Was Dewey religious?

IN HIS REVIEW of Louis Manand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Albert W. Alschuler paints a portrait of John Dewey's pragmatism that is best described as caricature ("It's all relative?," Nov. 20-Dec. 3). First, he derides as "drivel" what he takes to be Dewey's inversion of classic stimulus-response theory. He unfortunately fails to grasp Dewey's more radical idea: stimulus and response are alternating components in an adjustive cycle. A response at one moment may condition a stimulus at some later moment.

Another of Alschuler's mistakes involves the pragmatic notion of truth, which he seems to think involves nothing more than personal satisfaction. But Dewey argued that "a belief is true when it satisfies both personal needs and the requirements of objective things" (italics added). Both William James and Dewey recognized the existence of disagreeable truths.

Alschuler also characterizes Dewey as "antireligious." If he had read A Common Faith, he would surely know better. In that book Dewey honored the religious dimensions of experience and suggested ways in which they could be made more secure and more productive.

Alschuler might at least have consulted the back issues of this very journal. In an article published in the CHRISTIAN CENTURY of November 14, 1934, Henry Nelson Wieman wrote that "some of us have known for a long time that he [Dewey] was a deeply religious man."

I hope that the readers of the CENTURY will not be misled by Alschuler's claims that Dewey's psychology is absurd, that he and James equated truth with personal satisfaction, and that Dewey was antireligious. One frequently encounters such claims in the writings of Christian fundamentalists. Given its rich history of first-rate scholarship and informed debate, I am surprised to find them in the pages of the CENTURY.

Larry A. Hickman
Director of the Center for Dewey Studies
at Southern Illinois University,
Carbondale, Ill.

I was pleased that the editors included Albert Alschuler's review of The Metaphysical Club in the CENTURY. Many of the points raised helped put some perspective on Louis Menand's take on pragmatism.

However, one key aspect to the discussion has to do with the notion of relativity which is trumpeted in the title, but less forcibly put forth in the review. It strikes me that relativity is a red herring in any discussion of pragmatism. In all my reading, I haven't discovered the concept; rather, the notion of probability is the prominent position put forward. Whereas relativity presumes many disparate targets, probability assumes coming at one central target, knowing that absolute proof is not available to any observer. As Menand suggests, "The more arrows you shoot at the target, the better sense you will have of the bull's-eye."

Pragmatism is grounded in epistomology, not ontology. It allows me, as a believer, to affirm my belief without getting locked in to absolute descriptions of reality. In a world where absolutes divide us into warring camps, the pragmatic approach probably gives us a way to disagree without being disagreeable.

Ralph Cook
Baltimore, Md.

Alschuler replies:

Ralph Cook departs from Louis Menand's view that the key idea uniting his pragmatists was the equation of truth and utility. He says that pragmatism merely recognizes that "absolute proof is not available to any observer" and that "the notion of probability is the prominent position put forward." My review maintained that Menand's description fit the views of William James and John Dewey only "sometimes" and that it did not fit the views of Charles Sanders Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes at all. Some pragmatists, especially Peirce, did emphasize probability. Menand treats Peirce's epistemology as no different from James and Dewey's concept of truth. As far as I can tell, the two ideas have nothing in common. I doubt in fact that pragmatism has a unifying theme.

Cook is also correct in saying that people who call themselves pragmatists commonly deny that they are relativists. Richard Rorty does so in the same essay in which he declares that his goal is to "convinc[e] our society that it need be responsible only to its own traditions, not to the moral law as well." Rorty argues that the moral force of convictions lies wholly in the fact that a particular family, community, nation or people endorses them and that "nothing else has any moral force."

Similarly, Richard Posner denies the charge of "vulgar" relativism but concedes, "If moral relativism means that the criteria for pronouncing a moral claim valid are local, so that we cannot call another culture immoral unless we add `by our lights,' then I am a moral relativist." Despite their disclaimers, the word "relativist" seems to describe Rorty and Posncr. More important, I think it describes Menand. (Incidentally, the editors of the CENTURY supplied the title that Cook complains "trumpeted" relativism.)