Two Paths of Departure from Hegelian Idealism

CHAPTER4 TWO PATHS OF DEPARTURE FROM HEGELIAN IDEALISM Dialectical Materialism and Dewey's Pragmatism Now our analysis will shift, for a time, from NCTM and MOE documents to pragmatist and dialectical materialist philosophies. Our purpose in these investigations is to better understand the similarities and contrasts between NCTM and MOE at the level of implicated philosophical positions. We explained in chapter l our rationale for comparing Dewey's pragmatist philosophy with dialectical materialism. Although NCTM curriculum and pedagogic principles no doubt draw from a great many different sources, the over all discourse / worldview is clearly American progressivist education and associated philosophy. Dewey was highly influential in the progressivist movement. He wrote many well-received works specifically on the applications of his philosophy to education. And his philosophical writings in fact match NCTM policies extremely well. This is true even terminologically, for many of Dewey's expressions, such as "problem-situation," "process of inquiry," "learning by doing," etc., show up explicitly in NCTM literature. Hence a close examination of Dewey's philosophy should further articulate the underlying philosophical principles ofNCTM. The texts we have closely examined include Dewey's famous article: The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology; his books: Essays in Experimental Logic, How We Think, Democracy and Education, Education and Experience, Logic the Theory of Inquiry; and we make use of White's impressive study of Dewey's early Hegelian period: The Origins ofDewey's lnstrumentalism. We also draw from portions of other works by Dewey and will cite these as they come up over the next few chapters. MOE explicitly claims itself to be an expression of dialectical materialist principles, so there are no caveats with respect to our choice of dialectical materialism for study in this case. A deeper understanding of dialectical materialism will throw more light on the underlying assumptions of MOE curricular policies. But in this case we cannot examine only one author. Dialectical materialism is a philosophical tradition that begins with Marx, and then continues with a particular set of interpretations of Marx's work produced by Engels through three enormously influential books: Anti-Diihring, Dialectics of Nature, and Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. These works were a major influence on the intellectuals attending the Second Communist International, and they are cited frequently in the works of Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung and more recent authors who have systematized the classical tradition, like Maurice Cornforth. We will refer to these works as a whole-Engels, Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung and those who systematize and elaborate their work like 145 CHAPTER4 Cornforth-as "the classical dialectical materialist texts." We have studied Engels, Mao Tse-Tung, Lenin and Cornforth extensively and will cite their texts in appropriate places. But we have also carefully studied many of the works of Marx himself; including but not limited to: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, The German Ideology, Grundrisse, On the Jewish Question, Theses on Feuerbach, Capital, and Mathematical Manuscripts. To make things more complex and complicated, dialectical materialist psychologists-Vygotsky, Leont'ev, Luria, Davydov, and El'konin being amongst the best known-have expanded upon principles we find in the classical texts to develop them in new and much more elaborated directions. In the case ofLeont'ev and his "activity theory," we find intersections between Dewey's theories and dialectical materialism in the domain of human cognition. In the case ofVygotsky, we find an enormous intersection with the work of another pragmatist philosopher----George Herbert Mead. Yet these intersections are far from producing identical theories overall: pragmatism provides directions for more specificity and consistency in some domains of dialectical materialist thought, dialectical materialism provides more dimensions within which to locate some of the pragmatist insights. We concentrate on Marx and the classical texts of dialectical materialism in this book but refer to the works of dialectical materialist psychologists and to other Marxist traditions at appropriate points. This chapter begins with an introduction and overview to Hegel's philosophy because Dewey's philosophy retains the influence of his Hegelian beginnings in many ways, and dialectical materialism explicitly acknowledges its debt to Hegel. We have studied Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, and The Shorter Logic in order to better understand these two different paths of departure from Hegelian philosophy. This chapter traces out the different paths taken by Dewey and Marx from their Hegelian beginnings. Chapters 5-8 analyze carefully the Deweyian and dialectical materialist theories of experience, language, cognition, logic, freedom, self, society, philosophical anthropology and other philosophical domains that we reconstructed in our comparisons ofNCTM and MOE literature. In those chapters we frequently go back to NCTM and MOE to highlight relations of fit and contrast with these philosophies. In chapter eight we address pedagogic implications of our philosophical work explicitly, and in chapter nine we address mathematics philosophy and education explicitly. Our task in this chapter, chapter 4, is to provide an overview of Hegel's philosophy and an analysis of how Dewey and dialectical materialists both rejected its objective idealism while retaining many of its core themes. I. THE HEGELIAN INFLUENCE Dewey was an avowed Hegelian for the first two decades of his academic career, though one can trace gradual and progressive movements away from classical Hegelian thought during that period. From the early 1880s until the beginning of the 20th century, Dewey's works cite Hegel positively. With his 1903 publication 146 .

Load more