Dewey and the tragedy of the human condition

Critics of Dewey have argued that he fails to recognise the tragic dimension that is central to human existence. I defend Dewey against these critics by elucidating Dewey’s conception of the tragedy of the human condition, which, I argue, is for Dewey a feature of our fundamental agential relation to the world that conditions human agency by necessitating, enabling, and constraining agency. I argue that this conception of tragedy gives rise to a secondary sense of tragedy located in our responses to the world that we can call hubris: a desire to transcend those limitations. That sense of tragedy underpins Dewey’s subsumption of theoretical to practical agency, his connection between agency and value, and his critique of certain forms of scientism.