Supplement to Final Class Fall 2025 For Hauptli’s MSC Course “Plato vs Dewey”

 

    Copyright © 2026 Bruce W. Hauptli

 

I. Whose “Faith,” “Faith In What, & Why “Faith?”

 

For Dewey freedom, whether personal, economic, or political, is a highly prized value hat comes as individuals engage in reflective action with “…resolute will[s] operating in a world in some respects indeterminate, because open and moving toward a new future.” [1]  It is a necessary condition for democracy.  Freedom is not sufficient for democracy, however.  According to him, “Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature.  Belief in the Common Man is a familiar article in the democratic creed.  That belief is without basis and significance save as it means faith in the potentialities of human nature as that nature is exhibited in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth.  This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display into one another in the incidents and relations of daily life.[2] 

 

Does he think that all human beings have this “faith?”  Clearly not!  His unending “historical” looks at Western civilization make it clear that his views of inquiry, metaphysics, human nature, and valuation are not the views found previously in our civilization. 

 

Does he think that everyone today (either his or our own time) has this faith?  Again, clearly not!  He talks about earlier America and current America and how there are “robber barons” “fascists”,” Marxists,” and other view which disparage democracy and “commoners’ views, as Westbrook points out, Dewey completely understood that many American social theorists believed that

 

…widespread political participation was not only not a necessary feature of democracy, it was also not a desirable feature.  They argued that increased political participation by incompetent citizens might undermine the stability of liberal-democratic regimes by unleashing irrational passions and encouraging demagoguery, thereby destroying the peaceful competition of responsible elites which was at the heart of a realistic democracy.  Widespread apathy was thus seen by some as a functional feature of an effective democratic polity.  Participatory ideals were useful primarily for purposes of legitimation and for ensuring elite responsibility but were not to be taken seriously as ideals.[3] 

 

Dewey explicitly and forcefully rejected such views and championed a moral democracy which required his “common faith” that we can life of free inquiry which is pursued in a social setting of similarly minded individuals.  When this faith is present, individuality can prosper, and democracy can exist.  Living an “associated” life with others which conforms to such a model involves a moral commitment to oneself and to others which instantiates a democracy.  As he says in his “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us:”

 

I did not invent this faith.  I acquired it from my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit.  For what is the faith in democracy in role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication.  I am willing to leave to upholders of totalitarian states of the right and the left the view that faith in the capacities of intelligence is utopian.  For the faith is so deeply embedded in the methods which are intrinsic to democracy that when a professed democrat denies the faith he convicts himself of treachery to his profession.[4] 

 

Clearly, Dewey is neither availing himself of a traditional “appeal to faith” nor referencing some particular established creed.  Instead, he is [optimistically, even in light of the Fascist and Communist challenges of the day, e.g. 1939] maintaining that democratic government can provide for a moral social order which is not in the service of any external authority, but instead fosters both individual and social development. 

 

For Dewey the chief obstacle for such a life arises when groups of individuals (examples: castes, classes, races, sexes, material wealth groupings, or “cultural” groupings) isolate themselves from one another and seek to exploit others.  Against these divisive forces, as we have seen, Dewey marshals his “faith.” Is it just his “fellow travelers” who have this “faith?”  Is it “common” enough for him?  Again, no!  He wants to maintain many have inherited it from their enculturation, a few have acquired it on through “reflective inquiry.” 

 

But Dewey’s distinction between “wants/desires/values” and “valuations/ideals” is very important if we are to understand his clam that this faith is necessary for democracy.  I think his claim arises out of his “critical reflection” (as does democracy’s status as actuality or as an “ideal”).    In his Experience and Nature Dewey maintains

 

...of immediate values as such, values which occur and which are possessed and enjoyed, there is no theory at all; they just occur, are enjoyed, possessed; that is all.  The moment we begin to discourse about these values, to define and generalize, to make distinctions in kinds, we are passing beyond value-objects themselves; we are entering, even if only blindly, upon an inquiry into causal antecedents and causative consequents, with a view to appraising the “real,” that is the eventual, goodness of the thing in question.  We are criticizing, not for its own sake, but for the sake of instituting and perpetuating more enduring and extensive values.[5] 

 

If a man believes in ghosts, devils, miracles, fortune-tellers, the immutable certainty of the existing economic regime, and the supreme merits of his political party and its leaders, he does so believe; these are immediate goods to him, precisely as some color and tone combinations are lovely, or the mistress of his heart is charming.  When the question is raised as to the “real” value of the object for belief, the appeal is to criticism, intelligence.  And the court of appeal decides by the law of conditions and consequences.  Inquiry duly pursued leads to the enstatement of an object which is directly accepted, good in belief, but an object whose character now depends upon the reflective operations whose conclusion it is.  Like the object of dogmatic and uncritical belief, it marks an “end,” a static arrest; but unlike it, the “end” is a conclusion; hence it carries credentials.[6] 

 

It is easier to wean a miser from his hoard, than a man from his deeper opinions.  And the tragedy is that in so many cases the causes which lead to the thing in question being a value are not reasons for its being a good, while the fact that it is an immediate good tends to preclude that search for causes, that dispassionate judgment, which is pre-requisite to the conversion of goods de facto into goods de jure.  Here, again and preeminently, since reflection is the instrumentality of securing freer and more enduring goods, reflection is a unique and intrinsic good.[7] 

 

For Dewey values arise in experience and can be immediately/primitively experienced, and they can then be critically assessed and become more enduring and extensive values.  In both cases we have fact—something is valued and the conditions leading to such experiences are critically considered to allow for more of these valued experiences.  When these valuations are themselves critically examined and assessed, we come to have finally, however, critical reflection can assess the valuations “goods de jure”—that is, values reflectively credentialed.  When prehistoric persons first tasted meat which fell in their fire, it tasted good (a primitive good, sorry for the pun).  When they reflectively and critically perfected cooking such immediate goods became stable goods.  When the value of cooked food was reflectively and critically assessed we came to the level of a “reflectively credentialed good,” and, finally as human beings developed and refined the culinary arts, treasured consummatory dining experiences arose.  Dewey would certainly point out, however, that critical reflection would surely show that there are good foods which should not be cooked. 

 

Of course, the sort of critically reflective inquiry process Dewey champions is a social one, and whether it is dealing with personal, practical, social, economic, political or moral, problems, better resolutions arise when the inquiry is shared like-minded individuals. 

 

With Dewey, I believe that neither science nor philosophy arrives at answers that are final.  Instead, each finds uncertain but acceptable stopping points in a critical and tentative rational agreement amongst the participants.  While, ideally, the answers will be completely convincing to all, this ideal is rarely attained.  Nonetheless there are factors which mitigate against continuance of the critical process: the costs (economic, temporal, and or social) of further inquiry may be unsupportable, there may be a pressing need for action which constrains further inquiry, participants may be exhausted, etc.  In such circumstances, if a decision needs to be made critical inquiry may need to tentatively end and the politics of decision-making will have to take over.  I won’t pursue this further except to say that here I am a fan of Dewey’s view that such decisions are best made within a process which is deeply democratic. 

 

II. An Important “Internal” Criticism of Dewey:

 

Critics of Dewey from George Santayana [1925] to Richard Rorty [1982] have maintained there is an inconsistency between Dewey’s “naturalistic methodology” and his presumed “basic principles,” or “unrecognized metaphysical commitments.”[8]  Whether we are considering his discussions of the processes of inquiry (whether ordinary, scientific, or moral” )his view that there are no fixed starting points, first principles, unchanging essences, or final truths or goods, or his defense of democracy, these all seem undercut by his view that the world and human experience are plastic, unchanging and “natural” rather than “transcendental.”  His rejection of Greek philosophy, Roman Christian thought, Medieval theological views, rationalism, empiricism, and idealism, are all motivated by his pragmatic instrumentalism,  yet this requires a specific take upon the changing world, human nature and naturalism—one which seems to go beyond what his methodology would legitimate. 

 

     Similarly in value theory, his rejection of teleology, final causation, and transcendentalism and advocacy of a naturalistic view of human nature, consummatory experience, valuation, and ideals seems to promote a fixed and unchanging view unsupported by his naturalistic commitments and his “faith.” 

 

     While Rorty discusses, this criticism, in his “Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope” [1999] he maintains that:

 

willingness to accept the liberal goal of maximal room for individual variation…is facilitated by a consensus that there is no source of authority other than the free agreement of human beings.  This consensus, in turn, is facilitated by the adoption of philosophical views about reason and truth of the sort which are nowadays thought of as symptoms of ‘postmodern scepticism’ but which I think of as just good old American pragmatism. 

  The core of Dewey’s thought was an insistence that nothing—not the Will of God, not the Intrinsic Nature of Reality, not the Moral Law—can take precedence over the result of agreement freely reached by members of a democratic community.  The pragmatist claim that truth is not correspondence to the intrinsic nature of something that exists independently of our choice of linguistic descriptions is another expression of this insistence.[9] 

 

While many believe philosophers will never solve any of the problems (or answer any of the questions), and this leads them to think that the contrast between philosophy and science is not at all favorable to philosophy.  But scientists are able to reach broad intersubjective consensus as to whether or not a scientific question is answered, or a scientific problem is resolved.  In his “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics,” Rorty offers a discussion which may help mitigate this critique:  

the trouble is that intersubjective agreement about who has succeeded and who has failed is easy to get if you lay down criteria of success in advance [and, he suggests, this is what scientists are able to do].  If all you want is fast relief, your choice of analgesic is clear (though the winning drug may have unfortunate belated side effects).  If you know that all you want out of science is accurate prediction, you have a fast way to decide between competing theories (though this criterion by itself would, at one time, have led you to favor Ptolemaic over Copernican astronomy).  If you know that all you want is rigorous demonstration, you can check out mathematicians’ proofs of theorems and award the prize to the one who has proved the most (although the award will then always go to a hack, whose theorems are of no interest).  But intersubjective agreement is harder to get when the criteria of success begin to proliferate, and even harder when those criteria themselves are up for grabs [as they are, he suggests, in philosophy].[10]  

Effectively, I believe Rory here points to the pragmatists’ claim that the real “proof” of our practical, scientific, political or moral “tools” is found in utility in resolving our practical, scientific, political or moral “tools” problems. 

 

Of course, when the agreement disappears, the tools no longer work, or the environment changes, the pragmatist recommends taking up the inquiry process once again rather than seeking fixed, eternal, and absolute “answers!  So, here, we see the core contrast the course points to the contrast between Plato’s ideal and Dewey’s. 

 

III. Several Alternative Contemporary “Defenses of Democracy” for those unhappy with Dewey’s:

 

the view that democracy is only “better than the other forms of government which humans have come up with,” but this does not make it “ideal” 

 

the view that democracy is good because it allows for the nonviolent changing of rulers when citizens are unhappy (a view which does not need to be committed to a “Deweyan faith,” a view that democracy is good, that it promotes human progress or development—indeed it is compatible with a view that human nature is fundamentally corrupt (and allows for “throwing the bums” when their corruption becomes intolerable (but has no promise that these bums would be replaced by “better” rulers)

 

a criticism offered by “social elites” which holds that democracy must be guided by the highly educated—for example John Stuart Mill believed that highly educated citizens should have more votes than lesser educated individuals (who, presumably, would have more votes than uneducated individuals)—as it were, a Quazi-Deweyan view without “the faith in the common man”

 

IV. Finally, having studied Dewey, we should consider a clear “external critique:” Dewey doesn’t provide a firm “proof” in the manner of Plato, but while Plato’s “proofs” may not be satisfactory, this doesn’t mean we should stop looking for such a proof.” 

 

IV. Discussion, Questions, and Comments. 

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File revised on 01/20/26


[1] John Dewey, “Philosophies of Freedom,” originally published in Freedom in the Modern World, ed. Horace Kalen (NY: Coward-McCann, 1928), and reprinted in The Later Works, v. 3.  The selection we are discussing appears in John Dewey: The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Columbus: American Education Press, 1939), pp. 133-141, p. 141. 

[2] John Dewey, “Creative Democray—The Task Before Us” [1939].  Originally published in John Dewey and the Promise of America, (Columbus: American Education Press, 1939).  It was presented at a dinner in honor of Dewey It is reprinted The Later Works, v. 14.  The selection we are discussing appears in John Dewey: The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), op.cit., p. 242. 

[3] Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1991), p. 545.  Emphasis, bold and italics, added to the passage. 

[4] John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” was first read at a dinner in honor of Dewey in New York on 10/20/1939, then published in John Dewey and the Promise of America Progressive Education Booklet No. 14 (Columbus: American Education Press, 1939), and reprinted The Later Works, v. 14.  The selections we are discussing appears in John Dewey: The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), on pp. 242-243, and emphasis (bold) has sometimes been added to the passages. 

[5] John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 403.  Emphasis [bold] added to the passage.  

[6] Ibid., p. 405.  Emphasis [bold] added to the passage.  

[7] Ibid., p. 406.  

[8] Cf., George Santayana, “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics,” Journal of Philosophy v. 25 (1925), pp. 673-688, and Richard Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” New Studies in the Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Steven M. Cahn (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1977), pp. 45-74,  reprinted in in his Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 72-89. 

[9] Richard Rorty, “Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope,” in his Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 229-239, pp. 238-239.  The essay originally appeared as “Global Utopias, History and Philosophy” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity and Globalization, ed. Luiz Soares (Rio de Janiero: UNESCO/ISSC/EDUCAM, 1996), pp. 457-469. 

[10] Richard Rorty, “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics” [1997], in his Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 175-189, p. 180.  The essay originally appeared in Common Knowledge v. 6 (1997).