The instrumentalist philosophy of the Chicago pragmatists¹ was distinctively shaped by their social activism. John Dewey’s involvement and leadership in a wide variety of regional and national organizations for education, labor, civil rights, and liberal politics elevated him as the most prominent figure of the movement. But all of the Chicago philosophers made significant contributions to their city’s welfare. Dewey’s University Laboratory School was a paradigm for improvements to Chicago city schools and for the progressive-education movement, and he and Mead championed industrial education. Dewey, Mead, and James Tufts wrote extensively on educational issues, and Tufts was an editor of The School Review. They also worked for better schools as members of the City Club, which Edward Ames joined as well. The City Club not only fought for more democratically controlled schools against political autocracy, but also took stands against corruption by party bosses, the hardships of poverty, and unfair labor practices. Jane Addams and Ella Flagg Young worked closely with the other pragmatists on these efforts. After many years of service as District Superintendent of Chicago Schools, Young joined the faculty of the Department of Pedagogy at Dewey’s invitation. She subsequently became the President of the Illinois State Teachers’ Association and the National Education Association, and the Superintendent of Education in Chicago (for each position, Flagg was its first female officer). Addams’s Hull House inspired a generation of social workers for the Settlement House movement, applying Christian ethics and democratic principles to the problems of the working poor. Dewey served on the Hull House’s first board of trustees, and Mead, Tufts, James Angell, and Addison Moore all sat on the board of directors of the University Settlement.

Labor relations were naturally at the heart of educational and political issues in Chicago. Dewey, Mead, and Tufts were the most involved, characteristically siding with labor in the expectation that unions and contractual negotiations were a stage necessary for the closer integration of economic decisions with all other social issues deliberated by a democracy. The City Club with Mead’s leadership in the early 1900s investigated labor disputes and disruptions, publicized the worker’s complaints, offered arbitration, and pressured owners to heed public sentiment. Tufts subsequently took leadership roles in labor issues, chairing the garment industry arbitration board and becoming president of the Illinois Association for Labor Legislation and chairman of the Illinois Committee on Social Legislation. His later writings were focused on the moral obligations of social cooperation and justice, and he edited The International Journal of Ethics for seventeen years. Edward Ames, in his additional capacity as minister of the Hyde Park Church for most of his adult life, also explored social values in the context of formulating a liberal and undogmatic theology. His pragmatism was reflected in his experimental church school curriculum and his aim to help his congregation integrate religion, as the highest expression of community values, into all aspects of their lives.

All of the Chicago pragmatists exemplified the proper experimental relationship between philosophical reflection and social activism. They agreed that social conflicts are a natural stage of progress toward a greater harmonious coordination of individual aims and efforts. This progress can be mediated, they believed, by philosophical reflection toward new hypotheses suggesting more effective social relations and hence novel moral obligations. New social relations must respect present conditions and older relationships, looking only for gradual adjustment without absolute breaks in some vain leap toward a worshipped ideal. Ethical theory is transformed by this scheme of social progress, from a fixation on present morality or ideal morality, toward the production of new moralities. Democracy alone is capable of providing the conditions necessary for intelligent public participation in social conflict and progress. Social progress is not the responsibility of a few visionaries or autocrats, since practical hypotheses for change must originate from those people whose lives are most affected and whose experience will supply the test. Therefore, public education is the lifeblood of democracy, and education itself must be as progressive as the society it hopes to shape. The churches’ traditional dominance over social virtue must be replaced by public education’s responsibility for the civic virtues. Religion itself, as the repository of the deepest values binding together a society, cannot be replaced. Its value for human progress is only strengthened if it is purged of the institutional authority that typically resists social evolution.

Ethical Theory

John Dewey’s essay, “Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality,” portrays moral thinking as the deliberate control and modification of moral ideals, which are those ideals used to make practical judgments of what ought to be done in actual situations. Moral thought has three phases. First, the discernment of the possibility of moral thought focuses on our ability to judge critically the value and priority of ideals. This phase is called the science of ethics or the logic of conduct. Second, since moral thought can be viewed as an actor’s deliberate active experience, psychology can be brought to bear on discerning the factors of that intentional experience. Third, since moral thought can be viewed as a type of experience occurring within environing conditions and having a certain kind of social value, sociology and all the other special sciences can be brought to bear on discerning the organic relationships between the actor and his environment. Dewey’s conception of philosophy is precisely the coordinated pursuit of these three phases of moral/practical thought. This conception of philosophy accounts for Dewey’s claim that scientific inquiry is relevant to the ideals of moral conduct.

James Tufts agreed that the inherent sociality of human activity must affect the philosophical conception of morality. “The Social Standpoint” is a brief manifesto declaring that genuine sociality is no mere matter of relationships between individuals, but rather the phenomenon of group activity. Sociality must become the starting-point for investigations not only into ethics, but also into economic, political, and religious activities. Tufts was a life-long student of the history of culture and morality. “On Moral Evolution” offers a historical explanation of present social relations and morality which serves as a key component of Dewey’s third phase of moral thought.² Social institutions are composed of rules controlling instinctive interests for group success. The historical progress from rules imposed by culture or an autocrat toward rules thoughtfully adopted by cooperating individuals is mirrored in the maturity of the moral self out of childish dependency. Values such as “honor,” “justice,” and “responsibility” developed out of this process, and continue to progress today. George Mead’s “The Philosophical Basis of Ethics” exemplifies Dewey’s second stage of moral thought by portraying moral consciousness as the most concrete and inclusive experience. The pragmatic grounding of metaphysics on ethics is one corollary, but two other implications are explored: the moral motive is the recognition of purpose in consciousness, and “the moral interpretation of our experience must be found within the experience itself.” Moral conduct therefore cannot be dependent on ideals external to one’s own life.

Dewey’s essay Ethics pulls together these observations to proclaim a new ethical theory. Greek philosophy stressed personal character and intelligence in its conducive role for a free, stable society; its limitations lay in the uncritical acceptance of the Greek division between the wise (contemplating fixed, eternal reality) and the ignorant (working with mutable, impermanent material). Moral philosophy has only recently freed itself from transcendent norms, just as science has; this “revolution…of the applied and experimental habit of mind” deals only with the present possibilities of social life. True democracy will rely on this moral psychology. Utilitarianism and German idealism have taken steps toward placing moral reason within the struggles of life. A sufficient moral theory will use physiology, anthropology, and psychology to make law, education, economics, and political science more intelligent instruments for the public good.

Society, Democracy, and Education

George Mead highlights the failure of those reformers promoting social ideals either to take into account present social conditions or to accurately predict the future evolution of social conditions. “The Working Hypothesis in Social Reform” suggests that reforms must be proposed as working hypotheses that offer specific solutions to actual problems in light of our best understanding of the social forces operating now. Social reforms are thus testable, falsifiable, and revisable, becoming genuine scientific hypotheses. John Dewey’s “Psychology and Social Practice” focuses on the misuse of ideals in education and the utility of hypotheses in that field. He complains that education assumes that the child’s psychology is fundamentally different from adults, and supposes that schooling should impart to the child those specialized skills of adulthood. Instead, psychology should use the school to test developmental theories of social personality. Psychology can thus contribute to an ethical understanding of that institution. Similarly, psychology should study all social institutions in their relations of value to all members of society, providing a democratic alternative to aristocratic and hierarchical control of the schools. Dewey’s “Democracy in Education” pursues these themes by portraying democracy as grounded on freedom of intelligence, not just freedom of unreflective action. For the educational system to perpetuate and improve our democracy, it must practice freedom of intelligence, both for teachers and students. The ideal of the rote drilling of information for student recitation is based on false psychology. Teachers must be allowed to experiment with teaching methods, for only they actually do the teaching and hence only they could learn how to improve teaching. Learners too must have environments providing opportunities for using their intelligence to actively experiment with the material, natural, and social operations of the world.

Ella Flagg Young further outlines Dewey’s educational philosophy in “The Philosophy of Education, 1895–1902. John Dewey.” Her own work, exemplified by “Scientific Method in Education” expands on the concept of educational reform as the scientific practice of problem-solving through hypotheses. This practice must take into account new psychological discoveries about the growth and maturity of the human mind. The mind grows by attention, not on information presented to a mind for concentrated focus and memorization, but on those things selected out by a mind for unification with learning already gained. Teachers should neither try to control the child’s passive concentration to produce conformity with adult standards, nor to release the child’s instinctive fascination to promote spontaneous freedom from all standards. The teacher should rather try to structure the child’s activities with environments stimulating their own abilities toward control and understanding.

Jane Addams illustrates the failures of the educational system in “Educational Methods” with particular regard to its treatment of immigrants. It inefficiently produces adults capable of working in factories or business offices, and completely fails to create genuine citizens, capable of knowing their social value or purpose. Ironically, despite its explicit aim to make an adult fit for a life of work, education cares nothing for an individual’s own cultured life, relationships with others, or abilities to grasp the larger significance of his work. Education is presently centered on forging human machinery, not citizens intelligent enough to contribute to the evolution and progress of their society. As George Mead recounts in his appreciative review of The Newer Ideals of Peace, Addams identifies the larger American ideal of militarism as dictating the role of government in society. Its quest to uphold law and order to preserve existing institutions prevents it from constructively mediating or resolving the actual ongoing struggles inherent in the progress of industrial society. Addams understands the real social environment for the young adults of an industrial city, Tufts proclaims in a review of The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Tufts recommends this book particularly to teachers for a better grasp of the adolescent’s perspectives on the adult world. Tufts’s review of Twenty Years at Hull House also commends Addams for her insights into the real lives of the city’s inhabitants. The autobiographical story illustrates her personal growth into convictions that have been successfully applied in her social work.

In “The Bearings of Pragmatism upon Education,” Dewey explicitly describes the usefulness of the pragmatic theory of intelligence to the problems of democracy. Education has been dominated either by a rationalistic emphasis on theoretical knowledge for its own sake (aimed at educating the leisure class), or an empiricist emphasis on obedient and uniform acceptance of facts (aimed at educating the working class). Intelligence for pragmatism is the instrument of social coordination, and education accordingly must be based on social activity, observation, and experimentation, in a context of practical occupations. Lacking citizens capable of social intelligence, society will only perpetuate social stratification and conflict. As Dewey explains in Moral Principles in Education, the moral character of the student is a significant aspect of social intelligence, and hence education should aim at its growth. But just as sheer recitation of information will not create a genuinely intelligent adult, neither will the direct exhortation of moral rules create a genuinely ethical adult. While society should set the goals of schools and judge its success, only educators should control specific pedagogical techniques. All studies should aim at developing self-control, responsibility, and leadership skills in the context of interacting with actual social conditions in the community. Students would then realize the present value of their activities, both for themselves as worthy individuals and for society as needing their contributions. Moral character arises through this educational process, since moral ideals are not just external standards to be dutifully obeyed but instead the self-motivation toward socially cooperative conduct.

George Mead focuses on the crucial relationship between the teacher and the student in “The Psychology of Social Consciousness Implied in Instruction.” Where the teacher and student are sharing their work and experiences as a team, the student’s attention is not divided. If the teacher imposes the work to be done with the threat of punishment for lack of attention, then attention will surely be divided between the artificial threat and real natural interests. The lived experience of the child must be foremost, in order to establish real social relationships and communication. Mead’s many explorations into the nature of social relationships find their culmination in his path-breaking article, “The Social Self.” When absorbed in the objective world there is no self, but only a “me” which acts. The social self arises in reflection on how one’s past conduct has been in turn affected by the conduct of others. Such reflection permits not only role playing but self-conscious role adaptation and experiment, in turn permitting moral conduct. This brings the possibility of conflicting voices, roles, values, ideals – demanding a reconstruction of the social self to restore harmony.

Religion

In keeping with his principles of the psychology of education, Dewey’s “Religious Education as Conditioned by Modern Psychology and Pedagogy” states that religion must not be taught in the form that adults find conclusive and satisfactory, but in a manner relevant to the actual emotions, interests, and responsibilities of children. The authority of the religious institution should not simply instruct the child in some watered-down versions of the dogmas that adults can understand. Psychology should study children’s experiences across a variety of social and religious environments. Dewey’s “Religion and Our Schools” emphasizes that religion, like morality, should require no distinct or separate curriculum, but be infused into the entire educational experience. Tradition and authority, claiming a monopoly over the supernatural source of religious inspiration, naturally fears scientific and democratic progress and its control of public education. But those who agree that the universality of the spiritual life demands no breaches or barriers should instead favor the control of education by the whole community. The separation of church and state originated in a time of social and political conflict among powerful dogmatic churches, and remains a useful reminder that no particular dogma should usurp the state’s authority. Current conflict among religious moralities is primarily a matter of class conflict, where social factions cannot agree on public morality, which only the rule of popular sovereignty can reconcile. The public’s satisfaction in greater harmony and unity must be the only test of virtue. Surrendering religious education to the exclusive preserve of divergent sects will never pass this test. Religious virtue is social virtue, and hence the separation of church and state cannot also require any separation of religion from state. Public education will not and should not teach organized and institutional religion. Far from promoting irreligion, this refusal may complete the disintegration of the historic churches that is required for the maturity of a genuinely public religion.

Simon MacLennan likewise approves of science’s dominance over the tradition of authority in “The Fundamental Problem of Religious Belief and the Method of Its Solution.” Far from trying to eliminate religion, science should respect and seek to understand the authenticity and pervasiveness of religion across humanity. But science (and religion) should avoid the metaphysical interpretations of naïve realism, dualism, or idealism, which cannot offer a criterion of knowledge. Only “objective idealism” or “experimentalism” can offer a criterion of knowledge by stipulating that conscious experience is metaphysically ultimate. Since knowledge transforms experience, and experience is fundamentally personal, knowledge of reality can neither lose the character of the personal nor fail to satisfy the criterion of personal growth. Unlike Bradley’s absolute idealism, which sets the absolute reality beyond possible human knowledge, objective idealism defines the growth of experience as the reality, without anything beyond human experience to stand against it. Science for objective idealism will never contradict the experience of God as the ultimate personality.

Irving King also links the proper understanding of religion to the study of the growth of human experience in “The Pragmatic Interpretation of the Christian Dogma.” Pragmatism takes immediate experience to be primary, and finds that objects of knowledge are portions of experience abstracted and transformed in order to resolve particular crises. Religious beliefs do not truly refer to realities beyond human experience, but to successful modifications of social relations. Their novelty is forgotten as they become culturally rigid dogmas, but they remain meaningful only insofar as they direct the lived values of people. Taken as facts merely to be respected and obeyed, dogmas cannot infuse lived experience and hence appear all the more empty even as they stand ever higher above the human realm. Dogmas also can be conservative obstacles to future social progress.

Edward Ames agrees that a religion should not stand in the way of the process of cultural progress that originally called it into existence. His essay “Theology from the Standpoint of the Functional Psychology” emphasizes that the inquiries of functional psychology into religious experience cannot stop short of examining the value and meaning of theological principles. Human religious development follows the course of actual cultural progress. Primitives focus on the immediate environment and its spiritual denizens. The rise of nations and monarchy brought a consolidation of divine power toward monotheism. The modern collisions between civilizations and the rise of democracies is now replacing arbitrary authority (both political and divine) and its attendant theological systems with the intelligent self-control of socially responsible citizens. Public authority demands that religion serve its practical needs of lived experience. The teachings of Jesus, freed from theological dogma, likewise demand that the individual’s religious experience produce virtuous conduct. Theology could become scientific by treating rituals of worship and rules of conduct as reformable and testable means to social ends.

Anna Strong echoes in “Some Religious Aspects of Pragmatism” the close relationship between religious belief and practical conduct in the history of religion. By relating reason and faith in the view that knowledge serves conduct, pragmatism overcomes the rationalism of dogmatic theology and absolutist philosophy. God is a dynamic reality altering through time, although pragmatists differ on whether God is the whole of reality or just a portion of reality. Tufts agrees that neither dogmatic theology nor rationalistic philosophy can provide “The Ultimate Test of Religious Truth.” Both reduce belief to lifeless fact and forbid God any participation in the moral struggle. Only a philosophy respecting the limitations and needs of human experience can treat religious beliefs scientifically as working hypotheses to be revised and tested in our experience.

Douglas C. Macintosh’s answer to the question “Can Pragmatism Furnish a Philosophical Basis for Theology?” is affirmative, so long as pragmatism’s thesis is understood. Far from arguing that all useful beliefs are true, or that all true beliefs are useful (both are easily refutable notions), pragmatism states that the criterion of a belief’s truth lies in its working in experience. This pragmatic test of belief is the most rigorously intellectual test possible.³ Furthermore, pragmatism’s scientific conception of the hypothetical and fallible nature of meaningful beliefs is compatible with the existence of universal theological truths. Such compatibility is possible only if some of the more extreme versions of pragmatism are set aside. For example, it must be denied that truth and reality does not transcend the human realm of experience.

William Wright argues in “A Psychological Definition of Religion” that psychology can give a scientific treatment of religion only by (1) defining religion impartially and objectively, (2) differentiating religion from morality, magic, aesthetics, and other subjects, and (3) studying only the practitioner’s attitude toward a religion without importing the investigator’s own opinions. Two recent definitions, locating religion in the adherence to social values and in the belief in superhuman spirituality, are incomplete. Wright proposes this functional definition: religion attempts to conserve social values through specific actions engaging a more powerful non-human agency upon which humans are dependent. The study of religion can ask the sociological and historical question of how a religion has succeeded in its aim. The metaphysical question of religion’s validity is not a psychological issue, although pragmatism is closest to functional psychology’s viewpoint.

Frederick Henke’s “Advantages Accruing from the Functional View of Religion” argues that religion should contribute to the ongoing evolution of society and human experience. This pragmatic criterion can be satisfied if religion is viewed functionally. Five specific advantages are enumerated. Legalism and authoritarianism is replaced by a responsiveness to present social concerns. The teachings of Jesus can be best understood as revolutionary advances on older customs and morals. The church’s value is not established by faith in historical mysteries, but by its concern for the good of people today. Moral revelations of the past can be superseded by new visions of morality relevant to present social conditions. Last, only a functional view of religion can overcome the hopeless conflict between dogmatic religion and scientific discovery. Henke concludes by optimistically predicting that functionalized religion can serve as a mediating and coordinating systematizer of human experience guiding society toward righteousness.

References

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