ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to elucidate the relationship between Dewey and Nietzsche. Both contend that knowing is not an abstract process and that knowledge necessitates the knower’s activity. Knowledge, as both make clear, offers the subject the possibility of getting into fruitful relations with a historical and cultural reality. Although for both knowing is doing, Nietzsche goes further than Dewey insofar as for the former knowing is also creating. In other words, Nietzsche can be seen as a postmetaphysical poet and redescriber who emphasizes poetic creation, form, and the will to power, whereas in Dewey, who was impressed with the achievements of the natural sciences, the idea that knowing is doing is closely linked to method, rational inquiry, or the arts of intelligently directed action. The author’s discussion of the relation between Dewey and Nietzsche leads from epistemology to the question of (aesthetic) form and thus to Dewey’s reluctance to present himself as a radically postmetaphysical poet-philosopher. Dewey’s naturalist aesthetics has undoubtedly gained in importance in the past decades. However, the author advances the argument that Dewey’s understanding of form is one of the weakest aspects of his pragmatist aesthetics and that it also affects his theory of knowledge.
