Holmes & Dewey, experience as culture

"…In 1925, John Dewey published his most wide-ranging philosophical book, Experience and Nature. Dewey used the term "experience" in that book exactly as Holmes had used it forty years earlier in the famous opening paragraph of The Common Law—as a name for culture. (Dewey later said that he wished he had called the book Culture and Nature.) And in the final chapter, he praised Holmes as "one of our greatest American philosophers," 6 and went on to quote a long passage from Holmes's essay on "Natural Law." Holmes read the book several times, with growing pleasure. He thought he had found in Dewey a philosopher whose conception of existence seemed to match his own. "[ A] lthough Dewey's book is incredibly ill written," he told Pollock, "it seemed to me … to have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was." 

Holmes sat on the Supreme Court for thirty years. He was finally persuaded to retire in 1932, and he died, in Washington, D.C., in 1935, two days before his ninety-fourth birthday. After his death, two Civil War uniforms were found hanging in his closet with a note pinned to them. It read: "These uniforms were worn by me in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood."

Dewey was sixty-six when he wrote Experience and Nature, and he was by no means finished. He retired from Columbia in 1930, but he continued to write and lecture; and in 1937, when he was seventy-eight, he traveled to Mexico to head a committee to investigate Joseph Stalin's charges against Leon Trotsky. Dewey admired Trotsky's courage and the dialectical sophistication of his mind; but, as he told one of the Americans traveling with him, he thought him "tragic. To see such brilliant native intelligence locked up in absolutes," 9 he said. Alice Dewey died in 1927, and in 1946, Dewey, now eighty-seven, married Roberta Lowitz Grant, who was forty-two. They adopted two Belgian war orphans, and Dewey enjoyed having them around while he did his work. In late 1951, while he was playing with them, he fell and broke a hip, and he never fully recovered. The following spring, he contracted pneumonia, and he died on June 1, 1952…"

— The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand