Our sophisticated culture needs philosophy more than ever to help solve its problems, Larry Hickman believes.
 

As we navigate our cars, computers, and cell phones to get through our busy days, philosophy may seem a very remote enterprise. Some philosophers today have even suggested that the discipline is essentially dead—that it no longer has much to say to our highly technological society.

Larry Hickman disagrees. Strongly.

"Philosophy is alive and well precisely because it has finally turned its attention to technical and technological themes," he says.

Hickman is an internationally known expert on American philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas on technology he has interpreted, publicized, and amplified. Like Dewey, he believes that philosophy and technology are tools for the common good. He subscribes to the roll-up-your-sleeves, proactive school of philosophy called pragmatism. 

Pragmatists don’t sit around debating whether the world exists. They want to be making a difference in the world.

"For pragmatists, the phrase ‘applied philosophy’ is redundant," Hickman says. "If philosophy is worth anything, then it’s applied, in some way. Pragmatism is a forward-looking philosophy that says that where an idea comes from is less important than what it can do for you." 

He adds, "That’s the idea of the American frontier, you know? When people went into a new place on the American frontier, the first question wasn’t ‘Where are you from?’ but ‘What are your plans? Where are you headed?’ It’s a very future-oriented idea."
 

John Dewey (1859-1952), America’s foremost pragmatist and our most influential philosopher, wrote extensively about logic, democracy, science, and many other topics. But he remains best known among the general public for his hands-on work in the philosophy of education. His progressive Laboratory School, opened in 1896 at the University of Chicago, tested different educational techniques, cultivated children’s skills and interests, and stressed a close relationship between the schools and society. 

As director of the Center for Dewey Studies at SIUC, Hickman heads the world’s top resource on Dewey. Special Collections at Morris Library houses Dewey’s papers and other key materials in American philosophy, and the center houses virtually everything ever written about Dewey in English. More than 50 scholars from across the United States and abroad visit here each year.

Hickman himself first visited the center as a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University in the late 1980s, when he was writing his first book about Dewey. "I was very impressed with it and the way it dovetails with the work of SIUC’s Philosophy Department and Special Collections," he says. "It’s a very nice symbiotic relationship."

The center was established in the early 1960s to produce an authoritative edition of Dewey’s voluminous writings. Under the leadership of Jo Ann Boydston, the center’s staff published a 37-volume edition of Dewey’s books and articles, completed in 1990. When Boydston handed over the reins to Hickman in 1993, the center had already embarked on its next major project: editing Dewey's letters—some 20,000 items of correspondence. 

That work continued under Hickman, but with a new focus: electronic publishing. The project's chief funder, the National Endowment for the Humanities, wanted an easily searchable CD-ROM edition of the letters to be the center's top priority. (Publishing the entire correspondence in print form would run to more than 100 volumes, Hickman once calculated—hardly feasible financially.) Eventually, the center hopes also to publish several print volumes of selected letters. 

Soon after arriving at SIUC, Hickman also turned his attention to preparing an electronic edition of the Collected Works, a massive task that involved re-keying and re-scanning text, proofreading it, and helping to develop a powerful search engine. 

This focus on electronic media seems appropriate for someone whose research specialty is the philosophy of technology. But for Hickman, technology isn’t just our machine culture. He defines technology very broadly, as being "central to the human enterprise—the means by which we continually adjust and adapt and reform and reconstruct our tools, our habits, and our institutions." 

Technology, he says, is essentially human inquiry: our use of tools and techniques to create something new from raw materials and stock parts. Like Dewey, he doesn’t limit his definition of tools to tangible objects. Tools are any human invention used in problem solving and creation. 

"The distinction between a hammer and a metaphor is just a convenient way of dividing the more basic idea of tool use," says Hickman, adding that tools are as integral to the making of a novel or poem as to the building of a bridge.

In Hickman’s view, as in Dewey’s, the sciences, the arts and humanities, professions such as law, and what we usually call "technical" fields all fit under the overarching umbrella of technology.

"I go so far as to say that a mathematician working in an empty room, with no calculator, pencil, or pad, is using technology," Hickman says. "She's using raw materials—numbers. She's using stock parts—various theorems. She's using tools—hypotheses that she’s developing. And she’s producing a final product, which is what happens on the right side of the equation."
 

In two widely praised books—John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (1990) and Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work (2001)—Hickman has made a name for himself by showing that Dewey had a well-developed philosophy of technology. This aspect of Dewey’s thought had been largely overlooked—in part, Hickman says, because "his writings on technology are scattered through his major works and some of his minor ones."

It may also have been overlooked because many early philosophers of technology focused on a then-current European view of technology as an autonomous, oppressive force that enslaves us and robs us of our humanity. Call it the Ted Kaczynski perspective. (In his manifesto, the Unabomber argued that the industrial-technological system reduces human beings to "mere cogs in the social machine.")

"That wasn't Dewey’s view at all," says Hickman. "He was interested in technology as a liberating force. He saw it as what human beings do naturally. In the same sense that spiders make webs, human beings make tools and techniques."

He adds, "That we sometimes make tools that don't work very well for us, or that we should change, doesn’t indict technology. There are tools, techniques, and social organizations that are oppressive. But when technology seems to fail us, the answer is more technology, not less."

Hickman would remind us that Dr. Frankenstein’s monster—before Hollywood got ahold of Mary Shelley’s book—destroyed what was dearest to its creator because Frankenstein abandoned it to a life of exile, apart from humanity. The lesson? "We are responsible for what we create," Hickman says.

Hickman was attracted to Dewey because Dewey's interest in social progress and reform tied together technology, democracy, and education. "Democracy and education are the way that we retool our culture and society," Hickman says.

As a social undertaking, technology is necessary for the advancement of education and democracy, Dewey believed. Democracies test new social and political ideas in much the same way that a scientist tests a hypothesis, just less systematically. And by increasing the spread of information through new tools, technology helps spread democracy. (Despite its excesses, Hickman says, "I think Dewey would have been very hopeful about the educational possibilities of the Internet.")

To reject technology would be to reject our own nature, Hickman says. 

"We live in a technological milieu. Those are our dominating metaphors. We move through the world technically and technologically. We have to find some way of understanding that if we’re to ameliorate our problems."

Philosophy is the way to do it, he says. 

"No other discipline studies inquiry as inquiry. At the very heart of philosophy is logic, and for Dewey, logic is the theory of inquiry—how we improve our ability to work through the problems in other disciplines." 

In short, it can teach us to be better critical thinkers. "That’s got very practical ramifications," says Hickman. "If you want to put up a space shuttle or start a new movement in painting, it’s important to be able to understand the way that inquiry works."

Philosophy’s traditional concern with ethics and values also matters more, not less, in a highly technological society. Today’s thorny debates over such things as bioengineered crops, therapeutic cloning, assisted suicide, abortion, same-sex marriage, computer information privacy, business ethics, and even standardized testing in the public schools all involve philosophical considerations and can benefit from the input of philosophers. It doesn’t get much more real-world than that.
 

Hickman is a lean, tall, fast-talking Texan who grew up in San Antonio, went to college in Abilene (Hardin-Simmons University) and Austin (University of Texas), and taught philosophy at Texas A&M for 20 years before coming to SIUC. 

He misses Texas’s rich cultural mix, especially the Hispanic flavor of its food and music. But Hickman, who now considers Carbondale home, notes, "I’ve spent time in west Texas, and as wonderful as it was, I also have to say that I like trees that are taller than I am."

His interests outside of philosophy include film (Truffaut, Fellini, and Robert Altman are among his favorites) and video art. At Texas A&M, he taught a course called Philosophy and the Visual Media and gained state funding for an annual film and video festival. He explains, "It was an attempt to fill an enormous void at A&M," which at the time didn’t have much to offer in the arts. Fittingly, a 2001 documentary about Dewey that he wrote and narrated won a Golden Eagle award this year from CINE, a Washington, D.C.-based group that honors excellence in documentary film and video.

In keeping with his view that philosophy should be engaged in real-world struggles, Hickman agreed to be the faculty sponsor for the gay and lesbian organization at A&M in its successful seven-year court battle to become a recognized student group. More recently, he has written on the question of legalizing gay marriage. He supports it, a stance that has drawn fire both from conservative groups and from gay activists who condemn marriage as bourgeois.

Taking on such controversial issues, he says, is "part of the fun of being a philosopher," adding that he learns what he thinks about these issues through the process of writing about them.

One of his chief roles as the Dewey Center’s director is outreach. The center answers dozens of inquiries about Dewey every month and assists with projects to translate Dewey’s works into other languages, from Chinese to Icelandic. Nationally and internationally, Hickman is invited to talk about Dewey’s ideas. His audiences aren’t always philosophers. Many are educators. Some have been historians, sociologists, literature teachers, environmentalists, and even landscape architects.

In between visits this year to speak in Poland, Mexico, Japan, China, and Italy, Hickman was named SIUC's Outstanding Scholar for 2002. Besides his two books on Dewey and technology, he has edited a two-volume anthology of Dewey’s writings, three other anthologies in the philosophy of technology, and a collection of commentaries that includes contributions from nearly every major Dewey scholar. 

Being in the thick of things goes hand-in-hand with the world-engaging emphasis of Dewey’s philosophy.

"One of the ideas about pragmatism," says Hickman, "is that you’re always pushing things forward."
 

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