Dewey’s Concepts of Stability and Precariousness in His Philosophy of Education

This article connects two of Dewey’s generic traits of existence—stability and precariousness—to four elements specified in his preface to Democracy and Education (democracy, evolution, industrialization and the experimental method) and one element specified in his preface to How We Think (childhood). It argues that Dewey’s metaphysics of stability and precariousness is implicit in his philosophy of education and provides a unifying aspect to his philosophy of education that is relevant to the modern world. The article then briefly looks at whether Dewey developed a metaphysics at all and concludes that Dewey did indeed develop a metaphysics—a new metaphysics of human experience—which needs to be further analysed in relation to various aspects of his philosophy of education. Richard Rorty, negatively, claims that John Dewey’s metaphysics, especially as expounded in his work Experience and Nature follows a mistaken path by referring to generic traits of existence. The best thing in that work, according to Rorty, is its negative function. It exposes the pseudo-nature of philosophical problems and the consequent need to slough off the dualistic presuppositions of such pseudoproblems. On the other hand, Dewey, when he offered what he considered being something positive in that work metaphysically through the generic traits of existence, confused the causal process of believing something and the justification of that belief. Dewey’s metaphysics of the generic traits of existence, on such a reading, has no real function to perform. A similar disparagement of Dewey’s metaphysics is found in Richard Gale’s article, which derides Dewey’s metaphysics by arguing that Dewey had a HumptyDumpty theory of metaphysics, designed to prevent the separation of the world into discrete particles that would, if left in isolation, never be unified again. On such a reading, Dewey’s metaphysics merely functioned to underscore his latent Hegelianism. Instead of arguing against such views by extensively considering Dewey’s metaphysics (as does, for example, Raymond Boisvert), the essay will argue indiDewey’s Concepts of Stability and Precariousness ♦ 39 Volume 23 (1) ♦ 2007 rectly for it at a more concrete level in relation to Dewey’s philosophy of education. In particular, it will be seen that Dewey’s concepts of stability and precariousness play a decisive role in his formulation of a philosophy of education in the modern, industrial epoch. It will, as a consequence, be clearer what Rorty’s rejection of Dewey’s metaphysics means. Once the connection between Dewey’s concepts of stability and precariousness and his philosophy of education has been established, the question of whether Dewey had a metaphysics at all will be briefly addressed. For Dewey, existence is neither purely open nor purely closed. If it were purely closed, there would be no problems, no tension and no need to do or undergo or learn anything; experience would not arise. If it were purely open, there would be a constant flux of problems, with no stable points, no beginnings, no middles and no ends; learning would be useless. As Boisvert remarks, “As far as Dewey is concerned, change alone allows for no solutions, while permanence alone provides no problems.” The nature of existence itself as a unity or synthesis of being and becoming provides the basis for human learning: We are here concerned with the fact that it is the intricate mixture of the stable and the precarious, the fixed and the unpredictably novel, the assured and the uncertain, in existence which sets mankind upon that love of wisdom which forms philosophy. This mixture is dialectical in that one cannot exist without the other; they presuppose each other or are internal to each other and yet not identical or reducible to each other. There is thus an ontological gap between a purely closed world and a purely open world. The two can never collapse into each other without annihilating existence. Given that all existence is characterized by both stability and precariousness, the problem now is to connect those aspects of Dewey’s ontology to his philosophy of education. The solution to the problem of how to link Dewey’s metaphysics to his philosophy of education is suggested, in part, by Dewey himself in his reference to the importance of his philosophy of education to his general philosophy: Although a book called Democracy and Education was for many years that in which my philosophy, such as it is, was most fully expounded, I do not know that philosophic critics, as distinct from teachers, have ever had recourse to it. I have wondered whether such facts signified that philosophers in general, although they are themselves usually teachers, have not taken education with sufficient seriousness for it to occur to them that any rational person could actually think it possible that philosophizing should focus about education as the supreme human interest in which, moreover, other problems, cosmological, moral, logical, come to a head. Indirectly, Ralph Sleeper’s contention that Dewey’s prefaces were designed so that the reader “would see the relevance of his thought to the world in which he was