Abstract:

The concept of experience is the theoretical core of John Dewey’s philosophy of moral education. “Experience” contains three sets of relational categories of opposite unity, including reality and generativeness, practice and rationality, as well as subjectivity and objectivity. The mutual transformation of these three relational categories constitutes the dialectics of Dewey’s concept of experience. Dewey developed the dialectics of Hegel’s “absolute spirit” into the dialectics of “experience”, insisting on the standpoint that the concept of experience exists as a particularity containing universality. The concept of experience embraces the unity of opposites between particularity and universality, and at the same time particularity has priority over universality. The dialectics of “experience” is based on the core of human development, and explores how to guide life. The dialectics of Dewey’s concept of experience can break the limitation of examining moral education from the perspective of metaphysical epistemology. Moral education should guide students to plan possible survival scenarios to achieve the dialectical unity of reality and generativeness, should establish the ethical ideal of democracy to achieve the dialectical unity of individual value and social value of moral education, and should return to the life world to realize the dialectical unity of intellectual and practical moral education.

Key words: experience, dialectic, moral education