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                      GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
                         AND POLITICS


                              BY
                          JOHN DEWEY
        Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University


                           NEW YORK
                    HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
                             1915




                       COPYRIGHT, 1915,
                              BY
                    HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY


                 THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
                        RAHWAY, N. J.




PREFACE


The will of John Calvin McNair established a Foundation at the
University of North Carolina upon which public lectures are to be given
from time to time to the members of the University. This book contains
three lectures which were given in February of this year upon this
Foundation. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many courtesies enjoyed
during my brief stay at Chapel Hill, the seat of the University.

     J. D.

     Columbia University,
     New York City, April, 1915.




CONTENTS


                                                        PAGE
       I GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: THE TWO WORLDS                 3

      II GERMAN MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY            47

     III THE GERMANIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY               91

         INDEX                                           133




GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS




I

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY: THE TWO WORLDS


The nature of the influence of general ideas upon practical affairs is a
troubled question. Mind dislikes to find itself a pilgrim in an alien
world. A discovery that the belief in the influence of thought upon
action is an illusion would leave men profoundly saddened with
themselves and with the world. Were it not that the doctrine forbids any
discovery influencing affairs--since the discovery would be an idea--we
should say that the discovery of the wholly _ex post facto_ and idle
character of ideas would profoundly influence subsequent affairs. The
strange thing is that when men had least control over nature and their
own affairs, they were most sure of the efficacy of thought. The
doctrine that nature does nothing in vain, that it is directed by
purpose, was not engrafted by scholasticism upon science; it formulates
an instinctive tendency. And if the doctrine be fallacious, its pathos
has a noble quality. It testifies to the longing of human thought for a
world of its own texture. Yet just in the degree in which men, by means
of inventions and political arrangements, have found ways of making
their thoughts effective, they have come to question whether any
thinking is efficacious. Our notions in physical science tend to reduce
mind to a bare spectator of a machine-like nature grinding its
unrelenting way. The vogue of evolutionary ideas has led many to regard
intelligence as a deposit from history, not as a force in its making. We
look backward rather than forward; and when we look forward we seem to
see but a further unrolling of a panorama long ago rolled up on a cosmic
reel. Even Bergson, who, to a casual reader, appears to reveal vast
unexplored vistas of genuinely novel possibilities, turns out, upon
careful study, to regard _intellect_ (everything which in the past has
gone by the name of observation and reflection) as but an evolutionary
deposit whose importance is confined to the conservation of a life
already achieved, and bids us trust to instinct, or something akin to
instinct, for the future:--as if there were hope and consolation in
bidding us trust to that which, in any case, we cannot intelligently
direct or control.

I do not see that the school of history which finds Bergson mystic and
romantic, which prides itself upon its hard-headed and scientific
character, comes out at a different place. I refer to the doctrine of
the economic interpretation of history in its extreme form--which, so
its adherents tell us, is its only logical form. It is easy to follow
them when they tell us that past historians have ignored the great part
played by economic forces, and that descriptions and explanations have
been correspondingly superficial. When one reflects that the great
problems of the present day are those attending economic reorganization,
one might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted confession that
historians are really engaged in construing the past in terms of the
problems and interests of an impending future, instead of reporting a
past in order to discover some mathematical curve which future events
are bound to describe. But no; our strictly scientific economic
interpreters will have it that economic forces present an inevitable
evolution, of which state and church, art and literature, science and
philosophy are by-products. It is useless to suggest that while modern
industry has given an immense stimulus to scientific inquiry, yet
nevertheless the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century comes
after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth. The dogma forbids
any connection.

But when we note that Marx gave it away that his materialistic
interpretation of history was but the Hegelian idealistic dialectic
turned upside down, we may grow wary. Is it, after all, history we are
dealing with or another philosophy of history? And when we discover that
the great importance of the doctrine is urged upon us, when we find that
we are told that the general recognition of its truth helps us out of
our present troubles and indicates a path for future effort, we
positively take heart. These writers do not seem to mean just what they
say. Like the rest of us, they are human, and infected with a belief
that ideas, even highly abstract theories, are of efficacy in the
conduct of human affairs influencing the history which is yet to be.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have, however, no intention of entering upon this controversy, much
less of trying to settle it. These remarks are but preliminary to a
consideration of some of the practical affiliations of portions of the
modern history of philosophical thought with practical social affairs.
And if I set forth my own position in the controversy in question, the
statement is frankly a personal one, intended to make known the
prepossessions with which I approach the discussion of the political
bearings of one phase of modern philosophy. I do not believe, then, that
_pure_ ideas, or pure thought, ever exercised any influence upon human
action. I believe that very much of what has been presented as
philosophic reflection is in effect simply an idealization, for the sake
of emotional satisfaction, of the brutely given state of affairs, and is
not a genuine discovery of the practical influence of ideas. In other
words, I believe it to be esthetic in type even when sadly lacking in
esthetic form. And I believe it is easy to exaggerate the practical
influence of even the more vital and genuine ideas of which I am about
to speak.

But I also believe that there are no such things as _pure_ ideas or
_pure_ reason. Every living thought represents a gesture made toward
the world, an attitude taken to some practical situation in which we
are implicated. Most of these gestures are ephemeral; they reveal the
state of him who makes them rather than effect a significant alteration
of conditions. But at some times they are congenial to a situation in
which men in masses are acting and suffering. They supply a model for
the attitudes of others; they condense into a dramatic type of action.
They then form what we call the "great" systems of thought. Not all
ideas perish with the momentary response. They are voiced and others
hear; they are written and others read. Education, formal and informal,
embodies them not so much in other men's minds as in their permanent
dispositions of action. They are in the blood, and afford sustenance to
conduct; they are in the muscles and men strike or retire. Even
emotional and esthetic systems may breed a disposition toward the world
and take overt effect. The reactions thus engendered are, indeed,
superficial as compared with those in which more primitive instincts are
embodied. The business of eating and drinking, buying and selling,
marrying and being given in marriage, making war and peace, gets somehow
carried on along with any and every system of ideas which the world has
known. But how, and when and where and for what men do even these things
is tremendously affected by the abstract ideas which get into
circulation.

       *       *       *       *       *

I take it that I may seem to be engaged in an emphatic urging of the
obvious. However it may be with a few specialized schools of men, almost
everybody takes it as a matter of course that ideas influence action and
help determine the subsequent course of events. Yet there is a purpose
in this insistence. Most persons draw the line at a certain kind of
general ideas. They are especially prone to regard the ideas which
constitute philosophic theories as practically innocuous--as more or
less amiable speculations significant at the most for moments of
leisure, in moments of relief from preoccupation with affairs. Above
all, men take the particular general ideas which happen to affect their
own conduct of life as normal and inevitable. Pray what other ideas
would any sensible man have? They forget the extent to which these ideas
originated as parts of a remote and technical theoretical system, which
by multitudes of non-reflective channels has infiltrated into their
habits of imagination and behavior. An expert intellectual anatomist,
my friends, might dissect you and find Platonic and Aristotelian
tissues, organs from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Locke and
Descartes, in the make-up of the ideas by which you are habitually
swayed, and find, indeed, that they and other thinkers of whose names
you have never heard constitute a larger part of your mental structure
than does the Calvin or Kant, Darwin or Spencer, Hegel or Emerson,
Bergson or Browning to whom you yield conscious allegiance.

Philosophers themselves are naturally chiefly responsible for the
ordinary estimate of their own influence, or lack of influence. They
have been taken mostly at their own word as to what they were doing, and
what for the most part they have pretended to do is radically different
from what they have actually done. They are quite negligible as seers
and reporters of ultimate reality, or the essential natures of things.
And it is in this aspect that they have mostly fancied seeing
themselves. Their actual office has been quite other. They have told
about nature and life and society in terms of collective human desire
and aspiration as these were determined by contemporary difficulties
and struggles.

I have spoken thus far as if the influence of general ideas upon action
were likely to be beneficial. It goes against the grain to attribute
evil to the workings of intelligence. But we might as well face the
dilemma. What is called pure thought, thought freed from the empirical
contingencies of life, would, even if it existed, be irrelevant to the
guidance of action. For the latter always operates amid the circumstance
of contingencies. And thinking which is colored by time and place must
always be of a mixed quality. In part, it will detect and hold fast to
more permanent tendencies and arrangements; in part, it will take the
limitations of its own period as necessary and universal--even as
intrinsically desirable.

The traits which give thinking effectiveness for the good give it also
potency for harm. A physical catastrophe, an earthquake or
conflagration, acts only where it happens. While its effects endure, it
passes away. But it is of the nature of ideas to be abstract: that is to
say, severed from the circumstances of their origin, and through
embodiment in language capable of operating in remote climes and alien
situations. Time heals physical ravages, but it may only accentuate the
evils of an intellectual catastrophe--for by no lesser name can we call
a systematic intellectual error. To one who is professionally
preoccupied with philosophy there is much in its history which is
profoundly depressing. He sees ideas which were not only natural but
useful in their native time and place, figuring in foreign contexts so
as to formulate defects as virtues and to give rational sanction to
brute facts, and to oppose alleged eternal truths to progress. He sees
movements which might have passed away with change of circumstance as
casually as they arose, acquire persistence and dignity because thought
has taken cognizance of them and given them intellectual names. The
witness of history is that to think in general and abstract terms is
dangerous; it elevates ideas beyond the situations in which they were
born and charges them with we know not what menace for the future. And
in the past the danger has been the greater because philosophers have so
largely purported to be concerned not with contemporary problems of
living, but with essential Truth and Reality viewed under the form of
eternity.

In bringing these general considerations to a close, I face an
embarrassment. I must choose some particular period of intellectual
history for more concrete illustration of the mutual relationship of
philosophy and practical social affairs--which latter, for the sake of
brevity, I term Politics. One is tempted to choose Plato. For in spite
of the mystic and transcendental coloring of his thought, it was he who
defined philosophy as the science of the State, or the most complete and
organized whole known to man; it is no accident that his chief work is
termed the "Republic." In modern times, we are struck by the fact that
English philosophy from Bacon to John Stuart Mill has been cultivated by
men of affairs rather than by professors, and with a direct outlook upon
social interests. In France, the great period of philosophy, the period
of _les philosophes_, was the time in which were forged the ideas which
connect in particular with the French Revolution and in general with the
conceptions which spread so rapidly through the civilized world, of the
indefinite perfectibility of humanity, the rights of man, and the
promotion of a society as wide as humanity, based upon allegiance to
reason.

Somewhat arbitrarily I have, however, selected some aspects of classic
German thought for my illustrative material. Partly, I suppose, because
one is piqued by the apparent challenge which its highly technical,
professorial and predominantly _a priori_ character offers to the
proposition that there is close connection between abstract thought and
the tendencies of collective life. More to the point, probably, is the
fact that the heroic age of German thought lies almost within the last
century, while the creative period of continental thought lies largely
in the eighteenth century, and that of British thought still earlier. It
was Taine, the Frenchman, who said that all the leading ideas of the
present day were produced in Germany between 1780 and 1830. Above all,
the Germans, as we say, have philosophy in their blood. Such phrases
generally mean something not about hereditary qualities, but about the
social conditions under which ideas propagate and circulate.

Now Germany is the modern state which provides the greatest facilities
for general ideas to take effect through social inculcation. Its system
of education is adapted to that end. Higher schools and universities in
Germany are really, not just nominally, under the control of the state
and part of the state life. In spite of freedom of academic instruction
when once a teacher is installed in office, the political authorities
have always taken a hand, at critical junctures, in determining the
selection of teachers in subjects that had a direct bearing upon
political policies. Moreover, one of the chief functions of the
universities is the preparation of future state officials. Legislative
activity is distinctly subordinate to that of administration conducted
by a trained civil service, or, if you please, bureaucracy. Membership
in this bureaucracy is dependent upon university training. Philosophy,
both directly and indirectly, plays an unusually large role in the
training. The faculty of law does not chiefly aim at the preparation of
practicing lawyers. Philosophies of jurisprudence are essential parts of
the law teaching; and every one of the classic philosophers took a hand
in writing a philosophy of Law and of the State. Moreover, in the
theological faculties, which are also organic parts of state-controlled
institutions, the theology and higher criticism of Protestant Germany
have been developed, and developed also in close connection with
philosophical systems--like those of Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel. In
short, the educational and administrative agencies of Germany provide
ready-made channels through which philosophic ideas may flow on their
way to practical affairs.

Political public opinion hardly exists in Germany in the sense in which
it obtains in France, Great Britain or this country. So far as it
exists, the universities may be said to be its chief organs. They,
rather than the newspapers, crystallize it and give it articulate
expression. Instead of expressing surprise at the characteristic
utterances of university men with reference to the great war, we should
then rather turn to the past history in which the ideas now uttered were
generated.

In an account of German intellectual history sufficiently extensive we
should have to go back at least to Luther. Fortunately, for our
purposes, what he actually did and taught is not so important as the
more recent tradition concerning his peculiarly Germanic status and
office. All peoples are proud of all their great men. Germany is proud
of Luther as its greatest national hero. But while most nations are
