When you read this, you may wonder "Why is Dr. Pope making us read this essay? Are we going to talk about teaching Intelligent Design or something?"
Well, we can talk about that. But that's not the reason I assigned this piece. I think this piece is essential to understanding Dewey's ideas about knowledge, change, and the Absolute.
To put it very briefly, prior to Darwin the basis of philosophy was that knowledge was fixed and absolute. Anything worth knowing was Final. Darwin calls the existence of any essential quality of anything into question, by pointing out that organisms change over time and they do so as a result of environmental factors interacting (trans-acting?) with random changes in organisms. Thus what a thing IS is ultimately hard to pin down.
Dewey takes this insight and wants to apply it to philosophy, calling into question philosophy's traditional search for an Absolute Reality beyond our own. He wants us instead to focus on more immediate concerns:
"To improve our education, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must have recourse to specific conditions of generation." (44) Specifics, not abstract generalities. Not essences. It's the move from Absolutism to Pragmatism.
Think this doesn't apply to education? Think of the difference between these two ways of describing a child who is acting up:
"He's a bad kid."
"He's a kid who acts badly."
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I just wanted to share a quote I liked in this reading. "Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitueds of aversion and preference." We discussed Dewey's key ideas in class on Wednesday and how habits are the basis of a humans development. That when problems occur people are forced to think and create new habits. I just thought this was a good quote that showed where Dewey is coming from and wanted to share.
I agree with the quote that Dr. Pope listed, "to improve our education, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must have recourse to specific conditions of generation." (44) Darwin's Origin of Species caused a new mode of thinking which caused a change in knowledge which in turn changed morals, politics, and religion. All of this caused a crisis. The people who were against Darwin said the issue existed between science and theology. Dewey claims the issue was within science itself. The Absolute is not what everyone had thought it to be for the past two thousand years before.
As I look back at my notes one interesting note that stuck out was "change was a problem so the telos is finding the end of the changes." I find it really interesting because as I look back at the different changes that have occured in my life I can never really find the end. to me change is a never ending cycle that just keeps going. One change leads to another which leads to another. It is a cycle that is infinite and almost impossible to really find the clear end, unless you want to count death.
I also want to comment on Dr. Pope's Dewey quote and Meredith's comment on that quote. I agree with the notion that the absolute is not what people have thought for thousands of years but I also think that that is what makes us who we are today. If the absolute was the absolute, how would we be different today?
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