Again Steve, I seem to be guilty of exaggeration. It is a few years since I
read Novack on pragmatism, and I got this impression that he thought that
pragmatism was the antechamber to Marxism. I have just one chapter of the
book scanned here, but it is the relevant chapter, and I now see that your
excerpts fairly well characterise his view. He sums up on Dewey:
"The modifications introduced by pragmatism did not succeed in eradicating
the inherent and insuperable defects of empiricism but rather reaffirmed
them in its own way. The dualism between materialism and idealism
discernible in Locke flowered into eclecticism with Dewey. As an
illustration, take his treatment of, the relations between the social
system and the philosopher himself.
"Dewey did not hesitate to apply the principle of historical materialism
that a thinker's views are fundamentally shaped by his social situation and
class outlook to explain the special features and errors of Aristotle's
metaphysics and politics. Yet he claimed that his own philosophy was
totally exempt from class conditioning and that he spoke for the general
interests of all men. The coexistence of two such incompatible types of
interpretation did not disconcert him; he used either one as he pleased.
"Dewey was the most radical consummator of the pragmatic tendency. He did
for pragmatism what pragmatism helped to do for the empirical tradition.
His instrumentalism pressed its ideas to the farthest limits and thereby
disclosed their basic insufficiency. Empiricism cannot go beyond Deweyism
without annulling its basic premises and either passing over into
materialism to its left or towards logical positivism or linguistic
analysis to its right." [George Novack, Empiricism and Its Evolution - A
Marxist View: Chapter IX]
But on the other hand, Novack's own understanding of Marxism is hardly
definitive!
Andy
At 11:46 AM 18/10/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi Andy,
>
>Andy says:
>"Certainly, my reading of Novack on pragmatism could be summarised as
>"pragmatism is only an inch short of Marxism." While I think Pragmatism a
>la Peirce or Dewey or Bridgman was certainly a great achievement, I have
>always regarded both Marx and Vygotsky as qualitatively different from
>Pragmatism."
>
>I completely agree with you, Andy, that Marxism and Pragmatism are
>qualitatively different. Is the metaphor of one being "an inch short" of
>the other from Novack? Novack seemed to assess Dewey himself as on
>occasion coming within an inch of materialism - Novack was careful to
>attribute to Dewey his many scientific insights - but I am not so sure
>Novack said Pragmatism as a philosophy was that close to dialectical
>materialism. Perhaps my reading is off?
>
>
>Speaking of George Novack, in Pragmatism Vs Marxism: An Appraisal of John
>Dewey's philosophy, he quotes an amusing story and commentary on Mead told
>by T.V. Smith in his 1962 book A Non-Existent Man: An Autobiography. In
>the chapter The Instrumentalist Theory of Knowledge, Novack critiques
>Dewey's approach to epistemology, the "all-important" question of "what is
>the basis of knowledge," as one that "wobbled all over the lot, unable to
>stay permanently in a single place." He says about Mead:
>
>"Mead, Dewey's cothinker at Chicago, was no less equivocal on this prime
>question. T.V. Smith writes: "Long after I had become a colleague
>of Mead, I asked him one day at lunch, for instance, whether he thought
>that there was anything existing before life came upon the scene. This
>seemed to me to be a question to be answered plainly Yes or No, depending
>upon one's drift toward Realism of Idealism. Mead answered the question
>at great length. Or at least he seemed to think he did. I repeated the
>question for a Yes-or-No answer. He answered it at greater length. I
>then asked him plaintively to answer it so that I could understand his
>answer. He seemed as puzzled at my perturbation as I at his
>'equivocation.' I never did understand; and naturally enough, I came to
>doubt whether he did.
>
>[Novack is still quoting from Smith] "I took it that he was confused,
>having left Idealism (Hegelianism) and not having arrived firmly at
>anything else. This type of confusion, between the knower, or the
>knowing, and the known, seemed so to dog the steps of the Pragmatists that
>I decided they were all what I came to call 'basement-Idealists' rather
>than, with Hegel, the 'attic' kind. They all seemed to me doubt - what I
>could not doubt - that anything existed apart from some experience, and
>yet they seemed unwilling to face the consequences of such a
>position. They wanted to be Idealists without giving up the fruits of
>Realism. It made them unhappy to be thus accused, but so they seemed to
>me" (A Non-Existent Man, p48)."
>
>Best,
>- Steve
>
>
>
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