature. We are not an unnatural consciousness dealing with a natural world, but a part of a natural world experiencing itself. Consciousness (our consciousness) is as much a part of the world as anything else, and it cannot be relegated to a detached, purely rational (though subjective) experiencing agent. Dewey's genius was to recognize that the mind was inside, not outside, this happening we call experience. Dewey writes, "Environment is not something around and about human activities in an external sense; it is their medium, or milieu, in the sense in which a medium is inter-mediate in the execution or carrying out of human activities, as well as being the channel through which they move and the vehicle by which they go on" (Dewey, Knowing and the Known, 224). John Dewey and Ayn Rand hung around psychologists for a reason. You cannot understand our understanding of our experience unless you understand our understanding of ourselves. You cannot understand our judgments, our rational proclivities, if you don't understand the ongoing intellectual environment that produce the legislation of our thought. Pure reflection and this idea of Pure Knowledge is ridiculous when you consider that the mind doing the reflection is a part of an environment limited by its' own culture and language. This is why we struggle to understand all the writings of antiquity, when we have not yet understood the environment, the language, and the culture of the writers themselves. Dewey's Pragmatism dives directly into the experimental. He incorporates every aspect of scientific understanding in his attempt to understand thought and reason, and all their implications. We cannot discuss ethical premises related to property without understanding economics. We cannot discuss economics if we do not understand a people's culture and values. We cannot understand a people's culture and values, if we do not understand their history. In other words, the amount of understanding required by Experimental Philosophy is much greater than the amount of understanding required to merely reflect on ideas in a vacuum. John Dewey did much to elucidate this point.

I think it is more a matter of context mixing. Not dropping. But I get where you are coming from.

There is a difference between taking a rational action to make a particular point and worrying about an idealistic view of morality. If you have a principled problem with offering advice, then don't do it. But if you think that a book will help make a point you believe in, do not fail to do so on the basis of some abstract contradiction. Only real things can be contradictory.

Like with Social Security, Medicare, and Civil Rights legislation, Health Care Reform will define the political environment for the foreseeable decades to come. If the consequences of this bill become popular, Democrats will hold power for twenty or thirty years, running on the importance of keeping their Heath Care entitlements in place. If the consequences of this bill become unpopular, however; if the Democrats fail to deliver quality health care to all Americans, then the Democrat Party could be sunk and we may see the longest reign of a Republican Majority in the history of the United States Government. 2010 will only be a small step in either direction. If the Republicans don't take both the House and the Senate, the chances are that they will not be able to accomplish enough of their own agenda to run on their own progress in 2012. If HCR is popular by 2012, if we have pulled out of this Recession by then, President Obama could lead another relentless campaign and regain the Congress on his coattails. By 2012, 2010 could look like an ominous overreaction to positive legislation. So we won't know anything until then.

I'm not certain that this is what they are saying. You should not allow your family to define your presentation of who you are. It is their decision to reject you, as a person and family member. You are not rejecting them. You can only choose to act according to the truth as you understand it. I am religious in one sense and totally irreligious in another. This sometimes causes conflict with my parents because with such contradictions, either my parents or I am correct, or we are both wrong, but it cannot be that we are both right. I am not insecure about my beliefs and therefore am not threatened nor feel defensive when people hold beliefs different than my own. My confidence does not require proselytizing my family and therefore they do not feel insecure around me. There are arguments from time to time, but these arguments are the inevitable result of a rational disagreement. I do not view such disagreements as negative.

I am totally irresponsible when it comes to imbibing alcohol. For me to choose to drink alcohol is irrational and dangerous. The same would be true for people who lack the virtues necessary to avoid addiction to gambling. I play poker. I love putting my mind up against the minds of others with money on the line. I rarely win a lot, but I rarely lose anything at all. It is a rational endeavor. Given that most people that play poker are playing for the entertainment of it all, I allow them to pay me for their enjoyment. I don't play for fun, I play for money, and therefore play differently than people who play for fun. The same is true of people who play for the emotional high. I'm willing to allow them to pay me so that they can get their fix. Gambling addicts are acting irresponsibly when they choose to gamble, because they aren't playing for money, they are playing for a high.

Agreed. We are facing a precarious situation now. We can only hope that our representatives make enough changes and amendments to the current law to protect the incentives of profit for individuals capable of producing life saving medicine and technology.