Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

Dewey was of the opinion that ideas are much like hands: they are instruments for dealing with the world. ‘An idea has no greater metaphysical stature than, say, a fork. When your fork proves inadequate to eating soup, you don’t worry about the inherent shortcomings in the nature of forks; you reach for a spoon.’ Ideas are much the same. We have got into difficulty because ‘mind’ and ‘reality’ don’t exist other than as abstractions, with all the shortcomings that we find in any generalisation. ‘It therefore makes as little sense to talk about a “split” between the mind and the world as it does to talk about a split between the hand and the environment, or the fork and the soup.’ ‘Things,’ he wrote, ‘…are what they are experienced as.’74 According to Menand, Dewey thought that philosophy had got off on the wrong foot right at the start, and that we have arrived where we are largely as a result of the class structure of classical Greece. Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers were for the most part a leisured, ‘secure and self-possessed’ class, and it was pragmatically useful for them to exalt reflection and speculation at the expense of making and doing. Since then, he thought, philosophy had been dogged by similar class prejudices, which maintained the same separation of values–stability above change, certainty above contingency, the fine arts above the useful arts, ‘what minds do over what hands do’.75 The result is there for us all to see...

How pragmatism relates to post-modern phlosphy?