A Consideration of the "Collective" in the Philosophy of John Dewey during the Depression

In recent years, economic individualism is often being criticized. Under the influence of contemporary thought from postmodernism and post-structuralism that criticized the modern autonomous individual, Dewey's concept of "collective intelligence" is drawing attention. However, in recent literature, an argument about the "collective intelligence" of Dewey in the 1930s when a policy of the collectivism was appreciated is not fully considered. Because it was in the 1930s mainly that he used the concept of "collective intelligence", in this paper, I focus on the Depression Era. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the meaning of the "collective" in the philosophy of Dewey which includes his concept of "collective intelligence" as part of it. The conclusions are as follows. 1. Dewey's criticism of economic individualism is synonymous with the criticism of the corporate capitalism that is referred to in order to express the characteristics of the Progressive Era. This is because Dewey sees economic individualism as the ideology of corporate capitalism. Dewey objected to corporate capitalism pushing forward quantitative standardization and corporation under the name of respect for individuality. 2. Though it was a fact that Dewey showed empathy for collectivism, he was more interested in a condition to enable the free interaction between a person's inside and the reified cultural heritage rather than the policy and institutions of collectivism. At this point, Dewey was different from George Sylvester Counts who insisted that education needs indoctrination. For Dewey, the culture produced by "collective intelligence" is not the thing which is external for an individual, but also the interaction in which (s)he participates with it. 3. Dewey's concept of "collective intelligence" includes its relation with the individual intelligence logically. The aim of Dewey was to look for the alternative model for the "incorporated" individual in the Progressive Era. It was, for Dewey, the "integrated" personality that has restored the individual inside because it had an indivisible relation with "collective intelligence". This model shows that an individual is always mediated by "collective intelligence". It does not mean "a lost individual" in corporate capitalism any more. Dewey insists that, as the community of modern scientists suggests, through their experiments and communication, the individual intelligence could appropriate and then reorganize "collective intelligence". The "collective" for Dewey during the Depression is not limited to what collectivism means. Dewey asked for the United States to shift to a "Great Community" from a "Great Society" in The Public and Its Problems in 1927. On the one hand, it is certain that an argument of Dewey in the 1930s who asks for the shift to "new individualism" from the "older one" succeeds and reflects it. On the other hand, Dewey in the 1930s discussed scientists' cooperation and the artifact as collective intelligence which were not fully discussed in The Quest for Certainty in 1929. It shows that collectivism was used as a whetstone for his philosophy of anti-dualism, not as a policy or institutions.