The readings in 'The Essential Dewey- Vol. 2', and the interpretation of these readings provided by Hickman and Alexander, overemphasize "the instrumental" function in the philosophy of John Dewey.
This conflicts with Dewey's own registering of the value of the instrumental presented in 'Experience and Nature' on Page 205 (Dover Publications) in the Chapter 'Nature and Communication':
"Communication is uniquely instrumental and uniquely final. It is instrumental as liberating us from the otherwise overwhelming pressure of events and enabling us to live a world of things that have meaning. It is final as a sharing in the objects and arts precious to a community, a sharing whereby meanings are enhanced, deepened and solidified in the sense of communion. Because of its characteristic agency and finality, communication and its congenial objects are objects ultimately worthy of awe, admiration, and loyal appreciation. They are worthy as means, because they are the only means that make like rich and varied in meanings. They are worthy as ends, because in such ends man is lifted from his immediate isolation and shares in a communion of meanings. Here, as in so many other things, the great evil lies in separating instrumental and final functions. Intelligence is partial and specialized, because communication and participation are limited, sectarian, provincial, confined to class, party professional group. By the same token, our enjoyment of ends is luxurious and corrupting for some; brutal, trivial, harsh for others; exclusion from the life of free and full communication excluding both alike from full possession of meanings of the things that enter experience. when the instrumental and final functions of communication live together in experience, there exists an intelligence which is the method and reward of the common life, and a society worthy to command affection, admiration, and loyalty".
Similar passages of a fuller reading of Dewey are found also on pgs. 184-185 "use establishes a genuine community of action", pg. 179 "the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which they are partners".. in another passage in 179 that can be condensed to "meaning is a distinctive cooperative behavior", and on pg. 171 "the import of logical and rational essences is the consequence of social interactions, of companionship, mutual assistance, direction and concerted action".
The main thrust that underlies the instrumental function of "transaction" overly emphasized by Hickman and Alexander, is human cooperation to realize the benefits and belonging of social action, concerted action.
The main conflict, the contradiction, in the construction of the ethical essays in Volume 2 is that the "moral moratorium in the everyday" in 'the Good of Activity' (from 'Human Nature and Conduct'), contradicts the text of 'Experience and Nature'. It does so because the emphasis is on merely individual action with no foresight of consequence of conduct within the social dialectic depicted in 'Philosophies of Freedom'. The fact that an individual who wishes to execute (carry out) his aims within an association group, a society, must be able to do so over time, not merely once. This makes the maintenance of those relationships within society a fundamental instrumental priority. It is in this way that one understands Paul Ricouer's comment on Dewey- when asked in the Hans Jonas Seminar in 1990- that "the moral is instrumental", and primarily instrumental over and above any singular aim the individual wishes to achieve, because it instrumentally maintains channels of cooperation for the continued achievement of aims.
This glaring contradiction between what is expressed in 'Experience and Nature' and what is expressed in the 'The Good of Activity' demonstrate flaws in the construction of Philosophical positions in the Dewey corpus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTuSDNRJYmE&feature=related
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