John Dewey and Dialectical Materialism:
Anticipations of Activity Theory in the Critique of the Reflex Arc Concept

Charles W. Tolman and Brad Piekkola
Department of Psychology
University of Victoria

1
The historical relationship between Dewey's evolutionary
naturalism and dialectical materialism has been a turbulent one. 
It has been both confusing and confused. A major source of this
state of affairs was Dewey's attitude toward the Soviet Union. 
In 1947, for instance, Corliss Lamont (1947) advanced the
argument in New Masses that "American naturalism and dialectical
materialism are in accord..." on many significant points such as
the priority of physical events in constituting the cosmos, the
priority of matter over mind, and the evolutionary emergence of
mind at the human level. According to Lamont, naturalism was
just a "polite" name for materialism. Howard Selsam (1947)
disagreed vigorously with Lamont. For Selsam, Lamont had failed
to address the "real question," namely, "does or does not Dewey's
hostility to the Soviet Union and everything Marxist bear a
direct relation to his philosophical thought?" Selsam's answer
was that it does. No matter how materialist- or dialectical-
appearing naturalism might be, it could only in fact be the "left
flank of supernaturalism and philosophical reaction."
It cannot be denied that Dewey's position vis--vis the
Soviet Union was highly problematic. Immediately following the
1917 revolution and through the 1920s Dewey was widely read and
highly regarded in Russia. During this period, for example,
Albert Pinkyevich, a prominent Russian educator of that time,
"regarded Dewey as the foreign thinker closest to the spirit of
Marxism and Russian Communism" (Brickman, 1959). Dewey visited
Russia in 1928 and his resulting observations were "sympathetic
enough to earn him the label of 'Bolshevik' in some American
newspapers" (Brickman, 1959), although he did express concern for
what he took to be a confounding of education and propaganda in
Russian schools. 

Dewey was described in 1931 by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia
as "an outstanding American philosopher, psychologist,
sociologist, and pedagogue" (quoted in Brickman, 1959). In the
1952 edition this had changed to "a reactionary bourgeois
philosopher and sociologist." In the same year a book by Shevkin
described Dewey as the "henchman of contemporary imperialist
reaction" and "wicked enemy of...all freedom-loving peoples on
our earth" (quoted in Brickman, 1959). There had begun a
deliberate withdrawal of overt interest in Dewey and all foreign,
non-Marxist influences in philosophy and the social sciences by
virtue of a decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU(B) in
January, 1931, but the real cause of the hostility voiced later
was Dewey's outspoken condemnation of the Moscow Trials and
Stalinism in general. The final straw for both sides came with
Dewey's chairmanship of the Trotsky Inquiry in Mexico in 1938. 
>From that time onward Dewey was an avowed opponent of Soviet
policy.

2
Dewey's views on Marxism appear to have followed the same
course as his attitude toward Russia and the Soviet Union. An
initially cautious sympathy turned overtly hostile in the 1930s
and remained that way. It appears to be the case, however, that
Dewey's views on Marxism were never based upon first hand
acquaintance with the works of Marx, Engels, or Lenin. The most
important source of the negative appraisal was his personal
contact with Trotsky (Cork, 1945; Moreno and Frey, 1985). 
But none of this, as Corliss Lamont rightly recognized,
touches in the least on the epistemological status of Dewey's
evolutionary naturalism. The evidence is overwhelming that
Lamont was right; Dewey's naturalism distinctly qualifies as a
materialism, even if not always consistently so. It is
surprising that Lamont, in making this point in his debates with
Selsam (1947, continued in 1958), failed to cite the article by
Dewey, Sidney Hook, and Ernest Nagel that appeared in The Journal
of Philosophy in 1945. This was a reply to W. H. Sheldon (1945)
who had "accused" naturalists of being materialists. Dewey and
his colleagues responded by pointing out that there are two types
of materialism. The first was identical to what Engels had
called "metaphysical materialism." If this is what one means by
materialism, Dewey wrote, then "naturalists are not
materialists." He went on to describe a second type, a non-
reductive form that bore a remarkable resemblance to dialectical
materialism. "Accordingly," Dewey wrote, "if materialism
signifies a view something like the one just outlined, Mr.
Sheldon is not mistaken in his accusation of naturalists as
materialists." J. Cork (1949) made a comparison of Dewey and
Marx which confirms this general conclusion in considerable
detail. 

It is also certainly the case that the dialectics of Dewey's
naturalism was not merely a matter of appearance. He began his
philosophical career as an avowed neo-Hegelian, and was converted
from that position after reading James's Principles of Psychology
(1890). This book appears to have reinforced the growing
influence on his thinking of Darwinian evolution, which,
according to White (1964) "...meant the surrender of Dewey's
idealism" (p. 151). But in the resulting naturalism the
dialectical logic was preserved more or less intact. Dewey may
have been unique among American neo-Hegelians for his grasp of
the logical aspect of Hegel's system. Indeed it is very likely
that it was just his appreciation of dialectical thinking that
attracted Dewey to James in the first place. There can be no
question that James's thinking was naively dialectical (see
Tolman, 1989). And the implicit dialectics of Darwin's theory of
evolution is well-known. 

As evidence of Dewey's dialectics, we cite his position on
freedom: "The place of natural fact and law in morals brings us
to the problem of freedom. We are told that seriously to import
empirical facts into morals is equivalent to an abrogation of
freedom. Facts and laws mean necessity we are told. The way to
freedom is to turn our back upon them and take flight to a
separate ideal realm. Even if the flight could be successfully
accomplished, the efficacy of the prescription may be doubted. 
For we need freedom in and among actual events, not apart from
them. It is to be hoped then that there remains an alternative;
that the road to freedom may be found in that knowledge of facts
which enables us to employ them in connection with desires and
aims. A physician or engineer is free in his thought and his
action in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. 
Possibly we find here the key to any freedom" (Dewey, 1922, p.
303.) This bears a more than coincidental resemblance to similar
passages in Hegel (1975, p. 55) and Engels (1947, p. 140ff). 
We conclude that the assessment of Dewey's naturalism should
not be obscured by his troubled relationships with communism, the
Soviet Union, and what he took--falsely--to be Marxism. The
position itself, whatever other difficulties it may contain, is
fundamentally materialist and dialectical. If Dewey was
consistent in developing his ideas on psychology, this fact
should be evident there as well.

3
Activity theory is explicitly based upon dialectical and
historical materialism. A test, therefore, of any psychological
theory claiming to be dialectical and materialist would be to
examine the extent to which it coincides in its most fundamental
claims with those of activity theory. We intend to show here
that Dewey's psychology passes such a test with ease. 
Fundamental to activity theory is a reconceptualization of
the subject-object relationship as activity along the lines
suggested by Marx in his theses on Feuerbach. In pre- and non-
Marxist psychology, Leontyev found that "activity is interpreted
in either an idealist framework or a natural-science, materialist
framework as a response of a passive subject to an external
influence, in which the response is guided by innate organization
and learning" (Leontyev, 1979, p. 41). This is the "two-part
scheme" that "found direct expression in the well-known formula
S-R" (p. 42).

According to Leontyev: "The unsatisfactory nature of this
scheme consists of the fact that it excludes the process that
active subjects use to form real connections with the world of
objects. It excludes their objective activity" (p. 42). 
Leontyev went on to point out that the problems with this
formulation could not be solved by inventing a third, middle term
such as an intervening variable. This "creates the illusion" of
having overcome the problem: "A simple substitution has occurred:
the world of real objects is replaced by a world of socially
elaborated signs and meanings. Thus, we once again have a two-
part scheme, but now the stimuli are interpreted as 'cultural
stimuli'" (p. 44). 

Leontyev concluded that to find a real solution to this
problem "we must replace the two-part scheme of analysis with a
fundamentally different one..." (p. 45). This requires a
rejection of the old "units" of stimulus and response--which were
not units at all, but abstract elements--for a new unit, a unit
of life, of actual existence in the world. This new unit was
that suggested by Marx, namely activity. Leontyev defined
activity as follows: [It] "...is the nonadditive, molar unit of
life for the material corporeal subject. In a narrower sense
(i.e., on the psychological level) it is the unit of life that is
mediated by mental reflection. The real function of this unit is
to orient the subject in the world of objects. In other words,
activity is not a reaction or aggregate of reactions, but a
system with its own structure, its own internal transformations,
and its own development" (p. 46). Leontyev went on to point out
that a basic characteristic of activity is its "object
orientation" and that all forms of development, ontogenetic and
phylogenetic, "can be adequately understood as the history of the
development of the object content of activity" (p. 48). There is
of course much more to Leontyev's theory of activity, but these
are its most fundamental claims. 

Dewey's well-known article on the reflex arc published in
1896 made essentially the same argument, and for essentially the
same dialectical reasons. He began by showing how the new
scientific psychology was deluded if it thought that by importing
the reflex arc, the sensori-motor circuit, into psychology it had
sidestepped the old metaphysical dualism of mind and body. This
old dualism, Dewey maintained, found a "distinct echo" in the new
dualism of stimulus and response, based as it was on
"preconceived and preformulated ideas of rigid distinctions
between sensations, thoughts, and acts." "As a result, the
reflex arc is not a comprehensive, or organic unity, but a
patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of
unallied processes. What is needed is that the principle
underlying the idea of the reflex arc as the fundamental
psychical unity shall react into and determine the values of its
constitutive factors" (p. 358).

Dewey thus saw the need for a new unit, which was a
"concrete whole," and which he called a "coordination." He cited
the familiar case of the child who sees a candle, reaches for it,
and gets burned. "Upon analysis," he wrote, "we find that we
begin not with a sensory stimulus, but with a sensori-motor
coordination, the optical-ocular, and that in a certain sense it
is the movement which is primary, and the sensation which is
secondary, the movement of body, head and eye muscles determining
the quality of what is experienced. In other words, the real
beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a
sensation of light. The sensory quale gives the value of the
act, just as the movement furnishes its mechanism and control,
but both sensation and movement lie inside, not outside the act"
(pp. 358-359).

When seeing is followed by reaching, there is not one
separate thing followed by another. It is instead "...an
enlarged and transformed coordination; the act of seeing no less
than before, but it is now seeing-for-reaching purposes. There is
still a sensori-motor circuit, one with more content or value,
not a substitution of a motor response for a sensory stimulus"
(p. 359). And this whole process can be characterized as both
movement and sensation. They form an identity, a unity, yet they
are distinct. The distinction is a "teleological" one in terms
of "function, or part played, with reference to reaching or
maintaining an end" (p. 365). In short, the coordination always
has an object, and it is this object that "gives the value of the
act," is its "content." It is this "end," further, that
"furnishes the motivation" (p. 368). 

An essential component of Dewey's analysis is the
recognition that stimuli and responses do not simply lie around
waiting to be connected. The process under examination is
precisely one of "constituting" stimuli and responses: "The real
problem," wrote Dewey, "may be equally well stated as either to
discover the right stimulus, to constitute the stimulus, or to
discover, to constitute the response" (p. 367). 
Although the language differs, there is a striking
similarity between Leontyev's and Dewey's accounts. In every
way, Dewey's coordination was, to use Leontyev's words, "...not a
reaction or aggregate of reactions, but a system with its own
structure,its own internal transformations, and its own
development" (Leontyev, 1979, p. 46) We maintain that this
similarity is no coincidence. Both were guided by the
materialist epistemological requirement for an objective
description of the reality in question. They both therefore saw
clearly the inadequacy of the mechanical account and the need to
replace it with a more "processual" one. And in both cases the
resulting processual account bore the obvious stamp of consciuous
dialectical thinking. There can be no doubt that in 1896 John
Dewey was anticipating important aspects of what we now know as
activity theory.

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