1. “This need and principle… is the necessity of a deliberate control of policies by the method of intelligence, an intelligence which is not the faculty of intellect honored in text-books and neglected elsewhere, but which is the sum-total of impulses, habits, emotions, records, and discoveries which forecast what is desirable and undesirable in future possibilities, and which contrive ingeniously in behalf of imagined good. Our life has no background of sanctified categories which we bay fall back; we rely upon precedent as authority only to our own undoing….”
-John Dewey, “The Need For a Recovery of Philosophy, pg 231 of Pragmatism, edited by Louis Menand
2. Dewey is drawing the distinction here between a text-book philosophy and a real-word philosophy. It is one thing to take one (or more, but less than the total) aspect of the intelligence or the human experience and raise it above all others in an attempt to explain human intelligence and function in terms of that one (or more) aspect. Instead, human intelligence should be understood as an amalgamation of a variety of things, not subject to such distilling and, indeed, not limited by the past understandings or dogmas held by (supposed) thinking men. Truly, this conglomeration should include every aspect of the human experience and every human discovery in order for this human intelligence to make cogent hypotheses about the world and, following that, in making the best decisions in all areas of human life, be they government, religion, education or whatever other endeavor human beings partake in. If humans merely rely on the past as an answer to the future, at least according to Dewey, it will lead “to our own undoing….”
3. When Dewey speaks of “the need for a recovery of philosophy,” it is not so much that he is saying that humans need to pick philosophy up again as a practice (although, if by philosophy it is meant “better philosophy,” then perhaps he is), but that the current state (in his time) of philosophy was such that philosophers had concerned themselves with things that did not necessarily matter to anything outside their discipline of taking dead men’s ideas on test drives and trying to apply outdated systems of thought to modern problems without thought of what that means in reality.
What Dewey would mean by reality is what actually happens… and all things actually happen. He says, “While all that happens is equally real-- since it really happens-- happenings are not of equal worth.” What defines their worth are the importance human beings place on them, perhaps out of necessity to their existence or merely by convention (such as the use of money as a means of trade). To speak of a reality (or consequences of that reality) that is somehow greater than the reality that human beings directly experience is to speak of something which humans have no apprehension of and actually draws human attention away from the issues at hand, whatever they may be. Philosophy then, need be concerned with those things which are of direct interest of humanity: that which happens.
It follows, then, that any attempt to magnify one aspect of the human experience above all the others will, of course, skew this purpose of philosophy, because it will not allow the fullness of reality to come to bear on human intelligence, but merely a caricature of reality in which the artist has taken a feature which he has noticed more than others and expanded it so that when other men look at the picture he has drawn, they can initially see nothing but the enormously deformed feature and will come to judge all other things in the picture they eventually stumble across.
For Dewey, the creation of a view of intelligence (an it’s application) which considers all these things will lead to “our salvation.” It is not to say that all people will be willing (or even perhaps able) to think and operate in such a manner, but what is important here is that philosophers strive to create such a reality and foster the growth and articulation of such a thing.
4. Within the scope of Pragmatism as a whole, many things have been considered: Peirce discussed “meaning,” James considered “truth,” and, here, Dewey speaks of “intelligence” and “knowledge.” For the most part (with James being a slight exception), the three men have really been shooting at the same target. Peirce’s “meaning” concerned itself with the proper defining of the terms which people so easily throw around; definitions not in terms of other words but in terms of reality. James’ “truth” is really a way of talking about belief, in which the “truth” of things to people is reliant primarily upon the idea “working” for them in a given situation.
What that will be taken to mean, in the light of these two other pragmatists’ ideas (and for the sake of consistency) is that something “works” in that it is the logical conclusion of all pre-existent ideas within the person, e.g.- “Daddy loves me,” “the floor is solid,” “I am hungry,” etc. However, just because it is the logical conclusion of all the pre-existent ideas within the person, it doesn’t make it true (at least not in the sense Peirce or Dewey would put it), but it does allow the person to live effectively within their surroundings. It is a giant puzzle (in which the puzzle is reality), in which not all of the pieces are present, and it forces the person to imagine the remainder of the picture in light of the pieces which he does have. Even false ideas about reality are part of reality, so they would count as pieces of the whole, but that is really just mentioned in passing and it of no importance for the remainder of this discussion.
Dewey, then, when he speaks of “knowledge” and “intelligence” speaks primarily about the discovery of the remainder of reality’s picture. It means an open-minded (not being held back by pre-suppositions or the fear of being wrong) look at the world around man and creating a developing (and developing is key) world-view founded upon the observations, interactions, and thoughts of human beings and bringing the full weight of all those things upon man’s perception of reality, which will, point to what Peirce calls “the one true conclusion,” also called “the way things really are,” or “reality.” What both these men are considering is a situation where human experience, expanding in all direction ad infinitum finally comes to the ultimate conclusion, which is reality. This is not the same thing as an ultimate conclusion about reality, because that conclusion would have to be included in itself. It is instead, absolute understanding of reality or knowledge of reality.
The question here is this: Has Philosophy made the recovery that Dewey so eloquently pleaded for? The answer is a resounding, “Maybe.” The fact that papers are being written, classes being given, and conversations being had regarding this issue is definitely a plus. It is less and less that philosophers are arguing with each other over things of no consequence and more and more that they are discussing things, defining terms, and struggling to come to agreement, instead of coming to a victory in debate. Philosophers in a variety of fields of philosophy are coming to conclusions based on the very terms on which Peirce and Dewey talked about. However, while there are some very good things happening, there also exist the “point-counterpoint” arguments of those unwilling to seek greater levels of understanding (as if the point and counterpoint were the only two options!), endless rehashings of ancient systems of thought without consideration of what they really mean in the grand scheme of things, and the general unquestioned acceptance of ideas based upon things like religion or political party-lines. A resounding, “Maybe.”
What then, is the next course of action? To seek truth without bias, of course; for things to be said as they really are meant (which is to say, the meaning of what one is saying); and the laying of all ideas, discoveries, thoughts, and the like out upon the table so that the current conception of “things as they really are” can be as clear as possible. Of course this conception may change upon the formulation of new ideas or upon the having of new experiences, but that is part of the process. It is a steady maturing of humanity’s conception of reality, where each new idea or experience point more and more to “the one true conclusion.”