AbstractI respond to the comments by Larry Hick-man and Thomas Alexander about mybook, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The“Permanent Hegelian Deposit” in the Philoso-phy of John Dewey. I focus on four issues: 1)Precisely how do I prefer to characterizeDewey’s debt to Hegel? 2) How do I justifymy admittedly controversial reading ofDewey’s World War I criticisms of Hegel?3) Where do I believe Dewey found ideas inHegel that led him to articulate the histori-cal fallacy? 4) How do I respond to Alexan-der’s concern that I have underestimatedthe influence of William James’s Principlesof Psychology (1890) on Dewey?

Keywords: John Dewey, William James, JamesA. Good, Hegel

At the 2006 Society for the Advancement ofAmerican Philosophy meeting, I had theopportunity to hear substantive commentson my book, A Search for Unity in Diversity:The “Permanent Hegelian Deposit” in thePhilosophy of John Dewey.1 Because we ranout of discussion time, at the suggestion ofMichael Eldridge, Peter Hare graciouslyagreed to publish our papers in the Transac-tions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. First andforemost, I want to thank Larry Hickmanand Thomas Alexander for the constructivefeedback I received in that session, becauseit was precisely the sort of scholarly interac-tion that authors need to both broaden anddeepen their understanding of the subjectsthey hope to master. In the following pagesI respond to their comments by focusing onfour issues: 1) Precisely how do I prefer tocharacterize Dewey’s debt to Hegel? 2) Howdo I justify my admittedly controversialreading of Dewey’s World War I criticisms

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TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETYVol. 44, No. 4 ©2008

Dewey’s“PermanentHegelianDeposit”: A Reply toHickman andAlexanderJames Good

of Hegel? 3) Where do I believe Dewey found ideas in Hegel that ledhim to articulate the historical fallacy? 4) How do I respond to Alexan-der’s concern that I have underestimated the influence of WilliamJames’s Principles of Psychology (1890) on Dewey?

I. Dewey’s Debt to HegelHickman writes that one of the “great lessons” of Hegel’s Phenomenologyof Spirit “is that when an institution or a system succeeds, it renders itselfunnecessary.” He follows that assertion with the claim that “Hegel’sinfluence on Dewey’s early work seems to have succeeded so thoroughlythat it makes itself unnecessary in his later work.” I would like to place aslightly different spin on the latter claim that I believe makes better senseof Dewey’s 1945 letter to Arthur Bentley, from which Hickman quotes:“I jumped through Hegel I should say not just out of him. I took someof the hoop with me, and also carried away considerable of the tensepaper the hoop was filled with.”2

I am reminded of the St. Louis Hegelians’ claim that one of their goalswas “to make Hegel talk English.”3 Their pursuit of that goal gave theman important place in any adequate history of the American reception ofHegel because, rather than simply study the British neo-Hegelians orother commentators, they studied Hegel’s complete works in the 1832–1845 German edition, translated significant portions into English, andpublished works of their own in which they applied Hegelian insights toboth philosophical and political/social problems. In all of this, however,the St. Louis Hegelians tended to remain so indebted to Hegelian termi-nology, much like many Hegel specialists today, that they limited theirreach. Unless one is immersed in that terminology, it is difficult to fullyappreciate and evaluate the profundity of their Hegelian analyses of the-oretical and practical problems. Thus, although the St. Louis Hegelianspromoted the American reception of Hegel, at the same time they limitedhis influence by not completing the translation of his terminology intothe language of late-nineteenth-century American intellectuals.

Although it was not a stated goal, nor maybe even his intention, Ibelieve Dewey went a long way toward completing the St. LouisHegelians’ goal of disseminating Hegelian insights to Americans. Hewas able to do so because, in addition to thorough study of Hegel, heimmersed himself more deeply than the St. Louis Hegelians in othercontemporary intellectual currents. For example, rather than translatephilosophical problems generated by the challenge of Darwinian biol-ogy and experimental psychology into Hegelian terminology, duringthe 1890s Dewey became increasingly adept at translating Hegelianinsights into the naturalistic terminology that was coming into voguebecause of the influence of Darwinian biology and experimental psy-chology. In this way, Dewey truly “made Hegel talk English.” Nonethe-

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less, this does not mean that Hegel became unnecessary in Dewey’smature thought. His own claim that he took part of the Hegelian hoopwith him is consistent with Hegel’s dialectic, properly understood. ForHegel, when institutions and systems succeed they are not merelyabsorbed into a more inclusive identity; in fact, Hegel derided this as“identity philosophy” in his criticisms of Spinoza and Schelling.4

Rather, successful institutions and systems retain their identity as theyare shaped and combined with the other through the dialecticalprocess. As Dewey understood quite well, this is one of Hegel’s mostimportant insights—identity in difference.5 Hence from one angle, wemight describe Dewey as a philosopher who so comprehensivelyabsorbed and extended Hegelianism that that he became somethingquite new and different (e.g., a particular kind of American pragmatist)and, from another angle, we might view Dewey as one of the greatestLeft Hegelians because he furthered the development of Hegelian phi-losophy along humanistic and historicist lines.

I argue at length that by the early 1890s Dewey developed a “non-metaphysical” reading of Hegel remarkably similar to a great deal ofcurrent Anglo-American Hegel scholarship.6 In order to distinguish itfrom late-nineteenth-century British neo-Hegelianism, which I labelthe “metaphysical/theological” Hegel, I label Dewey’s new interpreta-tion of Hegel the “humanistic/historicist” Hegel. On Dewey’s reading,Hegel should be read as a post-Kantian philosopher. For example, onthis reading, rather than a theory of the categories of reality, Hegel’slogic is a theory of the categories according to which humans experi-ence reality. This reading highlights the historicism of Dewey’s readingbecause he came to believe Hegel successfully resisted the philosophicaltemptation to posit a supra-historical being or realm of logical cate-gories that would function as a guarantor of comfort and stabilitywithin the unsettling adversities of everyday life. The British neo-Hegelians sought to “correct” Hegel on precisely this point becausethey feared historical relativism, so they transformed his absolute eitherinto a transcendent being or into unchanging logical categories. In hispublished writings, Dewey began to refer to the neo-Hegelians as neo-Kantians for a very good reason; he recognized that they sought to cor-rect Hegel by making a Kantian move when they posited a reality thattranscends possible experience.7 These neo-Hegelians, or neo-Kantians,introduced dualism into Hegelianism, which, as all Dewey scholarsrealize, Dewey was loathe to avoid. Perhaps few Dewey scholars areaware, however, of the extent to which Hegel also viewed dualisms asanathema. In point of fact, for Hegel, the reification of dualisms is whatcalls philosophy into existence. Rather than contradiction, as is so oftenclaimed, it is a human quest for unity or harmony that drives the dialec-tic forward. On this point, I prefer to quote from my book:

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In an early essay, “The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’sSystem of Philosophy” (1801), Hegel explained that antitheses—”spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and intellect, freedom andnecessity, etc.”—arise naturally as we struggle to understand ourexistence. These antitheses emerge, Hegel explained, in particularplaces and times in response to particular problems but, “with theprogress of culture,” they lose their force because past problems areno longer our problems. Nevertheless, these antitheses are enshrinedas indubitable “products of Reason” and, as such, the same lifelessantitheses seem to animate philosophy for time immemorial. ForHegel, “the sole interest of Reason is to suspend such rigid antithe-ses.” Reason is not opposed, Hegel wrote, to oppositions, limitationsand dichotomies, because “life eternally forms itself by setting upoppositions. . . . What Reason opposes, rather, is just the absolutefixity which the intellect gives to the dichotomy . . .” Hegel recog-nized that conceptual dualisms serve a legitimate function in every-day life, but believed that problems arise when we mistake thesefunctional concepts for fixed, eternal truths. He believed philosophyshould serve the practical purpose of resolving dualisms that havebecome reified with age and that set man against himself, his neigh-bor, and his natural environment.8

According to Hegel, “When the might of union vanishes from the lifeof men and the antitheses lose their living connection and reciprocityand gain independence, the need for philosophy arises.”9

For Hegel and Dewey, dualisms and oppositions are a normal part oflife. Reified dualisms are a different matter, however. More than logicalpuzzles for philosophers, they saw reified dualisms as manifestations ofmodern man’s alienation from society, nature, and his highest ideals.This takes us to the core of what I believe is Dewey’s “permanentHegelian deposit.” Both the St. Louis Hegelians and Dewey imbibedHegel’s conception of philosophy as Bildung, an organic process of indi-vidual and cultural maturation. As Bildung, philosophy is inherentlypractical because it promotes growth through a never-ending process ofdiremption and reunification of individual humans and of their culture.Further, rather than seek to eliminate adversity and oppositions, whichare necessary to growth, philosophy as Bildung teaches us how to usethem productively. An important implication of this conception of phi-losophy and human life is that social tensions created by individualdiversity are necessary to the process of reunification and growth. Thuswe must go beyond tolerance and learn to embrace diversity.10

II. Dewey’s World War I Criticisms of HegelAlexander correctly notes that I rely heavily on Dewey’s unpublishedHegel lecture, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit.” I argue that the lecture isthe most complete source for Dewey’s non-metaphysical reading of

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Hegel and that his published comments about Hegel up until the pub-lication of German Philosophy and Politics (GPP) in 1915 are consistentwith that lecture.11 I maintain that in GPP, Dewey abruptly reversed hisreading of Hegel without fully articulating or defending the new read-ing. Certainly, he never articulated or defended his post-1914 readingof Hegel as fully as his previous reading. I also contend that in GPPDewey mistranslated and misused passages from Hegel’s Philosophy ofRight to support his new reading of Hegel and that the new reading ishighly problematic when compared to what Hegel actually wrote. InGPP Dewey makes Hegel out to be a pre-Kantian metaphysicalphilosopher who posited a transcendent God that not only constitutesall of reality, but also drives history toward a predetermined endpoint.All of this strikes me as rather irrational behavior on Dewey’s part, andfor this reason I believe Dewey scholars must be careful with his post-1914 comments about Hegel. Consequently, I view Dewey’s 1915 letter to Scudder Klyce, from which Hickman quotes, more as an indi-cator of Dewey’s irrationality than a thoughtful interpretation of Hegel.Dewey may have genuinely believed what he said about Hegel after1914, at least for some time, but I think many of those comments pro-vide little evidence about the “permanent Hegelian deposit” in histhought because they are so biased.

Alexander addresses my characterization of Dewey’s World War Icriticisms of Hegel more directly, writing that, for me, Dewey’s “‘offi-cial break’ with idealism is . . . German Philosophy and Politics.” At thisjuncture I would like to point out that I consciously avoid discussingDewey’s “idealism” in favor of talking about his “Hegelianism,” andthat I define “Dewey’s Hegelianism” over the course of several chaptersin an effort to avoid confusion over words like “idealism” and“Hegelianism” that I believe has been prevalent in the literature onDewey’s debt to Hegel. Moreover, I never claim Dewey made a philo-sophical break with Hegel. On the contrary, because I see such a signif-icant Hegelian deposit in his mature thought, I think it is misleading tospeak of Dewey’s break from Hegel at all.

Alexander oversimplifies my interpretation of GPP when he writesthat I read it as “the outcome of personal family crisis, a new academicenvironment at Columbia, and anti-Germanism,” and that I depict“Dewey [as] swallowing pragmatist caricatures of idealism in order tobe popular and credible.” I argue that, beginning in 1905, Deweyfocused less on parsing the myriad types of idealism (i.e., distinctionsbetween Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and all of the fin de siécle ver-sions of British and American idealism) and more on advancing prag-matism. In order to accomplish that, Dewey seems to have decided thathe would characterize idealism broadly to the extent that was necessaryto this agenda, and focus on characterizing pragmatism precisely. Thisstrikes me as a perfectly legitimate strategy.

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I also explicitly reject the notion that Dewey wrote GPP because hewas caught up in anti-German hysteria:

At the time of the original publication of the book, war had been rag-ing in Europe for a year, and it is easy, perhaps too easy, to concludethat Dewey had been caught up in anti-German hysteria. Yet in 1915widespread anti-German hysteria had not begun in the United Statesand, in fact, most Americans still favored President Wilson’s policy ofneutrality. Moreover, it was after the publication of German Philoso-phy and Politics that Dewey engaged in heated polemics about Amer-ican involvement in World War I. At this time he was only mildlyinvolved in the “preparedness versus pacifism” debate, opposing uni-versal military training for schoolboys. (A Search for Unity in Diver-sity, 242)

I do, however, invoke personal crises, not as an explanation for GPP in itsentirety, but as a way to explain the substandard scholarship in Dewey’scritique of Hegel. As I mentioned above, Dewey’s critique of Hegel inGPP is a significant reversal of his previous interpretation, and it is basedprimarily on mistranslation of passages in the Philosophy of Right takenout of context. It would be tedious to repeat all of the arguments I makeabout Dewey’s characterization of Hegel in GPP. My primary points arethat, for the first time, Dewey reversed his previous interpretation ofHegel, and that his reversal relied on much weaker evidence than he pro-vided for his earlier interpretation. In my view, that behavior cries out forexplanation, and philosophical explanations do not work because Deweydoes not rationally defend his World War I interpretation.

I do not need to develop a special explanation for GPP as a wholebecause the bulk of the book is a critique of Kant that is consistent withboth Dewey’s pre-war and post-war readings of Kant. I argue in previ-ous chapters of the book that Dewey’s critique of Kant is substantiallythe same as Hegel’s critique of Kant. The primary problem for bothHegel and Dewey is Kant’s dualism, which they claim makes it impos-sible for him to account for the unified self and the unified world ofordinary experience. I point out that what worried Hegel the most wasKant’s ethical formalism, which, Hegel argued, was the sort of thinkingthat led to the violence of the French Reign of Terror.12 Because FrenchRevolutionaries believed they had abstract equality and freedom, equal-ity and freedom that transcends social mores, and that they hadabsolute rights, they concluded that they should destroy anything andeverything that opposed their individual, subjective goals: “This is whythe people during the French Revolution, destroyed once more theinstitutions they had themselves created, because all institutions areincompatible with the abstract self-consciousness of equality.”13 Hegelwarned that this sort of abstract ethical theory would inevitably lead toviolent terrors; in GPP Dewey claimed it led to the German militarism

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of World War I. Dewey’s analysis of abstract ethical theory bolsters aclaim I make that GPP is fundamentally Hegelian intellectual history.In addition to repeating Hegel’s critique of those types of theories,Dewey sought to demonstrate that German philosophers, particularlyKant, had given voice to the German Volksgeist. Thus I read most ofGPP as a remarkably Hegelian book.

Dewey’s objection to dualistic moral theories is extremely importantto the larger issue of his Hegelian deposit. In 1943 Morton Whiteargued that a movement away from Hegelian idealism can be detectedin Dewey’s criticisms of T. H. Green’s moral theory.14 In “Green’s The-ory of the Moral Motive” (1892), Dewey is critical of the dualismGreen posited between the finite moral agent and the infinite, univer-sal self because it made the moral perfection that was supposed to bethe goal of moral life unattainable. According to Dewey, Green’s moralideal was “the bare thought of an ideal of perfection, having nothing incommon with the special set of conditions or with the special desire ofthe moment.”15 Although White’s interpretation is based on more evi-dence than this one article, the upshot for him was that Dewey’s criti-cisms of Green’s ethical thought demonstrated that he was rejectingHegel. White, and many subsequent Dewey scholars, worked on theassumption, not always particularly explicit, that all forms of Hegelianidealism posit transcendent ideals or norms.

I argue in the book that Dewey’s criticism of Green’s moral theory isvirtually cribbed from Hegel’s criticisms of both Kant’s and Fichte’s eth-ical theories, maintaining that this illuminates Dewey’s 1893 claim thatT. H. Green’s ethical theory was “falsely named Neo-Hegelian, being intruth Neo-Fichtean.”16 Both Kant and Fichte, according to Hegel, erredwhen they posited moral ideals that transcend our particular desires andsocial context. Because they did so, their theories are mere Moralität, sys-tems based on abstract moral rules that are difficult, if not impossible, toapply in the concrete situations in which we must act. A true ethics,what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit, is based on rational standards tempered byculturally accepted standards of conduct that help us understand how toact morally within our social context. Moralität, Hegel argues, assumeswe are asocial, isolated individuals who are obligated to fulfill moralduties despite our actual desires, the practical consequences of ouractions, and the demands of our society. Hence, Moralität simultane-ously sets man against himself and his society, sending him in search ofa moral ideal that is “the unattainable beyond ” because of the limitationsof the concrete world in which we must act.17 Dewey reiterates this lineof criticism against Kant’s moral theory in GPP.

III. The Historical FallacyHickman asks me to say more about where Dewey might have found thehistorical fallacy in Hegel. In “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”

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(1896), Dewey objects to what he sees as a reification of both stimulusand response into metaphysical realities, arguing that they are stageswithin “an act, a sensori-motor co-ordination.” Dewey explains that psy-chologists thought “stimulus” and “response” allowed them to overcomethe metaphysics of mind/body dualism and that they were working toestablish mechanical principles of human behavior. But for Dewey,

the ordinary conception of the reflex arc theory, instead of being acase of plain science, is a survival of the metaphysical dualism, firstformulated by Plato, according to which the sensation is an ambigu-ous dweller on the border land of soul and body, the idea (or centralprocess) is purely psychical, and the act (or movement) purely physi-cal.18

Dewey claims psychologists erred because they committed “the psycho-logical or historical fallacy.”19 This fallacy occurs when

A set of considerations which hold good only because of a completedprocess, is read into the content of the process which conditions thiscompleted result. A state of things characterizing an outcome isregarded as a true description of the events which led up to this out-come; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been inexistence, there would have been no necessity for the process.20

In short, Dewey believes we must move beyond the reflex arc conceptand see human behavior as a completed circuit, rather than an arc, ofcoordinated activity, because there is no scientific basis for metaphysi-cal dualism, but also because the reflex arc model distorts our percep-tion of human behavior. Rather than stop with the analysis of behaviorinto discrete stages, we should move on to see the whole, what Deweycalls “the act.” Doing so, he affirms, allows us to understand humanlearning and development. Borrowing William James’s example of aninfant reaching for a bright light that turns out to be a lit candle, Deweymaintains that the stimulus, the light, and the response, reaching forthe light, are part of a larger temporal process.

Traditionally, Dewey scholars have characterized “The Reflex ArcConcept in Psychology” as evidence that he was moving from Hegel -ianism toward pragmatism under the influence of James’ Principles ofPsychology.21 It seems obvious that James influenced Dewey’s criticismsof the reflex arc concept, because he not only uses James’ example, buthe also uses James’ term “the psychological fallacy.” Despite this evi-dence, John Shook recently argued that Dewey had formulated a ver-sion of the psychologist’s fallacy ten years earlier in “The PsychologicalStandpoint” (1886).22 In that essay, Dewey argues that philosophicalconcepts like sensations are the results of our analysis of experience, butwe must resist the temptation to read the results of our analysis into

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experience as though they were there all along. To quote Dewey, “thecorrectness of the procedure which, discovering a certain element inknowledge to be necessary for knowledge, therefore concludes that thiselement has an existence prior to or apart from knowledge.”23 Shook’sinterpretation led me to consider the possibility that, before James’Principles, Hegel had already influenced Dewey to undercut philosoph-ical dualisms in this way. In the book, I argue that Dewey did find thehistorical fallacy in Hegel.

To see how this might be the case, it is useful to think about the dif-ferences in Dewey’s and James’ characterizations of this fallacy. Jamesdefined the psychological fallacy as “the [psychologist’s] confusion of hisown standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making hisreport.”24 Although Dewey uses James’ appellation, “the psychologicalfallacy,” and deploys it in the same way as James, Dewey’s preference for“historical fallacy” emphasizes his point that the error occurs when wemistake the early moments of a temporal process for pre-existing realities.

I believe it becomes apparent that Dewey could have found thisstrategy in Hegel when we go beyond the textbook characterization ofthe dialectic as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, terms Hegel uses onlyonce in his writings.25 There are two important problems with thischaracterization. First, it may suggest Hegel developed a formal logic,according to which we apply logical categories to a content that is for-eign to our thoughts about it. I will return to this issue a bit later. Sec-ond, it might imply that Hegel’s dialectic was based on traditionalbinary truth values: Thesis and antithesis are asserted as truths, they arediscovered to be false, and the third stage is a simple truth that hasemerged from recognition of their falseness. This is utterly at odds withHegel’s concept of Aufhebung, commonly translated as “synthesis” or“sublation,” which includes the notion that the truth of the first twostages of cognition is preserved in the third. According to Hegel, it isnot that the two original stages were false, but that it would be false tostop at either of those stages, or to assume the truth of the dichotomythey represent. This, I believe, is precisely what Dewey calls the histor-ical fallacy; it is the error of artificially truncating the process of inquiryand mistaking the early stages of an inquiry for real objects. Thus Ibelieve Dewey could find the historical fallacy any place in Hegel’s writ-ings where he uses the dialectic, which is arguably the most pervasivefeature of Hegel’s entire philosophical oeuvre. In fact, the bigger prob-lem in my mind is that, heretofore, Dewey scholars have not seen hishistorical fallacy as an example of Hegel’s philosophical method ratherthan an indication that he was moving away from Hegel.

IV. The Influence of James’s Principles of PsychologyI will now focus my attention on Alexander’s very substantive com-ments about the influence of James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology

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on Dewey. Anyone familiar with the secondary literature on Dewey’sphilosophical development knows it is common to claim that James’sPsychology inspired Dewey to embrace functional psychology and thehistorical fallacy. In the book, I disagree with both of those claims,arguing instead that, prior to the publication of James’s Principles,Dewey had found functional psychology and the historical fallacy inHegel. I will begin addressing the issue of Dewey’s source for functionalpsychology by quoting at some length his letter to James, dated 6 May1891:

I cannot suppress my own secret longing that you had at least workedout the suggestion you throw out on Page 304 of vol I. If I under-stand at all what Hegel is driving at that is a much better statement ofthe real core of Hegel than what you criticize later on as Hegelianism.Take out your “postulated” ‘matter’ and ‘thinker,’ let ‘matter’ (i.e. thephysical world) be the organization of the content of sciousness up toa certain point, & the thinker be a still further unified organization[not a unify-ing organ as per Green] and that is good enough Hegelfor me. And if this point of view had been worked out, would youhave needed any ‘special’ activity of attention, or any ‘special’ act ofwill? The fundamental fact would then be the tendency towards amaximum content of sciousness, and within this growing organiza-tion of sciousness effort &c could find their place. At the risk, afterall, of burdening you, it seems to me that on page 369 you virtuallyfall into the meshes of the “psychological fallacy” (Let me say that Ithink the discovery & express formulation of this alone would havemarked any book as ‘epoch-making.’) I surrender Green to your ten-der mercies, but the unity of Hegel’s self (& what Caird is driving it)is not a unity in the stream as such, but of the function of thisstream—the unity of the world (content) which it bears or reports. Itmay seem strange to call this unity Self, but while Kant undoubtedlytried to make an agent out of this (and Green follows him,) ButHegel’s agent (or Self ) is simply the universe doing business on itsown account. But I must forbear. But Hegel seems to me intenselymodern in his spirit, whatever his garb, and I don’t like to see himdressed up as Scholasticus Redivivus—although of course his friends,the professed Hegelians, are mainly responsible for that.26

At the beginning of the comments above, Dewey refers to theprovocative passage in James’s Principles in which he distinguishes the“stream of Sciousness,” from “con-sciousness.” Consciousness, Jamesexplains, implies that a precondition of all experience is that the thinkeris aware of his existence as a subject during experience. James uses theterm Sciousness to underscore his claim that we only distinguishbetween the self and its object “in subsequent reflection” upon experi-ence.27 James also speaks of the Self and not-Self, me and not-me, lan-guage reminiscent of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre (1794/95), but

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explicitly rejects the view of James Frederick Ferrier, the Scottish ideal-ist who was influenced by Fichte’s notion of the “self-positing I” that isa precondition of all consciousness.28 The similarity to Fichte is tanta-lizing because of Fichte’s rejection of substance metaphysics and hisfamous pragmatic claim that all philosophy is founded on the act ofpositing rather than on a logical principle. Moreover, Fichte actuallyagrees with James’s claim that we are only aware of the self-positing insubsequent philosophical reflection upon experience. Furthermore, inThe Vocation of Man (1800), Fichte articulated the pragmatic maxim:“We do not act because we know, but we know because we are calledupon to act:—the practical reason is the root of all reason.”29 Nonethe-less, not only is there no evidence in the Principles that James is awareof the similarity between his position and Fichte’s, he seems convincedthat his position is at odds with Fichte’s. Nor does Dewey’s letter betrayany interest in that connection. Instead, Dewey is keenly interested inwhat he believes are Hegelian overtones in James’s reflection on thestream of Sciousness.

As I read Dewey’s letter, he is trying to tell James, respectfully, atleast three important things. 1) The Sciousness passage reveals that youare more Hegelian than you realize. 2) You misunderstand howHegelian you are because you confuse Hegel with the neo-Hegelians. 3)You would be wise to become even more Hegelian because doing sowould help you eliminate mind/body dualism from your psychologyand articulate an embodied self. Although in previous sentences Deweyacknowledged a deep indebtedness to James, he was not specific aboutthe content of his debt, other than to say that he was indebted to “por-tions of the book as had previously appeared.”30

So how would Hegel, according to Dewey, help James avoidmind/body dualism in his psychology? In addition to Hegel’s concep-tion of mind and body as moments within the learning process, ratherthan pre-existing entities, Hegel would help James because he hadalready begun working out a functional psychology. I draw this conclu-sion from study of Hegel’s critique of faculty psychology, particularly asfound in Kant. Although he never analyzes it specifically, the term “fac-ulty” is pervasive throughout Kant’s critical philosophy. In the Critiqueof Pure Reason, he speaks of the faculty of understanding, which appliesrules and categories to experience, and the faculty of reason, whichapplies categories to that which is, in principle, beyond possible experi-ence. In his critique of faculty psychology, Hegel found it astonishingthat “such a contingent medley of heterogeneous beings can be togetherin the mind like things in a bag, more especially since they show them-selves to be not dead, inert things but restless movements.”31 Similarly,in the Encyclopedia, Hegel wrote “. . . our own sense of the mind’s liv-ing unity naturally protests against any attempt to break it up into dif-ferent faculties, forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities,

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conceived as independent of each other.”32 I could quote similar pas-sages at some length, but suffice it to say that Hegel’s critique of facultypsychology is almost as pervasive in his writings as the term “faculty” isin Kant’s.33 Rather than faculties, Hegel speaks of the understandingand reason as “moments” within a temporal process. Because Hegeldoes not use the terms “function” or “functional psychology,” in thebook I argue that Dewey found a rudimentary functional psychology inHegel. The important point is that, for Hegel, terms like understand-ing and reason refer not to things, or even to capacities, but to momen-tary stages within a dynamic process.

Accordingly, in the passage I quoted above, Dewey explains to Jamesthat Hegel thought of “matter” or “the physical world” not as a meta-physical realm distinct from mind, but as the organization of the con-tent of consciousness. “The thinker,” Dewey maintains, is, for Hegel,not a unifying organ, as in T.H. Green (and in Kant), but “a still furtherunified organization.” Most importantly, Dewey says “the unity ofHegel’s self . . . is not a unity in the stream as such, but of the functionof this stream.”34 I read that claim as Dewey attributing functional psy-chology to Hegel. Reason and understanding, mind and world, forHegel, are moments within a process. This is true because Hegel con-ceives mind as activity, rather than as an object or metaphysical realm.Hegel’s usage of the term Begriff, which is usually translated as conceptor notion, lends plausibility to Dewey’s reading of Hegel. For Kant,Begriff was a static universal representation; Hegel draws on the rootmeaning of the word, which is the verb begreifen or greifen, to grasp orseize.35 This is one of the ways in which Hegel offers an alternative toKant’s faculty psychology. Hegel maintained that the self encountersthe world because we are always engaged in some project; all activity,including intellectual activity, is motivated by desire.36 The self gener-ally pursues its projects through habitual, non-reflective activity. Whenthe self encounters an obstacle to its project, it is alienated from theworld and responds by fashioning concepts, which are essentially tools,to reach out and grasp elements of the situation in which it encoun-tered the problem for the purpose of analyzing the situation into itsconstituent parts. This is the moment or stage of understanding, and itsfunction is analysis. The self engages in this activity for the purpose ofreintegrating itself into its situation so that it can resume its project, butit can only do so by moving beyond the moment of analysis to reason.In reason, the self reintegrates itself with its environment by modifyingboth, and thus “sees the whole.”37 This is the dialectical process and itsconclusion always goes beyond mere negation, driven by a determinatenegation that culminates in a positive solution that allows the self toresume its project by overcoming alienation and returning to “homewith itself in . . . its other.”38 For Hegel, this process is dialectical pre-cisely because the two poles are both shaped and reintegrated without

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losing their identity (Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung). Moreover, Hegel’slanguage of alienation and return brings into sharp relief that thisprocess is more than a formal, antiseptic method applied to an externalreality; it is “the way of despair” that leads to personal growth.

Hegel’s rejection of faculty psychology may be even clearer in hisdiscussions of the will. In The Philosophy of Right Hegel declares

It must not be imagined [sich vorstellen] that a human being thinks onthe one hand and wills on the other, and that he has thought in onepocket and volition in the other, for this would be an empty repre-sentation [Vorstellung]. The distinction between thought and will issimply that between theoretical and practical attitudes. But they arenot two separate faculties; on the contrary, the will is a particular wayof thinking—thinking translating itself into existence [Dasein],thinking as the drive to give itself existence.

Later in the same passage, Hegel writes, “The theoretical is . . . con-tained within the practical.”39 Hegel viewed all cognition as “purposiveactivity.”40 And Dewey agreed that Hegel rejected faculty psychology,asserting that Hegel’s,

philosophy of spirit shows that these so-called faculties of mind, andalso all concrete empirical material, are simply elements in the devel-opment of the active unity of spirit. We understand spirit, then, notwhen we begin by supposing a substance which we term soul or bysupposing a lot of separate mental faculties, but only when we tracethe varied process by which spirit realizes itself. Our so-called facul-ties will then appear in their proper place as stages in its evolution.Thus the whole science becomes living, organic and systematic.41

I will now focus on Dewey’s postscript to the 6 May 1891 letter toJames, because it is relevant to Alexander’s statement that “By 1894Dewey is able to undertake a critique of James’s theory of emotion.”Dewey writes,

Would it horrify you, if I stated that your theory of emotions (whereyou seem to me to have completely made out your case) is goodHegelianism? Although, of course, Hegel gets at it in a very differentway. But according to Hegel a man can’t feel his own feelings unlessthey go around, as it were, through his body.42

In “The Theory of Emotion” Dewey also writes, “On the historicalside, it may be worth noting that a crude anticipation of James’s theoryis found in Hegel’s Philosophie des Geistes, 401.”43 Why, according toDewey, does Hegel have such a theory of the emotions? I believe thisbecomes apparent in Dewey’s unpublished Hegel lecture in which hewrites that according to Hegel, the soul’s “unity with nature” entailed

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that “it can feel its own qualities only so far as these find bodily expres-sion,” taking on outward form. In the lecture, Dewey goes on to claimthat, for Hegel, “a man cannot feel his own feelings except as they comein this round-about way through his body. . . . That is to say, sadness orjoy, scorn, hatred, courage, etc., are not felt directly and of themselves;they are felt only through the outward bodily expression.” Here I mustpoint out that as I was writing the book, I relied on a copy of the lec-ture dated 1897 that is located in the John Dewey Papers of MorrisLibrary, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Subsequently, JohnShook discovered what he and I believe to be a substantively similarcopy of the lecture located in the University of Michigan’s BentleyLibrary that is dated 1891. Whether or not Dewey attributed this the-ory of emotions to Hegel before he read James’s Principles I cannot sayfor certain.

Be that as it may, in §401 of the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel proposes“a peculiar science—a psychical physiology” that would study the wayfeelings manifest as “specific bodily forms.” According to Hegel, “themost interesting side of a psychical physiology would lie in studying . . .the bodily form adopted by certain mental modifications, especially thepassions or emotions.”44 Although Hegel speaks of “mental states” inthat section, in his lecture Dewey agreed with contemporary scholarswho argue that Hegel overcame Cartesian mind/body dualism. Hegelopposed Cartesian dualism not because it generated an annoying epis-temological problem, but because it alienated man from nature, fromhis own natural desires and inclinations, and from his fellow man.Although Hegel praised Descartes’ reliance on reason, rather thanauthority, he viewed mind/body dualism as a manifestation of the mostvexing and potentially destructive problem of modernity, alienation.

Hegel overcomes mind/body dualism by contending that mind andworld are moments within consciousness and that consciousness doesnot go beyond itself to embrace objects in the world. This view makessense if Hegel used “consciousness” the way Dewey used “experience,”and in the book I argue that Hegel did. That is to say, Hegel’s con-sciousness is not an inner realm metaphysically set apart from theworld. Rather than giving “reality to a different content,” consciousnessworks with what it finds within itself. This content is “an initiallyimplicit being” translated by consciousness into an explicit being.45

Engaged in a project, the self encounters a negation of its project. As itfocuses on and analyzes that negation, it becomes an explicit being. Atthe same time, the self becomes an explicit being as well, because it isnow set over and against an other, the negation. As it reintegrates thenegation into its project, through a dialectical process that shapes bothself and other, mere negation becomes a determinate negation, mean-ing that it is now integrated into the refashioned project. It is impera-tive to notice that, for Hegel, even “being” is a stage in the process of

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consciousness, and consciousness itself is an act rather than some sort ofincorporeal object. The content of both the self and the other are madeexplicit by the action of consciousness; in that process, both self andother become real: “Accordingly, an individual cannot know what he[really] is until he has made himself a reality through action.” Hegelgoes on to say that a person’s “essence and intrinsic nature is beginning,means, and End, all in one.”46 In other words, beginning, means, andend are different ways of describing the essence or nature of a continu-ous process, in this case, the process of the self ’s becoming. The dis-tinction between self and other is real because the other really didinterrupt, or negate, the self ’s project and, at the same time, the dis-tinction is a construction within the process of consciousness as the selfseeks to continue its project.

How is this relevant to Hegel’s theory of emotions? According toHegel, “self-consciousness is Desire in general.”47 Through the processI described above, the self becomes self-conscious, aware of itself, and itdoes so because desire impels it to act. As the self engages in action itgains a growing awareness of the desires that impel it to act. As Deweyrealized, the process of consciousness is also central to Hegel’s theory ofcognition. According to Dewey, Hegel believed that “we only know ourthoughts when we give them an objective form, when we . . . get themout into spoken sounds or written words.” For this reason, in his Hegellecture Dewey describes Hegel as “the great actualist.” For Hegel,Dewey writes, “there is no such thing as a faculty of thought separatefrom things.”48 The real, as far as humans are concerned, is that whichhas actual effects in human experience.

If I am correct that Dewey read Hegel in this way during the 1890s,what was left for James to do for Dewey? I agree with other Deweyscholars that, in James, Dewey found a more fully biological functional-ism that he could not have found in Hegel, and that this allowed him tonaturalize Hegel in a Darwinian way. As a pre-Darwinian thinker, Ibelieve it should come as no surprise that Hegel did not emphasize con-tingency to the degree that many post-Darwinian philosophers have,including both James and Dewey. For example, James’s talk of percep-tions and conceptions as “biological sports” is nowhere to be found inHegel.49

In 1905 Dewey explicitly associated himself with the pragmatistmovement initiated by Peirce and James.50 Over the next several years,he defended pragmatism, and penned many criticisms of idealism. Ifind it telling that when Dewey attacked idealism, he criticized it asneo-Kantian because it assumes the existence of “apart thought,” logi-cal categories supplied by thought to sensations. I believe Deweyunderstood he was attacking Kantian transcendentalism, not Hegelianhistoricism. In his Hegel lecture, Dewey describes Hegel as reluctant tospeak “in order that the fact may be heard.” Dewey maintains that this

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restraint “does not imply a low conseption [sic] of thought or reflec-tion: it implies rather the highest conception of the value of thought.”

It implies that thought is so real that it can be found only in theobject and not in any subjective opinion. Nor does such a methodimply that knowledge is passive, that the mind is to be merely recep-tive in knowing; on the contrary, it implies the most acute, the mostintense mental energy. It is when mental energy is only partial that weindulge in opinions and arguments. We get part way into a subjectand, lacking energy to pursue the quest for the real meaning of thefact, we come to a halt. Then the checked energy relapses into sub-jective reflection and disputation. The mind has not enough activityto break out of the weary treadmill of its own ideas; to make its wayto the fact itself. The highest activity of thought is that which willmake itself the pure expression of the facts.51

In this passage alone, Dewey implies that Hegel did not believe in “apartthought,” that Hegel rejected the passive spectator theory of knowledge,and that Hegel advocated avoidance of the historical fallacy.

I need to return to Alexander’s comments, however. Alexanderexplains:

In my view, the impact of James’s Principles showed that the profferedsolution of a “synthetic power” as a condition of experience was notneeded simply because experience didn’t need “synthesis” to begin with.

I take Alexander to be saying that Dewey learned from James’s Principles,rather than Hegel, that experience does not need synthesis. But in myfifth chapter I quote a passage from Dewey’s Hegel lecture that indicateshe believed Hegel agreed that a synthetic power is not a precondition ofexperience. This passage occurs in Dewey’s discussion of Hegel’s dialectic:

First, the period of implicit unity when, apparently all was harmony;when man and Nature and God were one. Then, secondly, there wasthe period of negation and of discord, the period when the variouselements of the original unity were isolated and set over against eachother. In the third period, however, a true reconciliation takes place.It is seen that underlying the discord and opposition there is still aunity, nay, even more, it is seen that the very principle of difference,of negation, is itself an expression and a realization of this unity,—that the period of discord is an element in the process by which thereal harmony maintains and extends itself.

Although Dewey is talking about the dialectic as an historical processhere, rather than experience as dialectic, he maintains Hegel does notbelieve in pre-existing separation of thought and being, and thus expe-rience only needs synthesis when it has been disrupted by a negation.

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This issue returns me to Dewey’s 6 May 1891 letter to Jamesbecause it is entwined with the question of whether or not Hegelbelieves in “apart thought.” I find it telling that Dewey complains hedoes not “like to see [Hegel] dressed up as Scholasticus Redivivus—although of course his friends, the professed Hegelians, are mainlyresponsible for that.” Not only does this indicate that Dewey sees hisreading of Hegel as contrary to certain “professed Hegelians,” but italso indicates that Dewey believes Hegel does not view thought as theformalization of an externally given content. Throughout his 1888book on Leibniz, Dewey equates “scholastic method” with formal logic.Dewey continues to use “scholastic” in much the same way in laterwritings. For example, in “Is Logic a Dualistic Science?,” Dewey definesscholastic logic as “an attempt to deal with thinking in vacuo, that iswith methods which leave out (or abstract from) the material offact. . .”52 As I address Alexander’s next comment, I provide more evi-dence that Dewey believed Hegel rejected “apart thought.”

Finally, Alexander wrote:

The impact of this [still referring to James] is seen in what I considerto be the single most important shift in Dewey’s philosophy after thatmade in “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” the 1905 essay“The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism.” Not only does this essayexhibit everywhere the influence of James’s formulation of radicalempiricism (which Dewey mentions in this first sentence and withwhich he allies himself ), it marks the dawning of the theory of expe-rience that would only really be first coherently articulated in the longintroduction to the Essays in Experimental Logic (1916) and restatedwith more depth and force in Experience and Nature (1925/1929).Dewey here breaks with the 2,400-year tradition in Western philoso-phy beginning with Parmenides of identifying reality with the objectof knowledge. I think this has serious ramifications for trying to thinkof Dewey as an Hegelian in any sense of the word, and it sets Deweyapart from the realists and naturalists he was engaged with at thetime. In this article Dewey argues that the world of experienceextends far beyond our experiences of “knowing.” Philosophers, withtheir focus on “the problem of knowledge,” have turned every type ofexperience into an instance of knowing, pasting an “Ich denke” infront of any sentence. Knowing, however, only is possible because itoccurs in the context of living in a world of events. However onemight want to tune the meaning of “the rational is the real,” Hegel iscommitted to the fundamental thesis that all forms of experience (orexistence) are, ultimately, moments of self-knowledge.

First, I am convinced Dewey disagrees with Alexander’s claim that“Hegel is committed to the fundamental thesis that all forms of experi-ence (or existence) are, ultimately, moments of self-knowledge.” In his1905 presidential address to the APA, Dewey address this issue directly:

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Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and transcendentalist, material-ist and spiritualist, defining this object [the object of knowledge] in asmany differing ways as they have different conceptions of the idealand method of knowledge, are at one in their devotion to an identifi-cation of Reality with something that connects monopolistically withpassionless knowledge, belief purged of all personal reference, origin,and outlook.53

In footnote at the end of that sentence, Dewey writes:

Hegel may be excepted from this statement. The habit of interpretingHegel as a Neo-Kantian, a Kantian enlarged and purified, is a purelyAnglo-American habit. This is no place to enter into the intricacies ofHegelian exegesis, but the subordination of both logical meaning andof mechanical existence to Geist, to life in its own developing move-ment, would seem to stand out in any unbiased view of Hegel. At allevents, I wish to recognize my own personal debt to Hegel for theview set forth in this paper, without, of course, implying that it rep-resents Hegel’s own intention.54

Alexander claims that, for Dewey, knowing is possible only “because itoccurs in the context of living in a world of events.” Similarly, Deweyclaims Hegel subordinates “logical meaning and . . . mechanical exis-tence . . . to life in its own developing movement.” In my book I arguethat this claim is consistent with Dewey’s Hegel lecture.

For Dewey, Hegel was not primarily concerned with knowledge.And rather than a theory of knowledge, Dewey depicts Hegel as devel-oping a theory of learning or growth (Hegel’s Bildung motif ). In sodoing, Dewey reads Hegel in a way that is consistent with a large bodyof Hegel scholarship. Moreover, Hegel has a concept of habit in whichhe claims we function, ordinarily, without thinking about what we aredoing. According to Dewey, Hegel believes in an original “unity of thebody and the soul,” that is “transformed” into a “made unity” by habit,“a unity which is the outcome of the soul’s own activity.” By allowing itto master the body, Dewey writes, habit “enables the soul to projectitself into nature.”55 Finally, as I mentioned above, early in the Phe-nomenology Hegel asserts that “self-consciousness is Desire in general,”and he remains consistent on that point throughout his writings.56 Thisraises significant doubt about Alexander’s claim that Hegel reduces allexperience to knowing experience.

According to Dewey, Hegel’s dialectic begins with an “implicitunity,” proceeds to an apparent opposition in which “the various ele-ments of the original unity [are] isolated and set over against eachother,” and ends with “true reconciliation.” Periods of negation are “ele-ment[s] in the process by which the real harmony maintains andextends itself.”57 Thus we ordinarily live in a state of harmony with our

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environment, but we periodically encounter negations that initiate thedialectical process, which seeks a reconstruction of the original unity.Rather than a synthetic construction of experience, this process is areconstruction of experience because its ingredients are both found andfashioned in the dialectical interplay of the self with the negation thatinitiated the learning process when it disrupted the project in which itwas engaged. Rather than being ubiquitous, knowing experiences onlyoccur when we seek to reconstruct the original unity of ordinary expe-rience. Moreover, this is more properly characterized as a learning expe-rience, rather than a knowing experience, because we construct theobject of knowledge in the dialectical process of growth (Bildung).

In an exposition of Hegel’s concept of the will, Dewey states that thegoal of human growth, on Hegel’s account, is self-unification and uni-fication of the self with the other.

Will realizes the unity in an activity which is neither merely subjectivenor merely objective, but in which both the idea and the existingobject are included and transformed, thus constituting what we mayterm either a higher idea or a more adequate form of the object. Will,that is to say, is not merely an act of changing ideas into existences,but is the activity which comprehends within itself as factors both anidea and an object.58

Rather than equating the object of knowledge with reality, according toDewey, Hegel’s theory of the will posits both objective and subjectiverealities that are transformed and united in a dialectical process. Theseparation of object from subject occurs in the moment of negation,analysis (Verstand) defines the poles of the negation, and reason (Ver-nunft) sees the opposition as moments within a larger process and, in sodoing, fashions the object of knowledge. In this process mere negationis transformed into a determinate negation, a negation that furthersgrowth. Rather than markers of ontologically separate realms, Hegel’sdialectical stages are functions within the learning process. Dewey callsthem “stages” within the “evolution” of the self.59 Further, Deweyexplains that, for Hegel, “we attend only to that which interests us, andonly that interests us which is felt to be bound up within our ownbeing.”60 It seems logical to conclude that Dewey believed Hegel’s phi-losophy allowed for reality beyond that which interests us, and thusbeyond the object of knowledge. All of these statements can be foundin the 1897 version of Dewey’s Hegel lecture, and the 1891 version issubstantially similar, which demonstrates that, at least eight yearsbefore 1905, if not sooner, Dewey believed Hegel did not equate real-ity with the object of knowledge.

Dewey’s reading is substantiated by Hegel’s attack on the very ideaof a theory of knowledge. In The Phenomenology, Hegel claims the

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conundrums of modern epistemology were created by the assumptionthat there is a boundary between thought and world.61 Hegel alsoargues that the idea of knowing a theory that precedes knowledge itselfis a manifest absurdity. As Hegel writes in his “Lesser Logic,” “to seek toknow before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus,not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim.”62 Likeswimming, Hegel maintains, in order to understand knowledge wemust learn by doing. Thus Hegel rejects epistemology-centered philos-ophy, transforming the western tradition of which Alexander speaks.

Hegel’s rejection of the dualism between thought and world isdirectly relevant to another issue Alexander raises, which is the way Ibelieve Dewey “tune[s] the meaning of ‘the rational is the real.’” Hegelformulated the classic statement of the Dopplesatz, or double dictum, inthe Preface of The Philosophy of Right: “What is rational is actual; andwhat is actual is rational.”63 Commentators have argued about thisclaim for decades, articulating three basic interpretations. First, somecharacterize the claim as an expression of political conservatism,according to which, whatever happens to exist at the time is rationaland therefore right. For Karl Popper, the dictum demonstrates thatHegel was an uncritical apologist for the conservative Prussian stateprecisely as it existed at that time. On this reading, Hegel is admonish-ing his readers to jettison all hope of changing the status quo throughnormative critique or political action.64 A second, and related reading,is that the claim is a statement of rationalist epistemology and meta-physics, according to which we can discern truth through the applica-tion of formal reason to a foreign content because, behind the flux ofexperience, which is merely ephemeral, reality conforms to a perfectlylogical pattern. Among Hegel specialists, both of these readings havefallen into disrepute in recent decades, and I see no evidence that, priorto World War I, Dewey favored either one. On the contrary, I believeDewey favors the third, politically progressive reading of the claim,which I outline below.

Alexander seems to imply that the claim is primarily related toHegel’s epistemology. I think related passages in Hegel’s writings castdoubt on that implication and favor a methodological/ethical readingthat I find in Dewey’s Hegel lecture. In the introduction to his “LesserLogic,” Hegel writes: “The actuality of the rational stands opposed bythe popular fancy that Ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras, andphilosophy a mere system of such phantasms” and “by the very differ-ent fancy that Ideas and ideals are something far too excellent to haveactuality, or something too important to procure it for themselves.”65

English translation of this passage, as well as the one from the intro-duction to The Philosophy of Right, is complicated by Hegel’s use ofwirklich, which is translated as “actual,” but also means “effective.”Thus when Dewey refers to Hegel as “the great actualist,” I think he

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demonstrates his understanding of Hegel’s choice of words rather well,conveying that, for Hegel, the rational is that which actually has effectsin the world. But rather than a manifestation of rationalist epistemol-ogy, or political conservatism, Dewey appreciates that, in these claims,Hegel is articulating the view that philosophy is a fundamentally prac-tical endeavor. This reading is consistent with another passage fromHegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: “Philosophy . . . hasnothing at all to do with mere abstractions or formal thoughts, but onlywith concrete thoughts.”66 This commitment is evident in Hegel’sclaim that the Phenomenology could not legitimately go beyond orbehind experience in order to explain it. As Josiah Royce explained inan apparent allusion to William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience,the Phenomenology can be understood as a study of the varieties of“individual and social types.”67 It is not hard to find contemporaryHegel scholars who agree with Royce’s assessment.68 This returns me tothe notion that, on Dewey’s reading, Hegel believed philosophy shouldnot posit explanations of human experience that transcend possibleexperience.

In addition to this methodological implication, I believe Dewey sawan ethical implication in Hegel’s dictum as well, because it is a claimabout what philosophical method ought to be in order to be culturallyreconstructive. Philosophy must confine itself to the world in which weactually live, so that it can change that world for the better. Recently,Robert Stern has argued against both the conservative reading ofHegel’s Dopplesatz, and the progressive reading I attribute to Dewey.Stern characterizes Hegel’s Dopplesatz as a commitment to philosophi-cal methodology that is politically neutral, but I believe Dewey saw thatmethodology as politically progressive because it committed philoso-phy to “the problems of men” in addition to the “problems of philoso-phers.”69 Thus I believe Dewey reads Hegel’s dictum as consistent withhis oft-quoted 1917 claim that “Philosophy recovers itself when itceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers andbecomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with theproblems of men.”70 It is not difficult to find this perception of Hegel’smethodology in the writings of the St. Louis Hegelians. In a descriptionof Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, William Torrey Harris wrote,

[Brokmeyer] could flash into the questions of the day, or even intothe questions of the moment, the highest insight of philosophy andsolve their problems. Even the hunting of wild turkeys or squirrelswas the occasion for the use of philosophy. Philosophy came to meanwith us, therefore, the most practical of all species of knowledge. Weused it to solve all problems concerned with school teaching andschool management. We studied the “dialectic” of politics and politi-cal parties and understood how measures and men may be combinedby its light.71

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This is an important element of the American Hegelian deposit inDewey’s reading of Hegel. Whether this is a “correct” reading of Hegelperhaps no one can definitively say, but recent historical, biographical,and philosophical scholarship indicates that it is certainly a plausiblereading.72 An important example is Steven B. Smith’s Hegel’s Critique ofLiberalism: Rights in Context. According to Smith, Hegel believed theprimary purpose of philosophy was immanent cultural critique. Heargues that Hegel intended the dialectic as a method of cultural criti-cism that identifies the standards of rationality within an existing cul-ture or system of thought and then criticizes practices that do notaccord with those standards of rationality. This method is immanentcritique in the sense that it criticizes a culture on its own terms, on thebasis of its highest ideals, rather than some apodictic first principle ortranscendent, abstract moral standards.73 This reading makes Hegel’sdictum consistent with other passages in his writings. For example, inhis Science of Logic, Hegel writes,

refutation must not come from outside; that is, it must not proceedfrom assumptions lying outside the system in question and inconsis-tent with it. The system need only refuse to recognize those assump-tions; the defect is a defect only for him who starts from therequirements and demands based on those assumptions. . . . The gen-uine refutation must penetrate the opponent’s stronghold and meethim on his own ground; no advantage is gained by attacking himfrom somewhere else and meeting him where he is not.74

In closing, my central purpose in writing A Search for Unity in Diver-sity: The “Permanent Hegelian Deposit” in the Philosophy of John Dewey wasto argue that there is a far more significant Hegelian deposit in Dewey’smature philosophy than scholars have previously recognized. I have nodoubt that James, Peirce, and many other intellectuals besides Hegel,profoundly influenced Dewey as well. The more I study this issue, how-ever, the more I am inclined to believe those intellectuals helped Deweyprimarily by providing him ways to translate ideas he found in Hegel intolanguage that was far more accessible to twentieth-century, naturalisticthinkers. Rather than a revolutionary who upended a 2,400-year tradi-tion, I see Dewey as reconstructing that tradition by drawing on resourceshe found in Hegel more than any other philosopher.

Lone Star College—North Harris jagness@earthlink.net

NOTES

1. James A. Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity (Lanham, MD: LexingtonBooks, 2006). Citations within the text that consist solely of page numbers referto this text.

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2. Dewey to Bentley, 9 July 1945. All quotations from Dewey’s correspon-dence are taken from Larry A. Hickman, general editor, The Correspondence ofJohn Dewey, 1871–1952. 3 vols. (Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex Corporation, 1999–2005).

3. Denton Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, Literature, Education,Psychology, with Chapters of Autobiography (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing Company,1920), 279. Although “making Hegel talk English” was an important goal of theSt. Louis Hegelians, it was only one component of their overall project of culturalreform. Good, “Introduction,” in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1867;reprint, Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 1: v–xx.

4. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1977), §§15, 16. I discuss this issue on pages 30–31 of A Search forUnity in Diversity: The “Permanent Hegelian Deposit” in the Philosophy of JohnDewey (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006). In “Dewey, Hegel, and Causa-tion,” presented at the 2008 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Amer-ican Philosophy, Jim Garrison and I argue Hegel’s dialectic is based on anon-reductive conception of causation that Dewey embraced. We contend thatthis theory of causation prevents Hegel from being a monist of any sort and pro-vides the basis of Dewey’s pluralism.

5. See Dewey’s discussion of the importance of Hegel’s concept of negationbeginning on page 24 of “Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: Lectures by John Dewey,”University of Chicago, 1897. Unpublished manuscript, John Dewey Papers, Col-lection 102, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Car-bondale, IL.

6. The sources on the “non-metaphysical” reading of Hegel are voluminous.For an introduction to it, readers should consult Klaus Hartmann, “Hegel: ANon-Metaphysical View,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A. MacIn-tyre (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972), 101–24; and H. Tristram Engel-hardt, Jr., “Klaus Hartmann and G. W. F. Hegel: A Personal Postscript,” inEngelhardt and Pinkard, eds., Hegel Reconsidered: Beyond Metaphysics and theAuthoritarian State (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 225–9.

7. I take this to be the crux of Dewey’s criticisms of neo-Hegelianism in arti-cles as early as “The Psychological Standpoint” (1886), “Psychology as Philo-sophic Method” (1886), and “Illusory Psychology” (1887). Dewey’s positionbecomes increasingly explicit in essays such as “The Present Position of LogicalTheory” (1891), in which he argues Hegel rejects Kant’s formalization of thought,which separates it from empirical reality.

8. Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent Hegelian Deposit”in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 2.

9. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy,trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press,1977), 90–91.

10. Good, “Beyond ‘Sushiology’: John Dewey on Diversity.” The Pluralist 1,no. 2 (Summer 2006): 123–132.

11. For a rendition of these arguments that is more concise than the book, seeGood, “Dewey’s ‘Permanent Hegelian Deposit’ and the Exigencies of War,” TheJournal of the History Philosophy 44, no. 2 (April 2006): 293–314.

12. See “Freedom and Terror” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, 582–95; andJoachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right,

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trans. with an introduction by Richard Dien Winfield (Cambridge, MA: TheMIT Press, 1982).

13. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B.Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5.

14. Morton White, The Origin of Dewey’s Instrumentalism (New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1943), 96–108, 134. Cf. Michael Buxton, “The Influence ofWilliam James on John Dewey’s Early Work,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no.3 (July-Sept. 1984): 451–63; and Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers:From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985),ch. 16.

15. Dewey, “Green’s Theory of the Moral Motive” (1892), The Early Works ofJohn Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UniversityPress, 1967–1972): 3: 163.

16. Dewey, “Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal” (1893), Early Works, 4: 52,53; and Dewey, “Green’s Theory of the Moral Motive,” (1892), Early Works, 3:160.

17. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §217. Cf. Hegel’s critique of the Enlight-enment in Phenomenology of Spirit, §§538–73.

18. Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), Early Works, 5:104.

19. Ibid., 105.20. Ibid., 105–106.21. A recent example is Jennifer Welchman, Dewey’s Ethical Thought (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1995), 124.22. John Shook, Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (Nashville:

Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 49. 23. Dewey, “The Psychological Standpoint” (1886), Early Works, 1:125.24. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publica-

tions, 1950), 1:196 (emphasis in the original).25. Gustave E. Mueller, “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis’”

Journal of the History of Ideas 19, no. 3 (June 1958), 411–14; Walter Kaufmann,Hegel, a Reinterpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978),154–5.

26. Dewey to William James, 6 May 1891.27. James, Principles of Psychology, 1:304.28. James Frederick Ferrier, Institutes of Metaphysic: The Theory of Knowing and

Being (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1854); Johnann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: EarlyPhilosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1988).

29. Fichte, The Vocation of Man trans. William Smith, introduction by E. Ritchie (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1906), 111.

30. Dewey to William James, 6 May 1891.31. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §303.32. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Translated from The Encyclopaedia of the

Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1971), 379.

33. Cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §378, 440, 442, 445, 451; Hegel, Phenom-enology of Spirit, §304; Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, §20, 24, 130, 135, 136, 195.

34. Dewey to William James, 6 May 1891.

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35. Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995),118–21; and M. J. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,1992), 58–61.

36. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §22, 167. Cf. Hegel’s claim that “The dif-ficulty for the logical intellect consists in throwing off the separation it has arbi-trarily imposed between the several faculties of feeling and thinking mind, andcoming to see that in the human body there is only one reason, in feeling, volition,and thought.” Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 471 (emphasis in the original).

37. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §564.38. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §413. 39. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, §4.40. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §22 (emphasis in the original).41. Dewey, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit,” 28.42. Dewey to William James, 6 May 1891.43. Dewey, “The Theory of Emotion” (1894–1895), EW 4:171.44. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §401. 45. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §401.46. Ibid., §401.47. Ibid., §167.48. Dewey, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit,” 46, 6, 4.49. Dewey explicitly mentions James’s use of the term “biological sports” in

“The Development of American Pragmatism” (1925), The Later Works of JohnDewey, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,1981–1999), 2:16.

50. Dewey, “The Realism of Pragmatism” (1905), The Middle Works of JohnDewey, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,1976–1983), 3:154.

51. Dewey, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit,” 4.52. Dewey, Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Crit-

ical Exposition, Early Works, 1: 251–436; Dewey, “Is Logic a Dualistic Science?”(1890), Early Works, 3:75. Cf. Dewey, “The Present Position of Logical Theory”(1891), Early Works, 3: 135–41.

53. Dewey, “Beliefs and Existences,” Middle Works, 3:86.54. Ibid.55. Dewey, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit,” 49. In this passage, Dewey is com-

menting on Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §409–410.56. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §167.57. Dewey, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit,” 14.58. Ibid., 58.59. Ibid., 2460. Ibid., 60.61. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §73.62. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, §10.63. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 20.64. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume II: The Hide Tide of

Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 1966), 41.For more examples of this reading, see M. W. Jackson, “Hegel: The Real and theRational,” in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: North-western University Press, 1996), 19–21.

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65. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, §6.66. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical

Writings, ed. Ernst Behler, trans. Steven A. Taubeneck (New York: Continuum,1990), 58. Cf. Hegel’s claim in the Science of Logic that “what is actual can act.”Hegel, Science of Logic, 546.

67. Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, ed. Jacob Loewenberg (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1964), 139.

68. See Michael N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998).

69. Robert Stern, “Hegel’s Dopplesatz: A Neutral Reading,” Journal of the His-tory of Philosophy 44, no. 2 (April 2006): 235–66.

70. Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (1917), Middle Works,10: 46.

71. W.T. Harris, Hegel’s Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of theMind (Chicago: S.C. Griggs, 1890), xiii. On the St. Louis Hegelians’ commit-ment to philosophy as a practical endeavor see also Snider, A Writer of Books, 317.

72. H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770–1801(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); John Toews, Hegelianism (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1980); H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Night Thoughts(Jena, 1801–1806) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Laurence Dickey, Hegel:Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983); Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2000); and Horst Althaus, Hegel: An Intellectual Biogra-phy, trans. Michael Tarsh (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

73. Steven B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989). Cf. Lewis Hinchman, Hegel’s Critique of theEnlightenment (Gainesville and Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1984); andWilliam Maker, “The Science of Freedom: Hegel’s Critical Theory,” Bulletin of theHegel Society of Great Britain 41–42 (2000): 1–17.

74. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:1969), 580–81.

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