The Politics of Hope and Optimism: Rorty, Havel, and the Democratic Faith of John Dewey - .Vaclav Havel, Richard Rorty - )

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Patrick J. Deneen

Above all, what should be avoided is a "quest for certainty." Solutions to existing problems arising from human affairs are always provisional and tentative. As he stated in Quest for Certainty, "no mode of action can give anything approaching absolute certitude; it provides insurance but not assurance. Doing is always subject to peril [and] to the danger of frustration" (1929, 23). But rather than prompting us to avoid such precariousness in our knowledge, Dewey suggests such an attitude is the necessary and desirable consequence of adopting a kind of knowledge that is constantly and rightly in danger of obsolescence. We should avoid reaching the conclusion that the opposite of uncertainty is knowledge. Calling this "the commonest fallacy," he urges a kind of patient willingness to submit to doubt, noting the undesirable tendency by which "thought hastens toward the settled and is only to likely to force the pace" (1929, 227). The attempt to secure knowledge about any aspect of human life is always discrete, and any resulting answer to questions about human affairs is always limited and momentary. Not only can our experience change in such a manner to render the old solutions moot, but new applications of human ingenuity and questioning can easily overthrow momentarily "settled" beliefs.

The proper method of investigating apparent truths, of constantly improving them through outright rejection or incremental adjustments, was called by Dewey the "method of intelligence." As described by him,

   Some of its obvious elements are willingness to hold belief in suspense,
   ability to doubt until evidence is obtained; willingness to go where
   evidence points instead of putting first a personally preferred conclusion;
   ability to hold ideas in solution and use them as hypotheses to be tested
   instead of as dogmas to be asserted; and (possibly most distinctive of
   all), enjoyment of new fields for inquiry and of new problems. (1986, 118)

The openness and provisionality of this approach lends itself most appropriately to the democratic temperament, given its willingness to entertain disagreement and variety of opinions. Dewey perceived the "method of intelligence" and democracy as intimately bound together: the "method of intelligence" could only fully find expression in an appropriately open society like a democracy; while democracy could only be improved from within by the application of the "method of intelligence." The "method," then, had explicitly democratic and progressive application:

   The purpose [of the method of intelligence] is to set free and to develop
   the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class or
   economic status.... Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral
   meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political
   and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the
   all-around growth of every member of society. (1950, 147)

Dewey's confidence in the ability of the "method of intelligence" to create conditions of moral and material growth is almost unbounded: nature holds an incalculable bounty for human use, if only its secrets can be unlocked by the proper attitude of inquisitiveness and the development of certain technical adeptness. Noting his indebtedness to Francis Bacon in this regard, Dewey wrote that "scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry" (1950, 46).(8) The job of the modern, and especially modern science--a realm of inquiry that extends to the human sciences as well as to the natural sciences--is to extract the secrets of nature by whatever means possible, even if these methods at times evoke ominous overtones. Indeed, again echoing Bacon, Dewey reveals the severity with which the modern scientist must approach his task: