American Pragmatism - Hegel Naturalized
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
John Dewey’s Legacy (1925-1952)
John Dewey (1859-1952), the great pragmatist, had already begun with Hegel in the 1880s. His dissertation “The Psychology of Kant” (1884) attempted to connect Kant and Hegel with empirical psychology. Dewey later emancipated himself from idealism, but certain Hegelian structures were preserved—transformed, naturalized, pragmatized.[1]
“Experience and Nature” (1925) is Dewey’s major work—a naturalistic metaphysics that understands experience not as a subjective state but as a transaction between organism and environment. The title is programmatic: experience is not separate from nature (Cartesian dualism) but part of nature—how organisms actively structure their environment.[2]
The implicit Hegelianism: Dewey adopts Hegel’s critique of the spectator theory of knowledge—the idea that cognition is a passive mirroring of what is given. Instead: cognition is active engagement, experimental intervention, practical reshaping. This is Hegel’s insight that mind does not find but makes—only turned naturalistically: it is not mind that produces the world (idealism), but organisms that structure their environment through action (pragmatism).
The transformation: Dewey eliminates Hegel’s metaphysics (absolute spirit, world history as self-realization) but retains the method: thinking as problem-solving, truth as validation in practice, institutions as results of collective action. This is Hegel without idealism—or more precisely: Hegel read with Darwin instead of Fichte.[3]
The Postwar Aftermath
After Dewey’s death (1952), pragmatism initially finds itself on the defensive. Analytic philosophy dominates, logical positivism sets the standards, Dewey is regarded as “unscientific.” But in the 1960s a pragmatist renaissance begins, which later (in the 1980s) leads to the “neo-pragmatist” reading of Hegel (Rorty, Brandom—see Volume III).
Important for our period: Dewey’s students keep the pragmatist tradition alive. Sidney Hook (1902-1989) writes “From Hegel to Marx” (1936/1950), a pragmatist interpretation of the transition from Hegel to the Young Hegelians. Hook shows: Marx was not a mere “inverter” of Hegel but a pragmatist—he read Hegel as a theory of practice, not as speculation about the Absolute.[4]
Systematic significance: pragmatism offers an alternative to the analytic rejection of Hegel: one can naturalize Hegel without denouncing him. One can preserve his method (thinking as problem-solving, institutions as practice) without adopting his metaphysics (absolute spirit). This line later becomes fruitful—in Brandom’s pragmatist reading of Hegel (Volume III).
On Dewey’s Hegel reception see James Good: A Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent Hegelian Deposit” in the Philosophy of John Dewey (2006). ↩︎
John Dewey: Experience and Nature (1925), chapter 1. ↩︎
On the transformation of Hegel in Dewey see Richard Bernstein: “Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience” in: The Journal of Philosophy 58 (1961). ↩︎
Sidney Hook: From Hegel to Marx (1936/1950). ↩︎