HEGEL, DEWEY, AND HABITS

1 An earlier version of this paper was read at an author meets critics session on Terry Pinkard's book Hegel's Naturalism. I would like to thank Prof. Pinkard and Katerina Deligiorgi for comments and discussion. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments, which were most helpful.

Abstract

In this paper, I argue against Terry Pinkard's account of the relation between Deweyian pragmatism and Hegelian idealism. Instead of thinking that their affinity concerns the issue of normative authority, as Pinkard does, I argue that we should trace their affinity to Dewey's appropriation of Hegel's naturalism, especially his theory of habits. Pinkard is not in a position to appreciate this affinity because (1) he misreads Dewey as an instrumentalist, and (2) his social-constructivist account of Hegel – which he shares with Pippin and Brandom, is not able to correctly take the measure of Hegel's naturalism. On my reading, Dewey's philosophy is concerned above all with understanding and making objective the proper relation between reason and habit, with our achieving an equipoise in which thought is informed by intelligent habits and where habits are instituted by past thought and inquiry. In achieving this equipoise, one's bodily nature becomes a form in which subjects can realize their freedom. I claim that the origin of this thought can be found in Hegel, and that Dewey, when seen through this lens, is a type of left-Hegelian naturalist.

Keywords:

• Hegel
• Dewey
• pragmatism
• habits
• naturalism

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was read at an author meets critics session on Terry Pinkard's book Hegel's Naturalism. I would like to thank Prof. Pinkard and Katerina Deligiorgi for comments and discussion. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments, which were most helpful.

²The claim is related to one that Robert Stern makes in Stern, ‘Hegel and Pragmatism’. Stern argues that the deepest affinity between pragmatism and Hegelian idealism revolves around their shared rejection of a Cartesian starting point for inquiry. Both Peirce and Hegel take it that inquiry cannot start with Cartesian doubt, which is a type of ‘paper doubt’, but must start with ‘real doubt’, doubt motived by a lived contradiction or problem. I agree with Stern that this is a deep affinity between pragmatism and Hegelian idealism. In this paper, I simply mean to point to another.

³I do not wish to deny that there are other perhaps equally important ways of reading pragmatism.

⁴I focus on Dewey because: (1) of all the pragmatists he is closest to Hegel; (2) because he developed, of all the pragmatists, the most complex theory of habits, one that was directly inspired by Hegel's; and (3) he is the pragmatist that Pinkard targets in his discussion. In line with Pinkard's usage, I sometimes talk about ‘the pragmatist’ and ‘pragmatism’. In doing so, I, like Pinkard, am just taking about Dewey and Deweyian pragmatism. For another account of the Dewey-Hegel connection that also focuses on the naturalism issue, see Renault, ‘Naturalistic Side of Hegel's Pragmatism’.

⁵One finds a similar, but more worked out, account of classical pragmatism in Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism.

⁶I would not deny, however, that although Dewey discusses the social/communicative nature of human life at great length, that it is under-theorized in his work compared, let us say, to Mead.

⁷The natural question to ask here is: what is the standard of critique for Dewey? For reasons of space, I cannot take up this complex issue here. See Welchman, Dewey's Ethical Thought.

⁸For more on this debate, see, besides Pinkard's book, Stern, Essays on Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and the special issue of Critical Horizons on ‘Nature in Spirit’ edited by Ikäheimo and Deranty, Critical Horizons.

⁹For influential social-constructivist accounts of Hegel, see Pippin, Hegel's Practical Philosophy and Brandom, forthcoming.

¹⁰See Pinkard, German Philosophy, where he accounts for the trajectory of German Idealism as a response to this paradox.

¹¹See Pippin, ‘Leaving Nature Behind, or Two Cheers for Subjectivism’.

¹²Here I am responding to a comment that Pinkard made in response to a previous version of this paper.

¹³See Brandom, Making it Explicit and Boyle, forthcoming.

¹⁴Here I am glossing the account given in the first chapter of Pinkard, Hegel's Naturalism. For Hegel's exposition of these points, see Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §350–375.

¹⁵For more on these characteristics of habits, see Levine, ‘Norms and Habits’.

¹⁶Here we find a significant difference between Hegel and Dewey. For Hegel, the self is a complex structure involving both habits and the normative self-understanding that one develops due to relations of recognition. Dewey thinks of the self as a bundle of bodily and intellectual habits.