Ratzinger accepts Nietzsche’s work as a consequence of a relatvistic culture that turned it’s back on the reality of God and denies the existence of an objective moral universe. That’s far different than your response to Dewey, which appears as an endorsement at worse, or a synthesis, at best. If the latter, maybe you can expound on what part of Dewey you would like to jettison.

I stand by my criticism; his project replaced the one, true God with a substitute of his own creation. The result was as one would expect. Feel free to pan for nuggets amongst the drek, but I’ll instead turn to those humble souls who bravely stumble towards Truth.

So do I. And I am highly critical of Dewey inconsistency in that regard. He seems to think that reform can “fix” a well-working system of socialization. BUT, in spite of this, Dewey offers much to a vision of a post-metaphysical philosophy grounded in an extensive–even to the realm of inifnite, to unnalyzed totality–sense of experience. He is also THE critic of this educational system, and his “followers” coopted his ideas lacking any philosophical understanding of his point. That the very reason he published his lectures given in 1938, Experience and Education, to attempt to correct those interpretations…

But I’ve made many other points other than experience. It seems to be that you found some “dirt” on Dewey that makes you want to villanize him. If we did the same with Heidegger the Nazi (who JPII paid serious attention to) or Nietzsche the God-Killer (supposedly), we would be left with an impoverished and uncatholic understanding.

Thankfully, many Catholics (including our current pope [see Deus Caritas Est]) don’t use the same methodology you do. You might want to clear up the issue of methodology, experience, post-metaphysics, defense on a charge lack of literacy support, and, above all, read James’ Varieties of Religious Experience to see if the foundation you’re assuming is really true.

My point is; Dewey works are remarkably absent any spiritual basis; “I believe that this educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following.” What? Such a description is both alien to the teachings of my faith, yet, now so commonplace, that I find it hard to find common ground, much less “Common Faith” with him.

I think our modern educational system is devoted to the erasure of cultural memory, re-routing the pursuit of higher truths towards social indoctrination and the molding of students as docile consumers. Is it unfair to blame some of this on Dewey? I don’t think so, as many of his acolytes hail the current state of education as his crowning achievement. Or, maybe, like Robespierre, he was not fully aware of where things would lead.

You may find merit and value in some of his work, but ultimately, you cannot deny that Dewey stands on the side of those waging a Permanent Revolution against the remaining vestiges of Christendom. As such, I take heart in his diminishing influence and look forward to building on top of the wreckage left by those who sought to make God in their own image.

Right now the biggest (and best, in my opinion) is Jean-Luc Marion. Who is very post-metaphysical, indebted to Nietzsche, AND deeply invested in a renewal of philosophical discourse in the tradition of the ordo amoris. Read his wonderful book “God Without Being” and then try and tell my that this is an institution that believes in “absolutes,” in the simple way you put it.

To be have little taste for “absolutes” is not NECESSARILY to be opposed to the Church or to not be a realist (if that dualism really matters). And, yes, I am very aware of Dewey’s work in education, my PhD will be in Philosophy of Education, and, in turn, I can confidently say that Dewey’s ideas about education, especially as put forth in Democracy and Education, can only be properly understood if you read Experience and Education and Experience and Nature after wards and Reconstruction in Philosophy before. All that, after ground yourself with the Jamesian psychology that influences his him early on.

Look, I disagree strongly with Dewey on many points, and I am happy to talk about that. But to write him off altogether because a simplistic understanding of his work is silly. Kimbal won’t be the first to lambaste Dewey, lots of people have. The point is whether there is any merit to it. As with most thinkers when we take a close and careful look at their work, we find things of value and learn a lot. That is the pedagogical value of Dewey, philosophically, I think we can learn much more by just looking at James. But thats beside the point.

At the same time this back and forth is very silly because I have raised many points that you gloss over in reasserting the same thing you said in the beginning. If you want to discuss this, you need to engage the point I put on the table. Otherwise I am just led to continue to believe that you don’t have sufficient idea of what your talking about, insofar as it is grounded in textual and contextual support.

You won’t like what Kimbal has to say (see johnathanjones’ post from Around the web) so avoid it.

Frankly, if they ever made up a team consisting of Modernist All-Stars, Dewey would be a very solid complementary player to brighter stars like Nietzsche, Freud & Marx.

That’s a good observation about distinguishing the individuals from generality. I will defer to your knowledge about Dewey. But from the first comment I am making a general point: it is curious how important threads of American political thought, such as his philosophical pragmatism, are detached from their leftist heirs. My suspicious mind is inclined to think that much of progressive history has gone down the memory hole because of its alliances with currently unfashionable ideas, such as Italian and German central planning and eugenics.

The problem with Dewey is he mistakes a preliminary guide to truth, as the best and only means to attain it. Leaving him, ho hum, as just another 20th Century rationalist and social engineer working in the narrow confines of his own restricted self-created system. His memory is preserved, I suppose by academicians, but in the end; “Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish?”

Sorry I am spouting off so much, but I rarely engage in “this side” of my work on these catholic blogs… But my adviser is a Deweyan and close friend of Sidney Hook and Rorty (while they were alive) and much of my last several years has been spent pouring over James and Dewey and finding them quite fascinating. This past spring I gave a paper on a comparison of James and Jean-Luc Marion, and Marion was quite pleased to see pragmatism at a continental venue. He even went as far as to say he is glad he found it later in his life because it might have distracted him, he finds it so interesting… So even beyond the American scene there is much to be said about the potential for overlaps, so to speak.

“We begin by noting that ‘experience’ is what James called a double-barreled word… ‘Experience’ denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped harvests, the changes of night and day, spring and autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are observed, feared, longed for; it denotes the one who plants and reaps, who works and rejoices, hopes, fears, plans, invokes magic or chemistry to aid him, who is downcast or triumphant. It is ‘double-barreled’ in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality.”

I tend to agree with Dewey here. So much the worse for ‘the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs’.