The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel died in 1831, but the influence of his systematic idealistic philosophy had continued to be all-pervasive. His thought had been advanced and developed by thinkers across the entire spectrum, from Karl Marx to right-wing Prussian bureaucrats. Basically Hegel had taught that the world operated according to a dialectical dynamic, which linked the minutest particulars to the loftiest and most abstract ideas in a vast, all-embracing system. Within this dialectic each thesis generated its own antithesis, a conflict that then became resolved in a synthesis of the two – which in turn became another thesis, and so on. For instance, the concept ‘being’ generated its opposite ‘nonbeing’, and these two conflicting notions then became synthesised into ‘becoming’. This dynamic operated throughout all things, all ideas – the entire universe. Hegel’s emphasis on the organic wholeness of the world enabled Dewey to reconcile the conflicts he had encountered, and he embraced neo-Hegelianism with all the fervour of his mentor Morris.
The other leading philosopher whose ideas touched Dewey during these years was Charles S. Peirce, who was also teaching at Johns Hopkins. Peirce’s theory of scientific logic laid the foundations for pragmatism, the philosophy that Dewey would later develop, bringing him worldwide renown. Curiously, Dewey found Peirce’s lectures a deep disappointment. As he wrote informally to a friend: ‘I think Mr. Peirce don’t think [sic] there is any Phil. outside the generalisations of physical science.’ This surmise was correct, but the twenty-two-year-old Dewey was not ready for such modern ideas. He thought Peirce’s lectures ‘appeal more strongly to the mathematical students than to the philosophical’. Astonishingly, it would take Dewey almost twenty years to accept what Peirce had taught him. The memory of Peirce’s ideas was to remain with him, for the most part unconsciously. When finally understood and accepted, they would prove seminal.
Charles S. Peirce was in many ways a remarkable man, though Dewey was far from being alone in not immediately recognising this. No less an authority than the Encyclopedia Britannica now describes Peirce as the ‘most original and versatile intellect the Americas have so far produced’. Some claim. And it has some justification. Peirce’s role in establishing the philosophy of pragmatism would have been enough to make him a major figure. His influence on Dewey – and the definition of terms he bequeathed to Dewey – would likewise have secured him a leading place in American intellectual history. But this is only half the story. Peirce refused to be limited; his influence extended far beyond philosophy. Psychology, engineering, chemistry, astronomy, surveying, physics, mathematics, the ‘evolving theory of reality’, and logic – especially logic – were all fields where Peirce made original, often highly significant contributions.
Needless to say, no university in such a conservative era was willing to accept such a free-ranging intellectual on a permanent basis. Peirce did at one stage entertain hopes of being appointed to a chair of logic research, but no such post yet existed, and no enterprising seat of learning was willing to risk establishing one for him. His four years as a lecturer at Johns Hopkins would prove his longest appointment. Among his students, Dewey’s attitude would prove typical: the philosophers thought him best suited to mathematics and science studies; the scientists simply weren’t interested in philosophy.
Meanwhile in Europe, where great scientific advances were being made, the scientists were heatedly debating the philosophical implications of the latest scientific discoveries; and the philosophers were becoming increasingly involved in scientific debate for the same reasons. Just a few examples will suffice to show the importance of this development. During the next decades Einstein would study Spinoza and Hume, whose ideas would greatly assist him in the concept of relativity. The philosophers Russell and Whitehead would attempt to establish the logical foundations of mathematics. Meanwhile the Austrian scientist-philosopher Ernst Mach (after whom the speed of sound is named) would argue strongly against the existence of the atom on empirical grounds: ‘No experiment has ever produced evidence of an atom.’ Such philosophical-scientific cross-fertilisation would play a leading role in the major discoveries of the next half-century. As a direct result of such interests, evidence for the existence of atoms would be produced, relativity would be discovered, and the incompleteness of mathematics would be proved. The importance of the overlap between science and philosophy during this period is almost impossible to exaggerate. Peirce and his friend the psychologist and philosopher William James were among the first in America to understand the implications of this development.
At the age of fifty-two, Peirce retired to a remote farm on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, where he lived in near destitution for the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He referred to himself as a ‘bucolic logician’ and would not have survived but for the generosity of William James, who recognised Peirce for the universal genius he was. (Among Peirce’s lesser achievements during this period was a pioneer design for an electric circuit-switching prototype computer, which can be found sketched out in one of his letters.) Two centuries earlier, when Newton had been asked how he had managed to make such great mathematical and scientific discoveries, he had modestly replied: ‘by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Peirce was the philosophical giant on whose shoulders Dewey would one day stand.
But all this lay far in the future. Dewey proved to be a slow developer: his originality only gradually emerged in all its multifaceted intellectual form. In 1894 Dewey left Johns Hopkins with his Ph.D. and became an instructor in philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan. There he further developed his neo-Hegelian ideas while at the same time pursuing his own research in the very latest experimental psychology. (This subject had been founded as a separate field of study only a decade or so earlier in Leipzig by the German ‘father of experimental psychology’, Wilhelm Wundt.)
It was around this time that Dewey met Alice Chipman, who had been a village schoolteacher before coming to study at the University of Michigan. They both shared a passionate interest in philosophy, and Alice’s outlook on the subject soon began to influence Dewey. Her belief that philosophy should apply itself to the real problems that beset real people in the everyday world shook Dewey out of his more academic approach to the classic problems studied throughout the long history of philosophy. But it proved to be only the beginning of a long process for Dewey, who still clung to his belief in neo-Hegelianism. John Dewey and Alice Chipman were married as soon as she graduated in 1886, and a year later they had a son.
In the same year Dewey published his first book, Psychology, which amazingly sought to reconcile the laboratory work of his experimental psychology with the out-and-out metaphysical philosophy of his neo-Hegelianism. His former professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins marveled at this ambitious intellectual endeavour: ‘That the absolute idealism of Hegel could be so cleverly adapted to be “read into” such a range of facts, new and old, is indeed a surprise as great as when geology and zoology are ingeniously subjected to the rubrics of the six days of creation.’ The book soon became a centre of academic controversy, with even Dewey’s students taking sides in the argument. The student magazine at Michigan was somewhat more robust than Dewey’s former psychology professor:
Having one foot in heaven, the other on earth
And in lieu of real seeing, his fancy gives birth
To wild speculations, as solid and fair
As water on quicksand, or smoke in the air.
Partly as a result of his wife’s influence, Dewey now began to develop an interest in educational theory. His own bitter experiences in the blackboard jungle had convinced him that all was not right with education in America. As ever, when failed teachers write on this subject it is never the teachers who are to blame. The entire system was wrong. Yet Dewey’s burgeoning originality was soon beginning to show here too. He saw that in sticking to traditional methods, schools were ignoring the experimental discoveries that were now being made in the new field of child psychology. Also, schools were simply not attuned to the social changes taking place in the emergent democracy of postbellum America. He saw a need for an entirely new philosophy of education.
In 1894, after ten years at Michigan, Dewey was appointed to a professorship at the University of Chicago. This university had been founded just three years earlier with lavish funds provided by John D. Rockefeller. Its president, William