Dewey's Naturalistic Mysticism

Gregory Aisemberg, University of California, Riverside

The best Americans are mystics by instinct.
— D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature

IT IS CERTAINLY ANTICIPATED that associating John Dewey with mysticism may initially mystify the reader. For one, Dewey was a thoroughgoing naturalist who was heavily influenced by Darwin and went on to develop a robust philosophical method he called "empirical naturalism" by which one can accept the positions and conclusions of modern science. Greatly dissatisfied with traditional philosophy, especially epistemology as fathered by Descartes and Kant, he sought to bring philosophy more in line with the rigorous practices of the sciences. He did so by subjecting traditional philosophical ideas to stern metaphilosophical critiques informed by his naturalistic and fallibilist method, which, as he writes in the second preface to Experience and Nature (1925), "destroys many [ideas and values] once cherished…by revealing their inconsistency with the nature of things—a flaw that always attended them and deprived them of efficacy for aught save emotional consolation" (xiv). Much of what would lie in ruins from Dewey's radically empirical program of demolition were the learned counterparts of superstition and supernaturalism—dualisms of all sorts that pose appearance against Reality, mind against body, as well as science against religion. Indeed, his efforts were largely aimed at exorcising the atavistic specters of supernaturalism insidiously lurking within and haunting traditional philosophy. Hand in hand with his negative campaign also went a positive philosophy assimilative of the categories of evolutionary biology, giving emphasis to the centrality of the organism-environment event, and committed to scientific experimentalism. What is more, the literature surrounding Dewey has tended to attribute to his thought an exaggerated emphasis on the concrete, the practical, and on problem solving—an emphasis which would seem to partly explain why so many who have only a passing acquaintance with Dewey hazily associate him with tangible utility. Hence, for these reasons, as Victor Kestenbaum points out in his book The Grace and Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent, Dewey's pragmatism, "viewed either as a philosophical position or more generally as a mood or sensibility defining the 'American environment,' would appear to be uncongenial to otherworldly talk about the sublime…the mysterious," or the mystical (200).