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A Common Faith
In A Common Faith, eminent American philosopher John Dewey calls for the �emancipation of the true religious quality” from the heritage of dogmatism and supernaturalism that he believes characterizes historical religions. He describes how the depth of religious experience and the creative role of faith in the resources of experience to generate meaning and value can be cultivated without making cognitive claims that compete with or contend with scientific ones. In a new introduction, Dewey scholar Thomas Alexander contextualizes the text for students and scholars by providing an overview of Dewey and his philosophy, key concepts in A Common Faith, and reactions to the text.
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
About the author
John Dewey
682 books653 followersJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology. He was a major representative of the progressive and progressive populist philosophies of schooling during the first half of the 20th century in the USA.
In 1859, educator and philosopher John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1884. After teaching philosophy at the University of Michigan, he joined the University of Chicago as head of a department in philosophy, psychology and education, influenced by Darwin, Freud and a scientific outlook. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1904. Dewey's special concern was reform of education. He promoted learning by doing rather than learning by rote. Dewey conducted international research on education, winning many academic honors worldwide. Of more than 40 books, many of his most influential concerned education, including My Pedagogic Creed (1897), Democracy and Education (1902) and Experience and Education (1938). He was one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism. A humanitarian, he was a trustee of Jane Addams' Hull House, supported labor and racial equality, and was at one time active in campaigning for a third political party. He chaired a commission convened in Mexico City in 1937 inquiring into charges made against Leon Trotsky during the Moscow trials. Raised by an evangelical mother, Dewey had rejected faith by his 30s. Although he disavowed being a "militant" atheist, when his mother complained that he should be sending his children to Sunday school, he replied that he had gone to Sunday School enough to make up for any truancy by his children. As a pragmatist, he judged ideas by the results they produced. As a philosopher, he eschewed an allegiance to fixed and changeless dogma and superstition. He belonged to humanist societies, including the American Humanist Association. D. 1952.
In 1859, educator and philosopher John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1884. After teaching philosophy at the University of Michigan, he joined the University of Chicago as head of a department in philosophy, psychology and education, influenced by Darwin, Freud and a scientific outlook. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1904. Dewey's special concern was reform of education. He promoted learning by doing rather than learning by rote. Dewey conducted international research on education, winning many academic honors worldwide. Of more than 40 books, many of his most influential concerned education, including My Pedagogic Creed (1897), Democracy and Education (1902) and Experience and Education (1938). He was one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism. A humanitarian, he was a trustee of Jane Addams' Hull House, supported labor and racial equality, and was at one time active in campaigning for a third political party. He chaired a commission convened in Mexico City in 1937 inquiring into charges made against Leon Trotsky during the Moscow trials. Raised by an evangelical mother, Dewey had rejected faith by his 30s. Although he disavowed being a "militant" atheist, when his mother complained that he should be sending his children to Sunday school, he replied that he had gone to Sunday School enough to make up for any truancy by his children. As a pragmatist, he judged ideas by the results they produced. As a philosopher, he eschewed an allegiance to fixed and changeless dogma and superstition. He belonged to humanist societies, including the American Humanist Association. D. 1952.
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July 21, 2023
Dewey's Common Faith
It is sometimes forgotten how deeply Americans and American philosophers think about religious questions. For example, the "golden age of American philosophy" of the early 20th century resulted in William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", Josiah Royce's "The Problem of Christianity" and William Ernest Hocking's "The Meaning of God in Human Experience", three difficult and searching explorations of religious questions and their relationship to science and contemporary culture.
Another outstanding study of religious questions by an American thinker is John Dewey's "A Common Faith" (1934) based upon the Terry Lectures on Religion in Light of Science and Philosophy Dewey delivered at Yale. At only 80 pages and three lectures, Dewey's study is much shorter than any of the three books by James, Royce, and Hocking. If anything, however, it is more difficult to read and understand. I am reading an accessible, inexpensive edition of this book published in 2013 with an outstanding introduction to Dewey and "A Common Faith" by the scholar Thomas Alexander.
Dewey tries to develop a "common" faith, meaning an outlook that may be shared by all the people in a social democracy regardless of class, prior creed, race, or other factors. By developing a "common" faith, Dewey does not necessarily mean to do away with all the specific current religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, in all their aspects.
Dewey, unlike James, Royce, and Hocking is an avowed naturalist. His common faith purports to do away with what Dewey sees as outdated, untenable beliefs in a supernatural being separate from the world of nature. Some readers have plausibly questioned whether Dewey follows through with this goal consistently throughout "A Common Faith".
This book is difficult in its language, thinking and organization. It often seems muddled and demands close attention. The three separate chapters each develop their own themes but are also circular, repetitive, and concentric making many of the same points in different ways.
In his first lecture, "Religion versus the Religious" Dewey develops his basic distinction between "religion", which includes particular religions with their widely varying doctrines and practices and the "religious". Broadly speaking, he rejects the former for their differences from each other and for their adherence to supernaturalism and he argues for a "religious" outlook, naturalistic in scope based on ideals such as love, friendship, knowledge, and community with nature. James, Royce, and Hocking would have understood and shared the broad contours of the distinction which has some resemblance to the current over-used phrase "spiritual but not religious". I think the distinction valuable but it is too harsh on individual religions and also understates the different approaches possible in a "religious" view of life.
In the second lecture, "Faith and its Object" Dewey argues that people have a tendency to take the needs and values of their lives and project them into an already-existing supernatural being with accompanying doctrines. Dewey argues that ideals are needed to give meaning to human life but arise from life and from the use of creativity and imagination. They are not realities found prior to human experience in a pre-existing spiritual realm. The religious life for Dewey is devoted to ideals as possible, such as the ideal of social justice, and works to realize the ideal in life rather than in responding to a pre-existing reality. Dewey argues that belief in supernaturalism, among other deficiencies, does not survive the teachings and methods of the sciences or of a study of history.
Of the three philosophers mentioned at the beginning of this review, only Hocking was alive at the time Dewey wrote "The Common Faith" and thereafter. Hocking was an idealist philosopher strongly committed to the spiritual character of reality. In 1957, Hocking wrote a book, "The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience" in which he discussed (pp 119 -- 122) "A Common Faith" at some length, with a focus on its treatment on ideals and imagination. Hocking praised Dewey's conclusion that "the meaning of life is found in serving ideal ends, that is to say, in attempting to embody them in practice. To find one's life integrated, that is to say, wholehearted and therefore significant, one must reach the point, says Dewey, where certain ideals present to imagination dominate conduct." Hocking criticizes Dewey for limiting ideals to the world of imagination and for rejecting metaphysics. He writes "if human life is to rest seriously, as Dewey urges, on the connection with the environing world 'in the way of both dependence and support,' we shall have to pass beyond poetry, fiction, or other modes of imagination to the objective facts of that relationship." Philosophers of differing persuasions offer critiques of Dewey's naturalistic use of ideals and imagination.
The third lecture "The Human Abode and the Religious Function" considers changes in technology and in social organization and their impact on religion. Dewey considers social change, which has reduced the scope of religion from the days in which it was the dominant cultural influence of a particular group, an even more important factor than science in changing the role of religious expression in a democracy from "religion" to "religious". He seeks a common devotion among citizens of a democracy to work for the betterment of all and for the realization of ideals. Dewey concludes:
The ideal ends to which we attach our faith are not shadowy and wavering. They assume concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant."
As with so much philosophy and with Dewey in particular, there are many insights in "A Common Faith" and many issues to question. The issues go to the sharpness of the divide between "religion" and "religious", the total rejection of supernaturalism, the consistency of Dewey's use of ideals and imagination with his professed naturalism, and the scope in advocating for militant social activism that he gives to the "religious" life. There is much to be learned and pondered in a good philosophical text even when the reader is not convinced. Deweys' "A Common Faith" is an inspiring effort to combine religious and secular ideals. It is a book that is part of American thought and achievement in thinking about religious issues.
Robin Friedman
It is sometimes forgotten how deeply Americans and American philosophers think about religious questions. For example, the "golden age of American philosophy" of the early 20th century resulted in William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", Josiah Royce's "The Problem of Christianity" and William Ernest Hocking's "The Meaning of God in Human Experience", three difficult and searching explorations of religious questions and their relationship to science and contemporary culture.
Another outstanding study of religious questions by an American thinker is John Dewey's "A Common Faith" (1934) based upon the Terry Lectures on Religion in Light of Science and Philosophy Dewey delivered at Yale. At only 80 pages and three lectures, Dewey's study is much shorter than any of the three books by James, Royce, and Hocking. If anything, however, it is more difficult to read and understand. I am reading an accessible, inexpensive edition of this book published in 2013 with an outstanding introduction to Dewey and "A Common Faith" by the scholar Thomas Alexander.
Dewey tries to develop a "common" faith, meaning an outlook that may be shared by all the people in a social democracy regardless of class, prior creed, race, or other factors. By developing a "common" faith, Dewey does not necessarily mean to do away with all the specific current religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, in all their aspects.
Dewey, unlike James, Royce, and Hocking is an avowed naturalist. His common faith purports to do away with what Dewey sees as outdated, untenable beliefs in a supernatural being separate from the world of nature. Some readers have plausibly questioned whether Dewey follows through with this goal consistently throughout "A Common Faith".
This book is difficult in its language, thinking and organization. It often seems muddled and demands close attention. The three separate chapters each develop their own themes but are also circular, repetitive, and concentric making many of the same points in different ways.
In his first lecture, "Religion versus the Religious" Dewey develops his basic distinction between "religion", which includes particular religions with their widely varying doctrines and practices and the "religious". Broadly speaking, he rejects the former for their differences from each other and for their adherence to supernaturalism and he argues for a "religious" outlook, naturalistic in scope based on ideals such as love, friendship, knowledge, and community with nature. James, Royce, and Hocking would have understood and shared the broad contours of the distinction which has some resemblance to the current over-used phrase "spiritual but not religious". I think the distinction valuable but it is too harsh on individual religions and also understates the different approaches possible in a "religious" view of life.
In the second lecture, "Faith and its Object" Dewey argues that people have a tendency to take the needs and values of their lives and project them into an already-existing supernatural being with accompanying doctrines. Dewey argues that ideals are needed to give meaning to human life but arise from life and from the use of creativity and imagination. They are not realities found prior to human experience in a pre-existing spiritual realm. The religious life for Dewey is devoted to ideals as possible, such as the ideal of social justice, and works to realize the ideal in life rather than in responding to a pre-existing reality. Dewey argues that belief in supernaturalism, among other deficiencies, does not survive the teachings and methods of the sciences or of a study of history.
Of the three philosophers mentioned at the beginning of this review, only Hocking was alive at the time Dewey wrote "The Common Faith" and thereafter. Hocking was an idealist philosopher strongly committed to the spiritual character of reality. In 1957, Hocking wrote a book, "The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience" in which he discussed (pp 119 -- 122) "A Common Faith" at some length, with a focus on its treatment on ideals and imagination. Hocking praised Dewey's conclusion that "the meaning of life is found in serving ideal ends, that is to say, in attempting to embody them in practice. To find one's life integrated, that is to say, wholehearted and therefore significant, one must reach the point, says Dewey, where certain ideals present to imagination dominate conduct." Hocking criticizes Dewey for limiting ideals to the world of imagination and for rejecting metaphysics. He writes "if human life is to rest seriously, as Dewey urges, on the connection with the environing world 'in the way of both dependence and support,' we shall have to pass beyond poetry, fiction, or other modes of imagination to the objective facts of that relationship." Philosophers of differing persuasions offer critiques of Dewey's naturalistic use of ideals and imagination.
The third lecture "The Human Abode and the Religious Function" considers changes in technology and in social organization and their impact on religion. Dewey considers social change, which has reduced the scope of religion from the days in which it was the dominant cultural influence of a particular group, an even more important factor than science in changing the role of religious expression in a democracy from "religion" to "religious". He seeks a common devotion among citizens of a democracy to work for the betterment of all and for the realization of ideals. Dewey concludes:
The ideal ends to which we attach our faith are not shadowy and wavering. They assume concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant."
As with so much philosophy and with Dewey in particular, there are many insights in "A Common Faith" and many issues to question. The issues go to the sharpness of the divide between "religion" and "religious", the total rejection of supernaturalism, the consistency of Dewey's use of ideals and imagination with his professed naturalism, and the scope in advocating for militant social activism that he gives to the "religious" life. There is much to be learned and pondered in a good philosophical text even when the reader is not convinced. Deweys' "A Common Faith" is an inspiring effort to combine religious and secular ideals. It is a book that is part of American thought and achievement in thinking about religious issues.
Robin Friedman
November 13, 2011
A man after my own heart! If this isn't the most important book I've ever read, it's very close.
Dewey succinctly shows how the seat of intellectual authority has shifted away from religion, in turn altering society's organization. Claims of authority based on access to the supernatural have been dispersed, replaced by the skeptical inquiry of science.
The religious crowd mistakenly attributes their loss of influence to rebellious worldly hearts or quibbles with particulars, when the issue (the intellectual issue, at least) is the entire method of knowing. Churchmen may offer "polite deference" to that method but remain "in a confused and divided state," "riding two horses that are going in opposite directions."
The skeptical crowd mistakenly concludes that mystic experience is bunk, when the issue is why it occurs, not whether.
Extremes result from people who will have all or nothing: "emergence and growth are not good enough for them. They want something more than growth accompanied by toil and pain."
"Active relation between ideal and actual" is what Dewey would call God, without insisting on that name. "Human beings have impulses toward affection, compassion and justice, equality and freedom. It remains to weld all these things together."
These facts have "crowded the social importance of organized religions into a corner and the area of this corner is decreasing.... We are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is infinite.... conditions are now ripe for emancipation of the religious quality from accretions that have grown up about it and that limit the credibility and the influence of religion.... 'Agnosticism' is a shadow cast by the eclipse of the supernatural. Of course, acknowledgement that we do not know what we do not know is a necessity of all intellectual integrity.... Such doubts are an incident of faith in the method of intelligence. They are signs of faith, not of a pale and impotent skepticism."
A challenging and immensely rewarding 87 pages.
Dewey succinctly shows how the seat of intellectual authority has shifted away from religion, in turn altering society's organization. Claims of authority based on access to the supernatural have been dispersed, replaced by the skeptical inquiry of science.
The religious crowd mistakenly attributes their loss of influence to rebellious worldly hearts or quibbles with particulars, when the issue (the intellectual issue, at least) is the entire method of knowing. Churchmen may offer "polite deference" to that method but remain "in a confused and divided state," "riding two horses that are going in opposite directions."
The skeptical crowd mistakenly concludes that mystic experience is bunk, when the issue is why it occurs, not whether.
Extremes result from people who will have all or nothing: "emergence and growth are not good enough for them. They want something more than growth accompanied by toil and pain."
"Active relation between ideal and actual" is what Dewey would call God, without insisting on that name. "Human beings have impulses toward affection, compassion and justice, equality and freedom. It remains to weld all these things together."
These facts have "crowded the social importance of organized religions into a corner and the area of this corner is decreasing.... We are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is infinite.... conditions are now ripe for emancipation of the religious quality from accretions that have grown up about it and that limit the credibility and the influence of religion.... 'Agnosticism' is a shadow cast by the eclipse of the supernatural. Of course, acknowledgement that we do not know what we do not know is a necessity of all intellectual integrity.... Such doubts are an incident of faith in the method of intelligence. They are signs of faith, not of a pale and impotent skepticism."
A challenging and immensely rewarding 87 pages.
July 9, 2017
A call for compassion and cooperation between people who believe in the supernatural and those who don't.
Dewey proposed a faith that has nothing to do with the supernatural, but that would use the tools of religion in the service of humanity and help us to better our condition as a community. His earnestness is admirable and the idea is brave. He is generous in thinking that we could ever reach his goal of a religious ideal without the trappings of religions. And it seems a logical answer to the divisions that plague us.
But the idea reminds me of Esperanto, the constructed language. Its creator wanted it to bring the world together. It's still spoken by a small number of people, but it never became the international language that its creator wanted it to be.
In other words, people's faiths, like their languages, are part of the ground they walk on. They won't easily give either of them up because it would be an emotional earthquake in their lives.
People seldom willingly pull the rug out from under themselves.
Dewey proposed a faith that has nothing to do with the supernatural, but that would use the tools of religion in the service of humanity and help us to better our condition as a community. His earnestness is admirable and the idea is brave. He is generous in thinking that we could ever reach his goal of a religious ideal without the trappings of religions. And it seems a logical answer to the divisions that plague us.
But the idea reminds me of Esperanto, the constructed language. Its creator wanted it to bring the world together. It's still spoken by a small number of people, but it never became the international language that its creator wanted it to be.
In other words, people's faiths, like their languages, are part of the ground they walk on. They won't easily give either of them up because it would be an emotional earthquake in their lives.
People seldom willingly pull the rug out from under themselves.
July 24, 2019
Dewey’s doctrines are: naturalism, unified self, social morality. To call these “religious” is misleading. To call them a “common faith” is false.
February 20, 2008
Religious experiences of human intelligence (not of divine) to inspire human freedom. Writes like a German. Or a capable translation of a bag German philosopher.
December 26, 2017
Compelling ideas on the merits and possibilities of a humanist faith, but deeply eurocentric in its execution.
July 3, 2021
I was more excited about this book before I read it than after, which says a lot. Dewey lays out his ideas about what's basically a humanist framework for a religion. He's rather silent on atheism, although his comments about agnosticism are entertaining and I'd rather have read an essay on what he thinks of that.
It's not bad by any means, it's just that in the age of "spiritual not religious" being the most dominant form of religion among young people it's hard to get excited about this. In 2021 it's more interesting as a critique of organized religion now that the idea of spirituality without religion is so much more commonplace than 1920. But the main of focus of this book is not his critique of organized religion, and you can find much more expansive texts critiquing religion if that's what you want.
It's not bad by any means, it's just that in the age of "spiritual not religious" being the most dominant form of religion among young people it's hard to get excited about this. In 2021 it's more interesting as a critique of organized religion now that the idea of spirituality without religion is so much more commonplace than 1920. But the main of focus of this book is not his critique of organized religion, and you can find much more expansive texts critiquing religion if that's what you want.
January 14, 2023
Considered one of the big 3 of great American philosophers. His attempts to derive a universal morality by an appeal to pure intelligence is laudable, but unconvincing. Unconvincing though his arguments may be, the public intellect is enhanced for having considered them.
June 26, 2022
A Common Faith is a series of three lectures by John Dewey in which he seeks to emancipate what he calls “the religious” from particular religions and articulate a “common faith” for democratic society rooted in naturalism and oriented toward the realization of social ideals. While brief and unsystematic, A Common Faith offers both a robust critique of “supernatural religion” and an inventive defense of the religious attitude and its attendant ideals. While Dewey is no friend of traditional religions, he is equally critical of “militant atheism” and hopes to preserve the best of the religious outlook in democratic society.
In the first lecture, Dewey takes pains to make a distinction between religion and “the religious.” A religion (he rejects the notion that one can speak of religion as a substantive idea with content applicable to all religions) posits a particular body of beliefs and practices coupled with some kind of institutional apparatus, while the religious “denotes attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal” (9). More specifically, the religious is a quality of experience, where experience refers to a way one lives in the world, that entails an adjustment in life to the universe, or reality as a whole, which implicates the whole self. Such an adjustment, Dewey maintains, unifies the self in relation to an ideal beyond the self that constitutes who one is and what one values and orients how one acts in the world. While an existential adjustment of this sort is voluntary in the sense that it is not imposed by some external force, it does not depend upon a particular resolve or volition; as an attitude toward life in all its aspects, the religious orients the will without a concomitant self-conscious alteration in the will.
Importantly, Dewey understands the religious in connection with nature, where nature includes not only what actually exists, but also all the possibilities inherent in existence as well. He therefore refers to the religious in connection with “natural piety,” which rests “upon a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts,” yet also appreciates that we are parts endowed with intellect and purpose and hence the capacity to actualize the possibilities within nature in accordance with desirable human ideals (23-24). The kind of faith tied to the religious has, then, “a moral and practical import,” and has little to do with assent to a body of propositions on the credit of their supernatural author. Rather, moral faith of this sort posits ideals that should be actualized, not ones which already exist in some transcendent metaphysical realm, and affirms the capacity of cooperative human activity to attain them. Ultimately, Dewey hopes to liberate the idea of the religious and religious values from particular religions, which he thinks merely burden the religious with doctrinal accretions that sap it of its dynamism and vitality. In fact, he claims that religions often inhibit the religious as a quality of experience in individuals’ lives, and that “many persons are so repelled from what exists as a religion by its intellectual and moral implications, that they are not even aware of attitudes in themselves that if they came to fruition would be . . . religious” (9).
In the second lecture, Dewey offers a conception of God in view of his idea of the religious. He observes that there are two ways to define “God”: first, as a particular, transcendent entity, and second, as the unity of ideal ends that inspire in us desire and action (39). Dewey is sympathetic to the second definition and critical of the first for several reasons. For starters, Dewey notes that the idea of God as a transcendent entity entails that God is supernatural and hence outside of nature, and scientific inquiry offers us no reason to affirm the reality of a supernatural realm. When God is identified with the supernatural, and scientific discoveries call into question beliefs connected with the supernatural, God, too, comes into question, and no amount of testimonial “evidence” from mystical experience can verify the existence of God understood in this transcendent way. Beyond this, Dewey worries that when we project human ideals onto God as divine attributes, this lends itself to a certain complacency with respect to the realization of those ideals; God, the believer insists, will take care of us in the end. Rather than identify the ideal with a particular entity outside of nature, Dewey proposes that we use the name “God” to refer to the “active relation between ideal and actual,” or put differently, to those “natural forces and conditions that promote . . . the ideal and that further its realization” (47).
Just because Dewey identifies the divine with ideal ends does not mean that the ideal is “wholly without roots in existence and without support from existence” (44). His conception of God, in other words, does not recapitulate the error involved in the identification of the ideal with a supernatural entity over and above nature. This is because, for Dewey, “the ideal itself has its roots in natural conditions”; it becomes salient when the imagination “idealizes existence,” or discloses possibilities available in view of what is actual (ibid.). We do not need some transcendent metaphysical standard to know what is good and hence the ends we should pursue; the value of social justice as an ideal worth our time and effort is not rooted in the supernatural fact that God is just, for example. Rather, “there are values, goods, actually realized upon a natural basis . . . and out of them we frame our ideal ends” (44-5). These ends, moreover, are no less divorced from empirical reality than the goods on which they are based: “aims, ideals, do not simply exist in ‘mind,’” Dewey explains. “They exist in character, in personality and action” (45). All of this is to say that, for Dewey, the idea of God conveys the union of the ideal and the actual, and the moral faith associated with the religious attitude has this kind of God as its object. Were God to be understood in this way and not as a transcendent entity outside of nature, the naturalistic foundations of the religious would be laid bare, and “religion would then be found to have its natural place in every aspect of human experience that is concerned with estimate of possibilities, with emotional stir by possibilities as yet unrealized, and with all action in behalf of their realization” (53).
In the final lecture, Dewey turns to examine the relationship between the religious attitude properly conceived and human social life. He first notes a radical shift that has taken place in Western Europe since the Renaissance and Reformation in the role religion plays in society. Prior to this shift, “an individual did not join a church,” but “was born and reared in a community whose social unity . . . and traditions were symbolized and celebrated in the rites, cults, and beliefs of a collective religion.” Religion in this earlier era completely permeated the political community and “the influence of its practices extended to all the customs of the community, domestic, economic, and political” (56). Conversely, in the modern period, religious institutions are “special” institutions within a secular community and, parallel to their diminished social role, voluntary associations that individuals can freely join and leave (57). Apart from the fact that secular institutions now fall outside the domain and authority of any church, the interests and values of secular culture outside of the church so powerfully influence the desires and aims of believers as well as non-believers (61). For Dewey, this revolution in the place and function of religion in society is important because it has helped liberate the religious from particular religions based on the supernatural that, inevitably, make a distinction between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the secular. The religious attitude, when freed from any one religion, functions independently of the supernatural and hence requires no similar division. Natural social life can therefore be its one and only object.
More specifically, the problem, Dewey insists in a now-familiar refrain, is the connection between religion and the supernatural: any effort to preserve the distinction between the natural and the supernatural with respect to social existence is likely to depreciate natural social life and inculcate the sense that the natural realm stands in opposition to the spiritual, supernatural realm. When goods “actually experienced in the concrete relations” of natural social life are seen as good in relation to “a supernatural and other-worldly locus,” this “[obscures] their real nature and [weakens] their force,” Dewey asserts (66). He advocates that religious attitudes and values should therefore be divorced from their supernatural referent and rendered immanent, applicable to finite social existence. In fact, he calls for “a more intense realization of values” often understood as religious “that inhere in the actual connection” of humans with one another (74). Not only should religious values be rendered immanent, but the zeal with which traditional believers devote themselves to these values should also be cultivated within democratic society. ��What would be the consequences upon the values of human association if intrinsic and immanent satisfactions and opportunities were clearly held to and cultivated with the ardor and the devotion that have at times marked historic religions,” Dewey asks rhetorically (66). Perhaps unexpectedly, he even thinks that this shift away from the supernatural toward concrete social relations need not entail the destruction of churches that now exist, but “would rather offer the means for a recovery of vitality.” He believes that “the fund of human values that are prized and that need to be cherished . . . could be celebrated and reinforced” in different ways and with different symbols by various religious institutions. “In that way the churches would indeed become catholic” (76).
Clearly, Dewey finds tremendous value in what he understands as the religious attitude and the kind of faith that accompanies it. He essentially advocates for a civil religion divorced from any reference to the supernatural that would inhibit devoted commitment to social transformation on behalf of citizens. His view is attractive and his conceptions of the religious, God, and the role of the religious attitude in society are creative. At the same time, it is not quite clear that the religious attitude Dewey describes is sufficiently robust to permeate the lives of citizens detached from traditional religions and their rich symbolic structures. Or, at the very least, secular culture would have to develop a persuasive symbolic structure of its own (one that compels more loyalty than the current accouterments of nationalism) to foster a widespread sense of the religious in civil society, and Dewey offers no real clues about what symbols would be most efficacious to this end. One also wonders whether Dewey has not been fair to the traditional religions themselves: his critique of supernatural religion certainly applies to some versions of Protestant Christianity, for example, but not necessarily to all Christian conceptions of the supernatural as it relates to natural social life and its goods. Dewey writes that he “cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed” (78). Has he read Thomas Aquinas and his twentieth-century interpreters? In any case, it is equally if not even more unclear whether his critique applies to other religions, like Judaism and Islam, which do not share Christianity’s basic distinction between the supernatural and the natural (or at least, not on the same terms).
In the first lecture, Dewey takes pains to make a distinction between religion and “the religious.” A religion (he rejects the notion that one can speak of religion as a substantive idea with content applicable to all religions) posits a particular body of beliefs and practices coupled with some kind of institutional apparatus, while the religious “denotes attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal” (9). More specifically, the religious is a quality of experience, where experience refers to a way one lives in the world, that entails an adjustment in life to the universe, or reality as a whole, which implicates the whole self. Such an adjustment, Dewey maintains, unifies the self in relation to an ideal beyond the self that constitutes who one is and what one values and orients how one acts in the world. While an existential adjustment of this sort is voluntary in the sense that it is not imposed by some external force, it does not depend upon a particular resolve or volition; as an attitude toward life in all its aspects, the religious orients the will without a concomitant self-conscious alteration in the will.
Importantly, Dewey understands the religious in connection with nature, where nature includes not only what actually exists, but also all the possibilities inherent in existence as well. He therefore refers to the religious in connection with “natural piety,” which rests “upon a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts,” yet also appreciates that we are parts endowed with intellect and purpose and hence the capacity to actualize the possibilities within nature in accordance with desirable human ideals (23-24). The kind of faith tied to the religious has, then, “a moral and practical import,” and has little to do with assent to a body of propositions on the credit of their supernatural author. Rather, moral faith of this sort posits ideals that should be actualized, not ones which already exist in some transcendent metaphysical realm, and affirms the capacity of cooperative human activity to attain them. Ultimately, Dewey hopes to liberate the idea of the religious and religious values from particular religions, which he thinks merely burden the religious with doctrinal accretions that sap it of its dynamism and vitality. In fact, he claims that religions often inhibit the religious as a quality of experience in individuals’ lives, and that “many persons are so repelled from what exists as a religion by its intellectual and moral implications, that they are not even aware of attitudes in themselves that if they came to fruition would be . . . religious” (9).
In the second lecture, Dewey offers a conception of God in view of his idea of the religious. He observes that there are two ways to define “God”: first, as a particular, transcendent entity, and second, as the unity of ideal ends that inspire in us desire and action (39). Dewey is sympathetic to the second definition and critical of the first for several reasons. For starters, Dewey notes that the idea of God as a transcendent entity entails that God is supernatural and hence outside of nature, and scientific inquiry offers us no reason to affirm the reality of a supernatural realm. When God is identified with the supernatural, and scientific discoveries call into question beliefs connected with the supernatural, God, too, comes into question, and no amount of testimonial “evidence” from mystical experience can verify the existence of God understood in this transcendent way. Beyond this, Dewey worries that when we project human ideals onto God as divine attributes, this lends itself to a certain complacency with respect to the realization of those ideals; God, the believer insists, will take care of us in the end. Rather than identify the ideal with a particular entity outside of nature, Dewey proposes that we use the name “God” to refer to the “active relation between ideal and actual,” or put differently, to those “natural forces and conditions that promote . . . the ideal and that further its realization” (47).
Just because Dewey identifies the divine with ideal ends does not mean that the ideal is “wholly without roots in existence and without support from existence” (44). His conception of God, in other words, does not recapitulate the error involved in the identification of the ideal with a supernatural entity over and above nature. This is because, for Dewey, “the ideal itself has its roots in natural conditions”; it becomes salient when the imagination “idealizes existence,” or discloses possibilities available in view of what is actual (ibid.). We do not need some transcendent metaphysical standard to know what is good and hence the ends we should pursue; the value of social justice as an ideal worth our time and effort is not rooted in the supernatural fact that God is just, for example. Rather, “there are values, goods, actually realized upon a natural basis . . . and out of them we frame our ideal ends” (44-5). These ends, moreover, are no less divorced from empirical reality than the goods on which they are based: “aims, ideals, do not simply exist in ‘mind,’” Dewey explains. “They exist in character, in personality and action” (45). All of this is to say that, for Dewey, the idea of God conveys the union of the ideal and the actual, and the moral faith associated with the religious attitude has this kind of God as its object. Were God to be understood in this way and not as a transcendent entity outside of nature, the naturalistic foundations of the religious would be laid bare, and “religion would then be found to have its natural place in every aspect of human experience that is concerned with estimate of possibilities, with emotional stir by possibilities as yet unrealized, and with all action in behalf of their realization” (53).
In the final lecture, Dewey turns to examine the relationship between the religious attitude properly conceived and human social life. He first notes a radical shift that has taken place in Western Europe since the Renaissance and Reformation in the role religion plays in society. Prior to this shift, “an individual did not join a church,” but “was born and reared in a community whose social unity . . . and traditions were symbolized and celebrated in the rites, cults, and beliefs of a collective religion.” Religion in this earlier era completely permeated the political community and “the influence of its practices extended to all the customs of the community, domestic, economic, and political” (56). Conversely, in the modern period, religious institutions are “special” institutions within a secular community and, parallel to their diminished social role, voluntary associations that individuals can freely join and leave (57). Apart from the fact that secular institutions now fall outside the domain and authority of any church, the interests and values of secular culture outside of the church so powerfully influence the desires and aims of believers as well as non-believers (61). For Dewey, this revolution in the place and function of religion in society is important because it has helped liberate the religious from particular religions based on the supernatural that, inevitably, make a distinction between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the secular. The religious attitude, when freed from any one religion, functions independently of the supernatural and hence requires no similar division. Natural social life can therefore be its one and only object.
More specifically, the problem, Dewey insists in a now-familiar refrain, is the connection between religion and the supernatural: any effort to preserve the distinction between the natural and the supernatural with respect to social existence is likely to depreciate natural social life and inculcate the sense that the natural realm stands in opposition to the spiritual, supernatural realm. When goods “actually experienced in the concrete relations” of natural social life are seen as good in relation to “a supernatural and other-worldly locus,” this “[obscures] their real nature and [weakens] their force,” Dewey asserts (66). He advocates that religious attitudes and values should therefore be divorced from their supernatural referent and rendered immanent, applicable to finite social existence. In fact, he calls for “a more intense realization of values” often understood as religious “that inhere in the actual connection” of humans with one another (74). Not only should religious values be rendered immanent, but the zeal with which traditional believers devote themselves to these values should also be cultivated within democratic society. ��What would be the consequences upon the values of human association if intrinsic and immanent satisfactions and opportunities were clearly held to and cultivated with the ardor and the devotion that have at times marked historic religions,” Dewey asks rhetorically (66). Perhaps unexpectedly, he even thinks that this shift away from the supernatural toward concrete social relations need not entail the destruction of churches that now exist, but “would rather offer the means for a recovery of vitality.” He believes that “the fund of human values that are prized and that need to be cherished . . . could be celebrated and reinforced” in different ways and with different symbols by various religious institutions. “In that way the churches would indeed become catholic” (76).
Clearly, Dewey finds tremendous value in what he understands as the religious attitude and the kind of faith that accompanies it. He essentially advocates for a civil religion divorced from any reference to the supernatural that would inhibit devoted commitment to social transformation on behalf of citizens. His view is attractive and his conceptions of the religious, God, and the role of the religious attitude in society are creative. At the same time, it is not quite clear that the religious attitude Dewey describes is sufficiently robust to permeate the lives of citizens detached from traditional religions and their rich symbolic structures. Or, at the very least, secular culture would have to develop a persuasive symbolic structure of its own (one that compels more loyalty than the current accouterments of nationalism) to foster a widespread sense of the religious in civil society, and Dewey offers no real clues about what symbols would be most efficacious to this end. One also wonders whether Dewey has not been fair to the traditional religions themselves: his critique of supernatural religion certainly applies to some versions of Protestant Christianity, for example, but not necessarily to all Christian conceptions of the supernatural as it relates to natural social life and its goods. Dewey writes that he “cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed” (78). Has he read Thomas Aquinas and his twentieth-century interpreters? In any case, it is equally if not even more unclear whether his critique applies to other religions, like Judaism and Islam, which do not share Christianity’s basic distinction between the supernatural and the natural (or at least, not on the same terms).
March 29, 2023
Underrated classic. Dewey reconceives religious experience and values in pragmatic, functionalist, naturalist terms. A great encapsulation of Dewey's philosophy as well.
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Reading for the Dewey Studies Reading Group, Spring 2023
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Reading for the Dewey Studies Reading Group, Spring 2023
July 24, 2011
Originally given at Yale as the 1933-34 installment of the Terry Lectures, Dewey built upon the distinction he saw between religion and religious. He said that a religion "Always signifies a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of institutional organization, loose or tight." In contrast, the adjective religious did not refer to "A specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs." (9) Further, religious "does not denote anything that can exist by itself or that can be organized into a particular and distinctive form of existence." (10) Positively, religious referred to "The sense of dignity of human nature is as religious as is the sense of awe and reverence when it rests upon a sense of human nature as a cooperating part of a larger whole." (25) And "Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality." (27)
In "A Common Faith," Dewey goes beyond the distinction between institutional and personal religion given by William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" and calls for a complete break between religion and the religious impulse: "The opposition between religious values as I conceive them and religions is not to be bridged. Just because the release of these values is so important, their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved." (28) He rejects the existence of a supernatural Being, and conceives of God as the unification of ideal possibilities through imaginative realization and projection. The ideal is rooted in the natural and emerges when "the imagination idealizes existence by laying hold of the possibilities offered to thought and action. . . . The idealizing imagination seizes upon the most precious things found in the climatic moments of experience and projects them." (48)
His rejection of the objective existence of a divine, supernatural Being and formulation of religious value as a projection of human ideals, places his thinking in line with previous philosophers such as Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche. Dewey has become what Francis Schaeffer would call a modern, modern man. Without the objective existence of a divine, supernatural Being, he has no basis upon which to claim that "the heritage of values" which we are supposed to pass on to the next generation are anything more than sociological constructs of a past time and place. If I don't value the same ideal ends that Dewey does, there is nothing in his thought to question my right to do so. And as Schaeffer pointed out, the word "morals" then becomes merely a semantic connotation word for non-morals; and what is, is right. The power to impose right and wrong upon others is the result. Dewey's premise that a "common faith‚" of mankind has always existed apart from from religious faith is ultimately done in by his initial rejection of a supernatural being. If God is dead; we are ultimately lost.
In "A Common Faith," Dewey goes beyond the distinction between institutional and personal religion given by William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" and calls for a complete break between religion and the religious impulse: "The opposition between religious values as I conceive them and religions is not to be bridged. Just because the release of these values is so important, their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved." (28) He rejects the existence of a supernatural Being, and conceives of God as the unification of ideal possibilities through imaginative realization and projection. The ideal is rooted in the natural and emerges when "the imagination idealizes existence by laying hold of the possibilities offered to thought and action. . . . The idealizing imagination seizes upon the most precious things found in the climatic moments of experience and projects them." (48)
His rejection of the objective existence of a divine, supernatural Being and formulation of religious value as a projection of human ideals, places his thinking in line with previous philosophers such as Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche. Dewey has become what Francis Schaeffer would call a modern, modern man. Without the objective existence of a divine, supernatural Being, he has no basis upon which to claim that "the heritage of values" which we are supposed to pass on to the next generation are anything more than sociological constructs of a past time and place. If I don't value the same ideal ends that Dewey does, there is nothing in his thought to question my right to do so. And as Schaeffer pointed out, the word "morals" then becomes merely a semantic connotation word for non-morals; and what is, is right. The power to impose right and wrong upon others is the result. Dewey's premise that a "common faith‚" of mankind has always existed apart from from religious faith is ultimately done in by his initial rejection of a supernatural being. If God is dead; we are ultimately lost.
January 30, 2024
I’ve been thinking about this book for about a year now, and the longer it sits with me the less I think it represents anything genuinely desirable and interesting. Initially it kind of clarified the idea of recognizing and utilizing the religious impulse and practice in a way that preserved what was necessarily human and good about it without an aggressive obsession with anti-apologetics and the rejection of ritual/supernatural belief as it’s first principle, something I agreed was an unproductive and harmful enterprise. Ultimately I think it just serves to describe a program for the same flattened civic Protestantism that infects religious studies and the way we evaluate religion. Far more useful as an artifact in the history of religious studies than an actual program, which is one of a self-satisfied pluralism that hinders genuine engagement with religion.
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October 25, 2008I think this marked the start of my quest for meaning and spirituality without religion. It was recommended by my brother.
August 5, 2011
One of the best book for understanding the difference between 'religion' and 'religious'. It presents a comprehensive case for the separation of church and state.
August 16, 2011
For me this is one of the greatest philosophy of religion book in the 20th century. Dewey assimilation of evolutionary theory with spiritual development is brilliant.
March 25, 2018
Although published more than eight decades ago, Dewey richly sheds light on topics that most people, even in modern day, remain deftly ignorant to and/or complacently blind. While the way he writes can be rather elaborate and lose the reader periodically, Dewey still clearly presents ideas and ideals that I, personally, believe would help to inoculate and help heal the spirits of many, many people. The primary draw I gained from this book is that a healthy imagination and a solid religious foundation is a great precept for living a robust life. Religion, however, bodes for caution. Obtaining a meaningful and clear differentiation between the two deeply intertwined and connected concepts, having religion and being religious, is not at all a simple notion.
One of the first enlightening passages I drew from came on page 32. Dewey states "[t]here is but one sure road to the truth - the road of patient, COOPERATIVE INQUIRY operating by means of observation, experiment, record and CONTROLLED REFLECTION."
I also found the following passage on page 51 to be very penetrating, as he states that "[t]here exists concretely and experimentally goods." These "goods" he also couples with "values". Those goods are definitively stated as
On page 48 he states "...and what I have tried to show is that the ideal itself has roots in natural conditions; it emerges when the imagination idealizes existence by laying hold of the possibilities offered to thought and action."
While I was enlightened by the words on the pages and noted many other quotes, I'm baffled by the level of knowledge and wisdom that has been available for so long, yet so many disparities continue and so many are lost.
One of the first enlightening passages I drew from came on page 32. Dewey states "[t]here is but one sure road to the truth - the road of patient, COOPERATIVE INQUIRY operating by means of observation, experiment, record and CONTROLLED REFLECTION."
I also found the following passage on page 51 to be very penetrating, as he states that "[t]here exists concretely and experimentally goods." These "goods" he also couples with "values". Those goods are definitively stated as
On page 48 he states "...and what I have tried to show is that the ideal itself has roots in natural conditions; it emerges when the imagination idealizes existence by laying hold of the possibilities offered to thought and action."
While I was enlightened by the words on the pages and noted many other quotes, I'm baffled by the level of knowledge and wisdom that has been available for so long, yet so many disparities continue and so many are lost.
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September 5, 2021So, what is left for the atheist, a lonely blank void? Hardly, for if we remove dogma, doctrine, and the supernatural from religion, the atheist’s objections all vanish. According to philosopher John Dewey, we may reject the notion of a god-being without rejecting the divine. Dewey used the following definition of religion: “recognition on the part of man of some unseen higher power as having control of his destiny and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship.” Dewey suggested such a higher power could be mankind’s set of ideals (justice, freedom, fairness, ethics, charity, the scientific method, truth, and the value of sentient life, etc., and away from disorder, cruelty, and oppression) as understood from mankind’s current environment and state of awareness. “Ideals change as they are applied in existent conditions.”—i.e., they are relative to the environment without being arbitrary. The authority to which we owe obedience and reverence is dialectic inquiry—i.e., Man’s conversation with himself as to what is most beneficial to our society, physical environment, and to our personal lives. This is Dewey’s common faith. Behold, humanism (aka natural humanism, aka secular humanism) has now become a legitimate rival of all supernatural religions. The atheist may now say “Yes, I am religious, but not in the way most people are religious.” Warning: Philosophy books are difficult to read. Dewey is both obscure and insightful. Personally, I found this book (80 pages) well worth reading.
August 6, 2019
Dewey is a challenging thinker in general, and his specific focus on religion and religious experience here is no different. What Dewey engages here is a questioning of some of the basic assumptions of the source of what we attribute with the monicker "religious experience," and his argument that we ought to attend more carefully to the social and cultural dimensions that give rise to religious experience is something that I think ought to resonate more dramatically with churches and churchgoers across America and the world at large. There's still a lot in here that I need to contemplate, to consider in light of my own personal beliefs and convictions; but the core of the book's struggle is, I think, an admirable one that provides significant room for growth and thought in the mind of the Believer.
February 24, 2020
The prose can be rather dense for the layperson at times, but this is a critical philosophical text for thinking about what makes us human. I've always struggled to put my thoughts into words regarding organized religion. I just never thought about it much to begin with, not having grown up in a community that used the church as a social bond. I am very much in favor of separating the "religious" from "religion". Why can't we experience god as the union of the individual with the collective, the actual with the ideal? Dewey elucidates the social purpose of religion and the necessity of the religious ideal.
December 18, 2022
4got I was reading this :) religious experience is not tied to any singular religion. the quality and creativity of lived experience is what makes the religious. so swag
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April 10, 2024JOHN SPITTING STRAIGHT FACTS
August 13, 2024
An enjoyable and ultimately stimulating read, but as an attempt to articulate some kind of moral foundations for Dewey's pragmatism I found it thin and unsuccessful.
December 19, 2012
Initial Difficulties:
Coming to this book with a few expectations, it was difficult for me to try and understand what Dewey was trying to do. First I thought he was trying to talk abstractly about the notion of faith through examination of religious case studies, as it were. Then I thought he was going to strip away all religious supernaturalism and talk about the nature of faith. Obviously I could not make sense of this book in either reading. Halfway, or so, through the chapter I realized the importance of the title A Common Faith. Common to who?—I asked. I think this question was very useful in my reading. It made clear why Dewey began talking about ideals and unifying experiences of the self—it also made clear why Dewey had assumed supernaturalism as the motivator for religious belief. The common faith that Dewey is explicating is the faith among scientists—or at the very least scientific people in a scientific society.
Dewey’s Contributions:
Religion as giving perspective to one’s life—this perspective makes sense only as it plays out in one’s life, and, therefore, when one is religious. It is the unifying aspect: this faith, is the motivator for religious action. Dewey made a useful distinction about the difference between religion, a religion, and religious, and he is talking about, when he talks about perspective, religious experiences. Dewey’s goal, it seems, is to show that one may have experiences that give perspective to life, and consequently unify it, without using the muddy concepts of religious language.
Critiques of Dewey:
I do not know what it means to unify a self as a self. I know what it means to unify a group—but when we talk about unifying a group it is always towards a certain goal. When we talk about the purpose of the self (religiously or otherwise), we are abstracting from a human body in activity and applying certain categories for what one hopes to be a summary of one’s biography, or something similar. I do not think that this entails the idea that such a summary is at the forefront of one’s mind during every action. Where is my faith when I am tying my shoe? This, I think, shows that what Dewey is talking about is perspective in/because of specific activity (i.e., When one is faced with decisions about what it means to be a/an [add adjective] human) (18).
Simply because Dewey has switched the “object of faith” from God or a god to ideals does not mean that he has, yet, told us anything about the “object of faith”—especially about any religious “object of faith.” I hope he does not simply read a supernaturalist interpretation on every religion, but perhaps it is not the purpose of this book to deal with that question. I understand that many people may think that religion has something supernatural as its object of faith (2), but I do not expect anything differently from a scientific society, and perhaps this is why supernaturalism is not explicated further.
Positive Integrative Thoughts on Dewey:
Dewey was useful in the sense that he laid out a possibility for scientific humanity to have religious experiences without an organized religion. He also shows that religious experience cannot come from scientific thinking (calculative thinking) but only through perspectival thinking (imaginative or meditative thinking) (19).
Difficulties with the Text (i.e., I don’t know how to read these statements)
1. “…the differences between them [religions] are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless” (8). But he gives a common element among religions: supernaturalism. He must be talking about particular doctrines, but these doctrines are to be seen in light of Dewey’s conceptual abstractions about faith or religious experiences, it seems.
2. Dewey’s conception of faith as faith in an “ought,” is different than hoping that something will be the case (26). It seems to me that Christians, at least, put their faith in God, not that God will act. In other words, I do not think that Dewey’s conception of “faith in what is possible” (23) is, to be religious, qualified correctly. I agree that religious experiences give perspective to life and “religious attitude signifies something that is bound through imagination to a general attitude” (23), but I disagree that Dewey’s faith does not have its “essential framework” settled in the same way that religions do (26). Dependence and humility seems to be Dewey’s framework (25). Most of my troubles with Dewey stem from, what seem to be, inconsistencies in application, but perhaps they are not inconsistencies, perhaps we are to understand religion in this way because it is how the scientific community views religion—and Dewey is writing to a scientific community.
Coming to this book with a few expectations, it was difficult for me to try and understand what Dewey was trying to do. First I thought he was trying to talk abstractly about the notion of faith through examination of religious case studies, as it were. Then I thought he was going to strip away all religious supernaturalism and talk about the nature of faith. Obviously I could not make sense of this book in either reading. Halfway, or so, through the chapter I realized the importance of the title A Common Faith. Common to who?—I asked. I think this question was very useful in my reading. It made clear why Dewey began talking about ideals and unifying experiences of the self—it also made clear why Dewey had assumed supernaturalism as the motivator for religious belief. The common faith that Dewey is explicating is the faith among scientists—or at the very least scientific people in a scientific society.
Dewey’s Contributions:
Religion as giving perspective to one’s life—this perspective makes sense only as it plays out in one’s life, and, therefore, when one is religious. It is the unifying aspect: this faith, is the motivator for religious action. Dewey made a useful distinction about the difference between religion, a religion, and religious, and he is talking about, when he talks about perspective, religious experiences. Dewey’s goal, it seems, is to show that one may have experiences that give perspective to life, and consequently unify it, without using the muddy concepts of religious language.
Critiques of Dewey:
I do not know what it means to unify a self as a self. I know what it means to unify a group—but when we talk about unifying a group it is always towards a certain goal. When we talk about the purpose of the self (religiously or otherwise), we are abstracting from a human body in activity and applying certain categories for what one hopes to be a summary of one’s biography, or something similar. I do not think that this entails the idea that such a summary is at the forefront of one’s mind during every action. Where is my faith when I am tying my shoe? This, I think, shows that what Dewey is talking about is perspective in/because of specific activity (i.e., When one is faced with decisions about what it means to be a/an [add adjective] human) (18).
Simply because Dewey has switched the “object of faith” from God or a god to ideals does not mean that he has, yet, told us anything about the “object of faith”—especially about any religious “object of faith.” I hope he does not simply read a supernaturalist interpretation on every religion, but perhaps it is not the purpose of this book to deal with that question. I understand that many people may think that religion has something supernatural as its object of faith (2), but I do not expect anything differently from a scientific society, and perhaps this is why supernaturalism is not explicated further.
Positive Integrative Thoughts on Dewey:
Dewey was useful in the sense that he laid out a possibility for scientific humanity to have religious experiences without an organized religion. He also shows that religious experience cannot come from scientific thinking (calculative thinking) but only through perspectival thinking (imaginative or meditative thinking) (19).
Difficulties with the Text (i.e., I don’t know how to read these statements)
1. “…the differences between them [religions] are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless” (8). But he gives a common element among religions: supernaturalism. He must be talking about particular doctrines, but these doctrines are to be seen in light of Dewey’s conceptual abstractions about faith or religious experiences, it seems.
2. Dewey’s conception of faith as faith in an “ought,” is different than hoping that something will be the case (26). It seems to me that Christians, at least, put their faith in God, not that God will act. In other words, I do not think that Dewey’s conception of “faith in what is possible” (23) is, to be religious, qualified correctly. I agree that religious experiences give perspective to life and “religious attitude signifies something that is bound through imagination to a general attitude” (23), but I disagree that Dewey’s faith does not have its “essential framework” settled in the same way that religions do (26). Dependence and humility seems to be Dewey’s framework (25). Most of my troubles with Dewey stem from, what seem to be, inconsistencies in application, but perhaps they are not inconsistencies, perhaps we are to understand religion in this way because it is how the scientific community views religion—and Dewey is writing to a scientific community.
March 17, 2013
In A Common Faith Dewey makes a key distinction between religion and the religious. While religion is influenced by the state of culture, a religious attitude does not necessarily carry this influence. Rather, a religious attitude results from a religious quality produced by a direct experience of what is good. A religious quality is the effect of an experience, but not a cause of production. This effect influences attitudes that define particular modes of conduct.
Dewey believes that we must rescue religious qualities from the intellectual pursuit of religious ideals. Theology assumes that all ideals are already embodied in a metaphysical framework, and that we can grasp the truths of these ideals with intellectual assent. The method of grasping is called divine faith. It involves a unification of self, which our imagination presents to us and the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices. Morals are intellectual truths that can only be grasped through divine faith.
Dewey wants to break morality from the realm of theology and bring it into our quotidian lives, where social intelligence should control decision making and provide a spark for positive social change. He believes that if we rely on supernatural agencies to execute moral actions, we will hesitate to act on our own intelligence, and the latter directly benefits the lives of others. Likewise, Dewey believes that we should refrain from explaining social phenomenon with traditional moral causes. For example, describing a murder as a sin, provides less value to a society than explaining its negative effect on the community in more scientific terms. However, there is still room for religion in our society, since religion reminds us that our successes are dependent upon the cooperation of nature and that truth is disclosed through directed cooperative human endeavors. Additionally, there is room for a religious attitude that utilizes scientific understanding and social knowledge as its mode of doing good for oneself and for others.
Although I appreciate what Dewey has to say, here, I think he lampoons the methods of theology a little bit too severely. I think that he could acknowledge that there may be more than one way to access universal truths that are applicable to the betterment of our society. For example, it seems intuitive, whether by divine sanction or scientific evidence, that killing an animal with a brain causes that animal to experience pain and takes away their life. It is highly possible that intellectual assent to the divine may be a way to bolster one's scientific understandings of the society that we live in. Additionally, moral convictions can be challenged and reinterpreted using a more scientific approach, which may lead to even more powerful and pragmatic convictions.
Dewey believes that we must rescue religious qualities from the intellectual pursuit of religious ideals. Theology assumes that all ideals are already embodied in a metaphysical framework, and that we can grasp the truths of these ideals with intellectual assent. The method of grasping is called divine faith. It involves a unification of self, which our imagination presents to us and the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices. Morals are intellectual truths that can only be grasped through divine faith.
Dewey wants to break morality from the realm of theology and bring it into our quotidian lives, where social intelligence should control decision making and provide a spark for positive social change. He believes that if we rely on supernatural agencies to execute moral actions, we will hesitate to act on our own intelligence, and the latter directly benefits the lives of others. Likewise, Dewey believes that we should refrain from explaining social phenomenon with traditional moral causes. For example, describing a murder as a sin, provides less value to a society than explaining its negative effect on the community in more scientific terms. However, there is still room for religion in our society, since religion reminds us that our successes are dependent upon the cooperation of nature and that truth is disclosed through directed cooperative human endeavors. Additionally, there is room for a religious attitude that utilizes scientific understanding and social knowledge as its mode of doing good for oneself and for others.
Although I appreciate what Dewey has to say, here, I think he lampoons the methods of theology a little bit too severely. I think that he could acknowledge that there may be more than one way to access universal truths that are applicable to the betterment of our society. For example, it seems intuitive, whether by divine sanction or scientific evidence, that killing an animal with a brain causes that animal to experience pain and takes away their life. It is highly possible that intellectual assent to the divine may be a way to bolster one's scientific understandings of the society that we live in. Additionally, moral convictions can be challenged and reinterpreted using a more scientific approach, which may lead to even more powerful and pragmatic convictions.
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October 7, 2016John Dewey (1859-1952) is an American public intellectual known for his philosophical work on democracy and civil society and as an advocate for education reform. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey argues that we must separate “religion” from the “religious” in order to act most effectively for social change. Dewey defines the “religious” as an intellectual and emotional attitude or orientation that moves individuals to actively pursue pro-social ideals established and verified by human experience. (Perhaps if Dewey had been writing a few decades later, he would have used the term “spirituality” instead.) Dewey contrasts this with “religion,” which he locates in institutional organizations and defines as a collection of beliefs and practices typically involving the supernatural. Dewey’s view is that modern development of the scientific method enables us to demonstrate the validity of naturalistic “religious” experience which acts in pursuit of ideals of justice, knowledge, and beauty. Thus, we no longer need religion to “dualistically” insist that pro-social values have merit because they are rooted in the supernatural realm. Religion is even harmful in that it can tempt people to waste their time arguing about doctrine or undermine their faith in human reason and experience. Therefore, Dewey wants to entirely separate the “religious” from “religion.”
Dewey’s motivating concern is his belief that we are members of a “continuous human community.” The benefits of civilization were made possible because the people who came before us acted in accordance with their ideals about human relationships, and we have a responsibility to at least pass on, if not expand, this “heritage of values” for future generations. He identifies this responsibility as a “common faith” that humanity has always implicitly shared. Ultimately, Dewey is interested preserving this common faith—and in making it “explicit and militant,” language which evokes the Christian theological language of the “Church Militant,” Christians struggling against sin on earth (as opposed to the “Church Triumphant,” Christians enjoying the glories of heaven). The argument of Dewey’s book is based in his evaluation that while the “religious” has the potential to serve the common good of humanity as a whole, “religion” no longer does.
Dewey’s motivating concern is his belief that we are members of a “continuous human community.” The benefits of civilization were made possible because the people who came before us acted in accordance with their ideals about human relationships, and we have a responsibility to at least pass on, if not expand, this “heritage of values” for future generations. He identifies this responsibility as a “common faith” that humanity has always implicitly shared. Ultimately, Dewey is interested preserving this common faith—and in making it “explicit and militant,” language which evokes the Christian theological language of the “Church Militant,” Christians struggling against sin on earth (as opposed to the “Church Triumphant,” Christians enjoying the glories of heaven). The argument of Dewey’s book is based in his evaluation that while the “religious” has the potential to serve the common good of humanity as a whole, “religion” no longer does.
June 26, 2010
While I very much enjoyed it, I wouldn’t recommend A Common Faith unless you’re into rhetoric, it can be dense. In any case, A Common Faith is about religious experience and Dewey claims to have written it after having one, but the events he describes are more broadly accessible (at least personally) than the “calling” many people of faith describe, since Dewey doesn’t rely on a specific explanation (i.e. the supernatural/God) to account for the cause of these events. Often, when I talk to people who self describe as Christian, I’m left with the impression that the narrative through which they interpret their own religious experience is very important, so much so that to examine the cause of that experience; to call into question the source of that ensuing happiness, is to threaten its very existence. What’s unique about A Common Faith is that Dewey addresses just this issue, but never denies the profound, transformative affect these events have on individuals. However, he does question the necessity to view them through the metaphysical framework demanded by even “the most liberal of Christian religions” which, at the end of the day, remain in conflict w/the physical world. The events he describes can be explained naturally, but that doesn’t make them deflated or sterile or ordinary by any means. In summation, Dewey affirms all that is transcendent about religious experience, without relying on all the embellishments stifling religion.
April 24, 2010
This little book is considered by many mainstream pragmatists to be one of Dewey's worst works. However I disagree. This is the most revealing book that Dewey penned during his long career. Larry Hickman gets his idea of "benign supernaturalism" from A Common Faith. Dewey and the pragmatists sought to establish the fact/value distinction rigidly in 20th century America. That comes out over and again in Faith. However the real problem is of a mimetic function. It is better to mimic the objective scientist, than the evangelical, according to Dewey.
August 7, 2014
This is a great book, and for its brevity (under 100 pages) is a stirring account of what it could be to be a religious naturalist--someone who no longer credits supernaturalism, but who experiences transformative religious passion in relation with the human community and the wider natural world. It remains as relevant as it was prescient when Dewey produced it in the mid-1930s.
November 4, 2013
Religion vs Religious is interesting, but he misunderstands mysticism to an absurd degree and is pushing to make religion a social/political/economic force, which to me is inane.
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