A propos of nothing, I've become fascinated with John Dewey's formal logic. Which is a bit like a Roman gladiator taking an interest in Pythagorean esoterica on his walk from the robing rooms to the amphitheatre (the theatre doubled, the lack of σκενε, the absence of angle), or Eugene Aram trying to get a hold on the decimalization of the coinage while being led to his execution. But life is what happens when other people are trying to kill us, I suppose. And there is a long arc there back to a current project of mine. I circulated a propos to a few low-key European schools, hoping to do a Ph.D. around it, but the last of those refusals came in recently.
Dewey is the great progressive and public intellectual, bridging the end of the long 19th c., and elevating the public tone to the middle of the 20th c. And he stood for what America was to the wold in those days, the naive realist with wealth and influence. But he's not writing from a blank slate.
I have this sort of New Yorker cartoon in my mind of him showing up to a meeting of the Boston philosophers of the Metaphysical Club, and profusely apologizing for the degree to which he was still under the spell of German philosophy, specifically Hegelian speculative idealism. "Oh," says one of them, perhaps Holmes, casting a quick look at the others "I don't think that will be too much of a problem..."
Among many other factors, he apparently found it very hard to publish things when writing using that vocabulary. So he shifted the words, but perhaps not the underlying sense -- the lingering deposit of faith, or perhaps it was just bred in the bone, and would not out of the flesh.
But what held him in the state of that problem? Why not fashion new Georgics, or transpose folk songs up past their Transdanubain seventh, up to... Whatever there was when there weren't other things in the way.
What story does he decide to take a position within, rather than write as if no story other than the one that he was writing at the moment held power over him? Because this is the essence of metaphysics -- not the diorama of incorporeal things, but the small arrow pointing to a certain spot within it: "You are here." The metaphysician clings to this description of the world that he is within because it gives his speech meaning and reality.
Start with Hume and Locke. They point out that rather than the world being a list of things that are, each of us receives the world through sense-impressions, and creates a sensibility while these impingements echo within us. Then Kant writes to point out that the world didn't give us the sense of what these things were -- it was our minds that understood each thing to be a certain thing. After Kant, Fichte subjectivizes this force that composes what the world is, and points out how it can be strong, and how it can be weak, Hegel points out that this thing that understands the world is doing different things in every age, with history itself being advanced by the self-realization of these souls. But then the shifting spectres of this idealism (the belief that it is the idea of the thing that gives the thing its reality) caused some people to wonder if we hadn't lost the firm grip on the mechanisms of understanding that Kant had given us. One group of the neo-Kantians set the doctrine forward as a refined epistemic; another looked to incorporate psychology, the understanding of what the human mind was, with this explanation of what it did. Meanwhile, Darwin sets the world alight with his story of evolution, and the hard sciences begin to tell the story of creation in that light.
Back in the States, Dewey begins by studying Hegel, grounding his understanding in the truth of the idea, rather than the distinct sense perception, or some great list of things that are, and why they are that way. So he has a sense that we are caught up in history, and our ideas serve history by giving it some substance, although not as a clear understanding of the moment as history. Darwin's influence was felt on these shores too, and so this Hegelian speculative idealism gains a scientific grounding. The changes in the world are proceeding according to a certain logic, although this logic is not merely veiled from us, but incomprehensible within what we think to be acts of comprehension. But there is a freeing aspect to this, because our ideas can advance this logic simply by being themselves, and not as explicit explanations of what the present moment is, sub specie aeternitatis. Our rationality can operate within history to advance history, not by undestanding its cunning, but by observing the things that conduct towards self-realization and social progress, and those that are retrograde to it. And idealism gives him that freedom, because there is no realism demanding a precise description of the mind-independent event of objective history.
Now jump back to the European debate. Kant's epigones had much trouble with the thing in itself, the inability to understand the essence of the object. We, instead, create our reality from appearances. Science and Darwinism implicitly suggests that the true description of the thing doesn't need to reach to its essence, because we receive the truth of the thing in understanding its empirical nature and its place in the story of things by scientific explanation. Jacobi had objected to the thing in itself, as without it, he could not enter the system, and with it, he could not remain in the system. But perhaps this was how Kant's propaedeutic was meant to function. It conducted us to the limits of our understanding, and kept us focused on those limits, rather than thinking that we had a more complete understanding through our "F=MA"-type reasoning.
So this learned naivete of Dewey's lands in a certain relation to this debate. The thing in itself, the essence of the object, he, like the other post-Kantians, leaves in Kant's sepulchre. Instead, he recognizes that scientific understanding can allow us to participate in this worldmaking. But we do so behind the veil of idealism, our ideas being merely chimerical forms that arise within us as the human race negotiates this undescribed and undescribable path, This, I think, is the important bit. The object has us in its power, and this has to to with the thing itself, but we, instead of straining our understanding towards that aporia, seek to become complicit with these forces. By helping along the evolution and the changes in things, we are operated upon by these things that we don't understand, and there is no obligation to do the impossible and attempt to understand them.
This resonates for me with Dewey, and with his time. But I think there might have been some important doctrines buried in that Koenigsberg sepulture, and perhaps, now that progress and the Enlightenment have shown us their dangers, perhaps it's time to go back to Kant, again.
Saprere aude, as Hamann quoted in his letter to Kant. Few know that it was the mystic of the North, romantic and student of the culture and historicism, who introduced that ancient notion to the conversation.