Question #11: Dewey and Naturalism

First, the reasons why naturalism and pragmatism are or could be opposed - these might come most easily from James. Put in the most simple terms, naturalism is fascinated with degeneration, with the devolution of the human subject, whereas pragmatism seems to be only interested in moving humanity forward. But there are crucial ways in which pragmatism and naturalism dovetail. Using Dewey:

First, and most obviously, it's no coincidence that Dewey uses the term "empirical naturalism" to describe his understanding of the scientific method. This use of the term naturalism refers not to the literary movement headed by Zola but rather to the older, original use of the term naturalism, which means some combination of a materialist and scientific philosophy. In other words, we have an initial point of agreement between pragmatism and literary naturalism: both discard Platonic realism/metaphysics and Descartian dualism, favoring instead a naturalistic/materialistic epistemology.

Beyond this similarity is the uniquely textual method that both naturalism and pragmatism employ. To put this more precisely, both naturalism and pragmatism (particularly in its Deweyan manifestation) represent practitioners of a textual field (literature, philosophy) attempting to use certain aspects of the scientific methodology to reveal truths on some border ground between their traditional disciplinary space and the space of politics and sociology. In other words, both naturalism and pragmatism, inspired by a materialist philosophy which abandons most traditional aesthetic or metaphysical concepts, seeks to find a way to bring literary/philosophic writing to bear on the contemporary social problems of the world.

This uniting takes place when he concludes that a useful description of his project is "naturalistic humanism." In other words, an the philosophical system of the type that both naturalism and pragmatism reject held, perhaps about all things, a separation of man and experience from nature. This for Dewey is but a silly obstruction - how else is man to know of nature than by experience? The only other alternative is a supra-empiricial, a transcendental knowledge of nature which both naturalism and Dewey see as an outdated and obfuscating mode of epistemology.

Perhaps nothing links Dewey's epistemology with naturalism more than his belief, as is only natural once we do away with a transcendental knowledge of nature, that non-cognitive experiences precede cognitive experiences, and that cognitive experiences are made up of non-cognitive experiences. This could more or less be the doctrine of Zola - in fact, it is a better way of putting it than Zola ever could. This is the central doctrine of naturalistic philosophy; not that consciousness does not exist or is a fiction, but that whatever consciousness is, it arises out of biological functionings of the nervous system. Dewey describes the alternative to such an understanding as a world in which every human is a stranger in every environment, abstracted from their surroundings and unable to know them. The naturalists, with Dewey, wanted to get rid of such an understanding of humanity, as well as humanity's morals and, indeed, consciosness. For both Dewey and Zola, humankind was another biological organism, finding its way in an environment by virtue of the biological signals communicated by its nervous system.

From here, it is not hard to imagine naturalism and pragmatism as divergent courses with near identical starting points. Both of them wanted to sweep away what they perceived as millennia of rubbish that had accumlated from a disassociation of man from his environment. Both of them did so, not by writing scientific texts, but by attempting to link this newly scientific awareness with the unique strengths of their respective disciplines. Etc.