There are as many different versions of naturalism as there are naturalists. They run the gamut from tender-minded anthropomorphic or humanistic naturalisms that depict nature as made to order for us human beings because it answers back to our deepest feelings and aspirations, to the tough-minded reductive materialistic naturalisms that strip nature of all the qualities that give it human meaning and purpose. The former eschews any bifurcation between man and nature, whereas the latter wallows in it, the only comfort it gives being the realization that we - that is, our scientists - were smart enough to discover that we are aliens in a universe that cares not a whit for our weal and woe. This essay will show that John Dewey's naturalism is distinctly of the anthropomorphic or humanistic sort. First, Dewey's metaphysical theory of naturalism will be expounded, and then it will be shown what ramifications it has for his epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and religion.

“The new age proclaims itself to be fleet of foot, with wings on its soles; the dawn has put on seven-league boots - Long has lightning flashed on the horizon of poetry; the heavens have collected their stormy might into a powerful cloud; now the thunder has resounded mightily, now it has retreated and flashed only in the distance, now it has returned yet more fearsomely: but soon we shall speak not of a single storm, but the entire sky will break out into flame, and then all your petty lightning rods will avail no longer. Then the nineteenth century begins in earnest . . . Then there will be readers who can read.” Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility”/ The readers of this volume will find Arthur O. Lovejoy's famous essay “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” amply confirmed: Romanticism cannot be defined. To include an essay called “Romanticism and Enlightenment” seems to be an impossibility compounded. On any reasonably comprehensive view the eighteenth century was not dramatically more uniform than the early nineteenth. Indeed, in one crucial respect it was less so, for no fact so inescapably galvanized the Enlightenment mind as that of revolution did the mind of Romanticism. There are many versions of Enlightenment - aristocratic and bourgeois, rationalist and empiricist, modernist and classicist, mercantilist and laissez-faire, urban and pastoral, religious and secular. Properly speaking, this chapter should be entitled “Romanticisms and Enlightenments,” a multiplicity that leaves the student no hook except the little word “and” to hang a hat on.

John Dewey's way of thinking about thinking invites the intellectual historian. We are scholars eager to put thought in its contexts: not only contexts internal to the history of philosophy but social, political, cultural, and biographical contexts. Dewey not only shared this impulse and wrote some provocative intellectual history himself, but provided the enterprise with philosophical underpinnings. Dewey argued that human beings were thinkers only in the second instance. In the first instance, he said, the self was “an agent-patient, doer, sufferer, and enjoyer.” Thinking emerged out of non-cognitive, “primary experience” and was in the service of controlling and enriching such experience. “To be a man,” Dewey argued, “is to be thinking desire.” In one of his most often-quoted remarks, he warned his fellow philosophers that they were losing sight of their cultural embodiment and that they were on the path to terminal marginality unless philosophy “ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.” Positions such as these not only underwrite intellectual history. They also inevitably provoke the interest of intellectual historians in Dewey's own desires, his own primary experience, and his own engagement with the problems of those outside the narrow circle of professional philosophers. They alert the antennae of intellectual biographers.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century social historians and historical critics cautiously developed a language for studying the arts that breaks out of a narrowly aesthetic vocabulary. We became interested not so much in literature or art or music, not even in “the arts” altogether, but in a given society's cultural production. The full consequences for our sense of how individual arts or artists operated at any particular point in time will take a very long time to absorb. Part of the problem here is that old-style “literary history” and “art history” constructed a continuous narrative with claims, which now seem remarkably fragile, to explain where art came from. Powerful figures within the art world were held to wield the infl uence of despots. In order to understand younger artists it was enough to show who they copied and who they reacted against. Cultural history is of course far more impersonal than this. It also registers types of event, and of historical change, held by literary history to be of secondary significance, such as the passing or the repeal of laws affecting state censorship or copyright, and the two or three major advances in the technology of book-production. During the eighteenth century a combination of legal, financial, and industrial factors produced a huge expansion in the bulk and influence of print culture, working one of those transformations that truly deserve the term revolutionary: yet the century in which it took place is notorious for being one of the quietest on literary-historical record.

John Dewey is often regarded as a purely secular thinker, a “naturalist” and “humanist.” In most commentaries, Dewey's pragmatism, including his moral, social, and educational thought, is barely, if at all, connected with his views on religion, in contrast to another classical pragmatist, William James, whose explorations of religious themes, emphasizing the value of individual believers' experiential perspectives, continuously attract scholars' attention. This chapter, however, discusses the socially oriented, pragmatically naturalist conception of religious faith Dewey developed in A Common Faith and elsewhere, as well as Dewey's influence on pragmatically naturalist currents in the philosophy of religion. In particular, Dewey's distinction between “the religious,” on the one side, and actual religions, on the other, is emphasized. According to Dewey, the religious aspects of experience can be appreciated without metaphysical commitments to anything supernatural. Here a problem arises: can the religious qualities of experience be fully naturalized by understanding them in a Deweyan manner as imaginative relations to human ideals, or will such naturalization inevitably reduce religious experience to something else?

Defining “art” has been a central occupation of philosophers of art throughout the history of the subject. This is quite natural. The range of things that have been talked about and treated as art in one context or another at some time or other is bewilderingly vast, including such items as popular films, Greek urns, experimental poetry, cathedrals, novels high and low, gardens, works of fashion, jokes, string quartets, sonnets, shields, ballets, photographs, and on and on. Reputations, modes of appropriate attention and discourse, places in curricula, and prices in various ways turn on what is treated as art how and when. If it is not the business of philosophers of art to analyze the concept of art so as to sort things out a bit, it is hard to see what their business ought to be. Taking up this business, philosophers have proposed definitions that variously treat (mimetic) representational content, (significantly absorbing) form, (well-wrought and shareable) expressiveness, or certification by accredited authorities as a necessary and sufficient condition for art. Nöel Carroll provides a useful survey of such efforts at definition in his recent Philosophy of Art, concluding, alas, that they one and all founder on counterexamples.

In his 1930 foreword to Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey wrote: “In the eighteenth century, the word Morals was used in English literature with a meaning of broad sweep. It included all the subjects of distinctly humane import, all of the social disciplines as far as they are intimately connected with the life of man and as they bear upon the interests of humanity . . . Were it not for one consideration [this] volume might be said to be an essay in continuing the tradition of David Hume.” Dewey's contemporaries saw Hume as a skeptic whose moral inquiries were meant to explain away rather than explain our knowledge of moral values and principles. To Dewey, Hume's intent was instead to provide a new and improved grounding for moral knowledge and principles, by demonstrating that moral phenomena are natural phenomena, susceptible to methods of inquiry commensurate with those of the natural sciences. This for Dewey was the “inexpungable element of truth in his teachings.” Dewey, like Hume, was an ethical naturalist who believed that moral phenomena are natural phenomena. But unlike Hume and his twentieth-century successors, such as the emotivists Charles L. Stevenson and A. J. Ayer, Dewey was not a non-cognitivist.

Dewey explained that the title of the book setting out his mature philosophy, Experience and Nature, was intended to signify to readers that what he was offering could be thought of either as “empirical naturalism or naturalistic empiricism.” He anticipated that many would greet either of these as an oxymoron - “like talking of a round square” - because their conception of nature was of “something wholly material and mechanistic,” which had no place for experience except “as something extraneous, which is occasionally superimposed on nature.” Among existing philosophies that professed to base their concepts and doctrines on experience and could claim to be versions of “empiricism,” none conceived experience as a natural phenomenon like rain, retro-viruses or retrograde motion of the planets. But even now, after the concept of a “naturalized epistemology” has become commonplace, the concept of experience on which Dewey hoped to base his naturalized empiricism is not widely appreciated, let alone accepted. Locating experience as in and a part of nature was only a relatively modest part of the radical reform Dewey was proposing.

During the Romantic period, from the last decade or so of the eighteenth century to the 1830s, most prose fiction was considered subliterary, suitable mainly for children, women, and the lower classes. A few works were cherished by readers in all classes as childhood reading or “popular classics,” including generations-old chapbooks, such as Jack and the Giants, Valentine and Orson, and The Fair Rosamund, and longer works such as The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and The English Hermit. Don Quixote and the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett were regarded as important works of literature. These and other earlier novelists were commercialized as “classics,” along with certain poets, dramatists, and belletrists, by publishers such as Harrison and Cooke after the ending of perpetual copyright in 1774. The spread of stereotype printing and sale of books in sixpenny “numbers” (or parts) from around 1800 gave a new plebeian and middle-class readership to earlier sentimental and pious novels such as The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and The Vicar of Wakefield, and to picaresque identity-mystery romances such as Tom Jones. Most novels published during the period itself were dismissed by critics and readers as “the trash of the circulating library, ” to be rented and read quickly rather than purchased and kept.

Ages are marked by literary fashion as much as by their political settlements or upheavals. We speak commonly of Elizabethan drama or of Enlightenment prose, thereby defining the epoch generically and even temperamentally. The continuing preoccupation with “Renaissance self-fashioning” only puts a modern gloss on the conventional notion that it was an age for drama. The eighteenth century has long been conceived as inseparable from its monumental achievements in prose, works reflecting the massive organization and integration of European civilization - the French Encyclopédie, Johnson's Dictionary, even, seemingly almost as long, Richardson's Clarissa. What is it, then, that makes us commonly associate British Romanticism with poetry? Why, indeed, until recently did we generally separate the writers of prose - except for literary theorists like Coleridge and Hazlitt - from the poets, pretending, for instance, that Jane Austen inhabited a world fundamentally different from that of Shelley rather than living at the same time and, indeed, about twenty-five miles from his birthplace, and writing constantly about families that easily could pass for Shelley's own? The Victorians started this conventional association almost as a way of distinguishing their epoch, another age of prose or at least to their minds of robust narrative, from that softer, more emotional, more lyrical world that preceded theirs, an irrecoverable infancy to which they longed to retreat.

Poets are no more insulated from political events and controversies than are any other class of people. Indeed, they are less so, in that poets work in language, the same medium in which political concepts and demands are formulated, contested, and negotiated. If this is generally true it is of particular relevance in periods of significant historical change, when political issues impress themselves with increased urgency on all sections of society and give rise to vigorous debates concerning fundamental political principles. The period between 1780 and 1830, during which the great Romantic poets came to maturity and produced their most important works, was such a period, as they were all aware. Wordsworth told an American visitor that “although he was known to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours thought to the conditions and prospects of society, for one to poetry.” Coleridge and Southey were both active as political journalists, and Coleridge produced a number of significant works of political theory. Byron spoke on political issues in the House of Lords, as well as satirizing political opponents and the political situation in general in his poetry. Shelley wrote to his friend Peacock, “I consider Poetry very subordinate to moral & political science, & if I were well, certainly I should aspire to the latter” (Shelley, Letters, II, 71).

We tend to forget that the word “democracy” has had a negative connotation through most of its long history. The Greek word demokratia means rule by the demos, the populace, the common people. For centuries, there has been a fear that the unchecked rule by the people would be anarchic and turn into tyranny. The Founding Fathers of the United States did not think of themselves as creating a democracy, but rather a new republic. The elaborate system of checks and balances, as well as the Bill of Rights, were intended to counter the abuses of unrestrained democracy. Only in the nineteenth century did the word “democracy” begin to take on a positive connotation, although Alexis de Tocqueville - the most perceptive commentator on American democracy - warned about the many dangers that it confronted. And John Stuart Mill, the great liberal thinker, was worried about the tendency of democratic societies to foster mediocrity. There has always been an undercurrent, even by champions of democracy, that it is neither viable nor desirable to think that a workable democracy can involve the active participation of all the people. Today, the word “democracy” has such a positive aura, and elicits such a powerful emotional response, that we rarely think about what we really mean by democracy.

Questions about linguistic theory have assumed striking prominence in critical work on Romanticism. This is in part because literary criticism over the past several decades, like philosophy for a much longer time, has taken a distinctly linguistic turn. But in addition to this pervasive preoccupation with theoretical understandings of the linguistic sign and of verbal representation, more particular circumstances, at least in the United States, have focused attention on Romanticism and language. Romantic texts, most notably Wordsworthian texts, were among the first to be read through the linguistic turnings of poststructuralist criticism in its American guise. Jacques Derrida's extended critique of Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages in Of Grammatology, along with his readings elsewhere of Shelley and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, cast an even greater glamor on Romanticism's role in theoretical formulations. And since many Romantic texts, verse as well as prose, turn out to contain powerful, agitated broodings on their own status as language, poststructuralist readers have often found their theoretical concerns anticipated, not merely refl ected back to them, in Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley.

George Herbert Mead wrote that the most important and distinguishing way in which American life shaped its philosophy was the freedom Americans had to “work out immediate politics and business with no reverential sense of a pre-existing social order within which they must take their place and whose values they must preserve”; he concluded that “[i]n the profoundest sense John Dewey is the philosopher of America.” Dewey, like Mead, believed that philosophy exhibits a national character. Dewey held that American philosophy was born out of the demands of democracy. For Dewey, this meant that it asked questions about how the individual should be conceived in relation to society and how each American might be actively engaged in the making of this new world. However, while Dewey is considered to be a uniquely American philosopher, he was also an international thinker. Indeed, his international political thought was a product of his American philosophy. In reading Dewey on the subject of international politics one cannot help but be struck, first, by how global his world was and, second, how actively engaged Dewey was with international politics. Dewey began writing on international themes as early as 1902 and during World War I incorporated into his philosophy an understanding of the world as being linked in complex webs of interdependent relationships brought on by industrialization.

In The Quest for Certainty, Dewey described “the main problem of modern philosophy” as follows, “How is science to be accepted and yet the realm of values to be conserved.” He suggested that a solution to the problem would be found if the separation of theory and practice, presupposed by philosophy since the days of Plato, were overcome. That task, he believed, will be accomplished when the traditional spectator theory of knowledge is replaced by a theory that regards the knower of the world as an agent in that world. Such a theory will be a theory not of knowledge as fixed and immutable but rather of knowledge as the upshot of inquiry as seen in the experimental sciences; it will, he promised, “cancel the isolation of knowledge from overt action.” Once knowledge is seen to be not only compatible with action but requiring action, it follows that the methods of inquiry that lead to knowledge in science are also the methods by which judgments of practice, and hence judgments of value, become known. Moreover, the methods of science are continuous with methods of inquiry in everyday life. Thus, somewhat surprisingly, Dewey, who sneered at an “alleged discipline of epistemology,” found himself again and again developing, presenting, and defending his instrumental theory of knowledge. The central sources are the essays he collected in Essays in Experimental Logic (now scattered in several volumes of the Middle Works of John Dewey), The Quest for Certainty, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry and finally “Experience, Knowledge and Value” in The Philosophy of John Dewey.