Fifteen Eighty Four

John Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925), the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once said, conveyed to him “a feeling of intimacy with the inside of the cosmos”; it read, he continues, as “God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.”

Experience and Nature is widely regarded as Dewey’s magnum opus. Expanded from three lectures delivered in 1922 to inaugurate the Carus Lectures, the book never really stopped developing: Dewey rewrote its first chapter in 1929 and, beginning in 1948, attempted a new introduction that remained unfinished.

Experience and Nature is also a radical book. It tries to get back to life as we live it, what Ortega y Gasset called “our life, the life of each one of us.” Dewey dismantles inherited divisions such as experience vs. nature, mind vs. body, self vs. society, and theory vs. practice, and builds a philosophy that treats both stability and precariousness as real and redefines itself as the critical examination and intelligent improvement of experience.

The notion of “experience,” central to the project, caused Dewey no end of trouble and still divides philosophers within and without the pragmatist camps. Dewey meant something close to its Latin root, experior, to try something out, rather than Locke’s picture of a mind inspecting its own private ideas. His efforts to clarify the meaning were not academic but primarily humane. The stakes, he thought, could not be higher: “Nothing but the best, the richest and fullest experience possible, is good enough for man.” Experience and Nature recasts philosophy as a tool for improving human life, bringing criticism and imagination to bear on the ideas and practices that have long governed it.

In our centennial volume, thirteen scholars explain Dewey’s great work and connect it to contemporary issues. Some show why Dewey offers a naturalism needing no transcendent causes or values, and a “denotative method” that empowers reflection to enlarge lived experience. Others defend experience against Richard Rorty’s dismissal and extend it toward atmospheres and moods. Several show how this pragmatist, radical empiricism finds a plurality of meanings in events without sliding into relativism. Deep thought is given to how existence is both precarious and stable, and how events that resist resolution (grief among them) can nevertheless press experience into fullness.

There are discussions about how mind grows out of communication, why sociality is the source of individuality rather than its rival, and what Dewey’s distinction between experience had and experience known offers to today’s “hard problem” of consciousness. The volume then turns to art and to what it means to live well, closing with Dewey’s most exposed claim, that philosophy should become a “criticism of criticisms,” and asking what could license philosophers for that role.

A century on, that question is still open, which is one good reason to keep reading the book that raised it.

Dewey’s Experience and Nature by
David L. Hildebrand and Nicola Ramazzotto