In my grad seminar this semester we are reading John Dewey's 1927 classic of cultural criticism and social philosophy, The Public and Its Problems. This is the third time that I have taught the book and at least the sixth or seventh time I've read it. Dewey was a great thinker, but let's face it, he wasn't a great writer. Max Eastman once famously noted of Dewey, "If he ever wrote one quotable sentence it has got permanently lost in the pile."
This week, for the first time ever, I actually noticed the hilarious blurb on the back of my well-worn copy of Dewey's book. Inexplicably, it comes from the Whole Earth Catalog:
"The potentiality for his ideas during this distressed period of history are ever more dazzling. And in this book, the dazzlement is fully let loose in a series of far-out proposals for experimenting with altered life styles."
What were those Whole Earth folks smoking? Let's look at a typical Dewey sentence: "But the difference between facts which are what they are independent of human desire and endeavor and facts which are to some extent what they are because of human interest and purpose, and which alter with alteration in the latter, cannot be got rid of by any methodology" (p. 7).
Dazzled?
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