Article - Imagination and Judgment in John Dewey S Philosophy Intelligent Transactions in A Democratic Context

Educational Philosophy and Theory
ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20
Imagination and Judgment in John Dewey's

Philosophy: Intelligent transactions in a
democratic context
THOMAS AASTRUP RMER
To cite this article: THOMAS AASTRUP RMER (2012) Imagination and Judgment in John
Dewey's Philosophy: Intelligent transactions in a democratic context, Educational Philosophy
and Theory, 44:2, 133-150, DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00623.x
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00623.x
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Educational Philosophy and Theory,Vol. 44, No. 2, 2012
doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00623.x
Imagination and Judgment in John

Deweys Philosophy: Intelligent
transactions in a democratic context epat_623 133..150
Thomas Aastrup Rmer

Department of Education, Unit for Philosophy of Education,The Danish University of Educa-
Downloaded by [Aristotle University of Thessaloniki] at 09:54 24 May 2016
tion, University of Aarhus
Abstract
In this essay, I attempt to interpret the educational philosophy of John Dewey in a way that
accomplishes two goals.The first of these is to avoid any reference to Dewey as a propagator of
a particular scientific method or to any of the individualist and cognitivist ideas that is some-
times associated with him. Secondly, I want to overcome the tendency to interpret Dewey as a
naturalist by looking at his concept of intelligence. It is argued that intelligent experience is the
basic concept of education. I suggest how this concept should be understood. I propose to look at
it as an interplay between the faculties of imagination and judgment.
Keywords: transaction, learning, intelligence, thinking
This essay is an attempt to reconfigure the relationship between democracy, learning,

and intelligence in John Deweys educational philosophy. In doing this, I address two
problems. The first problem has to do with the interpretation, particular within the
psychological domain, of the social aspects of John Deweys work. The other problem is
concerned with the way much of the research on Deweys educational philosophy
combines the concepts of experience and intelligence.
It is quite commonplace, particular within psychology, to equate the educational
philosophy of John Dewey with two points of view. First, his thoughts are attached to an
individualist approach to education. This is found in quotations such as Deweys
concept of experience has often been criticised for being too individualistic and lacking
a societal dimension (Illeris, 1998, p. 151). In this way, Illeris accentuates a tendency to
forget that the concept of learning in Deweys thought is deeply integrated with his
philosophy of society. This observation is reinforced in Philipp Gonons review of how
Dewey has been interpreted in Germany: In German-speaking countries, John Dewey
came to be considered a school reformer, an advocate of the project method and as the
propagator of a cognitivist psychology of learning (Gonon, 2000, p. 141). Second, as
indicated in the Gonon quote as well, Dewey is attributed a particular method, the
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Educational Philosophy and Theory 2010 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
134 Thomas Aastrup Rmer
method of project work. This method and similar approaches are quite often interpreted
as a sequence of instrumental phases in the cognitive handling of a particular problem.
These phases have different names, e.g. problem-setting, hypotheses, experimentation
and evaluation, that is, formal circular structures of cognition working completely
independently of the content of education.1 The project method is considered to be a
universal procedure, which can be taught and learned by anybody, at any age and in any
disciplinary circumstance. As long as the student works along these lines, everything else
seems to take care of itself.
However, both assumptions are mistaken. The reasons for the mistakes are, first, that
Deweys theory of learning and education is not at all attached to an individualistic
psychology. Basically, in a certain sense, it is not a theory based on individuality at all. I
will return to that later. Second, it is not the alleged method that should be the focus of
an attempt to identify the educational process. Thus, the ideas in this essay fit with a
recent trend to discuss Dewey as a contributor to an understanding of the exact character
of postmodernity, language and pluralityand as distant from scientism and cognitivist
psychology.
Furthermore, not only has Dewey been the victim of methodological and psycho-
logical simplifications, we can, if we look into much research on Dewey, find a lack of
understanding of the role of intelligence in educational experience. It is telling, for
instance, that, in recent books on the matter, there is no chapter or discussion on
intelligence as such (e.g. Hickman, 1998; Oelkers & Rhyn, 2000). Another tendency
in the modern reception of Dewey is a kind of dismantling strategy, a reduction of
Dewey to be merely a proponent of an open society. An example of this is found in
this quote from Richard Rorty: I have urged elsewhere that all that remains of
Peirces, Deweys and Poppers praise of science is praise of certain moral virtues
those of an open societyrather that any specifically epistemic strategy (Rorty, 1999,
p. 36). This lack of interest and this process of emptying are frustrating, because, as
we shall see, Dewey actually equated educational experience with intelligent experience.
Finally, there is a tendency to equate Deweys philosophy of education with a phi-
losophy of experience. This is not, of course, altogether wrong, but there is a pitfall in
this view. The problem is that the concept of experience is relevant to all Deweys
philosophy. By focusing only on experience, therefore, one tends to reduce the edu-
cation of philosophy to his natural philosophy, and this naturalism of Dewey is, I
think, unduly highlighted. To make experience the focal concern is in this sense
equivalent to forgetting the concept of education altogether, certainly a problematic
consequence. I am not going to say that experience is irrelevant to education. On the
contrary, experience is the underlying ground for the whole analysis to come. I am
going to argue, however, that what transforms an experience into an educative expe-
rience is the idea of intelligence, and I intend to present an interpretation of how this
concept of intelligence should be understood. One may say, to put the point a bit
polemically, that education should not be defined as learning by doing but as learn-
ing by intelligence.
Thus, the task in this essay is to reinterpret Dewey with these challenges in mind.
That is, first, to look at his concept of educational experience as being inscribed in a
broader social philosophy and to look at it as a theory of learning that is deeply
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Imagination and Judgment in John Deweys Philosophy 135
embedded in the subject matter and cultural material of education. Second, the task
is to discuss his concept of experience in a way that is closely connected to Deweys
idea of intelligence. To realise this goal, I will identify an educational circularity, which
is simultaneously detached from and attached to the subject matter of the educational
process and which is far more advanced than the simple formal circularity of learning,
which is found in various kinds of method-essentialisms. By pointing to both canoni-
cal and overlooked passages in Democracy and Education and Art as Experience, I will
provide a conceptual circularity between habit, imagination and judgment, and this
circularity is outlined in Figure 1. This circularity works, whether we talk about indi-
viduals, organisation, groups, adults or children, as a constant state of intelligent
reconstruction of habits at all levels in an open society. It is this circularity that is
the subject matter of this article. Educational experience is not a formal or a natural
processbut a process in which the subject and the world simultaneously emerge in
an open, intelligent and quivering instant, due to the workings of habit, imagination
and judgement. The consequence is that thinking is both connected to and detached from
culture and society, an ambivalence that might be fruitful for future ideas of education
based on the ideas of pragmatism.
The article begins with a short presentation of the concept of experience. It is argued,
perhaps trivially to some, that experience has two aspects, a passive and an active
component, and that all understanding of the processes of learning must be interpreted
with this duality and the transactions of its parts in mind. Subsequently, it is argued that
the passive side of experience should be equated with the faculty of imagination, that is,
the ability to make something present which is absent (the cultural material). On the
other hand, the active side of experience is found in the faculty of judgment, that is, the
ability to communicate reflectively to a critically engaged audience. This is how simple it
is and, to my knowledge, there has been no such systematic inquiry into the concepts of
imagination and judgment by recent commentators on Deweys work. I will not have
space to go much into the consequences of this for the practice of schooling. However,
as indicated above, I think that the insights of this essay point to a much more positive
attitude towards schooling as an institution, which is simultaneously both more remote
from and more engaged with society than is normally assumed to be the consequence of
Deweys thought.
Experience and Democracy

In his aesthetics, Dewey says: Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of
live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living (Dewey,
1980, p. 35, my italics).2 Notice the words live creature and environing conditions.The
concept of experience is biologically founded as a twofold process of exchange. Some
things in nature are characterized by the environing conditions affecting the organism in
a one directional process: for example, a stone that only very slowly erodes due to the
environing conditions. Other organisms are capable of reorganising themselves but
only through the slow development of the species. In this case, the reorganisation of the
structure and identity of the organism have to wait for the genetic material to experiment
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with itself and, eventually, change. However, what characterizes humans is that this
exchange and reorganisation are intelligent; that is, human beings can reorganise them-
selves and environmental conditions in such a way that the content of the interaction
changes as well. A complete change of subject, object and content simultaneously.
This entire essay deals with how we should understand the character of such an
intelligent process of change, that is, the human educational exchange with ones
surroundings.
This notion of experience, as an intelligent exchange between an organism and its
surroundings, means that we must concentrate on looking for a two-sided process. On
one hand, we must look at the movement from environing conditions to live creature.
This we call the consequences of action, and it relates to the fact that the environing
conditions are interpreted as consequences of former experiential actions. On the other

hand, we have the movement from organism to environment, which refers to the
component of action in the structure of experience. This is so because the organism in
this case expresses itself in one way or the other. Simplified, we may say that the first
movement constitutes the passive side of experience, because the environment decides
what is present, and the second movement relates to the active part of experience in
which it is the learning subject that influences the character of the environment (I will
later discuss this in detail).
This basic distinction structures all Deweys considerations about education. Regard-
less of whether we are talking about democracy, intelligence, organisation, responsibil-
ity, courage or habits, the task is to interpret each of these as experience, as exchanges
between environments and organism in an active and a passive component. But how is
this consistent with the following quote? We are concerned with the general features of
the way in which a social group brings up its immature members into its own social form
(Dewey, 1944, p. 10, my italics). It seems as if learning in this case is described as a
reproduction of an already existing formation instead of being an intelligent reorgani-
sation.3 But it is not any process that is considered to have educational effects. The
reason for this is that the concepts of social group and social form are used in a
normative way. Dewey talks about a genuine social life and a true social group
(Dewey, 1944, p. 5). The criterion with which he manages to make the distinction
between ordinary and genuine social forms is whether or not the group in question
promotes growth. What growth means is what the entire Deweyan philosophy is all
about. But basically it has to do with providing experiencesintelligent exchanges
between organism and the environing conditionsthat produce even more intelligent
exchanges later on. Growth is a kind of endless doubling of intelligence. This constant
doubling up can only take place in an open and democratic society. That is why many
closed groups, e.g. criminal groups and dictatorships, cannot be genuine social groups
and, therefore, are unable to offer education in its proper sense (they can only offer
instruction). In a dictatorship, there are a priori limits on the flow of experience (on the
passive and active parts of the experiential interchange) due to the restrictions of
freedom of speech, of the communication flow and of the exchange of interests inter-
nally and externally in diverse social forms. Education for social life, the doubling of
forms, therefore, can only take place in open societies. A dictators school must find
another name for itself. So, returning to the quote above, Dewey did not think of the
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society in the singular. On the contrary, a typical Deweyan remark would be: Such
words as society and community are likely to be misleading, for they have a ten-
dency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word. As a
matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected
(Dewey, 1944, pp. 2021).
In other words, a Deweyan education must work within the framework of Deweys
conception of democracy, that is, a condition of the maximum number of exchanges,
common points of interest and activities internally and between communities. It is only
in very simple and monolithic societies that concepts and ideas may be said to have a
privileged access to the world. In a democracy, where a plurality of communities develops
together, we must find another principle of education.
Thus, an experience is characterised by having a passive and an active element.

Something happens to us (the consequences), and we do something (the action). It is a
transaction of impression and expression.The dual nature of this process is important to
keep in mind in the rest of this article. Dewey attempts to inject this duality, in which the
organism not only imports the environment but also tries to export something as well, in
all of his analyses. This is not only a theory of education but also a theory of the basic
mechanism of life and knowledge itself.4 The result is that we ought to be sceptical of all
attempts to clip the wings of experience, that is, to interrupt the free flow of experience.
Instead, we ought to organise our society and education in such a way that the process
of experience can be intensified in free exchanges in a plural and open democracy. With
such a vigorous link between concepts of learning, experience and society, it is easy to
understand why in recent years an interest in Dewey has been revived. But it is equally
hard to understand why Dewey, particularly among psychologists, has been associated
with individualism. This theory is about learning and education in plural, multicultural
and post-modern societies.
Habituation and Intelligence

The next question is: How should we understand the exchange of communication in an
open society? The answer is provided by the concept of habit and the concept of
intelligence (and is illustrated in Figure 1 a couple of pages ahead). To begin with, let us
assume a situation in which we speak and act in particular ways, because so far things
have actually worked out fine. Eventually, we build up a continuum, a constructed
linearity between action and consequences, between active and passive experience,
between organism and its surroundings.There is a kind of agreement between the actions
of the subject and the consequences of these actions.The consequences of the action, the
passive side, are without cusps or surprises. An example: The teacher asks, What is
the capital of France?The pupil replies: Paris (the answer London would be within the
frame of a habitual answer even though it is wrong). The teacher acts/asks, and the
consequences in this case are without surprises. Dewey calls such linearity a habit. Habits
are not necessarily rigid routines. Habits are also an expression of increasing involvement
with the world.This is illustrated by the way we learn to know the infrastructure of a city.
Here we can regard the habits as a slowly growing sense of the structure of the town.5
This corresponds to the incorporation of consequences, that is, the passive aspect of
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experience. At the end of this process, after perhaps many years, you may be able to find
your way around town without thinking at all. The active part of habit is revealed, not as
a gradual incorporation of already existing cultural forms but as a habituation (note the
verb), that is, a subjectively-produced variation on the citys infrastructure; i.e. a new
path or a new road. A habit, then, is both something already existing in culture and a
habituation, a new continuum, a new linearity between action and consequences,
between impression and expression, a new form of life. A habit is an emergent property
of a pluralist culture.
It should be emphasized that language should be treated as action as well. Dewey
makes this clear: In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way
that the thing hat gains it, by being used in a given way (Dewey, 1944, p. 15). And
the concept of habit actually covers all human activityfor example, in unskilled
forms the habits involved are not of a high grade. But there are habits of judging and
reasoning as truly as of handling a tool, painting a picture, or conducting an experi-
ment (Dewey, 1944, p. 48). In this way, the traditional positivist-based approach
to education is queried, because education is not a conveyance of scientific facts.
Instead, education is the development of intelligent linguistic habits; it is the enhance-
ment of particular exchanges between organism and environment, a kind of cultural
breathing.
Thus, any activity and language-use involve habit.6 This does not mean that Dewey
is not aware that habits may take on routinised, fixed or arrested forms. These kinds
of habits tend to enclose and determine the subject in rigid routines, sheer causality
and lack of reflectivity. This would put an end to plasticity (Dewey, 1944, p. 49). In
this case, the habit stops being an exchange and becomes sheer impression, sheer
passivity. This, for Dewey, would be equivalent to the end of growth, the end of
educational experience: only an environment which secures the full use of intelligence in
the process of forming habits can counteract this tendency (Dewey, 1944, p. 49, my
italics).
Here, we arrive at central point, because Deweyan democracy, with its countless
fractures and pluralism, constantly interrupts these continuities or habituations. The
relationship between actions and consequences, therefore, changes both rapidly and
frequently. Someone who was once a friend might suddenly turn into an enemy, as
exemplified by the moral inconstancy in ethnically-mixed Bosnian villages during the
Yugoslavian civil war. But the change and the fissures in habitual continuity are, of
course, also seen in the ordinary events of modern life, in working and family life and in
schools and educational life in general.
This posits an important context for Deweys educational philosophy, because his
philosophy of experience becomes a philosophy for a modern pluralism that concerns the
relationship between breaks and continuities. Dewey, of course, worked at the beginning
of last centurys America, a time characterised by extreme social pluralism; and he
envisaged and even feared that the different communities would close themselves off
from each other. Such a closure would prevent possible experience; it would cut off
growth, creativity and democracy, and a closed and authoritarian form of life would
result. And notice also how, in this quote immediately above, how Dewey stresses not
only habits but also the concept of intelligence. Without intelligence, plasticity and
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growth is delayed. Intelligence and thinking become the defining characteristic of edu-
cation in a pluralist society.
Distance, Presence and Educational Intelligence

So far, I have described Deweys educational philosophy primarily with a biological
vocabulary, working in a plural and democratic context, and I have conceptualised
experience as an interruption of habits, on one hand, and the organisms reorganisation
of the habits, on the other. The next task is a closer analysis of the more specific
character of a habituation. The question is: how do we move from an interruption of
habit to a new habit?7 In other words, we still lack a discussion of how to understand
what was quoted earlier: the full use of intelligence in the process of forming habits. We
leave, therefore, the discourse of biology and adaptation for a moment, focusing instead
on the specifically human aspect of experience, that is, intelligent habituation. Instead of
the formalism of method often connected with Dewey, we will find an emphasis on
the content and subject matter of education. Not, of course, content understood as a
simple transmittable scientific knowledge. Rather, we will discover learning and content
simultaneously.
Intelligent habituation is equivalent to thinking (and not only reflection). For example,
[t]hinking, in other words, is the intentional endeavour to discover specific connections
between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two
become continuous (Dewey, 1944, p. 145). In this quote, thinking and habituation is
closely linked. As a habit is a continuum between action and consequences, thinking is
exactly the name of the activity producing this continuum. Thus, this is not only about
a habit of intelligence, but, more fundamentally, it is an intelligent habituation. Educa-
tion is in human nature rather than nature being a kind of education. In what follows, I
will first show how this intelligent habituation is described in Democracy and Education
and then illuminate the concept further by introducing some passages from Deweys
aesthetics, Art as Experience.
In part, Deweys considerations on the nature of thinking consist of a reflection on
the difference between being a participator and a spectator. A participant may be a
soldier in action (or a teacher who teaches). Often, the soldier finds it difficult to take
an objective stand on the war, because his actions are overdetermined by the need for
survival. The soldiers overwhelming approach is how do I avoid death? The spectator,
on the contrary, is not involved directly, and his point of view is rather how we should
speak about the war: Which linguistic habits should we ascribe to? For instance, Dewey
says in this evaluation of the First World War: But even for an onlooker in a neutral
country, the significance of every move made, of every advance here and retreat there,
lies in what it portends. To think upon the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see
what is indicated as probable or possible regarding an outcome (Dewey, 1944, p. 146).
Thus, there is no doubt that, to the extent we should promote thought, it is the
perspective of the spectator in particular that should be nurtured. This means that
thought assumes a certain distance. The defining difference between actor and spec-
tator is that the spectator has to act at a distance to the events in which the actor is
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involved. If the atmosphere of the act overwhelms the spectator, he becomes instead an
actor. But this distance, on the other hand, must be supplemented by a particular kind
of presence, by what Dewey calls social sympathy with the movements of the actor. In
sum, the condition of thinking is the co-presence of both participation and distance.
This is obvious in that only gradually and with a widening of the area of vision through
a growth of social sympathies does thinking develop to include what lies beyond our direct
interest: a fact of great significance for education (Dewey, 1944, p. 148, my italics).
When Dewey speaks of thinking as experimentation and as an inquiry, he does not have
in mind a settled, a priori scientific or pedagogical method. Instead, he wishes to work
within and to expand the area lying beyond our direct interest, whereby the stretch
between the distant and the present is made possible; a stretch, I will show in a
moment, which creates the conditions for the introduction of the notions of imagina-
tion and judgement. Because of this distance, the possibility for developing social
sympathies is realised or, in other words, the possibility for understanding the attempts
of other people and groups to habituate. Thus, an appreciation of the consequences of
a phenomenon demands a reflection on the significance of different possible habitua-
tions for all relevant groups. This is not a mechanical process. To think is to consider
the bearing of the occurrence upon what may be, but is not yet. In other words, what
we are looking for is something that is in the process of becoming something we yet do
not know. The same point is made, when Dewey says, The starting point of any process
of thinking is something going on, something which just as it stands is incomplete or
unfulfilled. Its point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it is going
to turn out.8
In this process, we retrieve the Deweyan criterion of democracy: a free exchange of
interests and numerous distinctions between and inside different communities. Where
an actor may be tempted to follow his own interest, the spectator forces him to include
others interests as well, thereby constructing a more intelligent habituation. The term
interest should not in this context be understood as a cut-and-dried, politically-based
expectation. Rather, the notion of interest refers to the fact that that self and world
are engaged with each other in a developing situation (Dewey, 1944, p. 126). Even
though the actor interacts with a limited part of the world, he is not inclined to see the
enlarged reality. An insight into the larger world can only be brought about by enlight-
ening him on the consequences of his acts. Therefore, the condition for an intelligent
habituation, for thinking, is the existence of an exchange between an actor and a
spectator perspective on the subject matter in question. In this process of distance and
presence, the actor is forced to see new people, new pieces of art, new texts and so
forth. He learns to develop social sympathiesnot, it should be emphasised, as sym-
pathy for a particular political or scientific value but as sympathy for the fact that other
people, too, engage in intelligent habituations, whether they are Nobel Prize winners or
terrorists. Again, not as a sympathy to the political goal of terrorism (which is a closure
of the free exchange of interests), but rather, if it is to be educational, an investigation
of how terrorists attempt to create a kind of linearity between acts and consequences
for themselves and others.
The rest of this essay is an elaboration of the idea of intelligence. In short, I am arguing
that intelligence should be understood along the lines of Figure 1:
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The clash of habits in a pluralist culture
Fractures of habits
Judgment
Imagination
Public documents for neutral

spectators
Figure 1: The transaction of the existing cultural and the possible social world in the medium of
imagination and judgement
I have already accounted for what in the Figure is meant by the clash of habits in a
pluralist culture and the fractures of habit. I have also discussed the character of neutral
spectators. What remains to be analysed is the circularity; how to comprehend the
concepts of imagination and judgment. This task is undertaken in the rest of the article.
Imagination
Imagination, in Figure 1, is the capacity that makes possible the passive aspect of
experience, the movement from surroundings to organism.9 It is the ability to make the
absent become present. It is about re-presenting reality, a kind of motor of translation. It
is the world tumbling in, all over our cognitive faculties. Dewey insisted that this ability is
of vital importance, e.g. for the general in the war, or a common soldier, or a citizen of one
of the contending nations, the stimulus to thinking is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is
indirect and dependent upon imagination (Dewey, 1944, p. 147). In this quote, imagi-
nation is connected directly with thinking, due to a distance between actor and spectator.
The importance of the concept is stressed even more clearly when he says, The
engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than
mechanical (Dewey, 1944, p. 236). Thus, in most situations in which there is a relation
between audience and actor, other interests and points of view are not directly present but
must be re-presented, that is, re-created anew, and this re-creation involves the faculty of
imagination. In other words, we must imagine who the other is (some other, another
pupil, a political group, etc.) or more precisely: what kind of habituations does the other
work with. We have to re-present the meaning of his texts, his art, his science and his
practice.The importance of this operation can hardly be stressed enough: If it were not for
the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience
would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes (Dewey, 1944, p. 232). Thus, it is
human development set up against the brutes.Without imagination, we would be like wild
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animals. It is education in its most general condition. In addition, statements, which we

might often consider to be a fact, are here considered as the result of the workings of
imagination. Such statements are not facts in the sense of having an exclusive relation to
nature, a relation that afterwards can be transmitted as a linguistic atom in different
classrooms (from universities, to professional schools, to student essays, etc.). On the
contrary, these statements or facts are the results of the activity of the imagination: only
a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realisation even of pure
facts (Dewey, 1944, p. 236). These representations that make the absent present are
constructions of a manifold, and they are worked out in the gap between actor and
spectator. Take, for example, the subject matter of unemployment. As an actor, one is
situated as unemployed, as social worker, as employer, etc. All these positions of partici-
pation tend to re-present matters quite unimaginatively.They might utter about each other
statements such as:they are lazy,the social service is mean and the workers are egoistic.
These are the positions of the brute, that is, positions that are incapable of exchanging
imagined interests in a criss-cross of communication. The educated point of view, on the
other hand, is the intelligent and pluralist working of the faculty of imagination, permitting
all kinds of positions and habituations to be exchanged, e.g. how different groups cope with
unemployment, distinctions within the notion of unemployment, consequences for the
economy and for politics, etc. These re-presentations of affairs, which are absent, are an
attempt to restore meaning to what takes place and is not immediately present. Most of the
things being discussed in the classroom will not be immediately present but will take place
outside the school, at places of work, in families, in workers unions or elsewhere. This
entire complex manifold, then, must be re-presented in a classroom or in an essay.
Teaching and learning, in this view, is about making the distant present, to suck into the
classroom the environing conditions.This sensitive reduction of the external worldthe
translation of the distant manifold into sentences articulated in the classroomis
described by Dewey with the aesthetic concept of dramatisations. The faculty of
imagination, in this sense, produces a piece of art and, in this production, an important
element of play is involved. For instance, he says, Theory andto some extentpractice
have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise (my
italics) and, furthermore, [a]n adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the
medium of realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct physical
response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in teaching. Dewey
concludes: Were it not for the accompanying play of imagination, there would be no road
from a direct activity to representative knowledge.10 This corresponds to saying that,
without our imagination, schools could not produce or work with knowledge (represen-
tative knowledge). So the implicit critique of traditional schooling is harsh, due to their
lack of cognitive playfulness, butand this may, perhaps, come as a surprise to some
the implicit critique of much constructivist schooling (self-learning, radical constructiv-
ism, etc.) is even harsher, because these positions tend to think that pupils are capable of
constructing knowledge isolated from the outside world.
The conclusion is that the faculty of imagination is not an isolated gift, working
independently of the content of the education. On the contrary, this faculty is deeply
rooted in ideas and practices that are socially available, and it works as a creative motor of
transaction, making diverse structures of consequences accessible for the activity of the
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faculty of judgment. In this process of translation, the habituating of social life should be
considered to be playful dramatisations of sentences, the quality of which is expanded by
increasing distance between the present and the absent and the readings based on social
sympathies. This is the account of the concept of imagination as it stands in Figure 1.
Judgment
If the faculty of imagination concerns the structure of the playful assimilation of
the environing conditions into any intelligent activity, then judgment in Figure 1 is
connected with the active side of intelligent experience. Judgment is a sort of action,
a suggestion that re-establishes the continuity between action and consequences.
Where the faculty of imagination produces the material, the subject matter, as dramas of
sentences, then judgment decides how the relationship between the different dramas
should be understood. Judgment decides by producing a new set of sentences, an
utterance, a book, etc.The importance of judgment is clear in all of us have many habits
of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were formed without our knowing what
we were about. Consequently they possess us, rather than we them. They move us; they
control us. Unless we become aware of what they accomplish and pass judgment upon the
worth of the result we do not control them (Dewey, 1944, p. 2930, my italics). The
importance of judgment is also found in Deweys discussion of the concept of appre-
ciation, that is, the approval of a particular set of statements. The choice of one set of
re-presentations (as prepared by imagination) rather than another is based on the sense
of taste. The practice of taste is, however, a habit itselffor example: The formation of
habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tasteshabitual modes of
preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence (Dewey, 1944, p. 235).There are
two kinds of habits, when we speak of judgment and taste. The first is the approval of a
particular re-presentation, because it tastes good; that is, it corresponds to the values
and interest that you have already. This kind of judgment is active in many instances
when we evaluate food, music, literature and science. And it is, of course, constantly
working, when school teachers evaluate the written or oral performance of students. It
works as well in a flat and simple kind of democracy where, for instance, everything is
decided upon by votes, by texting or by e-mail, without public argument or criticism.The
other way to exhibit judgment stresses that the faculty of taste is not only active in
applying particular standards.Taste is also working even when these standards need to be
articulated in the first place. This view on the nature of judgment is found also in the
following quote from a more recent Dewey-inspired theoretician of learning, David
Kolb: a second difference between knowing by apprehension and knowing by compre-
hension is that apprehension is a registrative process transformed intentionally and
extensionally by appreciation, whereas comprehension is an interpretive process trans-
formed intentionally and extensionally by criticism (Kolb, 1984, p. 103, my italics).Thus,
appreciation is distinguished from another kind of judgment, namely, criticism.
In sum, we have identified education as an enlightened or intelligent reflection
concerning fractures of the habituations of culture. This fracture starts a process of
reflection, which is possible due to the distance between spectator and actor, and its
components are, on one hand, the dramatisations of imagination and, on the other hand,
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judgments work of discrimination to suggest and approve of new vocabularies with

either simple approval or criticism as the basic principle. Thus, I have identified a
circularity of learning, which is well embedded in past culture and future social life. This
is the intelligent breathing of the human organism. The breathing-in is the sensitive and
playful workings of imagination on distant cultural elements, and judgment is the critical
element of breathing-out. I have already outlined what makes the imagination intelligent.
I still need a further discussion of intelligent judgment, criticism.
First, however, I want to provide an interesting note on how Dewey couples imagination
and judgement with two important ethical virtues.The exchange between imagination and
judgment is an activity with profound moral implications. The undergoing of conse-
quences, the imaginative enterprise, requires courage. It seems odd that a passive faculty
is associated with courage, a virtue that is normally associated with the actions of the hero.
But, here, courage is connected to the ability to let your enemies into your thinking. It is
somewhat similar to Immanuel Kants statement that it is our duty, therefore, to try to
discover new objections, to put weapons in the hands of our opponent, and to grant him
the most favourable position in the arena that he can wish (Kant, 1988, p. 443) or to the
passive contemplation of Aristotle (Aristotle, 1976, Book X). Courage is here defined as
the ability to be passive proper. Some issues are so controversial or even taboo that the
temptation to ignore them is overwhelming. It takes courage to allow them into your own
thinking, your own classroom or your own text. When, for instance, issues such as the
consequences of Islamic law are imagined by Salman Rushdie or some cartoonists,
new language games are established that interrupt existing habituations, and, in some
instances, this may mean a threat to ones career or even ones life.To be genuinely passive
is a brave act. On the other hand, judgment, the active side of experience, is attached to the
moral virtue of responsibility. This is so because the consequences imported by the
imagination are being transformed into public utterances with consequences for others.To
judge, therefore, is to take responsibility for the common future of a class, a school, a
community or a profession. It is to suggest which statements should be considered valid in
a common narrative. It is not only to breathe in cultural material and ruptures of habits but
also, at the same time, to evaluate them according to the bearings of new suggestions, new
habituations. This is the province of judgment.
The relationship between judgment and criticism unfolds to an even deeper level if we
realise that this entire discussion of the relationship between thinking, experience and
judgment is also involved with important parts of Deweys aesthetics.11 In Art as Expe-
rience, Dewey distinguishes between three different concepts of judgment: a legalistic, an
impressionistic and a critical.The first, the legalist concept of judgment, is defined in this
way: judicial decision can be made only on the basis of general rules supposed to be
applicable to all cases (Dewey, 1980, p. 300). Here, the general rule is the ontologically
prior, and it subsumes particularities under its name. Examples of this are found not only
the legal system but also in many situations in the educational system, for instance, when
an evaluation is made of a student essay.The implementation of this kind of judgment is,
therefore, a dissolution of the particular. It is the subsumption of any kind of activity
under an already established rulea rule, which in itself is postulated to have its validity
outside experience, that is, in nature, in God, in common sense, etc. In other words, it is
judgment exercised without any interest in concrete experience, taste and distinctions
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made in a particular field. It is action without consequences, and it is responsibility

without courage. The problem with judicial judgment is the lack of the use of imagina-
tion. The more dynamic society becomes, the more ruptures of habits are encountered
and the more problematic legal judgment ends up becoming. This is made clear when
Dewey says that the source of the failure of even the best of judicial criticism: its inability
to cope with the emergence of new modes of lifeof experiences that demand new
modes of expression (Dewey, 1980, p. 303).
The concept opposite of legalistic judgment is impressionistic judgment, and it is
in effect, if not in words, a denial that criticism is possible and it reacts from the
standardized objectivity of ready-made rules and precedents to the chaos of a subjec-
tivity that lacks objective control, and would, if logically followed out, result in a medley
of irrelevanciesand sometimes does (Dewey, 1980, p. 304). This judgmental practice

corresponds to the idea that sensations leave a naive imprint in the mind of the learning
subject, an empty sheet that is magically organised into something comprehensible. In
reality, however, it is not a concept of judgment at all, because it does not involve an
active element. It is sheer courage without responsibility, pure consequence and no
action. This is also, in fact, the basis for Deweys criticism of child-centred pedagogy in
Experience and Education, which was also (like Art as Experience) the work of the 1930s.
A major problem for impressionistic judgment is that it tends to forget that, to work at
all, it must presuppose another kind of judgment; for instance, to define an impression
signifies a good deal more than just to utter it. To define an impression is to analyze it,
and analysis can proceed only by going beyond the impression, by referring it to the
grounds on which it rests and the consequences which it entails. And this procedure is
judgment (Dewey, 1980, p. 306). Thus, the situations do not spring naively into the
mind. The situation must itself be defined as part of a process of habituation, and such
a process or action deals with judgment as well as imagination.
In modernity, with its many interruptions of equilibria of actions and consequences,
the many suggestions for new habituations cannot be evaluated by criteria, standards or
rules that are reminiscent of former habituations (an interruption of which the new
suggestions are the result).Therefore, Dewey says, Unless the critique is sensitive first of
all to meaning and life as the matter which requires its own form, he is helpless in the
presence of the emergence of experience that has a distinctively new character (Dewey,
1980, p. 304). Thus, there is a problem here of how to evaluate, to judge or to meet the
new form.
With these reservations, we can investigate more freely some of the educational themes
already announced in the discussion of Democracy and Education but which may find
more interesting expressions in his theory of art. Here are a couple of important quotes
concerning the faculty of imagination: The experience enacted is human and conscious
only as that which is given here and now is extended by meanings and values drawn
from what is absent in fact and present only imaginatively (Dewey, 1980, p. 272). Once
again, we see the emphasis of imagination as a particular human faculty and, a moment
later, we hear:
There is always a gap between the here and now of direct interaction and the
past interactions whose funded result constitutes the meanings with which we
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grasp and understand what is now occurring. Because of this gap, all conscious
perception involves a risk; it is a venture into the unknown, for as it assimilates the
present to the past it also brings about some reconstruction of that past. When past
and present fit exactly into one another, when there is only recurrence,
complete uniformity, the resulting experience is routine and mechanical; it
does not come to consciousness in perception. The inertia of habit overrides
adaptation of the meaning of the here and now with that of experiences,
without which there is no consciousness, the imaginative phase of experience.
(Dewey, 1980, p. 272, my italics)
Imagination and courage12 produce a reconstruction of an original text (the past) and,
on this basis, judgment attempts to formulate something new, which is a new vocabu-
lary (a venture into the unknown) that shall habituate a new linearity between actions
and consequences. Another important aspect of this quote is that a conceived break,
the gap, is always a breakdown in our perception and, I should emphasise, in our
concept. A habituation is then not just a new linguistic habit, but rather a correction,
or even a change, in the content of the perception or the concept. What we witness in
passages such as these is Dewey struggling to make sense of a pragmatic relationship
between tradition and change.13 It is a description of how tradition and change are
working together with imagination and judgment in the evolution of a truly human
action. It is a coming-into-presence of new language games, a new linearity: we only
know what the problem is at the very moment that we are able to solve it: Problem
and solution stand out completely at the same time (Biesta & Burbules, 2003, p. 60).
It is exactly in the search for a notion of judgment that is able to cope with the
emergent forms of life that makes Dewey turn to the idea of criticism. In Art as
Experience, Dewey repeatedly states criticism is judgment (Dewey, 1980, pp. 298, 308,
309). On the other hand, criticism is not valuing (p. 309), because valuing can easily
take place without criticism or intelligent activity at allfor instance, when we say, that
is a bad film, out of pure emotion without any further discrimination. Instead, we are
told that criticism is a search for the properties of the object that may justify the direct
reaction and that it is a survey (p. 308). Judgment, then, is an insistence on a relation
of inquiry between subject and object of experience, between past and future. Further,
his criticism issues a social document and can be checked by others to whom the same
objective material is available ... then his surveys may be of assistance in the direct
experience of others (p. 308). Here, the public character of judgment is underlined.
Judgment is exercised as a social faculty; it is communicated taste, exposed to public
scrutiny. Its documents and results are themselves the objects for the workings of other
peoples imagination and judgment.
In addition to being a critical, experimental, object-oriented and public activity,
judgment works according to two basic principles: discrimination and unification. Dis-
crimination, also called analytical judgement, has its roots in the (already mentioned)
sympathy with what is being evaluated. Not sympathy in the sense of appreciation or
agreement but via the attention to the attempt of actors (or students) to habituate or
form particular, yet unknown, experiences. Sympathy alone, however, is not enough. As
an isolated event, it may result in sentimentalism. Enlightened sympathy knows how
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earlier experiences have been given form; it recognizes similarities and differences in
the structure and content of a particular work. In other words, criticism can only be
implemented as part of a social tradition. This is the reason we ought to know the
masterpieces or the touchstones of a given tradition. Not because they provide a
ready-made answer to anything, but because they are appreciated as the excellent
exemplars of sensitivity within a tradition, that is, they may be the cause of new
conversations and new vocabularies.This is what Dewey says: in this sense acquaintance
with masterpieces, and with less than masterpieces, is a touchstone of sensitiveness,
though not a dictator of appraisals (Dewey, 1980, p. 311).
But it is also obvious that any piece of art may be understood within different
traditions of discrimination. That is the reason Dewey says, knowledge of a wide range
of traditions is a condition of exact and severe discrimination (Dewey, 1980, p. 312).

This means that what an object really is, what it tries to do, and which new experiences
it points to can only be properly addressed when you move between different traditions
of thought. The parallel to modern sciences and postmodern education is striking. Here,
too, we find a criss-cross of paradigms, traditions, overlapping research programs,
journals, etc. At first glance, every single research article seems to be, primarily within
one tradition; but, on closer inspection, we find a dissolution of the singular tradition into
a network of references relating to many different traditions. To be able to grasp this
properly, the judge must be adequately enlightened.14 Now, nobody, or only a very
few, can overlook the entire complexity of modern knowledge. That is why the results
of judgments are published as a public document for others to investigate further. An
evaluation of a text, a student or an essay, therefore, is a social enterprise, the open
traditions way of receiving new ideas or looking for what is pointing towards new ideas.
It is learning to see and hear and a reeducation of perception (Dewey, 1980, p. 324).
The other element of judgment is unification. Here, we are taught that without a
unifying point of view, based on the objective form of a work of art, criticism ends in an
enumeration of details .... Instead, this unifying phase, even more than the analytic, is
a function of the creative response of the individual who judges. It is insight. There are
no rules that can be laid down for its performance.15 It is at this point that criticism
becomes itself an art (Dewey, 1980, p. 313314). This is where all the threads run
together. The idea that imagination produces art or dramatisations was a point made
in Democracy and Education. Moreover, we remember how judgment was involved even
in the tiniest perceptions. This understanding of judgment as a piece of art that itself is
to become the object of judgment emphasises the scope of generality in Deweys
thoughts on these matters. The dramatisations we want students, teachers and others to
create are themselves the product of both imagination and a critical judgment that
discriminates with respect to the material produced by a sympathetically-minded faculty
of imagination. These threads, woven and spun by the open tradition, help keep the
breaks of habit, perceptions and concepts in place in a fragile and never closed order, to
be exposed once again to new earthquakes. This is what the Deweyan learner must be
able to do. A sensitive motor, a mechanism of transaction, an ecology of learning. This is
a classroom that is maximally open to the surrounding world, its practices, its texts and
its art works, together with an equally strong intensity of reflection, because students and
teachers must work toward publishing public documents to interested spectators.
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As a final perspective, I would like to add that this conclusion is very much in line with
what should be considered to be Deweys own neo-Aristotelian approach. Reading his
chapter on Labor and Leisure (Dewey, 1944, ch. 19), two all-important concepts within
the Aristotelian tradition, it becomes clear that Dewey should be interpreted as a
democratised Aristotle (just as Aristotle should be looked upon as a democratised Plato).
Dewey basically accepts the superiority of thinking to mere doing since Aristotle was
permanently right in assuming the inferiority and subordination of mere skill in perfor-
mance and mere accumulation of external products to understanding, sympathy of
appreciation, and the free play of ideas (Dewey, 1944, p. 256). However, Dewey does not
accept the Aristotelian way of connecting this with different social classes or functions in
the state (the citizen equipped with liberal education and slaves and women with pure
mechanical skills of life). Instead, we should, in an open and democratic society, con-
struct both practical and theoretical studies for everybody, which makes thought a guide
of free practice for all and which makes leisure [time to think versus simple consumption,
TR] a reward of accepting responsibility for service (Dewey, 1944, p. 261). This is
Dewey as a radical social propagator of a decentralised liberal education. Education is
about making every habit thoughtful. Learning is not doing.
Conclusion
I started by positing two challenges. One of these was to produce an interpretation of
Deweys educational thought that was not individualistic or instrumental but was rather
based on the social and democratic principles found in the major parts of Deweys
philosophy. Another challenge was to supplement the concept of experience with the
notion of intelligence. The aim of this was to elaborate not only the philosophy but also
the educational philosophy of Dewey. In the main part of the essay, I have focused on this
idea of intelligence. Basically, I have outlined intelligence as a circular relation between
habit, imagination and judgment, a relation that stresses distance and social sympathies
as focal points.
By stressing the faculties of imagination and judgment, Dewey points to a deep
interrelatedness between aspects of experience, tradition, the social context and the
content of education. For experience to be intelligent, the processes of imagination must
work with the pluralist cultural world as background, as something that can be represented
in a playful and dramatic way, and the processes of judgment can only work in front of an
audience disposed to social criticism.Thus, to move from the level of the brutes to the level of
education is to move from learning by doing to learning by doing thinking. Following this
line of thought, the school should not be a place of doing the project method or a place
of practical experimentation; rather, it should be a gap where intelligence can happen, a
place where new forms of life are evolving somewhere between a masterpiece (tradition)
and a sympathetically-minded group of spectators producing public criticism.
Notes
1. Exemplified also in the works of Donald Schn. Schn does not speak of project work but
tends to develop a concept of professional reflection based on a similar series of reflective
phases (Schn, 1983).
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2. See also Vanderstraeten (2002) for emphasis on the overall importance on this basic transac-
tion between organism and environment.
3. Learning as a negotiated reproduction of already existing social forms is found in some
theories of situated learning, e.g. Lave & Wenger, 1991.
4. This point is also found here: Perhaps we should stop trying to understand Dewey as a
philosopher of education at all. It might be better to think of him as answering the three great
questions of human existence: What is life? How should we live? What does life mean?
(Garrison, 1995, p. 63). However, as already mentioned, unless this view is supplemented by
the Deweyan concept of thinking, this view tends to conflate the theory of nature and the
theory of education.
5. This geographical and infrastructural metaphor is inspired by Wittgenstein, who compared the
learning of language games with learning to find ones way about in the city, see Wittgenstein
(1971, 85, 19, 203 and 500).
6. For this emphasis on the importance of habits, see Garrison & Neiman, 2003.
7. Which, in a Wittgensteinian view, is equivalent to asking how we move from one language
game to another.
8. See Dewey, 1944, p. 146 for these last two quotes.
9. See Reich, 2007 for inspiration to this paragraph.
10. All quotes from Dewey, 1944, p. 236237.
11. The connection between education, science and aesthetics is noted by Johnston: In short,
aesthetic cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual experience since the latter must bear
an aesthetic stamp to be complete. Here is an argument for the importance of aesthetic
qualities in thought ... This allows Dewey to make the rather bold claim that thinking is
pre-eminently an art; knowledge and propositions which are the products of thinking, are
works of art, as much so as statuary and symphonies (Johnston, 2002, p. 9).
12. And judgment itself. The whole circle of learning (habit, judgment, imagination) is always
involved in any part of the intelligent process. There is no starting point, only circularity.
13. Or between language as structure and as event (see Rmer, 2003).
14. For this vocabulary of enlightenment, aesthetics and education from a Deweyan perspective,
see Eisner, 1991.
15. This is a point that would be worth investigating further. In these passages, Dewey sounds
somewhat like that Aristotelian tradition that speaks of the problematic relation between
thinking and writingfor instance, in this passage from Hannah Arendt: No matter how
concerned a thinker may be with eternity, the moment he sits down to write his thoughts he
ceases to be concerned primarily with eternity and shifts his attention to leaving some trace of
them (Arendt, 1998, p. 18). On this view, when somebody starts to write, he leaves the play
of imagination and posits instead judgment as a unifying and social act.
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Article - Imagination and Judgment in John Dewey S Philosophy Intelligent Transactions in A Democratic Context

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Educational Philosophy and Theory

ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20

Imagination and Judgment in John Dewey's

THOMAS AASTRUP RMER

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