John Dewey's logical theory

by Delton Thomas Howard

Dewey's interpretation of Kant's doctrine as presented in the 'Deductions' is no doubt essentially correct. But granting that Kant found it necessary to introduce a synthesis in imagination to account for the unity of experience and justify our knowledge of its relations, it must not be forgotten that this necessity followed from the nature of his presuppositions. If the primal reality is a 'manifold of sensations,' proceeding from a noumenal source, and lacking meaning and relations, it follows that the manifold must be gathered up into a unity before the experience which we actually apprehend can be accounted for. But if reality is experience, possessing order and coherence in its own nature, the productive imagination is rendered superfluous. Dewey, however, clings to the notion that thought is a "synthetic activity" which makes experience, and draws support from Kant for his doctrine.

Dewey now inquires what relation this revised Kantian conception of the self bears to the view advanced by Seth, viz., that the idea of self-consciousness is the highest category of thought and explanation. Kant had tried to discover the different forms of synthesis, by a method somewhat artificial to be sure, and had found twelve of them. While Hegel's independent derivation and independent placing of the categories must be accepted, it does not follow that the idea of self-consciousness can be included in the list, even if it be considered the highest category. "For it is impossible as long as we retain Kant's fundamental presupposition—the idea of the partial determination of sensation by relation to perception, apart from its relation to conception—to employ self-consciousness as a principle of explaining any fact of experience."[48] It cannot be said of the self of Kant that it is simply an hypostatized category. "It is more, because the self of Kant ... is more than any category: it is a real activity or being."[49]

Hegel, Dewey continues, develops only one aspect of Kant's Critique, that is, the logical aspect, and consequently does not fulfil Kant's entire purpose. "This is, I repeat, not an immanent 'criticism of categories' but an analysis of experience into its aspects and really constituent elements."[50] Dewey, as usual, shows his opposition to a 'merely logical' method in philosophy. He plainly indicates his dissatisfaction with the Hegelian development of Kant's standpoint. He is unfair to Hegel, however, in attributing to him a 'merely logical' method. Kant's self was, as Dewey asserts, something more than a category of thought, but it is scarcely illuminating to say of Kant that his purpose was the analysis of experience into its 'constituent elements.' Kant did, indeed, analyze experience, but this analysis must be regarded as incidental to a larger purpose. No criticism need be made of Dewey's preference for the psychological, as opposed to the logical aspects of Kant's work. The only comment to be made is that this attitude is not in line with the modern development of idealism.

The question which finally emerges, as the result of Dewey's inquiry, is this: What is the nature of this self-activity which is more than the mere category of self-consciousness? "As long as sensation was regarded as given by a thing-in-itself, it was possible to form a conception of the self which did not identify it with the world. But when sense is regarded as having meaning only because it is 'there' as determined by thought, just as thought is 'there' only as determining sense, it would seem either that the self is just their synthetic unity (thus equalling the world) or that it must be thrust back of experience, and become a thing-in-itself. The activity of the self can hardly be a third something distinct from thought and from sense, and it cannot be their synthetic union. What, then, is it?"[51] Green, Dewey says, attempted to solve the difficulty by his "idea of a completely realized self making an animal organism the vehicle of its own reproduction in time."[52] This attempt was at least in the right direction, acknowledging as it did the fact that the self is something more than the highest category of thought.

Dewey admits his difficulties in a way that makes extended comment unnecessary. He does not challenge the validity of the Hegelian development of the Kantian categories, but proposes to make more of the self than the Hegelians ordinarily do. This synthetic self-activity must reveal itself as a concrete process; that is one of the demands of his psychological standpoint. It is impossible to foresee what this process would be as an actual fact of experience.

Although the next article which is to be considered does not offer a direct answer to the problems which have so far been raised, it nevertheless indicates the general direction which Dewey's thought is to take. This article, on "The Present Position of Logical Theory," was published in the Monist in 1891.[53] Dewey appears at this time as the champion of the transcendental, or Hegelian logic, in opposition to formal and inductive logic. His attitude toward Hegel undergoes a marked change at this period. Dewey's general objection to formal logic is well expressed in the following passage: "It is assumed, in fine, that thought has a nature of its own independent of facts or subject-matter; that this thought, per se, has certain forms, and that these forms are not forms which the facts themselves take, varying with the facts, but are rigid frames, into which the facts are to be set. Now all of this conception—the notion that the mind has a faculty of thought apart from things, the notion that this faculty is constructed, in and of itself, with a fixed framework, the notion that thinking is the imposing of this fixed framework on some unyielding matter called particular objects, or facts—all of this conception appears to me as highly scholastic."[54] The inductive logic, Dewey says, still clings to the notion of thought as a faculty apart from its material, operating with bare forms upon sensations. Kant had been guilty of this separation and never overcame it successfully. Because formal logic views thought as a process apart from the matter with which it has to deal, it can never be the logic of science. "For if science means anything, it is that our ideas, our judgments may in some degree reflect and report the fact itself. Science means, on one hand, that thought is free to attack and get hold of its subject-matter, and, on the other, that fact is free to break through into thought; free to impress itself—or rather to express itself—in intelligence without vitiation or deflection. Scientific men are true to the instinct of the scientific spirit in fighting shy of a distinct a priori factor supplied to fact from the mind. Apriorism of this sort must seem like an effort to cramp the freedom of intelligence and of fact, to bring them under the yoke of fixed, external forms."[55]

In opposition to this formal, and, as he calls it, subjective standpoint in logic, Dewey stands for the transcendental logic, which supposes that there is some kind of vital connection between thought and fact; "that thinking, in short, is nothing but the fact in its process of translation from brute impression to lucent meaning."[56] Hegel holds this view of logic. "This, then, is why I conceive Hegel—entirely apart from the value of any special results—to represent the quintessence of the scientific spirit. He denies not only the possibility of getting truth out of a formal, apart thought, but he denies the existence of any faculty of thought which is other than the expression of fact itself."[57] At another place Dewey expresses his view of Hegel as follows: "Relations of thought are, to Hegel, the typical forms of meaning which the subject-matter takes in its various progressive stages of being understood."[58]

Dewey's defence of the transcendental logic is vigorous. He maintains that the disrespect into which the transcendental logic had fallen, was due to the fact that the popular comprehension of the transcendental movement had been arrested at Kant, and had never gone on to Hegel.

The objection made to Kant's standpoint is that it treated thought as a process over against experience, imposing its forms upon it from without. "Kant never dreams, for a moment, of questioning the existence of a special faculty of thought with its own peculiar and fixed forms. He states and restates that thought in itself exists apart from fact and occupies itself with fact given to it from without."[59] While Kant gave the death blow to a merely formal conception of thought, indirectly, and opened up the way for an organic interpretation, he did not achieve the higher standpoint himself. Remaining at the standpoint of Kant, therefore, the critic of the transcendental logic has much to complain of. Scientific men deal with facts, look to them for guidance, and must suppose that thought and fact pass into each other directly, and without vitiation or deflection. They are correct in opposing a conception which would interpose conditions between thought on the one hand and the facts on the other.